by S. D. Perry
“Wow,” she said. “You think—that would explain…Jesus, that would explain a lot of things.” She sounded almost relieved. “What do you think it is?”
“I don’t know. I don’t know anything for certain…some biological agent, maybe…” He thought of the open Word file on his desktop, the random, unclear jumble of theory and supposition that he’d tapped out after visiting Dick Calvin’s a few hours earlier.
Even as he spoke, Bob’s battered truck pulled up in front of Dick’s house.
“Ah, I have to go,” he said. “I’m sorry. I’ll call you back later, or—”
“But what is it?” she asked. “Should I be worried? Should I leave Tommy with his dad? He’s supposed to come back on Tuesday, but if you think—”
“Sarah—”
“I need to know,” she said. “Don’t tell me that there might be something—something toxic here, then hang up.” She sounded close to tears. “Tell me what’s happening. I feel like I’m all alone, suddenly, I feel—” Her breath shook. “Please, John.”
Bob got out of his truck, closing the door gently—and a PIPD patrol car pulled up behind the truck, its bar lights dark.
“I’ll come over,” he said. “As soon as I’m done here. We can talk, I’ll tell you what I know. What I think. But I have to go now, OK?”
“OK,” she said, on another shaking breath. “OK, good. I’ll be here.”
A lone cop got out of the patrol car—one of the summer officers, a tall, spindly young man John didn’t recognize—and joined Bob at the foot of the walk, talking into the radio clipped to his shoulder. John turned his attention to the two men as they started toward him—and realized that he could hardly wait to see her. Her face, her voice, her touch; whatever the consequences, he didn’t care.
Bob was talking to the young cop as they reached the steps, spinning a plausible tale. “…and when he didn’t show up, I called John, asked him to come check.”
Bob smiled tightly, nodding at John. “John Hanover, he lives in the last house on the block. Doctor Hanover.”
The officer blinked at John. He was early to mid twenties but had perfected a world-weary, jaded air, the kind that veteran cops always seemed to wear. His voice was bland, pleasant, bored. “Uh-huh. You friends with Mr. Calvin, Doctor?”
“Well, we’re neighbors,” he said, realizing how stupid that sounded as he said it. Obviously they were neighbors. Bob had just said so. “I came by two, three hours ago; there was no answer. Same when I tried again, just now.”
“Uh-huh,” the cop said again. He turned his attention back to Bob. “Has Mr. Calvin been sick, or…do you have any reason to be worried about him?”
Bob shrugged. “Honestly, I don’t know him that well. He writes a column for the paper, we talk sometimes. Last time I saw him, he seemed a little down. Ah, depressed. I don’t know about what. We agreed to meet up tonight for a drink; he was supposed to come by my place. Like I said, when he didn’t show, I called his neighbor.”
The cop looked to John again, who nodded, hoping he looked as cool, as innocent as the reporter. The story sounded reasonable to John, but the officer’s gaze had gone calculating, skeptical.
Paranoid?
“Uh-huh,” he said, and stepped past John, muttering an excuse me. He rapped on the door, waited. Rapped again.
Bob cast a look at John, his eyes worried.
“Mr. Calvin!” The cop called, and John jumped. The cop put his hand on the doorknob. Turned it. The door opened, a sliver of stuffy dark beyond the frame. Thick, warm air swelled out.
“Step back, please,” the officer said.
“Maybe I should come along, make sure—” Bob began.
“You will wait here, sir,” the young man cut in, his voice too loud, his suspicious gaze hopping between the two of them, and John realized that he was nervous. His right hand had dropped to the black nylon holster on his hip. He wasn’t touching his weapon but looked like he was thinking about it.
Bob held up his hands, an OK-by-me gesture. The cop pulled a flashlight off his belt, clicking it on as he touched the radio at his shoulder once more.
“Sam-Two entering the premises at seven two two seven Eleanor, ten-twenty-three…”
He disappeared inside, leaving the door open behind him. John and Bob moved back from the front steps, pitching their voices low. John told the reporter some of what he’d experienced earlier in the day, and his reasonable belief that he wasn’t the only one.
Bob nodded. “It’s weird, all right. When I take a step back, look at what I’ve been thinking…well, more the way I’ve been thinking, I guess. I haven’t noticed anything really bad, in myself—well, past the drinking. I’m kind of obsessed with this theory, though—this story. I can’t stop thinking about it, about how and why and what I can do to fix it. I spent most of today reading, downloading articles, trying to find patterns…”
He turned and looked at Dick Calvin’s front door. The wedge of darkness inside hadn’t changed.
“You really think he’s dead?” John asked.
“I don’t know, Doc,” Bob said. “I hope not. Amanda seemed pretty sure that he wanted to kill himself, though.”
John hesitated, then asked, “If we’re all affected, do you think it’s possible that you believe this girl because…” How to put it gently? “Because you’ve been, ah, influenced?”
“Delusional, you mean?” Bob smiled and clapped a hand on John’s shoulder. John could smell a shadow of whiskey on his breath. “More things in heaven and earth, boyo. In this case, I hope she was wrong. I hope we’re all wrong.”
John nodded. “That’d be—”
Nice was blotted out by the shout from deep inside the house. The young officer sounded panicked. “Doctor! Get in here, right now!”
John broke and ran, faintly aware that Bob was right behind him. Up the steps, the cop was shouting again, upstairs, hurry! It was dark, only ambient streetlight from the windows to guide them to the stairs. John took them two at a time, using the banister to haul himself faster.
There was a bright line of light at the floor, the flashlight—the kid had dropped it—and by its sharp wedge of light, they could see the policeman supporting a long, inevitable shadow that hung from the roof, a body, Dick Calvin.
“Ah, shit,” Bob moaned, and they ran to help the panicked officer. Before they even cut him down, John knew they were much too late.
It was almost one in the morning before the soft tap came at the door. Sarah woke from her light doze at once and hurried to the door.
She smiled when she saw him and stepped aside to let him in. He only stood there. His hair was rumpled, his color pale; he looked very tired, and worried.
“I’m sorry it’s so late,” John said. Behind him, the street was silent and still.
“That’s OK,” she said. “Please come in.”
He didn’t budge. “One of my neighbors committed suicide.”
“Oh! Oh, John, I’m so sorry,” she said. She took a step toward him but saw that he didn’t want her to some any closer, the way he leaned away from her.
“I don’t know what to do,” John said. “I can’t seem to think straight. There are people killing each other, getting hurt, but others—the effects are so varied, I can’t imagine anything that would do what it’s doing.” He shook his head. “If I hadn’t felt—ah, different myself, I wouldn’t have believed there was any unusual influence. Even now, I keep half convincing myself that I’m just really stressed out.”
He smiled bleakly. “Bad things happen, all the time, everywhere. Just because a bunch of them seem to be happening here, that doesn’t mean anything. Not necessarily. And violence, murder—those things don’t happen in a vacuum. People are affected, vulnerable, anxious…prone to inventing the answers they need, when there are no sane answers available…”
He trailed off, and she could almost see him warring with himself, trying to decide if his theory was based on anything past wild speculation.
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“So…what’s the next step?” she asked, leaning against the doorframe.
“I don’t know. I can call the state, get them to send out some people to test the soil, the water…I’ve got a college friend who worked for the CDC for a while; I’ll try to get in touch with him. And I’m meeting a girl tomorrow morning, a friend of a friend, she might know something…”
He grinned, a self-conscious, slightly hysterical smile. “She’s psychic. How’s that for a logical approach to contagion? Maybe after I ask her to divine the source of our trouble, she can put me in touch with my grandmother.”
Sarah hugged herself against the early morning air. She didn’t know him well enough to know what would best soothe him, so she said what she felt. “I think keeping an open mind takes work,” she said. “But if you’re looking for an answer to an inexplicable problem, it’s kind of the best policy.”
“But what if the problem is only in my mind?” he asked, his expression stricken. “What if we’re just making up excuses, looking for ways to, to accept how we’re feeling? How can any of this be real?”
The way he looked at her then, she felt a hot, pulling need deep inside and found that she didn’t care if what she wanted was wrong, if what they both wanted was wrong. They both wanted it; that was what mattered. Suddenly, that was all that mattered.
“Come inside,” she said, and he gave in and stepped through the door. They didn’t speak again until he said her name, whispered against her neck sometime later.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
Bob called Amanda early, and they agreed to meet at John’s office. When he called John at home to confirm, there was no answer, but he got through on the cell. Ten o’clock. John didn’t work Mondays; they would have privacy—and Bob wanted Amanda to be able to concentrate, somewhere quiet where she felt safe.
At a quarter to ten, Bob pulled up in front of Devon’s house. Amanda and her boyfriend were on the front step, smoking. Amanda had said that Devon had gone, that he’d taken off for Portland, but it was still strange to see her without him. Her boyfriend, Eric, was quiet, with that vague insolent sullenness that seemed to attach to too many teenage males. Obviously, Amanda wanted him to be present, although Bob wished she’d left him behind; the kid seemed jealous every time she turned her gaze to anyone besides himself, and he was constantly touching her, distracting her. They drove to John’s office mostly without speaking.
John met them in the small waiting room, wearing the same clothes he’d worn the night before. He looked like he hadn’t slept, but his smile was open and sincere as he shook hands with both Amanda and Eric. He led them back to his office, pausing along the way to grab a few sodas out of a minifridge next to the empty receptionist’s desk.
John’s office was as Bob remembered—soft colors, soft furniture, and a window that looked out over Water Street. He could see the tall masts of sailboats at the far end, although the marina’s pier was blocked from view by the third story of the hardware store, the tallest building on the downtown waterfront.
Amanda and Eric sat on the pale-green sofa adjacent to John’s desk. John sat across from the couch, his office chair turned toward them. Bob stayed standing. He reflexively scanned the papers on John’s desk, saw the words traumatic bereavement at the top of one of them, heavily underlined.
“Thank you for coming in,” John said.
“Not a problem,” Amanda said, her tone neutral. “Although—maybe this is a dumb question, but why did you want to meet me, anyway?”
“Our mutual friend here believes you have a gift,” John said. “I didn’t think—I thought he might be wrong, but after last night, I wanted to meet you myself.”
“What happened last night?”
John shot a look at Bob, then took a deep breath. “I’m sorry to tell you this, but Dick Calvin committed suicide yesterday.”
Amanda’s soft, round face twisted. Eric put his arm around her, but she pulled away from him, turning an accusatory glare to Bob.
“Why didn’t you say something?” she asked.
Bob shook his head, suddenly uncomfortable with his decision to let John break the news. “I figured we’d be talking about it soon enough,” he said. “I thought with John here, we might be able to come up with some ideas, about how to handle things better from here on.”
“I know it’s a shock,” John began, but Amanda interrupted him, still looking at Bob, her voice rising.
“No, it’s not, I told you he was going to do it. You said we could save him, you said I might have saved him!”
“I was wrong,” Bob said, wishing for a drink. John didn’t step in, only watched patiently. Thanks, Doc. “And I should have told you already, I was just…” He resorted to the truth. “I thought John would be better at it, I guess.”
“So what’s the use of knowing anything?” Amanda snapped. For the anger in her voice, she looked miserable. “Why fucking bother?”
John was professional, his tone confident. “Because if there is something going on in Port Isley, and if you can actually see some of it—see things that other people can’t—then we can use that information. We might be able to stop more people from getting hurt.”
“Right, like we stopped the Lawn King from hanging himself,” she said.
John raised his eyebrows. “How do you know he hung himself?”
“He did, didn’t he?”
“Yes, but how did you know that?” John reached over to his desk and picked up a legal pad and a pen. “Did you see it? Tell me what you saw, or thought, exactly.”
Amanda hesitated, shooting another unhappy look in Bob’s direction…then told him the same things she’d told the reporter only the day before—about sensing things, about getting into people’s heads, about Devon and the kids she’d gotten stoned with, about her dreams. She said that when she’d sensed what she had, about Dick Calvin, she’d just known. “Like, if I said, how did Elvis die, you’d say…”
John blinked. “Uh, cardiac arrest brought on by an overdose and—”
“On the crapper,” Bob said, and Amanda nodded at him.
“Like that,” she said. “I just knew.”
John wrote quickly as she talked, only glancing at the paper occasionally. Bob was impressed that he managed to write in a mostly straight and even hand. Practice, he figured. He’d known a couple of reporters who could do that, one of them with a cigarette in his writing hand, watching people talk while they took down what was said. Bob had never gotten the hang of it, himself, though he’d fashioned his own private shorthand over the years…
Pay attention, old man. The devil was so often in the details.
“OK,” John said, as her brief story dried up. “And Bob said you’ve had some success trying to see things. Have you done any more of that?”
“No,” Amanda said. She shifted on the couch. Eric watched her, intently focused on her; Bob got the impression that if asked, the kid wouldn’t be able to remember John’s name or how they’d gotten to his office. “I mean, it’s—it’s like eavesdropping, or something.”
John nodded. “Do you think…do you think it’s possible that this empathy you’re experiencing is a reaction to what’s been happening in Port Isley?”
“What do you mean?”
“When I got here this morning, I looked up some things,” John said lightly. “About what sudden, unexpected violence can do to the people who are affected.”
Traumatic bereavement, Bob thought.
“What, some of them turn psychic?” Amanda asked.
“Not exactly,” John said. “But sometimes our perspectives can be skewed, by events beyond our control. Violence, murder, suicide—sometimes these things are so hard to accept, to even face, that our minds try to find a way to make sense of them for us. It’s a way to deal with pain.”
Amanda looked at Bob again, and he saw that her defenses had snapped shut as quickly as that, neat and solid as a European bank’s. “He thinks I’m full of shit,” she said. “Is that
what you think? Is that why you wanted me to meet with a shrink?”
John held up his hands, a placating gesture. “Hold on, that is not what I think,” he said. “You knew about Dick Calvin. I can’t just discount that, can I? I’m trying to keep an open mind, believe me, but to do that, I’ve got to look at all this from more than one angle.”
Amanda was still staring at him, and Bob shook his head, firmly. “He doesn’t think you’re lying, and neither do I. We’re just trying to work this out, that’s all. To be fair, you didn’t believe it either, when this first started.”
“She’s not lying,” Eric snarled, and if Amanda was pissed at the unspoken hint of disbelief, Eric seemed positively homicidal. He stood up, glowering at the two men, his lanky body poised as if to fight. “This is bullshit.”
Amanda stayed where she was. “No, it’s OK,” she said. When Eric didn’t sit down again, she added, “You can leave, if you want.”
Eric hesitated, then sat. He didn’t look happy about it. He slumped away from them, his posture telling them all what he thought.
John studied Amanda a moment, then sighed. “With my background being what it is, my training, I have to look at it from a psychological point of view. Strong, unpleasant emotions like guilt or grief or fear, witnessing violence—these things can have an intense effect on the people who experience them. I’m not trying to discount what you’re experiencing, I’m only looking for a way to explain what’s happening.”
“Show him,” Eric said, turning back to Amanda. “Do it. Tell him something you couldn’t know, about him.”
His tone was almost vindictive, but Bob didn’t disagree with the proposal. He’d hoped that she’d be willing to demonstrate her ability to John, to wipe out the doctor’s uncertainty once and for all. And wasn’t that why Bob had suggested John’s office, a calm environment, so she could focus?
“I’m not a fucking monkey,” she said. “I don’t perform.”
“It’s not like that,” Bob said. He moved to the couch, crouching in front of Amanda, wanting to be sure she could see his sincerity, his belief. “We don’t know what’s going on in Port Isley. Maybe nothing at all, maybe it’s just a bad summer, a dark summer. A run of coincidence, hard luck, law of averages…I don’t believe that, but I don’t know, I don’t think anyone knows. What I do know is that for whatever reason, you’ve been tuning in to these things. And we need your help.”