Jacob took off the glasses, folded the paper in half and slumped wearily against the back of his chair. “It’s a letter. A bunch of letters.” He gestured toward a bundle he’d dug out of an old tackle box, maybe a dozen pages in all, tied with twine. “To my dad.”
My stomach sank. I liked Jacob’s dad. And the thought of him being privy to some kind of psychic experiment was a real punch to the gut. Tentatively, I slipped a letter from the pile, giving Jacob ample time to keep me from reading it. But he made no move to stop me. I unfolded the note, and read.
I still think about you all the time. I know it doesn’t do me any good. It’s just hard to forget how we used to talk about opening up our own little cafe. Living upstairs with a dog and a cat and as many kids as God gave us. I guess it was all pretty childish. And now I’m with Darren, and you’re with Shirley. Maybe we’ll be happier in the long run, I don’t know. But when I close my eyes and my thoughts turn to you, I can still see our little cafe.
Love always, Leah
I’d braced myself for evidence of experimentation. But if there’d been experimentation going on, it sure as heck wasn’t of the psychic variety. “The paper looks pretty old,” I said eventually. “And your dad having a life before he got together with your mom isn’t exactly a crime.”
Jacob tapped the pile of letters. “But he saved these.”
“Remember, mister, I’ve seen your parents’ basement. They save everything.”
You can’t mollify someone who doesn’t want to feel better, and Jacob was still chewing on the idea that he was nothing more than a product of some mad scientist’s idea of eugenics. When I thought about it that way, even a few innocent love letters took on a more sinister bent. Jerry’d had a sweetheart before Shirley—a girl who hadn’t wanted things to end. What had prompted him to ditch her for Jacob’s mom? Some normal reason (like the type of sticking points our Wedded Bliss handbook insisted we overanalyze)? Or the direct intervention of Dr. Kamal?
Jacob shoved the letters aside. “This is going nowhere, and Pastor Jill is calling in fifteen minutes. We’d better run through the exercise and get our answers straight.”
9
IF I WERE a more sentimental guy, I might worry that Jacob’s only objective was to do enough of the work to make it look like we were planning a wedding and not investigating a mad scientist. But I’m a pragmatist. And I was relieved he didn’t actually expect me to explore my “feelings.” Still, I had to admit, I’d figured the sections I’d feel most uneasy about participating in would involve talking about my sex life to a Lutheran minister.
I’d never realized how prickly the subject of “family” would end up being.
Oh, I’d been prepared to come off like a total basket case with something to hide. People tend to think I’m exaggerating when I say my childhood memories were erased by a nefarious hypnotist—or at least I imagine they would, were I to actually confide in anyone. I’d figured I would be the one who’d need to prep my answers.
Not Jacob.
We parked ourselves in front of the computer and the jaunty little Skype connection song announced Pastor Jill’s impending arrival. I’d scanned through the questions and come up with a reasonable answer for everything. I’d grown up in the foster care system, I didn’t know my parents, that’s all there really was to say. It may not be the world’s most satisfying answer, but it did sound reasonably normal.
And yet, after a hearty Wisconsin greeting and a few sports-related pleasantries (which Jacob gladly fielded), Pastor Jill threw me a curveball by saying, “Since I already know Jacob’s parents pretty well, I figured Vic could start us off this week. Will I be meeting your folks at the ceremony?”
Your guess is as good as mine.
Obviously I couldn’t say that, so I forged ahead with my canned answer about foster care, and after an awkward pause, added, “And the people who raised me are dead.”
If my answer made the pastor uncomfortable, she didn’t show it. “Then they’ll be there in your heart. For better or worse, the people who are there in our formative years carry on in the people we’ve become.”
I’d rather have Momma Brill and Harold at the ceremony than in my heart. Her in a color-clashing modern day hippie dress, him stoic in a suit. Last I saw Harold, he’d been graying at the temples. Maybe he’d be full on gray.
“Vic?” Pastor Jill said, and Jacob nudged me with his knee.
“Sorry, what?”
“Would you say you had a relatively positive experience with these foster parents?”
Until the men in black took me away. “Sure.”
“And did you ever get the chance to thank them for the part they played in raising you? As an adult?” The Pastor knew about Darla’s data plan to the other side? I must’ve looked confused, because she added, “Everyone’s got their own idea of heaven. But I’ve always believed that our loved ones really can see and hear us. Not all the time. But when we talk to them directly, they hear us.”
Would a normal person have found that notion soothing? Who the hell knows. As for me, I was busy tamping down the growing horror that Jennifer Chance was lurking around and listening in from the afterlife, still smarting about her kidnapping debacle and planning her revenge.
Silence stretched between us all, and eventually Pastor Jill took pity on me and filled it. “Whatever it is you believe—we’ll delve deeper into that in our chapter on Faith—there are plenty of studies in Positive Psychology that show what a salubrious affect gratitude has in our happiness.”
I realized she’d been looking at me expectantly for some while. “Uh…okay.”
“Salubrious!” She grinned. I stared back. “It’s my word of the day. It means healthy and beneficial.”
“Oh. Right, yeah. Great.”
I was scrambling to come up with a better compliment when Jacob shot up out of his seat and stormed off to the bathroom with nothing but a quick, “Excuse me,” leaving the office chair he’d been sitting in spinning in a lazy circle.
“Sorry,” I said. “We, uh. There’s…a lot going on.”
“Pre-marital counseling can be an emotional experience. Tell me about your dynamic. If I weren’t here, what would you normally do in this situation?”
I wasn’t sure I had a “normal” way to handle the fact that Jacob’s whole childhood was nothing like we thought it was. Mine? Sure. It had “sketchy” written all over it. But Jacob really had seemed to live the perfect Normal Rockwell, small-town, nuclear family life.
And he’d just found potential evidence that it was all a lie.
There was still a good half-hour left on our meeting, but I cobbled together some BS about the way Jacob and I talk through our problems, which Pastor Jill seemed to buy. She said, “This would all be so much easier in person. I could give you both a big hug.”
I was about to agree with her—in that half-hearted way I do when I’m really just trying to disengage—when it occurred to me that Jacob and I needed more than an afternoon visit in Wisconsin to get to the bottom of things. “Say, if the two of us could swing some vacation time, would we be able to do that? Switch our Skype meetings to in-person?”
Pastor Jill brightened. “Absolutely! I normally recommend my couples take at least a few months to go through the exercises and really give everything a chance to sink in. But we’ve already had two remote sessions, so I think we can pick the most relevant subjects and massage them into, say, a week?”
We’d never spent more than couple of days up there. I couldn’t imagine a better way to snoop. “Yeah. We can probably do a week.”
“Fantastic. Just let me know when you have the dates and I’ll make time in my calendar.” She gave me a broad smile. “This is bound to be quite the salubrious experience!”
I signed out and went off to let Jacob in on my latest stroke of genius. Our upstairs hall is squeaky, but I called out to him as if he hadn’t heard me coming a mile away. “Everything’s cool. I got rid of the priest.”
Jacob shifted—I could see the shadows of his feet in the light beneath the door—and after a moment, he opened it. “Minister.” He gave me a wan smile. His eyes were red.
I could count the number of times either of us has cried (in front of each other, anyhow) on one hand. It’s not just a guy-thing. It’s a cop-thing. You don’t burst into tears when an assault victim is giving you the gruesome details or show up at a murder scene and start blubbering. Jacob and I were old pros as tamping down our feelings. And the fact that he hadn’t managed to keep his distress contained just goes to show how deep his upset ran.
There was literally nowhere to sit other than the toilet in our afterthought of an upstairs bathroom, so I caught Jacob by the wrist and tugged him toward the bedroom. I perched on the foot of the bed and gave the mattress beside me a few clunky pats.
“Listen,” I said. “My empathy is for shit. Seriously—all the tests say so. But if anyone can relate to what you’re going through right now, it’s me.”
Jacob sat down wearily beside me and scrubbed at his face with both hands. “What if my parents were complicit in this whole mess?”
Yeah, that was my worry too—but it wouldn’t help anything to admit it. “Think about it, Jacob. Your initials were in that book and you had zero clue. Who’s to say it wasn’t the same with them? Plus, even if there’s more to the story of their get-together than they told you, they’re still the same people who endured your boring-assed wrestling matches.”
I tried to take his hand but ended up whapping him in the leg with my cast.
He took pity on me and enfolded my fingertips in his hand. He smiled sadly, and said, “My wrestling matches were anything but boring.”
10
THE NEXT COUPLE of weeks were a scramble of logistics. With all the extra hours we’d been putting in since Memorial Day, Laura Kim could hardly deny us time off for our freaking wedding. Still, she was pretty darn fretful about the prospect of being without her star medium for any amount of time. I may have joked about bringing Richie out of retirement…and I may have obliterated any future chance at a new Lexus. But sometimes sarcasm is its own reward.
Work hadn’t been the only place we were busy. I could see how wedding planning would be stressful for anyone with a particular vision of their special day. Which wasn’t to say Jacob and I didn’t have a vision. Just that our vision was pretty basic: have all the typical wedding elements in place so no one would suspect that we were there for an investigation, and the wedding was more of a bonus. We grabbed the first available DJ, the first caterer to return our call, and the first “supper club” we found with a banquet room big enough seat two dozen of our closest loved ones.
And even that took a lot of legwork.
I was under no illusion that normal people spent months planning the sorts of details I was leaving to chance. Luckily, if anyone noticed my half-assery, I could play the guy-card and blame the fact that I was male.
But before we could lock up the cannery and say goodbye to our common-law partnership, there was one last thing I had to take care of—something I’d never entrust to the first person who showed up…and that was getting rid of the burden I’d been lugging around since I slammed my hand in a car door. Deliberately.
Dr. Ella Gillmore is the stern, no-nonsense ER doctor who heads up the night shift at LaSalle General Hospital. She sees ODs and GSWs, burst appendixes and busted heads. And ever since I’d encountered a roomful of habit demons in The Clinic, she’s seen me. Even when it’s not an emergency.
Given that the FPMP must be leaning on somebody important to make that happen, I did my best not to take advantage.
It was coming up on midnight by the time Dr. Gillmore got to me, though if she was tired, she didn’t show it. I’d kept myself busy wandering the medical bays, once I’d flashed my F-Pimp ID to everyone who seemed bound and determined to keep me in my own curtained-off cubby. I had already exorcised LaSalle more thoroughly than I’d perused the men’s underwear catalog in our last pile of junk mail (and not because I needed a new pair of briefs). Even so, medical buildings have big potential for ghost action. Habit demons, too. And I wasn’t about to let any non-physical entities catch me with my pants down.
Gillmore strode into my cubby reading my chart with a frown of disapproval. Then again, that’s pretty much how she always looks.
I took great comfort in her consistency.
“All right, Agent. I’ll bite. You’re a week and a half overdue to get your cast off, and it couldn’t wait till your hand specialist could see you?”
“I’m going out of town…and he seems to think two more weeks in the thing would do more harm than good.” The guy’s exact words were more like, If you’re not going to follow my orders there’s only so much I can do for you. Hopefully he hadn’t put that in my chart verbatim. “Besides, I was hoping you could write me a scrip for something that’ll take the edge off.”
Her only reply was a raised eyebrow.
“Wedding jitters,” I explained. “Not me. Jacob. This whole thing’s been a lot more, uh, trying than we could’ve anticipated.”
I’d damn near said traumatic instead of trying. But before I could pat my back on the smooth save, Gillmore said, “And you think I’m about to write a benzodiazepine prescription for a third party on your say-so? You may be exempt from certain rules. But the pharmacy is not a free-for-all—for you or anyone.”
Fantastic. After my personal habit demon incident, I’d scoured the cannery and disposed of every last benzo…and now I was paying the price.
That’ll teach me to be conscientious.
Gillmore said, “I can point to some compelling studies that show meditation can be as effective as medication, but I’m thinking I’d be wasting my breath.”
“That’s okay.” Jacob probably wouldn’t have gone for a nice Valium anyhow. “I’ve got access to all that research and more. I’ve even read some of it.”
Gillmore wheeled over a cart and draped it with a paper pad. “Wisconsin, right? So where are you staying?”
“With family.”
“For your honeymoon?”
“Not exactly. We haven’t gotten around to planning that quite yet.” Because if it turned out our investigation led us anywhere unusual, an impromptu honeymoon would make such a plausible excuse for going out of town. “We get all kinds of alone-time—heck, we live together. We figured this would be a great chance to catch up with Jacob’s folks.”
“Take my advice. Unless you like strangers getting all up in your business, steer clear of a bed and breakfast. This was before Yelp, so maybe things are different nowadays. But the first and only B&B I ever stayed at, the owners acted like they wanted to be my new best friends. Everywhere I went, there they were.” She shuddered. “It was unnatural, all that friendliness. Plus the room reeked of lilacs.”
Once I was all situated with a very intense light shining directly on my cast (since when was it so filthy?) it occurred to me that maybe Jacob wasn’t the only one with good reason for his anxiety to spike. The handheld cast-cutter Gillmore was brandishing was just the sort of thing you’d use to open up a cranium. I told myself they probably weren’t exactly the same—and, in fact, it also bore a striking resemblance to an immersion blender. But my medical anxiety kicked into high gear as my subconscious refused to be convinced that she was making me a smoothie.
Calm your mind. A phrase tossed around all the time by the yoga lady. It seemed like it should’ve had the same effect on me that most phrases do. Hope for the best. Cultivate an attitude of gratitude. Eat more fiber. But there was something about Bethany that allowed her to reach me in a way most self-satisfied advice-givers never did. Was she speaking to me not only with her physical body, but her etheric form? Or was the fact that I was hooked up to a bunch of electrodes when we yoga’d focusing me in a way that led to some sort of crude biofeedback?
While the cast-cutter whined, I thought back to our umpteen yoga sessions and slowed my breathing. I
kept a brainwave app on my phone nowadays…okay, technically it was a toddler video game, but I couldn’t argue with the results. People can get funny when you pop in earbuds while they’re talking to you. But I’d done the games often enough that I could imagine what the binaural pulses sounded like without having to hook myself up. I’d never done binaural pulses on electrodes. But I’ll bet if I had, the imagined whub-whub-whub might’ve been almost as effective as the real ones.
The calming techniques helped, sure, but they were no magic bullet. I was still in a medical setting with a saw blade whirring so close to my flesh I could feel the vibrations in my newly-healed bones. I’m sure it only took a few minutes, but like all torture, it felt like forever.
Soon, my armpits prickled and my back felt clammy, and the mineral smell of airborne plaster was making it impossible to keep breathing deep. I thought about how much Jacob would appreciate not getting clonked with a cast all night. I reminded myself there’s usually a price to pay for freedom. But before I could say, Never mind, I’ll just live the rest of my life with a hunk of plaster at the end of my arm, I felt something I hadn’t felt in weeks: the cool touch of air on my wrist.
I sighed with relief…and then I wished I hadn’t breathed quite so deeply—and not because of the plaster dust. “What is that smell?” It sure as hell wasn’t lilacs.
“A certain amount of odor isn’t uncommon. Did you keep it dry?”
“I did my best.” Given the amount of sweat currently trickling down my spine, I’d say I was incapable of keeping anything dry without a personality transplant.
“Well, Agent Bayne, that’s a nasty rash. It looks like you’ll end up with a prescription from me after all.”
Other Half (PsyCop book 12) Page 6