“None.” “But she had students.”
“That’s right.” She worked with young people. “Duhhh…so in a sense, she did have children, don’t you see?”
Wow, super mind here at work , Ashley thought but again did not verbalize. “She worked with young adults. Taught archeology and anthropology.”
“Had no children of her own,” finished Rae. “But she loved her work; was a crusader about it,” added Rae.
“Quite possibly, yes.”
“Pay was lousy,” Rae commented. “Sonja Orman could have made more on the line at a Swift meat-packing plant. As a result, she was constantly behind on her bills, but she felt placed here on Earth to teach.”
“She sounds like a wonderful person. There’s a Swift meat-packing plant not far from Charleston, where the killings are happening. You may want to go with that.”
Rae heard the sarcasm in Ashley’s voice and tried to ignore it. “Teaching was Orman’s crusade, and in the end, the spirits of untold numbers of students, young minds, had been touched by her passion.” Rae again saw the weighted down, bedraggled wingless angelic children carrying off the wounded white bird, and now it made sense—at least it did to her. She imagined the geniuses in the other room were flummoxed by it.
Yeah…right , thought Ashley. She remained angry and hurt. In her opinion, Dr. Hiyakawa had gotten Ashley’s beloved teacher and mentor, Gene Kiley, killed. “Some psychic,” she’d said to others in the unit just loud enough for Rae to hear. “So good she gets people around here killed.”
Rae pushed aside all the victimology items in her way. Clamoring to her feet, she removed the electrodes that made her a part of CRAWL. Standing and stretching now, just outside the brass pipe pyramid in the isolation chamber, her eyes met Ashley’s, and she felt an icy response growing laser-like. The body language told a story of negativity, and the girl’s eyes emitted a ray of displeasure, what in ancient times was called the ‘evil eye’.
Not very professional , Rae thought as she held the young woman’s glare for some time before breaking it off. Their mutual stare was like a gauntlet thrown down. Young Phillips had essentially and psychically dared Rae to show her anything worthwhile, essentially believing she could do better work on this case herself. When Rae broke off the stare, she psychically replied, Perhaps you can, Ashley. Be my guest. Although no actual words came forth, the mental words were as clear and as real as the gravity around them.
Until now, Rae’d felt the chamber that’d been created to house her and CRAWL instrumentation was her office, her space, essentially hers and therefore sacrosanct, but Gene had always been a large part of that equation. It’d always been the one place where Rae’d felt, and been made to feel by Gene, to be as normal and as sane as anyone on the planet. Certainly Gene had made the environment here a safe one. In fact, Gene had seen to it that Rae, a halfAsian, half-Irish woman with one black and one blue eye, genuinely feel untouchable and in charge here. So much of it she’d thought her doing, but now she knew that so much of it was due to Gene Kiley’s efforts and attitude. He’d worked tirelessly to make her feel this place was home, a place where she was among like-minded people, folks who understood and accepted and didn’t make her feel like some kind of alien or freak. Gene had been a strong empathic support and a psychic in his own right.
Now his absence in the labs proved so strong, so overwhelming that she wondered if the isolation chamber would ever return to its former peaceful character—the place where she centered herself: her once perfect centering ground. She wondered if she must find another, a place without the high-tech gadgetry, a simple room with a mirror and a cocoon of safety, a place away from the accusing eyes of such as Ashley Phillips and others.
All she knew for certain was that she no longer felt at ease here in her workplace.
It certainly was no longer home.
As she retied the now loose belt about her white robe, beneath which she stood nude, Rae felt no reassurance, no hearty positive vibes as always Gene sent her way. Rae’s first few days back, she’d thought it her own guilt-ridden angst simply bouncing off the young woman, but today it’d come clear that it was more than inner turmoil at work here. It wasn’t coming from within but from without. It was in fact unadulterated anger undulating from and directed at Rae. All from Ashley.
This does nothing for our working relationship , Rae thought. A relationship required nurturing and care; it was hard work, harder than caring for a garden or a single tomato plant, or an individual flower. It must be nurtured by a caring hand and a careful balance of trust, but neither of the principals in this case had had time to establish any such ingredients, thus ruining the recipe. Trust being absolutely necessary, the lack of it deep-sixed the ability to work together, and it harmed the case at hand. What progress could possibly come about? It’s a wonder I got as far as I did, she thought now. It was one thing to work as a medium with a roomful of doubt and disbelief flowing from strangers as when the chief brought politicians and men with deep pockets to observe the program at work, but quite another when one’s closest working relationship is like a bridge crumbling beneath one’s feet.
She knew she’d have to put in a request to replace Ashley, that Raule must find her someone more suitable, and this meant more problems needing resolution, more time lost, all piled upon the many other difficulties and anxieties in her life right now; it meant another strand, too, in the restraints that bound her hands while she attempted to work the Dream killings.
She threw up her hands in a gesture of defeat for the moment. Everyone would simply have to come back another day as inconvenient as that might be for the think-tank champions in the other room. Rae ambled off to the showers to freshen up and change into clothes and get out of Quantico for the day. It’d been grueling, her third day back since returning off the trip she and her daughter, Nia, had taken to see the Grand Canyon together. As she found the showers and got in under the warm spray, she thought of how that trip after Phoenix had reestablished the mother-daughter relationship, and how much she had discovered about her daughter. Not to mention how much Nia had discovered about her, and how much together they’d discovered about Nia’s deceased grandparents, who’d shown up at the South rim of the canyon, and had in fact floated amid the sunset, amid reflecting clouds, hovering over the amazing site that had drawn Aurelia there to begin with—two spirits in eternal love.
THREE
Shower finished and Rae fully dressed before the mirror, her father’s marble black eye and her mother’s cerulean blue eye staring approvingly back at her choice of Macy’s latest in fashion for the professional woman, she stepped out into a modern cave: the corridors of Quantico’s FBI headquarters. Here so-called normal people from secretaries and groundskeepers to pipe fitters in green overalls, and accountants in impossible-to-wrinkle suits worked a nine-to-five day. These civilians went about their business largely unaware of those among the badge carrying operatives here with a license to kill.
She tried desperately to get the current case off her mind, and she knew the only way to do that was a stopover at the Tavern on the Green here in Quantico where she could relax with a martini or a Jack Daniels Whiskey Sour—or two, and to talk to the best ear in town, Joannie Childs. She’d tried to talk to others as freely as she palavered with Joannie, but even with her shrink, Dr. Lyn Polkabla, this proved impossible, despite the tortures that Dr. Polk-a-person, as Nia called the shrink, put her through. Tortures of being pelted by a series of ping-pong balls hurled at her when she sat glum and uncommunicative. Apparently, Nia, too, had gotten pelted on occasion as well, as after the harrowing incident in Phoenix and Gene Kiley’s death, Nia had seriously begun to see “Dr. P” on a regular basis.
Worse than the ping-pong ball barrage was the shrink’s grabbing up her accordion to play songs from Cats and Man of LaMancha badly and out of tune if a client chose to sit idle. Caterwauling, Nia had called this form of torture.
Aaurelia’s cell phone rang. She lifted
it from her hip and saw it was Nia calling from school again, and she answered precisely as Dr. Polkabla had suggested. “Sweetheart, how is your day going?” This was a far cry from, “What now?”
“Awful,” Nia sniffed, “and I wanna come home.”
“Now?” “Now!”
# # #
They’d decided on Xavier Millbrook Stone Academy, a private school this time, one filled, Rae learned too late, with vile, mean girls. Girls who’d nothing better to do than dispense their venom on the newcomer. In this case, Nia Hiyakawa, her daughter.
Sadly, Nia had a heart like none other, a heart as good as they come, but she also had the same or similar psychic powers and empathic abilities as her mother, a thing she’d kept secret all her life until recent events had brought all to the surface. Learning of Nia’s powers had in a very real sense explained years of their drifting apart. Rae had falsely believed it had all to do with Nia’s anger and contempt for her mother’s psi powers. And even more so her mom’s inability to foresee and fix the problems and people closest to her; to avoid that changing day in Nia’s life when Rae decided to divorce Nia’s father, Tomi Yoshikane and to reclaim her life and her maiden name.
Rae learned that Nia had promised herself early in life to become a normal kid. Something Rae had assumed all along. But not so. It’d been an impossible goal that Nia had set for herself, one at loggerheads with her mom. In fact, they’d butted heads so often that at one point, Rae had begun to fear losing Nia’s affection forever.
“Not anymore,” Rae assured herself in the empty cab of her car.
Their Grand Canyon trip had changed all that.
What happened at the Canyon had bonded the two, mother and daughter, as never before.
Things were better between them.
Things would continue to get even better, Rae convinced herself now.
After all they’d been through in Phoenix, and their subsequent trip to the Canyon, they had to bond.
Together. Things like the death of a mutual loved one, things like Rae’s own near death experience, things like Nia’s putting herself in danger for her mother…such things bonded a mom and daughter.
“Nia, you can come home anytime, of course, and if we need to find you another school—a place where you fit in bet—”
“Fit in? I’ll never fit in anywhere! I’m a freak.”
“Stop that at once! You’re not a freak, no more than—”
“No more than you?”
“We’re not going to have this conversation over the phone. Get a cab, and I’ll meet you at home.”
“Home…you call that broken down old bed and breakfast a home?” Nia hung up so she might feel the winner here, getting the last dig in.
“Now I gotta race home.” She stomped down the corridor, going for the garage. “No stopover at the tavern, no chance to unwind with Joannie,” Rae muttered to herself, drawing a look from Edward Arlington Coffin, who’d come through a door in the techy playground where he spent many of his hours nowadays refining gizmos and gadgets. Eddy was the creator of the CRAWL, and he’d managed to streamline it for work in remote locations as well, Phoenix having been the first such test. Bugs, glitches, and problems still plagued the remote CRAWL, but Eddy assured everyone they’d soon be worked out.
“Rae, how’re you doing?” asked Eddy, a genius no older than her daughter, Nia.
“Pretty well, Eddy, under the circumstances.”
“Euphemism for death of a loved one,” he replied. “I understand.”
The funeral services for Gene had only been the week before. Eddy had a heart but it was somewhat overburdened by his brain.
“I gotta rush, Eddy.”
“What’s up?” “Personal.”
“Nia again, huh?”
“Something like that, yeah.”
“She’s having a hard time with it, same as you. I saw the latest images on the crawl screen. You may’ve come back too soon, and Raule’s saddling you with another case so soon could do more damage than—”
“What in the world’re you talking about? Raule saddling me with another field operation?”
“You ahhh haven’t heard? Charleston, West Virginia?”
“How is it you know about this before me?” “Ah, maybe just another foolish rumor floating about; rumors abound in a place like this.”
“Shut up, Eddy. I know all about it,” Rae lied.
“Oh…really?”
She must act as if she knew what he was talking about, despite her certainty that he was dead wrong. “Appreciate your concern, Eddy, but I’m just fine, and as for getting back in the saddle, it’s what my shrink ordered.”
“Shrink knows best, heh? You know I won’t be in the field with you. Have that contract with Lockheed to fulfill.”
“I think my shrink does know best. As for you’re not accompanying me to Charleston, yes, I know.” She was a champ at lying with a straight face.
“Who’s going with you?” he asked. “Not Ashley Phillips?”
“No way.” True or not about a second field assignment, Ashley and Rae were not in any way, shape, or form prepared to work off-sight. They could not work together in the safe confines of Quantico.
Eddy blinked. “Why not?”
“Trust me, she’s not ready.”
“You two aren’t getting on well are you?” “That’s an understatement.”
“You never did handle your own emotions well, Rae, and with your daughter’s problems, you sure this is the smartest move to—”
“Hold on, Mister Coffin! Do you really think I’m so far gone as to take cues from you, Edward, on the subject of handling emotional upheaval?”
Eddy shrugged. “Just want you to know that I still care, and by the way, it’s no longer Eddy or Edward.”
“Youuu…you got the name change you wanted so badly?” Her widening eyes gave away her excitement for him.
“Copernicus.”
She smiled at this. “How apt.”
Eddy had professed an undying hatred of his parents for their having used him in the manner of many parents with exceptional or gifted children, for having made a fortune off him, and for having named him Edwin Arlington after the obscure poet Edwin Arlington Robinson, and he had long promised to do something about it. “So now it’s simply Copernicus Coffin or should I call you CC?”
“Just Copernicus. Thought I’d go with one of those single name jobs like Prince, Cher, The Rock. Dropped the Coffin as well.”
“Really?” This came as a surprise.
“It kinda dragged me down, Coffin. Get it? Coffin, one foot…ahhh name in the grave, see?”
“Had to hurt mom and dad, Ed, I mean, Copernicus.”
“Well sure…understood, but—”
“But?”
“They’ve treated me as their invention all my life. I wanted part of me back, that’s all.”
“Sure…understood.” “You still love me?”
“Sure…sure, Copernicus.”
“And I you!” He smiled wide. He’d professed an undying love for her early on in their relationship, despite the fact she was old enough to be his mother, and in Phoenix he’d met and ‘fallen’ hard for a stripper. He was the emotional equivalent of a 6th grader, despite his adult genius. “What about your girlfriend in Phoenix?”
“Well…not too much to say on that score, except that…well, it’s over.”
“I think it was doomed from the start,” Rae suggested.
“Is that your professional opinion, Dr. Hiyakawa? If so, why didn’t you diagnose the problem sooner?” Eddy, as Copernicus, stormed off in a red-faced huff. He’d told no one other than Rae of his infatuation with the bleach blond stripper with the three children in Pheonix. In fact, other than confiding to Rae that the sex was great, he’d said little else. She’d tried to counsel him in this arena, but all he saw in this attempt was Rae’s green-eyed jealousy—his grandiose delusion.
Gene’s death had taken its toll on Eddy as well, despite hi
s outward aplomb on the subject. Beneath all that reserve and scientific zeal of late, hid a deep-seated guilt that he, too, had played a part in Gene’s demise. She could well imagine what Eddy’s subconscious must be prattling on about, something to the effect, “Had I done my job right, Gene’d be alive today.” The mantra was familiar to her because it was hers as well, yet the two of them had been unable to talk openly and freely to one another about the circumstances leading up to Kiley’s murder. In point of fact, no one had seen it coming.
She found the exit to the concrete parking garage, located her car, and slumped into the seat. When she saw no one around, Rae allowed the tears to flow. All the while, as she cried for Gene, for Eddy, for Ashley, and for Nia, she never thought of crying for herself, for allowing the grief to wash over her entirely so as to get past the flood. Instead, she cried for all the others, and she wondered if she’d ever be an effective psychic sensory investigator ever again.
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