Second Sight

by George D. Shuman

  “I will handle it,” Troy said.

  “You had better,” the old man said. “You had better indeed.”

  30

  The satisfaction he gained by humiliating women was only compounded by his stepfather’s misconception that he shared his vision, that the gift to render generals and their armies useless was a crowning achievement.

  Troy cared about none of it, nothing but the power he had so providentially achieved. He had always had his victims, and Sherry Moore would never have been among them if it weren’t for his father’s interest in protecting himself and the interests of Case and Kimble.

  Sherry was a curiosity herself. He hadn’t even needed MIRA to introduce them. She had simply walked into his life at the wrong time and place. He wasn’t sure how critical the damage to her body was from the radiation exposure in New Mexico; the report had only begun to receive East Coast coverage, and New Mexico’s governor was doing everything he could to downplay the incident. But Troy had access to Sherry’s medical records. Something had happened out there, and Sherry was now taking daily doses of Radiogardase, a widely used brand of Prussian blue—3,000 mg doses of a very old but very complex formula of a dye that had but one known medical use: counteracting the effects of exposure to deadly radiation.

  And, whether it was related or not, Sherry Moore had for some reason regained sight after thirty-two years. It was hardly remarkable that she might be acting out of character. It would have been all but impossible for any human not to. If she failed to question coincidence and improbable meetings with a virtual stranger such as himself, it was likely she was trying to think like someone she was not. Trying to mimic someone with sight, because for all Sherry Moore knew, the seeing world was far less complicated, far more obvious than the world of the blind.

  It would be ironic, he thought, from all he’d read about the woman, that she would become handicapped only after she regained her sight. That he had walked into her world at her most vulnerable moment.

  In any event, it worked in his favor. Sherry might have eventually found her way to Case and Kimble if she’d continued on her course of investigating Private T. J. Monahan. She might even have managed to blow apart the misconception of Edward Case, Nobel Prize-winning humanitarian. But providence had put her at his disposal, and while Troy would have enjoyed watching his stepfather’s ruin, he had himself to look out for as well. Troy with the power of MIRA behind him was going to overshadow anything his egotistical stepfather had done. Troy was going to become a name in the history books.

  He knew Sherry was wavering. He knew she was devastated when she saw that man at the door the other night. He knew she was reevaluating the last two weeks of her life and reevaluating the miraculous recovery of her sight. And he knew that he, himself, would be the first thing to go when she was ready to tell him. As close as they had gotten to having sex, she’d said no in the end. There was still some conflict in her mind, a moral dilemma perhaps. The boyfriend?

  Which meant he needed to find the journal and fast. He needed to know what she had done with it, whom she had talked to, and he needed to destroy her.

  And if Sherry was no longer willing to take the next step, then he would have to increase the output of MIRA and help her along.

  The world would not be surprised if Sherry were to kill herself. She’d overdosed on sleeping pills after her friend John Payne had been killed, hadn’t she? She’d just been exposed to radiation in New Mexico. Her boyfriend caught her with another man.

  She was poised to die.

  31

  Troy brought flowers to Sherry’s door. He suspected she would be embarrassed by how she’d acted the last time they were together. For the things she had allowed on her sofa after dinner the other night. No, it wasn’t really much, not nearly as much as if he’d put the whole tab of roofie in her wine or turned the MIRA device on her. But he’d only wanted to loosen her up, to get her talking and feeling sexy, because if she was feeling sexy she might lead him to her room and the diary.

  But Sherry wasn’t naïve. Not by a long stretch, and he knew he dare not push this woman. From all that he’d read, Sherry must not be underestimated.

  Which meant that he could no longer afford to be subtle with her.

  Horticultural Drive was down to one lane because of construction. The day was warm, and the mist from lawn sprinklers made rainbows in the sunlight. Tony turned onto Industrial Drive, lined with cyprus trees and manicured lawns, and finally in front of the Case and Kimble headquarters, a six-story wall of onyx glass surrounded by a million dollars’ worth of tasteful sculptures and pristine landscaping.

  Troy parked the Porsche in a reserved space. The guard waved as he came around to open Sherry’s door and led her along a concrete path that veered away from the main entrance and joined a pebbled rim of a sparkling blue pond.

  “You like goldfish?” he asked.

  She nodded as if she saw them every day, but it took all of her self-control not to exclaim how large they were. Weren’t goldfish as small as the crackers and come in glass bowls the size of your fist?

  “My office is in the courtyard, just around the back,” he said.

  It wasn’t a lab, or at least it wasn’t the variety of lab that came with white lab jackets and Bunsen burners. There was a full hand-scan security pad at the entrance. There were phone banks and a floor-to-ceiling movie screen, several comfortable leather chairs and the door to a stainless steel safe the size of two side-by-side refrigerators.

  Sherry expected cases full of arcane books, but there were only a few magazines around the room. The space looked more like a place to entertain important guests than a working office.

  “Doesn’t look like what I expected,” she said.

  “That’s because I’m in the main labs so much. They just gave me a place to rest my hat where they store all their records. Looks like a lot of security for nothing, but you’d be surprised how much industrial espionage goes on these days. You want to leave your purse, you can put it under my desk. They don’t allow packages in public areas. The museum’s a little cold, though, I’d keep your sweater.”

  She nodded.

  They took an elevator up one level and walked through a curvy hallway with glass walls facing a pond surrounded by tulip trees. The dozen or so people who passed them in the halls failed to acknowledge Troy, which agreed with his story that he was new to town. Still, the placement and elegance of his office seemed so strange.

  They stopped at a pair of golden doors and Troy pushed a paddle to open them. “Winston,” he said to an impeccably dressed older man. “We have a visitor to see the museum.”

  Winston nodded politely, but avoided Troy’s eyes. He handed Sherry a clip-on pass and ushered them into the placarded alcove, where hallways split into two directions.

  “I always like to do it backwards,” he said. “Start with the future and end up in the past. I think it’s more dramatic that way.”

  “Lead the way.”

  Displays were well designed, some frozen in glass cubes, some mounted on golden pedestals. There were lots of neat lights that formed holographic screens and images. There were microchips that when implanted in the brain could cure epileptic seizures or manage remote limbs; capsules that when swallowed could perform an endoscopy; nano-medicines, robotics, regenerative medicines, zero gravity cures, and on to Case and Kimble’s showcase of field research on HIV and West Nile virus. And as the time line of C&K’s medical wonders showed each decade receding, so did the backdrops, the models’ clothing and hairstyles, the furniture.

  One room was devoted entirely to the evolution of antidepressants and antianxiety drugs in the latter part of the twentieth century, receding to models wearing pillbox hats of the sixties; then Valium, amphetamines, anticoagulants, specialized sutures, and birth control. In the fifties scene, there were children in wooden wheelchairs and oral measles vaccines, early research in radiotherapy by white bearded doctors in black suits, X-rays as a cure for canc
er, and microwave treatments for subcutaneous heat therapy. Sherry looked at the old heavy machines in wooden or metal boxes, covered with archaic-looking dials and levers, and she thought of the rather modern-looking radiotherapy machine that had been destroyed by thieves in New Mexico, and it tugged at her heart that the poison was still in her.

  The seats of the Porsche were sun-warmed when they left Case and Kimble. Sherry turned the air-conditioning vents away from her face and wondered why she felt so odd, so out of sorts.

  Troy wheeled the car into traffic. “How about lunch?”

  “Fine,” she said, rehearsing in her head what she was going to say to him.

  Sherry stared at the sparkling lake as they rounded Horticultural Drive; she had the most curious sensation of being divided in two. Part of her was in Troy Weir’s Porsche heading for the interstate and part of her was remembering the day she met him, the book about Halley House Orphanage lying open at his feet on the steps of the Athenaeum. Perhaps even odder was the sensation that the two halves of her were coming back together.

  Sherry put on her sunglasses and looked out over the water.

  She kept wondering why his office didn’t really look like an office so much as a heavily secured boardroom that avoided the public entrances to the building. What new biologist rated an office like that?

  The company’s museum was certainly worth seeing, but why was the trip so important to him? Was he only trying to impress her?

  “Care to share?” he asked.

  She looked at him, his blond hair whipping in the open air. He looked good today, tanned, confident, she noticed how the other drivers were staring at them.

  “You’re deep in thought.” He smiled.

  “Just thinking how beautiful the day is,” she lied.

  “Why don’t we get sandwiches at the deli and sit on your lawn?”

  Sherry nodded. “Sure,” thinking it was as good a place as any to give him the news. To tell him she couldn’t do this anymore. To admit she had not been herself lately and that there was no place for him in her life.

  She laid her head against the headrest. Troy really had tried. She had to give him that. She couldn’t have been all that much fun, asking him questions all the time, trying constantly to find something wrong with him. He’d taken her to the aquarium not knowing how much that had moved her. He had made her laugh when she just as easily could have cried. He even wanted her to be interested in his work. He was clearly proud of his job. She could probably have acted more enthusiastic about his office and tour of the museum.

  She thought about Brigham then. He would be in Boston now, some nondescript brick building with its own discreet parking lot full of black sedans and limos. There would be men in suits standing in the halls, telltale bulges of SIG SAUER or Heckler & Koch automatics under their armpits. Breakfast would be served quietly by uniformed staff, the table, most likely round, would look like a who’s-who of the last thirty political years; former CIA directors, retired admirals and generals, former secretaries of defense, former presidents and vice presidents, not always the same perhaps, but enough to form a cohesive and extremely influential committee. Sherry had only learned of Brigham’s monthly breakfast club after a perilous forty-eight hours in Haiti last summer, when her unassuming neighbor, gentle old white-haired Mr. Brigham, set off a political storm that rained paratroopers down on a drug cartel involved in human trafficking. Of course, he didn’t come right out and say it, but Brian had hinted as much.

  “Yours or mine?” Troy asked.

  Sherry looked at him, and then heard the warble of her cell phone in her purse. She opened it and reached past where her key ring should have been and flipped the case open. Where were her keys?

  “Betsy.” She smiled. “I heard you’re coming to visit?”

  Sherry was silent a moment and the color drained from her face.

  Troy glanced at her thinking this was the call.

  “Because of me,” she said. “Oh, my God, I’m so, so sorry.”

  “No, no, I know that, Betsy, but how are you? Have you talked to Mr. Brigham?”

  “I understand. I know he will, but Betsy, you shouldn’t be alone.”

  “No, and I understand that too, but I did meet her and I do owe her family a visit. I insist.”

  “Yes, I don’t think I’ll be able to reach him until this evening. He’s out of town on business. Look, Betsy, I’m with a friend, can I call you right back?”

  Sherry closed the phone and stared straight ahead at the windshield.

  “Bad news?”

  Sherry nodded, still unable to speak. She opened her phone and dialed Brigham, but it went to his answering machine. Brigham had planned a full day, first breakfast with the club, then off to meet the agent in charge of the FBI field office in Boston.

  Sherry put down the phone, feeling the guilt that was beginning to well inside. If only she hadn’t brought Carla into this. If only she’d been content to leave well enough alone. What good had any of it done? Monahan was still dead and Jack McCullough was still dead and now this sweet old woman was dying and about to be with them. She thought about the happy little woman in Stockton. The clear bright eyes that seemed to single you out of a crowd. She sure had missed that one. Just like she’d missed the memories when holding the hand of the New Jersey state trooper. Did the ability to see both dull her facility to read people and destroy her gift to commune with the dead?

  “Troy,” she said, “that was a friend of mine from Stockton. She’s the friend of a friend I was telling you about the other night. The one who introduced me to the woman with the diary.”

  Troy nodded.

  “She tried to commit suicide last night,” Sherry had a tear streaking her cheek. “She’s in intensive care. They found her body this morning.”

  Troy took a deep breath and put his hand on her shoulder.

  “Troy, I have to go up there.”

  “I’ll take you,” he said flatly.

  “No, Troy, you’ve been a good friend to me these last couple of days, but I needed to tell you today that I have to stop seeing you.”

  “The man at the door the other night. It wasn’t your neighbor.” He smiled.

  “No, it wasn’t, but that’s only part of it, Troy. I needed to do this anyway. I haven’t been honest with you and I haven’t been honest with myself. That wasn’t me the other night. Not at your place, nor at mine. That just wasn’t me and it’s complicated, but you have to understand that.”

  Sherry looked at him. He hadn’t said anything to offend her. If he was disappointed or even annoyed, he was hiding it well.

  “I was going to tell you at my house. I appreciate your company and your kindness, but I’ve been avoiding some things lately and they need straightening out.”

  They rode in silence for a moment.

  “You still need a ride to the Catskills,” Troy said. “You said you don’t drive.”

  “I’ll work that out, it’s okay. I just needed to say the part about us.”

  “Hey”—he put on a big smile—“you told me that first night at my place you weren’t looking for a relationship. I took you at your word. I really did. You don’t owe me anything. Really. I already took the day off, though. If you can stand a few more hours of me, I might as well make the trip easy for you.”

  “Oh, Troy, you know I don’t mind you.”

  “Then let’s keep going. We’ll be back tonight and shake hands and leave it at that.”

  Sherry looked at him solemnly. “Really?”

  “Really,” he said sincerely.

  It was dark to the north. More rain, spring rain, more things coming to life and more things continuing to die.

  “We’d better put the top up,” Sherry said, fishing through her purse and looking again for her keys.

  He nodded. “Won’t be long. We can make it to the tollbooth before it rains.”

  “You didn’t notice my keys in your office, did you?”

  Troy shook his head.
“Lost them?”

  “They’re always hanging on this hook.” She opened the inside flap of her purse to show him.

  “Can you get in the house tonight without them?”

  “Yeah, that’s not a worry, I’ve got one hidden away. It’s just so strange.”

  The sky grew dark and the rain came minutes after they started north on I-95. By the time they were on I-87 the temperature had plummeted eighteen degrees and the rain had turned to sleet.

  Headlights came at them southbound like an endless string of diamonds, yellow, white, and blue behind the monotonous sweep of the windshield wipers.

  “So you might as well tell me about the diary,” Troy said.

  Sherry, wanting to think about anything other than Carla Corcoran dying in the hospital, nodded.

  “She was a sweet old woman,” Sherry said. “Her husband, many years ago, almost sixty years ago, was a security officer for a state hospital up there. He found a boy of about twenty who had gone off a cliff on top of a mountain. The boy was from an army base that used to be up there. It’s abandoned now, has been for decades. Well, the boy had a diary and the security officer kept it and gave it to his wife.”

  “This boy died in the fall?”

  “No.” Sherry shook her head. “But he never recovered. Head injury. He was in a semi-comatose state until he died last month.”

  “Jeez, all that time. Any family?”

  “No, and that’s why this lady kept the book. There was never anyone to give it to, I guess.”

  “How did you get involved?”

  “Even longer story,” Sherry said. “Suffice to say I heard about the boy and how he was found and someone introduced me to the guy’s widow.”

  “And she thought you would like to read the diary?”