The Empath

Twenty-four hours without sleep didn’t help. Last night Misha was restless. Maggie stayed up, stroking her whimpering pet. As with other animals she’d treated, her touch soothed.

She’d dozed off, then awakened to the feeling of someone pounding a rail spike into her body. The pain subsided then vanished. Always seemed to happen after a difficult case. Since real sleep proved impossible, Maggie resigned herself to downing a fresh pot of Blue Mountain, and went back to work.

Three weeks without answers. Three weeks of leaving her lucrative practice on the mainland to her partner, Mark Anderson, and holing up in the beach house on Estero Island like a sand hermit.

Three weeks of drawing blood, testing samples, consulting journals, articles, Internet Web sites. Nothing. Not a clue.

She didn’t dare show her findings to colleagues. This was too weird. Too … Witchy.

I don’t believe in witches. I don’t. I don’t. I don’t.

She believed in science, pure and simple. Logic. Nothing else.

Late afternoon sunlight streamed into the improvised lab on the house’s second floor. Papers, charts and notes littered a long white table, along with beakers, syringes, test tubes and slides. On the cool tile floor, Misha slept fitfully.

Maggie stared out the window. Sun-worshippers strolled at the gulf’s edge. Coconut palms ringing her beachfront home rustled in the wind. The burning blue sky promised another balmy afternoon in southwest Florida.

Momentary envy filled her. Mindless of the air-conditioning, she slid open the window to inhale the brine. She longed to be as insouciant as the tourists, nothing more to worry about than ruining their Birkenstocks in the saltwater.

She couldn’t be insouciant. Whatever was killing Misha could kill other animals, maybe even humans. Maggie suspected she had discovered a new, dreadful disease. She couldn’t risk it spreading to others, or turning Misha over to become a lab experiment by others. So she had quarantined her pet in the beach house, determined to find answers for herself.

Enough daydreaming. Back to work.

She removed the slide from the microscope. Maggie took a drop of blood obtained from a healthy shih tzu at her practice. Using a Beral pipette, she added the blood to a fresh slide containing Misha’s infected cells. Maggie covered the slide, placed it under the microscope.

Maggie fumbled for a tape recorder, clicked the record button as she bent over to peer into the microscope again.

“The tumor lies in the submucosa, infiltrating the lamina propria. Cellular morphology not characteristic of known tumors. The nuclei are indistinguishable. No nestlike appearance as in the fibrovascular stroma.”

A clatter sounded as Maggie dropped the instrument onto the scarred tabletop. The tape whirled, silently continuing to record her next words.

“Oh my God!”

Misha lifted her head, whined at the loud outburst. Maggie stepped back. Rubbed her eyes again. Oh God. It couldn’t be … surely she was exhausted, seeing things.

Dread surfaced as she forced herself to examine the clump of cells. Bracing her hands on the table, she studied the sample.

Blackened cells that had been separate, like individual drops of ink, bonded together as if pulled by invisible magnets. They surrounded the single drop of healthy blood, corralling it. Then absorbed it, sucking it into their mass. And grew.

They spread, forming a giant singular cell. As her shocked gaze watched, the singular cell divided. And again.

Cloning itself.

Cells taken from Misha’s stomach tumor were growing exponentially and forming a new organism. Growing, spreading to the edges of the slide.

It couldn’t be. Not happening. Somatic cells, even those mutated by cancer, couldn’t do this. Yet here it was, dividing and multiplying and growing to form … living tissue.

With a cry of disgust, she grabbed the slide, dropped it into a beaker of alcohol. Maggie stared, watching the now clearly demarcated black mass sink down into the liquid.

A sharp buzz made her cry out in alarm. Get a grip, Mags. Maggie sucked down a trembling breath. She covered the beaker with a towel and pasted on a shaky smile. Her sneakers thumped on the staircase as she headed for the door.

It had better not be Mark. He had agreed to take over the whole caseload while she begged off six week’s leave. But he’d phoned, whining about the work piling up.

Mark must never know how ill Misha was or he would insist on taking her pet and quarantining Misha at the office. She had to find answers herself. Misha would not be turned into a living experiment, poked and prodded by fascinated colleagues.

Maggie looked out the door’s scope. A blond little girl in a pink shorts set clutched the handle of a small red wagon. The wagon held a steel cage containing a rabbit.

Tammy Whittaker, seven, from next door. Tammy’s mother was a fussy, carefully groomed woman who insisted on calling Maggie “Miss Sinclair” instead of “Doctor.” Vets weren’t real doctors, she had said, sniffing that she couldn’t understand why anyone with a medical inclination would choose to treat filthy animals.

Dropping the curtain, Maggie felt a flutter of alarm. She only wanted to be left alone to muse over this latest frightening find.

The trilling buzz sounded again. With a sigh, she opened the door. Tammy Whittaker looked up at Maggie. Hope flickered in her huge brown eyes. “Hi, Dr. Sinclair. This is Herman, my rabbit.”

“Honey, I’m awfully busy….”

Tammy’s face screwed up. Her mouth wobbled precariously. “Herman’s hurt. Please, Dr. Sinclair, can you fix him? I have ten dollars I saved from my allowance. My mother says she won’t waste money on a stupid rabbit.”

The little girl’s woeful expression twisted Maggie’s heart. She went outside and picked up the cage containing the chocolate-colored rabbit.

“Come on, Tammy. Let’s see what’s wrong with Herman.”

Inside the spacious living room, Maggie set down the cage. She removed the large French lop from the cage and set him on the tiled floor. Herman weakly hopped. His back left leg flopped. Broken, probably.

A terrible suspicion crested over Maggie. “Tammy, how did this happen?”

Her gaze flicked away. “I forget to lock the door sometimes. He got out. Mom said he got his leg caught.”

Maggie gnawed at her lower lip. Outside of her own dog, she hadn’t examined an animal in over two months. Doing so caused odd images to flash through her mind, as if she could envision the source of the animal’s injury. Feel its past and pain.

Just an overactive imagination. It was only her great desire to heal, causing her to envision the injury’s source.

Yet the fledgling ability had grown stronger over the past six months. Maggie had solved the problem by leaving the initial exams to Mark, in exchange for doing the clinic’s paperwork.

“I thought your mother didn’t like animals.”

Sniffling, Tammy explained her friend Bobby had given her Herman when his family moved away. “It was either me or Sally. Sally has a big yard with a fence, but she’s got a hamster. Mom didn’t want him, but Dad said I could keep him if Herman stayed in the cage. Please, can you make him better? He’s hurting.”

Maggie gently stroked the quivering rabbit. Images poured through her mind like movie screen captions: Fear. Pain. Cage door open. Freedom. Good smells. Food nearby. White grass. Urge to void. Tall human. Screams. Pointed shoe. Hurt. Fear. Hide.

Tammy’s mother had kicked it in a rage for the droppings on her immaculate white wool rug.

Biting back a startled cry, she jerked her hand away. Maggie turned, hiding her reaction from Tammy.

“Is Herman going to be okay?” Tammy asked.

“He’ll be fine. I need to get the medicine to fix him.”

Maggie pushed a weary hand through her hair as she went upstairs to her office. She headed for a locked white cabinet and combed through it for the necessary supplies.