The Man from Nowhere Page 8

  Sighing, she put the shotgun on the table, then rested her forehead in her hand, as she often did at work when faced with numbers that weren’t working right.

  Time to examine her own beliefs about things, she decided. Time to think about where Grant Wolfe fit into her worldview. Time to figure out what disturbed her more: what he had said yesterday or that he might somehow be right.

  Did she believe in ESP? Telepathy? Yeah, at some level she did. Like many people, she’d experienced those moments of knowing something she shouldn’t have, like who was about to call just before the phone rang, or thinking about someone she hadn’t thought about in a while for a day or two before a letter arrived, or an e-mail. As if she knew they were thinking of her, too.

  At times, with Jackson, it had been often enough and significant enough to really catch her attention. With her dad sometimes, too, although she had always put that down to knowing him so well.

  But precognition? Knowing the future before it happened? That stuck in her craw. She didn’t like anything about that.

  But Grant’s story about his visions and his dream before the plane crash—that was something she couldn’t dismiss easily. He hadn’t made that up. He believed it. In fact, he’d believed it all along, not just now, because she had read in one of the news articles that he’d said, “I knew something was going to happen. I just knew.”

  That was something a lot of people said.

  She sat up a little straighter. A lot of people said that. How many times had she heard a friend say just that. Or herself? How many times had it been laughed off?

  I knew I was going to spill that.

  I had a weird feeling at that intersection yesterday, and look what happened to me!

  Honestly, when she thought about it, people frequently intimated that they knew something was going to happen before it happened. Big or small, explicable or laughed off, they said things all the time that indicated they had somehow known something.

  Well, what if it wasn’t coincidence? What if sometimes people really do know?

  She’d been feeling uneasy for days before Grant had shown up on that park bench. In fact, that very uneasiness had been the only reason she’d looked out and seen him, the only reason she kept looking for him, the only reason she’d been having trouble sleeping.

  Then she had transferred all that uneasiness to Grant, an obvious target.

  “Hold on,” she said aloud. Tad lifted his head quizzically. “Not you,” she said.

  He put his head back down, but didn’t stop watching her.

  “Back up,” she said to the empty kitchen. “Go back to the beginning. Think it through.”

  Rising, she grabbed her wall phone and dialed. Not the sheriff, but the motel. She wanted to talk to Grant, and she wanted to talk to him now.

  He was waiting for her outside the motel. The warm front had clouded the sky completely, though it had brought not even a spatter of rain yet. He wore his jacket, unzipped now as the temperature rose, and climbed into her car with her without a greeting.

  “I thought,” he said, “that you’d have liked it better if I left town.”

  “I thought so, too, yesterday. But that wasn’t a reasoned response.”

  At that he looked at her. “Do people in real life actually talk that way? I thought only psychologists did.”

  “I’m a fairly logical person. Not always, but often enough to catch myself eventually.”

  “Where are we going?”

  “My place.”

  “I’m not sure….” But he trailed off.

  “My place,” she said firmly. “I don’t want to be somewhere with constant interruptions, and I want to eat. Besides, thanks to someone I have a dog to worry about.”

  He gave a bark of laughter. “I seem to be at the core of all your problems.”

  “I’m not so sure about that anymore. So we’re going to talk.”

  Tad had behaved himself during her brief absence. Indeed, he had chosen to settle into a corner of the living room on a soft patch of rug, sandwiched between a bookcase and some floor pillows she had stacked nearby. A little nest.

  “Are you hungry?” she asked Grant.

  “More than I should be. I have a fast metabolism.”

  “Then let’s sit in the kitchen while I start dinner. I’m roasting a chicken and steaming broccoli. Do you like your potatoes mashed or baked?”

  “Either way. I like potatoes just about every way they come.”

  He paused on the threshold as he saw the shotgun on the kitchen table. “You didn’t exactly ignore me.”

  “No, I didn’t. The safety is on.” But she moved the gun, anyway, standing it in a corner, wedged against a cabinet.

  “Can I help with dinner?” he asked.

  “Just sit. I’ll pour us both some coffee, then get started.”

  He followed her direction, pulling out the chair he had sat in before. Tad decided to join them, and leaned into Grant’s leg. Grant obliged with some scratches around the ears.

  Grant remained silent, evidently giving her space to marshal her thoughts. She washed the chicken while the oven preheated, then patted it dry. She rubbed it with olive oil and seasonings, taking her time about it, then put it in the roasting pan and popped it into the oven. When she had set the timer and washed her hands, she joined him at the table at last.

  “I usually hang out in here until it’s time to turn the temperature down,” she explained, “but if that chair is uncomfortable for you, let’s go into the other room.”

  He shook his head. “I’ll be okay for a while.”

  “Let me know when you need to move.”

  He nodded, watching her, slowly scratching the dog behind the ears.

  Trish wrapped her hands around her mug and hesitated. “I don’t know how to piece this together for you, exactly. You know how the brain works—it hops all around making intuitive connections, then you try to explain it to someone and it’s mush.”

  He nodded. “I’m all too familiar with that. So just go ahead and pick a place. We’ll get it together.”

  “Well, I was sitting here this afternoon, kind of taking a journey down memory lane.” She reached out and touched the shotgun, running her fingers lightly over the stock. “This gun was my dad’s. We used to use it for scaring birds out of the fields and for target practice. So smelling the gun oil, holding it, took me back. And it made me think about the fact that I had actually cleaned and loaded it—because of what you told me.”

  He nodded encouragingly, saying nothing.

  “So I decided to think about what’s been going on, and that’s when I realized that for all you unnerved me with what you said yesterday, I had been uneasy even before I saw you.”

  “Really? Over what?”

  “Let me get to that in a minute. I was trying to think about these so-called paranormal things. I guess I already accept telepathy to some extent. I think a majority of people have experienced it one time or another, if not more frequently, and then dismissed it. But precognition…that bothers me.”

  “Me, too,” he agreed. “I can’t tell you how much.”

  She met his gaze. “I think we’re probably pretty close together on that. I mean, who wants to think the future is fixed?”

  “I certainly don’t. But there’s other ways of looking at it.”

  She drew a deep breath, then said, “I just want to know one thing before I go on.”

  “I’ll tell you if I can.”

  “How do you know it’s me? Because you found my house? Or something else?”

  “I saw you before I ever met you. I saw you getting ready for bed just before…” He closed his eyes.

  Her heart thudded. So she had been part of his vision, too.

  “You were in your bedroom. You climbed into bed. Then he shows up.”

  “God.” The word came out thinly. With effort, she gathered herself. “Okay. Let’s leave that alone for a minute. I can’t stand to think about it just yet. But I real
ized something this afternoon, something important.”

  “Which is?”

  “How often we say or hear others say, I knew that was going to happen.”

  He sat up a little straighter, dog forgotten, dark eyes growing intent.

  Trish hesitated, seeking words, slowly finding them. “We always brush that reaction off. Or almost always, anyway. We say that we must have noticed something subconsciously that warned us. It must have been a coincidence. Lots of reasons to dismiss it.”

  “Yes, there are.”

  “But the thing is, we all say it. And even if only just a very small percentage of the time there was no clue other than the internal sensing that something was about to happen, that’s…that’s mind-blowing.”

  He nodded. “I told you there is experimental evidence that at a rate well beyond statistical chance people are looking two or three seconds ahead.”

  “Right. Well, like I said, even if only a very small percentage of the time, that’s what’s really happening, then it must be possible sometimes to look even further ahead.”

  “It’s possible,” he agreed. “Scientifically possible, whether or not most scientists want to put their heads on the block by saying so.”

  “Someday, when I’m feeling really brave and really intelligent, I’ll ask you about that stuff.” She gave him a weak smile. “But right now I’m focused on only one thing.”

  “Understandable. Go ahead.”

  “So what I’m talking about here is not necessarily your premonition. It may be mine.”

  “Yours?” He leaned forward intently.

  “Mine. Like I said, I was uneasy before I ever clapped eyes on you. And in retrospect, I was clearly far more uneasy than I should have been. Uneasy enough to get seriously worried about you sitting out there every night, something that I am absolutely convinced wouldn’t have bothered me at all up until just recently.”

  “I’m not sure about that,” he said wryly. “I mean, a total stranger sitting across from your house every night at one in the morning? A lot of people would get uneasy.”

  “I went past uneasy. I went to the sheriff, feeling like a paranoid idiot for doing so. You did nothing threatening. If I hadn’t already been so nervous, I would have thought you were just sitting there to rest your leg. I am, frankly, not usually the kind of person to get in a twitter over nothing.”

  He nodded. “Okay, we’ll take that as a given. I don’t know you well enough to say otherwise.”

  “So I thought back and realized that what I had done was transfer my job anxiety to you.”

  “And why were you anxious about your job?”

  “That’s the thing.” She looked away, weighing it yet again. “I found some discrepancies between the number of microchips we had manufactured and shipped, and the number we had in inventory. Basically, we’re missing chips. So I notified the CFO in Dallas and sent him my numbers. Ordinarily I’d have just put it from my mind then. I’d done my job, I’d reported a discrepancy, and someone would explain it. A batch got destroyed and not reported, a shipment was damaged, my numbers were wrong. Any way you look at it rationally, it was probably no big deal.”

  “Maybe not.”

  “What was not rational was the way I started to get nervous. On edge. I started worrying that I’d made a mistake that would get me fired. Which, in all honesty, was a ridiculous overreaction. Even if I had made a mistake, all that would happen would be a warning. At the very worst. A warning.”

  He nodded. “People don’t usually get fired over a mistake like that.”

  “Unless it’s on a tax return, anyway.” She smiled mirthlessly.

  “Well, that’s one place it might cause a serious problem,” he agreed. “But on inventory? Not likely.”

  “Exactly. But I couldn’t shake the feeling that something terrible was going to happen, and by the time the CFO responded—quite nicely, actually—I’d focused all my anxiety on you.”

  He nodded. “I see what you’re saying.”

  “But I was sitting here this afternoon, thinking it over, and it struck me, what if all that anxiety I was feeling after I made that report to the CFO had some kind of basis? What if I sensed that it had set something bad in motion, something bad for me?”

  “Damn.” He whispered the word and his gaze grew distant as he thought. She waited, almost on the edge of her seat. The delicious odor of roasting chicken had begun to waft from the oven, and she heard a faint spattering and sizzle. Homey sounds, so far away from what they were discussing.

  He finally spoke. “Did the CFO contact you again?”

  “I don’t know. I’m on vacation, so once his first e-mail put the matter to rest, I stopped checking my work e-mail. I haven’t wanted to know, I guess.”

  He nodded, but now he seemed tense, too. “Do you happen to remember what kind of chips were missing?”

  She shook her head. “I don’t know one chip from another.”

  “Is there some way we can find out? Because I do know chips.”

  “Sure.” She glanced at the oven timer. “Let me just wait until I turn the chicken down. Five minutes. What are you thinking?”

  “I’m not really sure yet. Just show me what you’ve got so I can noodle it around.”

  As soon as she turned the chicken down and reset the timer, they went into her small office with one of the kitchen chairs. She insisted that he take her softer task chair while she herself sat on the hard seat of the kitchen chair. Her computer came up quickly from hibernation, but just as she was about to open her e-mail to see if she had anything additional from the CFO, Grant stopped her.

  “Are you wireless?”

  She twisted to see him better. “No, the company hooks us in by dedicated lines.”

  “Okay, good. So nobody can see what you’re doing.”

  “Not unless they’re watching me on the server.”

  He nodded. “Go ahead.”

  She opened her office e-mail, and her heart skipped when she saw another e-mail from Hank. “The CFO wrote me again.”

  “Check it out.”

  Did she really want to? But did she have any choice? Telling herself it was probably just a note about when she could expect the auditor, she clicked on it.

  Hey, Trish. The auditor wants to know if you’ve brought anyone else in on this, or if he needs to wait until you’ve finished your vacation. Hope you’re having fun. Hank.

  “Well, that’s nothing,” she said, but even as she was about to close the e-mail he touched her hand.

  “Let me read that again, Trish.” He leaned forward, scanning the mail. Then he shook his head. “I don’t like that.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because the damn auditor could have contacted you about this directly. Because I doubt he can get an audit going this fast, anyway. I ran a company, remember? I just don’t like it. But let me see what chips are missing. Do you have to access that on company files?”

  She shook her head. “Actually, no. I sometimes download files here so I can work on them, and that’s one of them. But they don’t have any technical details, just coded numbers.”

  “Of course not. Just get me whatever you have about the chip number or description. Write it down. Then let me at your computer and let me use your phone.”

  “That I can do.” She noted that he leaned back so she wouldn’t have to worry about him viewing one of the company’s internal files. She opened the e-mail she had sent to the CFO to begin with, and quickly on a scrap of paper scribbled down everything she had about the missing chips, including their production number.

  She then closed her e-mail account at work and handed Grant the paper. “I’m sure the chip number is a code.”

  “Most likely. But I have sources.”

  She left him at her computer and went back to the kitchen to finish dinner preparations. On the face of it Hank’s e-mail seemed totally benign, but on another level she knew Grant might be right. If the auditor had a question, he would have her co
ntact information. Someone at Hank’s level wouldn’t deal with that kind of piddling stuff, would he?

  Nope. The answer came to her clearly. So what was going on?

  Diced potatoes were boiling on the stove and she was preparing broccoli for the microwave when Grant returned. He limped into the kitchen, dragging the chair with him, then sat at the table.

  She faced him. “Well?”

  “I’ve got an old friend looking into the chip involved. He can do it without drawing attention your way.” He smiled faintly. “He was glad to hear from me.”

  She turned back to the broccoli, adding a little butter. “I’m sure he was. I’m sorry if your cover is blown.”

  At that he chuckled. “It wasn’t really cover, and it actually made me feel good to phone Dex and hear his voice again.” He paused for a long moment. “Trish. They want me back.”

  “That must feel wonderful!”

  He looked as if he couldn’t decide whether to smile or cry, and then simply nodded. “Better than I expected.”

  She sprinkled a tiny bit of mustard powder onto the broccoli, then tucked it into the microwave to be turned on just before the chicken was done. A check of the potatoes told her they were boiling at just the right rate. With nothing left to do, she rejoined him at the table.

  “So,” she asked, “do you think you’ll go back?”

  “I don’t know.” He sighed. “I’m starting to feel an urge to get back to work, but I don’t know if I can go back to the same place, if you know what I mean. Too many memories, I guess. But the nice thing about my work is that I can do it anywhere. I’ll have to think about it. But when Dex asked, ‘When are you coming back, G….’, I…Trish, I didn’t realize how alone I’d felt.”

  She nodded. “I can understand that. Before I came here, I had a good job in Boston that I had to leave for the same reason. Well, not exactly the same reason, because what happened to me was minor compared to what happened to you. But I couldn’t stand all the reminders. And I ended up in Dallas without any friends or family. It’s like we don’t know who’s there until they’re not.”

  His brow elevated. “Can I ask what happened?”