Chapter 12
CHAPTER TWELVE
From his position behind a tree, Gabe surveyed what he could only think of as the Langston estate. There was a wide lawn leading down a gentle slope to a wood lot that gave him cover.
The house occupying pride of place at the top of the hill was probably a couple of hundred years old, but the exterior was freshly painted.
In back and to the side was what he took to be an old carriage house, converted into a garage and probably converted again into her studio.
The woman he’d encountered in St. Stephens must be doing pretty well with her painted furniture, even if she had inherited the property from her parents.
He’d picked up that information from one of the articles he found about her—both in the local Frederick paper and in a couple of art magazines.
He’d had his phone read them to him on the way over.
He knew a lot about her background and her artistic talents, but he still had no idea why she’d been recklessly heading for Carson’s boat.
And then there was that intriguing line about “one of the men who killed him.”
As he moved from tree to tree, getting closer to the house, he saw her come outside carrying a two-step metal stool, the kind that was dangerous to use because there was nothing to hang onto when you stepped on top.
She set it in the driveway several yards from the house and the workshop.
Once it was in place, she opened a plastic grocery bag she was carrying and pulled out a can that had probably held some tomato product, judging from the red color.
After taking several steps back, she stood oddly, and he would have sworn that someone was behind her, holding on to her, but there was no one else in the scene.
She stood still, her focus on the can. As far as he could tell, her arms remained at her side, and her eyes were locked on the can.
From the look of intense concentration on her face, it seemed like she was putting considerable effort into something—focusing mental energy on some difficult task.
For long moments, nothing happened, but then it looked like a beam of light shot out from.
..somewhere...and struck the can. It started to glow, then leaped into the air like a jolt of electricity had struck it.
As it shot upward, she pressed her hands to her face, looking shocked that anything had happened.
In the next moment, the can clattered to the blacktop.
Jesus! What the hell was that?
He watched her get a rake and push the can out of the way, before pulling another one from the grocery bag and setting it on the step stool and moving back to where she’d been stationed earlier.
Only this time her stance was completely different.
There was no one standing in front of her, yet her arms were raised in a circle at waist height as though she had locked them around another person.
But there was nobody out here besides her and Gabe.
Even stranger, she leaned to the side as though she had to look around the person she was holding to see the can.
What the hell? He stepped out from behind the tree to get a better look at whatever weird scenario was being played out.
The same attitude of concentration was on her face, until it was replaced suddenly by a look of shock and alarm.
“No, don’t,” she shouted.
Seconds later something struck Gabe in the solar plexus. He doubled over, and as he went down, he blacked out.
* * *
“Travis, what have you done?” Olivia shouted as she ran toward the man who was lying on the ground. As she got closer, she saw that it was the guy from St. Stephens who’d said he was a detective.
She could feel Travis behind her as she dropped to her knees beside the fallen man. His eyes were closed, his face was deathly white, and his breath was shallow.
I spotted him...sneaking up on us. I just reacted.
You might have killed him—or,” she lifted one shoulder. “Or worse,” she added aloud.
“When you screamed, you pulled back your power, and I did too. I think I just stunned him.”
“Hopefully. But we can’t leave him out here.” She gave the supine figure a long look. “Unfortunately, I don’t think I can get him to the house by myself.”
“Maybe I can help.”
“How?”
“Lift his shoulders. I’ll do his feet.”
“You can do that?”
“I think so, now that we’ve done that trick with the fireballs.”
She bent to take the unconscious man by the shoulders.
At the same time, his feet and legs lifted.
Travis took more of the weight, and it was like the two of them were carrying the guy.
Still, it was a struggle to get up the hill.
Luckily, Olivia had left the kitchen door open, so that they didn’t have to put down their burden when they got to the house.
They carried him into the living room and laid him on the modern sectional sofa that she had bought when she’d redecorated the house.
Olivia went to get a blanket, and by the time she was back, their visitor was looking more normal.
“Maybe he just needs to sleep,” she said, as she covered him with a blanket.
“I mean, I hope we don’t have to call a doctor. What would we say happened to him?”
“Yeah,” Travis muttered. “Sorry.”
“You thought we were under attack.”
“Getting abducted and killed can make you jumpy.”
“I understand.” She was about to back away from their victim when she changed her mind. “He probably has a wallet. Maybe we can find out who he is.”
She had just reached into his pocket when iron-hard fingers wrapped around her wrist. At the same time, another hand came up and aimed a pistol at her face.
Olivia gasped and tried to back away.
From behind her, Travis shouted, but she was the only one who heard it.
“What did you do to me?” he growled.
“Nothing.”
“I saw what you did to the can. Then you did it to me.”
“Let me go, and we can talk.”
“Why should I trust you?”
“I brought you inside. I could have left you out there on the ground.”
“So nobody would see me.”
“If I thought someone was going to see, I wouldn’t have been doing the thing with the cans.”
He thought about that for a moment before saying, “Fair enough.”
When he let go of her wrist, she backed away.
“Why were you digging in my pocket?”
“To get your wallet and find out who you are.”
“Gabe Bowman,” he snapped, then winced. “Again, what the hell did you do to me?”
What do we do? She asked Travis.
I made a mess of this by hitting him.
She could feel him mentally sighing. Maybe we have to tell him some version of the truth.
Like he’s going to believe it.
If we do it right, it might work.
“Why are you just standing there looking like you’re going into a trance?” Bowman demanded.
“It’s complicated.”
He slowly sat up. “You got any aspirin? Or anything else for the bitch of a headache you gave me?”
“I didn’t,” she reiterated.
“Then what hit me?”
Without answering, she said, “I’ve got some NSAIDs. Let me get you a couple of pills and a glass of water.”
“So you can think up a good story?”
“So I can figure out how to tell you the truth so you’ll believe it.”
When he scowled at her, she turned toward the kitchen. She was back in a few minutes with a bottle of pills and a glass of water.
She took a seat in a chair opposite the sofa, and Travis sat on the other end of the couch where she could see both him and Bowman.
“Spit it out,” he ordered.
She and Travis had been silently conferring while she got the water and the analgesic.
“I’m going to back up a little,” she began.
Bowman watched her closely.
“You know how scientific experiments can go off the rails.” Without waiting for an answer, she went on.
“About thirty years ago there was a doctor in Louisiana who’d convinced some government special projects agency that he could create super-intelligent children by manipulating blastocytes soon after fertilization.
He was running a fertility clinic, which was where he got the genetic material to work on. ”
The detective pulled out a notebook and ballpoint. “What was his name?”
“Douglas Solomon. His contract with the mothers specified that they bring the children back for IQ testing periodically. Not all of them complied. When he did the tests, the kids had a normal intelligence spread, and the think tank that had paid for the program shut down the clinic. Right after that, it burned. And more recently, a lab Solomon was running exploded. Sounds suspicious, right?”
The detective winced.
Olivia hurried on. “We can talk about the clinic later. The important point right now is that there was something unusual about the children after all.”
Her gaze flitted to Travis before she looked down at her hands.
“None of them was able to form close relationships with anyone—until they came in contact with another child who was born out of Dr. Solomon’s experiments.
” She looked up again. “When they did, one of two things happened. Either they formed a psychic connection, or their brains couldn’t take the strain, and they died of cerebral hemorrhage. ”
Bowman shifted in his seat. “A psychic connection? Like what?”
“They could do things like read each other’s minds—or, uh, make fireballs and use them as weapons.”
There was dead silence in the room while Bowman processed that information.
“You don’t believe me?” Olivia asked.
“I...”
“You got hit by one. Luckily, we’re not too good at it yet.”
“We? I only saw you. Doing...something.” He stopped short and fixed her with a steady gaze. “Wait a minute. You and who else? Travis Carson? You said he was murdered.”
“Unfortunately. But somehow he found me and came back.”
“You expect me to believe that?”
She shrugged. “Can you give me another explanation for what happened to you? Maybe I’m up here developing a death ray when I’m not painting furniture?”
Bowman kept his gaze steady. “You’re saying that Travis is dead and you brought him back?”
“No—he was drawn to me, and he came back. Because we’re both children from the Solomon clinic.”
“So he’s a ghost.”
“I wouldn’t use that term.”
“What term would you use?”
“I’m not sure. I just know that we bonded. Somehow I kept him from...” She spread her hands. “From crossing over to the Other Side, or whatever you want to call it.”
“Jesus Christ. Give me a break. You expect me to believe that cockamamie explanation of why you assaulted me?”
She dragged in a breath and let it out. “I was pretty sure you wouldn’t.
But when you woke up on the sofa, you asked what I’d hit you with.
I wasn’t the one who did it. It was Travis.
He saw you sneaking up on me, and he was afraid I was going to get kidnapped and killed, too.
He attacked you with something you’d call paranormal. ”
Bowman stared at her. “If any of that’s true, where is Travis now?”
“He’s sitting on the other end of the sofa—wishing he could join the conversation. Unfortunately, I’m the only one who can hear him or see him.”
The detective’s head swiveled in that direction. “You’re saying you see him now?”
“Yes.”
His eyes hardened as he looked around the room. “I don’t see anything.”
“As I said, he can only...manifest to me.”
He swore again, but his expression turned inward. “Maybe you picked the right person to tell this story to.”
“What do you mean?”
“I work for an outfit called Decorah Security. We’ve got a lot of agents who have powers nobody would believe unless they saw them for themselves.”
“Like what?”
“Like stuff I can’t tell you because I’d be breaking confidences. But I will say that we’ve got a telepath in the group. And other guys who could get jobs in a superhero movie. Only they wouldn’t be faking it.”
She stared at him. “So you’re at least willing to withhold judgment on my being crazy—or a liar.”
“Yeah. But ...”
“But what?”
“You’ve got to admit that bringing somebody back from the dead is a pretty far...bridge.”
Her voice faltered a little. “Bringing him back from the dead isn’t exactly accurate. As you said, you can’t see or hear him. He isn’t actually back, not in the normal sense.” She laughed. “Normal, right?”
Bowman nodded, his brow furrowed.
“How about a demonstration of the power we have together? I mean, besides his hurling a thunderbolt at you.”
“Like what?”
She glanced at Travis, and they held a quick, silent conversation before settling on a tactic. Without warning and without her moving from her seat, they snatched the pen out of Bowman’s hand.
He made a startled sound, then caught his breath as the pen stayed in the air and flew around the room. It landed with a small thump on the lamp table beside the sofa.
Bowman looked at Olivia and shook his head. “That was a nice trick, but maybe it’s like the mediums who put on a show for the customers they’re fooling.”
“Is that what you really think?” she shot back. “They probably do their tricks with elaborate setups. I didn’t have any prep before I got your pen.”
“I guess so,” he said slowly. “But it doesn’t prove that Travis Carson is here.”
“He’s sitting there looking pretty frustrated. I’m worried that he’s going to give you another energy jolt.”
“I thought he couldn’t do it by himself.”
“Fair point. But he might make a Herculean effort for you.”
She was trying to decide what to do next when Travis leaped up and came around behind her chair. Reaching for the ends of her hair he lifted them up then moved his hands so that the hair looked like it was dancing.
“Stop,” Olivia ordered.
He did as she asked, then came up in back of Bowman, which would have been impossible if he’d had any physical substance. He lowered his fingers to the detective’s scalp and began to move them like bugs creeping across the man’s scalp, only harder.
Bowman sucked in a sharp breath.
“You can feel that?” Olivia asked.
“Yes, like my scalp’s crawling,” he said, his voice not quite steady. Lifting his head, he said, “Stop.”
When Travis lifted his hands and resumed his place on the sofa, their guest asked, “Tell me what you want from me.”