CounterProbe

by Carole Nelson Douglas

  Psychiatry was his only religion, and its sacred words were his only weapon. It might work, that twentieth- century talisman of his, and it might not.

  He leaned close to her ear, chilled by the unnatural warmth her body radiated, and whispered, repeated, shouted, “Ecnalubma… ecnalubma… ecnalubma” like a litany.

  “Try to remember—Try to remember—Try to remember.”

  The music died track by track until that last phrase rang sweet and low, repeating with stuck-needle stubbornness until it faded abruptly. Clothes slumped to the floor, rolling felt-tip pens rocked into stillness. Kevin’s hands on Jane’s wrists felt so cold he could have just retracted them from a deep freeze.

  Jane’s eyes were opening, slowly, the browns of her irises expanding into focus. She frowned at Kevin. “Me,” she insisted. Something left her eyes, some fleeting, fleeing memory. “And… not me.”

  He nodded. “No. Not you.”

  Heat radiated from Jane up his arms, engulfing him with a welcome wave of warmth, then dissipating beyond him. She began shivering, violently. Kevin sank with her to the floor, held her teeth-chattering face against his shoulder, rocked her, warmed her, although he felt his own aftermath of chill.

  Mrs. Volker had recovered enough to drop her apron. She was moving stiffly around the room, picking up the scattered belongings.

  “I kept them,” she explained wearily. “I kept it all just as it was when Lynn… went away. We thought she’d come back from that summer in Montana. And then, when she was reported missing, we never believed she was dead. We thought she’d come back. We knew she’d come back.”

  “You love her,” Volker accused Kevin.

  Kevin felt like a kid again, sitting on the floor of his messy room, confronting eternal adult charges.

  “Somebody has to,” he answered.

  Mrs. Volker began disjointedly humming “Try to Remember” as she bent from the waist, in a way that was murder on an aging back, to pick up Lynn’s strewn underwear.

  Chapter Six

  * * *

  Jane’s teeth chattered on the coffee cup rim.

  Kevin steadied her hand until she took the first, bracing sip. Her eyes flashed him a rare shot of gratitude before widening in caffeine-struck surprise.

  “Bitter,” she commented.

  No one commented back.

  They all hugged their microwave-rewarmed coffee cups in silence, Jane and Kevin on the spavined sofa, the Volkers on their separate chairs. Who would have thought,

  Kevin wondered, that the Volkers would have had a microwave? Life was chock full of surprises.

  “Did… Lynn… ever demonstrate any exceptional abilities?” Kevin figured it wouldn’t hurt to ask.

  “Never! No. Lynn was a normal girl all the way,” Volker said.

  His wife picked at the pink seam tape binding her apron edge. “She had a gift for finding lost things.”

  “Coincidence,” Volker spat. “First we’re kooks Who claim we saw a UFO a quarter century ago. Then we were nuts five years ago for believing Lynn hadn’t really died in that wilderness she got lost in. Now Lynn’s been proven dead and we’re supposed to say our dead daughter was a weirdo—”

  “What’s a weirdo?” Jane asked Kevin.

  Mrs. Volker’s eyes rebuked her husband.

  “Someone special.” Kevin briefly pulled Jane’s head to his shoulder. “Like you.” He faced Volker again. “Look. You’re not the only one who saw a UFO. I did, too, two nights ago. Maybe the same one, for all I know.”

  “You saw it?” Mrs. Volker sat forward on her maple rocking chair, stilling it.

  “I saw it. Not as well as I should have. I was… worried about Jane.”

  “That’s where she’s from!” Volker was standing, his head partially obscuring the photo of his daughter on the wall.

  “Oh, my God,” said his wife, and pointed behind him.

  He turned impatiently, his head shifting out of the way.

  The photograph of Lynn Volker still hung where it had for seven years. Not even the glass had cracked, despite the telekinetic storm upstairs. But—

  “Oh, my God, Jack—it’s reversed!”

  Kevin stood, too. He saw it but he didn’t believe it. Lynn Elizabeth Volker was still smiling at the world—with empty white eyes and fiberglass hair, out of a shadowed face, wearing a black blouse…

  Volker pointed to Jane like an Old Testament prophet confronting Pharaoh. “Get her out of here! Get her out of our house!”

  “It’s not her fault,” Kevin said. “She’s just… what she is.”

  “She’s not ours! Never was.” Volker was advancing, his sixtyish bulk more threatening because it seemed such an unlikely source of violence.

  “Jack, Jack, please!” His wife was baby-stepping toward him, her face schizophrenic with mixed emotions.

  “Please what, Adelle? I don’t care what we saw, what they did to us in that thing all those years ago. I don’t care what he saw two nights ago, or what they did to her! She ain’t ours. She’s an unnatural thing and I want her out of our house!”

  “She’s flesh of your flesh,” Kevin struck back. “Your genes. That’s how she was made—they took a cell from your wife, who must have been just pregnant at the time. Before even you or Mrs. Volker knew that—they knew. And that’s all it takes, a single cell. Hell, even we can do it today. Test-tube babies. Genetic engineering. Don’t you read the papers in Crookston? Baby Louise in England, dozens here at home. It’s routine medical practice. If we can do it, why shouldn’t they?”

  “We dreamed it, do you hear me, Dr. Blake? It was… what did the psychiatrists try to call it twenty-five years ago?—small-scale mass hysteria. Delusion. We ‘thought’ we saw the ship. We ‘thought’ we saw those… things… on it. We ‘thought’ we were up in the damn thing.

  “Well, we weren’t crazy; we were wrong! We were dreamers, we were fools, and we aren’t going to be nobody’s fools anymore. We deny it. So what do you do with your precious Jane Doe now, who wasn’t good enough for us to be her parents before? What do you do with her now? We don’t want her. We got grief enough.”

  Volker’s vehemence had left Jane cowering against Kevin’s hip, like a puppy that knows only the fact of its misbehavior, not its specific sin. It left Kevin swallowing his own sour rage, his regret at having exposed Jane to this rejection, and his sudden personal sense of abandonment.

  He remembered his own parents, whom he saw too seldom. He wondered if they would disown him when the newspapers made what they would of him, of their brilliant, never-understood only son, now on the run.

  Mrs. Volker had crept up on Kevin during the outburst. Her hand on his arm nagged for his attention.

  “Jane is… Lynn’s sister, isn’t she, Dr. Blake?”

  “Not sister, exactly—”

  “Twin? She’s her twin?” Pathetic eagerness to grasp the unthinkable made Adelle Volker’s face girlish in its uncertainty.

  “More than twin—” Kevin hadn’t thought it all out himself. He paused to phrase it accurately. “Jane is… Lynn’s undeveloped self. The genetic raw material, unshaped by environmental factors. She’s what your Lynn was when she was born—a baby, I guess. Only Jane’s all grown up.”

  “She’s nothing!” Volker pulled his wife away, over to his side. “Don’t you go tryin’ to make that creature into some helpless innocent to wring my wife’s heart. If she’s anybody’s baby, she’s your problem, Dr. Blake.

  “You got a lot of guts comin’ here again and upsettin’ Mother ’n me and makin’ us think there’s any hope for our daughter. There never was. Lynn was an ordinary girl and she died. She died, and we know it now! She was just unlucky enough to have weirdo parents who may have been crazy once but they’re not gonna do it again!”

  In the ensuing silence, Kevin heard an old-fashioned clock ticking for the first time. He reflexively glanced around to see where it was kept, but his eyes snagged on the photo-reverse portrait of Lynn Volker and stopped. Ma
ybe the old man was right; maybe what had once been positive —the Volkers’ need for a daughter, Jane’s late-found need to belong—had turned negative.

  At his side, Jane spoke, her voice smaller than he’d ever heard it, like it came from a. long way inside.

  “Kevin. I want to go away.”

  He nodded at the Volkers. Mrs. Volker’s face was frozen in distress. No one had consulted her, any more than they had when Lynn had vanished in Montana. He took Jane’s hand and pulled her up beside him. He really was her only family now.

  “I thought—” Kevin began… and ended. “I thought you folks could do her some good. Or the other way around. She’s got a lot to figure out for herself.”

  “She’s a freak,” Volker answered harshly, his farmer’s face hard-edged as a plow blade. “We never could have spawned her. Better to have our daughter dead and normal than like that.”

  Kevin turned Jane toward the door. “If anybody comes looking for us… her—”

  “We never saw you. That’s what we shoulda said twenty- five years ago. ‘Sorry, never saw nothin’…’ ”

  “Dr. Blake—” Mrs. Volker stepped from the shadow of her husband, her hands working behind the screening curtain of her apron. “You’ll… take care of her?”

  “Yeah.” He hadn’t meant to sound so weary. “I’ll get her… somewhere… safe and sound, Mrs. Volker. Home by midnight okay?” he couldn’t help adding with something else he hadn’t meant to sound—bitterness.

  Adelle Volker just shook her grizzled, untended head and watched them leave through her tears. Kevin shut the door behind them, not waiting for those inside to make the final, excluding gesture.

  “Cold out here,” Kevin commented, looking down the snow-whitened street at all the snugly closed front doors in Crookston.

  “They didn’t like me,” Jane noted quietly from the curve of his arm.

  “Fair play. You didn’t like them very much at first, either.”

  She frowned. “Everybody wants me. Why don’t they?” He couldn’t help laughing. “Conceited, aren’t you? Except that you’re always so damn literal.”

  “You wanted to keep me away from them, away from the other doctors and Dr. Swanson, from those men. Even from—” She glanced up evocatively at the white-washed winter sky.

  “From ‘them,’ I know. Yeah, I guess you are pretty popular, come to think of it. And it’s gonna get worse.”

  “Is that because I’m a freak?”

  “Probably.”

  “I know what ‘freak’ is; ‘an abnormally formed organism; especially, a person or animal regarded as a curiosity or a monstrosity.’ ”

  “Jane, shut up.” He opened the van door and boosted her inside.

  But when he got behind the wheel, she was waiting for him with unrelenting logic and her uncanny, emotionless perception.

  “You wanted them to like me this time. I tried, but 1 couldn’t help what happened upstairs. I’m… She paused so long that Kevin found himself hanging on the next word, as if it might be as important as Zyunsinth. It was. “I’m… sorry,” Jane said, her face puzzled. Perhaps she herself didn’t understand why she felt compelled to say that for the first time in her life.

  Kevin hugged her across the void between the seats. “I am, too. I am so damn sorry.”

  Over her shoulder, the blank face of the Volkers’ ultraordinary white frame house stared impassively back at him. The town of Crookston didn’t look one bit sorry at all.

  * * *

  Jane threw her third Baby Ruth wrapper on the floor. Kandy’s van wasn’t exactly pristine inside; Kevin twisted to survey the collection of brown paper grocery bags and newspapers piling atop Kandy’s original debris in the space behind him.

  The plowed winter highway unrolled like a silver Christmas ribbon tarnished gray after the holidays. Winter painted from a monochromatic palette—white fields, off- white sky, rough charcoal strokes for leaf-stripped trees and bushes fringing the overall shawl of snow.

  The boring landscape numbed Kevin’s survival instincts; driving didn’t help him keep alert, but Jane, of course, couldn’t spell him at the wheel. No driver’s education taught in the great big High School in the Sky.

  Kevin knew he shouldn’t be heading south for the Twin Cities, but he didn’t know where to go anymore and maybe “they”—whether police or G-men or extraterrestrials— weren’t following. The newspapers had said nothing, not even about anyone finding the two bodies north of Duluth…

  The van swerved as Kevin felt sleep buzz his brain with a kamikaze pass. Jane’s big brown eyes immediately questioned him—a look he was beginning to read as accusing. Paranoia. Nice Greek root word. Paranoos—demented. A shrink of all people should be immune, he knew, but put anyone under enough stress and all the standard afflictions of the human personality come screaming out of Pandora’s box.

  “Put the wrappers in the empty bag,” he instructed Jane. Maybe terminal tidiness would ensure normality. Another fancy phrase described that delusion, Kevin knew, but he was too fatigued to hunt for it. He glanced in the flat silver oval of the sideview mirror. Was that Jeep staying too close too long? Come on, either pass or get off the pot… God, he was beginning to feel tired.

  “Kevin?”

  “Nothing. I was just watching the car behind us.” Jane was growing hypersensitive to his moods now. The longer she spent with him, the more she seemed to know him, and there was something… freakish… about how perceptively she could tune in to the blips on his mental EKG.

  “Are they following us?” Her jacket rasped as she twisted around to look.

  “I don’t know. Maybe I’ll try to lose ’em.” He sped up, the van hesitating until the gas took hold and shot them forward.

  Behind them the Jeep, muffled with its winter canvas top, diminished into a squarish blob.

  “All right!” Kevin congratulated himself. “Guess I was wrong.”

  “Want a candy bar?” Jane wondered next.

  “God, no! Anything sweet right now would turn my stomach.”

  Her face fell at his refusal.

  “Hey, it’s okay. You can eat them. Maybe they’ll keep you warm. This van is colder than a well-digger’s designer shorts.”

  Jane signaled polite puzzlement, then bent to scrape up the wrappers and crush them into the bag behind her seat.

  Kevin pulled a hand off the steering wheel and thrust it into his jacket pocket. A cold roll of bills curved into his palm, almost as comforting to him as steel balls to Captain Queeg. Money. With money they had a chance.

  “Where are we going?” Jane asked.

  Kevin couldn’t bring himself to answer.

  * * *

  “They won’t come back here.” Turner was definite.

  Nordstrom’s face made the ridiculing little grimace that indicated mute disagreement.

  “They might not. He will,” Nordstrom said.

  “Why?”

  The imported psychiatrist threw his fur-lined leather coat over the plastic-shell chair, stationing his ostrich-skin briefcase by its splayed steel peg legs. The coat and case almost dwarfed Eric Nordstrom, a slight man whose air of neat effacement made him seem even smaller.

  “Blake’s an amateur,” Nordstrom continued. “A rules player despite his surface disrespect for convention. He’s too used to putting rats through mazes. He’s forgotten how to be one. He’ll come back here because he can’t help himself.”

  Turner leaned into his molded plastic chair. Although small, the interview room in the federal building felt chilly, partly because national government policy demanded heat conservation—mostly because of the scalpel’s edge of cold Nordstrom had brought in from the outside.

  Turner disliked the man, but he didn’t know why. Turner studied his vaguely unattractive features, muddy skin and thinning, badly cut hair, the affected rimless glasses. It was possible to imagine Nordstrom’s mother disliking her new infant on sight; possible even to imagine Nordstrom born with a cold, winking monocle
of glass propped up before each pale gimlet eye…

  “You’d like him better than you like me.” Nordstrom hefted the briefcase to extract a fistful of manila folders.

  “But it’s me you have to work with, and him you have to catch.”

  “Who?” Turner sat up, wary.

  “Blake. Young Dr. Blake. He and I attended Harvard together, did you know?”

  No… kidding. Turner made himself smile cynically. “Oh? Old school ties going to get in your way, Doctor?”

  The other man laughed, an oddly irritating sound. “We never got along, Blake and I. He was a nobody from the north woods with a few brains and a certain charm. Scholarship student.”

  The last two words reminded Turner that Nordstrom came from a wealthy New York family, that he didn’t have to work for a living, and that he certainly didn’t have to work for the government.

  “Then this job should be a busman’s holiday for you,” Turner commented.

  “Busman’s holiday?” Was the man impervious to conversational clichés?

  “You’ll enjoy working on Blake, then?”

  “Ah. You are a professional, aren’t you, Mr. Turner? I forget that, sometimes. I won’t be sorry, no, to interrogate Blake. But that makes it better, doesn’t it, Mr. Turner? If you have to use a dirty tool, better it be suited for the job.”

  “I never said—”

  “You don’t have to like me. You just have to need me. Dr. Kevin Blake never did. But he will.”

  Nordstrom fanned the pale folders, each bearing a slim burden of papers. “I’ve got copies of his med school and residency records, his group therapy sessions. I’ve got as much on Dr. Kevin Blake as there is to find. Let me assure you, Mr. Turner, he’ll come back.” His hands, clean as a surgeon’s, snapped the folders into a tidy pile. “Now, tell me, have you found the latest address on his parents?”

  Turner reached to the notebook in his jacket pocket, feeling inexplicably reluctant.