He set up breakfast, waving them aside when they stood to help, asking questions when Robyn finished her explanation. Then Hope and Karl exchanged a look, one that Robyn had come to know well and now understood: "We'll discuss it later, when she's not
around."
"Did Robyn tell you what she wants?" Karl asked as they dished up breakfast plates.
"I was warned not to bring it up," Robyn said.
Hope followed her look. "Karl..."
He only shrugged, unapologetic, and bit into his croissant.
"I told Karl I want to know," Robyn said.
"Know... ?"
Robyn gave her a look - it was like leaning around the proverbial pachyderm in the room to ask, "what elephant?"
"Everything," she said.
Hope and Karl exchanged another look.
"Let's start with what's important right now," Hope said. "This Adele Morrissey..."
"She's psychic."
Hope paused, as if fighting the temptation to leave it at that, then said, "We call them clairvoyants."
"So she sees the future?"
"No, just the present. It's remote-viewing. Have you ever heard of that?"
Robyn shook her head.
"They used to do it at spiritualist shows, back in Victorian times. The spiritualist would sit behind a screen or in a back room and would describe things in the audience."
"I didn't know that," Karl murmured.
Hope flashed him a smile, as if grateful for the diversion. "That's because you're not True News's weird-tales girl. This stuff is my life, remember?"
Robyn hadn't even thought of that, Hope's unusual specialty. There was more to it than a job, obviously.
"Most of that remote-viewing was fake, of course," Hope said, relaxing now, in her element. "Real clairvoyants are extremely rare. It's passed down through generations in varying degrees, so even if you have the blood, you may not be able to remotely view. But those who have the power can see farther than past a screen or into an adjoining room. They focus on a person, using a picture or personal effect."
"Like a psychic."
Hope nodded. "All that stuff has to originally come from somewhere, right? By using that object and focusing, Adele can see you. I have no idea how big a window she gets - like I said, true clairvoyants are rare, so we don't know a lot about them. She'd use that view, though, to pick up clues about your surroundings - a street sign, a landmark..."
"A napkin with a cafe name on it," Robyn said, remembering the day before.
"Exactly. You said she's a photographer, that she took pictures of Portia for the tabloids. I guess that's how she used her talents."
Clairvoyant paparazzi, able to find their targets anywhere, watch and wait for that moment when they were most likely to do something tabloid-worthy, slip in, snag the shot and leave, while their colleagues chased and hounded and prayed they'd get lucky.
Robyn considered herself a rational person. Too rational, some said. The summer she'd been fourteen, she'd followed a friend to a camp for the arts. At the end of the two weeks, her creative writing instructor told her, as gently as possible, that not all people were cut out to be novelists and if she enjoyed writing, she might want to consider nonfiction instead. In other words, Robyn didn't have an imaginative cell in her body. She'd come to accept that.
But now, faced with the existence of people with real psychic abilities, even her too-rational brain was satisfied that this did make sense, given the evidence. Was it that preposterous, when there were branches of science devoted to studying such phenomena? As Hope said, the stories about ESP and remote-viewing had to come from somewhere. As long as they were talking about people seeing the present, not the future, then yes, Robyn could accept it.
"So Adele is part of this... group," Robyn said. "This community, of people with... extraordinary powers."