the reckoner Part 1 ...an alienist, obsessed with a woman in the mist

A woman should be an illusion. ~Ian Fleming

I’m Derek Reckoner, a former psychotherapist and now a Canadian Security Intelligence Service consultant.

My former career as a Toronto psychiatrist taught me one thing—there are a lot of hurting people out there—many of them desperate, trapped in hopeless circumstances, and needing help.

My present career enables me to help them. You see, I’m a psychic—I work as an intelligence operative by day and then, offer a confidential private investigative service to selected clients by night.

I’ve been called everything from a shyster to an alienist to a fraud, but I prefer to see myself in terms of what I do—I mete out rough justice, that’s all. Like an accountant reconciling books, I right wrongs. I reconcile things. And that’s why the media call me The Reckoner.

“Have you made any progress tracking Piper Jordan?”

I massage my temples trying to ease a throbbing headache, lean back in my swivel chair and grimace at Marin. “No. It’s pretty grim, isn’t it?”

She nods sadly.

I love Marin—her professional demeanor, her genuine compassion, and the dark mystery of her. But somehow we never quite hit it off. There was always someone else—another woman waiting out there in the mist—someone I never could see but whom I sensed was waiting…waiting for me.

“Maybe this is the one, Derek, and that’s why you can’t get a read on her.”

“Could be, Marin—nothing else is making sense.”

Usually I function like a signal transmission tower picking up psychic pings from unsuspecting subjects. I force them to send mental signals to me and I read and extract the relevant data.

My abilities work with even the most hardened criminals—but don’t work with Piper Jordan—with her, I get a psychic failwhale, spouting a whole lot of nothing at all.

“Have you tried psychometry?” Marin asks in a faltering voice knowing it’s my last refuge of hope—handling Piper’s personal effects in a desperate attempt to pick up any psychic vibrations emanating from them.

What she doesn’t know is I’ve tried and failed—not only did her clothes and personal possessions not yield any vital clues, but they just made me more obsessed with finding her.

It’s time to fess up and admit failure.

“I tried reading her personal effects, Marin, but that’s another dead end street. I’m completely stymied. All I know for sure is that Piper Jordan is still very much alive, but her whereabouts are totally unknown.”

I call it quits at midnight and head home hoping to get at least six hours sleep before getting up and going to my day job consulting for ‘the agency’.

Along the way, it rains and I’m tempted to stop at a nearby all night diner and sip some coffee and stare at the splashing streets, but I resist the urge. I know my manic bursts of energy and don’t feel like enduring the ragged ends of days when I eventually flame out and come crashing back to earth.

I’m a frozen man—tired of my ascetic and reclusive life, longing to find someone real and genuine like Marin with whom to spend my lonely days and nights.

There's an emptiness inside me and I desperately need someone to fill it—someone like my absent lady in the mist, who may be Piper, or may be simply a figment of my tortured imagination.

© 2017, John J Geddes. All rights reserved.

Photo:https://goo.gl/images/gvBMso