by Dale Mayer
“Of course,” he said. “You caught him when he was in the wrong, and all he’s done ever since is try to make you be in the wrong.”
“I think it’s fear,” she said. “Fear is a great detractor for many people, but it’s also a great instigator. I think he’s always been focused on the fact I have the power to ruin him.”
“And yet, you didn’t?”
She hesitated. “I thought about it for a long time, and even now I’m not terribly proud of the fact that I didn’t go to the authorities about him. But I needed my degree. I was also working on campus, and he could have ruined me that way too. I knew, once I started down that path, there wouldn’t be a nice end, and it would be me who ended up in trouble. Not him, nor the men of the trust fund that kept him well endowed with everything he needed.”
“Interesting,” Samson said. “I guess I’m wondering if he had anything to do with your shooting.”
Startled, she looked at him. “I certainly hadn’t considered him being behind it, but it’s something he would do and consider himself fully justified in doing,” she admitted. “The loan of the equipment was from Professor Berkley—the prof who backed me up.”
“Interesting,” he said, “because somebody hired those men, somebody terrorized your ex-fiancé. Maybe Strauss heard about your kayaking plans. Now if only we could contact the police and get an update on your case.”
“Strauss introduced me to Mark,” she said, frowning as she thought back over the years. “We were in a conference, and he came up to me with Mark in tow and introduced us. He said we were two of a kind, and he said it in such a way as if to smirk and said the two of us should be more or less annihilated. We bonded immediately. Which could be considered a pretty smart tactic.”
“Through your ex-fiancé, Strauss could have kept track of you and anything you did.”
“Hell, why bother?” she asked, chuckling. “Mark and I didn’t spend much time together or talk much. I worked all the time.”
“So it must have been quite a shock to Strauss when he found you did get your doctorate?”
“Absolutely. And he would have known at least a day earlier than I did,” she said. “Potentially several days earlier.”
“So, if he really wanted to take you out, he could have made plans in those several days.”
“I suppose,” she said, “but that’s a lot of hate. I’m only one of thousands of students. I don’t know that he hated me that much. Besides, why now? He had lots of opportunity over the years.”
“Well, if you got the best of him back then, … maybe it just burned inside all this time, until he had to act. Some people just can’t let that go. And, now with your doctorate, you’d be his peer, not a subordinate—or a lesser person.”
“Possibly,” she said. “There is something very icky about him.”
“I remember,” Samson said. “Such a strange feeling when you meet somebody who just doesn’t seem to be all there, and yet, you know he’s in the scary professor category.”
She chuckled, then looked at the kitchen behind them. “I never did eat. Did you finish the scrambled eggs?”
“The food is sitting on plates in the kitchen, getting cold,” he said with half a smile. “Let’s eat.”
They finished eating and got the dishes cleaned up. She looked to Jamie’s door. “Do you just leave him in there?”
“Yes,” Samson said. “That’s the routine anyway.”
“And we’re back to that white room. Why white?”
“Because he said it helped him to cross over easier and to stay more balanced.”
“I wonder if I believe that,” she said. “Just so I can get this out once and for all, and you can clear it up for me, Jamie is one of the good guys, right? He’s not causing this disturbance, right? He’s not under some delusional state that wants the collapse of mankind and to allow whatever it is coming through to rise again?”
She knew she was taking a chance, being as blunt as she was. She knew she’d pricked Samson where it counted—his family.
He just glared at her.
She held up her hand. “Look. I’m an outsider. I see a young man. I see an older brother who’s desperate to help his younger brother. I see something very weird going on around here. I don’t even want to bring up Stefan and whatever ability he has or whatever happened to us down on the beach when you, me and Jamie talked telepathically, much less when I drowned in the sound,” she said gently. “I have to ask though. How much of any of that is something Jamie himself is causing?” She watched as Samson took several long, deep breaths.
He released his last breath slowly. “I can understand you might want to ask that question. And I’ll tell you the answer once, and then we won’t speak of it again. Jamie is one of the good guys.” And, on that note, he turned and stormed off to his lab.
*
Samson really couldn’t blame Whimsy for asking. What she’d been through was enough to stretch anybody’s belief system. He found it very interesting that the crazy professor he’d met at a conference many years ago was still around, still teaching and still as nuts as ever. Samson could certainly imagine Strauss causing trouble for Whimsy.
Particularly if she caught him screwing around with a student. That was grounds for dismissal. If he was on a tenured track, it was pretty hard to get dismissed. Hence the trend toward not offering tenure to professors anymore. To remove a tenured professor would require proving a criminal act, gross misconduct and not representing the ideals of the university. Even then there was no guarantee. And, with tenure, the crazy professor had a permanent job for the rest of his life. How sad was that?
Samson himself didn’t want tenure. He wanted the freedom to work as he needed to work, to do what he needed to do, when he wanted, with the belief that what he was doing was correct. Not following the university line, regardless if it was wrong.
As for Jamie … Samson stared out at the room next to him and wondered if Jamie had been mistreating him all these years or had he just not been stern enough with Jamie? Samson hadn’t expected to be a parent, but no doubt he’d been parenting his younger brother for a long time. And yet, Whimsy had stepped in and was handling that much better than he was.
It made him think about her and her sister and how that must have been a mother-daughter relationship too. In his case, the father-son relationship wasn’t a role he had asked for, but it was one he found himself in, and he was doing the best he could. But it was wearing him down. Jamie was a challenge twenty-four hours a day, whether he was here or in the hospital. If he was in the hospital, Samson dealt with terrible guilt for having put him there.
This time he’d broken his brother out and had put several people’s careers on the line so Jamie could be free again. How fair was that? He didn’t know what to do anymore. He bowed his head and rested it in his hands.
When his laptop beeped, he looked up to see four emails downloading onto the server.
That was the thing about the internet here. Emails could only download when everything connected again. He quickly read through the emails and learned a research ship was on the other side of his island. It was supposed to be studying water temperature differences. He wondered at that.
“Water temperature differences from what to what?” he asked in a surly voice. “And how long has it been there?”
Of course there was no answer. But he had been given the name of the ship and the company doing the research. As he looked, several more emails downloaded. He went through all the responses to the questions he had fired off, hitting some answers, especially answers to one very curious question.
The University of Seattle has a joint project going with a navigation communications company based out of Australia. They’re working on electromagnetic pulses and how different they are around the plates versus around the landmasses farther away from the plates. Also water temperature differences and timing differences. Nothing along the North American coastline though.
Samson studied t
hat email and frowned. “None of this makes any sense.” But it did suddenly tie in with Whimsy. Again. Even if the gunmen had tried to shoot or kill Whimsy, after attacking her, almost killing her, they would never have expected the ocean to pick her up and to bring her here. “Not unless they expected it to happen or had hoped it would happen.” He slowly stood, not liking the direction of his thoughts. But it would partially explain the tracking device.
“Surely that’s not possible,” he muttered to himself. He walked out of his lab to see her sitting on the recliner with her laptop in her lap, her feet up on the hearth. The fire was almost out. It was just embers, but they wouldn’t need it again until this evening. Her eyes were closed.
His gaze went to the bullet wound in her shoulder. It wasn’t healing as well as he’d have liked. Then, she needed to not have all this extra stress. Guilt washed over him. She shouldn’t have been involved in Jamie’s rescue. Then he had a horrible thought about something else altogether.
He took one step toward her. Her eyes flew open, and she stared up at him, a frown whispering across her face. “Samson?”
“I have a horrible thought going through my head,” he said, his voice low.
“How horrible?” she asked, straightening up as she closed the laptop and put it on the hearth in front of her. “You look very strange.”
He took several deep breaths. “I’m sure I do. It just occurred to me that maybe the shots fired weren’t trying to kill you.”
“I don’t know why else somebody would have tried to shoot me,” she said. “Obviously bullets are meant to kill.”
“Yes,” he said. “But what if they were also meant to do something else?”
“Something like what?” she asked, her hand instinctively going to her sore shoulder.
He watched the motion and continued, “I found something when I cleaned out your wound and bandaged you up. I instinctively knew what it was from the first moment I saw it. But I talked myself out of that. Because it was too crazy to consider. You know how we all do that? But we shouldn’t. We should listen to that first instinct.”
Whimsy nodded but was clearly confused.
“And still, I don’t know that I’m even close to being warm on this topic, but I’m wondering …” He hesitated, looking at her. “What if they put it in you on purpose?”
She stared at him. “What are you talking about?”
“A tracking device—but like those chips put in animals—only I’ve never seen one before, so I can’t be sure it’s not debris from your accident or even the bullet itself.”
She shook her head. “Then it would have made much more sense to have put it on my life jacket or onto my kayak.”
“When we found you on the beach, where were both of those things?” he asked.
She stared at him, and he watched the color slowly fade from her skin.
She massaged the wound in her shoulder, as if understanding what might come next, and it was already hurting her. “That’s not possible,” she said. “Nobody cares enough about what happens to me.”
“Maybe,” he said. “But what if somebody thought there was something special about you? And what if somebody thought maybe you would be a good experiment?”
Shock froze her. “Experiment?”
“You’re a marine biologist. The sciences are full of labs and experiments. You spent twelve years at the university, around Strauss and Berkley. Did they see something extra-special in you?”
“How would anyone think I was extra-special?” she argued.
“Like I’ve seen since you drowned?”
“Drowned?” She shook her head, over and over again, a frown on her lips.
He hated to bring that up. It was still too soon after the event. He tried again. “What if somebody put a tracking chip in you. As a precaution that your life jacket and kayak wouldn’t survive the trip. Hell, maybe they put GPS trackers on the life jacket and the kayak, but we know what ended up happening to them. And you were shot after your kayak sunk and after you lost your jacket, right?”
“Oh, my God …” Her free hand went to her mouth. “When I first lost consciousness?”
“So maybe the bad guys knew that, if you were to drown or to start to drown—”
“Drown…” she asked in a weak voice, shaking her head nonstop.
“—that you were so special that something would help keep you alive and potentially deposit you here.”
“I didn’t know I was special until we gathered on the beach and spoke telepathically to each other. … Then more things became clearer.” Her jaw dropped. “And that is one hell of a lot of ifs.” She paced the kitchen. “So you’re saying somebody expected me to get into trouble while kayaking on the sound, gave me a tracking chip via a bullet and expected the sound to save me? What a wild idea that one is. And not only save me”—she threw out her hands—“but put me on your beach so you could rescue me? Have you gone mad?”
Jamie’s door opened behind them. “No, he hasn’t gone mad. I think he’s correct. I don’t think you were brought here by accident. I think you were brought here deliberately.”
“Brought here?” Her gaze went from one man to the other.
Samson could understand her confusion and concern. Hell, he was already trying to figure out what was in his head.
“It’s one thing to shoot me with a tracking chip. It’s another thing to expect me to end up a long way away, as if it was all planned out by some great methodical mad genius,” she said.
“There’s a connection,” Samson said. “There’s always a connection.”
Her broken laugh made him wince.
“There might be a connection,” she said, “but that doesn’t mean it’s as crazy as what you’re suggesting.”
“So how did you get here then?” Jamie asked. “It’s not like Samson would have picked you out of a crowd.”
Once again Samson recognized the petulant young boy was back. But this time he realized just how correct Whimsy was about Jamie’s behavior. “That’s enough of that. Regardless of what is going on here, you can still talk to her with respect.”
“She doesn’t respect me,” Jamie said defiantly. “She doesn’t have the right to talk to me the way she did before.”
Her voice was surprisingly soft when she said, “No. You’re right. But I learned a long time ago I have to set boundaries for my own sanity. And, as long as Samson won’t or can’t set boundaries, I was trying to set them for his sake, so he wouldn’t collapse under the weight of caring for you when you are so lacking of love in return.”
Samson couldn’t believe that she’d uttered such words. It wasn’t that they were incorrect, because in many ways they were, but nobody ever talked to Jamie like that.
Maybe they should have.
He studied his younger brother’s face, seeing the anger and the hurt cross his features, but somewhere in the mix was also a realization that maybe Jamie was in the wrong. In Samson’s own mind all he could think of was kudos to Whimsy for helping to shape Jamie’s behavior to something that would be more livable for everyone.
“I’m not that bad,” Jamie said, but the petulance was gone, and now there was just worry and maybe fear.
Samson wanted to jump in, but something about this conversation made him realize it wasn’t his to jump in on.
And he was right; he knew for sure when Whimsy spoke up again.
“You have the capacity for so much love, but you need to direct it outward, not just inside yourself. Samson spends his life trying to do many things,” she said. “He looks after this place, does his research, looks after you. I mean, he’s already in trouble with the law for getting you out of that horrid clinic. And yet, ever since we’ve gotten here, you’ve done nothing to help. More than that, you’ve been incredibly disrespectful, and I don’t know, maybe not aggressive, but almost like grandiose, as if you have the right to order and beckon the world around you. Maybe you do on the other side, I don’t know, but I can’t imagine that k
ind of behavior on this side bodes well for any kind of spiritual development on the other.”
Jamie continued to glare at her.
But even Samson could see Jamie’s shoulders sag.
“No,” Jamie said, “it doesn’t. And Stefan has told me that before.” On that note, he spun on his heel, and, walking much slower, he headed back to his room.
When the door closed, Samson turned to look at her. “What was that all about?”
“A new day,” she said with a smile. “A new day for both of you, hopefully.”
Chapter 21
When did she become such an interfering busybody? Whimsy didn’t know why Jamie’s behavior with Samson bothered her so much, except it was like a mirror image of her and her sister. Talk about pushing her buttons. … As it was, she hadn’t had enough time with her sister, and Jamie was blessed to have Samson care for him as much as he did. It just hurt Whimsy to see that Jamie so obviously did not give a crap about Samson’s welfare.
Part of the problem was that she cared about Samson. She didn’t think it was just from a sense of gratitude that he’d saved her life, since she wasn’t sure if it was him or the sound or the dogs or something completely different that she should thank. The bottom line was, there was an imbalance in the brothers’ relationship, and she could see it, even if nobody else could. But that didn’t give her the right to try to change that lack of equilibrium. It wasn’t her relationship to fix.
She picked up her coffee mug and walked outside again to clear her head from all of Samson’s incredible what-if scenarios. The dogs joined her. She sat down on the porch at the edge of the steps and stared off into the distance. “You guys have an absolutely spectacular view.”
She rose and walked toward the trees. She couldn’t sense anything wrong, and she certainly couldn’t see anything wrong. Samson hadn’t given her permission to wander over the entire island, but she found a part of her that desperately needed to get away, to maybe stretch her own boundaries a bit.