Spark by Catherine Friend

Author:Catherine Friend [Friend, Catherine]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781626399310
Publisher: Bold Strokes Books
Published: 2017-05-31T04:00:00+00:00

* * *

Dr. Raj still hadn’t come up with anything. We talked every day, and he’d go into painful detail about this theory or that, but ultimately nothing he said reassured me that my body-switching days were over. I obsessed over the weather reports as if my life depended on them. Every morning, I raced to the kitchen window and searched the sky for cloudy wisps that might gang up and start a thunderstorm.

One day I couldn’t paint and I couldn’t bear to sit in the flat, so I walked all the way down to Trafalgar Square and the National Gallery. I returned to Dr. Rajamani’s basement exhibit and stood in front of each of the twelve scans, staring at them as if one of them held the answer to my problem. As I moved from scan to scan, my spirits sank because each scan was nearly identical, a mishmash of red and green and blue, with slender threads of white visible at the outer edges.

Then it hit me. The scan in front of me had much more white than the others. I checked all twelve, and found one more just like it. These two had been the only ones to catch my eye the day Chris and I had attended the exhibit’s opening. I called Dr. Raj, and he answered right away.

“Jamie Maddox, I am studying this. Be patient.”

I told him about the huge amounts of white in the two framed scans.

I could hear his confusion. “Of course, I did notice that as I prepared the exhibit, but I could find no data to explain it. Give me the patient numbers of the two with more white, if you please.”

I read off the two numbers and waited while he checked his research. “Hmm, the reason there was no more data on those two subjects is that they dropped out of the study after only one session.”

Excitement pulsed through me. “I’ll bet one of them was Ray Lexvold.”

“Yes, one was Ray, and the other was Meg Warren.”

“Dr. Raj, it can’t be a coincidence that the two scans with all that white never came back. We know that Ray was sent back in time. What if Meg was as well?” I asked Dr. Raj for her phone number and address. Maybe I could track her down and eliminate her as another traveler.

I had time, so took the Tube to Meg’s Soho flat. She didn’t reply to my buzz from the locked vestibule, but someone leaving held the door open for me. I climbed the narrow stairs, which were clean as freshly-fallen Minnesota snow, then found number Three A. The hallway smelled of furniture polish. I knocked, but no one came to the door.

I tried twice more, with the same results, then a door down the hallway opened. An elderly woman popped her curly gray head out and glared at me. “No matter how much ye knock and disturb the rest of us, ye can’t bring a person to answer her door when she isn’t there.

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