The Canary List: A Novel

by Sigmund Brouwer

  However, through lengthy and painstaking analysis of data generated by computer software, a striking and obvious anomaly for Miss Piper was found near the FOXP2 gene, in the region of chromosome seven.

  Miss Piper’s anomaly is unknown and/or unreported in any and all fields of human genetic research. But this is what we do know: it is a genetic difference that may manifest itself in any number of diseases or behaviors. The FOXP2 gene, which, for example, was identified by studying a severe speech disorder that affects 50 percent of a family in England, caused those with the disorder to be unable to coordinate the fine tongue movements required for speech.

  Unfortunately, that a unique anomaly exists in Miss Piper’s genetic sample is all that can be stated at this point. Without any information about the individual’s health, history, and/or behaviors, it is impossible to speculate as to how the gene sequence manifests itself in development or function.

  As previously requested, information on the source of this sample would likely advance this analysis.

  Crockett set the paper down.

  “Done.”

  “That’s it?” Her eyes were open again. “In short, Jaimie’s blood sample contains a genetic difference that has never been charted, but he can’t guess what it does.”

  Crockett shrugged, as underwhelmed by McFarlane’s conclusion as Sarah. “That’s it for the overview, and yeah, sounds like that’s what he’s saying.” He paused for a moment, recalling his phone conversation with the geneticist. “Here’s something else, based on our earlier conversation …”

  “Make it interesting, please.”

  “McFarlane says the minor code change could result in something ‘huge.’ He wants to know if there is anything unusual about Jaimie.”

  “And?”

  “I’ve been thinking about that. The only thing I can come up with is that magnetic bracelet Agnes mentioned.”

  “Wow,” Sarah said, without any wow in her voice.

  “I know. Not much. But maybe it’s something”

  Sarah idly nodded while flipping through the report. “This is interesting. The last page is an invoice. The analysis cost more than $50,000. Hard to believe that Madelyne Mackenzie cares so much about Jaimie’s well-being that she’d spend that kind of money. So it makes me wonder: what does she get out of it?”

  Thirty-Four

  unlight spilled through the windows of her Bright Lights office. Not exactly an office, though. More like an informal library. The main building at Bright Lights was a long, low structure, meant to blend with the hills behind it, with dorm rooms in both directions forming a kitchen and administrative area in the center.

  Weekends were busy, kids and group leaders up and down the hallways in a constant but monitored flow. Middle of the week, like now, it was quiet. But even at the busiest, Madelyne Mackenzie’s room reflected serenity. Comfy couch, beanbag chairs, thick throw rug in the center, bookshelves.

  She’d hold group sessions in here, or individual counseling. It needed to be relaxed to get the kids to open up to her.

  She wasn’t relaxed at this point, even with a mug of tea in her hand.

  O’Hare was in a chair opposite, satchel on his lap. Ten minutes earlier, standing outside under an oak tree, Madelyne had suggested maybe it wasn’t the right time to take Jaimie out of the country. He’d requested a quick meeting, but needed to get something first. The satchel in his lap.

  “I understand your concerns about Jaimie,” he began. “It’s a difficult situation.”

  “It wasn’t easy, either, looking a man in the face who has been dragged into something he doesn’t understand.” Madelyne had given a lot of thought to the few minutes Crockett had spent in her office in Burbank earlier in the week.

  Poor man. Face swollen from a beating in prison, but shoulders square. An aura of exhaustion and sadness, but somehow resolute. She’d accepted the meeting for several reasons. One was curiosity. Jaimie spoke so highly of Mr. G, and it was so unusual for Jaimie to have that kind of respect and affection for an adult, that Madelyne wanted to get a sense of the man. She’d liked him, even to the point of checking the school Web site and looking for his photo in the Staff section to check his appearance without the hideous bruises, enjoying what she saw, the longish hair and the set of his face.

  Two, she’d wondered if not taking an appointment might make him too curious. She’d decided ahead of time for the short and impenetrably polite professional approach, responding to his request to meet as if she had nothing to hide.

  Three, she did have something to hide. Jaimie had insisted she’d said nothing to Mr. G about the issue at hand, but after consulting with O’Hare, they’d realized it would be wise to see what Mr. G might know about why Jaimie had been on the run when she knocked on his door.

  Good thing. Crockett’s question about the exorcist had thrown her. If he hadn’t learned it from Jaimie, it must have come from Brad Romans, the social worker, who had access to Jaimie’s detailed file.

  Madelyne thought she’d handled the meeting reasonably well. Maybe she’d been a little too cold in places, but that was a reaction to her natural sympathy for the man, overcompensating for it. On the other hand, she didn’t know if it had been smart to try to give Crockett some hope. Madelyne knew that it wouldn’t be long until everything in Rome had been resolved. At that point, as O’Hare had promised, levers would be pulled. Crockett would be out of this, and his life would be back to normal. Nothing she could tell Crockett though, much as she wanted to help end his nightmare.

  “Dragged into something he doesn’t understand,” O’Hare said. “You mean the teacher.”

  “Crockett,” Madelyne said.

  “I’ve promised you and Jaimie that in less than a week, it will be over. Trust me, I’m not too happy about what happened. Nobody innocent should suffer here. That’s why he’s getting the legal help we found him. I prefer not to be an ends-justifies-the-means type of person. I’m not doing it just because Jaimie insisted. I’m doing this to make it right. But you need to realize that’s not the issue here. It’s Jaimie.”

  He patted his satchel on his lap, as if he understood how curious Madelyne was about it. “Yes, ideally, given it’s obvious that our enemy knows about Jaimie, we should reconsider her involvement. But you’ll see in practical terms how urgently we need her at this point.” He opened the satchel and pulled out sheaves of paper. “Genealogy reports.”

  “You have more on Jaimie’s family?” Madelyne had taken the comfortable chair beside the couch, turning it to be able to face O’Hare. “I thought her genealogy chart was a dead end.”

  “I’m not talking about Jaimie’s family tree,” O’Hare said. He was usually so confident in his conversations, but now he hesitated. “But others. As it turns out, Jaimie is not the only one.”

  “What?” Madelyne stood. “Why did you wait until now to tell me?”

  O’Hare pinched the bridge of his nose, as if he had a headache. “Can you sit? It’s not that I waited. This was never supposed to reach you. Understand that even telling you now is something that some back in Rome would find unacceptable. But if you’re threatening to keep Jaimie here, I don’t see that I have a choice.”

  Madelyne paced to her door and back. She was angry, of course, but her curiosity and the implications were a bigger factor. Much bigger. She’d deal with the anger later, but right now, she wanted more information. “Others. Like Jaimie. This changes everything.”

  “Does it?”

  “Of course it does. It’s staggering. Think of how this helps me present my case in scientific terms. Other girls like Jaimie! Nobody could continue to deny the conclusions of my research.”

  “I’m aware of the report’s significance,” O’Hare said dryly. “Yes, girls who share Jaimie’s genetic anomaly, but there are two differences. The first, you will find extremely encouraging for your research. The second difference, however, is what applies now.”

  “I’ll take the good news first.”
/>   “I have now confirmed six family pools with the same genetic anomaly. These genealogy charts map those six families, ranging from a span of two hundred years to five hundred years, and while we have genealogists still trying to fill those charts completely, already we see that an inordinately high percentage of the women in these families—high enough to make it statistically impossible to discount—are women who were condemned and/or executed for witchcraft across Europe and North America. In short, it bears out your speculation.”

  Madelyne paced again. This time not from anger, but because she couldn’t contain the excitement of the discovery. “I knew it. I knew it. I knew it.”

  First there had come the revelation about the magnetic bracelet and Madelyne’s first inklings this might be due to a genetic factor. Listening to the audio tape of the first session in which Jaimie had opened up under hypnotherapy, Madelyne had been struck by Jaimie’s confusion over her feelings of “darkness,” and her struggles to understand why it overwhelmed her when it did. The real revelation for Madelyne had been listening to Jaimie wonder if she was a witch, if people would have burned her in olden times, as Jaimie had said. If it was genetic, Madelyne had realized, maybe there were girls and women who had suffered in the past for sharing those feelings of darkness. O’Hare had agreed to Madelyne’s suggestion of a genealogy trace of Jaimie’s family tree. Both had been disappointed at the lack of results.

  “Yes,” O’Hare said. “You deserve the credit for suggesting the genealogy trace. What you didn’t know, of course, was that I applied the same suggestion more broadly.”

  “Where? How?”

  “Where? The most logical place to look. Vatican archives. How? My own research. Dozens of hours, privately. If a person didn’t know what to look for, it wouldn’t have been found, but you pointed me in the right direction.”

  “Six family trees!”

  “So far. I’m doing my best to untangle all this, but I have to move slowly, making sure no one else connects the different pieces of research and understands what we’re trying to learn.”

  “Six families,” she repeated it, like a lottery winner might do in the first few hours after the ticket was drawn. “Other girls like Jaimie. Same genetic anomaly.”

  “Now. And confirmed by DNA.”

  She lowered herself again onto the chair, leaning forward. “DNA? Not just a pattern of witches on the maternal side of a family?”

  O’Hare gave a discretionary cough. “I arranged for, um, some graves to be desecrated for the purpose of our research.”

  Madelyne didn’t care about the impropriety. Or illegality. Or whatever it was. This brought the revelation to a new level. “You’re telling me that you ran DNA tests on some of the women who had been executed as witches?”

  “Let’s just say the church has a long reach and a lot of cemetery real estate.”

  “And the genetic correlation was also confirmed? DNA of the exhumed bodies has the same anomaly as Jaimie’s?”

  “We didn’t need to exhume the bodies. Just get enough to test the DNA. And yes. Same anomaly. Keep in mind, you’d never be able to claim that every woman accused of witchcraft carried the anomaly, because witch hunts were unpredictable political beasts. And, let’s face it, sometimes all it took was insanity—or even a misdirected grimace—for a woman to be deemed a witch.”

  “Insanity,” Madelyne said softly. “If some of those women were like Jaimie and didn’t know why they felt what they did, that could have led them to insanity.”

  O’Hare nodded, his lips tight. “Poor women. None of them understood their power.”

  “This just makes it even stranger that my theory about Jaimie’s family tree was incorrect. Everything else seems so connected.”

  “I think it’s the DNA analysis that really matters. There is no doubt Jaimie is one of them. We’ll worry about her family tree later. For now, we really need her in Rome. Soon. If and when the pope dies, everything goes into motion, and if we don’t stop it now, you’ll never have permission to publish your papers.”

  He put the papers back into the satchel. “Please forgive me for this, but the stakes are simply too high, and in this specific instance, distasteful as it is, I have to be an ends-justifies-the-means type of person. If Jaimie doesn’t go to Rome, you won’t get any of this. All you’ll have is Jaimie. And no family tree.”

  “You’re threatening me.”

  “I have no choice. It doesn’t change our agreement. You are only to publish the findings after we’ve deemed it suitable. Obviously, if we make it through the death of the pope, we will have passed the crisis. Within a year, you can use all of this as research material. But first we need Jaimie’s help. Isn’t that enough motivation for you?”

  “What I want is secondary to what’s right for Jaimie.”

  “Then find a way to convince yourself it’s right for Jaimie. Like the scholarship funding that will ensure any future education she wants.”

  He leaned forward, clutching the satchel. “Jaimie is the only one who can help us. The other girls? Our last medical reports give the pope, at best, another two days to live. We don’t have enough time to recruit them. They have families. Jaimie doesn’t. At this point, as a foster child in your care, she’s the perfect candidate.”

  “We can’t put her on an airplane. Aside from the fact that she’s a juvenile suspected of arson and her passport will be flagged, we know that she is being hunted. If he knew enough to send someone to burn her house, he’s going to know she’s on the way.”

  “Who says it needs to be a commercial flight? There was a reason I told you not to book tickets.”

  Madelyne blinked a few times, then smiled a tight smile. “So easy to forget exactly how much reach you do have.”

  “Crockett’s out of jail,” O’Hare said. “I thought that alone would have been a good indication of my intentions toward helping him. And a better indication of the levers I can pull.”

  “But not before someone nearly killed him in there.”

  “Of course,” O’Hare answered.

  “Of course?”

  “We arranged for a guard to beat him up. To work on his face the most. It was Crockett’s best chance of getting out. And his attorney played it perfectly. Our organization can get a lot of things done.” He shook his head with a wry grin. “On the other hand, I could use suggestions on where to keep a horse for Jaimie.”

  Thirty-Five

  he setup of Dr. Lorna Moller’s office differed from Madelyne Mackenzie’s office in a few fundamentals, but the overall effect, at least to Crockett, was profound and calming. Romans had recommended Moller as another psychiatrist who might provide some more information on Jaimie. Romans occasionally sent children or parents to her. The browns and tans of her office added a subtle warmth, and the large oil paintings blended with the comfortable autumn feel. Moller’s potted plants were real, or maybe good fakes. Short of plucking leaves, Crockett couldn’t decide. He found it strange that his thoughts wandered in that direction. Here to talk to a psychiatrist about demon possession, and he had the urge to slide over and tug on a plant. Just another reminder of how surreal all of this was, like the shark attack had been.

  “Couch or chair, Mr. Grey?”

  He was here because he was metaphorically flailing, grasping at straws, or maybe more accurately, trying to unravel a massive ball of yarn with no idea what strings were important. He knew so little, and he was hoping anything would help. But, he figured, you started with the weird and unusual and pulled and tried to find out where it led.

  Genetics. Genealogy. And exorcism.

  Weird enough.

  So find out what another psychiatrist might say about exorcism and hope that might give him something to take back to Mackenzie and push harder.

  Slim as the odds were that it might work, what else could he do? He wanted to be a father to Mickey. No way was he going to take Dr. Mackenzie’s advice and trust that his innocence was enough so that when a little time passed
, he’d be free of this situation.

  “Chair would be good,” Crockett said. “And I appreciate an appointment on short notice.”

  He noticed that she was studying his face but trying not to get caught. She said nothing about his bruises.

  “Happy to help,” she answered. She had a radio voice and a television face. A decade or so older than Crockett, Moller had light auburn hair, cut in a bob that added fullness to her slender features.

  She sat in a chair opposite Crockett, then crossed her legs as she smoothed a long black skirt. “How may I help you, Mr. Grey?”

  Crockett settled in as well, not feeling nearly as relaxed as she looked. His appointment was only a half hour. He didn’t want to waste it.

  “I’m a teacher, and I have come into some information about one of my students that is a little … unorthodox. How much credibility would you give to the possibility that one of my students could be demon possessed?”

  “Oh, my,” she said. “Interesting.”

  Crockett nodded, letting his question sink in for Dr. Moller.

  “If you’re serious about this question,” Dr. Moller answered, keeping a diplomatic tone, “and nothing about you suggests otherwise, then I’m happy to answer in generalities, but not specifics. And I’m not willing to make any kind of diagnosis based on your description of how this student acts out.”

  “Sure. Would that apply to a discussion of a colleague as well?”

  “You’re going to suggest that another psychiatrist is also demon possessed?”

  “No,” Crockett said. “Definitely not. I’m asking about a psychiatrist who works with an exorcist.”

  To his surprise, Moller stood. Like a cat moving in sunlight.

  “I think I’ll get a coffee,” she said. “It sounds like this conversation is not going to be about assessing any personal problem, and I’m happy to discuss it as colleagues, which in a sense we are. Two professionals, trying to help a student.”