Scent of Roses & Season of Strangers Page 61

  But he was a scientist, commander of the science wing aboard the Ansor, a powerful man among his people. The High Council would demand his return and he would be forced to obey.

  In the meantime, he had a job to do. Which was why, when he finished working out, he drove straight to Julie’s beach house, why he was sitting on her bright-colored sofa helping her sort through the stack of magazine and newspaper articles about UFO sightings she had pulled off the internet.

  The articles posed little threat. No matter what in the stack he read, no matter how many people reported the sighting, they were always treated the same, as if the person or person who’d had the encounter was crazy—six bricks shy of a load, Patrick would have said.

  Even worse were the reports of alien abduction. It seemed the victims were assaulted twice—once by the “Visitors” who invaded their bodies and minds; a second time by society’s ridicule, the refusal to believe what these people had endured.

  He thought of Laura Ferris and wished he could ease Julie’s worry about her. But the fact was Laura hadn’t the strength Julie had and the abduction had affected her severely. All he could do was try to keep Julie’s fate from being the same. Or worse.

  “Listen to this—” Wearing jeans and a sweatshirt, she sat cross-legged on the floor at his feet. “‘According to a study led by Nicholas Spanos, a psychologist at Carleton University in Ottawa, people who claim to have sighted UFOs are neither psychologically disturbed nor especially prone to fantasy.’” She glanced up. “Apparently they did a study of people who had reported sightings or close encounters and used a control group of people who had not. Both groups were found to be psychologically the same.”

  “That’s impressive. People crazy enough to believe in UFOs aren’t any crazier than the rest of us.”

  She punched his leg. “You are such a skeptic.”

  “Yeah, well, I’m not alone. It says here that two psychiatrists associated with the Harvard Medical School believe flying saucers are misperceptions of sexual organs. Hallucinations stemming from primal modes of thinking from childhood. They say a flying saucer is actually a representation of a mother’s breasts. A cigar-shaped object is simply a phallic symbol. Flying objects are, and I quote, ‘extremes of gratification and omnipotence,’ unquote.”

  Julie looked at him as if he had lost his mind. “Tell me you are making a joke.”

  He chuckled softly. “’Fraid not.”

  She came up on her knees, pretty mouth set, and shook a finger in his face. “If you believe for a single moment—”

  Val grinned and held his hands up in surrender. “I don’t. Even I’m not that much of a disbeliever.”

  She laughed softly, settled back down on the floor and began to rummage through the papers spread out on the carpet. She picked one up and began to read.

  “Okay, how about this? ‘The tiny town of Rachel, Nevada, has become a tourist destination for UFO enthusiasts. Though only 53 cars a day travel the 98-mile-long State Route 375, so many sightings have been reported it has been renamed the Extraterrestrial Highway. The road runs near Area 51, a part of Nellis Air Force Base where, some UFOlogists believe, the government is testing captured alien spacecraft.’”

  He arched a brow. “Captured alien spacecraft? Now you’re the one who is joking.”

  “Maybe, maybe not. I’ve heard about this Area 51. It’s supposedly so secret they bought up all the land around it for miles so you can’t get near enough to see it.”

  “That’s what governments do,” he said, “try to keep its defenses secret. That doesn’t mean they’re testing alien spacecraft.” Though Val supposed they could be. Over the years, several Torillian crafts had gone down and never been recovered. And there were other space travelers who had visited the planet through the years.

  “Look at this. I printed a list of sites off Google. There are dozens of websites devoted to people who claim to have seen UFOs. UFOsightings.com has accounts by NASA astronauts. And look at this…there was a major sighting at O’Hare airport in Chicago fairly recently. Listen to this. ‘In November, a gray, metallic, saucerlike object was spotted hovering above Chicago’s O’Hare International Airport. As many as twelve United Airlines employees spotted the object and filed reports.’”

  “It was probably a weather balloon,” Patrick said, the usual answer to a sighting, and Julie tossed him a look.

  “‘Airline officials say they have no knowledge of any such occurrence and the Federal Aviation Administration is not investigating.’ I find that amazing.”

  Patrick just shrugged. “I imagine they get a lot of false reports. They hardly have time to investigate them all.”

  “Here’s an old magazine article from Omni, back in the days when the magazine was still in print. It’s a special issue on alleged extraterrestrial visitations. It says in 1969, after sixteen years of investigation, the government ended its official interest in UFOs. But later a number of people came forward claiming that a secret military underground continued the study.”

  She glanced down at the pages she had printed. “A retired army major named Robert Dean said NATO issued a classified report in the sixties stating that UFOs were real, extraterrestrial, and had visited the earth. A scientist named Bob Lazar claimed he worked in the late 1980s on an extraterrestrial spacecraft being researched and tested in Nevada, and a retired Air Force colonel named Charles Halt said he witnessed and investigated UFOs over England.”

  “Does it say how much these men got paid for their stories? I’d say that’s a pretty important factor in deciding whether or not to believe what they’re saying.”

  Julie frowned. “I suppose that’s true, but—”

  “But nothing. You, my love, are far too gullible.”

  “Here’s something interesting…apparently it was a big deal back in the 1970s. Thousands of cattle across the country were mutilated. There were all kinds of investigations but no one ever really found out who was responsible.”

  “You think they were caused by aliens?”

  “The government, of course, says it was all a giant hoax, that the deaths were caused by wild animals. A few might have been caused by members of some sort of cult.”

  She shuffled through the pages spread around her, found the item she wanted and read the words. “‘A book called An Alien Harvest, by a woman named Linda Howe, suggests there is strong evidence of extraterrestrial involvement. Howe claims the high heat and rapid pinpoint incisions made into the flesh of the cattle that were killed could only have come from sophisticated laser equipment weighing more than five hundred pounds.”

  “Or by natural decomposition, which is what probably what most scientists believe.” Fools that they were, Val thought. For years, cattle had been used as laboratory test animals for research—until they began to use people.

  Julie sighed. She thumbed through copies she had made from magazines at the library: Close Encounters, National Review; Seeking the Otherworldly, Skeptical Inquirer. Newsweek had a story on alien abduction, Omni had several.

  There were items of interest in Aviation Week and Space Technology. Another issue of Newsweek had a major feature on the possibility of long-ago life on Mars, the current work being done, and the government’s commitment to actually landing people there.

  She rummaged through her pile, held up a small article from the Los Angeles Times. “I ran across this on the internet this morning. I printed it off because of the date. It’s a UFO sighting that was printed in the paper the day after Laura claims she was abducted on the beach. I haven’t got round to reading it. I just copied it and tossed it into the pile.”

  Val reached for the article but Julie held it away from him. “I get to read it first.” She turned to the scrap of paper, just a small article on one of the back pages. “It says, ‘An object described as a silver, saucer-shaped disk was spotted yesterd
ay afternoon over Malibu Beach, California.’”

  Her head jerked up. “Malibu? My God, Patrick.” Her head went back down. “Several witnesses reported the sighting, including a United Airlines pilot whose name has been withheld. The pilot said the trail of the object was visible for about two minutes after it passed.” She fell silent, madly scanning the rest of the article. He could see the pulse beating rapidly in her throat.

  “This can’t be coincidence, Patrick. Someone reports a UFO over the ocean near Malibu beach the same day Laura claims she was abducted. Maybe—”

  He snatched the newsprint out of her hand and read the article to the end. “Maybe it was a failed missile launch from Vandenberg Air Force base, just like it says.” He handed her back the copy and Julie read it again.

  “I know that’s what it says, but…”

  “But you’d rather believe your sister was abducted by aliens.”

  Julie leaned back against the sofa, using his legs to prop herself up. She blew out a long breath of air. “It just bothers me, is all. A lot of people believe in this stuff, but the people who don’t seem to have all the power. If they wanted to cover things up, they probably could.”

  “Why would they want to do that?”

  “Any number of reasons. Public panic, I suppose. Or maybe they just don’t want to deal with the ramifications of admitting such a threat exists. I mean, we’re already facing terrorists all over the world. Maybe its just too much for people to handle. Maybe—”

  “And maybe UFOs don’t exist. Maybe the sound you heard that day on the beach had something to do with the Vandenberg missile launch.”

  Julie sat up straighter, her head cocked in thought. Then she rolled away from him and grabbed up the phone.

  “What are you doing?”

  “I’m calling the newspaper. It doesn’t give the exact time of the sighting in the article. I want to know when it was. Then I’m calling the paper in Lompoc, since that’s where the air base is. Somebody ought to be able to confirm the time of the missile launch and the time it was aborted. If they can’t, I’m calling Vandenburg.”

  “Don’t you think that’s going a little too far?”

  “Maybe. I guess we’ll have to wait and see.”

  It took the better part of an hour before she had the information she wanted. Long enough for her eyes to be shining with a mixture of satisfaction and what he would guess was fear, and her hands were shaking.

  “I told you, Patrick. I said they could cover things up. The sighting was at 3:07 in the afternoon. The missile was launched at four o’clock and aborted at four-thirteen. The Vandenberg missile wasn’t even off the ground when the UFO was reported.”

  He shook his head. “That doesn’t mean what was sighted was actually a spacecraft.”

  “No, but it damn sure wasn’t a missile.”

  Val said nothing. He didn’t like the way this was going, but at present there wasn’t much he could do. “So what now?”

  “I’m not sure. I only went into this hoping to find some way to help my sister. At first I was sure she was just being paranoid. She’s always had emotional problems. I was certain they had escalated into something more. Now…I just don’t know. After listening to her sessions with Dr. Heraldson, after sitting in with Dr. Winters’s abduction group, I can’t say I’m a hundred percent convinced this isn’t real. I told Laura I’d try to keep an open mind and I think I’ve done that. At least now if she tells me little gray men have taken her aboard their spaceship, I can listen with a sympathetic ear.”

  “You’re saying you believe her.”

  “No, I’m not. I’m saying there’s a chance it’s the truth. A lot bigger chance than I ever would have guessed.” Julie shivered, and Val reached down and urged her up on the sofa, then lifted her onto his lap.

  He looped a curl of her glossy dark red hair back over an ear. “Even if it were true, love, if space travelers really existed, it might not be so bad. In most ways people are the same, no matter where they come from.”

  “If it’s true, they’re hurting people. Innocent people are suffering and there is no one who can stop them.”

  He eased her back against his chest, smoothing his hands over her hair. “Maybe they don’t mean to hurt anyone. Maybe as intelligent as they are, they just don’t understand.”

  Julie eyed him strangely, but she made no reply, just nestled against his chest. He could feel fine tremors racing through her. When she raised her head, her face looked a little bit pale.

  “Take me to bed, Patrick. I don’t want to think about this anymore.”

  Neither did he. But unlike Julie, he didn’t have any other choice.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  Julie sat at Alex Donovan’s bedside, holding the old man’s once-paralyzed hand. He was sitting propped up in bed, smiling, his cheeks robust instead of hollow, looking more fit than he had in years.

  “It’s a miracle,” Alex said. “I ought to be lying out there next to Martha, six feet under, but for some damnable reason, God saw fit to keep me alive.”

  “It is a miracle, Alex. And no one is more grateful for it than I am.”

  “How does Patrick feel? He hasn’t come around all that much since the stroke. At times it’s hard to know what that son of mine is thinking.”

  “Patrick barely left your side the whole time you were sick. He loves you, Alex. He always has. Surely you don’t believe he feels anything less.”

  Alex pointed toward a small rubber ball lying on a tray beside his bed and Julie handed it over. “There is the matter of his inheritance.” He began to squeeze it with his still weak left hand, determinedly working the muscles and tendons. “Before his heart attack, there were times he seemed to need money very badly.”

  “He was trying to get Brookhaven built, and having terrible financial problems. But he never considered involving you, Alex, or asking you to help in any way. He knew you couldn’t really afford that kind of investment. Besides, I think one of the reasons he wanted to build those condos was to prove himself to you. He wanted to make you proud of him.”

  Alex grunted something unintelligible. “It was difficult to be proud of a son whose sole purpose in life was to immerse himself in excess…or perhaps find ways to destroy himself.”

  “He’s different now.”

  “Is he? I’m extremely proud of the man he’s become since his heart attack. But I’m terrified the change is only temporary.” He reached a thin hand out to touch her cheek. “I’m worried for you, Julie. I’m afraid you’re going to be hurt.”

  Julie felt the sharp burn of unexpected tears. “Patrick’s changed,” she insisted. “He never touches alcohol or drugs. He keeps himself in shape. He’s stronger now than he ever has been, more confident, more self-assured.” She swallowed past the lump that rose in her throat. “I love him, Alex. I tried not to, but I do.”

  Alex sighed. “I know you do. I can see it in your eyes whenever you look at him. And you’re right, he is different, more of a man than I ever believed he could be. Donovan Real Estate has actually begun to make money again, thanks to my son. And you, Julie. For years you wouldn’t give him the time of day. Now you tell me you’re in love with him. Under different circumstances, I couldn’t be more thrilled. But is it really possible for a man to change so much?”

  Julie tried to smile but it came out a little wobbly. “I hope so, Alex. I pray every day that the man I love is real and not just an illusion.”

  “I’m praying for it, too, Julie. For my son…and for you.”

  * * *

  Business was in full swing by the time Val arrived at the office the following day. Without looking up from the call she was taking, Shirl thrust a handful of messages into his hand and pointed down the hall. She pressed a palm over the receiver. “There are a couple of guys in your office
. I tried to get them to wait for you out here but they insisted. I thought it was better if I just let them in.”

  Val glanced toward the closed door and knew in an instant which men were waiting. “You did the right thing, Shirl. I’ll take care of it.”

  She nodded and frantically started taking messages again. It was amazing how much busier the place had gotten over the past few weeks. It was a shame Patrick hadn’t taken the time to manage his staff as Val had been doing in his place. It wasn’t that difficult and Patrick had been good at it. It bothered Val to think what would happen to the business once he was gone.

  He reached the door to his office, paused for a moment outside, then stepped in and pulled it closed. The same two men waited, one lean and well-dressed, leaning back in the chair behind his desk, the other stout and sandy-haired sprawled over the arm of the sofa. This time he knew their names.

  Val flashed a mocking half smile. “Ah, Mr. Ceccarelli. So good of you to drop in. You, too, of course, Naworski.”

  The tall, gray-haired Italian eyed him with a look of surprise mixed with respect. The Italian was dressed as impeccably as before, in the standard double-breasted blue pinstripe suit. An old memory surfaced and Val smiled to think the man must have watched too many Godfather movies, some of Patrick’s favorite boyhood films.

  “You’ve been doing your homework,” said the man behind his desk. “Good for you, Donovan. I’m impressed.”

  It hadn’t been all that hard to discover who they were. Ralph Ceccarelli and Jake Naworski were fairly well known around L.A, if you knew where to look for them. Val had simply paid a man who knew the right sort of places to look.

  “I don’t like faces without names,” Val said simply.

  Naworski came up from the sofa. “Yeah, and we don’t like the runaround you been givin’ those folks from the Teachers’ Pension Fund.” Where Ceccarelli looked slick, Jake look rumpled, his khaki slacks bagging in the knees, his yellow pullover grease-spotted over the belly and slightly wrinkled.