Becca, the public, was startled by this confession. “Okay,” she said. “No harm done.”
Dr. Call rested her hands in her lap and sat still for a moment. “Can I get you something to drink?”
“No, thanks. I’m good.”
“I’m sure I have some chips or something upstairs, if you’re hungry.”
“I’m really fine.”
Dr. Call nodded, as if relieved to have successfully negotiated some kind of social checklist. She relaxed in her chair. “All right. How much do you know about Electronic Voice Phenomenon?”
“Not a lot.” Becca must be growing accustomed to dissembling. She might be skeptical, but she’d read a great deal about EVP in the last few days. “Just that some people believe the voices of the dead can be heard in the static of old electronic devices.”
“That’s correct.” Dr. Call lifted a pen and turned it in her fingers. “A major portion of my work involves studying EVP. Recording voices, tracking sources of messages.” The corner of her mouth lifted. “You should know that this phenomenon is not considered particularly credible by the science community at large.”
“Yes, I can imagine.” Becca might share that wariness, were it not for the periodic talkativeness of her decades-dead mother. Her notion of the afterlife was vague in the extreme; more a wistful hope than a belief grounded in faith.
Dr. Call was observing her as if she were a specimen in a Petri dish. “Do you believe the voice you heard two days ago was the voice of your mother?”
“It sounded very much like her…but I was so little when she…” Becca studied her hands, clenched in her lap. “Yes. I believe it was my mother.”
“And you said that this is the second time she spoke to you.”
“That’s right. I heard her for the first time on my sixteenth birthday. It was my birthday two days ago, too.”
Dr. Call’s fingers drummed softly on the desk, as if itching for the keyboard. “And the message was the same?”
“Both times, yes. She said my name. And the words ‘not true.’” To her astonishment and dismay, Becca felt tears fill her eyes. She stared at the wall, praying this unexpected display of emotion would pass without comment.
“I see.” Dr. Call seemed as disconcerted as Becca. The silence grew, and Becca feared she might be offered chips again. To her relief, Dr. Call resumed her clipped and professional tone. “Does this message have meaning for you?”
Becca’s shoulder twitched, a parody of a casual shrug. “I guess a lot of things about my mother could turn out not to be true.” Maybe she did love my father. Maybe she did love me too much to leave me. “I’ve never believed she killed herself.”
“And she died when you were five years old.” Dr. Call cleared her throat. “Can I ask how it happened?”
She handed me a doll. Then she went into the kitchen. “She shot herself in the head in the kitchen of our house.”
“You were present at the time?”
“I was in the living room. I didn’t see it happen.” The detached tone this interview had taken was helping. Becca was able to relate these distant horrors without dredging them too painfully from the past.
“Explain your doubts about your mother’s suicide.” Dr. Call winced. “Please,” she added.
“I’m not sure I can.” Becca released a long breath. Her belief that Madelyn Healy had not deliberately put a gun to her head was like her faith in any god, fleeting and sporadic. She had no memory of the night itself, beyond her father’s voice, her mother’s delicate hands placing the doll in her arms. But police reports and years of therapy hadn’t banished the small, ambivalent doubt that the world was wrong about her mother’s death. Becca shrugged, defeated. “Just a little kid’s insistence that her mom wouldn’t do such a thing, I guess.”
“Perhaps an insistence your mother endorses. ‘Not true.’”
“Perhaps.”
“Do you have any theories, any alternate explanations for her death? Accident? Homicide?”
“No, I have no idea.” Becca shifted in her seat. The woman should really conduct her interviews wearing perma-dark sunglasses. She could cut glass etchings with those eyes. “So. Where do we go from here?”
“That’s up to you, actually. I can simply note the specifics of this report and close the file. Or I have time in my schedule for a more thorough investigation, if you wish.”
“An investigation. What would that entail?”
“I would invade your life, basically.” Dr. Call dipped her head, as if acknowledging what a pleasant prospect that must be. “I’d want to examine the radio that transmitted this message. If possible, to see the room in which you heard it, to run sound tests. And together we would try to establish the conditions most receptive to a third transmission.”
“You’d try to get her to speak again.” Becca stared at this strange woman. First she was queen of the lentils, then Virgil, now she was Merlin. “Is that really possible?”
“Frankly, it’s unlikely. In the research, authentic messages are capricious and unpredictable at best. We’ve had very little success evoking new information from a single credible voice. Either the given message is repeated, or the voice falls silent. But I feel there are enough anecdotal successes, enough promising attempts, to make the effort worthwhile.”
“Uh huh.” Becca’s flautas were coming back on her with a vengeance. She didn’t know what she’d expected from this meeting — a one-stop cure, a fast and soothing interpretation. She hadn’t planned to bare her life to this odd duck, though, and that would be inevitable if she continued.
Her mother’s voice had held such grief, both times she’d spoken. Not outrage or anger, as would be natural from a woman protesting a lie. Sadness. A faint note of pleading, as if she were begging Becca to believe her.
“All right,” Becca said. “I want to do this.”
“Fine.” Dr. Call swiveled back to her laptop and began typing, a jarring transition that pulled Becca out of her pensive thoughts.
“Wait…I’d better be sure I can pay for this.”
“I don’t charge subjects for my studies.” Dr. Call didn’t turn from the monitor. “My work is privately funded. I’d like to meet you tomorrow at two o’clock, at the site of the transmission. Address?”
Yes, tomorrow works for me too, thanks. Becca recited the address of the house on Fifteenth Avenue.
Dr. Call frowned, which didn’t change her usual expression all that much. “I recall your saying you live off Lake City? This is a Capitol Hill address, five blocks from here.”
“I didn’t hear the voice in my apartment. I heard it in the house I lived in as a child, where my mother died.”
“I see.” This time Becca rather enjoyed the doctor’s discomfort. “Meet me here tomorrow, then, and we’ll walk there together.”
“At two o’clock.” Becca waited, but Dr. Call just stared at her. It seemed Becca’s audience was concluded. She pushed back her chair.
Dr. Call stood quickly and extended her hand across the desk. “It’s been a pleasure meeting you, Ms. Hawkins. Good night.”
Becca accepted the formal clasp with a small flare of sympathy for this woman’s social clumsiness, her studied but stilted attempts at human interaction. Asperger’s, perhaps? Doubtful. People with Asperger’s were usually uncomfortable with eye contact, and that was not this chica’s problem.
Dr. Call escorted her out of her shadowed office and into the darkening street. She closed the barred gate behind Becca promptly, without further comment.