As soon as she had started her internship, she had managed through official channels to obtain those three autopsy reports. Cerebrovascular accident, subarachnoid hemorrhage, congenital aneurysm. She had read over all the details.
And what it spelled out in the layman’s language was a secret weakness in the wall of an artery, which for no discernible reason finally ruptured, causing totally unforeseen and sudden death. No way to predict, in other words, that a six-year-old child would suddenly go into seizures on the playground, a six-year-old who’d been healthy enough to be kicking six-year-old Rowan and pulling her hair only moments before. Nothing anybody could do for the child either, as the blood poured out of her nose and her ears, and her eyes rolled up into her head. On the contrary, they’d protected the other children, shielding their eyes from the spectacle as they took them into the schoolroom.
“Poor Rowan,” said the teacher, later. “Darling, I want you to understand it was something in her head that killed her. It was medical. It had nothing to do with the fight.”
And that’s when Rowan had known, absolutely, what the teacher would never know. She did it. She caused that kid to die.
Now, that you could dismiss easily enough-a child’s natural guilt for an accident she didn’t understand. But Rowan had felt something when it happened. She had felt something inside herself-a great pervasive sensation which was not unlike sex when she thought about it; it had washed through her and seemingly out of her at the moment the child fell over backwards. And then there had been the diagnostic sense, operative even then, which had told her that the child would die.
Nevertheless, she forgot the incident, Graham and Ellie, in the manner of good California parents, took her to a psychiatrist. She played with his little girl dolls. She said what he wanted her to say. And people died of “strokes” all the time.
Eight years passed before the man got out of his Jeep on that lonely road in the hills of Tiburon and clapped his hand over her mouth and said in that awful intimate and insolent voice: “Now, don’t you scream.”
Her adoptive parents never made a connection between the little girl and the rapist who had died as Rowan struggled, as the same blazing anger galvanized her, passing into that exquisite sensation which rendered her body suddenly rigid as the man let go of her and fell forward over the wheel.
But she had made the connection. Quietly and certainly she’d made it. Not then, when she had forced open the door of the Jeep and run down the road screaming. No, she had not even known she was safe. But later, as she lay alone in the dark after the Highway Patrol and the homicide detectives had left them, she knew.
Almost a decade and a half had elapsed before it happened with Graham. And Ellie was too sick with cancer by then to think of much of anything. And surely Rowan wasn’t going to pull up a chair to her bedside and say, “Mama, I think I killed him. He was cheating on you constantly. He was trying to divorce you. He couldn’t wait the bloody goddamned two months it’s going to take for you to die.”
It was all a pattern, as surely as a spiderweb is a pattern, but a pattern does not imply a purpose. Patterns exist everywhere, and purpose is at its safest when it is spontaneous and short-lived.
You will not do this. You will not take life. It was remembering heresy to remember slapping that little girl, even fighting the man in the Jeep. And it was too perfectly awful to remember the argument with Graham.
“What do you mean you’re having her served with the papers! She’s dying! You’re going to stick it out with me.”
He’d grabbed her by the arms, tried to kiss her. “Rowan, I love you, but she isn’t the woman I married … ”
“No? Not the woman you’ve cheated on for thirty years?”
“She’s just a thing in there, I want to remember her the way she used to be … ”
“You talk that crap to me!”
That had been the instant that his eyes fixed and the expression washed out of his face. People always die with such peaceful countenances. On the brink of rape, the man in the Jeep had just gone blank.
Before the ambulance had come, she had knelt beside Graham, put her stethoscope to his head. There was that sound, so faint that some doctors could not hear it. But she heard it-the sound of a great deal of blood rushing to one spot.
No one ever accused her of anything. How could they? Why, she was a doctor, and she’d been with him when the “awful thing” happened, and God knows, she did everything she could.
Of course everybody knew Graham was a thoroughly second-rate human being-his law partners, his secretaries, even his last mistress, that stupid little Karen Garfield person who had come over wanting some keepsake, everybody knew. Except, that is, Graham’s wife. But there wasn’t the slightest suspicion. How could there be? It was just death by natural causes when he was about to make away with the fortune made through his wife’s inheritance and a twenty-eight-year-old idiot who had already sold her furniture and bought their airline tickets for St. Croix.
But it wasn’t death by natural causes.
By this time she knew and understood the diagnostic sense; she’d practiced it and strengthened it. And when she had laid her hand on his shoulder, the diagnostic sense had said: no natural death.
That in itself ought to have been enough. Yet maybe she was mistaken. Maybe it was the great deceptiveness of pattern which we call coincidence. And nothing more than that.
But suppose she met with Michael Curry. Suppose he held her hand as she closed her eyes and thought about those deaths? Would he see only what she had seen, or would some objective truth be known to him? You killed them. It was worth a try.
What she realized tonight, as she wandered slowly and almost aimlessly through the hospital, as she took detours through vast carpeted waiting rooms and down long wards where she was not known, and would never be known, was that she had felt an overwhelming desire just to talk to Michael Curry for a long time. She felt connected to Michael Curry. As much by the accident at sea as by these psychic secrets. She wanted, perhaps for reasons she didn’t fully understand, to tell him and him alone what she’d done.
It wasn’t easy for her to face this weakness. Absolution for murder came only when she operated. She was at the altar of God when the nurses held out the sterile gown for her, when they held up the sterile gloves.
And all her life she’d been a solitary person, a good listener, but invariably colder than those around her. That special sense, the one that aided her so as a physician, had always made her too keenly aware of what others truly felt.
She’d been ten or twelve years old before she realized other people didn’t have it, sometimes not even a particle of it. That her beloved Ellie, for instance, didn’t have the slightest idea that Graham did not love her so much as he needed her, and needed to denigrate her and lie to her and to depend on her always being there, and being inferior to him.
Rowan had sometimes wished for that kind of ignorance-not to know when people envied you, or disliked you. Not to know that many people lied all the time. She liked the cops and the fire fighters because they were to some extent perfectly predictable. Or maybe it was simply that their particular brand of dishonesty didn’t bother her so much; it seemed harmless compared to the complex, insidious, and endlessly malicious insecurity of more educated men.
Of course diagnostic usefulness had redeemed this special psyche sense completely.
But what could ever redeem the ability to kill at will? To atone was another matter. To what proper use could a telekinetic ability like that ever be put?