Читать книгу The Man from Nowhere - Rachel Lee - Страница 8

Trish’s computer hummed quietly as she searched the Net for information. Outside, another bright, cool day was beginning to degrade into cloudiness that might bring rain or even snow. She didn’t know or really care. She was too busy trying to verify what Grant had told her last night about the research he’d been doing, then trying to find out if it led her to him.

Either she didn’t know the best search question to ask or the subject wasn’t one of the most popular. Either way, several hours passed during which she scanned articles that hinted at the matters Grant had spoken of last night without success.

He appeared to be right about one thing: from what she was seeing, not many scientists wanted to ask whether conscious intent could affect the quantum field.

She did, however, gradually realize that some terms were appearing repeatedly without explanation, as if they were understood. And she realized there was a certain evasiveness when they came up. Either that or they were used within such strictly defined limits that she couldn’t get the meaning.

Finally she changed her search criteria from quantum physics and linked conscious with Princeton. Up popped a Web site link for the Princeton Engineering Anomalies Research Lab.

She might not have studied physics in depth, but as an accounting major with a minor in economics, she had studied a lot of statistics, and as she delved deeper she discovered that the things Grant had discussed in loose generalities were actually being investigated with mind-blowing results. While the ultimate conclusion was that conscious intent had such a small effect on random number generators that it could be ignored, the fact remained: the statistics showed the effect to be way, way beyond chance.

Good Lord! she thought. What a door to open: human thought could affect the functioning of a machine…or the rate of radioactive decay. In small ways, yes, but even those small ways were a window to a whole different view of the universe. And it further elucidated what Grant had meant about some scientists being afraid to ask the questions. Of course they were afraid to ask. None of them would want to be labeled fringe lunatics.

She sat back in her chair, stretched and thought about what she had just learned. Grant, whoever he was, hadn’t been spouting some kind of extremism last night, but a valid scientific viewpoint, however much mainstream science might try to skirt it. That much at least hadn’t been a sales job.

However, there was no way to search for him, not with only one name, first or last she didn’t know. No matter how many ways she tried it, the word grant came up more often for grant applications and awards than anything else. How convenient.

She sighed, then spoke aloud to the empty room. “Get over this obsession,” she told herself. “Just get over it. Load the damn shotgun if you’re that worried, and then forget about it.”

Not a normally obsessive person, her behavior, her contradictory responses, had begun to seriously trouble her. The man limped around town in the middle of the night, sat on a public park bench for a whole twenty minutes, had spent time last night trying to reassure her in some way, and there was nothing left to do except regain her own sense of proportion and rationality.

Sitting here at the computer working the “Grant problem” as if she had nothing better to do with her time was out of character.

Wasn’t it?

She sighed again and rubbed her eyes. “What is going on?” she asked the room. The room, of course, didn’t answer.

But some little voice in her head finally did.

It’s not about this guy, it’s about another guy. A guy who lied to you.

Was she really in some subconscious way trying to make Grant a stand-in for Jackson?

Oh, yeah. Now you’ve got it.

At once she leaned forward and pressed the button to hibernate her computer. Then she shoved back from her desk, realizing only as she stood that she had grown stiff from not moving for so long.

“Idiot,” she said to herself.

In the kitchen she made a fresh pot of coffee and a turkey sandwich.

Yeah, she was an idiot, she decided, but only because, however indirectly, she had opened that damn Pandora’s box again, the box named Jackson Harris.

That box containing a torrid fairy tale, an all-consuming eight-month romance that had ended in the heartstopping, earth-shaking discovery that he was a married man. That he had lied to her all along, claiming he was divorced. An instant of discovery and shock that had seemed to kill everything inside her in one icy blow.

Until the pain started. To this day she couldn’t say what hurt worse: losing love, being used or being betrayed so callously. It had certainly hurt to leave her job in Boston because she couldn’t face the constant reminders.

But at least she had managed to find her way home. Maybe she had thought it would all get better here. Instead, just as Grant had remarked last night, she’d brought her baggage with her. You can’t run from yourself. Probably one of the oldest clichés in the world. And so, so true, as Grant had pointed out.

She sat at her kitchen table and bit into her sandwich, thinking about the tangled mess of her mind. A mind that she always preferred to believe was relatively neat and orderly…yet as of this moment seemed anything but.

What was the psychological term? Transference? No, more like projection? Whatever, it disturbed her to think that she might be reacting to Grant in a way dictated by her experience with Jackson. After all, what had Grant done except sit on a park bench in the middle of the night? So maybe her suspicions resided less with his actions and the timing of them than they did with the horrendous betrayal she had suffered at Jackson’s hands. Maybe she felt uneasy and threatened for no other reason.

Probably a good time to have a heart-to-heart with one of her girlfriends, but a glance at the clock told her that they were all still involved in the middle of their workdays. Not the time for a conversation like this.

She took another bite of her sandwich just as her cell rang. With a muffled groan as she tried to chew and swallow fast, she pulled the phone from her pocket as the ring tone played the same bars of “Carmina Burana” for the second time.

“Hello?”

“Hi, Trish, it’s Gage.”

“Oh, hi, Gage. Thanks for calling. I’m sitting here concluding yet again that I’m overreacting to that guy.”

“Conclude away. I did the ‘stop and identify’ I promised you I would last night.”

“I saw you. You’re going to think I’m nuts.”

A quiet laugh escaped him. “Not a chance. Why?”

“Because after you left I went out and talked to him. And then I met him at the truck stop and we talked longer.”

“Well, I’ll give you credit for guts and curiosity, but I’m not going to tell you that was a wise thing to do with a total stranger.”

“Well, since I’m getting concerned about the state of my own mind right now, I have to agree. I bounced from he’s not really a threat to feeling stalked, and now I’m on my way back again.”

At that Gage really laughed. “It’s hard to reach a conclusion in the absence of facts. But I have some facts for you. Interested?”

“In anything that might help me get my balance back. When I have to stand back and look at my own mental workings, something’s not right.”

She could hear the smile in his response. “Smart people do that all the time. It’s the idiots who never selfexamine. Anyway, I do have some info for you.”

“I’m listening.”

“I couldn’t find anything on him yesterday because he used a fake name on the motel register.”

“Not good.”

“Not a crime. When I stopped last night and talked to him, I got his driver’s license. No wants, no warrants, great credit rating and he owns property in California.”

“That’s a long way away. Anything else?”

“Actually, yeah. But nothing that raises a red flag.” Gage fell silent a moment. “Did he give you his full name?”

“No, just Grant.”

“Well, until the guy does something wrong, I don’t feel I have the right to share any more. Sorry, but there are limits. Just ask him his full name. Then you can find out what’s in the public record just as I did. But I don’t have the right, legally or ethically, to go beyond what I just told you.”

She almost sighed, but knew he was right. How much would she want Gage to invade her own privacy just because she made someone feel uneasy?

“Thanks, Gage. I appreciate your help.”

“You’re more than welcome. If he does anything else to concern you, let me know immediately, okay?”

“Sure thing.”

She closed her phone, slipped it back into her pocket and felt an urge to laugh at herself. Oh, it was so shocking! Yep, really shocking. Some guy sits on a public park bench, legal even at one in the morning, and nobody could do anything about it.

For some reason, her grandmother’s voice floated into her mind, the woman’s plainspoken way of telling someone to think about what they were doing: Are you tetched in the head? Always delivered in a kind voice, but always in its own way like a jerk back to a calmer state of mind.

“Are you tetched in the head, girl?” she asked out loud.

Yeah, maybe she was. And maybe tonight she’d go out and ask Grant for his full name. Or maybe not. Just because Jackson was a lying scoundrel didn’t mean every other man on the planet was.

She finished her sandwich in a calmer frame of mind. Then she grabbed a heavy flannel shirt and her book and went out back. Ten minutes later she had a small fire burning, and she curled up on a chaise with her coffee to read.

Clouds might be moving in, but that didn’t mean winter had arrived.

Yet.

The deepening night chill, which had begun its arrival with rain in the late afternoon, bit at Grant’s exposed skin as he limped his designated path from the motel to Mahoney’s, where he spent fifteen minutes sipping an excellent rye, and then again as he limped his way toward the park to sit in front of Trish Devlin’s house. He shoved his hands deeper into his pockets, but the night managed to bite even through his jeans, and his hood couldn’t cover his cheeks. If he was here much longer he might have to upgrade his clothing.

But he had no choice yet. His path was ordained, by what he couldn’t really say. All he knew was that he’d ignored something like this before and had lived to regret it. He wished he hadn’t lived.

So he followed the plan, according to what he knew, even though it was entirely possible he couldn’t make any difference at all to the outcome. How would he know? Science didn’t like these questions and had never tried to answer them. Theology even tried to steer away from this place.

But here he was in the midst of it. After nearly a year of thumbing rides around the country, trying to deal with his demons, he’d become aware of a different demon. And somehow he’d known he’d arrive in the right place at the right time.

The minute that last rig had pulled into the truck stop here, somewhere deep inside, he’d known: this is it. Certainty as strong as a compulsion had led him to check into the motel, then hunt for the bar he was sure he’d seen before. The clock he recognized over the bar. The time that had been nagging at him. The subsequent walk to a park and a bench that were somehow familiar.

Sometimes he wondered if his experience was something like that of serial killers who talked about a compulsion, an inner pressure to hunt a victim whom they somehow recognized even if they had never met.

Sometimes he wondered if he’d gone off the deep end. Sometimes he wondered if he himself was the demon he was hunting.

But he was here, guided by God knew what to this out-of-the-way place, and fear of failing yet again made him follow this set path night after night. The only reassurance he had that he wasn’t the demon was his own distaste for making Trish Devlin nervous.

He wished there was another way.

But there wasn’t. He just knew he had to be on that bench at that time. Period. And he couldn’t explain it to another soul without getting himself committed.

Smothering a sigh, ignoring the grinding pain in his hip and the stabbing pain in his thigh and the incessant ache in his back, which probably came from limping around so much, he plowed through the night, feeling as if he were walking through an iceberg rather than air. At times it was almost as if something pushed back at him, told him to turn around. But the compulsion overrode everything else, and because he hadn’t trusted that compulsion before, to his great grief and horror, he had to trust it now.

Time, he reminded himself, was an artifact of the large-number world he existed in. At the quantum level, past and future became one in a timeless present. So his experience was possible.

Possible.

Just possible.

A lot of rational people would tell him he was nuts. There’d been a time he would have agreed. But not since the…accident.

Except now he lived in a world where he knew there were no “accidents,” only probabilities, and there was one probability he had come here to prevent.

It was possible he had already prevented it just by coming here and making this walk every night. But the compulsion remained, so he remained, too.

He lowered himself to the bench again with a gasp of both pain and relief. Maybe when this compulsion let go, maybe when he dealt with whatever he’d come to deal with here, he’d be able to allow himself the gift of the hip replacement the docs had wanted to give him. A hip replacement he’d denied himself out of guilt.

He almost smiled then, realizing that he might actually be doing penance for something that had arisen from the morass of quantum probabilities, probabilities over which he could exercise only minimal control by making decisions. He had made a rational decision that time.

This time he was making an irrational one in order to atone.

And he was evidently scaring the woman who lived in that house. He felt bad about that, but maybe his whole purpose in doing this was to scare her. Because if he was right, she needed to be scared.

The last thing he expected to see was Trish Devlin come out of her house and march toward him. After their meeting at the truck stop, he expected her to avoid him like the plague. Instead, here she was, striding purposefully toward him, her snorkel hood up on her parka, her hands in her pockets.

When she reached him, she stood over him. The snorkel hood, even though it wasn’t fully zipped, managed to shadow her face completely.

“Who are you?” she demanded.

“A very cold guy who is sorry he keeps disturbing you.”

“I’m finding that hard to believe. The sheriff says you appear to be okay.”

“Then you shouldn’t worry about me.”

“Well, I can’t stop wondering about you. I go from being annoyed to being frightened to being just plain curious. Either way, I can’t sleep until you leave. So why don’t you just come into my house and tell me what the hell is going on?”

“Why should anything be going on?” He genuinely wanted to hear her answer to that.

“Because after what I told you about feeling stalked, a gentleman would have chosen a different bench tonight.”

“Reasonable,” he said. “But not possible.”

“Why the hell not?”

His answer was simple, and as true as he could give her. “Because I can’t.”

“That’s not true. You can walk any direction you want, sit on any one of another dozen benches.”

“Theoretically.”

She made a disgusted sound. “Why do I feel as if I’m caught up in a conversation with an evasive Zen monk?”

“I should be so lucky.”

“Then just give me your full name.”

“Why?”

“So I can do a Google search on you. So maybe then I’ll be able to sleep.”

“I don’t want you to sleep at this time of night.”

She swore then, a phrase he suspected was totally uncharacteristic. It didn’t seem to pass her lips easily. “Do you always talk in riddles?”

“Enigmas, actually. I can’t explain.” He hesitated, but sensed there was no danger in the revelation. And feelings were about all he had left to guide him in this unknown territory. “But I will give you my full name. The search engines should take you on an interesting journey.”

“I hope so.”

“My full name is Grant Frederick Wolfe.” He spelled the last name for her. “You’ll probably find me most often as Grant F. Wolfe, or even G. F. Wolfe, which is the name I used on most of my papers.”

“Thank you,” she said stiffly, then turned to walk back to her house.

This should be interesting, he thought as he watched her disappear inside. Because he had a pretty good idea what the search engines would bring up.

He glanced at his watch. Ten more minutes, then he could go back to the motel’s warmth.

Maybe, at some point, the universe would reveal to him why he’d been chosen for this particular hell.

Because he sure didn’t have any idea why.