[Ganzfield 2] Adversary (12 page)

I offered up a silent prayer of gratitude to whatever Higher Power had put Trevor in my life. I felt emotionally intact again.
Whole.
Because of him, I’d be able to cope, to make it through the day. I needed to…we had a
lot
of problems to solve.

The morning air felt warmer and a little damp. It was above freezing—it might even make it up into the forties today. I followed the trail back to the camp, carrying a small pile of clean clothing and my toiletries. I needed coffee and a shower, preferably both as hot as possible.

Drew’s mom, Viv, oversaw the kitchen in the winterized caretaker’s cabin that sat next to the lodge. She pointed me in the direction of the coffee then put me to work cleaning dusty pans and chipped dishes while I waited my turn for the single working shower. Water to the outbuildings, including the shower house, was shut off for the winter so the pipes wouldn’t freeze. This little cabin was the only building with heat and water. Fortunately, all the other buildings had fireplaces and were made from non-combustible materials. That must’ve been what appealed to spark firefighters to buy the old camp in the first place.

Viv McFee looked close to six feet tall, large-boned and a little plump. Strands of white shot through her blonde hair, which she wore tucked back in a braid. Her bright blue eyes were edged with what some people call laugh-lines, but I saw enough of her thoughts to know that most of them hadn’t come from laughing. Her mind gave off a sense of endurance. More than once, I heard her think something like
we’ll get through this. We’ve been through tough things before
. I’d met her briefly at Christmas, but apparently I hadn’t made much of an impression. She didn’t remember my name, but I didn’t take it personally. I was terrible at remembering names myself.

I finally broke the kitchen’s silence. “Who does this camp belong to?”

“Quentin and Gerry bought it a few years back. They wanted a summer place we could all come, even the active sparks.” I saw their faces in her mind as she talked. Gerry had shown Trevor and me to our campsite last night.

“I’m so confused about how everyone is related. How are there so many G-positives in one family?”

“You don’t know the story?” Viv gave me an appraising look.
Should I give her the public version or the real version?

“Real version, please.” I hoped I wouldn’t offend her by picking the unasked question from her mind.

She cracked a wide smile. “That’s right. You’re the little telepath dating Drew’s friend, Trevor. I remember you now.”

I decided not to take offense at the “little” thing. Compared to Viv and most of the McFees, it was accurate enough. Besides, I was intrigued. What was in the “real” version that made a “public” version necessary?

“It all goes back to Gram. That’s Nan Cochran McFee—my husband’s great-grandmother. Andrew brought me up to meet her shortly after we started dating. She was a hundred years old that year. She died at a hundred and three, I think, back in the early 1990s.”

I saw her memories of the old woman, whose body looked so hunched and frail but whose mind had struck Viv as being so strong. “When Nan was fifteen, she started having dreams of her future husband. Over and over she saw the same man in her dreams. She knew he was in America, and keep in mind, she was still back in Ireland at this point. Her family lore had always held that her mother’s people had a bit of the ‘second-sight,’ so she took her dreams seriously. After months of dreaming of this same man, she finally decided she simply had to know if he was real. This was 1904, mind you, and decent teenaged girls simply didn’t take off alone to cross the Atlantic. But she did. She ran away, booked passage in steerage on a westbound ship, and came to Boston.

“She kept dreaming of the man during the crossing and, the closer she got to Boston, the stronger her dreams became. She got off the boat, cleared immigration, and started walking. Then, as she went, she began to recognize more and more of the area around her. Finally, she came to the fire station in Roxbury. She’d seen it in her dreams many times so she knew she’d arrived. Nan walked right in, found the man she’d been dreaming about, and held out her hand.”

Viv paused, scrubbing at a particularly resistant black stain on one of the pans. Her mind had switched to eradicating the mark, which left me hanging.

“So what happened?”

“What? When?” asked Viv, distracted.

“When Nan walked into the fire station! I mean…what did she say?” I felt amazed at the things this girl from another century had done. She must’ve been an RV, but how could she’ve located someone she’d never met like that? Especially without dodecamine?

“Oh, right. Well, Nan walked up to the man she’d seen in her dreams, held out her hand to him, and said, ‘You’re the one. You’re the one I’m going to marry. What’s your name?’” Viv laughed gently at this in a can-you-imagine kind of way.

“Well, Old Sean McFee was apparently rather surprised by this little piece of information, coming from this strange girl just off the boat. But something about her struck him as more interesting than crazy and he went for a walk around the neighborhood with her. She told him some of the things she’d seen him doing in her dreams, like knocking down a beehive by throwing an apple he’d bought from a green-painted apple cart. She pointed out the tree where the beehive had been and even picked out the right apple vendor when he happened by. By the end of the walk, Old Sean was convinced there was something special about this girl. After two weeks, they were engaged. They got married a month later, on her sixteenth birthday. He was twenty-one at the time.”

Viv noticed that the drying cloth she was using was now too wet; she began to hunt for another. Once she found a new towel, her thoughts returned to the story of her husband’s great-grandparents.

“Nan and Old Sean had five sons: Sean Jr., Seamus, Dylan, Ian, and Thomas. The boys grew up and Nan started having dreams of young ladies. She knew the dreams were like the ones that’d led her to Old Sean, so she told her boys what to look for. The first was the girl with the red hair who sang in the church choir in Walpole. Next came the one who worked as a maid in the big house with the columns in Belmont. She sent each son off to find the girl she’d dreamed for him. Ian had to go all the way to Kansas City. But each son followed the directions his mother had given him, and each time the girl she’d described was just where his mother had said she’d be.

“The young men brought these girls home to meet their mother. Once Nan had seen that each girl was the one from her dream, she gave her son the go-ahead to court her properly. Dylan brought home a young lady who matched the description his mother had given him—the daughter of a police officer in Sharon—but he’d gotten the wrong girl, according to his mother, so she sent him back to find the right one.”

“The sons didn’t mind dating the girls their mother had picked out for them?” The idea rankled against my modern sensibilities on several levels.

“Turns out, Nan knew what she was doing. The boys may’ve been skeptical at first, but once they met these girls, they liked them enough to get to know them better. They all fell in love, and the girls fell in love right back. So, they each got married and had families. And Nan’s sons and grandsons all became firefighters—like Old Sean—in their turns. And many of them seemed to have his eerie understanding of how the fire was going to move and how to keep themselves and their teams safe.”

“So the daughters-in-law were all G-positives?”

“That, or carriers. Not all of the grandsons had the gift with fire that Old Sean and his sons did. But enough of them did that now we figure Nan was a remote viewer who was able to locate G-positives, even though she didn’t know what she was doing or how she was doing it.

“We believe she wanted her sons to find nice girls and settle down, and her unconscious mind did all the work. Between finding G-positives remotely and being a good enough judge of character, she unconsciously tracked solid matches for her sons. Then she did the same for her sixteen grandchildren when they were old enough.”

Wow.
I remembered reading something about how physical attraction was based on an unconscious recognition that the other person was genetically compatible. It looked as though Gram McFee had been breeding her own family of G-positives for generations. Perhaps it hadn’t even started with her. The family lore of “second-sight” might be part of a long chain of remote viewers who’d unknowing selected people with the same genetic trait.

“By this point, her ability to match-make through her dreams had been accepted by the family. It was almost expected that, when a grandson or granddaughter was ready to settle down, he or she would talk to Gram. Gram would dream on it for a few weeks then say where to find the right person.”

“So, when your husband brought you to meet her—”

Viv smiled at the reminiscence. “Her first words were, ‘Ah, Andrew. You found her after all.’” I heard the Irish lilt in the old lady’s voice in Viv’s memory. The wispy tone still conveyed her joy, as well as a little touch of smug pride. Her rheumy blue eyes had sparkled with an I-told-you-so mixed in with her happiness.

“So, you’re G-positive?” What was Viv’s ability? I didn’t know. Did she just not use dodecamine?

“I’m a carrier, but both of my boys are sparks. My Andrew was, too. He passed away from a stroke three years ago last January.”

An aching loneliness filled her at the thought of her late husband. However, she refused to let it stay and take hold. Instead, she pushed the feeling aside gruffly and wondered what she’d been talking about before she’d been side-tracked.

“Meeting Nan for the first time,” I prompted.

“Oh, right.” She didn’t notice I’d answered a question she hadn’t asked. “So, this whole big pack of sparks you see today was the work of an Irish lady and her second-sighted dreams. There are a few other types mixed in. We now have a couple of RVs and a healer; it looks like they got their mothers’ gifts. But the fire-love runs pretty strongly through the McFee family.”

Ellen McFee came out of the bathroom, absently indicating as she passed that it was my turn for the shower. Shadows darkened the pale skin under her eyes and a flashback of Melanie taking a bullet in the shoulder haunted her thoughts.

The overnight cold had thickened my shampoo and toothpaste into nearly unusable sludge. I tried to clean up as rapidly as possible; others were waiting to use the tiny bathroom. Once out, I grabbed a plate of scrambled eggs in the lodge and ate ravenously, realizing I hadn’t had a meal since our McBreakfast twenty-four hours ago. Now I was rested and fueled, and there was a lot that I needed to do.

I filled another mug of coffee and carried it back to the clearing for Trevor. He was just waking as I returned, and he used the cup to warm his hands while he sipped. He’d slept the past night shelterless in a New England winter and he felt as cold as that sounded.

I rummaged through my bag for my laptop and power cable, and then Trevor and I went to the lodge. While he took his turn with the shower, I started making a list.

I stopped. Something about a list. Hannah had a list—a list of the dead from Ganzfield. Was anyone missing from it? I knew that Zack was the only Ganzfield charm who hadn’t been among the dead. Rachel was the only RV. Cold shock slammed through my chest.
The healers—Matilda and Morris Taylor.
I hadn’t seen them lying in the snow yesterday. I tried to recall…Hannah hadn’t registered them, either. I needed to check. Where was Hannah? Not here. She never ate breakfast. I tried to find her mind and couldn’t. She was either out of range or still sleeping, and I didn’t know which cabin she’d used last night.

Where was Rachel? I needed an RV. A quick mental search and—
whoa!
I abruptly winced and shied away.
Ugh.
I’d just mentally walked into her room without knocking. She and Sean were doing some “life affirming” of their own in one of the nearby cabins.

A blush still stained my cheeks when Trevor returned from his shower and joined me at one of the tables in the lodge.
What is it?
he smiled teasingly.
Have you been watching me in the shower again?

I blushed further and flashed back to last night and the flickering blue light whispering across his silhouette as we’d touched. He flushed with remembered pleasure. Again, I hadn’t been aware I was sending him my thoughts.
I think you’re becoming telepathic.