“Okay, then, tell me what you saw. Why are you so convinced you’re going to be killed?”
Sarah didn’t respond for several minutes as she transferred the thawed stew to the pot on the stove and began stirring it as it heated. All her attention seemed to be fixed on the task. And when she did begin speaking, Tucker thought that her voice was very steady the way someone’s was when they were telling you something that scared the living shit out of them.
“Because I saw my grave. Waiting for me.”
“Sarah, that doesn’t have to mean—”
She nodded jerkily. “There are other things I don’t remember, images that terrified me. But the grave…that was all too clear. It has a tombstone, and the tombstone is already inscribed. It has my name on it. In the…waking nightmare…I’m falling toward it, into it, so fast I don’t see the date of—of my death. But the month is October, and the year is this year. And just as the darkness of the grave closes over me, I hear them applauding. And I know they’ve won. I know they’ve killed me.”
“They?”
“The shadows.”
“Sarah, shadows can’t hurt you.”
She looked at him with old eyes. “These can. And will.”
Tucker watched her as she turned to check on the steaming stew and put the thawing bread in the oven. There was a lot for him to think about. On the face of it, his first inclination was to ascribe her “waking nightmare” to something she’d eaten or a vivid imagination; as badly as he wanted to believe in precognitive abilities, he had yet to find a genuine psychic, and years of frustration had inured him to disillusionment.
He certainly had no proof that Sarah Gallagher was indeed psychic. The information he had gathered seemed to indicate that she was, and those witnesses who claimed to have heard her predictions prior to later events seemed both reliable and reputable. But there was no way to be sure that her “predictions” had not come from some as-yet-undiscovered means of foreknowledge that had nothing to do with so-called extrasensory perception.
Each of the “predictions” he knew of could, after all, be rationally explained, given a few reasonable possibilities. Months before, she had been mugged on her way home one night, and the resulting head injury had put her into a coma for sixteen days. She could have overheard information while in that coma, for instance, and—consciously, perhaps—forgotten where it had come from. That could explain her apparent foreknowledge of the early birth of a nurse’s baby, which had been her first recorded prediction. Some doctor with a suspicion of what could happen might have mentioned it within Sarah’s hearing. And though her prediction of a Chicago hotel fire that had killed forty people certainly seemed remarkable, Tucker had discovered that one of the men later arrested for arson had been treated for a minor traffic injury in the same Richmond hospital where Sarah had lain in a coma. It was a coincidence that bothered him.
Other minor predictions she had made could—with some ingenuity—also be linked to her stay in the hospital. Tucker had utilized quite a bit of ingenuity, so he knew it could be done. He hadn’t yet been able to explain away her apparent foreknowledge of several murders apparently committed by a serial killer in California, but he was half-convinced he could, given enough time.
All of which, of course, raised the question of why he had bothered to seek out Sarah Gallagher at all.
“You want so badly to believe.” Her voice was quiet, her gaze direct as she turned to look at him.
“Do I?” He wasn’t quite as unsettled, this time, by her perception—extrasensory or otherwise.
Instead of directly answering that question, Sarah said, “I can’t perform for you, Tucker. I can’t go down that list of questions you have in your mind and answer them one by one as if it’s some final exam. I can’t convince you of something you need irrefutable proof to believe. That’s not the way this works.”
“You mean it’s like believing in God?” His voice was carefully neutral. “It requires faith?”
“What it requires is admitting the possible. Believing the evidence of your eyes and ears without trying to explain it all away. Accepting that you’ll never be able to cross every t and dot every i. And most of all, it requires a willingness to believe that science isn’t the ultimate authority. Just because something can’t be rationally explained on the basis of today’s science doesn’t mean it isn’t real.”
“That sounds like the party line,” Tucker said dryly, having heard the same sort of “answers” for years.
She shook her head. “Look, I never believed in the paranormal, in psychics, myself. When I thought about it, which wasn’t often, I just assumed it was either a con of some kind or else coincidence—anything that could somehow be explained away. Not only was I a skeptic, I simply didn’t care; I had no interest in anything paranormal. It didn’t matter to me.”