Empathy



  Other Books By John Richmond

  Sins of the Fathers

  Shard

  Available in print and for download at most online retailers and at www.JohnRichmondBooks.com

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  EMPATHY

  John Richmond

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  Published By

  John R. Richmond

  [email protected]

  First Published 2010

  Copyright John Richmond, 2007. All rights reserved

  SmashWords Edition

  Any attempt to imitate the contents of this book in any form will be considered breach of copyright law and subject to lawsuit.

  Any resemblance to the lives of any persons, either living or dead is coincidental.

  No psychics were harmed in the writing of this book.

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  Table of Contents

  Chapter 1

  From the Journal of Drummond Fine, MD - Part 1

  Chapter 2

  From the Journal of Drummond Fine, MD - Part 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  From the Journal of Drummond Fine, MD - Part 3

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  From the Journal of Drummond Fine, MD - Part 4

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  From the Journal of Drummond Fine, MD - Part 5

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  From the Journal of Drummond Fine, MD - Part 6

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Author's Note

  About the Author

  Contact the Author

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  For Leila

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  Chapter 1

  EMILY BURTON CAME to New York to shoot herself in the head. She stood in front of the mirror in her room at the Morgan Hotel, her head cocked, listening. Her off-blonde hair—a little greasy, a little split at the ends—hung at an angle. Her eyes, tar emeralds in the low light, concentrated into slits; the brow above them all edges, the flesh below plum pillows. Her hands floated level with her belly, frozen in a clutch of long fingers and ragged nails.

  Emily closed her eyes and bunched her toes into the hotel carpet. She took a shaky breath and stretched out her mind like splayed fingers in the dark. It was there, she could feel it, she could feel all of THEM, but couldn’t differentiate one from another. She squeezed her eyes shut even tighter and shoved with her mind, attempting to divide individuals from the whole. It was like standing in the surf and trying to count drops of water. Emily opened her eyes and wrapped her arms—still muscled from the high school swim team she’d quit ten years ago—around her ribs. Her shoulders bunched and she let out her breath.

  “Give it a week,” she said to herself. If the white noise held, if she could keep the individual drops from smashing into her heart like bullets, Emily would let the woman in the mirror live. If they got through, there was her father’s service pistol in the gym bag on the bed. She’d come to Manhattan looking for silence, one way or another.

  Something twitched in her gut. Her heart jumped and her eyes slotted to the right. Had that been a slice of foreign emotion? She squinted one eye shut, her face falling into the all too familiar sideways cringe. She held her breath, waiting for the hammer to come down, expecting the flood of someone else’s feelings. A minute passed. She remembered to breathe. She was still numb with the white sound buzz of all of Manhattan. Still safe.

  She stared at herself standing there in mismatched bra and panties. Blue on the top, red on the bottom, and white skin all around. She suppressed the urge to salute. One week. If this relative quiet slipped away from her, then… Emily threw a wink to the patriotic-looking nutcase in the mirror. “Put you outta’ your, misery, babe.”

  The babe winked back, but it was flat, not the slick from-the-hip gesture she’d been going for. More of a fatigued wince. Lauren Bacall she was not. Maybe closer to Courtney Love at the end of a bender. A laugh flirted over her features like a ray of sun over November fields. For just a moment, she was the kind of beautiful boys wrestled each other to get near. She jerked back into listening posture, hands clenched, head cocked.

  Had that sun-burst really been from her, or had a stray drop of water gotten through the white noise? Not all the drops burned. Some were so cool and refreshing, effervescent that when the feeling faded she’d crash like a stone dropped from a highway overpass through some unsuspecting driver’s windshield. Sometimes she feared the highs more than the lows. Most of the time she just feared everything. Emily glanced over her shoulder at the gym bag.

  She turned her back on the woman in the mirror and trudged over to the bed. The duvet sighed a nylon whisper as she slid under it. The June air outside was wet breath from a dragon, but her skin rose in goosebumps from the rattling AC unit in the window. They didn’t do summer like this in Janesville, Wisconsin. Emily stared up at the scalloped ceiling and watched the stucco swim and swirl. So tired. Beyond tired. She’d driven the entire way in her old blue Accord without stopping for anything more than gas.

  Now, sleep, finally, but the underwire in her bra was digging into her left boob. Emily considered leaving it be, but a deep breath and a deep dig convinced her otherwise. With her last ounce of juice, Em levered up like that dried up old vampire from Nosferatu and slipped out of the torture harness. Oh, blessed relief. She sling-shot the bra onto the floor and dropped back into the pillows then hooked her thumbs into the waist band of her panties and slid them down her legs. (Maybe we could shave this week, Em?) Tired of screwing around, sleep reached up from the depths, wrapped an iron tentacle around her head, and pulled Emily down into the velvet nothing with her underwear still wrapped around one ankle.

  Dreams filled the gap in her consciousness and she kicked the gym bag off the bed. It landed on the floor with a metallic thunk. Emily whimpered and rolled over, away from the sound and into the silence.

  * * *

  SHE WAS NINE when it first happened, when the first color of feeling not her own slipped in and tinged her emotions. Emily was just proclaiming herself Queen of All

  She Surveyed—currently, the corner of Jasper and Elton Streets, Janesville Wisconsin—from atop the rusted brown jungle gym when Kenny Mitchell fell. Kenny, a grade lower than Em but the same recess period (and a real snothead if you wanted to know), was attempting to challenge her rule over the known universe when his footing betrayed him like a common courtier with evil ambition. He went down, splitting his chin on a metal bar and sending a stress fracture up through his left femur, but it was Emily who screamed.

  The world crystallized.

  A drip of spring melt water caught a bolt of sun and threw it from the oak tree by the side of the school, the one with Melissa Blocher’s dirty shoe still stuck in it. The wet buzzsaw of a crow’s call stretched over the playground. An airplane dragged a white ice road across the sky, it’s roar deepening in reverse doppler. Kenny’s left Adidas squeaked as it slid off the bar. His internal gyroscopes registered the point of no return and a weightless terror turned his bones to white light.

  At that same instant, helpless, electric fear poured into Emily’s chest. She was falling! She shrieked and grasped the nearest bar with an iron fist, eyes shut tight against the rus
hing ground. A crooked scowl—a child waiting for a blow—wrenched her pretty face into a ball of crumpled paper. She waited for the air to pulse from her lungs upon impact, her ankles to twist and sprain. But there was no impact.

  A moment later the world cleared and she stood, feet firmly planted on the jungle gym, blinking in the April sunshine. Kenny’s wails of agony and incomprehension floated up to her. She looked down at the small crowd of kids congealing around the one on the ground with the bloody face. She endured a sense of doubling for a moment, before jumping down to see if she could help, or just, you know, kind of stare at how gross it was.

  Kenny was back in school the next day, showing off his stitches (“Ewwww, like Frankenstein!”) and amassing a respectable signature collection on his cast. Emily floated on the periphery of the autographers, wondering if that strange connection between her and Kenny would reestablish itself.

  She could taste him all over her head, as if the inside of her skull had been painted with a generous coat of Kenny. It was not an entirely unpleasant feeling, Kenny-ness; a little sticky and hot—sort of spicy. It was BOY. That made it kind of gross, but at the same time it was kind of neat, too. She kept wanting to jump over things and shout.

  That feeling of BOY had faded almost completely by the time lunch period had rolled around the day after Kenny’s fall. And with a child’s ability to accept situations beyond her understanding, Emily just let it go.

  By the time she was Thirteen, Emily had gone from a bright-eyed tree climber to a cowering wreck. Puberty had done it, adding a catalyst to her already strange brain chemistry and pushing her ability into high gear. The occasional drizzle of feeling from outside had become a daily deluge. Waves of emotion lapped her feet at all times. In sleep she floated on the backs of alien dream-feelings. One moment nightmare, the next pleasure, none of it hers. The lines that separated Emily from the rest of humanity began to vibrate out of focus like strummed guitar strings. Even so, she had managed to hold onto her sense of self, to brace her shifting outline until one day a parade came to town.

  JANESVILLE’S DULY ELECTED sheriff looked across the breakfast table at his genetic footprints in the face of a thirteen-year-old girl. She had his sandy blonde hair, his eyes (Got her mother’s nose. Lucky break for the kiddo on that one.) and wore the same expression of concern. It was like she had known his face was going to make that pinched-brow look almost before he had.

  The damn babysitter had cancelled and Andy Burton just didn’t feel right about leaving Emily on her own, not the way she’d been lately. Some part of his little girl was slipping away, growing blurry. All teenagers went through a ragged-edged period between adult and child—Andy knew that—but Emily’s behavior of late was more troubling than the occasional mood swing or defiance for defiance’s sake. She would come home late from school and when he’d ask about her whereabouts, Emily would seem to snap out of a trance then explain that she had just been wandering. Just wandering. She never lied to him, that much he could always tell.

  It was more than a cop’s practiced ability to divine truth. Andy, too, had a gift. Nothing powerful as Emily’s, but certainly useful in his line of work and in knowing whether his teenage daughter had been bullshitting him. She hadn’t. When Emily said that between the hours of three and five she had spent her time roaming, dreaming away the sidewalk squares, he believed her. At the same time, there was something more, something worse perhaps.

  Andy had taken to hiring a babysitter—Sally Johansen from downstreet—to spend time with Em after school and on weekends when Andy had to work. Sally’s older brother Sam might toke a bit o’ smoke from time to time, but Sally was on the up and up. She was only a few years older and as much a friend to Emily as a sitter, but today she’d called citing “female troubles” and begged off. (Quite possibly, these “female troubles” were connected to the electric blue Toyota Supra parked in Sally’s parents’ driveway and the brooding, but sensitive young rebel known to drag it out on State Route 32.)

  Andy wasn’t about to leave Em at home on her own. He could just imagine her sitting by the window with that weird stare she’d adopted in the last few weeks—a mix of dreamy and shifty, like everything was transparent and she was caught by action just below the surface of things, or as if she were eavesdropping on a crowd behind a thick curtain, straining to make sense of the muffled noise.

  He didn’t relish the idea of her being around what he was going into today either. Oh, he didn’t think there would be much trouble—a few picketers, the odd hurled produce—but if Emily’s problem was what he thought it might be…

  “You okay, kiddo?” Andy asked.

  Emily’s own concerned expression intensified. If she were a less respectful kid, Andy would have thought she was aping him. He almost wished she were. “I guess so,” she said and looked into her drowned cornflakes, stirring the mush. “I feel kinda’....”

  “Worried?”

  She sighed, “Worried, yeah.”

  “Sally can’t make it today. Wanna’ come to work with your old man?”

  “Desk stuff?” She pulled a face. “Boooorrrrrinnnnng.”

  Andy picked up a Cheerio and flicked it at her head. Emily dodged and the sun lit up her face from the inside. Her mother had smiled like that. Kiddo got lucky on that one, too. “Nope,” he said. “There’s a protest kind of thing happening downtown and I need to be there to make sure everyone keeps their manners.”

  “Protest?”

  Andy imagined the marching rows of white hoods, the disgusting epithets brushed across signs inked in basements and garages lit with ignorance.

  “More of a parade, but I’m pretty sure there’s going to be a smallish bunch of folk none too happy about it.”

  Andy didn’t expect much of a turn-out. The Klan always drew a few well-intentioned shouters to the curb, but the sad fact in Janesville was that most folks turned a blind eye to idiocy. They were used to this kind of thing. Let the pillow-heads do their thing once a year and downtown could go back to its meetings of the Town Selectmen and custard shops. In all honesty, Andy wished the protesters would just leave off. The pillow-heads were like the devil himself: turn your back on Ol’ Scratch and he’s got no power over you. The protesters were really just giving the Klan the attention they wanted. Of course, that was his wise side. The rest of him wanted to hold them all down, tattoo their skin a nice shade of brown and then force them to live in Chicago’s South Side. But no one ever got what he really, really wanted in life. Thank God.

  Today’s job would be pretty easy. Andy and his deputies, Hal Svenson and Jerry French, would just let themselves be seen, big arms crossed over barrel chests, a humming prowl car—a quiet reminder. Emily could just stay in the squad car and read one of her books. She probably had a ton of homework anyway with all the gifted classes she was in. And they could have a long overdue father-daughter talk. It was high time Andy Burton told Emily what she was.

  He should have told her years ago, when the first signs that she was like him and her mother had begun to show. It had started when that kid, Kirk or Kenny something, had taken a header off the monkey-bars. Em had come home with that look of wonder on her face, and her mother had just known.

  Her mother always knew. Lisa Burton had a gift of her own. It had served her well until that sonofabitch patient took her away from them. Andy just couldn’t go back over that. His and Emily’s pain had swirled in and out of each other like black and white paint, the distinctions breaking down over time. Eventually, when it came to Lisa’s death father and daughter lived in dread silence. Neither of them talked about it at all after the first year. It was like Lisa’s memory existed as a shadow in the corner, always there, never acknowledged lest it writhe into full view and wail.

  But enough was enough. If Emily didn’t understand how to deal with her talents, how to be careful, she might end up like her mother. Andy couldn’t have that. He’d burn down the world before he lost Em.

  FORTY MINUTES LATER,
they sat in Andy’s patrol car, the engine growling out welcome heat through the dash vents. The radio hissed and squawked its police chatter, the volume turned low. Andy, now in full Sheriff Burton regalia—badge gleaming, shirt ironed—took off his hat and brushed a hand through his short hair. A chill mist slicked the windshield, blurring the image of officers Svenson and French. They flanked either side of the main street through downtown, their orange ponchos flapping. A group of about twenty people simmered under a forest of bobbing signs. Andy couldn’t read them.

  “Is that the parade?” Emily asked.

  “Naw, honey, that’s the protest part of it. The parade part won’t start for a little while yet.” The Klan had rented out the old Kiwanis building at the end of the strip and had been given permission to congregate there before beginning their annual march. Andy checked the time on the dash clock. He had a good twenty minutes before the pillow-heads hit the tarmac.

  The sound of Emily’s pencil scratching in a school workbook brought him back into the car with her. He looked at her, could smell her shampoo and her Emilyness. Sometimes he had to stop himself from leaning over and inhaling his little girl in big nosefuls. Little girl? She was already over five feet. More and more a young woman. Sometimes he could just watch her do her homework. Sometimes it scared him how much he loved this kid.

  He took a breath. He had to do this.

  Emily felt the change in him and looked up.

  “Let’s talk about your mom for a minute,” he said.

  “Dad,” she started, “we don’t have to.”

  He put a hand on her arm. “No, it’s okay. We do have to.” Andy pulled his hand back and ruffed it through his hair again. “I’ve been noticing some things about you lately.”