by R. J. Jacobs
It was a blocked number. Maybe a potential new patient, I thought.
I pressed the phone to my ear. “Hello?”
“Hi, I’m trying to reach Emily Firestone?” A familiar voice that I couldn’t place.
I held the rail, my voice echoing through the stairwell. “This is she.”
“I don’t know if you remember me; this is Sandy Harrison.” She paused. “I used to work with Paolo.”
Completely blindsided, I fought to suppress the wave of feelings swelling my chest. I scanned my memory. Did I remember a Sandy Harrison?
So much had happened. Sometimes turmoil clears out memory.
“I work in the lab where … he worked. I think I met you a few times, once at a holiday party.”
Oh.
Then, I remembered. The party.
I could picture the enviable breeze of her hair, curled like cursive letters in a way mine never would. I remembered the rich fabric of the dress she was wearing; I remembered feeling underdressed. She was pretty, with sincere eyes, a little younger than us. She’d said Paolo’s name, touched his arm when greeting him, showing a clear connection between the two of them that had made my jaw clench.
I wanted to ask how she’d gotten my number. “What can … Hi. How are you?”
“You’re a psychologist, right?” She sounded hurried, now; the rhythm of brisk walking.
I wondered how she could have remembered that. “Yeah,” I said. “That’s right.”
“I’d like to schedule an appointment with you. Do you have any openings in the next few days?”
“Just a second.” I closed the roof-access door against the night sky and went back to the couch in my office, trying not to sound out of breath. “Sorry. Yes, but I mainly work with kids. If you told me a little about what you’re looking for, I could help point you in the right direction. Across the hall is a great psychologist who I’ve known for—”
“I definitely want to see you,” she said. “If that’s okay.”
Was it? I paused half a beat to think. Accessing therapy can be intimidating, and seeing me wouldn’t be breaking any rules. I could meet with her once and then give her a referral if it wasn’t a fit.
Through the phone, I could hear her breathing. “Are you still there?” she asked worriedly.
“Yes, I’m here,” I said. Something in Sandy’s voice told me that she didn’t want to talk about what was going on over the phone.
ELEVEN
Sandy arrived early the next day. We’d agreed to meet at noon, but at a quarter till the echo of her footsteps rose in the stairwell. I stood stiffly, working my ankle in a circle to prep it for sitting stationary for an hour. Becoming a psychologist, I sometimes thought, was an odd occupational choice for someone who’d always hated sitting still. I slipped my foot back into the hard boot and met Sandy in the doorway. I held a clipboard with the new-patient paperwork I’d printed for her to fill out.
She hurried toward the door, then stopped abruptly when she looked up at me. I started to say hello but was distracted by the way she inspected the office behind me. Her head was quick and birdlike and her breathing was rapid—more than you might expect from a trot upstairs.
“Sandy?” I ventured. The confident blonde I’d met ten months earlier seemed so diminished that I needed to be sure she was one and the same. “It’s good to see you again. Everything okay?”
The sound of my voice seemed to bring her eyes back to me, as if the use of two senses was required to remind her where she was and why she’d come.
“In … in here?”
I nodded.
I stepped out of her way as she strode to the couch. After a quick look out the windows, she dropped her purse onto the hardwood floor and momentarily buried her face in her hands. The click of the closing door caused her to look up, and when she did, her eyes seemed tired and afraid. She rubbed at them. “Do you share this office with anyone?”
“No, not this office, but I share this suite. I’m renting space from a good friend.” I set the clipboard beside her on the sofa and lowered myself into my chair, trying not to wince as I extended my left leg. “What makes you ask?”
She didn’t answer.
“Sandy, I’m not sure where to start. I can tell you’re really upset.” It felt good to slip on my professional tone of voice. I realized I’d missed the honest productivity of work, the sense that I could make a difference. But I was puzzled by my new patient. I set the clipboard on the desk.
“Do you record these sessions?” she asked.
The question wasn’t completely unusual. I shook my head.
She sank back and looked at her nails as if she might find her words there. Earlier, I’d heard Marty’s voice carrying down the hall, but now the building was silent in the way of work spaces in midafternoon. The faint sweetness of Sandy’s shampoo hung in the air.
“I’m sorry,” she said oddly before composing herself. “What I’m about to say might be really hard for you to hear, but I have to tell you. Otherwise, I’ll feel like I’m going crazy. I already do.”
How would it be hard for me? This was maybe the strangest start to a session ever. I raised a palm and lowered myself into the chair opposite where she sat. “Let’s just start slow. Whatever it is that—”
“You know about the H1-N24 vaccine.” Sandy pressed her fingers against the bridge of her nose, her face half hidden when she looked up.
I tried not to wince. “More than I’d like to get into.”
“I know your father contracted … And that of all people, you don’t need a lecture on vaccine research. You’re the only person I could think of away from the lab who would understand.”
Understand what? I wondered. I had no idea where the meeting was headed, but some part of me felt set up, ambushed. Talking about my father was the last thing I’d expected. I had a mental compartment where I stowed memories of my father when I needed to focus on the task at hand. My face must have shown my confusion.
“This isn’t really a therapy appointment,” she said. “I don’t know who I can talk to, who’s safe. I don’t know what he knows and doesn’t know.”
I thought back to the blocked number that had come up when she’d called.
“What who knows?”
I folded my arms and Sandy stiffened. When she glanced at the door, I relaxed my posture. “Let’s slow down,” I said.
“It’s about Paolo. I think he was murdered.” The words burst out of her.
My mouth opened, but no sound came out. I leaned back in the chair as if she’d shoved me and could feel my pulse rising, my heart hammering suddenly, the way it had on the dock. The police, the marina, the smell of the coffee all came rushing back. “What … do you mean?” I finally managed to ask. “I was with him. He disappeared. Sandy, the police think he drowned.” The last phrase came out of me as a whisper.
Maybe we could both hear the disbelief in my voice.
“I know.” Her eyebrows shot up. “It looked that way, but there’s more to it.”
“How?” I finally managed to ask, my cheeks burning.
Time began to slow down as my mind grasped at the possibility of an explanation to the mystery that had plagued me for weeks—even as the clinician in me wondered if Sandy might be paranoid.
“It … our lab mate, Matt, is involved. I’m almost certain,” she said.
“What? How?”
“I can’t quite explain how; that’s partly why I’m here. But I know what I saw.” Sandy squinted, dropping her gaze to the space between her shoes. “I found something—on a hidden drive—data sets Matt had created.”
“Okay,” I said. My confusion was beginning to feel like anger, even as fragments of what Paolo had explained about their research began to activate in my memory.
Sandy took a deep breath. “I’ll try to start at the beginning. Vaccine research is heavily regulated because it’s potentially dangerous. Right now, the lab tests vaccines only on animals. It’s called the preclinic
al stage, which in itself is extremely regulated. Each virus sample is cataloged, meticulously, before its use and at the time it’s destroyed. Last week, I noticed an order discrepancy—one digit off in a previous order. I thought maybe I’d saved the record I was looking at twice without meaning to, so I logged on to another machine to check our lab record there—a computer I don’t normally use. We’re supposed to have access to the same records, so if I’d made a mistake, I should have been able to see the correct order numbers on anyone else’s computer. But on this one, trials showed up in a separate drive, and when I opened it, it showed completely separate data sets, each one using tiny variants of the protein mutation sequences of the previous test.”
My heart hammering, I was getting a little lost in what she was saying. But before I could interrupt, Sandy held up her index finger.
“It was Matt’s work. He had saved, then slightly altered, most of the samples he was supposed to destroy. It’s like running a completely illegal side project—conducting his own trials, basically, with no one’s approval, and then hiding all the data.” She let out a breath. “I think Matt’s trying to sell the research.”
“Sell it? How?”
Sandy edged forward in her chair, fingers digging into the fabric.
“There are groups, countries who would love to know the details of what we’re doing. In the wrong hands, the sequences could be turned into biological weapons. Since the logins are all stored, I could see that every one was Matt’s, dating back into the summer. Except one. On Friday, the fifth of October, Paolo logged in.” She paused to let this sink in with me. “I think Paolo uncovered the data sets from the duplicate tests, and Matt found out.”
And then Paolo disappeared, I thought.
“I think Matt wanted to make sure Paolo could never tell.”
“Oh my God,” I said.
“It’s something a person would kill to keep secret,” Sandy said quietly. “I just put it all together three days ago. I wanted to talk to you, in case you knew something I don’t. And because you … well, the police wondered about you.”
I knew what she meant. “And you did, too,” I said. I meant it as a question, but it didn’t come out that way.
Sandy nodded regretfully. “It just didn’t make sense. Paolo was so full of life. I don’t know …” Her voice trembled, her eyes round with fear.
I stood and went to the window, grinding my teeth together. I tried to keep my breathing slow, to stay calm. Her theory was out of the blue—but I knew this much: Sandy seemed authentically terrified, and the way she characterized Matt’s jealousy of Paolo exactly matched what I’d observed between them at the holiday party.
I turned away from the window, my shadow cutting a dark shape across the floor. “So why are you talking to me? I mean, I’m glad you’re here, but why not just call the police?” I reached toward my phone where Detective Mason’s number resided.
Sandy clenched her jaw. “Because there’s a chance, I guess, that I’m wrong—that I’m crazy, or saw something I didn’t understand. And if I am, starting a police investigation into our lab would be the end of my career. I need evidence to show the police.”
“Does Dr. Silver know about this? How could he not?”
“Jay Silver is a fantastic researcher, but he’s an absentminded professor in some ways. He’s so obsessed with finding the H1-N24 vaccine, he could miss something happening under his nose.”
“So why not just tell him?”
“Oh, he’ll be the first person I’ll tell as soon as I have the evidence in hand. Him and the police. But I needed to talk to someone outside the lab, someone safe.”
I took a deep breath and turned. A rivulet of sweat streaked down my side. We were frozen for another second before she motioned for me to sit back down, a pleading look in her eyes.
I passed into my third emotional state in three minutes. There was a release of tension inside me, a sudden pulling back of the curtain behind which had been the wildest, most horrific confusion of my life. After any death, people wrestle with disbelief. Staring at Sandy, my disbelief that Paolo’s disappearance, and presumed death, had been an accident crystallized. Subconsciously, I’d been waiting for an explanation for weeks.
An explanation I’d given up on receiving. Until just then.
“But would Matt really kill someone over his research?”
My attention was scattered as Sandy began describing the personal dynamics—the jealousy that Matt had seemed to have for Paolo from the very beginning of his work there in the lab.
“Paolo could seemingly do no wrong,” she said. “It seemed like there was no limit to what he could accomplish. Everyone knew he was Silver’s favorite, but Matt felt excluded. And he probably was.” Sandy said Matt’s name as though she’d spit it out. “Did you ever meet him?” she asked.
“Just for a second,” I said, my thoughts turning back to Matt sulking, sipping from his beer.
“At the holiday party, right?”
“Where I met you.” The singe of jealousy I’d felt at the time seemed like a crazy misperception. Suddenly, we were two women on the same team. “And, yeah, Matt was distant and weird, and like, rude, but that was nothing, Paolo said. Just something about a paper. Authorship order. I mean, right?”
“That alone can be pretty serious,” she said. “But this wasn’t just one paper. The way research works today, we’re all hanging on by a thread. But Paolo got assignments that Matt wanted over and over again.”
I remembered the way Dr. Silver had beamed with pride at the party, lavishing praise on Paolo.
The analytical part of my brain was trying to cool the emotional storm in my chest. I’d done a postdoc, too. I knew it was different from microbiology, but collaborating could be hard, publishing even harder. Then I remembered a phrase Paolo had used once to describe lab environments: like working in a shark tank. My mind spun as I tried to arrange these fragments into a picture. Pieces in a mosaic.
“Think back to when you were in school, in training,” Sandy insisted, her tone imploring for validation. “You know how crazy things get when people are trying to make their careers. Universities are like psych wards.”
My mind flashed to my own graduate training, to the desperation I’d felt at times, dashing across campus to make meetings, the crazy eagerness to get a committee together, or to locate some obscure form that needed to be signed immediately.
I thought of the statistics I’d read about mental illness among graduate students. I’d suppressed my own mania, pretty often, actually, then propped myself up when depression began to fall over me.
A new narrative started coalescing in my mind.
But there was one obvious problem: I had been with Paolo when he disappeared. When I reminded her of this, she refolded her hands. Her voice dropped. The spidery bare branches of hackberry trees reached toward the window behind her, white as lightning in the sudden sunlight. “Think. Is there any way Matt could have gotten on the boat before you left that afternoon?”
“It’s possible, I guess. Before we arrived.”
“Or once you were on the water?”
My initial thought was that there was no possible way—but was there? I hated that I couldn’t fully remember. “I really don’t see how,” I said.
“Did anyone board the boat or sail near you?”
“There was a family, on another boat, but it was nothing threatening.”
Sandy seemed to consider this. “The timing between Paolo seeing that data and him disappearing can’t be coincidental. Matt has access to sedatives for the animals in the lab—they’re extremely powerful but not always fast-acting.” She stopped and winced. “And compounds for euthanizing. If he was able to get any of that into Paolo’s system …”
Or mine. Could that explain the blackout of my memory?
But how?
As if reading my mind, Sandy said, “I wondered about that water bottle that Paolo carried everywhere. That stainless-steel one. I wondered i
f Matt put something inside it. That night, was he sick? At all? Tired?” Sandy strained for confirmation.
I glanced up at the shelf where Paolo’s camera sat like a sentinel. It was hard to hear my thoughts over the hammering in my chest. I thought back to the boat, the drive to the lake; I reviewed the details, pictured the bottle he always carried. “Maybe.” I tried to remember. Then I found a piece of the memory I’d been missing before. “He said not to drink after him. That his throat was sore.”
Her eyes narrowed.
Had we found something? I wiped my palms against my jeans. Focus began to burn in me.
Slow down. Think.
“But you didn’t drink from that bottle?”
“I don’t …” I thought back. I had no idea. “If anything, I …”
“What?” She scrunched her straw-colored eyebrows, lowered her voice. “You what?”
“I fell asleep. Hard.” I shook my head, apologetically. “I didn’t remember anything. I still don’t. I was sick when I woke up.”
Her voice quickened, and she put a hand on her stomach. “Emily, you could be gone now, too.”
I sat back against the windowsill as if pushed. A tiny voice inside me insisted her idea was far-fetched, that I would have sensed a shred of this before. A biological weapon? Matt’s jealousy? But I stopped listening to that voice. I’d heard an idea that made the most sense of anything I’d heard so far. I recalled the feeling in my stomach that morning—the nausea. I could feel it again, like I might throw up. Sweat brimmed my forehead as I looked at Sandy. I felt like the wind had been knocked out of me by a fall, my lungs struggling to fill as if the room’s air were being siphoned away. Sandy’s theory was an explanation—some hope for finding an answer. But if it was true, it would also confirm my worst fear—that Paolo was truly gone. Dead.
