The Immortalist (35 page)

Hank looked heartbroken. “I couldn't find that fucking dog anywhere,” he moaned. “Charles told me he'd gotten sick, so I called his vet, Doc Wilber. Woke him out of a sound sleep. He swore he hadn't seen Hannibal in months.”

“Could you have misunderstood which vet it was?”

“No. Charles lied to me. He knew how important this was, and still he lied. Something's seriously wrong. I think Hannibal's dead.”

“Alive or dead—we need him.”

“Well, I can't find a trace of him. Charles has probably cremated him.”

Cricket's jaw dropped in horror.
Anything but that
.

Noticing her alarm, Hank backtracked, “Well, then again, maybe not. “Remember when I called Charles down here last night to confront him with Bonnie? It stuck in my mind how his hair and clothes were soaking wet.”

“So what? It was raining.”

“Yes, but
his jacket was dry
. If he'd gotten soaked running through the rain from the parking lot, it would have been the other way around. Wet jacket, dry clothes underneath. No, he'd definitely been out in the rain
without
his jacket.”

“I did see that—now that you mention it.”

“What do you suppose he'd been up to?”

Cricket gasped and raised her hand to her mouth. “Burying him!”

Hank nodded. “But where? There are over sixty square miles of woods surrounding the institute. He could be anywhere.”

“No. Not just anywhere.” Cricket felt weak in the knees as the realization hit her. She steadied herself by grabbing Hank by the shirt collar. “Hank! I know where he is.”

“You do?”

“Remember his shoes?”

“His shoes? His shoes . . . Yeah, they were kind of muddy.”

“With
red
mud, Hank. Red clay is pretty rare around here. In fact, there's only one place where you can find it. It's called Squando's Gulch—deep in the woods, about a mile and a half from campus.”

“How can I find it?”

“I'm not sure you could. I know it because I grew up here. My favorite bridle path used to run past it.”

“Then I need you to lead me.””

“What about the guard?” Cricket nodded toward the door. “They won't let me back in if I leave.”

“Let me handle him.”

As Cricket retreated into the doorway of the office, Hank sauntered over to the outer storeroom and noisily picked out an assortment of things: a gray plastic body bag, face shields, rubber gloves, and disposable biosafety overalls. Whistling loudly, he piled everything onto an isolator stretcher. Then he wheeled the stretcher toward the exit.

“Evenin', Bobby,” he said, pausing under the security window. “Think you could give me a hand with this?”

“What's goin' on?” Bobby was a young Micmac whose flathead haircut gave his face a squared-off look.

“Another one to pick up.”

“Two in one night.” Bobby shook his head. “This is startin' to give me the willies.”

“No kidding. But, say—I really could use some help lifting this onto the truck.”

“Sure, sure.” Bobby hurried out the rear door of the security office and into the lobby. Hank bumped the release bar of the outer door with his rump, while Bobby pushed the stretcher from the other side.

Cricket was watching from the shadows. As soon as Bobby passed through the door, she dashed forward to catch it before it closed. Peering onto the parking lot, she saw Hank collapse the undercarriage of the stretcher and get ready to lift it. Bobby's back was turned. Crouching low, she headed for the shadows of a row of yews. The pelting rain covered the sound of her footsteps in the gravel. After a moment she heard the tailgate of the pickup slam shut. Then the clack of the cab door. The vroom of the engine. Finally, the squeal of the pickup's brakes as Hank pulled up to a stop sign at the end of the parking lot.

“Head for Rosalind Franklin Drive, on the west end of campus,” Cricket whispered as she got in and softly closed the passenger door.

Two

THE WHEELS OF
THE PICKUP FLUNG
a sheet of rain into the air as it sped down the road. Cricket saw the three glass-and-steel research towers—Dalton, Sobczak, and Rensselaer—gleaming on the right. On the left, a single light shone from the dock at Wabanaki Cove, where she caught a glimpse of the naked mast of the
Bay Dreamer
, Hank's boat, rocking against the night sky. After that the campus ended and the road began to climb. Streetlights petered out. Pavement gave way to gravel and mud. Then the road itself ended at the foot of an aluminum cell phone tower.

Hank slammed on the brakes. “You sure this is right?”

“That tower didn't use to be there,” said Cricket a little hesitantly. “This road was just a riding path. But, yes, it's what I remember. We'll have to walk from here on.”

As they got out of the truck, Cricket noted a second set of tire tracks, as well as footprints heading to and from the woods. “Somebody's been here, all right.”

Hank led the way, holding their only flashlight in one hand and balancing the body bag on his shoulder with the other. Cricket carried a little shovel that Hank kept in the back of the pickup. She put it to good use, like an alpenstock, to claw her way up the slippery trail.

They passed the hulks of fallen white pines. A culvert under the pathway. A painted boulder that had endured, like an archaeological remnant from her high school days—
MDI TROJANS RULE
!,
LOREN + AMANDA
, and
WHAT, ME WORRY?
And then a creek, swollen with rainwater, burbling through the dark forest.

“Only a little farther,” said Cricket, pointing to a notch in the skyline. “That break in the trees—it's an old rockslide. The stream we're following runs past it. That's Squando's Gulch.”

“Charles really does go all out, doesn't he? A lesser man would have just buried the damn dog in his backyard.”

The rockslide had opened up the entrails of the earth, spilling a deposit of sea-born clay of quartz dust and iron-red hematite onto the floodplain of the creek. By the light of the flashlight, the ground appeared maroon, like clotted venous blood.

Gifford had made no effort to conceal the grave—a four-by-four-foot square of loosened earth rising a little higher than the surrounding ground. Shoeprints were still visible on top. Not from boots, but from fancy men's dress shoes.

Cricket sat on her haunches and held the flashlight while Hank dug. He went at it fiercely, as though Emmy herself were buried alive beneath his feet. The blade of the shovel made a sucking sound as it slid into the loose, soggy clay. Watching him, Cricket thought of her e-mail to Étienne.
How he must hate me for what he thinks I've done
. She wanted to speak to him, to have the moment of truth that they should have had before they divorced. But she didn't know how to begin.

“Got him!” exclaimed Hank. Cricket aimed the flashlight into the hole. A swatch of wiry, gray hair and a quilted blanket showed at the bottom.

“Don't touch him,” warned Cricket.

“Right. Time to suit up.”

Hank and Cricket unzipped the body bag and put on the biosafety suits and plastic face shields over their rain-soaked clothes. Hank gave Cricket a pair of his work gloves to protect her fragile rubber ones from tearing. Her tiny hands seemed to disappear inside them.

Hank wielded the shovel for a few more strokes, then Hannibal was ready for resurrection. One of his eyes was half-open. He was stiff from rigor mortis, his legs doubled underneath his belly and bound with plastic tape. In the center of his forehead was a small, dark depression. A much larger wound gaped at the back of his skull.

“Jesus Christ! He blew his brains out,” said Hank.

“That's good news, in a way. It means Hannibal didn't die from Nemesis. His immune system was still fighting it off. There'll be antibodies we can harvest. But he must have lost a lot of blood from that wound. There might not be much left to work with.”

Together they lifted Hannibal from the grave and zipped him into the body bag.

“Getting him back to the truck's gonna be a bitch,” said Hank, tearing off his face shield. “Can you hold up the rear end?”

Cricket tried one handle of the body bag, lifting it a few inches off the ground. “I'll be okay,” she said none too confidently.

They started down the trail. Without the benefit of the flashlight on her end, Cricket found herself stumbling over rocks and roots and potholes. Before long, the bootees of her flimsy biosafety suit had disintegrated, entangling her feet as they flapped at every step. The mud squished constantly in her loafers.

The darkness, the drizzling rain, the gusts of wind, seemed to mirror Cricket's thoughts. She had to tell Hank the truth about her and Étienne. But how? When? A muddy trail in the middle of nowhere seemed the worst possible place. But the urge grew stronger with every step. “Hank, why did you never talk to me about the divorce?” she finally said.

There was a short silence, “I thought we talked about it plenty.”

“We had words. We didn't talk.”

“What was there to say? We grew apart, that's all.”

“And that was it?”

Hank didn't answer.

“It was about Tien, wasn't it? All those times you threw his name in my face . . . Well, I thought you were just looking for a fight. I never took you seriously.”

“Adultery's pretty serious.”

“I never slept with him, Hank.”

“Don't lie to me, Cricket. It's beneath you. I've seen evidence.”

“I know what you've seen. Emmy told me.”

Hank stopped in his tracks and turned around. “Then why are we having this conversation?”

Cricket set down her end of the body bag. “Hank, I wish to God you had confronted me the day Emmy showed you that e-mail. We could have had it out and done with.”

“You mean the e-mail where you admitted to adultery?”

“Not the way you think.” Cricket warded off the glare of his flashlight with her hand. “If you had asked around about Tien, you would have known. There never was and never could have been anything between us. We were colleagues. Confidants, even. But never lovers.”

“Bullshit! Do you think I'm stupid?”

The flashlight made her squint, but Cricket looked squarely into Hank's eyes. “Tien was . . . a man's man.”

“A what?” Hank scoffed. Then it dawned on him what she meant. “Oh, come on. Seriously?”

“I swear it, Hank. It's true.” Cricket braced herself for the worst. “I wish there were a way to make it up to you. God knows, I've been fucking miserable, too.”

Hank lowered the flashlight. As Cricket's eyes readjusted to the dark, she could finally see the expression on his face. It wasn't the anger she'd expected. In fact, he was grinning so wide she could see reflections of the flashlight off his teeth.

“It's . . . it's no joke.”

“Do you know how many nights I lay awake wondering what Étienne David had that I didn't? God, what an ass I was!”

She tried to turn away from him, but his strong hands steered her back by the shoulders. She collapsed against his chest, crinkling her plastic face shield against his jumpsuit. She cried, and as she did, he held her, speaking to her softly. Minutes went by. Then he pushed the face shield aside, wiped the tears from her cheek with his thumb, and kissed her on the forehead.

“Come on, enough of this. Let's save our little girl,” he said.

A few minutes later, they were in Hank's pickup, bouncing down Franklin Drive, with Hannibal secured inside the isolation stretcher. Cricket was on her cell phone—to Freiberg, Waggoner, Jean. Clearly, it wouldn't be safe to bring Hannibal to the BSL-4 lab. Not with the guard watching the door. So they drove to Freiberg's lab in Cheville House.

Freiberg and Waggoner were waiting as they wheeled Hannibal through the back door. Waggoner looked half-asleep. Freiberg, however, was scintillant. “You found him! Charles has met his match in you, my friends!”