My roommate was a pretty little thing who was the daughter of a famous hip-hop artist. Gita had shaved off all her hair and had a line of piercings down the curve of her spine, linked by a thin platinum chain, which made me wonder how she slept on her back. She talked to an invisible posse that was absolutely real to her. When one of those imaginary people apparently came after her with a knife, she had run into traffic and gotten hit by a taxi. She was diagnosed as a paranoid schizophrenic. At the time I lived with her, she believed that she was being controlled by aliens through cell phones. Every time someone tried to send a text, Gita went ballistic.
One night, Gita started rocking back and forth in her bed, saying, “I’m gonna get struck by lightning. I’m gonna get struck by lightning.”
It was a clear summer night, mind you, but she wouldn’t stop. She kept this up, and an hour later, when a thunderstorm cell came sweeping through the area, she started to scream and rip at her own skin. A nurse came in, trying to calm her down. “Honey,” she said, “the thunder and the lightning are outside. You’re safe in here.”
Gita turned to her, and in that one moment I saw nothing but clarity in her eyes. “You know nothing,” she whispered.
There was a drumroll of thunder, and suddenly the window shattered. A neon arc of lightning staggered in, seared the rug, and burned a hole the size of a fist into the mattress beside Gita, who started rocking harder. “I told you I was gonna get struck by lightning,” she said. “I told you I was gonna get struck by lightning.”
I tell you this story by way of explanation: The people we define as crazy just might be more sane than you and me.
“My father’s not going to be helpful,” Jenna insists. “We shouldn’t even bother.”
Again, my cold reading skills shine: The way she cuts her eyes to the left like that, the way she is now chewing on her fingernail—Jenna’s lying, too. Why?
“Jenna,” I ask, “can you run to the car and see if I left my sunglasses in there?”
She gets up, more than happy to escape this conversation.
“All right.” I wait for Virgil to meet my gaze. “I don’t know what you’re up to, but I don’t trust you.”
“Excellent. Then we feel exactly the same way about each other.”
“What are you not telling her?”
He hesitates, deciding whether or not to trust me, I’m sure. “The night the caregiver was found dead, Thomas Metcalf was nervous. Antsy. It could have been because his wife and daughter were missing at the time. And it could have been because he was already showing signs of a breakdown. But it also could have been a guilty conscience.”
I lean back, crossing my arms. “You think Thomas is a suspect. You think Alice is a suspect. Seems to me you think everyone’s to blame except yourself, for saying in the first place that the death was an accident.”
Virgil looks up at me. “I think Thomas Metcalf might have been abusing his wife.”
“That’s a damn good reason to run away,” I say, thinking out loud. “So you want to meet with him and try to get a reaction out of him.”
When Virgil shrugs, I know I’m right.
“Did you ever consider what that might do to Jenna? She already thinks her mother abandoned her. You’re going to take off her rose-colored glasses and show her that her father was a bastard, too?”
He shifts. “She should have thought of that before she hired me.”
“You’re really an ass.”
“That’s what I get paid for.”
“Then for all intents and purposes, you ought to be in a different tax bracket.” I narrow my gaze. “You and I know you’re not getting rich off this case. So what do you get out of it?”
“The truth.”
“For Jenna?” I ask. “Or for you, because you were too lazy to find it out ten years ago?”
A muscle tics in his jaw. For a second I think I’ve crossed the line, that he is going to get up and storm off. Before he can, though, Jenna reappears. “No sunglasses,” she says. She is still holding the stone, still fastened around her neck.
I know that some neurologists think that autistic kids have brain synapses so close together and firing in such quick succession that they cause hyperawareness; that one of the reasons children on the spectrum rock or stim is to help them focus instead of having all sensations bombard them at once. I think clairvoyance isn’t really all that much different. In all probability, neither is mental illness. I asked Gita, once, about her imaginary friends. Imaginary? she repeated, as if I were the one who was crazy, for not seeing them. And here’s the kicker—I understood what she was talking about, because I’d been there. If you notice someone talking to a person you can’t see, she may be a paranoid schizophrenic. But she may also just be psychic. The fact that you can’t see the other half of the conversation doesn’t mean it’s not truly happening.