Vacant (10 page)

“You're getting nothing?” Jarrod asked.

“No. If it was there at one point, it's worn off by now.” I made a frustrated sound. “Look, you bring me to a crime scene, a place where somebody had an altercation or a death in the last few days, I'm your guy. I'll get you several layers of information on what happened. But I need a place. The place. Most telepaths do, to be honest.”

“Oh.” Mendez's mind leaked dull frustration, mixed with embarrassment turned to anger.

Now I was embarrassed too and worried I wasn't doing what I needed to do.

Jarrod shifted, his spine going a little straighter. “It's good to know limitations. It's getting late. Why don't you make sure Tommy is settled and feeling okay?”

“I can be a help to you,” I said, wanting to believe it, needing to believe it. “I'm good at my job with the police, which is a hell of a lot of investigation and no bodyguarding at all.” I'd proven myself there. Cherabino—and Michael, and Branen, though he protested otherwise—had seen me in action. They'd seen me be successful. I worried that these guys wouldn't. And even the last people to see me successful hadn't given me a full-time job.

I wished Cherabino was here. She'd know what to do.

“I'll keep that in mind,” Jarrod said, but his voice was flat and I couldn't tell whether I'd pissed him off or not.

So I did the thing they expected me to do. “I'll check on Tommy now,” I said.

“You do that.”

Mendez poked at the letters, a mix of emotions in her. Death threats had a weight to them in her mind, I thought as I left. I wondered what that was about.

And I wondered, all over again, if Cherabino was okay. She had to keep her job. Witnesses and politics and everything else, she just had to keep her job. It was who she was.

Tommy came up
to me a while later. I was seated in a low oddly shaped chair near the back of the house, close enough to the hallway to get to Tommy if needed, having pulled a reading lamp down to a pad of paper to work on my report after I'd called Cherabino's house and she hadn't picked up. I felt him approaching, but as his mind didn't seem agitated, I kept working. Working kept me from worrying.

He stood there in front of me for a while.

I kept working.

He continued to stare.

I finally put the paper and pencil down on the ground. “Something I can do for you, Tommy?”

“You're a telepath.” His face was scrunched up.

“Yes.”

“And you say I'm going to be a telepath.”

“Um, yes.” I wasn't sure where this was going.

“You said you could teach me.” He stood straight, waiting, like obviously I was going to teach him right now on one prompt.

I stood up. Actually I might. I liked the calm pushy Tommy, and I'd been a teacher—for older kids—for a number of years. I wasn't familiar with teaching anyone his age the basics, but considering the situation, having him with
more skills would only help us. And it might get my mind off things, which I needed very much right now. I kept seeing the vision, and my death, and Cherabino's job, on the line, none of which were probably like I worried they were. No, taking some time to teach Tommy, to do something I was good at, would only help me. And him, hopefully.

“What do you want to learn?”

He frowned deeper, then gave it up. “I don't know. What is there to learn? I've never been a telepath before.”

I laughed.

“What?”

“Just the way you said that was funny to me. I'd be happy to teach you. We should probably start at the beginning.” I tried to remember what the beginning was. It had been a very long time since I'd either learned or taught that beginning.

He stood there expectantly.

“Why don't we move to the kitchen where there're stools enough for both of us?” I asked to buy time.

He turned around and went in that direction. No lack of action in this kid; it was corralling the action into something useful that was going to take all the effort.

I turned around and switched off the reading light. Then I found Jarrod's gaze to make sure he'd paid attention. He'd been sitting well across the open room, working on his own set of paperwork, and his head was up now, and he nodded. He didn't seem pissed at me, which was good, but I knew I hadn't helped all that much with the investigation, not yet.

I followed Tommy into the kitchen. Of the whole ridiculously designed house, I liked this kitchen the best. They'd put in simple cabinets and kept the original trim on the top of the room, and a butcher-block counter. Small lights illuminated the area this late, small lights that felt soothing.

Tommy turned on the overhead light, and it got a lot brighter.

My ideas got a lot brighter too as I joined him on the stool next to him. He was waiting patiently as I managed to focus.

“Let's start with the basics. Imagine your mind is a house,” I said. “Like this one. In fact, if you like this one, you can picture this one.”

“I liked our last house better,” he said.

“Great, picture that one,” I said, feeling my way through the analogy. “Or your dream house. There are a couple of stories, lots of rooms, and doors between some of the rooms. You get to walk anywhere in your house you like, and you get to invite people to visit you, but you also get to close off some of the rooms and not let people into them. There's a main floor, where you have your kitchen and your living area, and it's a good space for people to walk about. You have stairs up to the top floor, where you keep the stuff that's personal, that's just for you.”

“That sounds . . .” Tommy trailed off.

I felt his spot of loneliness. Sometimes his mom left him in his room, “space just for him,” and left him alone for hours.

I felt for him. I really did. I felt my own loneliness too, and my guilt at not being there for Cherabino when her world was falling apart. I took a breath and continued on with the lesson, because if I stopped, I probably wouldn't pick it up again, as much as we had going on. And it wasn't a bad time for lessons, and it wasn't a bad time to earn Tommy's trust. “The house is everything you need it to be, when you need it to be that,” I said. “That's the great part about this mind-house. Let's say upstairs is for you, is yours. You can have as many ideas and things in your head to keep you company as you like. Sometimes you might
even invite somebody very special to some of those rooms. But they're yours and you get to decide what happens to them. You might have a dog up there to bark and play with toys if you want, for example. But you don't invite people in, not upstairs.”

He thought about that. He'd always wanted a dog.

I thought about mentioning the basement of the house, something you generally did with someone older. The basement was where you kept the horrors, the secrets, the things you didn't want with you but couldn't let go. But Tommy was likely too young.

Of course he'd heard part of that, and was thinking his mom had a basement. A big basement.

Hmm. I couldn't go rummaging for more information right now—it wasn't ethical, especially in a teaching situation—but I'd ask him about it later.

“Let's start with something simple,” I said. “Most people when they're your age or they're just starting out, their house is leaky.” I held up a hand at his protest and offered a strong mental image. “The walls have big holes in them, so the air comes and goes and all the weather comes into the house whether it's good weather or bad.”

“That doesn't sound very fun,” he said. Maybe his mind was a bit like that, he thought. Especially at school, or around his mom. Things came in and he couldn't stop them.

“On a good day, when the sun is shining and people are happy, it can be very fun,” I said. “But a large part of what the Guild does in its entry classes is teach people how to seal up the walls, put siding in and a little armor, and put in big doors and windows that are strong enough to let the world in when you want and shut it out when you want. It can be a lot of work. But it puts you more in charge of your own space, your own head, your own mind. And it lets you understand the world better if all you're hearing isn't noise.”

He thought about that. I let him. It was a big idea, a big model on which to view the world.

“Other people have houses too?” he asked.

I nodded, trying to decide how much to ask.

“Sometimes they don't lock their doors.”

I nodded again. “And you see in without meaning to.”

“Yeah.”

I waited for him to ask whatever question was wandering around in his head.

“My mom thinks about stuff a lot,” he said quietly, but in the tone of voice like something was wrong.

“Does she?” I asked quietly. His mind was turned inward, closed, so unless I wanted to go rummaging around—not ethical in a kid that age even as a Minder—I had no way of knowing what he was thinking. Had I been so worried about myself and my problems that I'd missed something major? A stab of guilt hit me then.

“Yeah,” he said. “She has a lot of—of things I'm not supposed to talk about.”

“Like what?” I asked as casually as I possibly could.

He looked up and focused then. “I'm not supposed to talk about them.”

“Is she hurting you?” I ventured. I wasn't one to push, but if there was abuse or danger going on and I'd missed it . . .

I got a flash of hurt then, from him. “No.” She didn't hit him or anything, not like Michelle at school, whose parents hit her. “She says work stuff . . . she says I'm not supposed to know about that stuff and she could get in trouble if people knew that I knew.”

“Knew what?” I asked.

“Dead bodies and stuff,” he said, in the matter-of-fact voice nobody but a ten-year-old could pull off. “And stuff for her cases, and stuff about bad guys and cops and . . .
stuff.” He waved his hand. “She is under a lot of pressure. I'm not supposed to worry people.” This last was said in the tone of voice of someone repeating something another had said a million times.

“I see.” I waited patiently for him to talk more. Often people would tell you anything you wanted to know, just to fill the silence. Or adults would anyway. I'd never seen evidence kids were all that different.

He sat there for a long moment and said nothing. Then: “Are you going to teach me the house thing or not?”

“Sure,” I said, and clamped down on my concern so he'd feel that I was normal again. I was worried about him, though. There was something not right here, something . . . off. And I hadn't spent enough time with him to figure out what it was.

I took a breath. He'd have to come to trust me on his own, I guessed. I hoped. In the meantime, a lesson cost me nothing, and it made me more present in his life.

“Let's start with building you a sliding door,” I said. “Something really basic that gives you control over who comes in your house.”

He nodded.

“With your permission, I'd like to walk into your mind—just the beginning, just the little foyer area. It's easier to show you what to do than to try to describe it in words,” I said.

“You knock first,” he said.

I shrugged, and pictured a doorframe on the outside of his mind, and me standing there with a fist upraised. I knocked, gently, the sound pictured strongly enough he'd be able to experience it clearly.

Come in,
he said in a happy tone. He'd gotten what he wanted the first time just by asking. He was vaguely smug about it.

I stepped in, just in, as I'd promised. His mind was a
tangle of thoughts laid about the edges of an open clear space, boxes and bales of thoughts in no apparent order, but all tied up with twine. I'd never seen so many disorganized piles in my life. Still, I was here to show him something specific.

And earn his trust.

Now,
I started,
the most important thing about telepathy is picturing something very clearly, so clearly you believe it. Let's start with a floor for your house.

Okay . . . ,
he said.

In the next twenty minutes, we built mental models over and over, letting him find the pictures that would communicate best to him. And below the surface, I monitored the structure of the changes he was actually making, and I corrected, gently, when something was wrong.

At the twenty-first minute, I put a stop to it. He was sweating in the real world, and starting to tire in the mental one. I helped him surface back to reality.

“Time for bed,” I said. “It's going to be an early morning tomorrow.”

“Aw, do we have to? I was just getting good at the house thing.”

“They'll be plenty of time for more lessons later,” I said, and ushered him toward his room.

As I moved back out into the house to check in for the night with everyone else, my body was tired but my mind was wide awake. I didn't know what secrets the judge held, but whatever they were, they bothered Tommy. And that made me worried, in a whole new way.

*   *   *

It was after ten p.m., very dark, with the outside streetlight pooling stripes of light on the ancient wooden floor of the back hallway. I sat on a thick cushion on the floor, staring at the phone. I'd grabbed one of the handsets from the main
room—there were no fewer than three—when it had become obvious the rest of the household was going to bed. I was looking at the phone, oddly scared of it, oddly nervous about calling Cherabino after all this time of not knowing. She'd be okay, right? They had to see the truth and let her keep her job. It was the only possible reality that made sense, but I knew with a horrible certainty that politics wasn't about making sense. I didn't know what she'd do without her job. I just didn't know.

Tommy was asleep in the room behind me, the door shut to protect against noise. I was out in the hallway with a small pallet set up. Not ideal, but doable, at least for tonight.

At least I could do my job. I closed my eyes and scanned the area around the house, getting to know every mind, every current of Mindspace, within my range. Jarrod was asleep in a guest bedroom, the judge in the room next door. Loyola sat, cleaning a gun, in the front room, thinking tired thoughts and trying to plan. Two more minds, one outside curled up in a car seat, the other inside, sleeping underneath a basement window they'd considered one of their biggest security risks. Plenty of people around. Tommy would be fine, I told myself. But that vision still haunted me.

I widened my senses, as far as they would go, and looked carefully at the space around the house, as far as I could sense. The neighbors next door were fighting, quietly, over money. A hungry dog poked through an overturned trash bin across the street. A man stood, smoking, in the cold at the end of my range. Odd to smoke outside this time of night; I moved in carefully for a better look.

I pulled back after a moment. He was worried about losing his job, and unwilling to talk to his wife about it. There was no threat; he wouldn't be moving from that general area, and might hit up a donut shop in an hour or so.

After that, I moved back to check on Tommy, whose mind was dreaming disturbed dreams about trains and crashing thunder and a monster made out of shoes. He was deeply asleep, though; I nudged his mental pattern toward calm and called that good enough. It would either stick or it wouldn't, and I was unwilling to do more. We were connected too much as it was.

I opened my eyes in the hallway, which seemed even darker for the time away. The phone was there, staring at me. My body and my Ability were exhausted; I wasn't used to this, and I was short on sleep anyway. I sat there, looking at the phone but not calling, for a long time.