The Last Echo
Page 53

Violet thought about what Sam had told her, about his ability being different from Rafe’s, the garden-variety sort of psychometry.
Sara kept talking, not needing to be prompted now. “The more research I did, the more fascinated I became. I tested Rafe, giving him more files, letting him handle more evidence and items from the cases—mostly old ones that had already been solved—so I could gauge his accuracy. Sometimes it would take days, even weeks, but he was pretty good. He got about seventy-five percent of them right. The others . . .” She shrugged, her lips curving downward. “. . . he just came up ‘blank.’ He said he didn’t sense anything at all.
“In the meantime, I was trying to find out if there were others with gifts like his. I started putting out feelers and kept coming up empty. People at work were starting to look at me like I was crazy, and maybe I was. And then, one day, I heard about a girl.
“She was in foster care, and was being bumped from house to house. She was only fifteen and had already been in twenty-four foster homes. No one wanted her. She got in trouble at every school she attended. She was truant on a regular basis, fell asleep in class, and was being bullied by other kids. Yet somehow she managed to maintain a three-point-eight-three GPA, despite move after move. The school administrators accused her of cheating on more than one occasion.
“A police officer actually brought her to my attention after she called them about her foster dad, a family man everyone in the community admired. Turns out he was a serial ra**st they’d been trying to find for years . . . and somehow she knew.”
Violet was intrigued. Was the girl Krystal? It wasn’t hard to imagine Krystal having difficulty getting along in foster care with her outspoken personality and her unusual looks. Most foster parents probably hoped for kids who slipped a little more under the radar than Krystal did.
“When I met her,” Sara continued, “she was angry and withdrawn and reluctant to even talk to me. I thought that maybe introducing her to Rafe would help, but he refused—he was still dealing with his own issues—so I was on my own with her. It took nearly two months to get her to open up to me, but when she finally did, she revealed everything.
“She explained the myriad of ways she’d alienated her foster parents. At first, she didn’t know she had an ability at all, but she’d understood that she was different because she recognized things that the other kids didn’t. She knew when her fifth foster mother was defrauding the system by collecting checks for a child who’d run away. She knew too when her third and eighth foster fathers were abusing other girls in the home. And she would tell everyone who would listen: caseworkers, teachers, babysitters, even the foster parents themselves. But she found out quickly that no one believes a six-year-old, especially one with a history of making unsubstantiated claims. All she had were her ‘feelings,’ and feelings weren’t enough to file charges, only enough to get a little girl moved to the next home.
“In the end, though, she’d just stopped communicating at all, deciding it was best if she remained silent at all times. Most of the foster homes got tired of all the calls from the school because she was ‘unresponsive.’ But she couldn’t keep silent about her feelings at the last house even if it meant she had go back in the system again. And by the time I met her, she felt like she was some sort of freak.”
Something Sara said was bothering Violet. “Wait, when you say ‘feelings,’ do you mean she was empathic? As in Gemma?”
“Right. Gemma. Who did you think I meant?” Sara asked.
“I don’t know, I guess I thought you were talking about . . . someone else.” Violet tried to imagine Gemma as the lonely foster kid that Sara described, withdrawn and uncommunicative. Definitely not the Gemma she knew. “So what happened? Where did she end up?”
“Let’s just say it wasn’t hard for me to get approval to be a foster parent, and by the time I broached the subject with Gemma about coming to live with us, I’d already earned her trust. She couldn’t wait to get out of the system.” Sara scowled, her brows creasing. “I think Rafe’s still mad that I never consulted him.”
Violet’s head was spinning now. “Wait a sec.” She held up her hand; it was almost too much. “So you’re saying Gemma lives with you and Rafe?”
Violet took the coffee Sara handed her, even though the smell of it did nothing to soothe the churning in her stomach. They were in the kitchen now, and Violet was sitting at the same table where she’d watched Gemma reading Jay’s palm. She reached for the sugar.
“And she still lives with you?” Violet finally asked, trying to wrap her head around what she’d just heard. It was almost weirder than the fact that Sara was Rafe’s sister.
Sara nodded, taking the seat across from Violet. “She does. And it works out rather well for us. Well, for Gemma and me,” she corrected. “Rafe and Gemma . . .” She hesitated. “They’re like oil and water. Rafe can be . . . stubborn.” She shook her head exasperatedly. “And Gemma’s not much better. It’s like having two toddlers living under the same roof sometimes.” And then her expression morphed into a wide grin. “Or two teenagers, I guess.”
Violet didn’t know why it bothered her so much that no one had told her this before.
She just frowned into her coffee, disappointment weighing on her. Sara reached across the table to lay her hand over Violet’s. Her touch was firm but reassuring, and nothing like her brother’s. “I’m sorry, Violet. It’s hard for kids like Gemma and Rafe to open up, I suppose. They’ve considered themselves outsiders for so long, they have a hard time trusting anyone.”