Blind Spot (7 page)

“Even if Charlie Gasperini plays poker with Ellery, he still knows what kind of kid Devin is,” Suki said. “And what kind of a kid Alexa is. At least this is Witton—we’ve got that going for us.”

Mike motioned for Alexa to sit next to Suki on the couch. “Let’s review this alibi business.”

With stiff, wooden motions, Alexa complied. When she sat, Suki took Alexa’s hand in hers, looking for solace as much as seeking to give it. Alexa didn’t pull away as Suki feared she might, but allowed her fingers to lay motionless in her mother’s. They felt like death.

Out of nowhere, a loud noise broke the silence. Alexa screamed and bolted across the room.

“What the hell—” Suki said as she turned to the large window that overlooked the backyard. There, framed within one of the panels of glass, was a man bumping the lens of a video camera against the pane. He was filming them.

“Stop it!” Suki yelled at him as Alexa slid down the wall and slumped into the corner. “Stop it right this minute!”

It was Mike who walked over and calmly pulled the drapes.

After Mike left, Suki called her father. She considered driving to his apartment in Arlington, about half an hour away, but didn’t want to leave Alexa. She also didn’t know if she could bear to see the pain in his eyes when he heard the news. He’d never fully recovered from her mother’s death almost fifteen years ago, and she worried about his ability to handle the stress.

“I need you to sit down,” Suki told him as soon as he answered, torn by contradictory emotions demanding she tell him as quickly as possible and ordering her not to tell him at all. “There’s something I need to talk to you about.” She explained, as quickly and simply as she could, what had happened, but didn’t mention Alexa’s prediction. There would be time for that later. When she finished, there was total silence. Suki held her breath.

“I’m on my way,” Seymour said calmly. Suki tried to dissuade him, but he would have none of it. “This is when you need your family,” he told her in his I’ll-brook-no-nonsense tone. “This is what family is all about.”

He arrived within the hour prepared to stay for the duration, armed with suitcases and food and videotapes. “One thing you learn when you’ve lived as long as I have,” he said, hugging her to him, “is that nothing is as bad—or as important—as it seems at the moment it’s happening.”

Suki pressed herself tight within the comfort of her father’s arms. She wanted more than anything to believe him.

The air in the interrogation room was close, stale: it smelled of anxiety and the last inmate’s heavy hand with perfume. It was the same room in which Suki had met Lindsey last Thursday, and she was anxious to talk to her again. Suki’s typical interviewee was a man with a long rap sheet and bad hygiene, in desperate need of a dentist; in comparison, Lindsey Kern was a delight. But Suki knew Lindsey’s even, white teeth were not the source of her anticipation.

Suki skimmed the evaluation form she had started to fill out last week. There were many holes to be plugged, and Mike had promised to get her Lindsey’s records and the trial transcripts as soon as possible. She stared through the open doorway into the hallway beyond. The cinder blocks were painted a sickly brown. The brown was of the same color family as the pea green that covered the walls of the interrogation room. Puke colors, Kyle would call them. Why couldn’t they pick something cheerier? Suki wondered. Wasn’t being in prison punishment enough?

Lindsey appeared in the doorway, gave the officer a little wave, and sat down across from Suki. “Hi,” she said as the door clicked shut behind her. “I didn’t expect to see you again.”

Suki watched the door close and realized that despite this woman’s murder conviction, she felt no sense of personal danger. She reminded herself that although this might be accurate, it was not very smart, and realigned her chair so the panic button was within easy reach. “Why not?” she asked.

“I just had a feeling, when you left here last week, that you weren’t planning on coming back.” Lindsey shrugged. “Sometimes my feelings are right on, and as you can see, sometimes they’re not.”

Suki glanced from her watch to the partially completed evaluation form in front of her. She needed to get home as soon as possible. She had left Alexa with her father, and she didn’t want to give the two of them too much time alone; Seymour’s heart might not be able to handle the fact that once again, someone he loved was able to predict disaster. Yet she found Lindsey’s statement irresistible. “Could you tell me about some of these ‘feelings’?” she asked, although this was not one of the items on her form. “Have you always believed you were clairvoyant?”

Lindsey tilted in her chair, resting the back against the wall and raising the front legs off the floor. She placed her hands behind her neck, looking for all the world like a professor expounding to a group of attentive graduate students. “I would’ve told you I never thought I was clairvoyant until just recently—and I know this sounds crazy—but once I started noticing, and remembering, I realized I’d had lots of these experiences, all my life. I just didn’t recognize them.”

Suki ignored the clock ticking in her head. “Can you tell me a couple?”

“Oh,” Lindsey said airily, “you know, lots of small stuff, like answering the phone before it rang and being able to tell who was going to win the next election. I remember, once, I told my friend Wendy her father would be in a car crash.” The legs of Lindsey’s chair cracked to the floor and she laughed sharply. “Wendy was really pissed off when I told her father not to drive into Hartford to pick up her new dress, but boy, was she pissed after the accident. It was as if she believed I had
made
his brakes fail.”

A brittle shiver scurried up Suki’s spine, the kind the kids used to say meant someone was walking on your grave. Her mother had once predicted a similar event, with a similar outcome: her friend Florence had stopped speaking to her after her husband was killed on a bus trip to the Grand Canyon Harriet had told them not to take. “Did Wendy’s father die?” Suki asked.

“Oh, no,” Lindsey assured her. “Just a broken wrist. The car was totaled, though. Just like I told Wendy it would be.”

“Exactly how did you know? About the car, I mean. Did you see it? Hear it?”

Lindsey was silent for a moment. “I guess it’s mostly a visual thing. But also a sort of overwhelming sense of knowledge. More like a memory than anything else.”

Suki reminded herself that there were many rational explanations for what Lindsey was describing, including both coincidence and deceit. Many types of psychosis caused hallucinations and delusions, most notably schizophrenia and dissociative disorders; one could even argue that the definition of psychosis was a false observation that was then used as the basis for a false conclusion about the world. Still, Suki didn’t see Lindsey as psychotic.

Lindsey’s explanation for what she believed was so reasoned; most psychotics didn’t think their delusions needed explanation—they seemed to be missing the piece of ego necessary to stand back and observe. Yet, Suki knew psychologists far more experienced than she had been fooled before, and that a complete psych history was in order. “So you think this knowledge, this memory, comes to you through some kind of psychic mechanism?” Suki asked.

“I still have days when I wonder what’s happening to me,” Lindsey admitted. “How it can be happening to me. But yes, I do think it’s psychic.”

Suki rubbed the bridge of her nose. Definitely not a psychotic response. But hallucinations could also be caused by alcohol psychosis and drug abuse—the often cited, but rarely seen, LSD flashback, for example—and there were all kinds of toxic drug interactions. Lindsey was about the right age to have dabbled in LSD, and it was a well-known fact that prisons were rampant with drugs; Suki had once had a patient who kept getting arrested so he could return to prison and its easy access to high-quality heroin. Who knew what Lindsey might be taking to keep herself occupied? She might even be high right now. Suki looked into Lindsey’s eyes, which were clear and not the least bit dilated.

Lindsey smiled. “I heard Wendy became a drug abuse counselor,” she said with a wink.

“Do you ever get these memories any other way beside seeing them?” Suki asked. Visual hallucinations were actually quite unusual; auditory were the most common.

“Sometimes I smell them.”

Suki looked down at her form. Olfactory hallucinations were reported even less, and often indicated a diagnosis of temporal lobe epilepsy. But they could also signal a brain tumor. Or Lindsey’s symptoms could be metabolic, an abnormality of her limbic system or a pituitary imbalance. Migraines, and even severe sexual abuse, had been known to cause hallucinations.

It occurred to Suki that this evaluation might take longer than she had initially estimated. But instead of probing for Lindsey’s medical, psychiatric, or drug history, she asked, “So you didn’t think it was weird when it happened? When your predictions came true?”

“Well,” Lindsey said, “most of them didn’t come true. And the others, I don’t know.” She shrugged. “I guess I just assumed they were coincidences. There didn’t seem to be any other explanation.”

Suki put down her pen along with all pretense of filling out the form. “So what was it that made you decide they were more than just coincidence?”

“Isabel.”

“But aren’t they different things? Predicting the future and believing in ghosts?”

“Yes,” Lindsey said, giving Suki an appreciative nod. “And no. It’s actually a big controversy in the field—purists say that ghosts have no place in parapsychology, that ghosts and poltergeists are the realm of fairy tale and religion. The conservative wing thinks only actual psychic ability—clairvoyance, telepathy, psychokinesis, things like that—are worthy of scientific study.”

Despite Lindsey’s oxymoronic pairing of conservative and parapsychologist, Suki was fascinated. “But you don’t agree?”

“I think it’s all part of a bigger issue. Like I told you last week, this is about opening up your mind so you can see more, understand more. It’s not about closing it to only what’s convenient to study.” Lindsey grabbed Suki’s pen from the table. “I’ll show you what I mean.” She turned the evaluation form over and made a dot on the back. “My friend Babs does this with an apple, but this’ll have to do.” She licked the top of the pen and pressed it to the paper, leaving a small damp circle in the corner. Then she put the pen down. “What do this dot, this spot of spit, and this pen, all have in common?”

“They’re all ways for you to avoid answering my questions?”

“They are that,” Lindsey acknowledged. “But they’re also something more—and something less.” When Suki didn’t answer, Lindsey smiled broadly. “They’re all the pen.”

Suki raised an eyebrow. “How do you mean?”

“A pen in one dimension is a dot, in two dimensions it’s a circle, and in three dimensions, it’s a pen!” Lindsey handed it back to Suki. “When you limit what you let yourself see,” she explained, “you limit what you let yourself understand.”

Suki turned the pen between her fingers, watching it as if it held all the answers within its shiny black surface. Life was already so chaotic, did she really need to see any more? She flipped the evaluation form face-up. “Were there many drugs around when you were in college?” she asked.

CHAPTER FIVE

O
n Monday, they closed the schools for Jonah Ward’s funeral.

An hour before the service was scheduled to begin, Alexa still couldn’t decide what to do. “I need to go,” she said to Suki over a glass of orange juice she wasn’t drinking. “Everyone’ll be there.”

“Then we’ll go together.” Suki nibbled at her dry toast. “As a family. Grandpa and Kyle will come, too.”

“But what if Brendan’s there? Or Devin? What will I say to them?”

Suki reached to take her daughter’s hand, but Alexa yanked it away and stared at Suki as if it were her fault this was happening. Suki tried to think of how she would advise a patient to handle a similar situation, but as was so often true when she tried to apply her training to her personal life, she drew a blank. “No one will blame you for staying home,” she finally said.

“And Mrs. Ward,” Alexa said as if Suki hadn’t spoken. “What if I have to talk to Mrs. Ward?”

“You won’t have to talk to anyone,” Suki tried again. “We’ll go late and leave early.”

Without a word, Alexa stood and left the room.

Suki called Phyllis, hoping they could go to the funeral together, but Phyllis had a meeting downtown—she was a deputy commissioner for the department of motor vehicles and all the state’s deputies met to one-up each other on the last Monday of every month. Phyllis offered to skip the meeting, but Phyllis was in line for commissioner and Suki would have no part of it. When she called Jen, Jen was already with a patient. Suki wished she had the money to fly Julie in from California. There were others she could call, but she didn’t. Instead, she dressed and went in to see what Alexa had decided. Alexa was seated on her bed in a dirty T-shirt. Suki went to the funeral alone.

Driving her father’s car to the church, she couldn’t stop thinking of Darcy Ward, and allowed herself the tears she knew she could not cry at the funeral. Suki understood her position to be awkward, that she couldn’t squeeze Darcy’s hand and dab at her eyes as she might have done if Alexa had stayed home Friday night. But she wanted Darcy to know that she, too, was grieving for her. That she understood there was no pain greater than Darcy’s.

Suki slipped into the church just as the organ began to play. The small chapel was packed, and as she settled into the dimness of a back pew she felt, rather than saw, a wave of restless motion. She looked up to see a swell of faces twisting toward her. She nodded to Andrea and Marcy from her book group, to Louise and Arthur from the Friends of the Library, to Mr. Quinn, who managed the Stop and Shop. She tried to smile at Pat Hosansky, who headed up the education and technology commission she’d been a member of for years, but it felt like a grimace. Pat and Andrea smiled sadly at her and Louise fluttered her fingers in a small wave, then they turned quickly to the front of the church. The others did the same.