"You'll be safe now. I've got you…"
As the sunlight faded, Harper held fast to these last few things: his calloused hands that told of seed-sown soil, cracked lips that smirked of seeing stars, and brave eyes that knew of an everlasting golden light.
Hot Clams, Charlene D'Avanzo
Gordy Maloy, fisherman, paced the perimeter of my laboratory. It was his third lap.
"For the love o' God, Karen, what'd you mean the numbers're off! January you said I'd set clam this spring. I got fifty cages for this hot-lovin' creation o' yours. Now, you're sayin' I can't?"
"Gordy, I said you might—"
"Christ on a bike. And you're a Maine lobsterman's daughter? You know winter's—what's left of it now—when we get ready."
"Sure. December through March Dad was hold up in his shack fixing busted traps." Memory wisps—wood stove, hemp, red buoys, canary yellow rope—came and went in an instant.
"If you'd stop walking around and come over here, Gordy, I'll show you the data."
My father's stand-in son did as I asked, then put one hand—nearly twice the size of mine—on the lab bench. With the other, he pushed a ratty Red Sox cap up off his face. I hadn't noticed that wrinkles were overtaking his laugh lines.
"Sorry I lost it there, doc. You know—"
"I do know." I turned my computer monitor toward him. "Okay. Here's the graph I showed you in January." I pointed with the eraser end of a pencil. "Average growth of bio-engineered seed clams over two months."
Gordy took the pencil and leaned closer. In the air, he traced an upward sweep that mirrored one of the black lines. "Um … that's the one. Two months, and it's still growin' good. The rest of 'em are doin' nothin' or they're already dead."
"Exactly right. 10-10-30 grew fast in water hotter than you'll ever have at your aquaculture site. And every spat acted the same. That's why I was so excited. Of all the strains I made, it's the only one that did that."
He straightened up. "And it's 10-10-30 for October 10, 2030. I know all that."
With a couple of clicks I brought up a second graph.
Gordy squinted, then groaned and added "pissah". I often joked about his mix of Irish and Maine lingo. Not today.
"Yes," I said. "In the last trials, 10-10 was over the place. No trend at all."
"Christ, doc, I got a whole lot of coin in this clam culture. Permits, license, cages, and I'm payin' through the nose for that spot in Eel Bay. The water there's too hot for clams for, what, ten years now. Still, I gotta pay to use it. I got bills. Lots of bills."
"I can loan you money, Gordy, if—"
He backed away from the lab bench. "I don't need your money, Karen. I need clam spat nobody else has that'll grow like the dickens in seawater warm as your bath."
"Come back in two days. I'll work on this and maybe have something then. Okay?"
On his way out Gordy nearly collided with Hal Wenk, the newest addition to our lab. Hal was an attentive worker who was, more times than not, in his own world. Without apology, Hal slipped past Gordy and disappeared into one of our growth chambers.
I looked back at the computer screen. If shaking the blasted thing would help, I'd do it.
"Karen, you all right?" Rachel Butler, my research assistant, slid on to the stool next to mine and put her hand on my shoulder.
"Damn it, Rachel. Gordy's desperate to grow out 10-10. Save clam culture—"
"'Course you're upset. Gordy's closest you have to family. What can I do?"
I patted her hand. "You're a good friend. I'll sit here for a bit and calm down."
Rachel left to join Hal in our walk-in growth chamber, home to over a thousand tiny clams.
I returned to the computer to see, once more, if I could make sense of the 10-10 data. A year ago, I used recombinant DNA techniques to insert genes designed to increase high temperature survival for larvae of the hard shell clam, Mercenaria mercenaria. Since hard shells tolerated acidic waters, another outcome of high atmospheric carbon dioxide, I didn't need to worry about that for now. 10-10 showed promise right from the start and for months afterwards. Suddenly, its growth was erratic. In Gordy's words, "It got all wonky."
I lined up charts for the errant strain, then tapped my pencil on the February graph when it all went wrong. Why February? What happened then?
The growth chamber door opened. Hal stepped out, got something off the lab bench, and walked back in.
I retreated to my office to look over my paper calendar. Given our power outages, electronic ones were useless. Starting around 2020, so-called fifty-year storms hit New England much more often—just like climate change scientists predicted. And what used to be rare weather events were as common as muck at low tide. The power grid was a mess, and two or three times a year electricity in Maine could be off for a month or more.
I sat at my desk and flipped through the weeks. No electricity for a week in November, but a generator kept the lab going. Rachel took over when I went down to Boston to spend Christmas with a friend. So nothing there. Another power outage in January, this time for two weeks. But again, the generator kicked in just fine.
I turned the page. February. February 12th was Hal's first day. I stared at the date. I'd hired Hal because he was a whiz with tiny marine creatures and willing, eager even, to work all hours. Microscopic clam larvae didn't wait until Monday morning to be fed. He had great references and lived up to them.
Sure, Hal was a little weird. He was spacey sometimes, well a lot. And shy on the border of timid. No crime in that.
I looked up at the knock on my door.
Rachel poked her head in. "Did you want me to order that new microscope lens?"
"Sure. And come in. I need some help here."
Rachel took her usual chair opposite my desk.
"I've been looking at my calendar," I said, "and wondering what might've happened in February when 10-10's growth became irregular. Any ideas?"
Rachel looked away. She was a gentle soul—an animal-loving vegetarian who carried spiders outside. Someone who took in stray dogs and had three as a result.
"What?" I said.
She sighed and twirled strands of waist-length hair. "A month ago I would've said no. But lately, Hal's been acting odd."
"What do you mean, odd?
"Hard to say. Secretive, I guess."
"What does he do?"
Rachel frowned. I guessed that criticizing anyone, especially a co-worker, was difficult for her.
She crossed her legs and bounced a foot. "Um—well—he looks over his shoulder and closes the lab book when I walk into the growth chamber. That kind of thing."
"Huh. Anything else?"
"Ah, I did find a memo on the floor. From that LME group. It must've fallen out of his backpack."
"LME?"
"Love Mother Earth. You remember."
I nodded. Radical environmentalists, Love Mother Earthers wrecked a genetic engineering lab in Boston a few months earlier.
"But why didn't you say anything?"
She bit her lip. "It's Hal, Karen. He's, you know, different. But malicious? I can't imagine."
I nodded. "Sure. I understand. And thanks, Rachel."
After Rachel left, I walked over to my favorite spot—a floor-to-ceiling window that offered an unobstructed view of Chatham Harbor. Half a dozen pleasure boats swung on their moorings in a waterfront crowded with lobster boats only fifteen years earlier. Sooner than predicted, Maine's famous lobster, Homarus americanus, migrated to colder waters in Canada and left a string of devastated fishing communities behind.
Dad, who claimed that "God wouldn't let the ocean heat up", died two years after that. With mom gone over twenty years, I was alone. Gordy was divorced by then, so he stepped in as a kind of hybrid father-brother.
I scanned the harbor and fixed on the empty space in the middle. Dad's old lobster boat mooring site.
That afternoon, Hal left early. As usual, he knocked on my office door, told me where he was going and why
(doctor's appointment), and said "see you tomorrow, Dr. O'Shea." I said my customary, "See you tomorrow, Hal" as he gently shut the door. It truly was hard to imagine him as a radical anything.
I'd promised Gordy "something" in a few days, but 10-10's odd growth pattern was a sticky problem. Well, as Dad would say, "Start at the beginnin', girl." That meant looking at the first place clam data went—the lab notebook. So when I left the lab at five, the growth chamber notebook was tucked under my arm. Rachel saw me take it and simply nodded.
It's only five miles from University of Northern Maine's fledgling aquaculture lab to my bit of paradise overlooking the sea. But, given my empty frig, the grocery store was a necessary first stop. Finally, I drove the dirt road down to my cottage with my hand on the notebook.
I poured a glass of wine and took it out front to enjoy the sea breeze for a while, then went back in and sat down at the kitchen table with the opened notebook. What was I looking for? I wasn't sure. Maybe numbers that looked erased or otherwise changed.
I'd just begun to decipher Hal's chicken-scratch handwriting when a god-awful siren erupted outside. My car alarm. That was odd, but there was nothing to do but go out and shut it up. Five minutes later, I walked back into the kitchen and stopped dead. I'd left the notebook in the middle of the table. Now it wasn't there. I scanned the room. Nothing on the counters. Down on my knees, I looked under the old pine table. Nada.
I got up, plopped onto the chair, and stared at the tabletop. Was I losing my mind? No, I brought the notebook home and now it was gone.
Gordy picked up on the third ring. I told him what'd happened. "Can you come over now? I need help here."
Thirty minutes later, Gordy was in my kitchen drinking coffee. He'd changed into his spring-summer-fall onshore attire—tan canvas shorts fringed at the hemline, brown ankle-high leather boots with white socks, a sometimes clean T-shirt. And he talked fast and loud, like normal.
Gordy had a mission.
"Tell me everything that happened after I left the lab."
I expected a reaction when I described what Rachel had said about Hal. But his only comment was "huh."
"So," he asked. "Your car alarm's never gone off before?"
To my "never," he suggested we go out and look around. The station wagon in the garage didn't interest him, but the mix of mud and pebbles in front of the garage did. He walked back and forth, then squatted and called me over.
"Do you ride a bike?"
"Yes, but I haven't been on it since November."
He pointed to the ground. I knelt beside him. A fat bike tire track ran down the edge of the dirt driveway before it disappeared in a leaf-covered shoulder.
We both stood. "Do kids ride bikes down here?" he asked.
"It's too far from the main road."
He toed the mud. "It rained hard yesterday. This here's a fresh print. Looks like somebody set off your car alarm, then snuck into the house and took the notebook while you dealt with the car."
"You've got to be kidding." I looked from the garage to the house and back again. "But—"
"There's be just enough time for someone watchin' you. Think about it. You walked out here, then opened the garage door. Right?"
I nodded. I'd pulled down the heavy door after parking the car.
"Then, what, couple of minutes to figure out how to turn off the alarm?"
Another nod. Inside the garage, my eardrums had pulsed with the piercing scream while I searched for the remote. Two or more minutes easily.
"That's be enough time," he said.
"But Gordy. That'd mean somebody waited for me out here—then went into my home."
He put his hand on my shoulder and steered me toward the house. "Come on, I'll make you a cup of that herbal tea you like. Then we'll figure out what to do."
Back at the kitchen table, I sipped steaming chamomile and placed my hand where the notebook had been.
"It was right here, Gordy. Right here."
"Let's look at this logical, like you would say."
It was an old joke we shared, and it helped.
"Why would someone steal—what'd you call it—a lab notebook."
I shook my head. "I have no idea. It's where we record measurements like size of clam spat, number dead. That kind of thing. The data are stored in a computer of course. The notebook's kind of backup."
He thought about this for a minute. "So the numbers in the computer might not be the same as the ones in the notebook?"
The very idea of doctoring scientific data was anathema to me. "Theoretically, I suppose so. But why?"
"Think about it, Rachel. If 10-10 panned out, we'd give spat free of charge to the fishing community. So Maine growers'd have a chance to get back into it."
"Yes. And?"
"Remember tellin' me 'bout some rich company holdin' the patent on some corn genes? And farmers could only get corn seed from them? And got sued if they grew seed themselves?"
I nodded. For decades, nearly 100 percent of U.S. corn was genetically modified with bacterial genes to protect the crop from insects and offer resistance to herbicides. Additional genes created heat-tolerant strains. One company, GroGen, was among the richest in the world.
What Gordy was getting at finally hit me. "You can't mean that someone would steal my engineered clams and sell them."
"Do you have a patent?"
"I wanted to wait for the last set of experiments before I filed it. So, no."
"And if you thought this 10-10 was no good, you wouldn't bother with a patent. Right?"
"Yes, that's right."
"So, somebody could mess with the numbers, take your 10-10, 'n sell it for a ton of money. You'd probably never know."
"Christ, Gordy. Should we go to the police?"
"They won't get too excited about a missin' notebook, Rachel."
"So it's up to us?"
Gordy leaned back in his chair and crossed his arms. "Yeah. This is our deal." After a moment he said, "Tell me 'bout Hal. Looks like a weird one to me."
I explained my reasons for hiring Hal. "He keeps to himself and he's, ah, different. But that doesn't—"
Gordy interrupted. "But you trust Rachel, right? And she's suspicious of the guy."
I sighed. Maybe it was time to be suspicious of Hal myself.
We tossed around a few ideas and settled on the most obvious one. I described where Hal's apartment was in town so Gordy could inspect Hal's bike tires.
"I might even take a look around his apartment for the notebook."
"Not on your life," I said. "That's trespassing. We've no idea if Hal's done anything sneaky."
He shrugged. "Okay. But I'm going to keep an eye on him."
The next morning Hal acted exasperatingly normal. The missing notebook really seemed to throw him—that it was missing and where he should enter data. I watched how he moved and what he did all day, like an animal I was studying. I hadn't noticed before how robotic he was. Was he really like that or was it all for show?
Rachel was also distraught about the notebook. "It was stolen from your house? Who would do that?" She also asked me to be sure to lock my doors, something I assured her I was now doing.
Gordy found Hal's bike leaning against the apartment landing. The tires were fat, like half the bikes' in town. But the dirty tires did show that Hal was riding it around.
At ten that night Gordy called me at home. "There's a light in your lab," he said. "Is that normal?"
"I suppose Hal could be checking on something."
"Meet me on Water Street, a block from the lab. We can walk over and see."
"It'll be a waste of time, Gordy."
"See you in ten minutes."
I parked my car where Gordy asked. It was dark beneath a row of trees, and I nearly screamed when he appeared from behind an old maple. I whispered, "Don't do that," then wondered why I was whispering.
Under a nearly full moon, we easily made our way up the brick path to the lab's front door. It was locked. I t
humbed through a half dozen keys on my ring before I found the right one.
Gordy murmured, "I'll be right behind you." I nodded and stepped into the corridor.
Down the dark hallway, light from the top half of the lab door formed a rectangle on the linoleum floor. I made for the wooden door and pulled it open.
Rachel stood not twenty feet away, gas can in hand. At first, she didn't see or hear me. Then she turned and blinked but didn't say a word.
"Rachel, what the hell are you doing?"
I stepped toward her.
"Don't," she said and held up what looked like a toy gun.
I pointed at the thing. "What's that?"
"An electric igniter."
I stared at her. This woman—eyes hard, hair in tangles—was not the Rachel I knew.
I tried to speak deliberately. "Rachel. What is going on?"
"You … design … animals!"
"What?"
"You're god. Is that what you think?"
"You're not making sense. Give me that igniter."
She screamed. "Not one step closer! You've made monsters here. Little clam monsters. And I'm going to burn this evil place down and stop you! Get the hell out of here!"
She lunged at me and shoved me toward the half-open door. I fell me into the hallway. Rachel grabbed the handle, slammed the door shut, and locked it.
Gordy pulled me up off the floor. "I heard all that. This old building. It'll burn up in a minute."
"She locked the door—"
But his foot was already through the glass window. Good leather boots are useful like that.
Gordy reached through broken glass and opened the door. We both scrambled in.
Rachel held the igniter high in the air, turned to look at us, then leaned over and clicked it on. She'd covered the wooden lab bench and floor with gasoline, and the place was afire in an instant. Her exit was obvious. The end of the lab, right by the door, was free of accelerant. She strode through the space toward us. Her deed done, it looked like Rachel didn't care if she was caught.
My lab tech, my friend, was clearly out of her mind.
Winds of Change: Short Stories about Our Climate Page 14
