He falls silent, and I struggle to process what he’s said. Why Phoebe had called him. She must think my visions are some kind of ESP.
I can barely bring myself to think it. It sounds so much like late night television. B movies.
If they are ESP — I don’t think so, but if they are — does that mean I’m witnessing an actual event?
A memory of murder.
The thought makes my head throb even more. I have been banking on that idea all through the investigation, but haven’t made the effort to rationalize my own behavior, or follow the logic to its end. I’ve been treating the visions as I would a hunch. But if Flowers is right, it would mean I’m not crazy. That I’ve been basing my investigation on something authentic. But it also means that the terrible vision I’d had at the Baxter Building, the cops — my colleagues — being directly linked to what happened there. It means that one might also true.
Fireworks explode in my brain. Was that the real reason behind my meltdown? The recognition of evil combined with the confusion of identity engendered by my undercover operation?
I realize that the other two are watching me; Phoebe with clinical calm, Bernie with head cocked and an inquisitive expression.
I lick dry lips. “Do you know anyone who sees things that have happened? How reliable is this — ability?”
He spreads his hands. “I would say, just as reliable — or unreliable — as any other kind of witnessing. As with any sensory perception, it’s all down to the observer.”
Phoebe chimes in. “We all filter the information of the world through our particular viewpoints and emotional states. What touches me may not touch you, or not in the same way. We won’t invest the same meaning into any one experience.”
“And,” Bernie smiles disarmingly, “some people just like to make stuff up.”
No worse than any other eyewitness, then. And no better. I’ve been dealing with that my whole professional life.
Grain of salt. Trust, but verify.
Okay. I think I can handle that.
I have to leave them. Go walking to wrap my head around it all. Thoughts and beliefs ricochet around in my skull. I used to despise people like Bernie Flowers, irrational nonconformists, who want to skirt concrete facts and solid substance. In the course of my job as a homicide detective, I’ve known too many self-seeking, self-aggrandizing psychics who prey on the tragedies of crime and murder, seeking emotional fulfillment at the expense of people whom death had made vulnerable. There is no way I would join the ranks of those praying mantises.
And yet…
And yet, Bernie isn’t profiting. He’s an interested, if bombastic, professional. And my visions. The images. Things I thought were imagined. The horrid visual of my brother’s car plunging off the bridge, each time I passed the stage of his suicide. The lurid montage I had seen in the Baxter Building, the one that had pushed me into catatonia and enabled Zoe to cut permanent footholds in the ice cliff of my psyche. And now the killing of Victoria Harkness. I used to think the choice was between crazy and not crazy. But now the choice is between crazy and psychic. Even the word makes me cringe. The magnetic field has realigned and left me with two negative poles.
I walk through neighborhoods that are a jumble of Victorian, Queen Anne, and Craftsman houses. I frighten deer from the street-side buffet of ivy, rhododendron, and buttercup. My calves ache from uphill asphalt, my knees from downhill sidewalks. I pass free furniture left on the curb, vacant lots buried in blackberry brambles with the remnant of concrete foundations and steps that go nowhere. The eyes and caws of crows follow me like a smoldering telegraph of black wings.
I find my way up to the towering Astoria column decorated with a spiraling history of the region, a DNA of events leading to the present day. On one side of the park it’s possible to see the broad Columbia with its anchored ships and hustling pilot boats; on the other I look out over Youngs Bay with its feeder rivers, serene and green as a landscape painting. The Megler Bridge arches like a salmon’s leap over the deep channel of the river; the New Youngs Bay Bridge curves across the junction of bay and river, low and practical, without embellishment. Choices and solutions. Each bridge is what it is; a solution to a set of particular circumstances.
I have discovered my own beliefs are not based on immovable concrete abutments, but rooted in false bedrock that is now eroding. I’ve always associated so-called psychics with lies and con games, with people profiting from someone else’s pain. The worst kind of selfishness. It shakes me to the core to think I might have been wrong, that I’m now one of them.
Does this new ability make me evil, like those others? But if that’s true, then it means that choice and free will are meaningless. And if that’s true, then what the hell are we all doing here?
No. It’s up to me how to assimilate the new material, whether to struggle against the turbulence or harness its energy. Build a bridge to another shore. Victoria Harkness took something terrible and tried to transform it into something good. If her legacy means anything, it means I must try to do the same.
By the time I’m almost home I’m exhausted, my legs and feet pulsing with a deep-seated ache. But now I know I have to move forward with the investigation of both myself and Victoria. The two are so intertwined as to be one and the same.
