Chapter Forty-Three. Riley, Present Day
CHAPTER FORTY-THREE
RILEY, PRESENT DAY
I’m still digesting the venom in Elizabeth’s voice as Betty finishes her tea and English muffin.
“I don’t understand why someone would want Douglas’s old papers after all this time,” Betty says.
“Can you remember anything in particular from the paperwork?” I ask. “Maybe something stood out?”
“I’ve never looked at them,” Betty tells me. “I already lived through that time. And I’ve spent the rest of my life trying to forget it.”
I press my fingertip into a tiny, sharp crumb on the counter and transfer it to my plate. “I’m starting to wonder if maybe one of us did knock against that door handle accidentally. Or it could’ve just loosened with age.”
Betty’s cup clinks sharply against its saucer as she sets it down. “You know perfectly well that isn’t true, Riley.”
“I just thought—” I begin, but Betty cuts me off.
“Instincts want to help you, to guide you toward the truth. Yet you quash yours. Why would you do that?”
I lift up my empty hands. “I-I’m not sure.”
“You know as I well as I do the door handle was tampered with,” Betty said. “Because your mind doesn’t have an answer for who or why, you’ve begun to question your initial assumption. To convince yourself that you’re unreliable.”
I’ve never seen this side of Betty before.
She exhales, then continues. “I’m sorry I spoke harshly. It’s a bit of a touchy subject for me.”
“There’s nothing to apologize for,” I tell her. “You’re right.”
Betty gazes down at the pattern of pink roses on her plate. “When I was younger, I knew certain things and there was no easy explanation for how or why. Because my mother didn’t understand or experience what I did, she thought it was the work of the devil. I suppose that affected me.”
“I can see why,” I say. I’m about to ask her more when she pushes away from the kitchen island. “I’m going to take a shower, dear. After that, can we go for a drive? I realized during our outing yesterday the world has changed so dramatically. I’d like to see a bit more of it.”
“Absolutely,” I promise, bringing our dishes to the sink.
As I rinse the plates and cups, I think about how my instincts told me Danny was kind and generous, outgoing and big-hearted. All those things turned out to be true.
But there was one tiny detail from that very first night that snagged me like a splinter. At the Thai restaurant, I offered to pay half when the bill came. He pulled out his wallet. I’ve got this.
But the waiter told him his card had been declined. Danny brushed it off, saying the card had recently been compromised online and he’d forgotten to throw it away. He lay down a blue Visa, but not before I’d gotten a glimpse of the inside of his wallet.
My instinct was a faint vibration in my body, a warning tremble. Why so many credit cards? it whispered.
But I suffocated it with explanations: Maybe he enjoyed perks like getting airline miles with new cards. Maybe lots of people had seven or eight credit cards they carried around and I just didn’t know it. Maybe I’d overcounted the cards.
The rush of water traveling through pipes tells me Betty is starting her shower. I wipe my hands and head into the living room.
Something is driving me toward the papers again. It’s curiosity—or it could be instinct. But I’m not going to deny it.
Betty’s darkest memories are contained within these pages, I think.
A sense of trepidation fills me as I lift the yellowing pages out of their container and lay them on the coffee table.
There’s a faint brown ring on one that could be from someone’s long-ago coffee cup, and doodles of intersecting triangles in the margins of others.
I flip through pages of charts and numbers before I find a typewritten one with faint pencil corrections. Perhaps the final product is elsewhere and Douglas saved this draft. Ivy’s name leaps out at me and I begin to read:
CONFIDENTIAL PSI EXPERIMENTAL REPORT
Date: June 14, 1964
Subject: Ivy Lennox, age 21
Researcher: Dr. Silas Trimble
Assistant researcher: Douglas Sadler
Location: Berkeley, California
Experiment summary: The researcher became aware of the subject through an article in the Journal of Parapsychology, which detailed her exceptional psychical abilities.
After obtaining approval from the president of Marquis University, the researcher and his assistant took an airplane flight to California, where they contacted the subject by phone.
During the phone call, the research assistant pretended to be on the faculty of the California college where the subject had already undergone many psi tests.
The subject agreed to go to a nearby coffee shop for a double-blind variation on the Zener card test. The sum of $40 was offered to lure her to this experiment.
Prior to her arrival at a designated corner booth, a stack of cards was arranged in a specific order known by the researcher and placed on the table.
When the subject arrived, she sat at the table and touched the top card, speaking aloud the symbol that came to her mind, before moving on to the subsequent cards.
The research assistant, who was seated at the next booth, wrote down her answers.
The researcher and assistant did not look at or interact with the subject.
The subject appeared completely unaware of their presence.
When she finished the test, she bought a piece of peach pie from the diner.
The researcher and assistant continued to observe her as she walked to the college campus and delivered the pie to her husband, David Lennox.
Then she was observed returning to her home on Portner Lane.
Results: The subject correctly sensed 12 of the 25 cards. Given that the chances of correctly guessing any of the cards was 20 percent, this is a highly significant result.
Conclusion: The subject is worthy of intensive evaluation at the Marquis campus and should be persuaded to move there by any means necessary.