Broken Souls (The Chronicles of Mara Lantern, Book 2) (9 page)

“Looks like Bruce is keeping busy,” Ping said.

Mara called out from the office, “I think his bicycle repair work is the key to keeping this business going. Mr. Mason’s older customers have been coming in for years with their gadgets, but Bruce brings in the younger, hipper crowd, who more than likely would throw away their old gadgets and buy something new. A lot of the bicyclists like the idea of recycling and repairing stuff, and they get hooked on bringing in their stuff.”

“Sam said there was something you wanted to talk about?”

Mara stepped from the office, pulled out a chair with a loud skittering sound and sat down. “About this static I’m hearing from the radio . . .”

Ping raised a hand. “Sam told me that you wanted to talk before you called me about the Philco 90. What was on your mind then?”

“Oh! That’s right. Life has become such an endless string of issues that one thing keeps pushing out the other. I can’t keep up with everything.” Mara pulled her hair over her shoulders and leaned onto the table as if she needed the support. “I’m sure Sam mentioned to you that he found out about my dad, right?”

“You mean he found out about his father. The fact that he’s yours as well is incidental at the moment. It was all he spoke about when he got in this morning.”

“Whatever. Look, my father is a doctor. He’s the complete opposite of my mother. I don’t see being able to convince him that he has a son from an alternate reality. There’s no way that is going to happen.”

“Never say never, Mara. Two months ago there was no way you would ever believe that you have the ability to alter reality, that you are a progenitor.”

“That’s different. There was a way for me to demonstrate the truth of that.”

“And I’m sure you and your mother can come up with a way of demonstrating to your father that Sam is his son. Give it some time and consideration. I’m sure it will come to you.”

“Time is the problem. Sam is so eager to meet his dad, I’m afraid he might do something impulsive, like send Dad an email or call him up.”

“I don’t think Sam will do that. We had a talk this morning, and I think he understands the challenges that are involved. He’s a boy excited about the prospect of having a father for the first time in his life. Let him enjoy the notion of it while you and your mother work out how to go about introducing them.”

“I can’t even imagine it. You don’t know my father.”

“I bet your mother will figure it out. She’s a very smart, sensitive lady. Give her time. This isn’t something you have to fix right now.” Ping leaned back and tried to brush away the brown dust on his belly. “I’ve got pumpkin pie ingredients all over me.”

“You’ve got a smear of flour on your face too.” Mara smiled and wiped his cheek with her thumb.

“Thanks. That’s one item on your list of issues. What’s next?”

“I can’t seem to fix anything anymore.”

“What do you mean? I see satisfied customers coming out of here all the time. A lot of them stop by the bakery for coffee or a snack, carrying all manner of gadgets.”

“Oh, things are getting repaired, but it has more to do with metaphysics than mechanics. Everything I touch seems to repair itself.” She pointed to the front of the shop. “That big grandfather clock out there? I called Mr. Mickleson and asked him what he thought was wrong with it, and he told me that his grandson had been playing inside the waist—where the weights and pendulum hang— and several pieces had been knocked out of the mechanism. He said he had forgotten to send along the broken parts and would stop by in the morning.”

“Yes, and?”

Mara’s eyes widened. “Ping, it’s already fixed. It’s working. All I did was wind it and look at it with a flashlight. Missing parts replaced themselves out of thin air.”

“I’m not sure I’m seeing the problem. I told you that I thought your technical ability was tied into your metaphysical powers.”

“How would you like to spend all day having pies and cakes pop out of your oven without you having to first mix the ingredients and put them in to bake?”

“With business the way it is lately, that might not be such a bad thing.”

“Ping, I want to take things apart, figure out what’s wrong and fix them, with my hands and tools, not with this ability. I don’t want things to just fix themselves. Where’s the challenge in that?”

“As I see it, there are two ways you can approach this. One would be to accept that your metaphysical ability is another tool in your tool kit that you use to repair gadgets. Things aren’t
just
repairing themselves. You are repairing them through this extraordinary gift.” Mara opened her mouth to protest, but Ping silenced her with a raised finger. “Or you could work on better mastering your ability so that you can control when these things happen. You should be able to control what you do and when you do it.”

“How do I do that?”

“Practice, Mara. Practice. You’ve got to work with your abilities. Learn to use them, how to turn them on and turn them off. That will take practice and patience.”

“Patience seems to be a theme with you this evening.”

There was a loud pounding coming from the front door of the shop. Mara jumped up to answer it. “That must be Bohannon.”

“What about the radio?” Ping asked.

Mara stopped and turned. “We’ll have to talk later. And I want to get into this dragon business of yours too.”

Mara backed away from the front door to allow room for Detective Bohannon to hobble into the shop on his crutches. He held a laptop computer under his arm, pressed against one of the crutches, and seemed to have trouble maintaining his balance.

“Why don’t you let me carry the computer, Detective?” Mara said, stepping forward and slipping it from under his arm. “If you could close and dead bolt the door, Mr. Ping and I are sitting here in the back.”

“Thanks, Ms. Lantern.”

“Please call me Mara. That way I won’t feel like I’m participating in a police interrogation. That is, unless I am.”

“Mara then. You can call me Bo. And, no, this is not a police investigation, only a confused guy trying to understand what is happening.”

Ping stood up when they entered the back of the shop. “Confusion is our specialty, Detective,” he said and pulled out a chair. “Please have a seat.”

“You can call me Bo too,” the detective said, taking the seat. “What do people call you? Mr. Ping?”

“Just Ping, no
mister
. No one calls me by my first name.”

“I imagine calling you Aristotle would put off most people.” Mara smiled and poked him with an elbow.

“Yes, I saw that on some of the reports after the plane crash. Odd name, particularly for a Chinese American.”

“I’m sure it would be an odd name even for a Greek American in this day and age, but my father wanted to name me after an army buddy, and so I’m stuck with it.”

With that, the conversation died, slipped into an uncomfortable silence. Mara wasn’t sure how to start explaining all that had occurred since Flight 559 had plunged into the Columbia River. And Bohannon, while having dozens of questions, found himself tongue-tied, unable to formulate one that didn’t make him sound like a lunatic. He glanced over at Ping, forced a smile and widened his eyes, a silent call for help.

Ping straightened in his chair and said, “Bo, why don’t we start with what happened to the passengers on the flight that went down.”

Relief momentarily swept over Bohannon’s face. “That would be a good place to begin.”

“Each of the passengers on Flight 559 was replaced with a counterpart from an alternate reality, or realm, as I like to call it, with the exception of Mara. Her counterpart on the flight came to an unfortunate end during the explosion that brought down the flight.”

Bohannon frowned as if working on a puzzle. “So the bodies that were recovered from the river, the ones that were kept in the makeshift morgue in the hangar, were the original passengers, the ones who took off on that flight.”

“That’s correct,” Ping said.

“How did this happen?” Bohannon asked, looking at Mara.

Mara looked to Ping and said, “You seem good at summing these things up. How did this happen?”

“Mara’s counterpart from another realm used a metaphysical device that enabled people to cross over from alternate realities. Unfortunately she lost control of it in a tussle during the flight, and she came in contact with this Mara, which set off the explosion. I believe that the confluence of those events yanked the counterparts for each of the passengers—each counterpart randomly pulled from a different realm—into this realm.”

Bohannon tilted his head, as if he were trying to follow the logic of what Ping had said. He squinted slightly and said, “So you were a passenger on the flight.”

“Yes.”

“That means you are actually from an alternate reality, er, realm.”

“That’s correct.”

“And my former partner, Special Agent Suter, he was on the flight, and he was from a different realm.”

“That is correct.”

“Lord, have mercy. It was obvious that something didn’t add up, that we had a duplication of passengers—one set of dead ones and one set of live ones,” Bohannon said, looking up at the ceiling as he assimilated the information. “What about this explosion? You touched your counterpart?”

Mara nodded and said, “I didn’t understand that’s what she was, and I certainly didn’t understand that it would set off an explosion. Normally when counterparts touch, an explosion occurs, and the one who is out of place is pushed back to their own realm.”

Bohannon stiffened. “Is there anything else that can cause this to happen?”

“It appears that the reaction can be set off if someone comes in contact with even a few cells belonging to their counterpart. For example, we encountered a situation in which someone touched a toothbrush belonging to their counterpart, and it set off an explosion. Presumably the person was pushed back to their own realm,” Ping said.

“Who was that?” Bohannon said.

“Sarah Gamble and her grandson,” Mara said.

“Ah, that’s what happened to them,” Bohannon said. “We’ve had a few reports of missing passengers. That must be what is going on in this video.” The detective reached for his laptop, unfolded it and hit the Power button. “You have Wi-Fi around here?”

Mara nodded and said, “What video are you talking about?”

“It’s on YouTube, look.” He typed for a few seconds, dramatically clicked on the mouse pad and swiveled the laptop around so Mara and Ping could see the screen. Bohannon could not see the image but had watched it several times and knew what they were seeing by the sound track—the explosion, the screams and the whimpering woman at the end—and by the gaping mouths and looks of horror on Mara’s and Ping’s faces.

“I never liked the oboe,” Ping said. “Was anyone else hurt?”

“Nothing serious, but they did not find hide nor hair of Marcus Gentry after that.”

“I remember seeing his name on the list of passengers from the flight.”

Bohannon nodded and added, “He was from Little Rock, Arkansas. That’s where the oboe event happened. Similar things like this could be happening all over the country or all over the world. About a third of the people on the flight were not from this area.”

“God only knows what is going on out there.” Mara looked at Ping.

“There’s more to this than people being swapped back and forth between realms, isn’t there? I mean, some of these people aren’t like normal human beings,” Bohannon said, then added, “Sounds crazy, doesn’t it?”

“From your perspective, it sounds crazy, I suppose, but these people consider themselves normal. For many of them, it’s this world that has gone crazy,” Ping said.

“Suter turned into this slimy, fire-breathing lizard-thing right in front of us. Are you saying, for him, that was normal?”

“That’s exactly what he’s saying,” Mara said.

“Do some of these people have unusual abilities?”

Mara looked over to Ping to continue.

“Each of the people who crossed over is the result of a distinct evolutionary path. Each has inherited characteristics that would be unique and even unheard of in this realm. Suter, for example, obviously had some reptilian characteristics not usually seen among humans in this realm.”

“He also had some abilities that were . . . How can I put it? Supernatural?” the detective said.

“I prefer the term
metaphysical
,” Ping said.

Mara rolled her eyes, and Bohannon said, “Okay, whatever floats your boat. Anyway, what is that all about?”

“Bo, how deep into this do you want to go? I was a professor of metaphysics in my former existence, and I can talk for hours about the concepts and principles involved here. Do you really want to delve into all of this?”

“He
can
talk for hours about metaphysics,” Mara said.

“Give me the CliffsNotes version, please. I don’t want to convert to a new philosophy or anything,” he said.

“A few of the people who have crossed over have what I consider metaphysical abilities that come not from their genes but from their innate awareness of existence. However, some of the passengers seem to have abilities that are the product of evolution. For example, we have encountered a little girl who could levitate objects. Another could camouflage himself almost to the point of invisibility. These people inherited those traits from their parents.”

“Ping turns into a cloud of dust if you startle him,” Mara added.

“What?” Bohannon glanced at Ping, having trouble imagining it.

“Now you’re shocked at something?” Mara said.

Bohannon shrugged. “Not really. I’ve seen a woman crawl up the side of a building and a man who laid an egg, so I guess nothing should surprise me at this point.” He reached into his jacket and pulled out the blue flyer advertising what he thought of as the healing revival for the next day. “Do you think these people could be legit?”

Ping took the paper and read over it. “These are passengers from the flight, the Proctors?” Bohannon nodded, and Ping continued, “This could be any number of possibilities. They could simply be run-of-the-mill con artists with no abilities. They could be con artists with actual abilities. Or they could be earnest do-gooders with abilities. Oh, and I suppose it’s possible they could be earnest do-gooders who are delusional and think they have abilities.”