Free The Shadow by James Luceno Page A

leading him on before lowering the boom. “I never did return your calls.”
    Farley slumped in exaggerated defeat. “I know. And I can’t imagine why.”
    Margo leaned toward him and lifted his chin, her touch enough to induce a moment of staccato panting. “Because I don’t like you,” she said in a slow, falsely intimate whisper that emphasized each word.
    Farley’s eyes were fastened to her bare back as she walked away; then he folded his arms across his chest and gurgled a laugh. “Fascinating woman!” he said, more to himself.
    Margo made directly for her father’s desk—which was never an easy task, what with the distillation experiments in progress on every countertop, the beakers full of bubbling liquids, the electrical current jumping between galvanic spheres. Lane, his tweed jacket hung on the back of the chair, was still leaning over his work, muttering to himself, oblivious to her entry. Quietly, she set her stole and beaded handbag down, moved around behind him, and kissed him on the cheek.
    “Margo, what a nice surprise,” he told her. “Have you had dinner yet?”
    “Dad, it’s two A.M. ”
    He glanced absently at his pocket watch. “What are you doing up at this hour?”
    “I couldn’t sleep,” she said evasively. Her gaze drifted to Lane’s flannel shirt. “Dad, where you get this shirt?”
    He studied it for a moment. “You said you liked me in green.”
    Margo nodded. “I do. But that’s green,” she said, pointing to his drinking mug. “This—” she pinched hold of the shirt “—is red.”
    “Green, red, what does it matter so long as the shirt’s clean?”
    She rolled her eyes and gave him another peck, then took the apple from his desk and walked the few feet to his cozy reading chair, settling into it with her legs crossed over the rounded arm.
    “Dad, do you believe in telepathy? As a scientist, I mean.”
    Lane glanced at her while he worked on the orb with a small pair of pliers. “Mind reading?”
    “Do you think it can exist between certain people?”
    Lane stroked his chin. “Thoughts are not substantial things that can simply be passed along. We’re talking about the electrical activity of the brain. Oh, perhaps with the aid of a device that could record those electrical impulses, then decipher and somehow transfer them. But between people —unassisted? No, I don’t think it’s possible. Though your mother certainly did. It was uncanny the way she sometimes knew what I was thinking. But I suspect that her gift was nothing more than a product of her powers of observation. No, I’m afraid I’d have to side with the Great Dunniger and say that telepathy is simply a case of stage magic.”
    Margo was fiddling with the stem of the apple and gazing contemplatively at the ceiling, where the banks of fluorescents, the city light through Venetian blinds, the humming arc lamps, and the Bunsen burner flames had conspired to create a dizzying chiaroscuro of flickering light and shadow. She reflected on her evening with the inscrutable Lamont Cranston, the chief cause of her insomnia.
    “Somehow, I expected you to say that,” she told her father at last. “But it’s so strange. I’ve always had the feeling that there was this . . . indescribable connection out there, just waiting to happen to me. And tonight, suddenly, there it was.”
    Lane surfaced from a moment of intense preoccupation, “That’s nice, dear. Although what you’re saying suggests a belief in predestination—another scientific implausibility, unless we choose to posit the existence of faster-than-light particles to vouchsafe—” He caught himself running on and looked at her. “What exactly are we talking about?”
    Margo’s expression was wistful. “A man, Dad. And I’m probably never going to see him again.” She took a bite of the apple.
    “Why not?”
    “It’s just something I know. But while we were together I had the feeling that I could sense what he was feeling, and he