Baxter frowned. “There’s no way to check without exposing yourself. You could file an anonymous complaint.”
“Over a theory?”
“Let me think.” He stepped back and poured himself another glass of wine. “Don’t do anything yet. Let me think about this.”
“If Justin McCabe’s family contacts me, I’m going to talk to them. The young man is still in jail. He’s being held without bail because the judge determined he’s a danger to the community.”
“He is a danger, Katherine!” Baxter’s voice rose. “He could have killed you. He could have killed dozens of people. What kind of sick person—?”
“Shhh.” Katherine pressed a kiss to his lips. “I’m fine. I wasn’t hurt. Bumps and bruises only.”
He put his arms around her and squeezed tightly. “I will follow your lead on this, but know that I do not carry any misplaced sympathy for that man.”
“I looked at his student record.” She spoke into his shoulder. “He was an excellent student. Involved. Engaged in his classes. He volunteered with that moving company that works with the battered women’s shelter. This act was completely out of character. I want to know what happened.”
Baxter was quiet for a long time. “You see connections where other people can’t. You have a gift for it. It’s why your sense of systems is so intuitive. Why your mind is so damn beautiful. But if this is a large study, it could be coincidence. Not everything is related.”
“On a theoretical level, I can’t agree with you.”
He laughed a little.
There was no way she could tell him about the visions, not in that moment.
Another night. Another dance.
Katherine lifted her face to Baxter’s and placed a long and lingering kiss on his mouth. “I love you very much, Professor Pang.”
“I love you too.”
* * *
“I can’t do it,” Katherine said. “I can’t tell Baxter I have visions.”
Toni shrugged. “Okay.”
They were sitting on the front deck, and Katherine was opening the second bottle of wine. She’d called an emergency meeting since Wednesday was too far away. Also, it was Friday and Baxter was introducing a lecturer from Sydney that evening, so they had the house to themselves.
Megan frowned. “Don’t you think Baxter’s going to figure it out? I mean, you two seem really close.”
Toni asked Megan, “Are you going to tell your husband?”
“I don’t think he’d care,” Megan said. “It’s different for Katherine. She and her husband actually get along.”
Toni winced. “Damn, that’s depressing.”
Megan made a face. “I know. It is. I just don’t know what I want to do about it yet. Rodney’s a good husband mostly. He’s pretty involved with the kids. Less now, but he says that’s because I’m not working, so he has to work more.”
“But he moved your family out here for his job,” Toni said. “That’s why you’re not working.”
“We had that discussion a couple of weeks ago,” she said. “It went super well. And by that I mean he ended up sleeping on the couch.”
Katherine shook her head. “I don’t think Baxter and I would fight, but he’d definitely assume I had a neurological condition.”
“Maybe you do,” Toni said. “Maybe we all do. Maybe this is a shared delusion and we all need to get our heads—” She stopped speaking when white wine splashed in her face.
Megan glared at her, her hand held out. A wineglass was hovering in front of Toni’s face. “Sorry, what was that? My hand slipped.”
“What. The. F—?”
“How are you doing that?” Katherine scooted closer. “You’re holding it steady. Did you have a breakthrough?”
“Of a sort. It helps when I get mad.” She lowered her hand, and the glass fell to the table and tipped over. “Still working on it though.”
Toni narrowed her eyes and wiped her cheek with a napkin. “Nice trick.”
“Still think we have brain tumors?”
“Maybe you don’t, but I” —Toni pointed at her chest— “started a fight today between two of my best guys. At least I think I did. I was in a pissy mood, and I needed to talk to one of them. And he was perfectly happy when I walked up. I chewed him out over something super minor, okay? And the worst part was, I knew it was minor when I was chewing him out. I just couldn’t seem to stop myself. It was like the worst case of PMS ever.”
Megan asked, “Were you warm?”
“No. I mean, not more than normal. Why?”
She smiled. “No reason. Continue.”
“So I’m chewing this guy out and he’s getting more and more pissed, and at the same time I’m getting more and more relaxed. It’s like I was pouring my anger into him.” Toni sat back in her seat. “That’s not okay! I know that’s not okay, but I don’t know how to stop it.”
“So at the beginning,” Katherine said, “he was happy and you were angry.”
“Yeah.”
“And by the end of the conversation, you were happy and he was angry.”
“Yeah. And then he went and had an argument with another guy, and like, two hours were wasted on that bullshit.”
Katherine thought about the gym. “Is that what happened with Justin?”
Toni seemed to think a minute before she shook her head. “No. There’s no way that could have been because I was pumped when I jumped on him. If he’d drunk my emotions, then he’d have been even more frantic than he was, not calm.”
“Okay. So what you were doing today was involuntary.”
“Yes.”
“But you know you can push emotions onto people too.”
“Right.” Toni nodded. “Right. Okay, so if I feel like I did today, I need to stop and push those emotions back to whomever I’m getting them from. Like with Frank, I should have pushed his happy back to him, not just made him eat my mood.”
“I think so. It could be that just being aware of it is going to help. You know—more than me or Megan I think—that what you do is under your control.”
That seemed to please her. Toni gave Katherine a small smile. “At
