Lost Girls Read Online Free Page A

when it came to matters of life and death. And rappelling off the face of a mountain with an inexperienced climber who was also blind was in itself a matter of life and death.
    What was she getting involved in here? she wondered. And what kind of men were these who would stake their lives on the word of a long-retired superior? Why did she suddenly feel the ponderous weight of responsibility? As if she had a stake in saving this team lost on the mountain. She was becoming one of them. No longer a one-person show, but part of a unit going on a mission. Suddenly she needed Metcalf to know that she wasn’t infallible. Any thinking person should know that, but Brigham had said something to him and now Metcalf was long past doubting her abilities, if ever he did.
    This didn’t remotely correspond to Sherry’s experiences in the civilian world. Life for Sherry was a daily quagmire of uncertainty. Every year brought some new form of attack on what she did. Lawyers everywhere seemed bent on testing her right to practice what most people would call clairvoyance. It wasn’t clairvoyance, of course, not by a long shot. But instead of science making her more credible, it seemed only to make her a more desirable target, at least in the eyes of the legal world. Suddenly there was something they could point to. A tangible concern was at stake. If she wasn’t trying to defraud the public and was actually reading dead people’s memories, then the law had better get out there and regulate dead people’s memories, too. Someone had better ensure that the rights of the dead were protected. Or at least that’s what the lawyers were trying to get on record in a courtroom. Sherry found herself having to hire lawyers to protect her from lawyers.
    This was a refreshing change, she thought, men and women who spoke plain English. A group of people who believed that lies and strategies had two different meanings.
    She had learned about this phenomenon of blue or green love, whatever you called the brotherhood of arms, from her late friend Philadelphia police detective John Payne. But Metcalf took the concept of esprit de corps to a whole new level. It had only been necessary for Admiral Brigham to say it was possible for him to believe in her—that was all Metcalf needed, another man’s word. It was mind-boggling.
    The Pave Hawk began to descend into updraft turbulence. The metal floors hammered under her feet and she felt herself tense, fingers clutching the bottom of her seat.
    Metcalf was moving around the bay, organizing things for their departure, or so she imagined. She tried for the second or perhaps third time to guess what he might look like, knowing that voices could easily fool you. Usually Sherry put an approximate face on casual acquaintances and that was good enough. Sherry assigned variations of speech and manner certain physical characteristics and had no doubt they were well off their mark. Not that it mattered. Face recognition was not part of Sherry’s world. She was at liberty to imagine anything she liked about the people she came in contact with infrequently. When she did become close with someone, she cared more about his or her physical reality. When she became very close, she looked at his or her face with her hands. For some unfathomable reason she wanted to see Metcalf’s face.
    He was a big man. That much was obvious from the physical contact she’d had with him, especially in the limited constraints of the helicopter’s cargo bay. His chin, she thought, would be dimpled and square. His hair she imagined dark and buzzed across the scalp, his eyes were kind and blue, but for no other reason than…Suddenly she stopped, realizing she was fantasizing, and fantasizing was something Sherry Moore did not do.
    “How high are we?” She spoke quickly into the headset.
    “Just above sixteen thousand,” the pilot said. “We’ll be putting you down in a minute.”
    “You’ve done this before?” Sherry joked.
    The