Amanda's Story

by Brian O'Grady

  She hurried up the promenade and away from the two bodies. She slipped behind a copse of trees, ran across Madison Avenue, and disappeared into the afternoon crowds.

  Two hours later she was in the middle seat of a Southwest Airlines flight to Chicago. It would be a long night of flying before getting back to Dallas, but she could use the rest. Her batteries were drained and she wasn’t home yet. It didn’t take a lot of energy to project the persona of Dalice Lewis, the name she had chosen to fly under, but circumstances now demanded perfection from her. An FBI agent, someone she had known, had been killed in broad daylight. The situation had spun out of control and she needed to distance herself from it without leaving a trail that led back to Colorado Springs.

  ***

  “I’m sorry you had to come back early, Amanda.” Greg embraced his daughter-in-law just in front of the baggage carousel.

  “Don’t be. I was finished anyway, and wanted to be home. How are you?”

  “I’m okay,” Greg said, with a mixture of unusual formality and typical male detachment. “I know you and Ted were friends,” Amanda said, grabbing the first of her two suitcases.

  “Friends is probably too strong a term. I don’t want to talk about him,” he said abruptly.

  “All right. Where’s Lisa?” Amanda had resolved to respect the mental privacy of her inner circle. As there were only three members, she didn’t expect it to be a terrible imposition.

  “At home. We aren’t exactly communicating well at the moment.” Greg opened the door for her as she wheeled her suitcase out into the cloudy afternoon. “Before you ask”—he cut off her question—“there’s something we need to talk about.” Greg suddenly showed a side of himself she had never seen. Professional, serious, and somewhat intimidating. She followed him to the car and they drove silently back towards town.

  “Greg, you missed the turnoff.” She finally broke the silence, which had lasted more than ten minutes.

  “I don’t want to talk at home,” he said softly.

  They drove several more miles and he took a familiar exit, followed by three familiar turns, before he pulled into a very familiar driveway. The house facing them was empty, and for Amanda it would always be empty. “Greg, I don’t want to be here,” she said, and for the first time in months she felt the familiar pain of loss.

  “That may be the first completely truthful statement you’ve made since you came back,” Greg said, with more sadness than bitterness. “You know that Lisa and I love you as much as we loved Michael and Josh,” Greg said stiffly. “Nothing you do will ever change that.”

  “I know, Greg.” The moment of truth had arrived. Greg would need to explain his suspicions and the proof that supported those suspicions. He would admit that Lisa was concerned but didn’t completely agree with him, and then Amanda would have to make a decision. Continue living the lie, or confess everything. There really wasn’t much middle ground.

  “Something happened to you in Central America.” He waved off what he had just said. “Something more; something you haven’t told us.” Amanda let him continue. “I can understand the new attitude, the way you talk, the things you say. God knows you’ve been through enough.” He turned and looked at Amanda. “The day Abby Eden confessed, you came to the station to bring me back my keys.” Amanda nodded. “I saw how she reacted to you. I didn’t think much of it at the time, but then I remembered the therapist, Christi Bates, and Eden’s story that a woman, tall and black, coerced her to confess.” He opened his jacket and pulled out a single sheet of paper wrapped in a clear plastic evidence bag. Amanda followed the letter as Greg smoothed it out over the dashboard. “It’s the suicide note of Suzie Watts. No fingerprints on it except hers. Only, she didn’t write it. She put the words down on paper, but they weren’t hers.” Silence hung heavily between them. “The office manager of Dr. Eldridge Adegbite told us that the day before he was killed a woman, tall and black, talked her way into an unscheduled appointment. He was a psychiatrist who worked here in town, and he lived next to a drug dealer named Diaz. Diaz was a bad man, a very bad man, and I very much wanted to catch him, but just before we were going to bring him in, he kills the shrink, and then he cuts off eight of his own fingers and toes and bleeds to death.” Still Amanda was silent. “Three cases I was intimately involved with, and three sudden resolutions, all of which have a rational explanation that stinks to high heaven.” Greg turned away and wiped a tear from his eye, and silently held the floor for over a minute. “You know, I still can see Josh walking across that porch with his monster walk. And I see you bent over him, eyes full of love and life.” More tears began to fall. “God forgive me, but sometimes I wish I would have a stroke, or something that would wipe my memory clean; maybe then I could sleep.” He used his sleeve to wipe his eyes exactly like Michael used to do, and a pain so intense that Amanda gasped awoke inside her.

  “Greg, I want to go,” she said forcefully. “Now!” she demanded when he didn’t move.

  “Dalice is an unusual name, don’t you think?” Greg said matter-of-factly, returning to his recitation. “I remember Michael mentioning it years ago; she was your roommate in college. Although I think her last name was Watkins. I don’t know why I remember it; maybe it was that Joe Ely song: ‘Have you ever seen Dallas from a DC-9 at night …’ You should have chosen a different name.” His voice was devoid of emotion, almost calm, while Amanda’s emotions began to boil to the surface. Mittens was awake as well, but she was powerless against Greg. “Why Ted? I know he was on the edge, but he didn’t deserve that.”

  She didn’t have the energy to maintain the lie any more. Greg knew, and anything but a full admission would only cause him more pain. “I didn’t kill Ted; the Korean did.” It was out, and suddenly she needed to tell the entire story. “But I did kill the Korean.” She reached into her pocket and extracted the small fragment of metal she had found at Chang’s dead feet. “He shot me in the chest.” Amanda felt the full complement of protective instincts rise in Greg’s chest. “For what it’s worth, I didn’t want anyone to die. At least, I don’t think I did.” Now Greg let Amanda have the floor. “I’m responsible for your three cases.”

  “How?” he asked, turning in his seat to face her.

  “Instead of killing me, the virus did something else. I can’t explain how or why.” Amanda turned to Greg. “A couple weeks after they flew me to Tellis, I started to hear things—in my head.” She tapped her temple and for the next twenty minutes took Greg from Tela, Honduras to Washington, DC.

  When she finally finished, they sat in silence for a full two minutes. “I don’t understand, Amanda,” Greg whispered weakly. “I don’t understand how you could do this.”

  “Are you asking me how it was done, or why it was done?”

  “For now, let’s tread softly and explain how it was done.”

  Amanda fiddled with her fingers for a moment. “I can’t tell you how it’s done because I really don’t know. At first it was just happening to me. All of a sudden there was a chorus of voices in my head, and I began to question my sanity. Later, I realized that I had become a sort of receiver for the thoughts and emotions of those around me. Just before I left Tellis and came home I learned to filter and amplify those signals, and then it was a reasonably short step to control them.” She paused, but Greg’s body language told her that he needed more. “I imagine that at some level we all are physically connected, but a barrier keeps us apart. A wall or something that fastens our consciousness to the physical world, and confines it to our individual bodies and senses. This is how all of us experience the world. But when that barrier is removed, our minds naturally reach for each other; it’s like two magnets being drawn together. Instead of two magnetic fields, we get one larger field.” She glanced at Greg. He was closer but not yet comfortable with her explanation. “I think part of the reason you suspected me is that each time I visited your mind”—her verbiage was awkward
, but not nearly so much as the thought it expressed, and Greg winced—“I left footprints behind that led back to me. At some level you were aware of what was happening.”

  “So when the two magnetic fields merge, you direct them.” He looked at Amanda for the first time in several minutes. He held her gaze and then looked away. “My world is fairly simple, Amanda. I believe in the Newtonian laws of physics. I believe that every person has been given the choice to allow God or Satan to direct their actions, and all are capable of great good or great evil. And I believe that absolute power corrupts absolutely. It may be that the barriers that separate us were erected to prevent the moral erosion that has been eating away at you.”

  Their discussion was going as badly as Amanda could have imagined; the last thing she wanted was to alienate Greg and add to his pain. The second to last thing she wanted was for Greg to lecture her. “I didn’t ask for this, Greg,” she started softly, but her volatile emotions began to roil. “For a moment, I want you to imagine every one of your darkest thoughts and desires, all the things every person buries deep in the recesses of their mind, suddenly dragged into the light and amplified to unbearable levels. Then, I want you to imagine that you have the power to indulge those desires, without consequence. Do that, and then talk to me about moral erosion.” By the end, her voice had become angry and bitter. “All my life I have followed the rules of God and man, and things like this keep happening to me.” A small part of her wanted to cry, but a larger part of her mind shouted down the weakness.

  “I can’t possibly know what you’re going through, Amanda, but you can’t use it as an excuse for murder,” Greg said softly.

  “It isn’t murder if they deserve it; every one of them was guilty. They all had blood on their hands.”

  “And now so do you.”

  Amanda waved off his retort. “Justice was served. Simple, expedited, and completely infallible.”

  “Is it justice you were after, or an excuse?”

  “You’ve had thoughts of doing the same thing I’ve done. The only things that have stopped you are the possibilities of making a mistake and of discovery. I can’t be wrong, and the only reason you discovered me is that I led you.”

  Greg took a minute to study the backs of his hands. “Every cop at some point in their career secretly wishes to become a vigilante; I’m no exception. Whether it’s right or wrong, we are motivated by something greater than ourselves. Justice is a natural law, a harmony that is hard-wired into all of us, and the motivation to take matters into our own hands is to re-establish that harmony, not vengeance, or retribution, or personal gain.” He turned back towards Amanda. “Your motivations are completely different.”

  “So you don’t condemn the act, only its motivation.” She held his gaze.

  “I don’t know, Amanda. I’m a police detective; my entire professional life has been dedicated to the laws that protect society. You exist outside those laws; they weren’t written for someone like you. You’ve made yourself judge, jury, and executioner, and despite your belief of infallibility—or maybe because of it—I can’t shake the feeling that that there is something fundamentally wrong here. God forgive me, but I’m not sorry those people are dead, so maybe I can’t condemn the results, but the process, our process, no matter how cumbersome and inexact, has a purpose. It prevents any one individual from having the power of life or death over another. I just don’t know, Amanda.” He shook his head and turned away. “Forget what’s already been done. Right now I have to decide if you are a threat to society. What’s going to happen if someone cuts you off in traffic? Are you going to blow out their tires and send them careening into a wall?”

  Greg’s perspective was a new and unwelcome slant, and as much as she wanted to deny it, his assessment was likely much closer to the truth. “So you think I could be a danger to others?”

  “How much of a step is it from killing the guilty with complete impunity to killing the innocent? After twenty-three years of police work, the one thing I know for certain is that anything can be rationalized. And if you continue to change, are you going to reach a point where you won’t even bother to rationalize your actions? A point where even Lisa and I won’t be safe around you?”

  It was the worst possible thing Greg could have said to her, if only because there was a grain of truth in his question. What little human emotions remained inside her were concentrated around the three people in her circle. The realization that at some point she could rationalize hurting them terrified her. She grabbed her purse and opened the car door. “I need to be alone, Greg. I’ll be home before Lisa finishes dinner.” She pulled away from the door.

  “Lisa, it’s a five mile walk. It’s not safe.” Greg’s face was full of concern.

  “Nothing on two or four legs can hurt me,” she said with her back to him, and then realized that not all of Greg’s concerns were for her safety.

  CHAPTER 36

  Amanda couldn’t remember ever being so uncomfortable in the presence of Michael’s parents. Even when she first met them, the awkwardness began to fade immediately, but now, after a silent and tense dinner, no one seemed to know what to do or to say.

  “I will clean up,” Lisa said, rising from her chair.

  “I’ll help,” Greg said sullenly.

  “I don’t want it,” she snapped at her husband. “Go watch TV or read something. I want to do this alone.” Her last sentence was directed equally at Greg and Amanda.

  Greg pushed back from the table and stomped his way into the living room. The couch creaked as he dropped into it in obvious frustration. Amanda caught Lisa glancing at her, and they both looked away quickly. “I want to do this alone, Amanda,” she said in an injured voice.

  Hours later, after unpacking her suitcase, Amanda was back to pacing her small bedroom, her mind warring with itself. She wanted to be free, to use the gifts that God or the Fates had given her, without any moral restraint. She felt like an eight-year-old screaming at her mother that “they were hers; why couldn’t she use them like she wanted?” Why did Greg and Lisa have to interfere? After all she had been through, after all she had lost, it wasn’t fair that she couldn’t do what she wanted. She was being childish, and immature, and self-indulgent, and she really didn’t care.

  Of course you care. Michael, her conscience, had returned.

  Why? Why do I have to care? Why do I have to keep accepting things graciously?

  I doubt Suzie Watts or her boyfriend would agree that you’ve been gracious.

  “Very funny,” she whispered to her dead husband. She could imagine the broad smile on his face, so much like Greg’s.

  It’s not really a question of control anymore, Amanda; it’s a question of exercising that control. He didn’t have to read her mind—extrinsically or intrinsically, he was a part of it. Greg had implanted the fear that she could one day lose control and plow a row of death and destruction where ever she went. It was a hideous vision, and her regression into the petulant pre-teen state was simply her mind’s way of coping with that terrible possibility. Only, she had gained some perspective on Mittens’s and her blood lust, and with it a degree of control. What had once been an imperative would in time become a simple tool that she could take out and use, or lock away.

  Maybe we don’t need to do it, but you can’t deny that it is the most exciting thing we’ve ever done. Mittens had to have her say.

  “Amanda? Are you all right?” Lisa asked after a soft knock.

  Amanda opened the door. “I guess no one in this house is going to get much sleep tonight,” she said, inviting her mother-in-law inside.

  “I saw your light on.” Lisa stood for an awkward moment and then decided to sit in the rocking chair she had once nursed her son in. “It’s a good excuse to talk.”

  “I’m sorry I hurt the two of you,” Amanda began.

  “I know,” Lisa answered. “Greg filled me i
n. I didn’t want to believe it, but I guess he was right.” She stared at Amanda. “I knew something was wrong, but I didn’t say anything. No don’t …” Lisa cut off Amanda’s response. “Just give me a moment and let me get through this. I don’t ever want to know any of the details, okay?” Amanda nodded. “We move forward from here. We don’t forget what’s happened, but we don’t dwell on it either. Agreed?” Amanda nodded again. Lisa began to gently rock. “Can you control this?” she asked, and Amanda’s first thought was that Lisa had been talking to her son.

  “Yes,” she answered—and admitted to herself.

  “Do you want to control this?” Lisa followed up, and now Amanda was certain that she had been talking to her son.

  “That’s the real question.” Amanda sat at the edge of her bed.

  “I don’t think I have to tell you what’s at risk here.” Lisa took Amanda’s hand. “We can’t follow you down this road.”

  Amanda squeezed her surrogate mother’s hand, and instead of the usual uncomfortable tingling that came with human touch, she felt a reassuring warmth. “I know, and in moments like this it’s not a road I want to go down.” She released Lisa’s hands. “But there are other moments when I realize that I have an opportunity to do or to be anything I want.” Lisa visibly reacted as something about Amanda changed. “Before this happened I was a timid, scared little girl, always doing and saying things because they were expected of me, avoiding confrontation at almost any cost. I could count on one hand all the times I had raised my voice in anger. Imagine living with Greg and never raising your voice.” Amanda couldn’t help but sense Lisa’s unease, and her natural reaction was to console her. “I can’t live like I did before, and I know I can’t live like I have been. I have to find a middle ground.”