Amanda's Eyes (14 page)

“His name is Bonner.  Samuel
Bonner.  Klein swears he’s one of the best.  Retired, but he still takes the
occasional referral, mostly for exceptional cases or as a personal favor to
friends, which I gather Klein is.”

Dressed in a royal-blue polo that
set off his pale blue eyes, Jack sat facing me in a high backed chair, a
telepresence I could almost feel.  Even long distance, the man packed a punch.

“Okay.  Where do I find him?”

“About five miles due west as the
crow flies.”

“He’s in Hobson’s Hope?  No way!”

“Address is Forty-four Chestnut.”

He accessed his UpLink, and a 3-D
real-time satellite’s eye-view of Hobson’s Hope materialized between us, a virtual
view within a virtual view.  Jack palmed the image and spread his hands apart,
initiating a dizzying zoom-in that leveled off to reveal ant-sized vehicles streaming
between miniature buildings.  He flicked to shift the focal point from Center City
to the west-side, then zoomed in closer to tighten on the front of a pretty
Cape Cod surrounded by a white picket fence.

“That’s the house.”

I studied the quaint cottage
dubiously.  “Far be it from me to quibble, but a one-and-a-half-story bungalow
isn’t my idea of a state-of-the-art medical facility.”  Not that I was eager
for a return visit to the hallowed halls of healing, but ….  “Wouldn’t it be
better if I met him at a clinic or hospital?”

Jack spun the image, revealing what
appeared to be a small addition jutting off the back of the house.  “Bonner may
call himself retired, but he likes to keep his hand in.  He managed to cut a
deal with the U of PA Medical School.  He donates his case files to their
library and shows up for the occasional lecture, they fund his backyard eye
clinic.  Strictly a cutting-edge setup, according to Klein.”

“All right.  If it’s good enough for
Klein, it’s good enough for me.”

The satellite view dissolved.

“He’ll be expecting you tomorrow
morning at nine,” Jack said.

“I’ll be there.  Thanks for setting
this up.  And thank Doc Klein for me.”  Word was my surgeon barely had time for
a cup of coffee, what with transplants out the wazoo.  Hence the need for a
pinch-hitter.  I cleared my throat.  “You … uh … didn’t mention this to my
family?”

He shook his head.  “Or Ramirez,
either, since she’s dating your brother, Kevin.  Klein wasn’t happy about leaving
the doc out of it, but I helped him see the light.  The last thing we need
right now is to have the Gregson clan riding to your rescue.”

“Right.  No use getting the folks in
an uproar; it’s probably nothing anyway.”

His ice-blue gaze searched my face.  “Care
to fill me in?”

Well, sure, Jack.  It’s like this: 
I’m seeing things. 
Yeah. 
That would go over big.

I shook my head.  “Like I said, it’s
probably no biggie.  Part of the healing process maybe.  I would rather not go
into it until I hear what the doctor has to say.”

He nodded, reluctantly I thought. 
“Have it your way.  But keep me posted.”

“You bet, and thanks again.”  I
ended the transmission, and Jack and his console vanished.

Washing a hand down my face, I stood
and crossed to the French doors.  It was nine p.m., and the temperature on the
tiny balcony that opened off my room had already dipped below freezing, but I hardly
noticed as I sank tiredly into a fan-backed chair and folded my forearms atop
the wrought-iron railing.  Dropping my chin onto the backs of my hands, I
stared moodily across Sadie’s densely shadowed backyard.   Tomorrow couldn’t
get here soon enough.

“You want my professional opinion?”

Samuel Bonner was short and round
and button-nosed, with skin the color of dark caramel and a bald pate fringed
in close-cropped frosty white.  His coffee-brown gaze, warm with gentle good
humor when he had greeted me at the door, was currently unreadable.

Bracing for the worst, I nodded.  “Let
me have it.”

“
Nada
.”

“What?”

“My professional opinion is
nada
.” 
He got up to turn on the lights and raise the blinds.  The abrupt transition
from shadowed to bright made me blink.  “No structural defects,” he continued,
as he came back to sit in the chair.  “The optic nerve has completely
regenerated, everything’s healed and functioning exactly as it should be.  I
would say my old friend Aaron did his usual damned fine job.”

I didn’t want to ask but had to.  “What
about brain damage?”

“Diagnostics say no.”

Bewildered, seesawing between relief
and a completely irrational sense of letdown, I glanced around the high-tech
lab.  What it lacked in square-footage it more than made up for in advanced
technology, all the equipment either hand-held or built-in.

I looked back at Bonner.  “So what’s
causing my … ah … problem?”

He didn’t answer for a minute, just
sat there with his head cocked and his wise old eyes staring holes in me.  I
waited for some kind of pronouncement, but the one I finally got wasn’t exactly
enlightening.

He rubbed his hands together and stood. 
“You up for some hot apple cider?”

Without knowing quite how I got
there, I found myself ensconced in a comfortable blue wing-backed chair in his
study, listening to the doc putter around in the kitchen.  Autumn sunlight spilled
into the room through a pair of windows between my chair and an aged leather
recliner, bathing the room’s contents in pale gold.  The beige carpet and
sturdy pine desk.  The books lining the wall behind the desk.  The crazy quilt of
photos on the wall to my right and the corpulent mass of butterscotch-striped fur
draped limply across the back of a floral-print settee.  If not for the intermittent
twitch of the tip of its tail, I might have thought the cat was dead.

“Here we are,” announced Bonner,
arriving with two steaming mugs.

He had traded his lab coat for a red
cardigan.  Passing me a cup fragrant with apple, cinnamon, and nutmeg, he settled
into the recliner, flashing a quick glimpse of old-fashioned tan suspenders
bisected by a bright red stripe.

He took a drink and gave his lips an
exaggerated smack.  “Just what the doctor ordered.”

My own gray stoneware mug was at
half-mast when the cat launched itself into my lap, briefly kneading my thighs
before it flopped down and oozed across my blue jeans.  The amber eyes closed,
the tail tip flicked.

“Make yourself at home,” I suggested.

“Fat Murray,” said Bonner with an
indulgent grin.

“Nice to meet you, Murray.”  I scratched
the broad, flat head right behind the ears and got his motor running in a throaty
purr.

“He’s got a lousy BMI,” the doc
admitted cheerfully, “but he’s good company.”

“How long have you had him?”

Bonner’s eyes crinkled in amusement. 
“You’re not a cat person, are you?  Nobody
has
a cat; cats either condescend
to live with you, or they don’t.  Murray’s been with me about seven years. 
Since my wife, Katie, died.”

He raised his cup toward an
eight-by-ten of a woman surrounded by a lush garden bursting with colorful blooms. 
She smiled out from under the wide brim of a straw hat, one pink-gloved hand on
her hip, the other loosely cradling the handle of a wide, shallow basket.

“She was lovely.  Were you married
long?”

“Fifty-five years,” he boasted.  “You
know, if it weren’t for Katie, you and I wouldn’t be sitting here, drinking
this fine apple cider.  Retiring to Hobson’s Hope was her idea.  Said she was
tired of neighborhood-surveillance drones and traffic jams stacked clear up to
the clouds.  Wanted life at a slower pace.  Someplace quiet, with less crime. 
She loved it here.  We both did.”  Gazing at the photo, he smiled fondly and
shook his head.  “Lord, I miss that woman.”

“I’m sorry.  It must be—  Ow!”

Bonner leaned toward me as I hastily
put down my cup to rub the back of my left hand.  “Nipped you, huh?”

I cast a wary glance at my
assailant, who had lifted his head off my leg to give me the evil eye.  “Yeah. 
Maybe he had a bad dream.  I wasn’t even touching him.”

“Well, there you go.  Murray gets
cranky if you stop petting him before he decides he’s had enough.”  He beamed
like a proud papa.  “He’s quite the character.”

“So I see.”  Discretion being the
better part of valor, I started petting again.  Once Murray was purring, I felt
safe enough to shift my focus back to Bonner.  “Listen, Doc, about my eyes.”

Leaning back in his chair, he
regarded me thoughtfully.  “You say you’ve been seeing double?”

“Well ... yeah.”  Silence,
accompanied by a clearly skeptical lift of his left eyebrow that made my face
heat.  “Sort of,” I mumbled.

“Define
sort of
.”

Go ahead, A.J., give it to him
straight
.  I almost
laughed out loud but caught myself.  No matter how I described what I had seen,
he would think I had a screw loose.

That would make two of us.

“I can’t help you, if you’re not
completely honest with me,” he said.

It was a bald statement of fact
delivered too gently to be an ultimatum, too logically and calmly to be
anything but the truth.  With that one short sentence the doc put me smack dab between
a rock and a hard place with only one way out.  So, taking a deep breath, I told
him.

I expected rank disbelief, possibly an
SOS to the guys in the white coats, but aside from a slight sharpening of his
gaze during my narration, he didn’t immediately react.  Once my tale was told,
silence fell like a ton of bricks between us.  I would have given a year’s pay
to know what was going on in his mind, but his face wasn’t giving his thoughts away. 
Three minutes later the tension was approaching unbearable, and I was composing
a retraction. 
I’m kidding, doc!

Then he put down his cup.  “Well,
now.”  He clasped his hands atop his chest and stared at me.  “Well.”

I grimaced self-consciously.  “I
know it sounds crazy, but—”

Unlacing his fingers, he held up a
hand.  “You say the first episode involved Benjamin Palmer?”

The way he asked encouraged me to
take a shot in the dark.  “You know him?”

“I’ve known Ben and his mother for
years; we attend the same church.  Wilma Palmer is a tall, sturdy, raw-boned
woman and one of the unhappiest people I know.  I never met her husband—he died
before Katie and I moved here—but rumor has it, Edgar was henpecked to a
fare-thee-well.  Benjamin gets the same treatment.  Has, I gather, ever since he
was a little, bitty bump.

“Lord only knows how—Wilma keeps him
on a short leash—but he managed to make a lady friend a few years back, and it
looked like he might finally have a chance to get out from under his mama’s
thumb and have a life of his own.  But as soon as the relationship got serious,
Wilma ran the woman off.  Katie passed not long after that, and Ben stopped by
to pay his condolences.  One thing led to another, and we got to talking, and
out the story came.”  He paused meaningfully.  “You wouldn’t know it to look at
him, but Ben Palmer is eaten up with rage.  The man is a volcano waiting to
erupt.”

The implied connection sank in
slowly.  He hadn’t said it in so many words, but I finally realized Bonner was
suggesting I had developed some kind of freaky ESP.  Murray must have felt me
tense in reaction, because he jumped off my lap and stalked away in a huff.

“You’re saying I somehow tuned into
that?” I asked, hoping I had misunderstood.

“You tell me.”

“Come on, Doc.  That’s …” 
Loony
tunes. 
But I settled for, “… impossible.”

“You think so?  Tell me, Amanda, did
you happen to catch the news last night?”

“No, why?”

“Activate personal computer
interface,” he said.  A pinpoint of light sparked in the air between our chairs,
elongated vertically, and finally expanded horizontally, forming a virtual
monitor.  “The girl in the second incident.  What did you say her name was?”

“Nelson,” I replied slowly.  “Tina
Nelson.”

“News search.  Source: 
Hobson
Herald.
  Date:  yesterday.  Keywords:  
Tina Nelson
.”

The bronze starburst slowly spinning
mid-screen was replaced by the image of a young female reporter.  The stamp of
shock clear on her face, the correspondent gazed solemnly into the camera, as a
glittering background welter of red-and-blue lights thrown by an army of police
cruisers splashed the walls of a white Colonial.  Two more cruisers hovered
over the scene, their spotlights bathing both house and yard in a stark white
glare.

“Shortly after nine p.m. this
evening,” began the reporter, “police responded to a report of a possible
domestic disturbance at the residence of City Councilman Peter Nelson and found
the Nelsons’ fifteen-year-old daughter, Christina, bruised and bloodied from an
apparent assault.  The first officers to arrive at the scene were met at the
door by the Councilman’s wife, Carla Nelson, who insisted everyone was fine and
suggested they contact their dispatcher for an address correction.  A request
for permission to search the premises had no sooner been denied, when a woman’s
scream prompted the officers to force their way past the protesting Nelson.”

A yearbook-style photo of Tina
popped into the upper right-hand corner of the picture as the reporter
continued, “Arrested on suspicion of felony child abuse and serious bodily
injury to a child, both Councilman and Mrs. Nelson are being held without
bond.  Christina Nelson was transported to Hobson Memorial, where she is listed
in serious but stable condition.  We’ll bring you more on this shocking story
as details emerge.  This is Nala Halawagi reporting for
The Hobson Herald
.”

“Exit,” Bonner commanded quietly,
but I barely heard him and hardly noticed when the screen dematerialized.

Staring into the now-empty space
between our chairs, I had the distinct impression time and tide had ground to a
halt.  If not for the fact that I could hear it pounding deep and slow in my
ears, I would have sworn my heart had stopped, too.

“That’s … I saw— ”  I broke off, my
head wagging a feeble denial.  “But that can’t be.”  I focused on Bonner. 
“Please tell me there’s a rational explanation for this.”

He regarded me pensively for a
moment before asking, “Are you a scripture-reading woman?”

After trying, and failing, to guess
where this was headed, I shrugged.  “Not since my parents made us go to Sunday
school.  Why?”

Opening a shallow drawer in the
coffee table, he pulled out a Bible.  Judging by its battered, brown-leather
cover and the fact that Bonner almost immediately found what he was looking
for, this particular Good Book had seen years of near-constant handling.

“Here,” he said, handing me the New
King James and indicating a verse with his index finger.  “Read this.”

The Bible felt cool and weighty in
my hands as I focused on the line he indicated. 
Man looks at the outward
appearance, but the LORD looks at the heart.

I slowly lifted my gaze to meet his. 
“Doctor Bonner—”

“Sam.”

“Okay, Sam.  I hope you’re not
suggesting I’m seeing  ….  I mean, you can’t actually believe ….”

“You have a better hypothesis?”  He relieved
me of the Bible and put it back in the drawer, then leaned forward in the
recliner, elbows on his thighs, hands clasped between his knees.  “You’re a
reporter, look at the facts.  You came across two perfect strangers.  In each
of these encounters you saw … well, a kind of vision, I guess you could call it. 
A revelation of the person those individuals keep hidden from the rest of us. 
Today you got objective proof of that.  What more do you need?”

Inspiration tossed me a lifeline,
and I grabbed it with both hands.  “It won’t wash, Doc.  If I could see
people’s—”

“—Hearts?” he offered helpfully.

“Whatever,” I muttered, backpedaling
warily.  “If I
could
see that way, why those two?  Why not everybody?”

“Good question.  Let me think about
it.”  Lips pursed and eyes narrowed, he did.  “Right off the top of my head? 
Seems to me the emotional state of the subject could be the determining
factor.  Both individuals were pretty upset when you ran into them, right? 
Probably took every ounce of self-discipline they had to keep up appearances.

“Think of it this way:  Under
certain types of acute physical stress, we know the body diverts resources from
one system to bolster another.  Like when blood flow to the extremities
decreases to preserve the vital organs.  Maybe extreme
emotional
stress triggers
the same kind of exchange, the psyche drawing energy from one quadrant to bolster
another.  When strong emotions force an individual to divert resources to shore
up the
external
, the
internal
, that part of us scripture calls
the heart, might be stripped of a layer of concealment.  Most of us still can’t
see that innermost person, but for no physiological reason I can detect or
fathom, you obviously can.”  He paused, clearly waiting for me to respond.  When
I didn’t, “Well?  What do you think?”