“That one won’t.”
Still edgy, she asked, “Why are you doing this, Tucker? Why are you getting involved in my problems?”
“We’ve already discussed that, remember?”
“Because you want to keep me alive long enough to find out if I’m for real?”
When he answered, it was slowly. “I know you’re for real, Sarah. I know you’re not…a charlatan, not faking psychic ability for some reason of your own. I know that you genuinely believe you can see the future.”
“You just don’t believe I can. Which is one reason why we’re out here, right? So you can see if they come the way I saw them.” She tried not to sound defensive.
Again, he hesitated before responding. “That’s one reason. To see something that hasn’t happened yet…of all the psychic abilities, that’s the one I find most difficult to believe. How can you see what doesn’t yet exist? How can the human mind possibly do that?”
Sarah closed her eyes. “Do you think it’s any easier, any more believable, to see…a place you’ve never been, even though it exists? To see something that happened long ago in the past, when you weren’t there? To have someone touch your hand and know something about them, something so secret they don’t even tell themselves?”
“I don’t know. I suppose not.” He sounded a bit wary.
Doesn’t like the idea that I might know all his secrets. “You don’t believe in those things either. You always think there must be some logical explanation, some…deception involved.”
“I know you aren’t trying to deceive anyone.”
“Ah. Then I’m either crazy, or I’m telling the truth.”
“The truth as you believe it to be.”
“Which is just another way of saying I’m crazy. Thanks.” I hear voices in my head. You’d really think I was crazy if I told you about them.
“No, that’s not what I’m saying. Hell, I don’t know what I’m saying. I just…I can’t blindly accept the party line, Sarah. I can’t tell myself I could see a unicorn if I only believed they were real. It’s not the way I’m wired.”
Quietly, she said, “And yet I’ve never met anyone who wanted so desperately to believe.”
To that, he said nothing.
Sarah lay there in silence for a while, her eyes closed. She heard his occasional faint movements, smelled the coffee he drank, and mentally looked at his face.
It was a good face, but it puzzled her a great deal and made her feel more than a little apprehensive. What made a man like Tucker? He had achieved unusual success in his chosen field, penning bestseller after bestseller that enjoyed critical as well as commercial success. She had read several of his novels, though she hadn’t mentioned that to him. They were clever, those stories, not only entertaining but intelligent and well researched, peopled with vividly alive characters, and left a reader satisfied.
He was one of those semifamous authors who had not quite crossed the line into mainstream celebrity; his name was very well-known, but his face was unlikely to be recognized on the street. At least two of his novels had been made into films, but Sarah had read that he wanted nothing to do with that interpretation of his work—he wrote books, other people made films—and so had taken no part in the process.
So. He was wealthy enough that he probably wouldn’t have to write another word for the rest of his life if that was his choice. Successful enough to have reached the peak of a difficult and demanding profession while still in his thirties. He was single. Did he have family, friends he cared about?
Behind her closed lids another face appeared, clear as if it were a color photograph, and she studied it for several seconds. A pretty face. A face she didn’t know—and yet did. She knew the face, the woman. She knew her name. Lydia. She knew what Lydia was to Tucker. She knew what had happened to her.
It was no vision, no dramatic sequence of images and sounds. It was simply a knowing, a certainty of facts she should not have known. It had happened to her before since the mugging, but infrequently, and only with people she had known well.
Never before with a stranger, until Tucker.
Sarah opened her eyes as the face faded into darkness, and for a moment she was tempted to tell him what she had seen, what she knew. But she didn’t. In the last few months, she had learned too well the costly lesson that even the people who wanted to hear the truth all too often hated the truthsayer for telling them. So he was going to have to ask her. When he was ready, when he stopped doubting her, then he would ask her. Only then would she tell him what he so desperately needed to know.
Unable to bear the silence any longer, she said, “All this isn’t interrupting your work, is it?”
“No. I’d only just started a new book, and it wasn’t coming together very well. A break will do me good.”
“Just a little break to go on the run with a hunted psychic.”