“Evan’s under a tremendous amount of pressure, more than you can imagine. He’ll never go for something like that. And he’ll never let you take her out of the hospital alone.”
“Then you’ll have to help me.”
“Impossible.”
“You brought me into this for a reason. You wanted me to reach her, and I have. I can’t believe you would stop now. Imagine if she were your child. She’s just a little girl, no matter what you say she’s capable of, what she’s done. She scared, and she’s alone. We owe her this. You owe her this.”
“I don’t owe her anything.”
“How can you say that? She’s spent most of her life behind the bars of that place. She’s been drugged and restrained to keep her docile. You put her there. You sentenced her to that prison. And if you don’t help me right now, if you don’t give me the chance to get her out, I will go to the authorities for child abuse charges. Then it will all be out in the open. This will be over, one way or the other.”
“It will kill her if you do it that way. You know that, don’t you? The media pressure, the people falling over themselves to get at her. She’ll be destroyed, just as if you’d held a gun to her head and pulled the trigger.”
Jess had gained her feet. She found that she was breathing hard, and her throat felt tight. She fought to regain control of herself. “Then help me now,” she said. “Help me do what’s right for her.”
For a moment she thought Shelley wasn’t going to answer her at all. Various emotions passed across her face like ghosts. And then something seemed to move like a shudder through the professor’s body, and she nodded.
“This isn’t because of any threat of exposure. I’m beyond that now, understand? But you’re right, I did bring you into this for a reason. It’s time to force the issue, one way or the other. Evan’s gone too far with her and it has to end.
“I’ll call him to set up a private meeting off-premises for Sunday afternoon. They’ll be at minimum staff then. Do you know Jeffrey? I helped place him there, nearly ten years ago now. He’s an old patient of mine, in fact. He trusts me, and he’ll do what I say. He’ll help you get past the guard.”
She stood with effort, pain etched across her face. “I can’t go with you. I hope you understand. From then on, you’re on your own.”
—25—
“Okay, Sarah,” Patrick said. “We’re all friends here. I want you to try to relax.”
They were huddled around the table in the tiny observation room of the church basement: Patrick, Gee, Jess, Sarah, and Connor the stuffed bear. It hadn’t taken them long to get there. Jeffrey had seemed more than willing to cover for them, and he was good at it. In fact, he had done much more than that, getting Sarah upstairs and into the back of Charlie’s car without drawing suspicion, and providing a distraction for the man at the gate so that they could get out without anyone noticing a thing.
But Jess was already looking at her watch. She couldn’t be sure how long Wasserman would be gone, and what would she have accomplished if they were caught?
What she hadn’t counted on was Sarah’s resistance. The girl had been willing to go with her, eager to see the outside again. But when she explained what they were going to do, Sarah grew upset. No, Jess thought, it had been more than that; she had become frantic. It took everything Jess had to convince her that she would be all right, that these were friends who wanted to help her. Even now, she looked ready to bolt at any moment.
The empty worship hall hung like an expectant audience above their heads. Already she was regretting the decision to come. She was trying to reason, to find alternatives. Shelley had simply buckled under the terrible pressure of her disease, and was spending the rest of her life trying to deny the fact that her body had forsaken her. As for Sarah’s grandmother, she was crazy as a shit-house rat; and what about all those strange things Jess herself had witnessed? There were explanations, there had to be. Perfectly reasonable solutions. If only she could find them.
Yes, the whole thing was crazy. What could possibly happen now, here under the lights and the intensely scrutinizing eyes of Patrick and Gee? And how could she put Sarah through this? She had told the girl that they were her friends, but what did she really know about this group, other than what Charlie had told her? They were certainly odd, but whether it went further than that, she couldn’t tell.
She felt like a wrecking ball gathering speed and coming loose through its swing. This carelessness wasn’t like her. Damn it, you should have checked things out more carefully. You know better than that.
But there hadn’t been time. And it was too late now.
“We’re going to run a few tests, nothing serious, but I’m going to have a look at your brain waves, and we’ll record your heartbeat and blood pressure and respiration. There’s nothing that’s going to hurt, and nothing to be afraid of, okay?” Patrick fiddled with the contacts that had been taped to Sarah’s skull. He was very gentle with her, adjusting the cuff around her upper arm. “Can I talk to you for a moment, please?” He gestured Jess out into the larger chamber and closed the door.
“This isn’t going to work if you can’t calm her down,” he said, when they were out of earshot. “She can feel your nervousness. I can feel it. There’s something on your mind. Let’s get it out.”
“I was just wondering why, if this sort of psychic phenomena is as widespread and proven as you say, we all haven’t heard about it.”
Patrick looked at her oddly for a moment. His lighter-colored eye seemed to bore into her, searching for her private heart. She felt uncomfortable and crossed her arms. “You have, you just don’t know it. Let me tell you something. In 1985 the Army Research Institute was commissioned by Congress to study aspects of psychic phenomena. In their subsequent report they said that the data they had reviewed constituted genuine scientific anomalies for which no one had an adequate explanation. There was no scientific answer to what they had seen. And yet nobody listened. The report was buried, along with four others that said the same thing. In 1989, Radin and Ferrari at Princeton used meta-analysis to evaluate 148 different die-casting experiments performed during the last fifty years. They eliminated all except the most scientific and rigid of the group. What was left still proved the existence of psi with the odds against chance of more than a trillion to one.
“The truth is, the Defense Department has been conducting secret parapsychological experiments for years. Psi isn’t a belief anymore. It’s a proven fact. The data is there.”
“So what are you telling me? There’s some sort of conspiracy?”
“Absolutely.”
An intercom clicked into life. “Come on,” Gee said loudly from inside the observation room. His round, scruffy face peered through the window in the door. “Let’s get the show on the road. I gotta get home and watch The OC on Tivo. It’s a new episode, you know.”
Jess wondered for a moment how it might feel to get her hands around Gee’s skinny little neck.
“Calm yourself,” Patrick said. “We’re coming.” To her, more gently, he said, “We’ve got to get Sarah to relax, to enter a premeditative state more conducive to psi. She’s too tense, there’s something upsetting her. But you have her trust. We can’t do it without you. What have you got to lose?”
Jess held her breath, let it out slowly. “If she shows any signs of discomfort, seizure, anything at all, we stop. Immediately. All right?”