“Are they classified as emotionally disturbed?”
“Sometimes. I must confess to applying that label, although at the mildest classification. The per diem for the home is increased if there are emotional disturbances. We barely break even as it is. But we make do, and we do our best.”
“You make it sound so matter-of-fact, so, I don’t know, professional. I don’t think I could handle some of the emotional embers you must touch from time to time.” “Ah, yes, those,” she said, looking away for a moment. “Like when Hollywood goes sleepwalking, calling out for.his mama in a voice very much like Bambi in the Disney movie. Especially when he says, ‘Mama,” followed by ‘Sh h-h-h, Poppa’s comin.’ That’ll do it.” There was a special shine to her eyes when she told him this.
“Yes, I guess that would.” He was about to ask her about Jessamine, but then he decided to keep waiting. He asked Gwen instead about her coming back to Graniteville.
“It’s my home,” she said. “When you’re a southern woman and you’re no longer married, you either go far away or you go home. I was actually born and raised here.” “But you said you were a doctoral candidate at the university? At one time you’ve lived elsewhere.”
She nodded in the shadows. “Yes. Technically, my field of study is child psychology. I’ve discovered that there are different dialects of sign language practiced in the hill country, especially among children from some of the more dysfunctional families. Jessamine is an example. That’s not ASL she’s using; it’s her own.”
“Inbreeding is still a problem up here in the mountains?”
“That’s an indelicate phraseology, but the phone book is pretty revealing,” she said wearily.
“And you were married? To John Lee Warren?” “Yes,” she said softly. “For a while. We had grown up together through high school. He stayed behind here in Graniteville to work for the Sheriff’s Department when I went off to college. We got married when I came back home.”
“Was that always in the cards? That you would come back here?”
“My father insisted that I go away to college, but in my heart, I never left this town. Especially after Mom died while I was in college.
Graniteville isn’t such a special place, but this farm is, and so are these hills, although at I times they seem lonely, too, with all the people gone.”
She had shifted the conversation away from her marriage, so Stafford went with it. “As I said earlier,” he — noted, “I’m not so sure these hills are all that empty. Of people, I mean.”
She looked past him again but did not directly answer his question. She has that mountain secretiveness about her, he thought. He was utterly intrigued by this woman, by her physical grace and intelligence, all cloaked in a dignity that he had not seen in his world of Washington and government. He found himself wishing she were plain and uninteresting, because now it really was time to get back to business.
“So, Gwen,” he said. “The business at the airport. Jes’samine.” “Yes,” she said with a small sigh. “The airport. First, I have to tell you why we were at the airport. We were returning from Charlotte. I’d taken Jess to the Braden Institute there.”
“Which is?”
“A hospital specializing in young adult brain tumors.”
“Oh my.”
“Yes. She went to be tested. The good news is that all the scans were negative.” “That’s wonderful,” he said. “What on earth could be the bad news with a report like that?”
She turned to face him directly. “This is the part I need you to promise to keep to yourself,” she said. “I mean, you can know it, but I need to know that you won’t make it part of your official world.”
“I’m not following, Gwen,” he replied, equivocating a little.
“I know. But will you promise? — It’s for the child’s protection, not mine. I think you’ll understand when I tell you. But I guess what I’m saying is that even though you can know about it, you won’t be able to act on it. I simply can’t permit that.”
“Well,” he said, “I can promise to be discreet. And since you’re her guardian, if you won’t permit her further involvement, that pretty much settles it, doesn’t it?” But even as he said it, he knew that wasn’t true, either.
She thought about his answer for a moment, then nodded her head. “All right. As I said, it’s complicated. Jessamine — Jess — is, we think, a psychic.”
What did this have to do with the price of rice? “Oh” was all he could manage., “Yes, ‘oh.’ Emphasis on the ‘we think,’ of course, because it isn’t all that cut-and-dried. And then there is the problem of her speech, or the lack of it. But I, for one, think it’s true. The question is, To what degree? And what to do about it? She appears to have the ability of presence telepathy.”
“Presence telepathy,” Stafford repeated. He stood up, suddenly needing to stretch his injured arm. All he knew about psychics was that a certain government agency had gotten its bureaucratic mammary glands in the media wringer recently over a program called Stargate. There had been quite a flap, with the press preaching indignantly about millions spent on questionable research, joined eagerly by a horde of self-righteous congresspersons. He remembered all the talk of so-called mind readers communicating with clandestine agents and seeing through walls in far-off places. Right.
“Do you know anything about the subject of psychic research?” she asked.
“No. I was just thinking about Stargate and the fiasco that caused.”
She nodded. “Yes, that was unfortunate, because there’s more to it than palm readers by the roadside. Believe it or not, there is a growing body of professional research literature on the subject, such as the Macklin study done at Princeton.”
Stafford struggled to be polite. “I suppose there is,” he said. “And a lot of charlatans in the field, as well.” “Oh, yes,” she said, sounding a bit defensive. “Except I’ve personally seen manifestations of it in this child.”
Stafford sat back down. “Look, Gwen, I’m basically a cop. I’ve been trained to see the evidence in front of me. I kind of have a problem with the whole concept of psychic powers, or whatever you want to call them. I’m not saying they don’t exist, mind you, just that I’ve never seen anything remotely resembling convincing proof of it.”
“How about those people who help the police? And aren’t most of them women?”
He couldn’t answer that one. He had read about enough of those cases to make him wonder, but he remained skeptical.
“So what can she do?” he asked. “Bend spoons, things like that?”
She froze in the act of lifting her coffee cup. Dammit, he thought, that was a dumb thing to say. “Forget I said that,” he said. “It’s just—”
She put down her coffee cup, her face a pale mask of annoyance, and for a moment he thought the evening was over, but then she surprised him.
“I understand, Mr. Stafford,” she said patiently. “I should have anticipated that. It’s not an … unreasonable reaction to this whole subject.”
So now it was back to Mr. Stafford. He tried again. “Look, Gwen, you asked earlier what I was doing down here in Georgia. Well, officially, I’m pursuing a longstanding fraud investigation that involves the auctioning of surplus government material. Unofficially, I’ve been sent—
or maybe exiled is a better word for it — to Georgia for committing some political indiscretions within my agency. Add to that the fact that my wife left me for another man a year ago, and add to that the loss of my right arm. I’m probably not the most focused government investigator you’ll ever meet. That said, I must tell you that I haven’t exactly uncovered the crime of the century down at the DRMO in Atlanta, either.” “What’s a DRMO?” she asked. He explained the term, concluding with the fact that Carson, the man who’d fainted at the airport, was the manager.