Blind Spot (28 page)

“Can’t remember.” Lindsey shrugged again and Suki could see the sulk forming around her eyes. “Not long.”

“Did you notice any difference in your symptoms when you took it? Did you see Isabel any less? Have fewer headaches or nightmares?”

Lindsey looked out the window, through the Crosshatch of bars, into the concrete exercise yard below. “I heard the chief of police in Witton was killed over the weekend.”

“Lindsey,” Suki said gently. “You realize your trial starts in just a couple of days? That my testimony is going to be a very important factor in whether you spend the rest of your life in prison?”

“Did you know him?” Lindsey asked. “This Charlie Gasperini?”

Suki sat back in her chair. Maybe if she gave Lindsey what she wanted, Lindsey would return the favor. “Yes,” she said. “I knew him.”

“Did Alexa know him?”

“We’re not here to talk about Alexa,” Suki said evenly. “We’re here to talk about you.”

“You know,” Lindsey said, “there really are only two possible explanations when a person correctly predicts a future event. Either she’s precognitive or she’s going to make the event happen herself.”

Suki flipped her pen around between her fingers.

“It’s not a vision,” Lindsey added, “it’s a plan.”

Suki didn’t like either alternative, yet, like those sticky logic problems she had hated in graduate school, one of the two answers appeared to be true. Except in a case like Son of Sam, where both answers were true: Berkowitz had had visions
and
developed a plan. “Did you predict that Richard was going to die?”

Lindsey blinked and, once again, Suki saw the pain in her eyes. If she were a betting woman, she would bet that Lindsey hadn’t killed Richard Stoddard. “I worried about Richard dying,” Lindsey said. “I was afraid Isabel might kill him, but no, I never ‘saw’ it the way I’ve seen things since then. At that time, the only thing I could ‘see’ was Isabel.”

“Was she small? Did you see her as very tiny?”

“Still pushing that Lilliputian hallucinosis stuff, huh?” Lindsey snorted. “Isabel Davenport was a very small woman, so it only makes sense that she would be a very small ghost.”

Suki glanced down at her list. Hypergraphia. “You once told me you were a writer. Is this something you were driven to do? Are you compulsive about it?”

“We get a lot of time in here,” Lindsey said, her eyes on the exercise yard.

Suki turned slightly so she, too, could see out the window. The yard was vacant, silent. Weeds pushed out through the cracks in the crumbling concrete. Life where there was none.

“Empty time.” Lindsey was drifting, following her mood wherever it took her. “Hours and hours of nothing to do. Open, empty hours. Huge hours that go on forever. I read in the hours to fill the gaps and think a lot about things I never had time to think about before.” She focused once again on Suki. “I was reading William James the other day.
The Will to Believe and Other Essays
. Have you read it?”

Suki shook her head.

“He was a smart man—a very smart man. Forward-thinking. Let me see if I can remember this right.” Lindsey stared up at the water-stained ceiling and began to quote, “‘The ideal of every science is that of a closed and complete system of truth.’” She paused and then started again. “‘Phenomena unclassifiable within that system are therefore paradoxical absurdities and must be held untrue.’” She lowered her eyes and grinned at Suki. “Pretty good, huh? A paradoxical absurdity, that’s me.”

Suki watched Lindsey watching her. “Is that how you perceive yourself?”

“For a smart woman you sure can be dumb sometimes.” Lindsey steepled her fingers and gave Suki a long, probing look. “It’s not how I see myself, it’s how
you
see me—and how you see what I can do.”

Suki knew when she was beat. She put her pen down on the table and said, “Tell me more about what you can do. Explain to me how you can do it. How it works.”

Lindsey nodded, as if she had expected this all along. “The truth is, my abilities are minimal. There are many people much more sensitive, more talented, than I am. The real skill, the real gift, is in the control. I can’t make it start, and once it’s started, I can’t make it stop. Sometimes I see a picture—a vision, a place or a person, or two things linked together that have a meaning because of their linkage. But most of the time, like I told you, it comes in dreams.”

Suki sat quietly, barely breathing. She had only had time to skim the library books, but according to what she had read, images did seem to be the most prevalent mode of receiving extrasensory information, dreams the most common vehicle. There had been successful precognitive image experiments at Princeton involving the works of famous artists, solid ESP card research at Duke, and dream studies by the Maimonides group in which slides from a graduate student’s trip to Europe were used as the picture targets. Even Sigmund Freud had noticed that sleep enhanced telepathic ability.

“But sometimes, it’s more of a feeling,” Lindsey continued. “A feeling of fear. Or of danger.” She tapped Suki’s arm. “As it was with you. I felt an aura of danger around you. Around Alexa, too—I still do.” Lindsey paused and when Suki didn’t respond, said, “Sometimes what I see isn’t important at all. Like last week. On Wednesday, I saw the opening credits for the movie they were showing on Friday night.” She shrugged. “Who cares about that?”

A furry ripple of fear flowed up Suki’s backbone. Her mother used to play a game with her when she was a little girl in which Harriet would guess which movie was coming the next week to the Central Theater. Harriet was almost always right. “Are you always right?” Suki asked.

“No,” Lindsey said, “and that’s the problem. Sometimes I get visions that have nothing to do with anything. They’re full of people I don’t know, all jumbled and impossible to decipher. They just don’t make any sense. Or I’ll have a very specific vision: like of a small blond boy with brown eyes who has a scratch on his forehead, hiding in the woods. And then I’ll watch the news to see if anyone’s been lost, but no one has.”

Suki was both relieved and nonplused by lindsey’s admission. On one hand, Lindsey was acknowledging failure, on the other, there was something about the declaration that increased her credibility—like her timing mistake with Finlay. Suki reminded herself of all the ESP research that had come up empty, of all the departments of parapsychology that had closed over the years, of how often her mother had predicted events that never occurred. She would have to ask Kenneth how frequently Doris Sheketoff’s guesses were off the mark.

Lindsey scrutinized Suki intently, as if she were the psychologist under pressure to make a forensic assessment. “Other times, the visions are just obtuse. Skewed. Like someone’s playing a game and I’m ‘it.’ I’m the one who’s supposed to solve the riddle.”

Suki pulled at the collar of her blouse. “Did you ever have a vision that someone was going to die?”

Lindsey smiled shrewdly. “And then it happened?”

Suki nodded.

“Once.” Lindsey’s face fell at the memory, “I had a vision of a big shadow over my sister-in-law’s lung. She died of lung cancer six months later.”

“Did she smoke?”

“Not a day in her life.”

“Did you tell her about it?” Suki asked. “Did you try to get her to see a doctor?”

“You want to know about free will and determinism.”

“I guess,” Suki said slowly. “I want to know if you believe that what you see has to happen.” She paused. “If you don’t see it, do you think that’ll stop it from happening? Or do you think what you see can’t be changed? That it’s a given?”

“A lot of questions for an agnostic.”

“This isn’t about me, Lindsey.”

“I’m well aware of who this is about.” Lindsey folded her hands in her lap.

Suki picked up her pen; two could play this game. “Have you ever suffered from any transient weakness in your limbs?” she asked. “Ever had a problem with stuttering?”

Lindsey threw her hands upward in an exaggerated gesture of defeat. “I think my visions are a picture of the way things will be if nothing changes: the road ahead given the path being followed. But I also think that by altering behavior, you can change what is foreseen.” She smiled. “Free will
and
determinism.”

“But what if you don’t see it?” Suki asked. “If you stop yourself from seeing the vision, will that make the vision not happen?”

“Doesn’t make a bit of difference,” Lindsey said emphatically. “The future’s going to be the future whether I see it or not. No matter who sees it—or doesn’t.” She paused. “That’s what I have to tell Alexa.”

“Lindsey,” Suki began, “Your concern about Alexa is touching, and I do appreciate it, but she’s—”

“Alexa needs to know. She
has
to know.”

Suki pulled at her collar again. Why was it always so warm in public buildings: schools, courtrooms, prisons? So much waste. A waste of money, energy. She looked at Lindsey. So much waste.

“If you don’t let Alexa learn what she needs to learn,” Lindsey warned, “it’s going to backfire on you.”

“I told you before, we’re not here to talk about my personal life.”

Lindsey crossed her arms over her chest. “But that’s all I’m willing to talk about.”

“It’s your call.” Suki stood and rapped on the door, then busied herself gathering her things. When the officer arrived, Suki turned to Lindsey. “I think I’ve got all I need,” she said. “I’ll see you next week in court.”

As Suki wended her way back past the trap and into the waiting room, she thought of Lindsey’s words: “
There really are only two possible explanations when a person correctly predicts a future event
,” Lindsey had said. “
Either she’s precognitive or she’s going to make the event happen herself
.”

Suki shivered in the overheated air. Which would she rather believe: that her daughter was a murderer or that the paranormal was possible?

CHAPTER TWENTY

W
hen Suki got back to the farmhouse, the results of Lindsey’s MMPI were waiting for her. Almost an hour remained before her first appointment, and as both inside offices were in use, Suki sat down at the reception desk and pulled the computerized scoring sheets from the envelope. The Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory was the most widely used personality assessment test; hundreds of experiments involving MMPI protocol were published every year, and all this research had created a huge body of correlational data for both diagnosis and prognosis. Although, as Suki was well aware, accurately interpreting MMPI results was really an art form. She was a bit rusty, but had had years of tutelage in the lab of Chanley Hathaway, the man generally considered to be the worldwide expert on MMPI analysis.

The computerized sheets spread out in front of her contained Lindsey’s scores on each of ten standard clinical scales, four special scales and three scales that assessed validity. Although the standard scales attempted to measure mental illnesses like depression and schizophrenia, a high score on any given scale didn’t necessarily mean a person suffered from that disease. Rather it was how the scores combined, the pattern they created, that gave the clues to underlying pathology. “Look to the clustering,” Hathaway was always saying. “Look to the clustering.”

Suki looked to the clustering and was amazed at the profile the scores presented; it was not what she had expected. After listening to Lindsey’s answers that day at the prison, Suki had guessed Lindsey would score low on all the psychopathology scales and high on the validity scales measuring malingering. But this was not the case. Lindsey’s three highest scores were on scales that measured schizophrenia, anxiety and repression, respectively. This was a cluster usually indicative of fairly substantial psychosis. And her scores on the validity scales fell within normal ranges, albeit toward the high end. Suki checked the name and the ID number at the top of the printout to make sure this was indeed Lindsey’s test result. It was.

Suki had to admit that Lindsey did exhibit the incident-independent lability—wild mood swings not obviously based on events—often associated with psychosis, and her brain scans were clearly not normal. There were also strong indications she was not in touch with reality; after all, the woman was convinced she could see into the future as well as free her spirit from her body at will. But still, these results indicated a more severe illness than Lindsey presented.

Suki sat back in her chair and considered the results. She sketched the cluster picture Hathaway had taught her to draw. Then she turned the drawing to view it from various angles. This was clearly a pathological configuration. It was also clear that although she prided herself on her ability to maintain an open mind during a forensic evaluation, she had not done so. Her surprise at the scores was an unmistakable indication that she had prematurely concluded that Lindsey Kern was sane.

“A single test cluster is
not
a diagnosis,” was another of Hathaway’s favorite lines. “It’s only a data point. The clinician must analyze the scores within the full spectrum of the patient’s life history and behavior in order to render an accurate diagnosis.” Right, Suki thought. Within Lindsey’s life history and behavior. A life history which contained very few instances of, or correlates to, mental illness, behavior which appeared amazingly sane—until Isabel Jessel Davenport had arrived on the scene.

The door behind Suki swung open and a teenage girl, wearing a tiny black dress and shoulder-high lace gloves, sauntered across the room in platform shoes that must have been at least five inches high. Suki did appreciate Jen’s patients’ sartorial displays. At least this one’s hair wasn’t blue. The girl floated out of the office as if she were Scarlett O’Hara on her way to the ball.

“Yo!” Jen yelled from inside the office, and Suki wondered how she could possibly know she was there. “How goes it, pal?”

“Good,” Suki said, then remembered Frank Maxwell. “Really good.”

“Really good, like
really
good?” Jen leapt into the outer office. “Did something change over the weekend?” she demanded. “Is Witton finally coming to its senses?”