and smiled faintly. “Not that anyone can be sure of anyone just because they know them by sight.”
“You’ve lived in a big city?” His answer would seem to suggest that.
“Yeah. So I understand. I may be out there a few more nights, because it’s a convenient place to rest.”
She noticed he didn’t ask if that would continue to bother her. Apparently he felt he’d answered her questions sufficiently. And just like that, she felt nervous again, because the bottom line was that she hadn’t learned a damn thing about him really. The death of his dog? A personal tragedy? References to computer research? Conveniently lacking any verifiable details?
All of a sudden she didn’t feel silly anymore. In fact, she wondered if she’d just been treated to a good sales job.
She pushed back her plate and stood. “I feel stalked,” she said flatly. Then she grabbed her purse, threw bills on the table and walked out.
No one followed her to her car. When she glanced back as she was about to climb in, she saw Grant still sitting at his table, staring into space.
Yes, she felt stalked. That was exactly the word, the one she hadn’t actually put her finger on until just now.
And there were a lot of good reasons for her to feel paranoid about that.
Trish’s computer hummed quietly as she searched the Net for information. Outside, another bright, cool day was beginning to degrade into cloudiness that might bring rain or even snow. She didn’t know or really care. She was too busy trying to verify what Grant had told her last night about the research he’d been doing, then trying to find out if it led her to him.
Either she didn’t know the best search question to ask or the subject wasn’t one of the most popular. Either way, several hours passed during which she scanned articles that hinted at the matters Grant had spoken of last night without success.
He appeared to be right about one thing: from what she was seeing, not many scientists wanted to ask whether conscious intent could affect the quantum field.
She did, however, gradually realize that some terms were appearing repeatedly without explanation, as if they were understood. And she realized there was a certain evasiveness when they came up. Either that or they were used within such strictly defined limits that she couldn’t get the meaning.
Finally she changed her search criteria from quantum physics and linked conscious with Princeton. Up popped a Web site link for the Princeton Engineering Anomalies Research Lab.
She might not have studied physics in depth, but as an accounting major with a minor in economics, she had studied a lot of statistics, and as she delved deeper she discovered that the things Grant had discussed in loose generalities were actually being investigated with mind-blowing results. While the ultimate conclusion was that conscious intent had such a small effect on random number generators that it could be ignored, the fact remained: the statistics showed the effect to be way, way beyond chance.
Good Lord! she thought. What a door to open: human thought could affect the functioning of a machine…or the rate of radioactive decay. In small ways, yes, but even those small ways were a window to a whole different view of the universe. And it further elucidated what Grant had meant about some scientists being afraid to ask the questions. Of course they were afraid to ask. None of them would want to be labeled fringe lunatics.
She sat back in her chair, stretched and thought about what she had just learned. Grant, whoever he was, hadn’t been spouting some kind of extremism last night, but a valid scientific viewpoint, however much mainstream science might try to skirt it. That much at least hadn’t been a sales job.
However, there was no way to search for him, not with only one name, first or last she didn’t know. No matter how many ways she tried it, the word grant came up more often for grant applications and awards than anything else. How convenient.
She sighed, then spoke aloud to the empty room. “Get over this obsession,” she told herself. “Just get over it. Load the damn shotgun if you’re that worried, and then forget about it.”
Not a normally obsessive person, her behavior, her contradictory responses, had begun to seriously trouble her. The man limped around town in the middle of the night, sat on a public park bench for a whole twenty minutes, had spent time last night trying to reassure her in some way, and there was nothing left to do except regain her own sense of proportion and rationality.
Sitting here at the computer working the “Grant problem” as if she had nothing better to do with her time was out of character.
Wasn’t it?
She sighed again and rubbed her eyes. “What is going on?” she asked the room. The room, of course, didn’t answer.
But some little voice in her head finally did.
It’s not about this guy, it’s about another guy. A guy who lied to you.
Was she really in some subconscious way trying to make Grant a stand-in for Jackson?
Oh, yeah. Now you’ve got it.
At once she leaned forward and pressed the button to hibernate her computer. Then she shoved back from her desk, realizing only as she stood that she had grown stiff from not moving for so long.
“Idiot,” she said to herself.
In the kitchen she made a fresh pot of coffee and a turkey sandwich.
Yeah, she was an idiot, she decided, but only because, however indirectly, she had opened that damn Pandora’s box again, the box named Jackson Harris.
That box containing a torrid fairy tale, an all-consuming eight-month romance that had ended in the heartstopping, earth-shaking discovery that he was a married man. That he had lied to her all along, claiming he was divorced. An instant of discovery and shock that had seemed to kill everything inside her in one icy blow.
Until the pain started. To this day she couldn’t say what hurt worse: losing love, being used or being betrayed so callously. It had certainly hurt to leave her job in Boston because she couldn’t face the constant reminders.
But at least she had managed to find her way home. Maybe she had thought it would all get better here. Instead, just as Grant had remarked last night, she’d brought her baggage with her. You can’t run from yourself. Probably one of the oldest clichés in the world. And so, so true, as Grant had pointed out.
She sat at her kitchen table and bit into her sandwich, thinking about the tangled mess of her mind. A mind that she always preferred to believe was relatively neat and orderly…yet as of this moment seemed anything but.
What was the psychological term? Transference? No, more like projection? Whatever, it disturbed her to think that she might be reacting to Grant in a way dictated by her experience with Jackson. After all, what had Grant done except sit on a park bench in the middle of the night? So maybe her suspicions resided less with his actions and the timing of them than they did with the horrendous betrayal she had suffered at Jackson’s hands. Maybe she felt uneasy and threatened for no other
