Neighborhood Watch (v5.0)

by Cammie McGovern

  “Was it from the chemicals they were working with?”

  “He didn’t work with the chemicals. I did. None of the men who got the cancer worked in the labs. They were analyzing our results and drawing up designs. How do three men under the age of fifty get cancer from pencils and computers? No one would ever answer that question for me.”

  I can’t get over how easily she’s shed a twenty-year charade of pretending to do nothing. It’s as if, with Trish gone, there’s no point in any of the old secrecy anymore. She tells me I’d be stunned by what an amoral bunch scientists can be, especially if they think their precious research funding might be endangered. “David used to complain about it. I thought he was being ridiculous, and then he died under circumstances that no one would look into. There were people obsessed with stopping cold fusion research. He thought it was someone putting carcinogens in our water supply, which I thought was crazy until all these guys got cancer and died within six months of each other.”

  “Who wanted to stop work on cold fusion?”

  “Hot fusion got all the government contracts and money in those days—billions and billions. They had to hold on to it.” It all started when they were at Texas A&M after Fleischmann and Pons made their announcement. Their lab went to work the next day trying to replicate the experiment. After four months with no results, the tide began turning. Georgia State was the first to say it wasn’t replicable; MIT came out a few weeks later, calling cold fusion a hoax. Soon after that, the money disappeared. Basically, the government funded it long enough to look like they’d tried but not long enough to threaten the twenty-five years they’d invested in hot fusion. Without government subsidy, the university cut them off, even though most of the scientists they were working for agreed they hadn’t had enough time. She and David were postdocs at that point, low enough on the totem pole that they were able to move around under the radar. They stole equipment from the lab to continue the work in the basement of their tiny rented house. Their feeling, the whole time, was that the higher-ups knew and approved of what they were doing. They believed cold fusion had potential, though it might take ten years or more to get reliable results.

  A year later, in their makeshift basement lab, it finally happened: One of the beakers began to boil. “We couldn’t figure out what we’d done differently. Why this one and not the others? It’s addictive, a question like that. If you can answer it, you know you’ll change the world. We had to stay with it. We had to.”

  Committing to this after they got their degrees meant forgoing university jobs and mainstream research. It put them on the fringe, where they met Roland for the first time. “He’d been working in solar for a long time, and wind a little bit. He was less of a scientist, more of a designer, but he came out and saw what was happening with our research, that we’d gotten reactions going in one out of ten setups, higher percentages than anyone else was getting.”

  He was amazed and asked if he could join them. Soon after that David got sick, and Marianne’s world fell apart. “I had two young children I had to protect. I couldn’t put them in danger. I didn’t know if I’d been exposed or if I was going to get sick. Of course I married Roland. He was good to my kids. I had to make sure they’d be all right.”

  All along I’ve wondered if their marriage was a little like my own, born of circumstance, two people clinging to similar life rafts. They took Roland’s name and moved here to disappear. If David had been a target, they didn’t want to be found. The intention was to leave all the old work behind. “Then about three months after we moved here, I woke up one night with a question about the presence of trace carbons in our cathodes. I told Roland I wanted to set up one experiment. Of course there’s no such thing as one experiment, we both knew that. One set of answers opens up new questions and you need a new trial.”

  They built a lab downstairs, hidden in an annex, and kept going. Money quickly became a factor and, as isolated as they were, they had to play games to keep some coming in. After five years, they found themselves at a crossroads. The work was going well, but the minimal funding sources were drying up. Roland thought they were a year away from creating a viable hot-water heater. Anything like that, any commercial application, would have guaranteed financing.

  “That’s when John got involved. He was still in high school but he was already doing all this Free Energy Tesla stuff. He wanted to set up a Web site in his father’s memory and collect donations for the work we were doing. He also thought it was a way to bring like-minded people into our research without drawing attention to the cold fusion aspect. He was right, as it turned out. But that’s when I started to look at our data a little closer. One of the problems with fusion is that it’s so hard to measure if it has actually taken place. You need elevated temperatures but you also need tritium and helium-4 isotopes. We kept getting one or two of the markers of fusion but not all three. For a long time, I didn’t think that was significant, and then I started to think maybe the reason we couldn’t achieve fusion predictably was because we weren’t achieving it at all, that it was just a random chemical reaction taking place. I knew we had more problems than Roland wanted to admit. There were too many factors we couldn’t explain. It had never made sense that a nuclear event had occurred without producing any radiation. No one ever questioned that enough. The cold fusion people said that’s the beauty of this process—no radiation was produced. But the beauty of it was also the problem: It was too controlled. It created enough heat to bubble politely in a beaker but it was never explosive, never out of control. Roland wouldn’t hear any of this. He was more convinced than ever. He was even going to tell you about it.”

  That was the summer Trish wanted to work for Roland, which Marianne said was fine as long as Trish never saw the lab. They’d told their kids a little bit about their work but never about the lab in the basement, a hard-and-fast rule they always agreed on. Kids were unpredictable, teenagers even worse. If they knew, they’d get curious and sneak down at night to get a closer look, poke a finger in a beaker and skew six months of work. No, they never knew it was there, never even suspected, with the access hidden as it was behind a bookshelf on invisible rolling wheels. They’d done that much right, but beyond that, they agreed on less and less. Roland wanted John brought in as a financial partner. He was all of eighteen, good at Web site design but not ready for the weight of responsibility. It was a terrible time for Marianne. She saw much too clearly how fractured her family was, how damaged by work that she was now certain would never prove itself.

  She tried talking in veiled terms to Trish, but telling her the truth: that it was a decades-old dream that might not come true. Marianne thought it might help at a time when Trish was growing up so fast, becoming a teenager overnight, far smarter than the peers she humiliated herself trying to win the approval of. She knew Trish needed something from her and thought talking to her like an adult might be an answer. It wasn’t. It’s all a jumble in Marianne’s mind. A lot of things started happening at once. Trish stopped working with Roland around the time they started seeing a new and measurable difference in their results, more significant than anything they’d seen in years—higher temperatures, beakers boiling over. And then one night—magical, she still thinks, though she wasn’t there to witness it—five of them burst. It meant they had a reason to keep going, enough information to get back to work, which they did. They focused intensely, both of them downstairs at night—they could work only at night—and stopped worrying about Trish for how long? A week? Maybe two? By which point it was too late. One night Marianne went upstairs, peeked into Trish’s room, and realized she wasn’t there at all.

  It can’t be a coincidence that she started Neighborhood Watch during this time, just as her work was coming to fruition. When I ask, she says, “I had to start that group. The last time we got close to achieving real fusion my husband was killed. I knew people would go to great lengths to stop our work.”

  I study her face. “But it wasn’t outsiders you
were really worried about, was it?”

  For a long time, she doesn’t speak. “You have to understand, no one has ever been issued a patent for cold fusion. The potential is too enormous. The impact it would have on the world is unprecedented. Its value can’t be measured in dollars.”

  “Who did you think was trying to steal your work?”

  She looks at me for a long time. “She lived in an empty house with no furniture, no talk of where her money came from or when it would run out. She must have been working for someone. What was she doing here?”

  The telephone rings but before she goes to answer it, she hands me an envelope—plain white with my name typed across the front. “Here. This came for you this morning.” There’s no address, no postmark, no stamp.

  It looks exactly like the letter I got three years ago, with the cat note inside.

  My heart speeds up. I open it and find a sheet of white paper with a single line, typed: I need to talk to you. Please meet me at the library. I read it again and study the envelope. Could it be from Trish, hiding somewhere, looking for help?

  If it is, I need to get to her as quickly as possible. I know enough of the story now to fill in some of the gaps. Yes, this had a great deal to do with the work Marianne and Roland kept far too secret for too long, but there’s another piece that both of them have forgotten. Trish had a baby that was taken away from her.

  I’ve been thinking about this ever since Trish disappeared.

  It’s hard for any woman who has longed for and been unable to have a child of her own to imagine what surrendering a real one would be like. Does she think about him at night? Does she hear his voice in her head? I know this much: She may have given him up, but he’s never left her thoughts.

  I also know how to help her. There were women in prison who’d lost their children to courts and the foster system. They just wanted an address to write to, they’d tell me, and I’d get to work typing names into data banks. I can help Trish find her baby. If she’s at the library now, waiting for me, we can start there; I know how to search for birth records. I can help her find him and take her there.

  I slip out the back door before Marianne can ask where I’m going. Outside the library, I feel a chill pass through me opening the old familiar door. I wonder what would have happened if I’d lived out my life working here every day, going home at night, pretending to be fine except for the times when I so obviously wasn’t. Would that have been better than what I’ve been through?

  I know the answer before I even finish asking it: No.

  I open the door and breathe in the heady, familiar scent of old books and carpet cleaner. Heather is there at the front desk, looking older and thinner with gray hair now, the same as my own. I wait for someone to distract her at the desk so I can slip by unrecognized. I need to find Trish as quickly as possible. If she’s not here, I need to look outside. I scan the bent heads, the usual collection of library waifs and old people napping with newspapers open on their laps. It’s such a familiar scene it almost feels as if I never left at all. Then I look up and my heart stops.

  I see who wrote the letter and it’s not Trish at all.

  Sitting at a table, with a book open in front of him, is Leo.

  CHAPTER 32

  “What are you doing here?” I sit down across from Leo an arm’s length away, close enough to touch him, my heart beating crazily. Up close like this, I see all the details I remember. His hair is blond, streaked with silver; his hands are spotted with freckles and golden hair. He looks thinner than I remember and I feel my chest tighten. All those months of writing to him every night was the closest I ever came to losing myself entirely in the fantasy of happiness.

  “I got released,” he says, though he doesn’t sound happy or relieved. He’s too mad, I can tell. “Six weeks ago. I tried to tell you, but you sent back all my letters.”

  “No, I didn’t. I never sent any back.”

  We sit for a minute with this—his anger, my confusion. Why didn’t we remember where we were living, how anyone around us could have sabotaged our letter exchange, out of jealousy or spite? “I’m sorry, Leo. You stopped writing and I didn’t understand. I assumed you’d moved on.”

  “No,” he says, shaking his head. “No. I didn’t move on.”

  I want to reach out, take his hand, do something, and I can’t. I think about the dreamy promises we once made to each other. If I get out first, I’ll come every Saturday and bring you cookies. When we’re both out, I’ll take you for the spiciest enchiladas you’ve ever eaten.

  Once, after we’d been writing for a few months and letting our letters get racier, he asked if I liked having sex with the lights on or off. Off, of course, I wrote back. Maybe you’ve forgotten, but I’m a librarian.

  He responded: Ah, then, you’re in for a treat. I’m a lights-on, loud-music type. Jefferson Airplane, Jethro Tull, anything really. Your choice. But the lights, my dear. On.

  Now here we are, sitting so close to each other and crippled by our shyness. Maybe we’re both thinking of those letters, how easy they were to write compared to this.

  He says the hardest part of being released was leaving without knowing what happened to me. “I thought maybe your husband came back into the picture. I knew there was talk about your DNA testing and I assumed that’s what happened.” After he got out he kept seeing things we talked about doing, which made him depressed at first, then angry. “You don’t know this yet, but I don’t give myself away like that. I meant all of it with you.”

  I meant it, too.

  He’s been following the drama since my release. When he read about Trish’s disappearance and saw my name in the paper, he decided to try to get in touch. He drove here last night, slept in his car, and this morning left a note in Marianne’s mailbox.

  It’s too much to look at his face and try to take this all in. He leans across the table between us, close enough that I can smell his breath: coffee and cough drops. “Can we go for a walk?” he says.

  His gait is a little funny, legs bowed like a cowboy who has just dismounted. It’s strange. Up close he looks smaller than I remember from watching him through the window. I want to break this nervous impasse by touching him, but clearly, even outside and alone, this isn’t in the cards. He points us away from the garden toward a line of trees and undergrowth left to grow untended. A suburban wildness, too swampy for development. As we walk, I tell him about Trish disappearing in the middle of the night. I tell him it’s possible she ran away and it’s also possible her parents have done something with her, sent her away, silenced her somehow in the interest of preserving their work. I keep thinking of Marianne’s words: The timing was just terrible.

  I don’t know what Marianne was about to tell me when the telephone rang and stopped her story. If she did more than suspect Linda Sue of stealing their work secrets—if she killed her to save them. If she had stepped inside Linda Sue’s house she would have seen that there was nothing there. No computer, no files, no nefarious motives. It wasn’t Marianne and Roland’s work she wanted. It was Trish’s baby.

  Was any of this enough to spark a murderous rage in Marianne? Had she been on the brink of making a confession when she got interrupted?

  “And this is Cat Ashker we’re talking about—the author?” Leo says.

  “I’ve read some of her books. The first one came out while I was still teaching. I had one student who was a big fan.”

  “Did you like them?”

  “Oh, sure. Suburban menace and magic. They’re great. Amazing that someone so young wrote them.”

  “She started young. She always talked about becoming a writer. I was her librarian.” I blush a little, afraid I sound silly. I wish I could tell him what she said at her reading—that I mattered to her, that I made a difference. “That’s who I came here expecting to find.”

  “Huh.” He nods and jams his hands in his pockets. “Were you disappointed?”

  “No.” I try to sound perfectly clear. “N
o. I’m not.”

  “So no one has any idea where she is?”

  I tell him she has a history of disappearing, especially from pressured situations. “The police are still looking but I get the sense they’re not thinking of it as a crime anymore.” I don’t tell him, If they were, I wouldn’t be here right now. I’d be down at the station, undergoing my forty-eighth hour of questioning. I’d be so hungry and tired, prison would look like a hotel room. “I do have one idea about where she might be.”

  He looks at me, curious, waiting to hear my hunch. I tell him about Marianne and Roland’s secret laboratory. “Right before Linda Sue was killed, Marianne started taking Trish into her confidence, telling her about the work they were doing.” I think about her getting closer to the secret that lurked all her life in the basement, and I remember the story she told us. The plan for her final book and the ultimate threat to suburbia: slow-acting, toxic poisoning of the environment.

  “What if the reason no one’s seen Trish outside the house is because she never left?”

  “You think she might be hiding there, still inside the house?”

  I think about it—the drawings and notes on Roland’s desk, Marianne’s meeting to arm her neighbors with Taser guns, their terrible resistance to seeing Trish again. Marianne and Roland’s fears are alive. Is it possible they see danger everywhere because they’re still working on cold fusion? Finn saw the beakers of water, and Roland up late, working at night. I remember Marianne’s talk about bad timing. Does that mean they’re on the brink of another breakthrough? Does Trish recognize the danger of her parents’ work? Is she hiding down there trying to draw people’s attention to it?

  I am grateful to Leo for saying he’ll come with me. “I don’t know how we’ll get in or if they’ll let us look, but I need to try.” We walk back through the woods and the cornfield so we can approach the house from the backyard and not be seen by whoever is there now. Along the way, he tells me his reading program hasn’t been going as quickly as he’d hoped. He’s been on Sister Carrie for a while. “Good book,” he says. “Depressing but good.” I remember loving Sister Carrie, the decent woman’s slide into destitution and crime because so many stabs at love haven’t worked out. “I keep thinking, My God, if she just found the right man, she’d be okay.”