Neighborhood Watch (28 page)

I sit down at the table across from her, thankful for the tentative truce that has grown between us. Two days is a long time to hover by phones and wait while people in uniforms tell us what to do. Every few hours, we’ve learned a little bit more. For instance, Trish has done this before, gone missing for days when she had appointments and meetings scheduled. When her agent first heard about her disappearance, he actually said, “Oh, no, not this again,” then quickly backpedaled, calling her the most talented young writer he represented. “She’s astonishing,” he said. But yes, he admitted, she can be unreliable. He told about her reading at the Book Expo last year where three hundred people waited, and she never showed up. After that, she didn’t call or send an apology, didn’t contact anyone for almost two weeks. “I worried that time,” he said. “But eventually she turned up.”

The finger of suspicion pointed against me is softening. Marianne is no longer sure if this is my fault. I suspect she’s no longer sure what to think. When I sit down, she shakes her head, as tears I’ve seen only once before rise to her eyes. “I don’t understand. For five years, I was fine not knowing where she was. Now I can’t bear to have this go on another day.”

The doorbell has been ringing with neighbors stopping by, checking in, dropping off food. All of this reminds me of the feeling after Linda Sue’s death. As if we’ve all been poised, waiting for this to happen, expecting it somehow.

For the moment, though, we are alone and I take advantage of the silence around us to ask Marianne about her work. Her eyes widen and then she must assume Roland has told me everything. She looks toward the basement door and shakes her head. “We had to keep it a secret. We didn’t have a choice. My first husband, David, died doing this work and I needed to keep us all safe.”

“How did he die?”

“Pancreatic cancer. But there were other people on his research and development team getting the same cancer and no one wanted to investigate the connection or figure out what was really going on.”

“Was it from the chemicals they were working with?”

“He didn’t work with the chemicals. I did. None of the men who got the cancer worked in the labs. They were analyzing our results and drawing up designs. How do three men under the age of fifty get cancer from pencils and computers? No one would ever answer that question for me.”

I can’t get over how easily she’s shed a twenty-year charade of pretending to do nothing. It’s as if, with Trish gone, there’s no point in any of the old secrecy anymore. She tells me I’d be stunned by what an amoral bunch scientists can be, especially if they think their precious research funding might be endangered. “David used to complain about it. I thought he was being ridiculous, and then he died under circumstances that no one would look into. There were people obsessed with stopping cold fusion research. He thought it was someone putting carcinogens in our water supply, which I thought was crazy until all these guys got cancer and died within six months of each other.”

“Who wanted to stop work on cold fusion?”

“Hot fusion got all the government contracts and money in those days—billions and billions. They had to hold on to it.” It all started when they were at Texas A&M after Fleischmann and Pons made their announcement. Their lab went to work the next day trying to replicate the experiment. After four months with no results, the tide began turning. Georgia State was the first to say it wasn’t replicable; MIT came out a few weeks later, calling cold fusion a hoax. Soon after that, the money disappeared. Basically, the government funded it long enough to look like they’d tried but not long enough to threaten the twenty-five years they’d invested in hot fusion. Without government subsidy, the university cut them off, even though most of the scientists they were working for agreed they hadn’t had enough time. She and David were postdocs at that point, low enough on the totem pole that they were able to move around under the radar. They stole equipment from the lab to continue the work in the basement of their tiny rented house. Their feeling, the whole time, was that the higher-ups knew and approved of what they were doing. They believed cold fusion had potential, though it might take ten years or more to get reliable results.

A year later, in their makeshift basement lab, it finally happened: One of the beakers began to boil. “We couldn’t figure out what we’d done differently. Why this one and not the others? It’s addictive, a question like that. If you can answer it, you know you’ll change the world. We had to stay with it. We had to.”

Committing to this after they got their degrees meant forgoing university jobs and mainstream research. It put them on the fringe, where they met Roland for the first time. “He’d been working in solar for a long time, and wind a little bit. He was less of a scientist, more of a designer, but he came out and saw what was happening with our research, that we’d gotten reactions going in one out of ten setups, higher percentages than anyone else was getting.”

He was amazed and asked if he could join them. Soon after that David got sick, and Marianne’s world fell apart. “I had two young children I had to protect. I couldn’t put them in danger. I didn’t know if I’d been exposed or if I was going to get sick. Of course I married Roland. He was good to my kids. I had to make sure they’d be all right.”

All along I’ve wondered if their marriage was a little like my own, born of circumstance, two people clinging to similar life rafts. They took Roland’s name and moved here to disappear. If David had been a target, they didn’t want to be found. The intention was to leave all the old work behind. “Then about three months after we moved here, I woke up one night with a question about the presence of trace carbons in our cathodes. I told Roland I wanted to set up one experiment. Of course there’s no such thing as one experiment, we both knew that. One set of answers opens up new questions and you need a new trial.”

They built a lab downstairs, hidden in an annex, and kept going. Money quickly became a factor and, as isolated as they were, they had to play games to keep some coming in. After five years, they found themselves at a crossroads. The work was going well, but the minimal funding sources were drying up. Roland thought they were a year away from creating a viable hot-water heater. Anything like that, any commercial application, would have guaranteed financing.

“That’s when John got involved. He was still in high school but he was already doing all this Free Energy Tesla stuff. He wanted to set up a Web site in his father’s memory and collect donations for the work we were doing. He also thought it was a way to bring like-minded people into our research without drawing attention to the cold fusion aspect. He was right, as it turned out. But that’s when I started to look at our data a little closer. One of the problems with fusion is that it’s so hard to measure if it has actually taken place. You need elevated temperatures but you also need tritium and helium-4 isotopes. We kept getting one or two of the markers of fusion but not all three. For a long time, I didn’t think that was significant, and then I started to think maybe the reason we couldn’t achieve fusion predictably was because we weren’t achieving it at all, that it was just a random chemical reaction taking place. I knew we had more problems than Roland wanted to admit. There were too many factors we couldn’t explain. It had never made sense that a nuclear event had occurred without producing any radiation. No one ever questioned that enough. The cold fusion people said that’s the beauty of this process—no radiation was produced. But the beauty of it was also the problem: It was too controlled. It created enough heat to bubble politely in a beaker but it was never explosive, never out of control. Roland wouldn’t hear any of this. He was more convinced than ever. He was even going to tell you about it.”

That was the summer Trish wanted to work for Roland, which Marianne said was fine as long as Trish never saw the lab. They’d told their kids a little bit about their work but never about the lab in the basement, a hard-and-fast rule they always agreed on. Kids were unpredictable, teenagers even worse. If they knew, they’d get curious and sneak down at night to get a closer look, poke a finger in a beaker and skew six months of work. No, they never knew it was there, never even suspected, with the access hidden as it was behind a bookshelf on invisible rolling wheels. They’d done that much right, but beyond that, they agreed on less and less. Roland wanted John brought in as a financial partner. He was all of eighteen, good at Web site design but not ready for the weight of responsibility. It was a terrible time for Marianne. She saw much too clearly how fractured her family was, how damaged by work that she was now certain would never prove itself.

She tried talking in veiled terms to Trish, but telling her the truth: that it was a decades-old dream that might not come true. Marianne thought it might help at a time when Trish was growing up so fast, becoming a teenager overnight, far smarter than the peers she humiliated herself trying to win the approval of. She knew Trish needed something from her and thought talking to her like an adult might be an answer. It wasn’t. It’s all a jumble in Marianne’s mind. A lot of things started happening at once. Trish stopped working with Roland around the time they started seeing a new and measurable difference in their results, more significant than anything they’d seen in years—higher temperatures, beakers boiling over. And then one night—magical, she still thinks, though she wasn’t there to witness it—five of them burst. It meant they had a reason to keep going, enough information to get back to work, which they did. They focused intensely, both of them downstairs at night—they could work only at night—and stopped worrying about Trish for how long? A week? Maybe two? By which point it was too late. One night Marianne went upstairs, peeked into Trish’s room, and realized she wasn’t there at all.

It can’t be a coincidence that she started Neighborhood Watch during this time, just as her work was coming to fruition. When I ask, she says, “I had to start that group. The last time we got close to achieving real fusion my husband was killed. I knew people would go to great lengths to stop our work.”

I study her face. “But it wasn’t outsiders you were really worried about, was it?”

For a long time, she doesn’t speak. “You have to understand, no one has ever been issued a patent for cold fusion. The potential is too enormous. The impact it would have on the world is unprecedented. Its value can’t be measured in dollars.”

“Who did you think was trying to steal your work?”

She looks at me for a long time. “She lived in an empty house with no furniture, no talk of where her money came from or when it would run out. She must have been working for
someone.
What was she
doing
here?”

The telephone rings but before she goes to answer it, she hands me an envelope—plain white with my name typed across the front. “Here. This came for you this morning.” There’s no address, no postmark, no stamp.

It looks exactly like the letter I got three years ago, with the cat note inside.

My heart speeds up. I open it and find a sheet of white paper with a single line, typed:
I need to talk to you. Please meet me at the library
. I read it again and study the envelope. Could it be from Trish, hiding somewhere, looking for help?

If it is, I need to get to her as quickly as possible. I know enough of the story now to fill in some of the gaps. Yes, this had a great deal to do with the work Marianne and Roland kept far too secret for too long, but there’s another piece that both of them have forgotten. Trish had a baby that was taken away from her.

I’ve been thinking about this ever since Trish disappeared.

It’s hard for any woman who has longed for and been unable to have a child of her own to imagine what surrendering a real one would be like. Does she think about him at night? Does she hear his voice in her head? I know this much: She may have given him up, but he’s never left her thoughts.

I also know how to help her. There were women in prison who’d lost their children to courts and the foster system. They just wanted an address to write to, they’d tell me, and I’d get to work typing names into data banks. I can help Trish find her baby. If she’s at the library now, waiting for me, we can start there; I know how to search for birth records. I can help her find him and take her there.

I slip out the back door before Marianne can ask where I’m going. Outside the library, I feel a chill pass through me opening the old familiar door. I wonder what would have happened if I’d lived out my life working here every day, going home at night, pretending to be fine except for the times when I so obviously wasn’t. Would that have been better than what I’ve been through?

I know the answer before I even finish asking it: No.

I open the door and breathe in the heady, familiar scent of old books and carpet cleaner. Heather is there at the front desk, looking older and thinner with gray hair now, the same as my own. I wait for someone to distract her at the desk so I can slip by unrecognized. I need to find Trish as quickly as possible. If she’s not here, I need to look outside. I scan the bent heads, the usual collection of library waifs and old people napping with newspapers open on their laps. It’s such a familiar scene it almost feels as if I never left at all. Then I look up and my heart stops.

I see who wrote the letter and it’s not Trish at all.

Sitting at a table, with a book open in front of him, is Leo.

“
W
hat are you doing here?” I sit down across from Leo an arm’s length away, close enough to touch him, my heart beating crazily. Up close like this, I see all the details I remember. His hair is blond, streaked with silver; his hands are spotted with freckles and golden hair. He looks thinner than I remember and I feel my chest tighten. All those months of writing to him every night was the closest I ever came to losing myself entirely in the fantasy of happiness.