Backwoods (11 page)

“That was when Daddy brought me home from
Gallatin,” Alice said, noticing his attention.

“Gallatin?”

She nodded. “It’s a special hospital in
Massachusetts.”

“What do you mean, special?” he asked.

“Daddy says it’s a place for crazy people,”
Alice said and Andrew blinked in surprise. “He says I didn’t belong
there. My mother put me in it. He had to go to court to get me out.
It took a long time because she had a court order that said I had
to stay.”

“How long?”

Alice shrugged. “Three years.”

What the hell kind of person sticks their kid
in a mental institution for three years?

“I’m not mad at her for it,” she continued.
“Daddy is, but I’m not. He was gone a lot back then with his work.
He didn’t always see how things were, how I was.”

It’s my understanding she’s better now
than she used to be.
Suzette had told Andrew this.

“What do you mean?” he asked quietly.

Without looking at him, she said, “I used to
hit her. Kick her, too. I would bite her sometimes and once I
pulled out a whole handful of her hair.”

He tried unsuccessfully to picture this
small, slight, stoic child doing anything so violent. “Why?”

She shook her head. “I don’t know.” A quick
glance at him. “But I’m better now.”

When the fluorescents in the hallway abruptly
came on, the stark glow cut a thin, bright line beneath the office
door. Alice gasped, sharp and alarmed. “It’s Daddy!”

“Shit.” Andrew slapped the scrapbook
closed.

“Here.” Alice caught him by the sleeve,
tugged at him even as he heard the faint
beep-beep-beep
as
Moore punched in his access code at the key pad. “This way.”

Stumbling in tow, he hurried with her to a
small coat closet in the far corner. They ducked together inside,
closing the door just as Moore opened the one to his office and
walked inside. The closet door was vented with horizontal wooden
slats directly in front of Andrew’s face and when Moore snapped on
the lights, yellow glow spilled through the narrow seams.

“…repeated karyotypic abnormalities that may
be related to chromosomal instability, though I’ve yet to identify
the specific causal mechanism,” Moore was saying. “The
mitotic-spindle checkpoints that ordinarily preserve chromosomal
integrity during cell divisions isn’t initiating proper
apoptosis.”

Andrew shied back, keeping his hand against
Alice’s shoulder. She’d gone rigid beside him, stiff as a board,
tucked to his hip. Neither of them breathed as they strained to
listen while Moore rustled papers, opened and shut file cabinet
drawers and tooled momentarily around in his office. “It makes no
sense,” he said. “Benign neoplasm development continues at an
accelerated rate even after the recombinant polypeptide is
discontinued.”

His voice faded into silence, trailing off in
mid-thought. Through the slats in the closet door, Andrew could see
him. Moore had come to a stop by his desk, looking down at it with
a puzzled expression on his face.

Shit,
Andrew thought.
We left the
scrapbook out,

“In English, please, Dr. Moore,” another man
said in a dry tone, heavy footsteps marking a loud cadence on the
floor as he entered the office.

That’s Major Prendick.
Andrew
recognized the voice right away. “Shit,” he groaned aloud, the
Major’s words resounding in his mind:
Failure to comply with
these instructions will result in your being arrested and charged
with felony trespass on government property.

Moore turned away from the scrapbook and his
desk. “This new formulation isn’t any more stable than the last
one. The cells still aren’t self-regulating. I can trigger the
cycle of mitosis but I still can’t shut it off.”

“I thought you said you’d identified the
necessary proteins,” Prendick said.

“No, I said blocking certain D-type cyclins
from the biosynthetic hormones might lower the risk neoplastic cell
growth,” Moore shot back. “D cyclins are proteins that turn
mitosis—cell division—on and off. But there are other avenues we
can still try. D cyclins work in cooperation with two specific
protein kinases to activate tissue growth. Maybe if we knock out
the kinases currently involved and—”

“How long?” Prendick cut in.

“I can start on it tonight,” Moore said.
“Have a test serum ready to try in tomorrow, maybe the next
day.”

Andrew heard a soft
snict!
then caught
a whiff of tobacco smoke, just as Moore huffed out a short, sharp
breath.

“He’s smoking,” Alice whispered. When she
looked up at Andrew, the light from the office bathed her face,
bisected in parallel lines by stripes of shadows. “He’s not
supposed to be smoking. He told me he’d quit.”

She moved as she said this, stumbling in the
dark and knocking loudly into a box on the closet floor. Andrew
grabbed her to spare her a fall, but leaned into a cluster of bare
wire coat hangers dangling from the overhead rod. These banged and
clanged together and the damage was done. Through the narrow
margins of space in the door vent, he could see both men in the
office beyond turn to look their way.

“Shit,” he whispered.

“I’m sorry,” Alice hiccupped.

Moore started for the closet door, his brows
furrowed.

“Shit.” Andrew backpedaled, pressing himself
against the wall. Alice seized him by the hand, gripping hard
enough to draw his gaze.

“Wunno, wunno,” she said. Or at least, that’s
what it sounded like to him. But before he had time to do anything
other than blink stupidly at her, convinced he’d misheard, Alice
pushed him aside and shoved the door open, just as her father
reached for the knob on the other side. Startled, Moore danced
backwards, and Alice darted out, kicking the door shut behind her
before her father or anyone else could catch sight of Andrew
inside.

“Alice,” Moore exclaimed. She didn’t answer
him, just bee-lined for the door, and he followed her, catching her
by the sleeve. “Alice, what are you doing in here?”

“Where did she come from?” Prendick
asked.

Moore wheeled her about and she blinked up at
him, all round and impassive eyes. “You’re smoking.”

“And how did she get in the lab?” Prendick
demanded.

“You’re not supposed to be smoking,” Alice
said to Dr. Moore. “You quit.”

“I know.” Moore snubbed his still-smoldering
cigarette out beneath the toe of his shoe, then gathered his
daughter in his arms.

“How the hell did she get in the lab?”
Prendick snapped again.

As Andrew watched, safe again in the closet,
Moore hoisted Alice against his chest. “She must have figured out
the door codes. I’ll take her back to the compound, put her to
bed.” He carried Alice toward the door. She had her arms around his
neck and looked over his shoulder toward the closet as they left,
seeming to meet Andrew’s gaze.

“I want you back here after that,” Prendick
said. With a thoughtful frown, a slight crimp to his brows, he
glanced across the office toward the closet, as if having taken
note of Alice’s gaze and redirected his own to follow.

Shit.
Andrew shrank back again, his
breath cutting short.

He heard the soft,
crunch-tap
of
Prendick’s shoe soles on the linoleum floor, a slow rhythm, a
deliberate approach.

Shit,
Andrew thought.
Shit, shit,
shit.

The lights from the office outside abruptly
went dark and he risked a quick enough peek to see Prendick walking
out the door, swinging it shut behind him, leaving Andrew
alone.

“Shit,” he whispered, a shaky sound, and he
managed a breathless laugh as he listened to the muted sounds as
the men walked away. When he raked his fingers through the crown of
his hair, he found the roots damp with anxious sweat and he had to
laugh once more. “Shit.”

CHAPTER TWELVE

The next morning, Andrew was up before
sunrise, dressed and outside, waiting for Alice to begin her ritual
walk. When he saw her trailing along the outer edge of the yard,
Suzette marking a leisurely pace and broad space behind her, he
broke into a sprint, crossing the dew-soaked grass to catch
them.

“Hey,” he gasped with a winded grin. The
morning was the sort of crisp and cool found only in autumn, a
sharp but pleasant chill that was just enough to frost his breath
in a thin film before his face.

She didn’t stop, didn’t even look at him.
Continuing on her way, she brushed past him, mumbling numbers to
herself, counting her steps.

“Alice?” Puzzled, somewhat wounded by the
cold shoulder, he turned and followed. “Hey, hold up a second.”

Because she still didn’t stop, he pulled into
the lead, then turned again, positioning himself directly in her
path. Only then did she draw to a halt.
Because she won’t walk
around me,
he realized.
It would mess up her count.

Andrew squatted in front of her, trying
unsuccessfully to draw her gaze from her toes. “I wanted to thank
you,” he said. “For last night, covering for me, giving me the pass
code.”

As it had turned out,
wunno-wunno
wasn’t what she’d said to him in the closet in the split seconds
before she’d ducked out the door and distracted her father and
Prendick. He hadn’t realized it until he’d tried to leave the
building and discovered that the exterior doors required a pass
code for both entry and exit. After a moment’s frustrated near
panic, he’d thought of what she’d said, and of something else she’d
mentioned earlier, when he’d found himself locked inside her
father’s apartment.

Daddy always chooses binary numbers, using
only zeroes or ones. He says they’re easier to remember. That means
there are only eight possible combinations within the four-digit
limit. I guessed the right one my first day here.

Wunno-wunno
had in fact been
one-oh-one-oh,
or in this case,
one-zero, one-zero,
which happened to be Dr. Moore’s pass code for all of the
laboratory and compound key pads.

Her hair had fallen into her face and he
brushed it back behind her ear. “You mad at me?” he asked, because
she still wouldn’t look at him.

It was wrong and he knew it, but he’d taken
Moore’s scrapbook with him when he’d left the lab building the
night before. He’d sat up for awhile once he’d slipped back into
his room at the barracks, too full of adrenaline to relax or sleep,
and had flipped through the book, reading all of the articles
tucked inside. Time and again, he’d found himself drawn to the
photograph of Moore carrying Alice down the stairs of Gallatin
State Hospital.

Daddy says it’s a place for crazy
people,
Alice had told him.
He says I didn’t belong there.
My mother put me in it. He had to go to court to get me out. It
took a long time because she had a court order that said I had to
stay.

Andrew had studied that photo, the haunting
image of Alice’s large eyes, her vacant stare spearing out of the
print and up at him. What had happened to her in that place? he’d
wondered.
Three years,
he’d thought, stricken and sad.
Jesus Christ, the poor kid.

Her cheek was cold to his touch. Though she’d
worn socks and shoes that morning, unlike before, she still wore
only a thin flannel nightgown. “Where’s your coat?” he asked,
because she still wouldn’t look at him, wouldn’t acknowledge him.
“Here.”

He wore an insulated flannel shirt, the one
he’d been wearing on the day he’d wrecked his Jeep. Suzette had
laundered it for him since then. It was quilted inside, thick and
warm, and he shrugged his way out of it now, wearing a long-sleeved
thermal shirt beneath. “Put this on. You’re going to get sick.”

As he drew the shirt around her narrow
shoulders, tugging the collar together beneath her chin, Suzette
drew near. “Watch it now. I’ll get jealous,” she chided with a
smile.

Andrew thought of the magazine clipping he’d
seen last night, the image of Dr. Moore and Suzette together in the
laboratory.

Noted geneticist Edward Moore, M.D., Ph.D.,
and research associate Suzette Montgomery, M.D., at work at the
Genomics and Bioinformatics Division at Cold Spring Harbor
Laboratory in New York.

She carried a lit cigarette in her hand and
lifted it to her mouth now for a quick drag. “We need to stop
meeting like this, you know. People are going to think you’re in
love with me.”

He forced a laugh. “Just a coincidence, I
promise,” he said, standing. After an uncertain glance around, he
added, “I was on my way to the garage to see how my Jeep’s
doing.”

She took another pull from the cigarette.
“Oh.”

“Well, I, uh…” Fumbling now, he raked his
fingers through his hair, then managed a clumsy wave. “I’ll see you
around then.”

Suzette smirked, bemused. “Sure.”

He started to turn, to walk away, but Alice
caught him by the hand, her grip tight and urgent. “Is it fun?” she
asked.

Surprised, he looked down at her. “What?”

“Your job. Is it fun?”

Even yesterday, the question, and the whole
line of disjointed thinking that had prompted it, might have caught
him off guard or puzzled him, but he found himself growing used to
Alice’s way of phasing in and out of conversations with no apparent
concept of time.

“I’ve never thought about it like that
before,” he admitted. “I guess it can be, if you’re into being out
by yourself a lot in the woods.”

She looked up at him, patient. “Are you?”

“Sometimes, I guess. Sure.”

“Do you get lonely?”

Andrew knelt again, bringing himself to her
eye level. “Not really. Sometimes I like being by myself.”

She studied him for a moment. “Me, too.”

Whatever inner bulb had illuminated in her
mind abruptly snuffed again. He watched, fascinated and somewhat
sad, as her gaze grew abruptly distant, her attention unfocused,
her expression slackening into stoic impassivity once more.