Whispers From the Grave (7 page)

“That’s kind of farfetched, don’t you think? Rita was murdered a century ago! Why would it matter if he talked about it now?”

I was sorry I’d confided in her. Knowing Suki, she would embarrass me again by telling everyone what I’d said.

Beep! Beep!
I nearly leapt from my shoes when the sleek green car pulled up beside us, horn honking. Kyle leaned from the window, grinning mischievously. “Wake up, lady!” he teased. “You looked like you were sleepwalking.”

Suddenly I felt the clouds in my mind clear. I smiled back at him, drinking in his handsome face. “I’m wide-awake now.” I laughed.

He punched in a command on his steering wheel computer, and the passenger door popped open. I scrambled in beside him. Suki was right behind me, but Kyle roared off before she could get in. Glancing into the rearview mirror, I watched her grow small as we sped away. Soon she was an orange dot in the distance.

“You should have waited for her to get in,” I said.

“The exercise will be good for her,” Kyle said.

“I feel sorry for her.” I sighed. “She’s always following me around. She’s a nice girl, but she wants to spend every minute with me.”

“Pathetic.”

“It is. I hate to hurt her feelings.”

“What else can you do? She’s the type who doesn’t get the message unless you hit her over the head.”

He’s right,
I thought. Yet I couldn’t shake the prickling guilt.

Kyle turned into a parking space in front of the school. Suddenly, his big warm hand was closing over mine. “You look great today, Jenna,” he said huskily. “That sweater matches your eyes.”

I shivered inwardly with the compliment. The fuzzy gray sweater fit me snugly, and his emerald eyes swept appreciatively over my curves.

“You’re here to study
reading, writing, and arithmetic,
”
I joked, feeling flustered.

“I’d rather study you!”

I ducked out of the car before he could see me blush. The crisp autumn air cooled my warm cheeks. “Aren’t the trees beautiful this time of the year?” I said. Ancient maples with reaching gnarled limbs lined the paved parking lot. A sudden breeze rustled the papery red and orange leaves, sending some swirling down around us.

“I’m not looking at the
trees
,”
Kyle said pointedly.

“Would you stop!”
I said with a nervous giggle.

“You
stop
,”
he said, touching my shoulder. He turned me to face him. “You’re a pretty girl. You must have guys like me telling you that all the time.”

Before I could respond, he tucked his thumb under my chin and gently tipped my face toward his. His lips were soft and sensuous on mine. The kiss was short and sweet and sent my stomach into a spinning somersault. It left me breathless.

Kyle hooked his arm in mine and we strolled toward the building as leaves blew around our ankles. I noticed several girls watching us enviously.
We’re becoming a couple!
I thought excitedly.

He walked me to my homeroom and gave me a quick peck on the cheek before he bounded off to his class. I practically floated to my desk, lost in the memory of his kisses, until I
felt
someone staring at me. I turned to see Suki, glaring at me from the desk across from mine.

“Oh, Suki,” I stammered. “I guess you’re mad because Kyle didn’t give you a ride.”

“I guess you two wanted to be
alone
,”
she said crisply.

Obviously, she’d seen us in the doorway—seen Kyle kiss my cheek. Had she watched the other kiss too? I’d never seen her mad before. She was always so cheery, going along with whatever I wanted. This was a new side of her.

I regarded her intently and she stared back at me. For the first time, I noticed something odd about her eyes. Her pupils had jagged edges, like chocolate cookies that had been nibbled all the way around.

“You’re looking at my eyes,” she accused.

“Well, yes. Your pupils are a little unusual.”

“Uncle Terry says it’s genetic, probably inherited from one of my relatives—though I’ll never know who. I guess my strange eyes are one more reason for you to think I’m weird.”

“I don’t think that,” I said, but I knew it sounded like the lie it was.

“We’re more alike than you know, Jenna,” she said hollowly. She no longer sounded mad. Only sad. “Neither of us fits in. Neither of us belongs here.”

I stared at her, confused.

“We’ve both got it, Jenna.”

“Got what?”

“PK,” she said. “I knew you had it when that diary popped open by itself.”

“Huh?”

“Remember when you found the diary in the attic? You opened it with your mind.”

“The lock was rusty and it broke.”

“
You
broke it,” she said, a knowing smile twitching on her lips.

“Maybe I did,” I said slowly. “
You
have PK too? Could you control the dice?”

Suki shrugged. “Sort of. But not like Uncle Terry’s star pupil. I’m glad I couldn’t control those dice the way you could.”

“Suki, you make PK sound like a
disease
!
I think it’s totally frazzin to have this skill.”

She shook her head, her eyes watery in her waiflike face.

It occurred to me she might have some answers for me. After all, she was Grady’s niece. She probably knew more than I did about what was going on. “Did you inherit your PK from your parents, Suki?”

“From my mother. She had it, but my father didn’t have it.”

“What do you mean,
had
it? Doesn’t she anymore?”

“She’s dead. They’re all dead. All of my family is dead!”

I gasped, shocked.
So that’s why she lives with her uncle!
“I-I didn’t know. Was it an accident?”

Suki regarded me blankly. “No. They died of old age.”

It was a sarcastic reply. Obviously, she didn’t want to talk about how her family had
really
died. It was insensitive of me to ask. I vowed to be nicer to her in the future.

Before I could think of something consoling to say, Peter Froyder, our frizzy-haired homeroom teacher, had called the class to order and begun the computer roll call.

Pressing my thumb to the computer screen built into the corner of my desk, I was automatically entered into the school’s central computer. When my parents were in school they typed their names into their desk computers for the attendance count. It was too easy to skip school. Mom once admitted she sometimes covered for her friends, typing their names in when they ditched.

Too bad it wasn’t easy to skip anymore. The computer reads our thumbprints and instantly knows whose is whose and who is where!

I drifted through the morning, my mind brimming with everything that had transpired the last three days. There was absolutely no room for the facts my teachers tried to fit into my brain.

Kyle and I ate lunch together. Or rather,
he
ate. My stomach was too full of butterflies to digest my peanut butter sandwich. It was exciting sitting close to him— though it wasn’t the most romantic of settings. We were squeezed together at the end of a crowded cafeteria table with a bunch of loud, disgusting athletes.

“If you’re not going to eat that, I will,” Kyle said, reaching for my sandwich. He devoured it in three bites. “I’ve been hungry all weekend. It must be the fall air. I always get hungry when it starts to get cold.”

“I’m surprised you ate at all this weekend. I didn’t have an appetite after Mr. Edwards’s accident,” I said.

He gulped down half his milk and wiped his mouth on his sleeve. “I never lose my appetite. That wasn’t the first time I saw someone die.”

“Really?”

“I was with my grandfather when he died. He was old and sick and he hung on for a long time, slowly wasting away.”

“How sad!”

“I got to really know him those last days. On his deathbed, my grandfather told me how he’d made our family what it is.”

“Rich?” I said and instantly regretted it when Kyle’s eyes clouded.

“The Mettleys are about more than money!” he snapped. “My grandfather worked hard to get where he got. It was a struggle for him. I never realized what he went through before. Things were much more complicated than I thought.” He suddenly smiled sheepishly, embarrassed by his outburst.

“Kyle’s granddad was the first Mettley millionaire,” Mike Willoby said. “Kyle here is still coasting off his grandfather’s inventions.”

Kyle didn’t seem to mind when Mike teased him. “Eat your heart out, buddy,” he said and tossed an apple at him.

“Too bad you didn’t inherit your grandfather’s brains,” Mike said. “Maybe you could come up with some inventions of your own.”

“What did your grandfather invent?” I asked Kyle.

“Several money-making gadgets,” Mike answered for him. “Kyle’s grandfather was a famous inventor. Didn’t you notice his picture hanging in the lobby of Twin-Star Labs?”

“No, I didn’t really get a chance to look around much,” I admitted.

“We’ll fix that!” Kyle said. “If you’re not doing anything after school, I’ll take you on a tour.”

We met in front of the school after my last class and headed straight for the lab. “Twin-Star Labs has been rebuilt since my grandfather’s time,” Kyle explained. “It used to be brick. That was before they built with fiberglass. The old building didn’t make it through the earthquake in 2064.”

“What’s it like to own a whole building?” I asked, taking in the towering, cream-colored structure.

“I don’t own the whole thing. Just a share my grandfather left me. He developed most of his really successful inventions before he was twenty-two.”

Kyle showed me around, and I admired the photos of his grandfather and the spacious labs filled with fascinating inventions.

“Do you know anything about PK?” I asked him.

“Sure. My grandfather is the one who started the PK experiments at Twin-Star.”

“Do you know that I have—“ I stopped in midsentence. I wasn’t sure I wanted him to know about my supposed PK ability. He might think I was strange.

“Were you going to ask if I knew about your PK skills?”

“You
do
know!”

“I’m a shareholder! I keep up on everything. I know about your abilities, Jenna. I’m impressed.”

“Really?”

“Really.”

“I’m not sure I can actually move things with my mind. I’m a scientist’s daughter and have a hard time believing in PK.”

“Remember,
I’m
a scientist’s grandson. Telekinetic abilities are real. And you have them.” He sounded so sure.

“Everyone around here seems to think that. It’s like they know things about me I don’t know about myself.”

“Don’t go paranoid on me,’ Kyle teased.

“I just wish I could get someone to answer my questions.”

“That’s easy enough. Let’s see if Dr. Grady is in his office.”

He was there, seated behind a massive shiny desk, conversing with his computer. He leapt up when he saw me. “What a surprise! I was going to call you, Jenna.”

“Sorry to barge in on you, Dr. Grady,” Kyle said. “Jenna has some questions for you.”

“Yes, of course,” he said, and nodded at the two chairs against the wall.

“You’re busy,” I said, edging back toward the doorway. Dr. Grady’s intensity always made me nervous.

“I’m never too busy for you, Jenna. I’ve been wanting to talk with you too. I was going to give you time to recover from the weekend.”

“Recover?"

“Suki told me about your neighbor. It’s a terrible shame! I thought you might need some time to get over it.”

“Everyone in the neighborhood is still in shock. We all liked Mr. Edwards. It was awful for Kyle too. He saw him fall.”

“So Suki told me,” Dr. Grady said, shaking his head. “Terrible, terrible thing.”

“He was really old,” Kyle said. “At least he didn’t die a slow death like my grandfather.”

Dr. Grady nodded, his mouth twisted in a grim line as if he was remembering Kyle’s grandfather. They must have worked together. I wondered if they’d been friends.

“Well, Jenna,” Dr. Grady said, smacking his hands together abruptly. “You had some questions for me?”

“Lots of them. I’m having a hard time believing this PK stuff.”

“That’s understandable. PK goes against everything you believe in. Our solid world, for instance.” He rapped sharply on the wall. “You think the only way to touch things is with your hands? In a sense, your mind has hands and your thoughts are its fingers.”

I must have looked as confused as I felt, because he began to speak slowly as if trying to explain something to a small, dense child. “Do you know what brain waves are, Jenna?”

“My thoughts?”

“Actually, brain waves are rhythmic shifts of voltage between areas of the brain which result in the flow of electrical currents.”

“Oh.”

“Even though you can’t see these brain waves, they are there. They are real. Some people have a natural ability to control these waves.”

“You think I can do that?”

“You were amazing with the dice,” Dr. Grady said, his dark eyes sparkling. “Your scores indicate a success level far higher than statistics could account for. In other words, it is statistically improbable for the dice to consistently land on the numbers you were concentrating on.”

“So it wasn’t a coincidence?” I asked, not completely convinced.

“A coincidence? Highly improbable. As Kyle mentioned, Twin-Star Labs has been involved in researching psychokinesis for many years. As a young man, Kyle’s grandfather began experimenting on a device that can actually amplify PK abilities. Once you become more comfortable with your abilities, we’d like you to utilize this device.”

“What kind of a device?”

“It’s a visor you wear on your head!” Kyle said. “It makes your brain waves stronger.”

“Does it hurt?” I asked.

“Of course not!” Dr. Grady said hurriedly. “You know we wouldn’t do anything to harm you.” He leaned over to the wall safe and punched in a code on the computer lock. When the door popped open he retrieved something that looked like a pair of plastic earmuffs with glasses hooked to the front.

“That’s the visor?”

Dr. Grady nodded, slipping it onto his head so it smashed down his wiry brown hair. “I don’t want you to be afraid of this. I wouldn’t ask you to do anything I wouldn’t do. It’s important you feel confident.”