Blind Spot (14 page)

Alice gave Suki a thin smile, exposing a row of tiny white teeth. There was a spot of red lipstick on one.

Suki wondered what Miss Manners would suggest now. Continue the polite discourse, or confront Ellery with what she knew? There was no doubt in Suki’s mind that Finlay’s disappearance was Ellery’s doing, and she felt a beat of encouragement at the desperation the move displayed. Then she thought about what other acts that kind of desperation might engender. Suki watched Ellery in silence—a psychologist’s, rather than an etiquette maven’s, trick.

“Look, Suki,” he said, shoving his hands deep into the pockets of his pants, “I had no idea this was coming. No idea at all. Let me tell you, it’s about the last thing I need right now.” His gaze was level, and if Suki hadn’t known better, she would have believed he was sincere. “The place is in a shambles,” he added.

“Do you think you could tell me where he’s gone?” Suki asked. Polite discourse appeared to be the game.

“I wish I could,” Ellery said, his eyes still locked on hers. “But personnel rules, you know. Confidentiality and all that.” He touched his hand to his forehead, as if he were wearing a cap, and flashed her a quick smile. “Sorry I couldn’t be of more help.” Then he turned and went into his office, shutting the door firmly behind him.

Speechless, Suki stared at the closed door. Ellery McKinna was even more dangerous and powerful than she had thought. For not only was he able to manipulate others’ lives to a degree she wouldn’t have thought possible, but even worse, he had the ability to convince himself that his lies were truth. And it was within this ability that Alexa’s true peril lay.

Suki stopped at a phone booth and looked up Finlay’s address. She drove to his house. No one was home. As she walked around the small cape, she noted the drapes were drawn against the living and dining room windows, and the yellow light above the front door was lit. Glancing over her shoulder to see if anyone had noticed her prowling, Suki pressed her nose to an undraped kitchen window. The counters were spotless and two chairs were neatly pushed under a tiny wooden table. It was extraordinarily tidy, too tidy, no pile of mail or open newspaper, no shirt thrown over the back of a chair, as if those who lived here planned to be absent for quite some time.

When Suki got home, Alexa was in her room working on an English project with Kendra, Robin, and Steph. The girls stayed through dinner, heating up a couple of frozen pizzas, and Alexa went to bed as soon as they left, deftly sidestepping her mother. Suki decided not to push the issue.

Instead, she helped Kyle with his homework, then went into her study to work on the Kern evaluation. As she sat down at the desk, she couldn’t help but notice the unpaid bills stuffing the cubby next to the phone. The first section of the report had to be finished by tomorrow, and she was behind schedule. She needed that check.

Suki bent over Lindsey’s medical file. She was surprised to see that Lindsey had had a fleeting flirtation with a psychotic diagnosis—by the same psychiatrist who had hypothesized TLE. At age nine, Lindsey’s parents had taken her to see a Dr. Eugene Stieglitz; her presenting problem was chronic nightmares. Dr. Stieglitz had postulated either TLE or schizotypal personality structure as a diagnosis, but apparently the Kerns hadn’t agreed with him, for no follow-up was recorded.

And it looked like the Kerns had been right. Except for a couple of visits to the university health center to get help with a “mild sleep disorder,” Lindsey hadn’t sought out any type of mental health professional until she went to a Boston psychologist, a Naomi Braverman, a few months before Richard Stoddard died. A single psychotic episode was an extremely unlikely occurrence.

But Dr. Stieglitz’s suggestion of TLE so early in Lindsey’s life could be used to further Mike’s argument. Unfortunately, Lindsey’s apparent mental health for the next twenty years could not. Suki recorded the facts on the graph paper she used to rough out chronologies and then flipped to Dr. Braverman’s notes.

No definitive diagnosis had resulted from the neurological and psychological batteries done at the time. Beside the MRI and EEG, Lindsey had also taken Rorsharch, TAT, IQ and Wechsler tests. The first two tests provided information on the brain, the next two on psychopathology, and the last two on intelligence. The TAT and Rorsharch suggested an absence of psychosis and the other two indicated high intelligence. Bad news for Mike. Suki scrutinized the handwritten note at the bottom of the Rorsharch report. “Within normal range but pushing boundaries,” Dr. Braverman had scribbled. Better news for Mike, and interestingly, a similar assessment to the one that could be made for the results of Lindsey’s neurological tests. Suki wondered if anyone had ever attempted to correlate claims of paranormal abilities with scores on standard psychological and neurological tests. She rather doubted it.

Suki hunted for medication notations and found that Tegretol, a drug commonly used to treat temporal lobe epilepsy, had been prescribed. As she graphed the prescription date, Suki chalked up another point for Mike. But when she checked to see how long Lindsey had taken the medication, she saw that only one prescription had been written. “Apparently ineffective,” Naomi Braverman had noted. Take Mike’s point away.

Suki hit the pad of graph paper with the back of her pencil. This was doubly difficult because of the time lag. She was charged with assessing Lindsey’s competence at the time of the crime—over nine years ago—and reconstructing a long past event was like trying to recapture a dream: confusing, elusive, almost impossible. But, as one of her law professors was fond of pointing out, American law was always about reconstructing a past event: Actus Mens.

Lindsey Kern was hard enough to comprehend in the present: her self-deprecating humor, her clear and lucid understanding of the legal concept of insanity, her mood swings and strange mutterings. Suki glanced at the pile of books at her feet. She had cleaned out the Witton library’s paranormal section: books on ghosts, psychokinesis, precognition, clairvoyance, and psychical research lay at her feet. As the complexities and ambiguities in this case grew, so did her fascination.

“
Try me the next time you want to find someone
,” Lindsey had bragged when Suki saw her last. “
I can find people. Anywhere they are. Try me
.” Maybe Lindsey could help her find Finlay. The stack of books rose a couple of feet from the floor, and the card catalogue claimed the library’s paranormal collection was even larger. Maybe finding lost people from a prison cell wasn’t as far fetched as it seemed.

“Mom?” Kyle poked his head in the doorway.

Suki stared at him blankly.

He put his hands on his hips, his expression impatient. “It’s me, Kyle. Remember? Your son?”

Suki tilted her head a bit and narrowed her eyes. “Oh yeah,” she said. “Your face does look familiar.…” He looked just like his father. Suki could go for days without thinking of Stan, and then, suddenly, out of nowhere, she would feel his loss, like a punch in the stomach. “Last name is Jacobs, right?”

“Glad to see you still have a bit of your sense of humor left.” Kyle walked into the room and casually dropped his hand to her shoulder. He patted her awkwardly and then retreated to the doorway; fourteen-year-old boys didn’t go around touching their mothers. “Scott’s mom said she’d pick me and Jeremiah up after soccer practice tomorrow and take us all to Papa Gino’s.”

“Jeremiah and me,” Suki corrected.

“Whatever.” Kyle made the “W” sign with his fingers and rolled his eyes. “Can I go? Scott’s on the phone. He needs to know now.”

Suki tried to imagine tomorrow, but drew a complete blank. For a moment, she couldn’t remember what day today was.

“Come on, Mom,” Kyle said, jamming his hand in and out of the pocket of his jeans. “It’s Papa Gino’s, not Bosnia.”

“Sure, I guess, sure. How will you get home?”

“Mrs. Fleishman’ll drive me or I’ll call you,” Kyle said as he turned toward the hallway. He stopped his forward motion by grabbing the doorjamb and swinging himself back in. “Oh, I forgot to tell you, Coach Blanchard said I need to get new soccer shoes. Cleats are all shot.” Then he disappeared.

Toilet paper and Papa Gino’s and new soccer shoes. Suki started to pull the graph paper toward her, then stopped. She didn’t need Lindsey, she could ask Warren Blanchard; he would be able to find out where Finlay Thompson had gone. But would Warren be willing to help her? The enemy? The mother of the prime suspect in his nephew’s murder? Then she remembered the compassion in his eyes the last time they had met, his hatred of bureaucracy, his love of the underdog. It was worth a shot.

Suki got back to work and within an hour had completed graphing Lindsey Kern’s life as a patient. She put her pencil down and stretched her hands over her head. How sane was Lindsey? How sane was anybody? She thought of Lindsey’s mumblings about the dead boy’s hand. She
had
found important information written in a dead boy’s hand the very next day. Alexa
had
predicted Jonah’s death. Her mother
had
predicted a plane crash. And then there was Kenneth’s story about Doris Sheketoff.

Suki leaned down and picked up one of the library books. It was a general parapsychology textbook, and as she flipped through the first chapter describing the history of the discipline, she couldn’t help but be impressed by the names: J. B. Rhine’s lab at Duke University, Division of Parapsychology at the University of Virginia Medical School, Parapsychology Department at the University of Edinburgh, PSI Research Program at Princeton.

She turned to the chapter on precognition and was soon lost in a complex, but tantalizing, discussion of physics and unified field theory. She read about symmetry and parity and optical isomers, about how the discovery that parity doesn’t always hold true for subatomic particles implied that time flowed both backward and forward—some physicist had apparently discovered the “footprint” of a “left-handed” particle that existed before the particle did. According to the book, that meant that the idea that time moved from the past into the present was a human one, invented to allow us to function in a world where all our ideas about space and time and the transmission of energy are wrong.

The argument reminded Suki of Voltaire’s obervation that “if God did not exist, it would be necessary to invent him.” She was filled with wonder. Was it possible? Could all times—past, present and future—always be here? Could one somehow cross over and tap into those other times?

A scream cut through the silence of the house. Suki was up the stairs so fast that she was standing in Alexa’s doorway before she realized she had left her chair. Alexa was sitting straight up in bed, the blanket and sheets puddled at her waist. Her eyes were wide open, but focused on something Suki couldn’t see.

“Alexa. Sweetheart,” Suki said softly, not wanting to startle her. Alexa didn’t move. “Alexa,” she tried again, a bit louder. Suki stepped closer.

Alexa blinked but didn’t say anything.

Suki sat down on the edge of the bed and cautiously reached out to touch Alexa’s hand. When Alexa didn’t stir, she gently pressed her toward the pillow. “Why don’t you just lie back down, now?” she suggested. “Get some rest.”

Alexa remained immobile, as if frozen into a seated position, paralyzed by her dream state.

“Sleep,” Suki murmured. “Sleep.”

Slowly, as if each movement was tied to a separate muscle, Alexa turned her head toward Suki, her eyes unseeing. “Mom,” she said, drawing out the syllable. The low, slow disembodied voice seemed to emanate from somewhere behind the bed. Alexa was still asleep.

“Yes, honey, it’s me. I’m right here—”

“No!” Alexa jerked up and went rigid again. Then, just as suddenly, she drooped and covered her face with her hands. She began to sob uncontrollably. Her whole body trembled.

Suki held onto her tightly. “Hush, honey,” she said. “You’re having another nightmare.”

Alexa pulled away. “I saw you,” she said, her voice more her own, but her eyes still distant. “You were at the bottom of a long tunnel, a mine shaft or something, with lots of pulleys and wires and things. I was at the top. Far, far away. It was dark. But I could see you. Clearly. Real clearly. You were all twisted and broken and I was trying to get you up, but you wouldn’t move and I couldn’t get down to you. I kept trying and trying but it was too far.”

“It’s just a dream—”

“Your hair was all white and curly and strange, but I knew it was you. And I couldn’t get to you. I couldn’t help you.”

Suki didn’t move.

“And somehow I knew it was all my fault. That it was because of me that you were down in that mine shaft—because I wouldn’t believe something you were trying to tell me. It was my fault, my fault, you were … were …” Alexa covered her face with her hands again. “You were dead.”

Suki just stared at Alexa. Alexa had never been told the exact circumstances of her grandmother’s death. She knew it was suicide, but that was about all she knew.

“I don’t want you to die, Mom,” Alexa wailed. “I don’t want you to die.”

“I’m not going to die,” Suki assured her. “At least not in the immediate future,” she added, knowing there was no way she or Alexa could be sure.

Alexa stared at her mother and nodded slowly, apparently soothed by Suki’s words. Then she closed her eyes and slumped back into the pillow, her arms flopping to her sides. Within minutes, her breathing subsided into deep measured sighs and Suki wondered if Alexa had ever been awake.

Suki pulled up the sheet and blanket. “Go to sleep, baby,” she whispered. “Go to sleep.” She kissed Alexa, then tiptoed down to the study.

She dropped into the chair at her desk. What was that all about? she wondered as she looked down at the parapsychology book open in front of her. Clairvoyance and precognition and time going forward and backward. Parity and optical isomers. Dead mothers and elevator shafts.

CHAPTER TEN

A
s Country Club Lane turns eastward, it becomes Roaring Brook and rises to a small bluff overlooking a snake of a stream that even in early spring could never be mistaken for a roaring brook. Suki stood knee-deep in the winter yellow grass that grew along the edge of the road, throwing pebbles into the water. Although the first streaks of morning sun had shaded the black sky to cloudy gray, it was an opaque light, hard and distant, holding no warmth. She shivered in her sweatshirt and threw another stone as she waited for Warren Blanchard. She missed the brook and her rock landed on the steep slope that marked the beginning of Judi Zvi’s backyard. She had no idea whose property she was standing on.