The Immortalists (3 page)

The silence had become oppressive, and Richard pulled away from the microscope to look around at the cluttered lab.

He’d gotten a good price on the space by taking the whole floor, but the size of it now mocked him with a faint echo accompanying every sound he made. It was hard not to dwell on the days that it had been wall-to-wall with recent graduates anxious to work for him and the kids—talented scientists still clinging to their idealism and willing to work on the cheap. But not cheap enough. Not anymore.

He scanned the stools lined up along cluttered tables and once again thought about subletting some of the space. Without question, it would be smart financially, but it felt like the first step toward admitting defeat. He feared that if he started down that path, the momentum would build until it swept him away.

The phone next to him buzzed, reminding him that there actually was life in the building. It was almost noon, and he assumed it was someone making a plan for lunch. Some pizza and a little mindless small talk in the sun was exactly what he needed. Maybe even half a beer.

“Hello?”

“Dr. Draman?” his receptionist said. “I’ve got Troy Chevalier here.”

It took a couple beats to put meaning to the name. “I’m sorry. Did you say Troy Chevalier? Annette’s husband?”

“I don’t know who he’s married to. Do you want me to ask hi—”

“No!” Richard said immediately. “Don’t mention his wife. Just have him wait in my office, please. I’m on my way.”

Richard ran from the lab, trying to remember his last conversation with Annette, her son’s name, and to come up with even a remote reason that her husband would show up there.

“Troy,” Richard said, extending a hand as he strode breathlessly through the door. “How are you? How’s Jonny?”

“We’re good,” he responded. “We’re doing good.”

It was an obvious lie. His skin was unnaturally pale, and there was a slackness to his face that gave him an air of complete hopelessness.

“I’m sorry about the mess,” Richard said, clearing a stack of books from the chair in front of his desk. “Please sit down.”

Chevalier did, though it seemed like even that simple act caused him pain.

“I’m so sorry Carly and I couldn’t make Annette’s funeral. We—”

“I understand. You have your own problems. The flowers you sent were beautiful. We really appreciated them.”

Richard sank into his own chair as Chevalier’s gaze turned distant. As though he was reliving the image of his wife’s coffin sinking into the earth. Or, God forbid, the image of her hanging from their ceiling.

“Troy? Have we met before and I can’t remember it? I don’t mean to sound abrupt, but I’m really curious why you’re here.”

“Annette was murdered.”

Richard froze for a moment, watching Chevalier’s face turn angry.

“But my understanding is that the police—”

“That it was suicide? They don’t know what the hell they’re talking about.”

Richard wasn’t sure what to say. He’d been around grieving families for most of his career, but the causes of death in his world were always obvious. This was something he hadn’t faced before.

“Troy, Annette was a wonderful woman, and I know that she loved you and Jonny as much as anyone could. But we both know she had problems…”

“I’m not an idiot, Richard.”

“I didn’t say—”

“Annette would have never done anything to herself where Jonny might find her. Do you understand me?
Never
.”

The force of the delivery gave his statement more weight than it probably deserved. The loss of a loved one could do terrible things to people.

“I can only imagine how hard this must be for you, Troy. Have you thought of talking to some—”

“I’m talking to you,” he said, pulling a thumb drive from his jacket and sliding it across the desk.

Richard looked down at it but otherwise didn’t move. “What is it?”

“The data from a pet project Annette was working on. I think this is why she was killed.”

Again, Richard wasn’t sure how to respond. Should he humor the man or try to bring him back to reality? In the end, he decided against confrontation. Chevalier had suffered enough, and he just needed time to work through it.

“What pet project?”

“I don’t really know—I’m not a scientist. She was excited about it, though, and she told me about it sometimes. I had no idea what she was talking about. You know how it is, right, Richard? When someone you love is passionate about something? You just sit there and listen.”

“Sure, but…”

“At first, the pharmaceutical company she worked for just ignored it, but about a year ago they started putting pressure on her to stop spending time on it. I guess it’s pretty theoretical and didn’t have much potential to make money. She told them she’d be happy to resign if they didn’t think they were getting their money’s worth out of her. They backed down, but then weird things started to happen.”

“What kind of things?”

“Look, I don’t want to get into it, OK? And I don’t want to get you involved any more than I have to. All I’m asking is that you take a look at what’s on that drive and tell me what you think. Tell me if this is why they killed her.”

The strange inflection on the word “they” made Richard even more uncomfortable—something he would have bet good money wasn’t possible.

“I don’t know, Troy. I think when horrible things happen we look for reasons. For someone to blame. But sometimes—”

“Richard, please. Are you going to make me beg? Do you want me to get on my knees?”

“No, I don’t want you to get on your knees. Look…Why me? You must know a hell of a lot of biologists.”

“Precisely because I don’t really know you. I think some of the people Annette worked with and I are being watched. And because Annette thought you were one of the top people in the field. You’re one of the few people I’m confident will be able to understand it.”

“What makes you think people are watching you, Troy?”

“You think I’m nuts, don’t you?”

“No. I think—”

Chevalier pulled a small black box from his jacket and slammed it loudly onto the desk. “Do you know what this is?”

“I don’t.”

“It’s a tracking device. I found it on my car.”

Richard ran a hand nervously through his blond beard, and Chevalier misinterpreted the change in his demeanor.

“Don’t be scared. I disabled it.”

“That’s not what I’m worried about, Troy. I—”

“You still think I’m crazy.”

“Let me finish my sentence, OK? What I think is that you’ve suffered an incredible loss and that kind of stress can be really destructive. Listen to me on this, OK? It’s something I know about.”

Chevalier’s eyes turned glassy with tears, but he managed to regain control before they ran down his cheeks. “Just look at the drive, OK? If not for me, for Annette.”

Richard Draman stayed focused on the computer screen as he reached out and moved a piece on the checkerboard laid out across his desk.

“Are you sure you want to do that, Dad?”

He ignored the plastic click of Susie jumping his pieces and opened another file on the drive Troy Chevalier had given him. Impossibly, it was even more mesmerizing than the last.

While none of the research looked like anything someone would kill over, it was groundbreaking stuff and yet another confirmation of Annette’s brilliance. The field of genetics was still in its infancy, and the equipment available sometimes didn’t feel much more precise than the stone tools of humanity’s ancestors. If you wanted to know what genes contributed to a particular disease, you were still forced to compare the genetic structure of healthy people with sick ones, narrowing down the differences and applying statistics until you found a possible candidate.

What Annette was trying to do was create a Rosetta stone that would allow her to read the currently unfathomable code of life. Her ideas were still in the very early stages, but if they were correct and could be fully developed, they had the potential to revolutionize the field of biology and to cure not only progeria but virtually every genetic disease ever identified.

“Daddy?”

Susie was looking up at him from the chair on the other side of the desk, trying not to let her paper-thin lips curl into a smile.

“What is it, sweetie?”

“I won.”

He looked down at the board and frowned. “You must have cheated.”

“It’s checkers! How can you cheat? I won fair and square, and now you have to come and read to me so I can go to sleep.”

“I wish I could, but I have to work.”

“But it’s nighttime. You don’t have to work during the nighttime. And it won’t take long. We’re reading
Matilda
. The chapters aren’t very long.”

He let out a long breath. “I know. You’re right. But this is really important. Let’s make a date for tomorrow. You promised to show me how to use that Kinect thing on your video game, remember?”

“Really?”

“Of course, really. But this time I’m going to beat the pants off you.”

She slid off her chair and went for the hallway, her bare feet slapping the cracked wood floor. “I’m gonna go tell Mom. Maybe she’ll want to play!”

Richard returned his gaze to the computer screen and Annette Chevalier’s ghost. “Ha! Good luck with that.”

Richard jerked upright at the sound of the quiet knock, unsure where he was until he managed to focus on Carly standing in the doorway. She was wearing one of his old college T-shirts, the bottom cutting across the tops of her long legs to reveal a hint of the pink panties beneath.

“It’s almost midnight,” she said, coming around the desk and settling onto his lap. “When are you coming to bed?”

“Sorry, I must have fallen asleep. I was going through the data Troy gave me.”

She pressed a little closer to him, resting her head on his shoulder and letting her long hair fall down his back. “I’ve been thinking a lot about Annette. I mean, I didn’t know her very well, but it’s hard not to wonder what was going through her mind. She had so much—a healthy son, a beautiful home, a wonderful husband.”

The comparison was obvious and a little depressing. “You’ve got the last one, though, right?”

She smiled up at him. “A wonderful husband? I don’t know… I suppose I could have done worse.”

“Did you get Susie off to bed OK?”

“Yeah, but she was disappointed you didn’t read to her. You need to play that video game tomorrow.”

“I told her I would.”

“Yeah, but you also said you’d spend some time with her and
Matilda
.”

“You’ve got to cut me some slack on that,” he said, pointing to the screen. “This is something I might be able to use to help her. But going through it and doing the thousand other things I have to do every day isn’t a nine-to-five job. It’s all gotten really complicated.”

She didn’t respond, and he knew she was building to something. He’d always been a little jealous of her ability to sink into philosophical calm while he was left to shout at the wind or hide in minute cellular details.

But it also worried him. Was it really a natural talent for monklike fatalism or just a cleverly disguised version of the denial he saw in so many of the other parents?

“I know how busy you are,” she said finally. “But you have to remember something really important.”

“What’s that?”

“She’s here now.”

He closed his eyes and leaned his head back on the chair, trying unsuccessfully to blank his mind, to keep it from exploring the implications of his wife’s words.

They’d met when he was getting his master’s. She was studying at a culinary school down the street from his apartment and spent a fair amount of time digging around the grocery store where he shopped. By the end of the semester, he’d written a computer program that calculated the probability of her being in the store at any given time, and he lived his life around those carefully printed schedules and an endless supply of phony grocery lists.

Despite a long history of success in attracting—if not keeping—women, he’d found it impossible to find the courage to talk to her. She, on the other hand, hadn’t suffered the same paralysis. It had been near the artichokes that she’d finally stepped in front of him, blocking his path to a shelf of summer squash. He could still remember her first words to him: “You shop a lot, don’t you?”

Richard tilted his head forward again, resting his chin on the top of her head. “She’s going to be here tomorrow too, Carly.”

“But what if you’re not?”

“I don’t understand.”

“You could be driving home from the lab a few days from now, and a drunk driver could cross the center line. I doubt the last thought that would go through your head would be that you spent too much time with your daughter.”

“Thanks for the vivid preview of my death. I usually don’t think about it with that kind of detail.”

“My pleasure.”

He reached into a drawer and retrieved a couple of glasses, splashing some scotch into them before handing one to her. She turned and put her feet on the desk, pressing her back into his chest.

They didn’t sit and drink together enough anymore. The wild, passionate adventure they’d started together had slowly devolved into something squeezed in between Susie, the restaurant, the lab, and the bills.

“Sometimes when I think about our past it seems more like a movie I once watched than something I did,” he said. “I can see us getting drunk in bars and driving piece-of-shit rental cars through third world countries. I remember us trying to have sex in that little bed with the mosquito net in Namibia. It was a hundred and three degrees, and every time one of us bumped up against the net, the bugs attacked.”

“I know it really happened because I still have a mark on my butt where those things were chewing on me,” she said.

He smiled, and they sat there for a few minutes sipping their drinks. “I have to save her, Carly.”

She nodded slowly but didn’t turn to look at him. “I know.”