Seeing Is Believing

by Lindsay McKenna

  “No,” Wes said quietly, “we were hired by them to find you. They thought you’d been kidnapped when you didn’t return from your vacation.”

  With a brittle laugh, Ruth looked at her Indian companion. “I’m sure they were very worried—for their own sakes.” She gestured toward the Indian. “This is Elmer Running Antelope. He’s a Yavapai medicine man, my friend and teacher of ten years.”

  Elmer nodded briefly to them, his mouth set, his coal black eyes snapping with anger at the intrusion. Ruth laid a hand on his thick, heavy shoulder.

  “What you don’t know is I’ve been walking the Red Road for that time. I met Elmer a decade ago in Gallup at a powwow, and we struck up a friendship. Over the years he’s been teaching me.”

  Wes frowned. “Red Road?”

  “Yes,” Diana said, “it’s a term that means a person has embraced a Native American way of believing and living.”

  Ruth smiled a little, got to her feet and dusted off her Levis. “That’s putting it mildly. Elmer and I had very long, involved talks when we first met. I began to see the world through another filter of reality. A Native American one.” She lifted her hands to encompass the huge, dry cave. “The more I heard, the more I realized just how far I’d gone.”

  “Gone?” Wes asked, confused.

  “Gone in a negative sense, Mr. McDonald. Psi-Lab isn’t a very friendly place, you know. No, you probably don’t. It takes a Q-Clearance even to get in the door, which means only a very few people at the top levels of federal government even know of our existence.” Ruth pinned Diana with a worried look. “Whatever you do, don’t get tangled up with them. Do you understand?”

  Diana nodded briefly, taking the warning at face value.

  Ruth picked up from the earth a wand of dried sage ceremonially wrapped with red yarn. It had been lit earlier; almost half the wand was burned away. The faint smoke wafted upward on a slight breeze. She lifted the sage close enough to inhale the fragrance. “Psi-Lab hires green, idealistic psychics and trains them to be sneaks, thieves and killers in the other dimensions—in the name of our ‘enemies,’ whoever and wherever they might be. Patriotism, motherhood and apple pie—all the watchwords they pound into you during the brainwashing phase.” She stared at Wes. “You don’t believe me. That’s okay, because I know the truth.” Looking fondly at Elmer, she added, “He taught me a long time ago that the truth needs no defense, Mr. McDonald, so I’m not going to try to prove anything to you.”

  “There is a great danger in the other dimensions,” Diana said quietly. “I know people can die if they aren’t properly protected or trained.”

  “Your mother is a medicine woman. You know exactly what I’m talking about.”

  “Yes.” Diana felt a mild alarm that Ruth Horner was so psychic as to know that her mother was a medicine woman. It was one thing that her mother should have such faculties in place, quite another that this woman should. Her mother was a known quantity, responsible with her gifts. But then Diana told herself to relax, that Ruth wasn’t a threat to her.

  “Your mother should be proud of you, you know?” Ruth smiled sourly. “I figured I could disappear, this time for good, and no one would ever find me. I didn’t feel Psi-Lab had anyone in its unit good enough to track me after the red herring I left behind in the guise of that gourd. It would stop them from finding me. The power from that gourd was enough to confuse and throw anyone off my trail. What I didn’t count on was them hiring a Native American from the outside to hunt me down. They’re smarter than I gave them credit for.”

  “Why did you want to leave?” Diana asked. “Couldn’t you go to your boss and tell him you wanted to quit?”

  Laughing harshly, Ruth moved the wand of sage in a gentle semicircle from right to left, dispersing more of the thick, pungent smoke. “Quit? My dear young woman, there is no such thing as ‘quitting’ Psi-Lab. I’ve been their virtual prisoner since I was ten years old.” Her face hardened, emphasizing the lines at the corners of her mouth and eyes. “I was a slave of sorts, to do their psychic bidding. I had no life of my own. I lost my marriage….”

  Diana looked at Wes. What would he do? Would he make Ruth come back with them? Back to Psi-Lab? The woman was terribly unhappy about the prospect.

  “What was the argument in the casita all about?” Wes asked.

  Ruth gave him a pained look and sat back down, the sage carefully cradled between her thin fingers. “Elmer came to pick me up after I’d put the gourd in place. We had a horrendous argument because I was feeling guilty about leaving Psi-Lab, and he jumped all over me about it, about what they were doing to me—messing with my head, messing with my life…. They were, you know. I felt as though I had to stay at Psi-Lab. If I didn’t, many of my friends, people I literally grew up with, would be left in danger.” She shrugged.

  “In danger?” Diana asked.

  “Yes. You see, in our own metaphysical way, we’re in the business of discovering the enemy’s strengths and weaknesses. Usually, during sleep lab, we’d travel astrally via what you call an OOB—an out-of-body experience—to a prearranged overseas mission, as a team. Everyone relied on me. I did most of the traveling, most of the defending when we were on an astral journey somewhere to eavesdrop on a conversation or ferret out a piece of information deep inside some high-security-clearance place.” She gently set the sage back onto the rich, red earth between her legs. “I was afraid if I left, I’d be leaving my friends wide open and defenseless. That’s not true, but it was the fear they’d programmed into me. Elmer made me see the reality. That was the crux of the argument.”

  Diana felt the power around the medicine man. He was no one to be trifled with. “You left because there was no other choice?”

  “None,” Ruth answered flatly. She looked at Wes. “You’re military. You know how the government functions. Once a marine, always a marine—that’s the saying. Well, it applies in top-secret areas, too, especially one like Psi-Lab. We’re a very hush-hush, superspecialized unit with a small family of coworkers. We can’t talk to anyone about what we do, the stresses, the strains.” She grimaced. “That’s why I lost my marriage. I had horrible responsibilities and stresses on me, but I couldn’t even talk to my husband about them. I couldn’t talk to anyone. Psi-Lab officials didn’t care about me as a human being they just wanted to squeeze me dry of my psychic abilities. I’m sure they would have wadded me up and thrown me away once I burned out. I think that’s what scared me into planning to run away and cover my trail after me. I’ve seen them do it before, and some of those poor souls who wanted to quit or retire ended up in insane asylums, locked away, prisoners forever.” Ruth grimaced. “So much for government pension and all that. No, with my kind, the superpsychics, once we’ve burned out, we conveniently disappear and our families are told that we’re undercover. Maybe six months later, the family receives a visit from a government chaplin telling them we’ve died in the line of duty. Of course, it’s not true. We’ve just been put away—permanently. There was no way I was going out like that. No way.”

  Horrified, Diana stared openmouthed at Ruth. “Are you serious? They’d lock you up in an asylum?”

  She chuckled, but it was a deadly sound. “That’s right.”

  “But…why?” Diana insisted. “You served your country. Why would they reward you like that?”

  “Because,” Ruth said in an undertone, “we’re the elite. We have Q-Clearance. Psi-Lab officials are afraid that if any of us filter back into the general population, we might talk. They’re deathly afraid of us spilling the beans on what we do there for them. In order to minimize that risk, the older members of our team conveniently ‘disappear.’”

  “Can you prove this?” Wes demanded, scowling.

  “What’s there to prove?” Ruth shrugged. “One of my dear old friends, Tony Lodge, visited me astrally one night. He woke me from a deep sleep. Clearly terrified, he begged me to follow him, to let him show me where they’d taken him.” She gave Wes a guarded look. “Yo
u see, Tony had just retired after thirty years of service to Psi-Lab. He was looking forward to moving to a cabin in Montana, where he planned to fish for the rest of his life. They had a retirement party for him. And of course, we all had sugarplums dancing in our heads about Tony getting to leave Psi-Lab and fish happily in Montana. We were wrong.” Ruth crouched down and sifted some red soil through her fingers, watching the particles fall back to earth. “I followed Tony astrally to where his physical body was lying. He was at an insane asylum in upper Vermont, near the Canadian border.” Her mouth thinned as she looked up at them. “He told me they’d escorted him to the airport as planned, but on the way there, they’d shot him full of drugs that knocked him out. When he regained consciousness some time later, he was in a padded cell.”

  Standing, Ruth dusted off her hands. “That was just the beginning of my reality check with Psi-Lab and how it cares for its patriotic employees, Mr. McDonald. I could tell you other stories, but I won’t. I was able to prove, at least to myself, that the government had Tony’s sisters and brothers convinced that he’d gone undercover and been killed. The funeral was closed casket, so who knew if poor Tony was in there or not?” She smiled grimly. “Neat and tidy, aren’t they?”

  Wes nodded. “If it’s true, yes, they are. So instead of trying to retire, you’ve just disappeared on them?”

  “That’s right. I’m not going to end up like Tony. If I thought I could get him out of that padded cell, I’d do it. But I’m only one person, and he’s heavily guarded by two feds posing as doctors at that facility. You see, I found the place isn’t really for the insane, it’s for government spies and the like who know too much, who the federal government can’t trust to go back into mainstream America. Instead, they tidily put them away—forever.”

  Wes gave a slow nod. As a member of the elite Delta Force team, he’d heard rumors along this line, but had never talked to someone close to the situation—or the truth. He had seen other highly secret government departments make decisions that might have been more in their best interests than in those of the person or people involved.

  Ruth rubbed her hands down the sides of her Levi’s. “Well, you have a choice to make. Are you going to take me back against my will or let me walk free?”

  Wes compressed his lips. He glanced sideways at Diana’s very readable features and saw she was silently begging him to let Ruth Horner walk away. “Can you give me a good reason why I shouldn’t take you back?” he asked quietly.

  “I have a God-given right to live my own life the way I see fit,” Ruth answered in a low voice. “Psi-Lab owned me, Mr. McDonald, just as Delta Force owned you for the time you were with them. Maybe you enjoyed what you did with them, but I don’t like what I do. I work on the dark underside of metaphysics. I fight battles in the unseen dimensions. I’m sick of the power struggles, the death….”

  Uncomfortably, Wes nodded. He realized that Ruth was reading his mind to know he had been in Delta Force. “A reluctant warrior?”

  “You could say that, among other things.” She pointed to her lined face. “I’m fifty years old. I want what’s left of my life for me. I don’t want to be owned by the company store anymore, Mr. McDonald. That’s what Elmer and I were doing: performing a cutting-away ceremony to free me of Psi-Lab forever. And right in the middle of the ceremony, you walked in. How ironic.” She shook her head and sat down next to her teacher again.

  Diana bit her lower lip. If she had her way, she’d let Ruth go. It was obvious the woman was tired, embittered and needing rest. But unfortunately, it wasn’t Diana’s decision to make. It was up to Wes. Silently, she pleaded with him to make the right choice.

  Slowly unwinding, Wes stood up. He looked down at Diana and saw her eyes filled with anguish and hope. Without a doubt, he could feel her, could sense what she wanted him to do. The Yavapai medicine man was staring at him, too, his eyes as unblinking as those of a deadly rattlesnake. When Wes looked into Ruth Horner’s eyes, he saw a tired, jaded human being who had been asked to do too much for too long. He was all too familiar with that feeling himself, after serving with Delta Force. His responsibilities had been many; the lives lost beneath his command would be on his conscience until the day he died.

  “Okay,” he told Ruth quietly, “we’ll leave. I’ll make out a report tonight for Psi-Lab and fax it to their office tomorrow, saying that we came to a dead end in our search for you.”

  Ruth nodded, tears springing to her eyes.

  Filled with joy, Diana gasped. How badly she wanted to hug Wes, but now was not the time or place.

  “Thank you for your heart, your understanding, Mr. McDonald,” the older woman said.

  Elmer spoke up. “He’s an honorable warrior. He knows what you have walked through. He honors the courage of your convictions.”

  Wes nodded. “Warriors get tired, too,” he agreed. “You’re not stealing government secrets, and you’re not in trouble or danger at all, so it’s an easy decision for us to make.” Looking around the cave, he noticed the small tree at the rear of the cave that Diana had described earlier. Pride moved through him as she rose and joined him, her arm sliding about his waist.

  Ruth stood up and walked over to Wes, her hand extended. “May you walk in peace, too, Mr. McDonald.”

  Diana smiled through the tears.

  “I’m trying to, Ms. Horner.” He released her cool, slender hand.

  “I’m going to miss my friends and colleagues at Psi-Lab,” she told them, her voice trembling with emotion. “I wish—I wish you could tell them that I’m all right, that I’m safe, but I know you can’t. I wish I could warn them about their fate, but I can’t even do that. I don’t even dare astral travel to any of them for fear they trace me back to where I’m living.”

  “Maybe a letter written in some city you’re passing through might do the job. You could tell them you’re safe, happy,” Wes suggested gently, realizing the trauma that Ruth Horner was going through. How would he feel, cut off from his buddies still in Delta Force? He didn’t have many friends, but the ones he had, he cherished. His respect for Ruth’s courage increased.

  “That’s a thought,” Ruth mumbled, wiping her eyes self-consciously with the back of her hand.

  “Just be sure to mail the letter without fingerprints, so the FBI can’t trace it to you.”

  She laughed a little. “Well, where I’m going to live, no one would find me, believe me.”

  “Good.” Wes wasn’t about to ask where that was. If he was asked by Psi-Lab officials, he wanted to be able to answer honestly that he didn’t know. He put his hand up in a sign of farewell to them. “We’d better get going. I’ve got a Sedona police officer at the bottom of the trailhead, waiting to hear if we’ve found you.”

  Diana disengaged her arm from Wes and impulsively reached out, throwing both arms around Ruth. How thin and strong she was! “May there be rainbows in your life, Ruth. Walk in peace with the Great Spirit,” she whispered before she broke the embrace.

  Ruth smiled and sniffed. “Thank you, Diana.” She touched her shoulder momentarily. Lowering her voice to a bare whisper, she said, “And take care of this man of yours. His heart’s open now, and you’re so special to him….”

  Smiling softly, Diana nodded. “I will, and thanks.”

  “One more thing, before you leave,” Ruth said with a frown. Pinning most of her attention on Diana, she asked, “Have you ever heard of a half-blood medicine man by the name of Rogan Horsekiller?”

  “No,” Diana said.

  “He’s trouble,” Ruth warned darkly. “Ask your mother if she knows of him.” She glanced back at Elmer. “I swore I was done with psychic work, but Elmer was telling me of this métis medicine man who is a power stalker. He’s causing a lot of problems within the Native American community. Elmer’s worried that Horsekiller has big plans. Bad ones.”

  “I’ve never heard of him,” Diana said lamely.

  “Well, you will. Sooner or later. Just inform your mother so she’s
prepared for the bastard.”

  “I will. Thanks.”

  Wes took Diana’s hand. “Come on, let’s go talk to that policeman.”

  *

  “Are you hungry?” Wes asked casually. They sat in a small vegetarian restaurant on the outskirts of Sedona. At 3:00 p.m. the place was relatively empty of customers, and the booth they sat in was at the rear, where there was less chance of being overheard.

  Diana took a drink of a thick carob milkshake. She blotted off the mustache left by the shake with her paper napkin. “Would it be unseemly to admit I’m hungry for you, not food?”

  Wes had the good grace to blush. “You’re a pretty brazen lady.”

  “Wait until you get to know the rest of me.”

  His grin broadened and he reached across the Formica table to grasp her hand. “I like a bold woman.”

  “Being around you takes every ounce of my courage,” Diana admitted, nudging the milkshake in Wes’s direction. He’d been eyeing it ever since its arrival at the table.

  “Thanks.” He took a few sips and sat back, watching her. “I hope Ruth is going to be happy.”

  “Do you believe what she said about Psi-Lab? Putting their burned-out or retired psychics into a special government-run mental ward?” Shivering, Diana added, “It sounds horrible.”

  Wes nodded. “I don’t think she’s lying. But I don’t know the whole truth of it, either. Who knows? Maybe Tony was mentally deranged by what he did for Psi-Lab. Maybe he wasn’t to be trusted out in the world again.” With a shrug, he added, “I get the sense that, because of the high paranoia of their work, being spies in a psychic or metaphysical sense could breed that kind of suspicion. I’ve met some pretty crazy spies who were undercover too long, too stressed-out or broken to really function normally. Maybe what Ruth saw was the government’s way of helping someone who’d been shattered by his work the best they knew how. Maybe Tony wasn’t really a prisoner.”