Bloodstream (20 page)

“If you’re hunting for trouble,” he said, “best check under your own roof.”

“What?”

He gave her an ugly smile, then raised his ax and brought it down, hard, on a log of firewood.

Claire was in her office later that afternoon when the call came. She heard the phone ringing in the outer office, and then Vera appeared in the doorway.

“She wants to talk to you. She says you were over at her house today.”

“Who’s caffing?”

“Amelia Reid.”

At once Claire picked up her extension. “This is Dr. Effiot.”

Amelia’s voice was muffled. “My brother Eddie—he asked me to call you. He’s afraid to do it himself.”

“And what does Eddie want to tell me?”

“He wants you to know—” There was a pause, as though the girl had stopped to listen. Then her voice came back on, so soft it was almost inaudible. “He said to tell you about the mushrooms.”

“What mushrooms?”

“They were all eating them. Taylor and Scotty and my brothers. The little blue mushrooms, in the woods.”

Lincoln Kelly stepped out of his truck and his boot landed on a twig, the snap of dead wood echoing like gunshot across the still lake. It was late afternoon, the sky leaden with rain clouds, the water flat as black glass. “A little late in the year to go hunting for mushrooms, Claire,” he said dryly.

“But a-hunting we will go.” She reached into the back of her pickup and grabbed two leaf rakes, one of which she handed to Lincoln. He took it with obvious reluctance. “They’re supposed to be a hundred yards upstream from the Boulders,” she said. “They’re growing under some oak trees. Little blue mushrooms with narrow stalks.”

She turned to face the woods. They were not at all inviting, the trees bare and absolutely still, the gloom thickening beneath them. She had not wanted to come out here this late in the day, but a storm was predicted. Already a half inch of rain had fallen, and with the temperature expected to plummet tonight, by tomorrow everything would be covered with snow. This was their last chance to comb bare ground.

“This could be the common factor, Lincoln. A natural toxin from plants growing right in these woods.”

“And the kids were eating these mushrooms?”

“They made it some sort of ritual. Eat a mushroom, prove you’re a man.”

They walked along the riverbed, hiking through ankle-deep leaves and thickets of wild raspberry canes. Twigs littered the forest floor, and every step made a sharp explosion of sound. A walk in the woods in late fall is not a silent experience.

The forest opened to a small clearing, where the oak trees had grown to towering heights.

“I think this is the place,” she said.

They began to rake aside the leaves. They worked with quiet urgency as sleet fell, stinging pellets of it mixed with rain, coating everything with a glaze of ice. They uncovered toadstools and white fairy rings and brilliant orange fungi.

It was Lincoln who found the blue one. He spotted the tiny nubbin poking up from a crevice formed by two tree roots. He brushed away the oak leaves and uncovered the cap. Darkness was already falling, and the mushroom’s color was apparent only under the direct beam of his flashlight. They crouched side by side, battered by rain and sleet, both of them too chilled and miserable to feel much sense of triumph as Claire slipped the specimen into a Ziploc bag.

“There’s a wetlands biologist up the road,” she said. “Maybe he’ll know what it is.”

In silence they sloshed back through the mud and emerged from the woods. On the bank of Locust Lake, they both halted in surprise. Half the shoreline was almost completely dark. Where the lights of houses should have glowed, there was only the occasional glimmer of candlelight through a window.

“It’s a bad night to lose power,” said Lincoln. “Temperature’s going to drop into the twenties.”

‘Looks like my end of the lake still has electricity,” she noted with relief.

‘Well, keep the firewood handy. There’s probably ice building up on the lines. You could lose yours next.”

She threw the rakes in the back of her truck, and was circling around to the door when something in the lake caught her eye. It was only a faint glimmer, and she might have missed it had it not been for the contrasting blackness of the Boulders jutting into the water.

“Lincoln,” she said.
“Lincoln!”

He turned from his cruiser. “What?”

“Look at the lake.” Slowly she walked toward the small tongue of water lapping at the mud.

He followed her.

At first he couldn’t seem to comprehend what he was seeing. It was only a vague shimmer, like moonlight dancing on the surface. But there was no moon out tonight, and the streak of light wavering on the water was a phosphorescent green. They climbed onto one of the rocks and looked across the water. In wonder, they watched the streak undulate like a snake on the surface, its coils a swirl of bright emerald. Not a purposeful movement, but a lazy drifting, its form contracting, then expanding.

Suddenly the clatter of sleet intensified, and needles of ice stippled the lake.

The phosphorescent coils shattered into a thousand bright fragments and disintegrated.

For a long time, neither Claire nor Lincoln spoke. Then he whispered, “What the hell was that?”

“You’ve never seen it before?”

“I’ve lived here all my life, Claire. I’ve never seen anything like it.”

The water was dark, now. Invisible. “I have,” she said.

11

"I‘m not an expert on mushrooms,” said Max Tutwiler. “But I might recognize a toxic variety if I saw one.”

Claire took the mushroom out of the Ziploc bag and handed it to him. “Can you tell us what this is?”

He slipped on his spectacles, and by the light of a kerosene lamp, studied the specimen. He turned it over, examining every detail of the delicate stalk, the blue-green cap.

Sleet
tick-ticked
against the cottage windows and wind moaned in the chimney. The power had gone out an hour before, and Max’s cottage was getting colder by the minute. The rising storm seemed to make Lincoln restless. Claire could hear him moving around the room, fussing with the cold woodstove, tightening the window latches. The ingrained habits of a man who has known hard winters. He lit newspapers and kindling in the stove and threw in a log, but the wood was green, and produced more smoke than heat.

Max did not look well. He sat clutching a blanket, a box of Kleenex by his chair. A shivering testament to the miseries of a winter flu and a cottage without heat.

At last he looked up with rheumy eyes. “Where did you find this mushroom?”

“Upstream from the Boulders.”

“Which boulders?”

“That’s the name for the place—the Boulders. It’s a hangout for the local kids. They found dozens of those mushrooms this summer. It’s the first year they’ve noticed them. But then, it’s been a strange year.”

“How so?” asked Max.

“We had all those floods last spring. And then the hottest summer on record.”

Max nodded soberly. “Global warming. The signs are everywhere.”

Lincoln glanced at the window, where needles of sleet tapped at the glass, and laughed. “Not tonight.”

“You have to look at the big picture,” said Max. “Weather patterns changing all over the world. Catastrophic droughts in Africa. Floods in the Midwest. Unusual growing conditions lead to unusual things growing.”

“Like blue mushrooms,” said Claire.

“Or eight-legged amphibians.” He pointed to the bookshelf, where his specimen jars were displayed. There were eight jars now, each containing a freak of nature.

Lincoln picked up one of the jars and stared at a two-headed salamander. “Jesus. You found this in our lake?”

“In one of the vernal ponds.”

“And you think this is because of global warming?”

“I don’t know what’s causing it. Or which species will be affected next.” Max refocused his bleary eyes on the mushroom. “It’s not surprising that plant life would be affected.” He turned the mushroom over and gave it a sniff. “This damn cold has blocked up my nose. But I think I can smell it.”

“What?”

“The scent of anise.” He held it out to her.

“I smell it too. What does it mean?”

He rose and pulled down
An illustrated Textbook of Mycology
from the bookshelf. “This species grows in both hardwood and coniferous forests, from midsummer through fall.” He opened the book to a

color plate.
“Clitocybe odora.
The anise funnel cap. It contains a small amount of muscarine, that’s all.”

“Is that our toxin, then?” asked Lincoln.

Claire sank back in her chair and gave a sigh of disappointment. “No, it’s not. Muscarine causes mostly gastrointestinal or cardiac symptoms. Not violent behavior.”

Max returned the mushroom to the Ziploc bag. “Sometimes,” he said, “there is no explanation for violence. And that’s the frightening thing about it. How unexpected it can be. How often it happens without rhyme or reason.”

Wind rattled the door. Outside, the sleet had turned to snow, and it tumbled past the window in a thick whirl of white. The wood stove gave off only the barest suggestion of heat. Lincoln crouched down to check the fire.

It had gone out.

“Lincoln and I saw something tonight. On the lake,” said Claire. “It was almost like an hallucination.”

She and Max sat facing the hearth in Claire’s parlor, their backs turned against the shadows. She had coaxed him out of his unheated cottage, had offered him a bed in her guest room, and now that dinner was over, they sat before the fire and took turns pouring from a bottle of brandy. Flames hissed brightly around a log, but for all that light, all that combustion, precious little heat seemed to penetrate the room’s chill. Outside, snowflakes skittered against the window and stray branches of forsythia, bone bare, clawed at the glass.

“What did you see in the lake?” he asked.

“It was floating on the surface of the water, near the Boulders. This swirl of green light, just drifting by. Not solid, but liquid. Changing shape, like a slick of oil.” She took a sip of brandy and stared at the fire. “Then the sleet began to fall, churning the water. And the green light, it just disintegrated.” She looked at him. “It sounds crazy, doesn’t it?”

“It could be a chemical spill. Fluorescent paint in the lake, for instance. Or it could be a biological phenomenon.”

“Biological?”

He pressed his hand to his forehead, as though to ease a headache beginning to build there. “There are bioluminescent strains of algae. And certain bacteria glow in the dark. There’s one species that forms a symbiotic relationship with luminescent squid. The squid attracts mates by flashing a light organ powered by glowing bacteria.”

Bacteria, she thought. A floating mass of them.

“Scotty Braxton’s pillow was stained with a luminescent substance,” she said. “At first I thought he’d been using some sort of hobby paint. Now I wonder if it was bacterial.”

“Have you cultured it?”

“I cultured his nasal discharge. I asked the lab to identify every organism that grows out, so it will take time to get the results. What have you found in the lake water?”

“None of the cultures are back yet, but maybe I should take a few more samples before I pack up and leave.”

“When are you leaving?”

“I rented the cottage through the end of this month. But with the weather turning so cold, I might as well cut it short and go back to Boston. To central heating. I have enough data already. Samples from a dozen different Maine lakes.” He looked at the window, at the snow falling outside, thick as a curtain. “I leave this place to hardier souls like you.”

The flames were dying. She stood up, took a birch log from the pile, and threw it onto the fire. The papery bark caught instantly, snapping and sparkling. She watched it for a moment, savoring the heat, feeling it flush her cheeks. “I’m not such a hardy soul,” she said softly. “I’m not sure I belong here, either.”

He poured more brandy into his glass. “There’s a lot about this place that takes getting used to. The isolation. The people. They’re not easy to get to know. In the month I’ve been here, you’re the only one who’s invited me to dinner.”

She sat down and regarded him with a new measure of sympathy. She recalled her own introduction to Tranquility. After eight months, how many people here did she really know? She’d been warned it would be this way, that the locals were wary of outsiders. People from away drift to Maine like loose bits of fluff, linger for a season or two,

and then scatter to the four winds. They have no roots here, no memories. No permanence. Mainers know this, and they greet each new resident with suspicion. They wonder what has driven this stranger into their midst, what secrets lie hidden in some past life. They wonder if the stranger has somehow carried with him the very contagion he is trying to escape. Lives that fall apart in one city often fall apart yet again in another.

Mainers can see the progression. First the new house, enthusiastically purchased, the garden with freshly tamped-down daffodil beds, the snow boots and L.L. Bean jackets. A winter or two goes by. The daffodils bloom, fade, bloom untended. The heating bill astounds. The storm windows linger months past thaw. The stranger begins to shuffle pale-faced around town, to talk longingly of Florida, to recall beaches he has lolled upon, and to dream of towns that have neither mud season nor snowplows. And the house, so lovingly restored, soon collects one more decoration: a For Sale sign.

People from away have no permanence. Even she was not sure she would stay here.

“Why did you want to move here, then?” he asked.

She settled back in her chair and watched the flames engulf the birch log. “I didn’t move here because of me. It was because of Noah.” She looked up toward the second floor, toward her son’s bedroom. It was silent upstairs, just as Noah had been silent all evening. At dinner he had scarcely said a word to their guest. And afterwards, he had gone straight to his room and shut the door.

“He’s a handsome boy” said Max.

“His father was very good-looking.”