Crosstalk (53 page)

She took them off. “Excuse me?”

“I said, ‘Dr. Verrick wants to do another round.' I'm Liz, by the way. And you're Ms. Flannigan, right?”

Briddey nodded.

“Can I get you anything? Water? Coffee? Juice?”

“No, thank you. I'm fine.” Did she dare ask for a bathroom break so she could try to find out if Sky had located a recording of Dr. Verrick's voice? No, better not, at least not till she knew how much Trent was able to hear.

“You understand the procedure for sending?”

Briddey nodded again.

“Can you repeat it back to me, just to make sure?”

“Of course,” Briddey said, and did.

“Yes, that's it exactly,” Liz said, and gave her a new, unopened deck of cards. She told her to wait to open the deck till she'd left the room, and went out.

Briddey put her headphones back on and then pulled at the cellophane tab. “Are you ready to begin, Ms. Flannigan?” Dr. Verrick asked.

Briddey put her hands up to her headphones. His voice was different. She could hear excitement in it, and the sense that he was waiting distractedly for something was gone.
The scan that can spot telepathy without the subject's help has arrived,
she thought.

But Sky had assured her there was no such technology, and the only other thing that could have excited Dr. Verrick was their test results. Could Trent have somehow, in spite of her defenses, in spite of her sending false answers, heard what was really on the cards, and Dr. Verrick had decided they
were
telepathic?

“Ms. Flannigan?” Dr. Verrick called. “Can you hear me?”

“Yes,” she said. “Sorry. I'm having trouble opening the deck.” She plucked, she hoped convincingly, at the corners of the cellophane wrap, pulled an end free, opened the deck, and set it down in front of her. “Now I'm ready.”

“Good. Begin when you hear the buzzer.”

She did, thinking of a symbol, turning over the card and then sending the symbol she'd thought of to Trent while she thought furiously about what to do. C.B. had told her not to audit Dr. Verrick, but she
had
to know what he was thinking.

First, though, she needed to barricade the door to make sure Trent couldn't hear her.
I'll visualize a pile of sandbags against the door,
she thought, then remembered C.B. telling her the more detailed the visualization, the stronger it was, and imagined them next to the gardener's cupboard instead.

She took hold of one and dragged it over in front of the door and then went back for the next, saying loudly with each trip,
Trent, I'm sending you an image of a circle (or star or wavy line). Can you see it?

When she had a solid layer piled against the door and the wall on either side, she said,
I'm sending…image…Trent,
and went over to the radio to locate Trent's station.

He said from the radio:
I didn't catch that last one
.

I
said,
it's a star. Repeat, square,
she said, and began looking for Dr. Verrick's station.

Did you say square or star?
Trent asked.

I said “stare,”
she said to throw him off while she inched the needle up the dial.
Repeat, s…
She let her voice trail off and began humming tunelessly.

What? I can't hear you,
Trent said.
You need to concentrate.

I am
, she thought, leaning closer to the radio to try to catch the doctor's voice over Trent's talking and turning the knob again.

“Are you able to hear the images she's sending?” Dr. Verrick asked, his voice emerging from the radio, and in spite of what she'd just heard Trent thinking, he must have said yes, because Dr. Verrick said, “Excellent. Did you write them down?”

Well, of course he wrote them down,
Briddey thought.
Isn't that the point?

“And her responses to the images sent to her?” Dr. Verrick asked, and Trent must have answered in the affirmative again because Dr. Verrick said, “Circle, star, wavy lines, star,” apparently comparing the lists. “Just as I thought. A hundred percent accuracy.”

What?
Briddey thought. Trent had just said he couldn't hear her.

She tuned quickly back to Trent's frequency to hear his response to that, but she was too late. Trent was saying, “…buzzer sounded. Send the next one.”

She flipped back to Dr. Verrick. “…obviously trying to keep the extent of her telepathic ability from us. Have you been able to pick up anything else?”

She flipped back to Trent, too quickly, overshot the frequency, then had to fiddle with the knob to bring it in again—too late.

I need to be able to listen to both of them at the same time,
Briddey thought. Maybe if she visualized two radios—

“You don't have to do
that
,” Maeve said, appearing at her elbow in a Rapunzel dress and tiara. “All you need to do is—”

“What are
you
doing here?” Briddey said. “Sky told you to stay in your safe room. Trent will
hear
you!”

“No, he won't. I told you, I've got tons of defenses. If you want to hear who the person's talking to, you just turn the tuning knob to the person's frequency and then tap this.” “This” was the volume knob. “Then you can hear both of them. I don't know why you did a radio, though. It would have been way easier to do a phone and just click on group chat
and then—”

“Go
home
!” Briddey said desperately. “If they find out about you—”

“They won't. I've got like sixteen layers of defenses. Not like this place.” She looked doubtfully around at the courtyard. “I could help you imagine a forest of brambles or something.”

“No. Go. Now, before Trent hears you talking.”

“I could help. I know lots of stuff. C.B. taught me—”

“I don't care. I need you to go inside your castle and stay there, no matter what happens.”

“Even if—”

“No exceptions. Now go, or I'll tell Sky.”

“Who's Sky? Is that like a code name for—?”

“Yes,” Briddey said. “Go.”

“What's
my
code name? I think it should be—”

“Now!”

“Okay, fine,” Maeve said disgustedly. “I was just trying to help.” She disappeared, only to pop back in a moment later. “I forgot to tell you, it only works if you've heard the person's voice before,” and vanished again.

Please, please, please don't let Trent have heard any of that,
Briddey thought, and dialed the tuning knob back to Trent.

“What's wrong?” his voice issued from the radio. “Why isn't she sending? I haven't gotten anything the last two times.”

Briddey hastily turned over a card. It had a cross on it.
Wavy lines,
she thought at him.

“Wavy lines,” Trent said, “finally!” He began fussing over whether it was the tenth or eleventh word. Cindy must have been right about him not being able to hear her, thank goodness. But just in case, Briddey tuned to Dr. Verrick.

“What else did you hear?” he asked.

There was a pause, during which Briddey cursed herself for not tapping on the volume knob like Maeve had said. “And you didn't hear anyone else?” he asked.

Briddey tapped frantically at the knob, afraid she'd miss the crucial part of Trent's answer, and then thought she must have done it wrong because there was silence. “Curse you, Cin—” she began, reaching for the tuning knob. And heard a female voice say, “No, but she's definitely sending him incorrect answers.”

The assistant, Liz.
But how could—?

She has auburn hair,
Briddey thought.
That's why she made me go through all the steps of the Zener test again for her, because she needed to hear my voice so she could separate it from the others
.

She must be one of Dr. Verrick's patients who'd become telepathic, too, when she had the EED. That explained why Dr. Verrick had had the testing rooms and the Zener cards all ready, and why he'd come back when Trent phoned him and then seemed so uninterested in what he had to say and in the tests. He hadn't needed them. Liz could tell him whether they were telepathic or not. He must have been waiting for her to get to the hospital.

Trent had thought he'd been using Dr. Verrick to get his phone, but the reverse was true. Dr. Verrick had been using Trent to get to her.
That's why he suggested the possibility of hearing voices to me that day at his office,
she thought,
and why he moved our surgery up. Because I was a redhead, and he thinks that's what's causing this.
And Liz's being one of his patients hopefully meant he thought the EED was the trigger for the telepathy.

“Do you think she's sending the incorrect answers consciously?” Dr. Verrick said from the radio. “Or could it be a problem with her connection?”

“I'll need to hear more of her responses to be certain,” Liz said, “but I sense she's doing it deliberately.”

“But why?” Dr. Verrick asked. “She and Mr. Worth contacted me to tell me they were communicating.”

“Perhaps her psychic gift frightens her,” Liz said, “or perhaps…could she have made psychic contact with someone else, too?”

“It's possible, I suppose,” Dr. Verrick said, “but—”

“If the person she's communing with is a man, she might be afraid Mr. Worth would be jealous. Don't you tell your patients they have to be emotionally bonded to connect?”

Your patients?
That meant Liz wasn't one.
Then who is she
?

“I'm sensing a feeling of spiritual strife from her,” Liz said. “Her chakras are closed, and her aura is emanating emotional conflict.”

Aura?
Briddey thought.
Chakras? Who
is
this?
And knew, the memory that had been just out of reach before, slotting neatly into place. The ad Kathleen had emailed her, for the psychic who claimed she could put couples in touch with each other's souls. Lyzandra. At the Spa of the Spirit. In Sedona, Arizona.

“Those who have courage to love should have courage to suffer.”

—A
NTHONY
T
ROLLOPE
,
The Bertrams

But C.B. said psychics weren't telepathic,
Briddey thought.
He
said they were fakes who used mentalist's tricks and cold reading to make it look like they could read minds
.

Yet Lyzandra was saying, her voice coming confidently from the radio, “I haven't heard anyone else's voice yet, but a short while ago I lost the connection for nearly five minutes, and at the end of the disruption, I heard her think, ‘Please don't let Trent have heard that.' ”

Briddey leaned close to the radio, listening. “And when I was in the testing room with her,” Lyzandra was saying, “I caught something about her wondering if she dared call someone.”

Oh, my God,
Briddey thought, trying not to panic.
My safe room's not strong enough to keep her out. I've got to tell Sky.

But that was the worst thing she could possibly do. If Lyzandra heard her talking to him—

Briddey,
C.B. called.
I've got to talk to you. It's ur—

No!
Briddey flung herself at the courtyard's blue door, pushing with all her might against it.
Night Fighter to Dawn Patrol! Maintain radio silence!
she called urgently, but he wasn't listening.

I did some research on Sedona,
C.B. said.
It's a big mecca for—

We are under attack, Dawn Patrol! Repeat, we are under attack!
she cried, trying to think of a way to warn him that Lyzandra was listening without giving his presence away.

“The Highwayman,”
she thought, and began reciting the part of the poem where Bess, the landlord's daughter, had shot herself to warn her lover of the soldiers, praying C.B. would get the message.

And either he did or he gave up trying to get her to answer, because he retreated. Briddey jammed the bar more firmly into its brackets, made sure the latch was in place, and still reciting “The Highwayman,” ran across to the sandbags. She had to make the courtyard stronger to keep Lyzandra out. She started dragging the sandbags over to the door one by one and piling them in front of it.

“She's stopped sending the symbols and seems to be reciting something,” Lyzandra said from the radio, and Briddey remembered that she was supposed to be transmitting the pictures on the Zener cards.

Circle,
she thought, heaving a sandbag into place.
Square. Wavy lines. Cross.

The bags were impossibly heavy and hard to get a grip on.
I should have let Maeve imagine that forest of brambles for me
, she began, and then stomped firmly on both the name and the thought. If only Sky had had time to teach her those other screening techniques.

But he taught me some
, she thought, and launched into “Ode to Billie Joe” and then the theme from
Gilligan's Island,
interspersing the verses with
star, wavy lines, blue moons, pink rainbows. Night Fighter calling Dawn Patrol. Zeroes at twelve o'clock. Maintain radio silence. Repeat, maintain radio silence
.

“Are you getting anything?” Dr. Verrick asked.

“No. Her chakras aren't open, so what I'm hearing from her spirit-mind voice is very cloudy.”

“Can you make out anything at all?”

“Yes. Something about the sky and stars and fighter pilots and a bridge. Nothing that makes sense.”

Good, it's working,
Briddey thought, dragging another sandbag over and casting about for something else to recite. Not “My Time of Day,” which made her think of that late-night walk with Sky, and not “Molly Malone.” Or
Finian's Rainbow,
which meant she shouldn't be thinking about Lucky Charms either.

Monopoly playing pieces.
Cat, wheelbarrow, top hat, iron…
But there were only eight of them, even counting the discontinued shoe, and “Teen Angel” only had a measly four verses. She needed longer songs, longer lists.

Victorian novels,
she thought.
The Master of Ballantrae, The Moonstone, The Old Curiosity Shop, Far from the Madding Crowd…

“Her spirit-mind voice is still very clouded,” Lyzandra said from the radio, “and I'm getting negative vibrations. I think she may be intentionally concealing her thoughts. You need to ask her about the telepathy directly.”

“But if she's intentionally giving us wrong answers,” Dr. Verrick said, “what makes you think she'll tell us the truth?”

“She won't. But when you ask someone a question, their spirit thinks of the truth, no matter what they may say, and it's sometimes possible to read that thought.”

She's right,
Briddey thought.
It's the “don't think about an elephant” problem
. And it was equally impossible to try to make her mind a blank.

I could run away,
she thought, remembering that first night in the hospital. But that would only convince them she was hiding something. Her strongest defense right now was that they didn't know she'd overheard them and knew what they were up to, and she had to keep it that way. Which meant staying here and looking innocent and thinking about things completely unrelated to telepathy, like movie stars and flowers and designer shoes.

“Ms. Flannigan?” Dr. Verrick's voice came over the headphones. “We need to ask you some questions.”

“About the Zener test?” she asked, thinking,
Gucci, Manolo Blahnik, Ferragamo, Christian Louboutin, Christian Bale,
at them. “Was I doing something wrong?”

“No, no, not at all, but Mr. Worth picked up some interesting things in your responses, and we need to ask you about them. He said he heard you mentally communicating with someone else.”

You're lying
, she blurted out and immediately squelched the thought.
Sandra Bullock, Brad Pitt, Johnny Depp, Emily Blunt—

“Whose voice did you hear? Was it someone you knew?”

Yes,
she thought at them.
The highwayman and Professor Harold Hill and F. Scott Fitzgerald
. “I don't know what Trent can be referring to,” she said. “The only voice I've heard is his.”

“Ask her again,” Lyzandra said, and Dr. Verrick promptly asked, “Are you certain? The voice of one person can sometimes be mistaken for another.”

“How could I have heard someone else?” Briddey asked, making her voice register bewilderment.
Anthony Trollope, Thurston Howell III, Jimmy Choo
. “I'm emotionally bonded to Trent.”

“Ask her something more general,” Lyzandra ordered.

“Have you ever had a feeling that someone was in trouble?” Dr. Verrick asked.

Besides me, you mean?
she thought, and hastily changed her answer to,
The castaways are in trouble. And so's the innkeeper's black-eyed daughter. And Adelaide. She's got a terrible cold.

“Have you ever had a premonition of death?” Dr. Verrick asked. “Have you ever had a vivid feeling of déjà vu? Have you ever been forewarned of danger? Have you ever had an out-of-body experience?”

Briddey answered the barrage of questions as best she could, singing snatches of “Luck Be a Lady” and “I Wish I Were an Oscar Mayer Weiner,” and listing as many flowers as she could remember—
camellias, violets, petunias
—but it was hard to stay focused and not let anything else through.

When Dr. Verrick asked, “Have you ever had a feeling you knew what was going to happen before it did?” she had a sudden image of Aunt Oona saying, “ 'Tis Mary Clare on the phone, I can feel it,” and had to stomp the thought out forcibly, as if it were a brushfire, and loudly recite other types of fires:
forest fires, wildfires, campfires, Chariots of Fire.

But that wasn't safe either. When she thought
bonfires,
she had a sudden memory of Sky sitting in the car with her, telling her about Joan of Arc. She veered instantly away to junk food, but that reminded her of the stale Doritos of their midnight feast—and the popcorn Cindy had fed the ducks. Shoes made her think of her sodden sandals thrust unceremoniously under the bed; movie stars of Hedy Lamarr.

Sky was right. Every thought
was
connected to every other in a tangled maze of memories and cognitive links and associations, so that no matter what she thought about or what neural pathway she took, it circled treacherously back to the elephant in the room.

So, fine, think of elephants,
she thought, and spent the next five minutes naming every one she could think of, African and Asian and circus elephants, Babar and Jumbo and Dumbo—no, that was a Disney movie and too close to the Disney princesses. Think about their tusks and their trunks and their fear of mice. And of snakes, which Saint Patrick threw out of—

No, you can't think about Ireland. It will lead them straight to Cindy. Think about someplace else. Angkor Wat, Mount Fuji, Mount Rushmore, Niagara Falls—
no, not that either. Sky had said he'd take her there on their honey—

“Her spirit is in contact with another spirit,” Lyzandra said from the radio. “A man's. Someone much more accomplished in mind-spirit contact. A seer, perhaps, who instructed her in resistance.”

“Do you know who he is?”

“No. I'm getting an image of his name, but it's obscured. It begins with
S
.”

I shouldn't have chosen Sky as a code name
, Briddey thought sickly.
It's too close to—
and slapped the thought of C.B.'s name away.
Saint
, she thought.
You heard me think “saint.”
Saint Margaret, Saint Michael, Saint Catherine,
and wondered if that was whose voices Joan of Arc had really heard, or if she'd only told her interrogators that to keep them from finding out who she was really talking to.

“Mr. Worth, is there anyone at Commspan whose name begins with an
S
?” Dr. Verrick was asking.

“There's Suki Parker,” Trent said. “And Art Sampson. Briddey said she had a meeting with him this morning. She was very upset that she had to cancel.”

“Could the name be Sampson?” Dr. Verrick asked Lyzandra.

It will be now,
Briddey thought. Instead of just throwing up a screen of random thoughts, she should have been sending red herrings to throw them off the scent.
Whatever happens, I can't let them find out I've been talking to Art Sampson,
she thought at them.

“The name
might
be Sampson,” Lyzandra said doubtfully. “I'm not sure.”

If they find out Art Sampson's telepathic…,
Briddey said, and imagined herself going up to his office. But as she thought about getting out of the elevator and walking along the corridor, the image came to her unbidden of Sky grabbing her and pulling her into the copy room.

This was like walking in a minefield. Everywhere you put your foot was dangerous. And the questions kept coming through the headphones: “Can you hear any other voice besides Mr. Worth's? Do you recognize it? Is it a stranger or someone you know? How often have you heard it? When did you first hear it?”

This was just like the voices—a relentless barrage of words coming too fast, too continuously, for her to do more than put her arms over her head and try to protect herself. The effort of coming up with answers and white noise, of preventing Dr. Verrick and the psychic from reading her thoughts and keeping Sky and Cindy out of them, was exhausting. She felt like she had that night in the hospital stairway, as if she'd used up every bit of her strength—

No, you can't think about the hospital either,
she thought.
Think about songs you wouldn't want to get stuck in your head—“Itsy Bitsy Teenie-Weenie Yellow Polkadot Bikini,” “The Little Drummer Boy,” “Tell Laura I Love Her,” Laura Linney, Laura Bush, Laura Ingalls Wilder…