“A yellow house. I thought I might’ve— It sounds stupid now.”
“That’s where your parents lived on base. You were born there.”
She’d been dreaming of home.
Clint began with names, Marysue and Richard Delaney, names she knew already, thanks to Yates. He went on to describe the high-security military training base where they had met. The base located in a remote section of Nevada desert. It was comprised of three sections: Sector One was devoted to combat training. Sector Two was designated for psychic training; men and women with special skills had been gathered there to hone their innate abilities.
Clint explained that the researchers who had been brought in to administer the program had scoffed at the idea of psychic abilities. “They referred to us as fleas,” he said.
Teddy frowned. “Fleas?”
“You know, the old joke. A military scientist tells a flea to jump and records how high it jumps. He cuts off a leg, repeats the command, records the height of the jump. The experiment is repeated three more times, until the flea has no legs at all, and a final command to jump is given. When the flea doesn’t move, the scientist records the following: Flea without legs is deaf.” He shook his head. “They thought we’d end up the punch line to some military joke.”
Instead, the psychics—Clint, her parents, and the others there—had proved beyond doubt that extrasensory perception was not only real but could be actively cultivated.
It was inspiring, at the beginning. They were energized by the work they were doing. They thought they were the good guys, fighting for a cause. Then Richard and Marysue had married.
Clint stopped.
“What?” she said in a voice that was cracked and dry. She had been afraid to interrupt, afraid of losing a single detail of her parents’ story.
“At that point,” Clint finally continued, “two things happened. They expanded the program to include another sector—Three. They recruited the best of our group to form an elite psychic corps. I was planning to join, but I had to go home and take care of my father in Las Vegas, and I accepted a position with the Las Vegas PD instead. I left the facility.”
“Did my parents join Sector Three?”
“Your father. Richard was better than any of us. The things he could do with his mind. He could crush a piece of metal in a blink of his eye.” Clint shook his head. “But it was more than that. He was a natural leader, the kind of guy who just drew people to him. Your father might have changed the world.”
“What happened to him?”
“I wasn’t there, Teddy. I left months before it got bad. There are only whispers . . .” Clint paused. “Sector Three changed him. I don’t know what happened inside those walls, but it wasn’t good. Richard became paranoid, obsessive . . . violent.”
That wasn’t what Yates had said.
“Your mother was pregnant with you. You were born on base. A few days later, your father led a coup against the officers in charge of Sector Three. Somehow he’d broken into the arsenal and stolen semiautomatic rifles, ammunitions, grenades, everything he needed to start his own private war—on a military base.” He shook his head as if still in shock about the outcome of events. “Naturally, they returned fire. Richard was killed.
“About a month later,” Clint continued, “at a little after three in the morning, I heard a knock on my door. It was your mother. She was frantic, Teddy. Nothing like the woman I knew. She shoved you in my arms and told me to take care of you. She said she’d be back for you as soon as it was safe.” He stood and moved to the window.
On clear days, you could see the brilliant orange of the Golden Gate Bridge from this spot. But today wasn’t clear. Great billowing drifts of fog obscured everything.
“And?” she said.
Clint turned. “And nothing. I never heard from her again.”
“She never—”
“I never heard from her again,” he said. “I went back to the base, but Sector Three was destroyed. It looked like there had been a massive explosion.”
Teddy’s stomach twisted. That matched the landscape that she’d seen months ago in Clint’s memory of the desert. She felt trapped in the classroom. As if the story of her parents, of her past, were too big to fit into the small room. She stood, but there was nowhere for her to go. “Why didn’t you tell me any of this before?”
“I wanted to,” Clint said. “But every time I tried, I thought, If she finds out now, she won’t want to come to Whitfield. Or It will distract her from her studies. Or It might influence the outcome of her exam.” He sat back in his chair. “I owed it to your parents to look after you,” he said. “And that’s what I did. I wanted to wait until the right time to tell you.”
The anger was back. “There isn’t a right time,” Teddy said. “Every day you waited made it worse.”
He nodded, rubbed his hands on his pants legs. “I used every contact I had in law enforcement to try to find her. Every psychic contact, too.” He shook his head. “I traced every Jane Doe that came across my desk. Missing persons, hospitals, arrests. Nothing.”
But she wasn’t gone—at least not according to Yates. “Okay,” Teddy said.
“Okay? That’s it?”
“What am I supposed to say? You want me to make you feel better about yourself. Make it seem like you did the right thing. You tried to find her. Guess what: you didn’t.” Because despite everything he had just said, he still was keeping things from her: about the theft, about Yates, about what was really happening at Whitfield.
“Teddy, I—”
“You know what?” Teddy said. “I’ll take a page out of Boyd’s book on this one: sometimes trying isn’t good enough.”
CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT
TEDDY WENT OVER THE PLAN in her head for the millionth time, partly to prevent her mind from spinning into what-ifs: What if
