Henry wanted to talk to Bruxton too, but not in front of the guard. Wondering what the hell Bruxton wanted at this time of night, Henry got out of his car and went inside the guardhouse.
“I’ll get him for you,” the guard said. He punched in a number, waited a moment, then said, “Doctor Bruxton, I’ve got Doctor Pennell here . . . Yes sir, I’ll tell him.” The guard hung up and looked at Henry. “He’s on another line right now. Said he’d call you back in a few minutes. You’re to wait.”
Even if he didn’t now own Bruxton, Henry would have been irritated at being ordered around like this. Like Bruxton was God or something. Well, he’d hang around this time, but soon, things’d be different.
Henry stepped outside and lit up a cigarette.
“I used to smoke,” the guard said, joining him.
“What made you quit?” Henry replied, too insecure to tell the guy to buzz off.
“The poster that showed what your face would look like if the damage smoking did to your lungs was out where you could see it.”
“You’re a better man than I am.”
“I wouldn’t say that, Doctor Pennell. I mean you’re a doctor and everything, and I’m just . . . this.”
“What you do to make a living doesn’t mean that’s who you are,” Henry said, not believing a word of it.
This blather went on for about fifteen minutes, until Henry’s irritation at being made to stand around like a retard waiting for instructions reached the boiling point. Just when he was ready to take off, the phone in the guardhouse rang.
Henry followed the guard inside and waited to be handed the phone. Instead, the guard listened a moment, said, “Okay, I’ll tell him,” and hung up.
“Doctor Bruxton said to go on home. He’ll talk to you tomorrow.”
Jaw clenched in anger, Henry stalked to his car, flopped in, and left rubber on the pavement as he sped off.
As he drove, the knowledge that soon he’d no longer have to tolerate this kind of crap softened his anger. Then he realized he hadn’t even needed to put up with it tonight. Just because he hadn’t yet told Bruxton what he knew didn’t mean anything. Henry could have ignored Bruxton’s order to wait and be home by now.
Henry had missed his first chance to take control of his own life. But then, when you’ve been a toady as long as he had, it was bound to take a little while to shed that skin. He turned off the highway onto the country lane that led to his home.
He drove the next three miles without thinking, hypnotized by his headlights feeding on the white center line. He hadn’t passed a single car since leaving work, which, even though it was late, was a little surprising for the main drag. But the road he was on now, dark and small and lined by mile after mile of dried corn waiting for harvest, was used mainly by farmers moving their combines or whatever from one field to another. So, at this time of night, it was always deserted. And he liked that, enjoyed living in a remote corner of the county, because people had never brought him anything but trouble as far back as he could remember. And even Lynn was turning against him. She’d always been a self-contained person, preferring books and gardening, and her dogs, to people. But lately she’d been complaining constantly about feeling isolated out here. Pretty damn bad when you can’t even find peace at home.
Eyes on the white line, Henry guided his car around a gentle curve in the road and hit the brakes.
Damn.
There was a car with its hood up, stalled right in the middle of the road. Would it have been so hard to get it onto the shoulder before it died?
He could see the driver bent over the fender, his head and shoulders lost in the engine, apparently oblivious to Henry’s presence. Henry didn’t know anything about car repair, but figured he had to offer the driver a ride or the use of his phone if the guy didn’t have one. Letting the engine run, he put it in park, got out, and walked to the stalled car. “Hello there. Anything I can do to help?”
The driver took his head out of the engine. “Aren’t you Henry Pennell?”
“Yeah, but how did—”
The other man’s hand came into view, holding something. At practically the same instant that he saw the stun gun and failed to recognize it, Henry was hit by an electrical jolt that dropped him to the pavement. While he struggled to comprehend what was happening, the other man grabbed him by the collar and hauled him into the cornfield beside the road, where he rolled Henry onto his stomach and wrapped a thin cord around his neck.
And so Henry Pennell, forty-two years of age, died in full compliance with his belief that people brought him nothing but trouble.
12
SUSAN MORRISON TOUCHED up the microscope’s fine focus, and the first of the developing human embryos in the multiwell dish came sharply into view. Satisfied that it looked perfectly normal and healthy, she checked each of the others.
All four embryos were in the so-called blastocyst stage, in which the future child consists of a small cellular cluster at one end of a hollow ball of cells that will eventually form the fetal part of the placenta. In her long career, she’d seen many hundreds of developing embryos and she still felt the same sense of awe and respect.
Four potential human lives.
In her dish.
Under her control.
Four embryos. Among them, a world-famous pianist perhaps, a Pulitzer Prize–winning novelist, a network anchor, or a drug-controlled thief. Who could tell?
Maybe in the future, the parents could order the exact child they wanted. But for now, the best Susan could do was give them the boy they wanted, along with an assurance that he would be free of the common genetic defects. In the next room, a young woman waited, prepped and ready to receive her son.
A few weeks earlier, a reporter had wanted to do a story on Susan’s clinic, but she had turned him down. In the eyes of many, she was playing God—and in the Bible belt, that was a potentially dangerous perception for her. In time, the miracles she was capable of achieving would be widely accepted and there would be no danger in her art. But that time was years away.
In most clinics, it was accepted practice to introduce the earlier four or eight-cell stage into the patient. But so few of those implanted, and each attempt was so expensive and emotionally draining for the hopeful clients, that it had become customary to introduce as many as four embryos at a time. Occasionally, this produced multiple births. And while a couple might desire a single child with all their hearts, the birth of two or three was often a far less joyous event. So Susan had begun introducing but a single blastocyst. And her success rate with this modified approach soared.
So which was it to be?
Pianist?
Novelist?
Anchor?
Thief?
She looked up at Eric Taylor, the embryologist member of her team. “Let’s use number two.”
“It’s always been my favorite,” Taylor joked.
While he got the embryo into the transfer catheter, Susan returned to her patient, Sally Marcum, who was on the examining table, her heels in obstetric stirrups, a catheter guide extending from her womb to the exterior through her vagina.
Susan moved to where she could see Sally’s face. “How are you doing?”
“I’m okay.”
“We’ll be finished in just a few minutes.” Susan moved to the foot of the examining table, took her seat between the stirrups, and waited for Taylor, who entered a few seconds later and knelt at Susan’s side. With him holding the syringe attached to the transfer catheter, Susan threaded the thin tube through the already-installed guide sleeve. As Susan worked, a nurse watched the ultrasound screen for the emergence of the catheter from the uterine end of the guide.
“I see it.”
Susan carefully advanced the catheter a bit more, then stopped pushing. “We’re there.”
Taylor gently depressed the plunger on the syringe, and there was a flash of light on the ultrasound screen as the medium from the catheter entered the uterus. Susan then removed the catheter from the guide, and Taylor went back to the lab to verify that the embryo had indeed been delivered.
He returned a few minutes later and gave Susan the okay sign.
“Wonderful,” Susan said. “Freeze the others.”
If for some reason, the embryo she’d given her patient did not implant, they would thaw each of those remaining, one at a time, and try again with the first one that still appeared healthy.
Susan looked at her patient. “Sally, you’ll need to stay right there for an hour. Then you can go home. You should spend the rest of the day in bed. Tomorrow, you can get up, but don’t be very active.”
Susan went to her office to make a few notes in her patient’s record, finishing that task at five after nine. Plenty of time to get to the airport and catch her flight to Memphis, where she would meet Holly and they would go on to Madison together.
Ready to depart, she checked on Sally and then let the other members of her team know she was leaving. While she was exchanging a few last words with the group’s geneticist, the receptionist interrupted. “Doctor Morrison, you have a call.”
“Tell them I’m away for a few days. Or let Doctor Shields handle it.”
“The caller said it’s extremely urgent.”
THE PLANE FROM Jackson, Mississippi via Houston had landed in Memphis twenty-five minutes ago. But Holly had still not seen Susan come into the terminal. And it was only thirty minutes until they were to leave for Madison. While Holly strained to see farther down the approach to the terminal, she heard herself being paged to the United Airlines ticket counter.
She hurried over there. “I’m Holly Fisher. You paged me.”
The man behind the counter consulted a notepad beside him and said, “Susan Morrison asked us to tell you her husband had a heart attack and she won’t be able to go with you.”
Holly’s first thought was for Susan and what terrible news this was. She longed to know more. How bad was it? It sounded as though Walter hadn’t died. But he might be in grave danger of doing so. She considered calling Susan, but realized that she was probably at the hospital.
Then, Holly’s thoughts shifted to herself. She’d have to go to Madison alone. Until that moment, she hadn’t realized how much she was counting on Susan. From their trip to Dallas, Holly had seen that Susan always seemed to know what to do when the unexpected occurred. How could Holly proceed alone?
But then, she remembered why she was going to Madison. This was her battle, not Susan’s. Holly didn’t need a committee to give these people what they deserved. Chin up, her doubts banished for now, she headed toward the gate where they were already preboarding her flight.
Direct flights out of Memphis to cities that aren’t airline hubs are rare. Memphians have long said that you couldn’t even go to hell from Memphis without a stop in Atlanta. Holly’s trip today, didn’t involve Atlanta, but she would have to change planes in Detroit.
On the initial leg of the trip, the plane was not full, allowing the seat between her and the woman next to the window to go unoccupied. A few minutes after they were airborne, the woman closed her eyes and began fanning herself with a motion sickness bag so that about fifty times a minute the sun reflected off its shiny black surface directly into Holly’s eyes. Hoping to put a stop to this, Holly reached up, opened the air nozzles above both adjacent seats, and directed them on the woman’s face. But the fanning continued.
Ten minutes later, Holly felt like grabbing the bag from the woman’s hand and tearing it into shreds. And in the row ahead, across the aisle, obnoxious hard-rock music was leaking audibly from some guy’s headset.
Ordinarily, Holly would have borne these intrusions with better grace. Though she was not aware of it, her irritability was rooted in fear. She was off to a strange city to investigate people who might be dangerous, and she was alone. The prospect of what lay ahead would have been far less intimidating with Susan along. In any event, when the beverages were served, the fanning woman put down the motion-sickness bag to accept a cup of orange juice and never fanned again.
In Detroit, when she reported to gate D7 for her connecting flight, as instructed by the concourse monitors, a ticket agent redirected her to C9. Upon arriving at that gate, she learned that her plane’s departure would be delayed. It finally took off forty minutes late. Even if they didn’t make up the lost time in the air, it would still be possible for Holly to reach the dairy before five o’clock if everything else went right. But with all the problems she’d been having so far, and still afraid of what she might confront in Midland, she was not in an optimistic frame of mind.
Despite the poor start to her trip, Holly enjoyed this leg because she spent a good part of it affectionately watching the seats across the aisle, where a one-year-old boy in little blue sweat pants, a tiny football jersey with the number 98 on it, and the cutest little white gym shoes was traveling with his mother.
Fifty miles out of Detroit, the boy launched his teething ring into the aisle, and Holly returned it. A hundred miles later, a little truck went whizzing through the air, landing under the seat in front of Holly. This too she retrieved and returned. For the rest of the trip, the mother slept with the boy in her lap, his hands playing with her hair. As the plane rolled up to the gate in Madison, the boy celebrated their arrival by bouncing a small car off the cabin roof.
After the crowds in the Detroit airport, the Madison terminal seemed almost deserted. Its small size allowed Holly to find the Avis desk easily and sign the papers for the rental car she’d reserved. Having only the sketchiest of ideas about what she was going to do here, it had been impossible to predict how long she’d stay. To be safe, she’d cleared her calendar for three days and brought the appropriate amount of clothing in her carry-on. She’d had the foresight to check the weather in Madison before leaving home, so when she stepped from the terminal and was greeted by a cold wind that brought tears to her eyes she wasn’t surprised. As she slipped on the jacket she’d brought, the Avis shuttle pulled up at the curb.
Five minutes later, Holly was staring at the sky through the windshield of a white Honda Accord and seeing nothing but fat gray clouds bearing ugly black scars where the bottoms had been sheared off—a sky that could produce anything. It seemed like another bad sign and she wished again that Susan was beside her.
But she wasn’t, and there was work to do.
Using the Madison map the Avis clerk at the terminal had given her and a less detailed Wisconsin map she’d brought, Holly plotted her course to the small town of Midland, where she felt she would find the heart of the mystery she’d been unwillingly drawn into.
13
AS HOLLY MADE her way to the southwest on the twolane state highway to Midland, the clouds that had appeared so malignant at the airport became much less threatening. Eventually, there were stretches of several minutes at a time where she could see the sun.
The land here was gently rolling hills, most of it clad in brown cornstalks. In some fields, green or red machines moved down the rows like great herbivores, consuming the crop in wide swaths and spitting a thick stream of shelled corn into an accompanying truck. There was also a lot of farm machinery on the road, and Holly often found herself crawling along for miles behind some mountainous piece of equipment.
She had arrived in Madison at three-thirty. Without the hindrances she was encountering, it would have only taken around forty minutes to reach Midland. Now, she wouldn’t make it until after five, meaning she’d probably have to wait until tomorrow to visit the dairy. Still no breaks.
At five-fifteen, on the outskirts of Midland, she came upon the Green and White Motel, a line of little individual cottages that should have been called the Faded and Peeling Green and
White Motel. Seeing a heavyset woman carrying a stack of blankets from the cottages to the farmhouse used as an office, Holly pulled into the driveway and got out of the car with the engine still running.
“Need a room?” the woman asked, coming over to her. Her breathing was labored and, with each exhalation, it sounded as though she had a harmonica in her throat.
Though Holly did need a place to spend the night, and the Green and White had a vacancy, she’d stopped merely to ask a few questions. “I was hoping you could give me some information about the Midland Dairy.”
“What do you want to know?” Another harmonica breath.
“When do they close?”
“Six o’clock.”
Finally, something was going Holly’s way. “How far is it?”
“Nine miles.” The woman took another deep breath and added, “Straight ahead about five miles, take a left on Dairy Road.”
Though Holly very much wanted to visit the dairy today, the late hour and the possibility that she wouldn’t find any other place to stay if she waited made her take a chance on the Green and White. With little time to spare, she went into the office and paid for a room without looking at it.
Needing a bathroom break, she got into her car and drove down the gravel drive to the unit she’d rented. She grabbed her luggage from the trunk and went inside to find herself in a cheerless room that belonged in a reformatory. On the wall was a hand-lettered sign: “Why ruin your good name by taking our light bulbs?” She tossed her overnight bag on the metal bed. Cringing at the sound this coaxed from the springs, which were part of the frame, she went into the bathroom.
Oh swell.
The shower stall was in a white metal enclosure with a thin green curtain on rings at the entrance. Without even looking hard, she could see the brush marks on the stall from the last time it was painted. “So I guess a mint on my pillow is out of the question,” she muttered.
The Lethal Helix Page 10
