Page 35 of Lion's Share
After letting out a frustrated noise, Ben closed the laptop and rose from his chair. He knew a few more bits and pieces than he had before he started poking around, but none of it seemed to make a coherent whole. And although he supposed he could have done more research on the spontaneous development of telepathic abilities, he knew he was tired and needed to give his brain a break. None of this was going to change overnight.
He hoped.
But the next morning seemed like a typical enough start to the day in Silver Hollow — overcast and cool, with the sun playing hide-and-seek with the clouds, teasing him that it might decide to come out after all.
Fat chance.
Around ten-thirty, after he’d showered and gotten dressed and checked his email to make sure he hadn’t missed anything important, his phone pinged. At once, he picked it up, thinking that might be Sidney reaching out to see if he wanted to have lunch or something, but instead, the message was from Marjorie Tran.
I’m packed up and ready to go, but I wanted to talk to you before I leave town. Do you have time to meet for a few minutes?
Considering how open his day looked, Ben had nothing but time.
Sure. Come on over.
Five minutes.
Sure enough, she was on his doorstep exactly five minutes later. Once again, she was wearing a black tank top, army green cargo pants, sneakers, and not a speck of makeup. And, as usual, her expression was so neutral he couldn’t get the slightest hint of what might be going through her mind.
Sidney’s newfound powers would have been especially helpful in a situation like this, but because they weren’t what you could call reliable, Ben knew he’d have to go on his own instincts.
“Want some water or tea?” he asked out of habit, but Marjorie immediately shook her head.
“No, I’m fine.” She paused there, then added, “Well, ‘fine’ is probably a misnomer. What I’ve found here is fascinating, and I wish I didn’t have to leave. Unfortunately, I couldn’t find anyone to take my class tomorrow, or I would have stayed longer.”
And thank God for that. During her time in Silver Hollow, Marjorie had managed to avoid any entanglements with Rebecca Morse or her partner, and Ben wanted to keep it that way.
“So…what exactly have you found?” he asked.
Marjorie pulled the iPad out of her satchel and swiped to a series of charts and graphs. “I’ve been getting some very strange readings with my equipment. The electromagnetic field fluctuations here aren’t completely random after all — there is a pattern to them, almost like a pulse or heartbeat.” She handed him the iPad so he could see the display better. “Look at this. Every twelve hours, there’s a spike in the readings, followed by a series of smaller waves that gradually diminish over the next few hours. Then the cycle repeats. Sometimes the spike is bigger, sometimes smaller, but the pattern is generally consistent.”
Ben studied the jagged lines on the screen, trying to make sense of what he was seeing. “Any idea what could be causing something like that?”
“That’s the million-dollar question.” Marjorie took the tablet back from him and scrolled to another screen. “I’ve never seen anything like it before. The closest comparison I can make is to the electromagnetic signatures you get from certain types of particle accelerators, but even those don’t have this kind of rhythmic consistency.” She paused there and appeared to weigh her words before she went on, “You’ve been here longer than I have, and you seem to know the town pretty well.”
“I don’t know about that,” he protested. “I just moved here last month.”
The way her eyes narrowed told him she didn’t think too much of that argument. “That’s still better than a couple of days. Anyway, have you noticed anything unusual happening around the times when these spikes occur?”
Ben’s thoughts immediately went to the portal, to the times when the unicorn — and more lately, the griffin — had appeared, to Sidney’s psychic flash yesterday. But he couldn’t exactly share any of that information with Marjorie.
“What kind of unusual?” he asked, hoping he sounded noncommittal and not as if he was hiding the mother of all secrets from her.
“Electronic interference, for one thing. My equipment has been going haywire at certain times. Car alarms going off for no reason. Street lights flickering. That sort of thing.” She stopped there and was quiet for a moment, almost as if she was thinking of something else and trying to figure out the best way to phrase it. “Or…maybe people acting strangely? Reporting headaches, disorientation, anything like that?”
Marjorie sounded almost diffident as she asked the question, and he thought he could understand why. It was one thing to be dealing with physical phenomena…electrical glitches and cell phones dropping out, waves and patterns that could be easily measured. People’s reactions to those phenomena were an entirely different ball of wax, however.
He thought of how Sidney had been able to see into Rebecca Morse’s mind…or even how she’d been able to communicate with the unicorn on a very basic level. “I don’t know for sure,” he said slowly. “But you know how small towns are — people don’t always talk about anything that sounds too out of the ordinary.”
Marjorie nodded and didn’t look too disappointed. “I figured as much. The thing is, these readings are so significant that I’m probably going to have to file a report when I get back to Davis. The university has protocols for this kind of anomalous data, especially when it involves potential safety concerns for a populated area.”
Ben’s stomach knotted with sudden worry, although he tried his best to continue to look neutral and noncommittal. “What kind of safety concerns?”
“Electromagnetic fields of this intensity could potentially interfere with pacemakers, insulin pumps, that sort of thing,” Marjorie replied, not looking too perturbed by any of those possibilities, as if it was all still an abstraction for her and not much more. “And if the source is something geological — maybe some kind of unusual mineral deposit — there could be other implications.” She shrugged. “I don’t want to alarm anyone unnecessarily, but I also can’t in good conscience ignore data like this.”
No, probably not. He hadn’t even thought about what the power outages might mean in a broader sense, how they might affect the health and well-being of the people of Silver Hollow. “So…what happens when you file your report?”
She slid the iPad back in her satchel and said, “It depends on what the review committee thinks. They might send a larger research team to do a more comprehensive study. Or they could contact other agencies — USGS, maybe even some other federal departments if they think there’s a broader environmental concern.”
