Chapter Fourteen

 

The voices of the conversation came abruptly to her ear. It had always been that way when a distant conversation was about her. She would hear it, as though some guardian angel had intended her to. Now, that angel seemed to be by her side.

“...come to our attention that you’ve brought a possible liability into our organization.”

“Nothing I can’t handle...”

“...handle it, should the need present itself.”

The voices belonged to Hadley, and some mysterious cohort, probably part of the group that he mentioned. They were talking about her; she knew it whenever her nerves fluttered, and she shuddered inside from what felt like her stomach dropping.

They spoke about killing her; Hadley must have found out about the notes.

She had to flee this place before the guards or Hadley saw her...or anyone else who may have been watching. She would think of some other way to help the kid once she took off in the car. The scattered gravel from the retired railroad tracks crunched louder under her feet the faster she moved. Her light blue VW loomed closer and closer in the small, off to the side, parking area.

When she reached it, she slammed the door shut, automatically locking it. Her breath was heavy, rasping; she had to quit smoking. The engine regurgitated as usual when she keyed the ignition. Not now, she thought, I don’t need this.

“Come on, you piece-a-shit!” She yelled through the small car, the engine ironically purring to life at the sound of her angry voice. It took her mere seconds to leave the remote, desolate part of town behind in a cloud of its own dust.

The farther away she drove, the more the mist in her head began to clear, and she could think of her next logical move. Thoughts ordered themselves into proper sequence, and she remembered something—a name. Just before they mentioned her, the ominous voice mentioned someone searching for the boy.

Wiley...Wiley...not a fool...

Wiley, she knew that name. In fact, there was a guy she waited on often in the diner who was rumored to be FBI. Ed, the owner, always referred to him as “The G-Man;” she always referred to him as “Mr. Wiley.” Could it be the same person? It made sense. She would take the risk, drive to the diner and find out. Thankfully, she hadn’t quit her job just yet. If Wiley was FBI, she was going to need him on her side, once she explained.

A maroon-colored Sedan appeared in the rearview mirror out of nowhere; it seemed to be trailing her. She stepped on the gas lightly, shifting her eyes from the road to the mirror, but the Sedan continued to follow her.

* * * *

Stu Wiley had a habit of trusting his intuition and being right almost every time. He hinted to the others that he might have a lead, but vocally distributing information, especially in public, was out of the question in this case. The Bureau had been searching for and following this group for years, but their capabilities were immense and far-reaching, achieving feats of espionage through a conglomeration of highly sophisticated psychic beings. That was how they managed to elude authorities for so many years...they listened.

He thought back to the discovery of the underground tunnel back in DC. The group had exhausted quite a few locations, and Wiley knew that the nation’s capital would be next to impossible for them to hibernate in, in the current day and age. He felt sure this time that the theory of Hadley being anywhere in the world was nothing more than a cat and mouse game, a wild goose chase, but any number of clichéd sayings would fit the theory he was now ready to dispel.

The signature style of “in plain sight,” or “right under the radar of the authorities,” was how Hadley and the group had operated throughout the years; it was a repetitive pattern maintained in many different ways from using the FBI as a cover, to the tunnel in DC back in the seventies, and now to the university’s investigative team.

It suddenly occurred to Wiley like the appearance of a lost object; what if Hadley and the group were functioning here, right amid the continuous humdrum of the small, Pennsylvania town? Sidney Pratt had suspected Hadley of being nearby in Pittsburgh. What if he was closer than that? Wiley thought.

He’d retrieved official blueprints of the entire county, combing with fine detail any underground locations: mines, waste facilities, anything that could be renovated to match the site in DC. There were many mining facilities in Pennsylvania, most in functioning utilization—those were of no interest to him.

There was one defunct mining facility situated amid a vast underground, and it was only ten minutes from where he sat. He knew of these mines from when he was a kid, but was never really sure what became of them. Could it be possible that Hadley could be so close? Why not? He had to get to Ryan somehow. What would make him remain here after taking the boy? It had to be more than just the use of the signature style.

It took him only minutes on his laptop to discover that those old mines had been renovated into a medical research facility. He felt warmer; now all he had to do was discover the sponsor of the medical research, probably another dummy company used as a cover for the group, or what if the facility itself was a dummy headquarters? He stared at the blueprints, his inner instinct swelling a surge through his body. It had to be, but if Hadley was there, it meant something was keeping him here, but what?

Silently, he felt like a lottery winner, and then the phone rang.

Surprised to see Ed’s Diner on his caller id, he answered it. It was Ed who nearly shouted in his ear...

“Hey, Stu, one of my girls here says she needs to see you. I’m not sure what she’s talking about, something about a missing boy or—”

Another voice interrupted Ed’s, as though the phone had been pulled away from him.

“Mr. Wiley, this is Ursula Masters. I’ve served you several times in here—dark haired waitress? Are you the one looking for the boy, Ryan?”

Wiley knew her, but the surprise of what she uttered stunned him speechless.

“If so, I know where he is, but you have to come now, I think someone has followed me.”

* * * *

“Whatever it is, it’s like it’s calling me back there.” Leah heaved a distressing sigh, lounging back in the comfortable chair in Susan’s office. They were continuing their earlier discussion of her recurring visions, while Dylan and Brett were visiting Sidney.

“I keep seeing the scenes of my life in that house over and over: the rocking chair, the spun spool of yarn that I followed down the hallway, Agnes, the basement, my mother. The scenes flash before me, faster and faster, like there’s a message I haven’t received.”

“And you continue to see things you didn’t see at the time, like your mother hanging, your father being strapped in a straight-jacket?” Susan had known this, and her point was that of confirmation.

Leah nodded, wiping away a perfect sized teardrop from her eye.

“Is there anything different about the scenes each time? You said you thought there might be a message?”

Leah recalled the visions, especially the last one; there was something different.

“The couple of times when the visions came to me in my dreams, I could hear breathing, a rapid, harsh, almost muffled breath. I kept moving closer and closer to the large, Victorian mirror that my mother had ordered me not to go near. I finally came upon it and looked, and this hideous face stared back at me. It wasn’t like anything I had ever seen before; it didn’t look human. It was distorted, mutated, and horribly grotesque.”

Leah conjured the first words she could think of to describe what stared back at her in the mirror just before she woke from the dreams that accentuated the horrid visions.

“That part never happened in my life,” she said. “I never got close to the mirror. It was a gigantic oval glass, so my mother was insistent that I not go near it.

“Leah, what are the early impressions that you have of your mother that linger with you today? What kind of a person did you see her as?”

Leah thought back to her mother, and how she and her father were two completely different people. Her memories of her were few.

“She was pushy, strict, but not really mean, just...selfish, now that I look back. I have always wondered why she married my father when she was so career oriented.”

“Leah, it could be that—”

Suddenly, the room was enveloped in a mist, and Leah saw a man jump out from behind Susan, who sat behind her desk, talking on, and blind to what Leah was seeing. Leah sat across from Susan’s desk, seeing the man in full view as he stepped closer and stood directly behind Susan.

Susan reacted to Leah’s unblinking eyes and parted lips.

“Leah, what’s wrong?”

Leah didn’t answer, only stared behind her.

“My God,” Susan said, jumping up from the chair.

“What are you seeing?”

“There’s a man behind you, Susan,” she said, pointing with her finger.

Susan turned and saw nothing, then stepped aside. The tall, structured man with reddish brown hair stared at Leah, having come to approach the seer. Unlike so many spirits she had seen, this one spoke inside her mind.

“Leah, I am Ian, Ryan’s father.”

The surprise when she told Susan whom she was seeing made them forget Cedar Manor. Leah leapt from the chair, facing the spirit and obtaining her position of control.

“Look,” he said, then pointed to his left. She looked to where he was pointing, and then through the mist appeared an entranceway, a tunnel, a set of old railroad tracks.

“Ryan,” he said, continuing to point. Then she caught a glimpse of Ryan, sitting on a bed in a room. Quickly, another face came and faded amid the mist, a man with dark hair and gray at the temples.

“Hadley,” he said, the words forming in her mind.

It was the first time she had seen Roman Hadley. The tracks, those old railroad tracks looked familiar. She continued to stare at the sight until the mist evaporated and Ian was gone, as though he never was there, and the room resumed as unbroken.

“Leah, talk to me,” Susan asked in a now calmer tone. “Is he still there?”

Leah turned to face her, eye to eye.

“I think I know where Ryan is.”

* * * *

Sidney sat up in bed as Dylan and Brett had just left his room. Dr. Talbot had called his rate of recovery astounding, but continued to warn against stress. That is why Sidney didn’t tell him what he had just told Dylan and Brett, that he was still hearing Ryan...

“Without getting upset, Sid, what has Ryan said?” Dylan had asked the question calmly with Sidney understanding that it was crucial to finding Ryan.

“He keeps calling my name,” Sidney said. “He mentions Hadley, but nothing else. I’m not so sure he understands or knows where he is. There was one other word he mentioned: testing.”

“Hadley is obviously testing the extent of his abilities,” Brett said.

“Yeah, but where? Sid, we are going to come back tonight in case you hear anything else. In the meantime, we have to tell this to Agent Wiley, after we retrieve Leah from Susan’s office.” Dylan stepped backwards to the door as he spoke.

Sidney looked up curiously.

“What’s wrong?”

“Nothing, she’s fine,” Dylan said, as he and Brett left the room.

Now, Sidney couldn’t help but recall Tracy’s ominous words that the voices he’d heard in the journey would be familiar for a reason. It was a clue, something that he was subconsciously aware of, but had inadvertently buried. He thought back to everything he’d seen during the journey, but it was the episode inside Susan’s office when he was a boy that kept coming back to him like a boomerang.

What was so specific about that day? He thought about Mark, the lost love of Susan’s life. He heard the voice again in his memory...

“Call her Suzy Q; and tell her that Mark loves her...”

He kept hearing it over and over, and something was not only familiar, but significant about that voice. He hadn’t realized it before, but the voice was like Ryan’s, which would mean...the voice was alive, not dead!

How could it be? Susan mentioned Mark being killed in Vietnam. Was it possible that he was still alive? But if Mark was alive, like Ryan had been, why was his voice so acutely familiar? He hadn’t heard it since that day—or had he?

Mark’s voice repeated in his mind, and then suddenly he heard the same voice in a different context, using words he’d heard spoken to him before...

“I can’t begin to tell you, Sidney, how impressed I am with the team’s research and accomplishments. Keep up the good work...”

Then the dialogue of a more recent instance interrupted.

“I am truly sorry for the loss of Tracy Kimball, Sidney. You all did the best you could...no one is to blame...”

The different words, spoken by the same voice, jumbled together.

“Suzy Q...can’t begin to tell you...Tracy Kimball...”

Sidney felt something like electricity flow through him at the realization that was dawning, a revelation that came to him in the peaceful, quiet confines of his room. It can’t be, he thought, but the voices of Mark and Roman Hadley were undeniably the same!

The heat of panic started to stifle him, and he exhaled in a long, dramatic release. He had to do something, learning by now to trust his intuitions. It didn’t matter if he was wrong. Ryan’s life was at stake, but if Roman Hadley and Mark was the same person, he had to tell Susan first...