Has Anyone Seen Jessica Jenkins? (20 page)

“What made him so unhappy?” I asked.

Nancy checked her mirror and changed lanes. “It’s a long story,” she said.

It wasn’t even 8:20 yet. I didn’t have to be at school till quarter to nine. “I’ve got time.”

Nancy stopped at a traffic light and then turned to me. “It started with his wife.”

His wife. Max’s mom. “What about her?” I asked.

“Rachel had a rare genetic disease. She’d lived with it for years, but it had begun to spread through her body at an alarming rate. The awful thing was that she was pregnant when this happened, so the doctors didn’t want to use aggressive treatment to fight the disease.”

Pregnant . . . with Max?

“The doctors pretty much gave up on fighting her illness,” Nancy went on. “All except for James. We’d gotten to a really important stage with our research, and he was positive he could use it to help her.”

“So he tried the serum on his wife?”

Nancy nodded. The light turned green, and she set off again. “Not that it did anything. But she held on. Managed to carry her baby to full term. A beautiful little boy.”

I stifled any response. I wondered if Nancy had met Max lately, and whether she’d still describe him as a beautiful boy.

“I think it was little Max who kept her going. But just before his first birthday, she started to go rapidly downhill. James had been working around the clock on the serum. We’d added a few ingredients and changed the percentages a bit. We really thought we were onto something.”

Nancy took a left and turned onto the long road that runs parallel to the river all the way up to school. “Rachel was starting to slip away,” she carried on. “Her doctors said it would only be a matter of weeks. James was desperate. He never slept — just spent all day by her side and all night doubling his efforts on the serum. It was a powerful medicine, and we decided, together, that we would try this latest version of it on Rachel.”

“Did the hospital know that he tried the serum on his wife?”

“Good grief, no. He’d have lost his license on the spot.”

“But he still did it.”

“He would have done
anything
for her. Anything to make her better. I was there, and I can still picture the scene as if it were yesterday. The way James sat with her and held her as she sipped it . . .”

“And what happened?”

“Not a thing. In fact, that night she went downhill even more quickly. It was their wedding anniversary the next day. James had bought her a stunning necklace. She was so thin that she hadn’t been wearing her jewelry for months. Nothing fit anymore. James wanted her to feel beautiful again.”

I felt a twitch of something itchy running along my skin, making the hairs on my arms prickle. “What kind of necklace was it?” I asked.

“A beautiful pendant — a multicolored stone. Stunning. It was a black opal.”

My brain was whirring even faster now. The serum. A brand-new pendant with a precious stone in it . . .

“Rachel put the pendant on — and something incredible happened. She sat up in bed for the first time in months. She talked lucidly for the first time in weeks. She had a conversation with both of us. We laughed together. Then she started saying strange things.”

“Like what?”

“She said she could hear the wind — which was impossible, as we were on a ward in the center of the hospital. Plus, there was barely a breeze that day, but Rachel was convinced she could hear it.”

Nancy glanced at me and continued. “And there was more. Rachel looked up at the ceiling and said how beautiful it was, how many different shades of white she could see in it. Stroked James’s hand and told him she could feel the lines on his palm so strongly she half thought she might try reading his future from it. He said he could read his future himself, and that she was in it.”

“That’s so romantic,” I said.

“Yeah.”

We were approaching school. Still fifteen minutes early. Nancy signaled and pulled over down the road from the school gates. Then she cleared her throat. “Rachel died that night.”

I felt hot tears behind my eyes. “I’m sorry,” I said. I wasn’t just sorry for Nancy. I was sorry for Max. It all made sense now. His tough-guy image — and the fact that it wasn’t really convincing. I winced as I remembered my comment about the photo in the hall at his house. No wonder he’d been irritated with me after that.

“Is that why you said the serum might be dangerous for adults to drink?” I asked.

“Yes. We didn’t know it at the time, but we deduced later that if your brain is no longer in the developmental stage, taking the serum can speed up the multiplication of cells, which is highly dangerous.”

“And you think that’s what happened to Max’s mom?”

Nancy nodded. “James gave up on almost everything after Rachel died. His whole world caved in. He threw away every drop of the serum that he could find. All of it gone, apart from twenty bottles or so that I’d kept at home. James tore up and burned all the notes on the serum,” Nancy continued. “Deleted all the computer files. Threw away everything he could find that reminded him of it.”

“Why?”

“He couldn’t forgive himself for what had happened; he blamed himself for Rachel’s death — for getting it so wrong. And then, once he’d gotten rid of everything to do with the old serum, he started again from scratch.”

“Huh? He went back to his research?”

“James didn’t want Rachel’s death to be in vain. Trying to find a cure for the illness she’d had was the only thing that gave his life any meaning.”

“What about his son?” I prompted.

“Yes, of course, poor Max. James loved him, but he wasn’t the best father in those days.”

Or
any
days, judging by some of the things Max had said.

“He invested all his time in his research. He felt that if he could somehow make a breakthrough, perhaps Rachel’s death would have some meaning. Then one day he made the mistake of saying too much to the wrong person.” Nancy twiddled with her hair. “Remember I told you we were government-funded?”

“Uh-huh.”

“Well, James and I had become friendly with the man from the department who’d granted the funding — Oscar Finch. James and Oscar would go out drinking together — too much drinking, if you ask me, but at least it gave James someone to talk to. A friend whom he could confide in and trust. At least, that was what we thought at the time.”

“OK.”

“One night, after downing half a bottle of whiskey, James told Oscar what he’d done with the original serum, how he’d given it to Rachel. And he told Oscar what had happened.”

“Yikes. Did he lose his job?”

“Far from it! James got a message from Oscar the next morning asking him to come and see him. After the conversation they’d had the night before, James was convinced he was about to get sacked, but Oscar had different ideas. He believed we were on the verge of a modern miracle.”

“Really? But that’s good, isn’t it? So he was happy for you to carry on with the research?”

“Not exactly carry on with it. He wanted us to go back to the
original
research. He wanted us to re-create the serum James had given his wife. Not just that, but he wanted us both to leave our jobs, take the whole thing out of the public sector, and run it with him as a private scheme.”

“I don’t understand. What does that mean?”

“It means that the research would no longer have been about medical advances. It wouldn’t have been about trying to find ways to cure the very sick and heal the unhealable. Instead, it would have become about developing a magic trick on a scale the world had never seen before — and selling it to the highest bidder. All Oscar saw was a magic potion that somehow enhanced people’s senses and gave them capabilities beyond anything anyone had ever heard of.”

“I see.”

“A medicine that could make you hear things happening a mile away, see things previously invisible to the human eye? Well, Oscar’s eyes just saw dollar signs — and lots of them,” Nancy went on angrily. “His idea was that we could develop it into the perfect weapon to sell to the world’s armies, the perfect spying tools to sell to intelligence agencies across the globe, the perfect product to make aging people feel younger. Basically, the perfect anything that would make him rich.” She paused for a second to take a breath. “Oscar didn’t care about medicine, about people’s well-being. All he cared about was getting rich and becoming powerful — no matter what it took or who it hurt.”

“I’m guessing Dr. Malone said no?”

“Darn right he said no! His medical research had
never
been about money or glory. Those things meant nothing to him, and they meant even less after he lost Rachel.”

“And how did that go down?”

Nancy laughed sadly. “They had a massive argument. James finally got it through to Oscar that he would
never
use his research to pursue gimmicks, egos, and money. Surprise, surprise — within a week our funding was cut and James was ordered to submit his final report and ditch the project. He had to sign a contract agreeing that he’d never go back to it.”

“Jeez.”

“Yeah. So that was that. To be honest, at that point, James had lost all his fight anyway, and the research had more or less stalled. So we packed up our stuff and went back to our day jobs. James worked every shift he could to make sure he kept the house and gave Max everything he needed. Max was all that mattered to him.”

I thought about the way Max had described his dad’s double shifts. As if the
hospital
were what mattered to him. Turned out he couldn’t have been more wrong.

“And what happened to Oscar Finch?”

“I’ve no idea. He probably found some other sucker to make him rich.”

I thought for a moment. “So I’m guessing this guy is the one you meant by ‘the wrong hands,’ then?”

Nancy turned to me. “He’s a dangerous man, Jess. You don’t know how relieved I was to find the crystals this morning. If Oscar found out about any of our latest research . . .”

She didn’t need to finish her sentence. I’d probably already pictured all the worst things she could imagine. Not only the tabloid headlines and the experimenting cage; now I also had a picture of me being sold off to the highest bidder and used by terrorists in some kind of superpowered war.

Nancy glanced at me. “Hey, there’s no need to look so scared,” she said. “We haven’t seen Finch for years. He’s completely out of the scene — and no one’s been breaking into the lab.” She reached out to pat my hand. “There’s really nothing to worry about.”

We’d been sitting down the road from the school gates for ten minutes. It was time to go. But I couldn’t move. Something was bugging me, and I couldn’t ignore it. I didn’t want to ask, but I knew I had to . . .

“Nancy,” I said nervously. “What did he look like?”

“Finch?”

“Uh-huh.”

Nancy allowed herself a smile. “You know, I had quite a crush on him when we first met him. He was so handsome. Over six foot tall, immaculate sandy hair — always combed and parted to perfection — and the bluest eyes you’ve ever seen.”

My gut did a backward somersault. “Blue eyes?” I asked, trying to keep my voice steady.

“Yes — so intense you felt he was seeing right into your soul when he looked at you.”

“Mm-hmm,” I murmured. I couldn’t trust myself to say anything else. I swallowed hard. Eventually, I found my voice. “And how did he dress?” I asked.

“Oh, he was the sharpest person you’ve ever met. You could wear your best clothes and you’d still feel scruffy next to him. In fact, I don’t think I ever saw him out of a shirt and tie. Nice dresser. Smooth talker. An evil, cold, and calculating person.” Nancy stopped and looked at me. “Jess, are you OK? You’ve turned white.”

“I — I just realized I’m late,” I said. What else could I say? I couldn’t tell her. I
couldn’t
. She was so happy that everything was resolved at the lab. The doctor was happy, too. She’d already told me how good he was feeling now that he was working on his research again. I couldn’t take it all away from them. And I couldn’t betray Max. But what
could
I do?

All I knew was I had to get away. I needed to find Izzy and Max and tell them the news — that I was almost positive I now knew who we’d seen at the lab last night.

And that things were about as bad as they could possibly get.

Except, as it happened, I was wrong about that. It turned out things could get much, much worse.

I started looking for Max as soon as I got through the school gates. We still had five minutes till the bell rang for homeroom, and I was sure he’d be in the athletic field next to the school yard, hanging out with his soccer friends near the goalposts.

But he wasn’t with his soccer friends.

I searched for him when the bell rang and we formed lines for our classes. I was sure he must be at the back of his line.

But he wasn’t in line.

I darted out of homeroom as soon as Ms. Forshaw finished taking attendance then I ran along the hall to his homeroom and peered through the window.

He wasn’t in the classroom.

He wasn’t anywhere. He wasn’t at school.

I bumped into Izzy in the corridor outside Mr. Martins’s classroom. We had English first thing. “Iz, Max isn’t here,” I breathed.