Second Sight

by George D. Shuman

  She marveled constantly at how little attention they’d paid her back then. No one was interested in her health or education, not until it was evident that she was seeing things she shouldn’t be seeing and then all of a sudden the professionals were coming out of the woodwork. Everyone was throwing themselves at her feet.

  She was twenty when it first happened in public. A man in the throes of a heart attack had grabbed her hand on a busy Philadelphia street corner and pulled her to the sidewalk. She remembered the moment that life slipped from his body, his hand still clamped around hers feeling somehow different, and then the din of traffic and screaming pedestrians faded into silence and she saw a vision of a man being cast off a bridge into a dark river.

  She felt ridiculous sharing her story with a detective that evening, and undoubtedly he did as well. But Sherry’s description of the bridge was so specific that police divers located it and recovered the body of a teamster boss who had gone missing hours before he was to give testimony to a secret grand jury. Then a clerk in the organized crime division of the U.S. Attorney’s Office leaked to the press that it was a blind woman who led investigators to the body.

  Weeks later Sherry received a request from the widow of a car rental tycoon to help locate her husband in the Canadian wilderness. When she did, the media besieged her, and then the medical community as well, wanting to know about the blind girl’s gift. They wanted to study her brain. They wanted to test her sight. To this day she received invitations from optometrists, ophthalmologists, and neurologists galore for free treatments.

  It was sad, she realized, looking around the waiting room, that the people who most need help are the ones who never get it.

  The minutes went by, faces staring blankly at the floor, teenagers in wheelchairs swaying to some unfathomable cadence, the weary-looking mothers and fathers with fixed smiles. Neurology departments in city hospitals were fermenting stews of suffering and sadness.

  “Sherry Moore,” a voice yelled mechanically from a hole in a glass partition.

  Sherry walked to the counter, smiling politely at the handsome young man in the seat by the door. What tragedy had brought such a good-looking young man to this place? she wondered. Perhaps it was a relative. Perhaps he suffered some invisible malady like epilepsy.

  The clerk pushed a paper in front of Sherry and told her to sign it.

  Sherry looked for the blank line she had so infrequently signed in a life without sight and scribbled an indecipherable signature she had adopted over the years, triggering a tirade from the woman who snatched the form and replaced it with another, drawing an X by the correct line and jabbing her finger at it. “There! Write it there! See where it says patient’s signature?”

  Sherry signed it and turned for the corridor to Dr. Salix’s office, noticing that the young man by the door had left. She had to acknowledge that being blind was even more limiting than she had come to think over the years. Certainly she had missed all kinds of interesting people around her, the wonders of nature and miracles of man. Eyes were truly remarkable things, she realized, and again she was reminded of her fear of losing them.

  “Sherry”—the doctor smiled—“you look awesome.”

  “Thank you.” She sat. “I feel good.”

  He picked up the ophthalmoscope and pulled up her eyelids as he checked both eyes. “No spots or shadows?”

  “None.”

  “No blurriness?”

  She shook her head.

  “Light sensitive?”

  “Huh-uh.”

  “What about the light showers?”

  “Gone.”

  “Completely gone?”

  She shrugged. “Mostly gone.”

  He laid the scope down and shook his head. “What color are the lights?”

  “White,” she said. “Sparkles of white light.”

  Salix took a seat behind his desk. “Sherry, do you have any, um, unusual electronic equipment around your house? High-tech alarm systems, something with an electromagnetic field?”

  She shook her head no. “I have an alarm, but it’s been there for years. Why do you ask?”

  “There’s a phenomenon called phosphene. It is the experience of seeing light without light entering the eye. Phosphenes can be triggered by electrical or magnetic stimulation of the visual cortex, sometimes the random firing of ocular cells.”

  “Meaning?”

  “Your eyes may be particularly sensitive to the electronic clutter in the air. Radio and microwave transmissions, cell phone signals; God knows what’s out there.”

  “Will it hurt me?”

  “No, and if you can find the source of the energy, you could actually make it go away.”

  “So all is good then,” she said.

  “It’s good.” He held out his open hands.

  She smiled.

  “Sherry, what do you know about the ECoG?”

  “You’re not going to ruin this by cutting into my skull.” Sherry recalled hearing a discussion about cranially implanting a pulse generator to stimulate an electrocorticogram’s targets.

  “It’s just a suggestion. Food for future thought.”

  “You think this is temporary?”

  “What if it is, Sherry?”

  “Then it’s temporary. I know how to be blind, Dr. Salix. I can do blind just fine again.”

  The doctor shook his head.

  “Let’s just take it a month at a time. If anything seems out of the ordinary, call me back. If not, we’ll wait three months and do another EEG. If that’s the same we’ll go back to our annual checkups. Deal?”

  Sherry nodded.

  “When is your gamma ray test in Boston?”

  “The thirty-first,” she said.

  He wrote something down.

  “Dr. Salix. The man I tested with, Thomas Monahan. I went to the hospital up in Stockton. They told me he had been there almost all his life, but there are no records about his admission. Nothing about his family.”

  Salix sat and leaned forward toward her, his forearms on his knees, hands folded.

  “What do you want me to do, Sherry? Whole-body donors aren’t specifically categorized. Not unless there’s a specific condition under study. The cadavers brought to Nazareth would have ended up in pathology. Nazareth is a teaching hospital.” He shrugged. “I just pulled two at random from the lineup.”

  “Something about his brain, the way it worked, might have been responsible for my regaining sight. I think there was some kind of response from his memories—you said yourself I was talking out loud in the lab. I have never done that before. Whatever came back to me from him was more than just memory.”

  “Sherry, that’s hardly probable.”

  “Yeah, well, so are my abilities, and this guy was in a psychiatric institute.”

  “I’ll say it again. What do you want me to do?”

  “I want you to find his records and compare them with mine. They had to have given him an EEG in sixty years!”

  “Sherry…” He sighed, holding up his outstretched hands.

  She gave him a look and he nodded.

  “Okay, okay, you’re right, I’m sorry. I’ll give it one more try. I’ll have my assistant call the hospital in a day or two. They’re working on month’s-end books right now, but maybe Thursday. We’ll get a doctor on the phone and we’ll see what was going on with him before he died.”

  “Thanks,” Sherry said. “That’s all I want.”

  14

  CASE ESTATE

  LANCASTER, PENNSYLVANIA

  “Do you know of her, then?”

  “What I read in the papers,” Case said impatiently. “What about her?”

  “She was having tests done at Nazareth, simple electroencephalogram. Dr. Salix is her neurologist, has been for fifteen years.”

  “I know the fucking miracle story if that’s what you’re getting to,” Case said.

  “Salix brought in two cadavers and used them in his tests. One of them was Monahan.”
>
  “Jesus fucking Christ.”

  “I thought you’d want to know.”

  “Is there a recording?”

  “My source says there was.”

  “Of what exactly?”

  “Well, it still hasn’t been transcribed, but whatever was said in that room during the procedure. Dr. Salix records all his procedures. It’s all on tape.”

  “His notes. What did they say?”

  “They haven’t been transcribed either. His staff is doing a month’s end on the books.”

  “I want a fucking copy.”

  “It’s done. I have people on the inside.”

  “What happened to Monahan?”

  “He should have been returned to the pool for the students. They use a Delaware crematory afterward.”

  “Don’t tell me what should have been done. Make sure he finds his way there.”

  “Yes.” Weir hesitated. “May I ask just who this cadaver is?”

  “A very old acquaintance.” Case kneaded his forehead with thumb and middle finger. Then he looked up and stretched his neck. Monahan was the very tip of the iceberg, he thought. How many Monahans were out there still waiting to surface? And all it would take is one nosy bitch to get it started. One would set off another and they would tumble like dominoes…no, more like fallen tombstones in a long, winding path that would lead directly to Case and Kimble’s door.

  “Just find out what you can.” Case’s voice seemed to falter.

  “Is there anything else I should know?”

  “He’s dead.” Case shrugged. “But listen to me, Troy. I want him to remain dead. No one can go snooping into his life. If this woman Moore so much as utters his name I want her silenced. You get those transcripts. I want to know what happened in that room.”

  “Yes, Dr. Case.”

  Case stood and looked down, tapping his fingers on the desk. There was nothing he hadn’t done in this dog-eat-dog world to get ahead. His work would still be unknown if it hadn’t been for the Monahans of the world. Thank God they had all given their lives.

  15

  Troy Weir approached the mirror above the marble bathroom sink and studied his face in the bright light. He smoothed his eyebrows, plucked a stray hair, and brushed back his bangs with a trace of alcohol-free gel on his fingertips. Then he straightened the knot of his pearl silk tie and gave himself a nod of approval.

  An hour later he parked his Porsche on Chestnut Street and took a corner stool at Christian’s bar. The hostess gave him a smile as he walked by her podium and when he looked back she was still checking him out behind an armful of menus.

  He ordered a Ketel One on the rocks and scanned the two-story room. Tables were occupied on both levels, the air filled with hundreds of voices, glassware clinking, silverware clattering, the harsh sound of busboys stacking plates. The dinner crowd would soon leave the room to night prowlers, and the mating dance would begin. A few were already planted at the immense bar in their preferred stools, some advantage gained by facing the ladies’ room door or a mirror that doubled the view, or maybe it was just what they considered their lucky seat. Two very young women in short dresses giggled over lime margaritas. Another, a brunette some ten years older, was using her reflection in a martini shaker to get her bangs to lie right.

  A man in his forties was looking up the skirts of ladies climbing the stairwell to the balcony tables. The bartender was juggling glasses while watching his own reflection in the mirror.

  Troy stabbed an olive and thought about Sherry Moore. He’d seen her picture before he arrived at the neurology department yesterday afternoon. It was grainy and admittedly not a good one, a journalist’s photo of her getting into a car outside Nazareth Hospital the day she was released. Still, he wouldn’t have picked her out of the masses in the waiting room. She looked nothing at all like her picture. Nothing at all like what he’d expected. In fact, if the clerk at the Neurology Department hadn’t called out her name at just the right moment, he might have walked back out thinking she had failed to show or that he had somehow missed her.

  Not that he’d missed her. You couldn’t miss Sherry Moore. He simply hadn’t made the connection. He’d remembered thinking at the time that she must be a sales representative for some pharmaceutical company. Who knew better than Troy how sexed up the pharmaceutical sales rep business was? I mean, you didn’t just send any old fuddy-duddy with a briefcase to attempt to interrupt a doctor’s busy schedule. That took a very special and highly motivated individual. A very sexy individual.

  The vodka felt warm on his throat. There was energy in the crowded room. He wondered if Sherry Moore had ever been to Christian’s before. Perhaps he could bring her here and make her do tricks for him some night. That would be different. That would be fun.

  If she ever had appeared to be blind, there was no longer a clue of it. In fact, she looked stunning in that waiting room with her earphones parting tangles of long chestnut hair. Composed, assured. It was impossible to tell if she was listening to NPR or Black Eyed Peas.

  And once he saw her it changed everything. He wondered what he could do to move her. To make her look at him twice. Oh, sure, he could have turned the equipment on and had her doing cartwheels in front of the Lombard-South subway train, but this wasn’t some trollop from Jamborees or Vespers or the Pennypack Club. Not some snot-nosed law student from Boston College who thought he could extort money from the Defense Department’s number one psychological warfare contractor.

  Sherry Moore deserved so much better. She deserved his personal attention and he intended that she should not be disappointed.

  He’d been reading about Sherry Moore ever since his encounter. He had downloaded every piece of material he could find on Moore and devoured it in six long early-morning hours. She had never been married and had no children. She had not been able to see since the age of five, when she was found abandoned on the steps of Nazareth Hospital in an ice storm. She suffered retrograde amnesia in addition to loss of sight. She was unable to recall the events prior to her head injury at age five.

  Sherry Moore had been written about in every major newspaper. She had the confidence of at least one state attorney general and half a dozen law enforcement entities. She had surfaced in hundreds of investigations, from missing persons to missing wills, treasure hunting, historical research, and archaeology. And now, after thirty-two years, she could see.

  “Is this seat taken?” A woman with dyed red hair was at his shoulder, perfectly positioned to afford him an eye-level view of one barely covered breast.

  He shook his head. “Be my guest.”

  She smiled slyly and removed her sweater. The man at the opposite side of the bar suddenly found posture and began fumbling with the cuffs of his sleeves. The bartender flipped two bottles, catching one behind his back.

  He’d read there’d been a life-changing incident for Sherry Moore, something about a case in Wildwood, New Jersey, that sparked a suicidal spiral into depression. One of the articles suggested there was more to Sherry’s relationship with one of the detectives in Wildwood than met the eye. The article went on to quote her as saying that a favorite memory of the detective was when he surprised her on her birthday at an aquarium in Camden and the staff let her feed and pet the dolphins. Of course, there were always exposés and insinuations by overly enthusiastic journalists. Anyone could make an affair out of anything said, but there was no indication in recent print that Sherry was carrying on a relationship now. No boyfriends showed up at the hospital when she miraculously regained her sight. No girlfriends came to see her, if that was how she was inclined. That would have made news, for sure.

  By all appearances she was single and had no one to share her newfound miracle with.

  He wanted to see how she would react to him. How she felt after suddenly being able to see after thirty years. One would expect her to be overwhelmed, of course, and animated, curious about everything. She might also be scared of eye contact with the faces that had so long
eluded her. He knew she had seen his face at the neurological department at Nazareth. He knew it would register with her again, but it would take more than a wink to get Sherry Moore’s attention.

  Two more men sat at the bar. The redhead to his right was whispering into a cell phone. The margarita girls had spun backward on their stools and were talking to two boys with U.S. Naval Academy sweaters. A group of four women, young, late twenties, took a high-top table twenty feet away. They were all stunning, a collage of bare legs and shoulders. One of them smiled at him and then quickly looked away.

  But it was a table behind theirs that drew his attention, a family of three—father, wife, and toddler. They were money for sure. Oatmeal-colored sweaters lay across their shoulders. Her diamond was the size of a cocktail olive. All pretty and proper and pristine they were.

  She was thirty-something and blond. Hair pulled back in a short ponytail. The kind you might see behind a black riding helmet in the Lancaster Rolex Classic each August. Her face was perfect without makeup. She wore a lemon-colored blouse buttoned to the neck, khaki slacks, and practical leather moccasins. She was drinking Perrier and he iced tea. They were indulging the child, he imagined, putting into service their parental obligations before handing off the infant to a nanny for bedtime stories and another week of freedom.

  There were shopping bags piled at her feet. They would have an apartment in the city, he guessed. Either that or they would be staying at the Rittenhouse. Most likely a driver was waiting for them outside. The time was only 8 p.m. On Saturday night the stores were open until 10 p.m. She could say she forgot something. She could catch a taxi back to the apartment or hotel later. “Oh please, while we’re here in the city,” she might say. He wouldn’t want the headache of an argument.

  “Crowded, huh?” The redhead leaned close.