“Neither,” she said. “It’s like having the flu. No single position is better than another, but when the contractions subside, I get some relief.”
“What can I do?” I asked.
Katrina sunk back down into a kitchen chair and motioned to the counter. “Freeze whatever is left out and wash the surfaces down. Then, vacuum the main floor of the house. Also, there’s a load of laundry in my room that needs to go down to the basement.”
“You want me to clean the house?”
“I do. I’ll feel better if the house is neat. Jonathan’s driving down from Boston and I want everything to be right.”
A clean house, I thought. That’s ironic. I’ll have to remember to tell this kid it wore secondhand cloth diapers as an infant, but the house was as neat as a pin.
I glanced at my watch. It was 7:45 a.m. None of us had slept the night before, and I had a sneaky suspicion Katrina’s labor would keep us up another night. Frank had dropped Charlie and me at Harbor House and then driven over to my mother’s place to check on Norma. I wondered if Norma had been “mooning” somewhere else besides Dr. Corey’s house, hence her absence at five in the morning, though I had a hard time believing she worked nights. I didn’t want to upset Katrina, so I started to clean the kitchen. Minutes later the phone trilled.
“Finally,” I muttered, pulling the ancient phone cord toward the pantry. “Is she there?”
“CeCe,” Frank started, and all I could think of was, Not Norma. She had nothing to do with this.
“Please don’t say it.” I glanced over at Katrina, who had waddled over to an open breakfront with a dust rag in her hand. Keep cleaning, I willed her as I stretched the phone cord to its limit.
“I’m sorry, Ce,” Frank continued. “Norma’s dead.”
“What?” I said, but I knew when Katrina called us in Chinatown, unable to reach Norma, that something had gone terribly wrong. “How?”
“It looks like a strangulation. There are signs of a struggle,” Frank answered. “I have to assume it was your father.” Oh god. My father had literally tried to choke information out of Norma.
“Jesus, Frank,” I said. “If this really is my father’s doing, then we needed to find Gayle yesterday.”
I peeked back into the kitchen. Katrina wiped and restacked a set of mixing bowls.
“What about Corey and Kelly?” I whispered.
“They’re upset. No word from Gayle,” Frank said. “Hold on, Cheski’s trying to reach me. I’ll call you in two.”
I hung up the phone and stared out a tiny window in the pantry. It wasn’t worth telling Katrina about Norma. Nor could I call my mother as the news would surely trigger an emotional relapse. Instead, I called Dr. Grovit at home. I imagined him sitting in the same spot in his disaster of a kitchen where we had left him with his empty glass of water and a sink full of dishes.
“Dr. Grovit here,” he answered.
“Hey,” I said. “Are you okay?”
“I’m very upset, but I’ll survive. How are you?”
“Not great,” I said, and then added. “Can you leave town for a few days?”
“Will you tell me why?”
“I can’t, but I think you’ll be safer if you hit the road,” I said. “Has my father contacted you again?”
“Last night, by phone,” Dr. Grovit said grimly. “It was unpleasant. He was completely irrational and highly agitated. I’d go so far as to say delusional, and I’m saying that as a doctor.”
“How so?” I asked.
“Your father seems to think he still works at the labs, and he was worried that if your daughter’s true identify were to become public, his career would be ruined. He insisted I knew where she was. Eventually, I hung up on him.”
My heart sank as my fears had been realized. My father, having gotten nowhere with Dr. Grovit, had probably tried to physically wrestle information out of Norma.
“But his career has already been shot,” I said. “Why would he be worried about a reputation he’d already lost?
“Because he’s delusional. It doesn’t need to make sense to you or me. The issue is that he believes it, and that’s what makes him dangerous,” Dr. Grovit said. I could hear his kitchen chair scraping along the floor as he rose. “I have a brother in Brooklyn I can stay with.”
“Thank you,” I said as I jotted Dr. Grovit’s brother’s number down. I placed my finger on the old-fashioned phone’s wall mount and disconnected the call. The vintage phone was hefty, but the weight made each call feel important, and so far my conversations were anything but light. As soon as I replaced the clunky black receiver, it rang again.
“CeCe?”
“Speaking.”
“This is Barbara.”
“Oh my god,” I gulped. “Where have you been?”
“I’m in South Dakota visiting family.”
“What happened to Wyoming?”
Barbara paused. “I was in Wyoming, but how did you know?”
“Dammit, Barbara,” I yelled. “It doesn’t matter how I know. What’s important is that stuff is blowing up here, and we really needed your help. How could you disappear with no forwarding address?” My anger surprised me, but then again another murder had just taken place, and the stakes had skyrocketed. When Barbara had left, there was only one dead body. Now there were two and a missing teenage girl.
Barbara began to weep. Through the old-fashioned receiver, her cries crackled as if she were calling from the moon. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I called the food co-op yesterday, and they mentioned someone had asked for me. That’s what prompted me to call. Please understand—I couldn’t handle being home without Bob.”
I apologized profusely and briefly, very briefly, filled Barbara in on the events of the past week. I described Gayle with both her natural blond and dyed-black hair, but Barbara couldn’t think of anyone that met the description, nor was she familiar with the online social site where Bob and Gayle were communicating.
Finally, I asked what was sure to be a painful question for her. “Is there a chance Bob was into anything heavier than pot?” Before Barbara could answer, I mentioned the faint puncture marks on Bob’s arm.
“On his arm?” Barbara replied, her voice softening. “That’s not from drugs. Bob had dialysis last year.”
“Excuse me?”
“Our family physician had been on Bob’s case about his weight so Bob went on a crazy crash diet for a few months that ultimately harmed his kidneys. It took eight months of weekly dialysis for his kidneys to recover.”
“I had no idea,” I said. It astonished me to think how little I actually knew about Bob. How little any of us knew, for that matter. It was as though Bob had shared bits and pieces of his life with various people, and until all the parts were retrieved and combined, like one of his intricate dioramas, the truth would remain elusive. “I’d like to give Frank your number,” I said, more a directive than a question. Before I hung up, Barbara agreed to keep the line free for Frank’s call. I knew my next call should be to Frank, but instead, I dialed the number for Kelly Goff’s blue-shuttered house. He answered on the first ring.
“Gayle?” Kelly said, his voice almost pleading.
“No, it’s me, CeCe.”
“I’m hysterical,” Kelly said. “She hasn’t made contact since yesterday. I just read that kids missing more than forty-eight hours are likely dead.”
“She’s not dead,” I said although given what had happened to Norma, I wasn’t so sure. “And stop reading crap online. I need to ask you something. How did your husband Michael pass away?”
“Kidney failure,” Kelly replied.
I brushed my fingers across my mouth and blew softly into my hand just to assure myself that I could still form words. Kidney failure. Was there something in the water around the recycling center? Before I could ask for details, Kell
y added, “It was a genetic anomaly.”
“How did Gayle take it?
“Horribly. I shouldn’t have allowed it, but she used to go to the dialysis center after school and sit with Michael while he received treatment. She’s mature in so many ways, but in this case, she was too young to process the consequences of his illness. In retrospect, I should have shielded her from the medical part. It was deceiving, because until the end, Michael was quite healthy. Dialysis, when it’s effective, is a modern miracle. On his nontreatment days, Michael seemed fine.”
“And he received treatment once a week?” I said.
“More in the final months.”
I ended the phone call and slid down to the floor. At my ground-level view, I noticed that our bottom row of pantry shelves were in dire need of vacuuming. I considered alerting Katrina to the housekeeping emergency, figuring it might keep her occupied between contractions. I poked at a Godzilla-sized dust ball with my finger and watched as it rolled aimlessly backward, gathering loose pieces of lint along the way. By the time the dust ball landed securely in a corner, it had almost doubled in size. I considered Bob’s network of people, from his art to his job to his social communities online. I wondered how far his network extended and how long it took him to build his seemingly disconnected web of contacts. Bob, of course, had been contagiously friendly and like the dust ball, he had a way of attracting people. Yet, it still didn’t seem to make sense. I stood up too quickly, causing a head rush that was accentuated by my lack of sleep. I grabbed for a shelf to steady myself and stepped out of the pantry to find Katrina dusting a row of cookbooks.
“How are the contractions?” I asked, ignoring the stars fading from my vision.
“I’m getting better at breathing through them,” Katrina said, but her face crumbled as another stab took hold.
“I’ll be within yelling distance,” I said, and then headed upstairs. I found Charlie in his bedroom, head buried in a computer. A screen of HTML code let me know I had come to the right person.
“Hey,” I huffed. “Is there a way to find out how quickly Bob grew his network of contacts on the Other Life social site?”
Charlie looked up. “I’m assuming you want me to perform this magical feat without logging on as Bob?”
“You know you can do it,” I said, stroking Charlie’s Silicon Valley–sized ego.
“Gimme a few,” he said.
“Awesome.” I gave Charlie a thumbs-up and ran to Frank’s makeshift conference room. I spotted Bob’s notepad on the conference table and flipped through the pages. Bob, my favorite Freegan, hadn’t wasted an inch of paper. Each page was meticulously filled out in neat, legible handwriting. I considered Bob’s age: mid-sixties. Not so old that the technological revolution has passed him by, but old enough to revert to his old habits—a pencil and paper. I didn’t know what Charlie would find, but I suspected that Bob’s Internet avatar was relatively new, as was his interest in hard drives.
I picked up the phone extension in that room and called Frank.
“I’m on my way over,” he said, and with that I told him about my conversation with Barbara and Kelly.
“Kidney disease,” Frank repeated slowly. “And Michael’s complications were genetic in nature?”
“According to Kelly, yes.”
We didn’t speak as Frank digested the information. The silence was endless, so I walked to the window of the conference room and stared out across the bay to the Sound View labs. I had seen photos from the seventies of the first buildings erected on the site. The original buildings had long since been torn down and replaced with more modern facilities to better service the international hub of scientific advancement. The labs had been my father’s baby. He had hosted the ribbon cutting for every single building on the property. I knew there was no way he would allow the product of his achievement to be torn from his life. He probably felt as strongly about the labs as I did about finding Gayle. It was too bad our motivations for finding Gayle were diametrically opposed: he wanted to kill her, and I wanted to hug her.
“You still there?” Frank said.
“I’m here.”
“Do you know what’s strange about being adopted?” Frank asked.
“I don’t.”
“Well,” Frank started, “for me, it’s the idea that I don’t know who I am, or rather who I’m from. Genetically speaking, I guess I could establish some history through genetic testing, but it’s not the same as knowing who put me here and how that makes me the person I am. Genetic testing doesn’t have all the answers.”
“Oh,” was all I could manage. “I guess I could see that.”
“I’m wondering if Gayle was also thinking about her own family history.”
“But why? She’s just a young girl. Teenagers are so far removed from their backstory.”
“Teenagers who aren’t accompanying their adopted father to kidney treatments aren’t thinking about their ancestors’ lives. But we know Gayle is not average, and her experiences seem to be extreme for a young person. Maybe, after spending hours at a dialysis center full of ill people, she had reason to ponder where she came from.”
I thought about what Frank said as I watched a small boat bob along the bay. I remembered the time I forced Teddy and Charlie to ice skate right up to the line where the unfrozen choppy waters of the Long Island Sound met the mouth of the bay. It was a ridiculous stunt, but I wanted to know if a wave could freeze in motion, and it seemed the only way to answer my question was to skate to the edge. If there was one genetic truth in this bizarre mess, it’s that a child of mine wouldn’t let an important question go unanswered.
“And then,” I continued Frank’s thought, “her aunt, whom she trusted, unwittingly tips her off to the person who might be able to tell her about her genetic origins.” Of course, I could relate to Gayle’s curiosity, but I worried about her journey to this terrible precipice.
“Yes,” Frank said. “Corey warned Gayle about a man named Prentice. A quick Google search on the name Prentice, would identify your father as the former founder of the labs, the same labs where her aunt had started her medical career. It was easy enough for me to uncover the link between your father and Lifely, and I’m sure a computer-literate teen could have done the same. She must have believed your father had been involved in her birth and could help her reestablish her genetic history.”
Wow. How dangerously right. “But how did she find my father?”
“Just because we never looked for your father doesn’t mean he couldn’t be found. Let’s face it, he had to have contact with someone since he still paid your mother’s household bills. Whether he liked it or not, he had established a paper trail over the last year.”
“And then there’s Bob and Michael,” I added. “So do we think Bob had befriended Michael at the dialysis center and that’s how he met Gayle?”
“It seems logical.”
“Frank, if we don’t find Gayle soon, we’ll never know,” I sighed. I was exhausted, but I found the energy to tell Frank my theory about Bob’s pencil and paper note-taking. “I’m finding it hard to believe Bob had been socializing online for years. This was a guy who built things with his hands, stuff he could see and touch. I think his activity was recent, and I bet the timing was tied to his visits at the dialysis center, which started and ended within the last twelve months.”
We sat in silence again until Charlie burst through the door.
“Hey, Sherlock,” he said as he tossed some papers my way. “Other Life actively promotes shared user code as long as it benefits members. I wrote a quick app that allows users to summarize their connections on a time line, sort of a graphic tracking of your popularity. Once I installed the app and connected to Bob and a few of his other friends, I was able to access Bob’s activity, which is all within the last year. Look at this,” he said, pointing to a graph. “His activity shot up in the
last three months.”
“Frank,” I said, “did you hear that?”
“Loud and clear,” Frank said through the handset. “But I have a question. Barbara said Bob had recovered from his kidney problem. Is that correct?”
“About a year ago. Barbara said something about a home dialysis machine that he then used periodically.”
“I think you’re right,” Frank said. “And it appears Bob had recovered around the same time Gayle’s father died, so the two men definitely overlapped in their treatment.”
“Yup.”
“Okay,” Frank said. “I’ve got some stuff to think about. In the meantime, I need CeCe to stay with Katrina, and I’d like to borrow Charlie for a few hours. You game, Charlie?”
“Not feeling it,” Charlie said as he scrunched his face up. “I’ve done plenty of illegal things, but I steer clear of illegal organ rings.”
I balled up a piece of paper and chucked it at Charlie. “How can you write amazing computer code one minute and be a total moron the next? My daughter is not selling kidneys on the black market.”
“You two got a better theory?”
I stared at Charlie for a minute and then said, “I got nothing.”
“I do,” Frank said, his voice tinny through the speaker. “But I really need Charlie’s help. I’ll be there soon.”
fifty
Frank lugged an old desktop computer into Harbor House and placed it on the kitchen table. He attached the power cord and then left to retrieve three more computers from his car. By the time he was done, our kitchen looked like a New Delhi call center.
“Does anyone realize I planned on giving birth in this room,” Katrina yelled, “today?”
“If Charlie is as fast as I think he is, we’ll be done pretty soon,” Frank said.
Katrina keeled over and screeched, “Great mother of God, this freaking hurts!” For the first time ever, I watched as fear enveloped Frank’s face. This was a man I’d seen shot at, attacked, and jumped by a garbage thief, yet never once had I seen him flinch.
Drawing Blood Page 24
