Night Game (GhostWalkers, #3)(60)

She believed him. She rarely believed anyone, not really. Not all the way. But with Raoul, she felt almost as if she knew him intimately, the real Raoul, not the one every one else saw. And God help her, she actually believed him. “Maybe I’m just tired.” She murmured the words aloud.

“You didn’t do this, Flame. You didn’t cause Burrell’s death.”

“How do you know that? Whitney’s capable of anything, even killing a kind old man just to get the end results of his experiment. He must have changed a lot over the years to have you think he wouldn’t do it, or he hid that side of himself well.”

“I didn’t much like him. None of us did. He was cold. Inhuman.” He shifted her as gently as possible until they were turned around in the bed. “Lie down.” He waited until her head was on the pillow before he pulled a blanket over her. “I never could understand how Lily loved him. She didn’t know he wasn’t her biological father. She found out after he died.”

“He isn’t dead.”

“Maybe he isn’t. In all honesty, you’ve got me halfway believin’ the man is out there somewhere recording every move we make.” Gator switched off the lights and stretched out on the bed beside her, careful to avoid touching her leg.

“I should leave.”

He heard the sound of his heartbeat accelerate. He knew she heard it too. The protest surged up, a strong tidal wave of denial. The walls rippled with a low pulse of dissent. She laid her hand over his.

“I’m not going. I have to find out who did this to Burrell. I’m just saying, it’s the smart thing to do. And there’s Joy. Someone did something to her. I wish I could believe she was dead, but I don’t.”

In the darkness he turned his head to look at her. “You don’t think she’s dead? Why? What makes you think she’s still alive?”

She would never have told anyone else. Ever. She would have gone to her grave and never told a single soul. Sometimes when I go places I hear echoes of sounds.” She waited for him to snicker. To laugh. To say she was crazy.

He twisted his fingers through hers and brought her hand up to his chest, over his heart. “Go on.”

“I think plants sometimes absorb the sound. It gets trapped there in certain plants and I can hear it.”

“You think the sound is trapped in the plants?” The pad of his thumb brushed idly over the back of her hand. “I’ve heard it too, the echo of screams, or laughter. The murmur of voices. At first I thought it was because my hearing was so acute, but then I realized that I was hearing something that had taken place in the past, minutes to months earlier. I thought it could be pockets of space, like the air pockets in a car when it sinks under water. But sound disperses. That didn’t make any sense at all. But plants don’t have ears. How the hell would they hear?”

“The echo of the past in certain places really bothered me.” She sniffed, still trying to get a handle on her emotions. It helped that Gator had bantered a little with her, but she still wanted to cry a river of tears for Burrell. For Joy. For herself. She forced control, wanting to share something of herself with Gator, just because he cared enough to comfort her. The casual rubbing of his thumb over her hand should have been trivial, but it wasn’t.

“I did consider that maybe Whitney had managed to drive me out of my mind, but then I remembered it had happened a couple of times when I was really young, before I realized just what a monster he really was, so I did some research. I wrote down each time I heard the sounds and tried to remember everything that was around me at the time. The one thing each incident had in common was that there were plants there. Not a single plant, but a large group of plants.”

“I never thought of plants. How would they hear things?”

She was acutely aware of his thumb on her hand, stroking caresses back and forth. It wasn’t sexual. She almost wished it were. There was comfort, an intimacy, the small gesture tying her to him where any other touch might have driven her away. She stared up at the ceiling, shocked she was talking about things that mattered to her, revealing secrets she’d never dared to tell another soul—things she’d never wanted to tell another person.

“There’s an Asian plant with transparent leaves called Hydrilla verticillata. Under a microscope you can see live streaming protoplasm. And before you think I’m brilliant and a scientist, I looked it up and someone else had conducted an experiment. In the research I read about, Huxley used a tuning fork and managed to speed up the protoplasm by using sound.”

“And this relates to the voices we hear, how?”

“I love the sarcasm in your voice. You’re such a skeptic.” She laughed softly, a small sound that actually held humor when deep inside she was weeping. Flame had a difficult time analyzing why she wanted to share her theories with Gator and why he could make her smile in the midst of overwhelming grief. She didn’t even know why it was okay with her to be lying in the dark, his body solid and warm and so comforting she wanted to cling like a small child to him. The sound of the rain beat down on the roof and only added to the surreal feeling.

“Well come on.”

“We can destroy things with sound, why not make them grow? For years scientists have believed songbirds contribute to plant growth by singing all the songs in the early-morning hours. A French physicist conducted a very successful experiment exposing how plants respond to sound waves. He composed musical note sequences that helped the plants grow. Each note is chosen to correspond with an amino acid in a protein with the full tune corresponding to the entire protein. It’s done with electromagnetic energy…”