Forever Dead (9 page)

“I was cleaning out the cages after you left and found something really strange.”

My ears buzzed at the sound of her words. Martha and strange were anathema. I didn't think the word was even in her vocabulary. God, what else could happen to me today?
Let me count the ways
, I thought.

“I took all the dead insects and put them in separate jars according to their cage numbers, just as you'd asked me to do, but when I came to do the two mesh cages of larvae there weren't any.”

“No cages?”

“No. No larvae in the cages. They were completely empty. Not a single larva, none at all.”

“You mean all the cages with larvae? The ones I brought back from the canoe trip?” Something twigged in my mind.

“That's right. The ones from you know what,” she said with one of her meaningful looks, “as well as all the larvae from your succession experiments. Only the larvae were touched, and whoever it was was very, very careful. They didn't miss a single larva. My guess is they dumped the contents of each cage into a bag and then swilled out the cages.”

“Why would they do that?”

“Maybe they figured you wouldn't try to catalogue all those dead insects, that you'd just count your losses, pitch them all, and start again, that you'd never notice the larvae were missing.”

I thought for a moment. “But why would they want me to think that?”

I just might have done that too, but I needed those samples for the lab work because of the lost collection on the river. But why would they be interested in the larvae at all? Who could possibly get anything from destroying those larvae? What was so important about
the larvae that they had been stolen, and why had the rest of my insects been fumigated?

“Maybe someone's found a cure for cancer in blowfly larvae.” Martha caught my venomous glance. “Just kidding.”

“What about my pickled larvae, in the jars near the door?”

“They're all there except for the two I labelled ‘Dumoine.' They've vanished.”

“Only the stuff from the canoe trip. What about the live larvae in the other room?”

“They're still there. It was the first thing I checked.”

“Put new labels on them will you, Martha? I don't want them to go missing. They might hold the answer to this whole mess.”

“What do you mean by that?”

“I'm not sure, but whoever did this was interested in the insects I brought back from Dumoine, and some of those came from Diamond's body. Maybe there's a link: dead body, a ransacked lab, stolen insects and disks. No bookie would bet on odds that this is all coincidence. There's got to be a link among the insects, the body, and my stolen disks.”
Not to mention a probable attempt on my life
, I thought morosely. Martha opened her mouth.

“Don't say it again, Martha. I don't want to hear it. Whoever it was could have dumped formaldehyde on top of my disks just as they did with the laptop. They didn't. They stole them instead, so there's a chance they're still around.” I was angry and a little bit scared, if I had the guts to admit it, which I knew I didn't. At least not to Martha, anyway. I couldn't bear the thought of what it would do to Martha's face to know I was scared.

“But, Cordi, the cops have nothing to go on. They're not optimistic they can find out who did it. No one saw or heard anything.”

I heard myself in her words. She was usually the optimist, me the pessimist, but I couldn't afford to give credence to my pessimistic thoughts. Hearing them coming at me from Martha almost dissolved my resolve, but then I thought about what would happen to me if I didn't fight and I rallied my wits.

“I don't care what the cops say. I'm damned if I'm going to let someone screw my career without going down fighting. I've worked too bloody hard to see it slipping through my fingers.”

Martha cleared her throat and looked at me.

“Now what?” I asked, feeling like my balloon had just been pricked and I was mentally hunting around for the ragged bits of wet rubber to try and put it back together again.

“I know it's a bad time, but the editor of
Animal Behaviour
emailed asking about your revisions.”

“Oh, Jeeesus, Martha. Stall him. Tell him I'm working on some last-minute stuff. Don't let on that I've got no data! I need more time.” I pulled my hair. “I can't lose this. It's too important a publication, and if I don't publish, the team in Calgary will surely beat me to it, not to mention kissing my job goodbye. He says they've already approached him but I'm first as long as I can deliver. Damn it to bloody hell. Why is it always me?”

After Martha left I tried to compose a letter to the funding people explaining why my quarterly report would be late, asking for more time. But I couldn't concentrate. My mind kept wandering back to my ransacked lab. What was so important about the larvae and my disks? To put me off the scent? What scent? I sat, stocking feet propped on my desk, thinking about it, and then took the rest of the day off, I was so discouraged by it all. I needed to talk to Ryan. Even that was discouraging. I had to make do with my brother, ever since Luke had left.
Not that I didn't appreciate bouncing ideas off Ryan, but he had his own family and I was aware that they came first. I wanted another Luke, or did I just need another Luke to lean on? Depressing thought, because Luke had actually been a bit of a jerk and a lot of a prima donna. Surely next time I could want a companion that I didn't need? Had that ever happened? Stop thinking!

I grabbed a cold juice from among all the frozen specimens in the little fridge in my office. I needed activity to keep my thoughts at bay until I could bounce them off Ryan, before they bounced me into more and darker thoughts. I scooted out of my office, hoping to get across the Champlain Bridge to Aylmer before the federal civil servants flocked out of work and created a half-hour wait.

Usually I loved the drive past Aylmer, where the country really began and the tree-clad cliffs of the Eardley Escarpment rose above the river valley, which once had been a shallow inland sea. But my thoughts blocked out the beauty of the land and I saw it only vaguely through my self-doubts. Twenty-five minutes later on the straight two-lane highway I crested a hilltop and the Ottawa River spilled across to the horizon, and for a precious moment my thoughts deserted me as I took in the sparkling water that beckoned me. Shortly after, I turned right onto a dirt road that weaved past several houses and then through an old farm gate into the valley that had been my home off and on all my life.

At the crest of the hill I stopped the car, determined to get a grip on myself. It was my elixir after a long day's work. Spread out at my feet were rolling fields planted with corn and hay, stretching to the escarpment, which swung up over my head. The barns stood at the end of the road by the cornfields. The old stone farmhouse where I had grown up, and where Ryan and his family now lived,
was catching the late afternoon sun, rosy and warm. My little cabin lay out of sight, out behind the barns.

I wheeled my car in past the farmhouse and pulled up in front of the dairy barn. Ryan's car was parked there, although he usually parked in back near the entrance to his office. I got out as the hum of crickets, the heat of summer, the feeling of the dried earth, and the smell of manure and hay mingled in the air with my thoughts. As if they needed fertilizing, I thought sourly — there were enough of them already.

I opened the heavy wooden door and walked into the darkness of the barn down a long narrow corridor, then through a second swinging door into the barn proper. Three lines of fifteen stalls ran the length of the barn and the cows were all in and ready for milking, their impatient lowing matching the full stretch of their udders.

I caught sight of Ryan on the far side, hauling the milking equipment to a cow, the black snake-like tubes with the shiny vacuum cylinders looking like a modern-day Medusa.

“Hiya. Where's Mac?” I was amazed at how normal my voice sounded. My whole career was ready to whirl down the drain and here I was asking about Mac. I looked down the aisles for the tall, thin, rake-like figure of Macgregor with his mane of milk white hair. He'd run the farm since my parents had retired to Ottawa and France, but recently Ryan had been doing more.

Ryan had the milking stool strapped around his waist so that when he stooped to collar the teats he had something to lean against and save his knees. I watched as he pulled on the long black tubes and expertly hooked the milking unit onto the cow's udder. I'm not sure I'll ever feel comfortable with this vacuum pump stuff. I'm always afraid I'll suck off the cows' teats when I do it. Being a woman, it kind of makes my skin crawl to see those
teatcups clamped down like that. The whole thing was so different from when I was a kid and my parents had hand-milked the cows. I sometimes missed the sweet warmth of the cow against my shoulder and cheek, the pull of the teats, the spray of the milk. When I had finally learned how to do it, the milking had been mesmerizing and strangely relaxing: sitting on a wooden stool about where Ryan was now, my head leaning against the cow, eyes shut, the milk rhythmically splashing into the bucket. That gentle noise was now replaced by the hum of vacuum suction. I looked at the cows and felt sorry that none of them had ever felt a human hand-milking them.

“Where's Mac?” I asked again.

“He's got some kind of flu bug again.”

Mac had seemed less vital recently and I realized with alarm that he must be pushing seventy-five. What would we do without him? Ryan couldn't run the operation on his own. He was too often away on business, and Rose, his wife, had two preschoolers to care for. The thought left me cold, yet life is defined by death. If we lived forever, life could not be the same. Death gave it meaning, where immortality could not. Death made it leaner, meaner, infinitely more exciting, because every second was precious. God. Even eternity was weighing on me today. Where the hell did these thoughts come from?

Now that I was here with Ryan I suddenly felt tongue-tied, my thoughts everywhere but where they needed to be. Problem was I didn't know where to start. I wondered if my theory was just crazy nonsense, and I didn't want to hear Ryan tell me as much. I was so easily deflated when I was in this kind of mood. But a theory was better than the alternative — nothing — and I couldn't sit around waiting for the police: they'd as much as told me they couldn't do anything.

Ryan disconnected the tubes, disinfected the cow's teats, and moved to the next cow. After he'd hooked her up he leaned against the barn wall and grinned at me. “How's the city?” Ryan seldom had occasion to go into Ottawa. He had a lab and a darkroom behind the barn, and with a fax machine and computer he was able to conduct much of his business from home, run the farm, and have lunch with his family all at the same time. I hesitated, and Ryan looked up and saw the worried look on my face.

“What's up, Cor?”

I fiddled with the ear of the cow Ryan had been milking. It flipped its head and tried to nuzzle my fingers. “Some jerk broke into my lab and killed all my insects.”

“Oh lord.” Ryan looked at me, searching my face. He reached out for me, held me close. “I'm sorry, Cor. All that work.”

The warmth of Ryan's body made me want to melt into it and forget all my troubles. Hugs had that effect on me. Horrified, I felt tears stinging my eyes and pulled away, turning my back to Ryan. All I needed now was to cry like a blithering idiot.

“Why would anybody want to do that?” said Ryan, jumping into the awkward silence I had created. “I can understand it if you worked with cute cuddly things and some bozos thought you were mistreating them, but insects? Who would ever dream of championing insects?”

I struggled to get my voice out of the bubbly crack-ly stage that preceded full-fledged tears and said nothing.

“Can you salvage any of your experiments?” Ever the practical Ryan.

“That wasn't the worst of it, Ryan.” I paused and turned to him. “They took all my backup disks and drenched the computer in formaldehyde, wiping out all my data — maybe three years of work, four papers — all
my backups. The computer tech people aren't holding out much hope and neither are the cops. Whoever it was did a good job, wore gloves and all those spy-type things.”

Ryan's jaw sank down around his knees. “But you have paper backup?” He looked down at my face. “Oh no, Cordi,” he whispered. “Tell me it isn't so.”

I looked down at my feet.

“No paper backup for some of my raw data,” I said bitterly, “and the disks were in the lab too.”

“Dear God, Cordi. What are you going to do?”

I could have hugged him for not reminding me how many times he had told me about making sure I had backup. Even so, I couldn't still the urge to defend myself.

“I thought I had it all organized. The backup disks were in my office far away from the lab in case of any accident. I guess I should have brought a copy home.”

“What happened?”

“When I was backing up last week — you know how slow it can be — I asked Greg if he'd turn off the computer, put away the disks in my office, and lock up when it was finished. Unfortunately my office was locked and he didn't have my key, so he took the disks back up to the lab and put them in the drawer under the computer, meaning to return them to my office this week. He forgot, and I never noticed.”

“Can you salvage anything?”

“Yeah, but I've lost most of my raw data. And I need it to do revisions for
Animal Behaviour
. They may give up on me. The Dean won't be pleased either. He's under pressure to have his staff perform, and having me basically lose maybe a year's work puts me behind the line for publishing. I can't understand why all this happened in the first place.”

Ryan scrunched up his brow, the worry lines tickling his eyes.