The 100 Year Miracle (21 page)

“The ghosts coaxed the men?” This seemed an important point to Harry that needed to be clarified.

It was not, it seemed, so important to Rachel.

“They were an uneducated people,” she said and shut the door without giving any indication of whether she would open it again anytime soon.

Harry decided that she would keep her word and that he should wait. Certainly she meant for him to wait. Ten minutes went by.

Coaxed how? Seeing Becca had been unexpected. It had left him both terrified and thrilled, but she had not indicated he should follow her. This had not stopped him from trying, of course, but that was of his own volition. He did not doubt that Becca had been, as Dr. Bell said, a hallucination, but that did not stop him from wanting to see her. The pain relief, the mobility—they were wonderful, but seeing Becca was the high. “A curse,” Rachel had called it. That did not seem a very apt term to Harry.

Finally, Rachel opened the door and handed him a spoon. “I really need to wash my hands,” she said and pushed past him.

“Can I read them?” Harry asked, only glancing at the dose.

“Read what?” She was heading into the bathroom.

“The ghost stories.”

“Do you speak French?”

“No.”

“Then you would find it challenging,” Rachel said and shut the door.

Harry looked at the spoon. It was a known side effect, and she did not seem worried. She wouldn’t give him more than he should have. He knew that. He trusted her. She wasn’t worried, and so he shouldn’t worry.

24.

As project leader, tenured professor, and a man with a lot of letters behind his name, Hooper would have been entitled to marginally better lodgings than were being enjoyed—or perhaps endured—by the other members of the team, who were mostly post-doc researchers and a few graduate students, but he liked maintaining a certain “professor of the students” facade. Still, the truth was all of his years in the field had led to various illnesses and injuries, which were beginning to add up. There were those that could be measured (one case of reoccurring malaria, two bouts of hepatitis A, one seriously infected leg wound, giardiasis twice, and three or four notable cases of dysentery) along with the cumulative bodily stresses that could not be so easily measured but that manifested in aching knees, difficulty sleeping, and a back that wasn’t as reliable as it once was. All of this made whatever creature comforts that could be had worth having.

Unfortunately, there weren’t better lodgings available in the camp, and while he did not have to participate in the cooking and dishwashing chores that rotated among the other team members, this was not always a blessing. Hooper’s own cooking skills could not be said to be wide, but they were deep. The six dishes that made up his repertoire had been perfected by round after round of experimentation, controlling for all possible variables until the ideal ratio of ingredients and precise cooking methods had been achieved. He was especially proud of his spaghetti carbonara. However, it would seem from the dinner he had eaten that night—and several of the other nights—that this domestic skill wasn’t as widely developed as one might hope.

It had been Marcus’s turn to cook that night. Hooper had agreed to be his thesis advisor not that long ago and had been impressed by the young man’s fastidious nature and attention to detail in the lab. Hooper trusted Marcus’s prep for an experiment more than he trusted his own, and given how much cooking had in common with the experimental sciences, Hooper had expected the skills to be transferrable. He had been disappointed.

Marcus’s idea of dinner had been to pick up and prepare half a dozen boxes of off-brand macaroni and cheese, the kind that came with powder the color of hunter safety vests. He prepared these more or less according to the instructions but failed to cook the pasta long enough so that it stuck in Hooper’s teeth, giving him the opportunity to taste it for a good long time. This had been paired with several other boxes of frozen chicken nuggets, which Marcus did have the good sense to reheat in the oven rather than the microwave. He had offered two condiments—ketchup and mustard. And because they deserved a treat, his shopping trip was topped off by a case of beer and a large box of individually wrapped children’s snack cakes.

If this was how Marcus ate at home, Hooper was left to conclude that he was doing some sort of experiment to determine if consuming a sufficient quantity of preservatives could lead to immortality. Hooper did not care to offer a hypothesis on the matter, but he did feel that life wouldn’t be worth living in perpetuity like this even if you could.

Those on the night shift had finished their dinner, including the entire box of snack cakes, and had left to get what sleep they could. The day shift had not yet gathered there in the dining hall, which, even clean, smelled like old food and disinfectant. Like any research trip, Hooper had very few waking moments to spend alone, and he was spending them there. But at least he still had his beer, and that was something because Hooper was worried.

Rachel Bell had been his star post-doc. He wasn’t sure he’d said that aloud to her or anyone else. Probably he had not. She was smart and meticulous, which could be taught, and she was driven, which could not be. It had not taken him long to know she would have a distinguished career ahead of her if she did not derail it of her own accord.

Rachel had constructed for herself a shell of equanimity, but it was thin and had a tendency to crack, especially when she was under stress. Things had been worse this past year. Her composure had become wobbly, and he had wondered at one point if she was ill. But he was the department chair, not her minder or even her friend, and besides, academia tended to tolerate difficult personalities that would be shunted aside in a more corporate environment. Eccentricities were, with no proof whatsoever, considered a sign of either intelligence or creativity or both.

In the cold dining room with a lump of undercooked macaroni and cheese in his stomach, Hooper knew he had been swayed by that academic fairy tale where Rachel was concerned. He had forgiven much, overlooked more, and allowed her more leash than, it seemed now, she could handle. He had, on this trip alone, allowed her to shun the rest of the team, duck out of most of the chores, and now she was staying in a beachside mansion while the others—including him—were sleeping on short-sheeted mattresses. This had led to serious disharmony among the others. Rachel was on the verge of being roasted on a spit by her peers. And more than that, he had now seen proof that she had, in nontechnical terms, gone rogue.

He had neglected some of his more basic duties as project leader, showed favoritism, and allowed a lack of discipline on his team.

“Shit.”

It was a rookie mistake that he should have outgrown. Perhaps he had outgrown it once but had started to devolve. Maybe he didn’t have as much business as he’d thought leading trips like this anymore. Maybe he would be better off retiring to his lab and his lecture hall. Maybe it was time to retire all together. If he had the money, he would.

Hooper wouldn’t have said that five years before, but it had been a rough five years. The divorce had been difficult on his bank account, and in an overreaction, he had made poor investment decisions from which he was unlikely to recover. Current projections estimated that he would be working in campsites like this one until he was ninety-three and a half.

It was the “half” that got to him.

Hooper reached into his pocket for his phone. He had thought without thinking that he should check for messages only to remember once again that the device was lost.

To console himself, Hooper drained what was left of his beer in a short chug and wondered if there was another left in the fridge. He pushed himself up to his full height and groaned. His long limbs had been folded quite severely onto the stool, and his knees and hips creaked as he rose. With a deep breath that he pushed back out with a hiss through his teeth, Hooper shuffled toward the kitchen. If he could find one last bottle, he would have just enough time to drink it and toss the evidence before the second shift arrived and made him coffee.

*   *   *

Rachel sat on the floor of the bathroom with the door locked, transcribing the notebook she’d ripped from Hooper’s hand. She’d rather he had never seen it, but now that he had, she couldn’t risk him looking for it again.

After mixing up Harry’s dose, Rachel had spent two hours going through her usual procedure. Moving as quickly as she could, she’d set up her samples in their flasks and used the pipette to allot nutrients and green algae for food. She had lowered the tank temperature slightly. The variables were set and noted.

While those cooked, she transcribed her work into a new notebook. The tile floor was hard, and the shaggy, cream-colored bathmat offered less padding than she’d hoped. The sharp pain radiating from the two points in her pelvis that ground into the floor reminded her that she had not been eating. She hadn’t been on a scale. She should weigh herself to better calculate dosage to body mass. She would make a note of that. In the meantime, she had less padding, and her butt hurt, forcing her to adjust her position. She wanted to take a small dose, just a little bit, to help her get through the work, and resisting took more self-discipline than she cared to admit. She had a little self-experimentation planned for later, and she couldn’t risk skewing the results. With a deep breath, she set her jaw and pushed through.

Each page was copied from English to a shorthand code Rachel had developed in graduate school. It had proved undecipherable to anyone else, and other students had stopped asking to copy her notes. It was something she should have done originally. She could only hope that if Hooper went looking for her notebook again, he would be as stymied as they had been. As each page was completed, she tore the original into sixteen pieces and threw the pieces into the toilet to flush away.

When that was done, Rachel went back to her real work. She took four samples from the tanks and prepared each for the centrifuge. While they cycled, she set up a cooler with some pilfered dry ice from the work site. When the tubes were finished spinning, she discarded the liquid that had separated and was floating at the top. Then, using a small container of liquid nitrogen, she flash froze two of the samples and packed them in with the dry ice. Finally, she gathered the other tubes and a handful of supplies to take down to the kitchen.

Sometimes you needed a little fire.

*   *   *

Tilda had not slept much nor had she slept well, and when she woke later than usual but still exhausted, she was forced to choose between warm sheets but lots of tossing and turning or the self-satisfaction of just getting up and on with it. It wasn’t an easy call, and she spent a good twenty minutes trying to deny the question altogether before dragging herself to standing.

She pulled her swim cap, goggles, and suit off the rack in the bathroom where she’d last left them to dry and shoved them in her gym bag with a towel. She wore the same sweatpants and sweatshirt to the pool each time, and she pulled them out of the dirty laundry and put them on before heading down to the kitchen for a to-go cup.

On the way, she stopped on the second floor and tiptoed to Harry’s room. She had left his door half open along with her own. It had been the best she could do without resorting to a baby monitor. She stuck her head inside. He was a lump under the covers turned over on his side and facing away from the door. She stood there for a moment, watching him much like she had watched her children sleep those years ago, as though her presence could forestall some waiting disaster. She had learned in the most horrible way that that was not true for her children, and she knew, too, that it was not true for Harry. But still she stood there and watched.

His cane wasn’t in the same place she had left it the night before. She had put it near the head of his bed, so it would be easy for him to reach. But it was now at the foot, and Tilda assumed he had gotten up to use the bathroom, which meant that he was able to get up and use the bathroom, and she was grateful for that.

Harry hated cell phones and did not own one. Tilda no longer considered that his decision, not that she would put it that way when she came home with one for him. She would keep it charged and check that he had it in his pocket whenever she left the house. Tilda was still thinking about cell phones, which to get and where to get it, as she left Harry’s room and headed for the stairs.

The guest room, which was really Becca’s room, was right in front of her at the top of the banister. Anyone going up or down would come face-to-face with it. The door had been shut tight ever since the woman had shown up with her fish tanks and metal suitcases of equipment, and so the thin triangle of light that spilled out of the ever-so-slightly open door couldn’t help but grab Tilda’s attention.

She stood at the crack and tried looking inside, but the view was too limited. She saw only the thinnest slice of the room, and most of that was the unmade bed. It was almost as useless as looking through a peephole the wrong way. Tilda looked over her shoulder, but the door to that floor’s bathroom was open and the light was off. She wasn’t in there.

Tilda rapped her knuckle against the frame twice, not too quiet and not too loud, formulating a cover story as she did so. Maybe something about a cup of coffee or some extra towels. But there was no answer. Tilda rapped again just a little louder but not, she hoped, loud enough to wake Harry. Still no answer, and so she did what anyone would do. She pushed the door open and let herself inside.

25.

Before doing anything, Rachel had given herself a quick tour of the downstairs, checking the dining room, the library, the parlor, the bathroom, and even opening the closets and the door to the garage. It was too bad the kitchen didn’t have a door, but it couldn’t be helped. A burner was something Rachel hadn’t packed.

She’d filled a standard cooking pot with tap water and set it on the stove with the fire turned up as high as it would go. The two tubes from the centrifuge were sealed, and when the water came to a full rolling boil, she dropped one of them in, along with a razor blade. And then she waited.