Bloodstream (25 page)

She stood up and placed her hands on his shoulders. They were tense, all his muscles knotted with the effort not to cry. We are so much alike, she realized, both of us constantly fighting to rein in our emotions, to stay in control. Peter had been the exuberant member of

the family, the one who screamed with delight on roller coasters and roared with laughter in movie theaters. The one who sang in the shower and set off smoke alarms with his cooking. The one who had never hesitated to say “I love you.”

How sad you would be to see us now, Peter. Afraid to reach out to each other. Still mourning, still crippled &y your death.

“I miss him too,” she whispered. She let her arms slip around her son and she rested her cheek in his hair, inhaling the boy-smell she loved so much. “1 miss him too.”

Downstairs, the doorbell rang.

Not now. Not now.

She held on, ignoring the sound, shutting out everything but the warmth of her son in her arms.

“Mom,” said Noah, shrugging her off. “Mom, someone’s at the door.” Reluctantly she released her hold on him and straightened. The moment, the opportunity, had passed, and she was staring once again at his rigid shoulders.

She went downstairs, angry at this new intrusion, at yet another demand tugging her away from her son. She opened the front door to find Lincoln standing in the bitterly cold wind, his gloved hand poised to ring the bell again. He had never stopped in at her house before, and she was both surprised and puzzled by his visit.

“I have to talk to you,” he said. “Can I come in?”

She had not yet lit a fire in the front parlor, and the room was cold and depressingly dark. Quickly she turned on all the lamps, but light was poor compensation for the chill.

“After you left my office,” he said, “I got to thinking about what you’d said. That there’s a pattern to the violence in this town. That there’s some sort of connection between 1946 and this year.” He reached in his jacket and took out the sheaf of photocopied news articles she’d left him. “Guess what? The answer was staring right at us?’

“What answer?”

“Look at the first page. The October issue, 1946.”

“I’ve already read that article.”

“No, not the story about the murder. The article at the bottom. You probably didn’t notice it.”

She smoothed the page on her lap. The article he’d referred to was partly cut off; only the top half had been included in the photocopy.

The headline read: REPAIRS ON LOCUST RIVER BRIDGE COMPLETED.

“I don’t know what you’re getting at,” she said.

“We had to repair that same bridge this year. Remember?”

“Yes.”

“So
why
did we have to repair it?”

“Because it was broken?”

He ran his hand through his hair in frustration. “Geez, Claire. Think about it! Why’d the bridge need repairs? Because it got washed away We had record rainfall this past spring, and it flooded the Locust River, washed out two homes, tore out a whole series of footbridges. I called the U.S. Geological Survey to confirm it. This year was the heaviest rainfall we’ve had
in fifty-two years.”

She looked up, suddenly registering what he was trying to tell her. “Then the last time the rainfall was this heavy.

“Was the spring of 1946.”

She sat back, stunned by the coincidence. “Rainfall,” she murmured. “Moist soil. Bacteria. Fungi.

“Mushrooms are fungi. What about those blue ones?”

She shook her head. “Max had their identity confirmed. They’re not very toxic. But heavy rains would encourage the growth of other fungi. In fact, it’s a fungus that caused mass occurrences of St. Vitus’ dance.”

“Is that a seizure?”

“The medical term for St. Vitus’ dance is
chorea.
It’s a writhing, dancelike movement of the limbs. Occasionally, there’ll be reports of mass occurrences. It may even have inspired the witchcraft accusations in Salem.”

“A medical condition?”

“Yes. After a cold, wet spring, rye crops can be infected by this fungus. People eat the rye, and they develop chorea.”

“Could we be dealing with a form of St. Vitus’ dance?”

“No, I’m just saying there are examples throughout history of human diseases linked to climate. Everything in nature is intimately bound together. We may
think
we control our environment, but we’re affected by so many organisms we can’t see.” She paused, thinking

about Scotty Braxton’s negative cultures. So far nothing had grown out from either his blood or spinal fluid. Could there be a locus of infection she had missed? An organism so unusual, so unexpected, the lab would have discounted it as error?

“There must be a common factor among these children,” she said. “Exposure to the same contaminated food, for instance. All we have is this apparent association between rainfall and violence. It could be just coincidence.”

He sat in silence for a moment. She had often studied his face, admiring the strength she saw there, the calm self-confidence. Today she saw the intelligence in his eyes. He had taken two completely disparate bits of information and had recognized a pattern that she had not even noticed.

“Then what we need to find,” he said, “is the common factor.”

She nodded. “Could you get me into the Maine Youth Center? So I can talk to Taylor?”

“That could be a problem. You know Paul Darnell still blames you?’

“But Taylor’s not the only child affected. Paul can’t blame me for everything else that’s gone wrong in this town.”

“Not now, he can’t.” Lincoln rose to his feet. “We need answers before the town meeting. I’ll get you in to see the boy, Claire. One way or another.”

Standing at the parlor window, she watched him walk down the icy driveway to his truck. He moved with the balanced stride of a man who’d grown up in this unforgiving climate, each step planted squarely, the boot sole stamped down to catch the ice. He reached the truck, opened the door, and for some reason glanced back at her house.

Just for an instant, their gazes met.

And she thought, with a strange sense of wonder,
How long have I been attracted to him? When did it start? I can’t remember.
Now it was one more complication in her life.

As he drove away, she remained at the window, staring at a landscape bled of all color. Snow and ice and bare trees, all of it fading to black.

Upstairs, Noah’s music had started again.

She turned from the window and flicked off the parlor lamp. That’s when she suddenly remembered the promise she’d made to Warren Emerson, and she groaned.

The cat.

Night had fallen by the time she drove up the lower slope of Beech Hill and pulled into Emerson’s front yard. She parked next to the woodpile, a perfectly circular tower of stacked logs. She thought of the many hours it must have taken him to arrange his wood with such precision, each log placed with the same care one usually gave to constructing a stone wall. And then to pull it down again, bit by bit, as winter consumed his annual work of art.

She turned off her engine and looked up at the old farmhouse. No lights were on inside. She used a flashlight to guide herself up the icy front steps to the porch. Everything seemed to sag and she had the strange illusion that she was tilting sideways, sliding toward the edge, toward oblivion. Warren had told her the door would be unlocked, and it was. She stepped inside and turned on the lights.

The kitchen sprang into view with its worn linoleum and chipped appliances. A small gray cat stared up at her from the floor. They had startled each other, she and the cat, and for a few seconds they both froze.

Then the cat shot out of the room and vanished somewhere into the house.

“Here, kitty kitty! You want your dinner, don’t you? Mona?”

She had planned to take Mona to a kennel for boarding. Warren Emerson had already been transferred to Eastern Maine Medical Center for his craniotomy, and would remain hospitalized for at least a week. Claire didn’t relish the thought of driving here every day just to feed a cat. But it appeared the cat had different ideas.

Her frustration mounted as she went from room to room in search of the uncooperative Mona, turning on lights as she went. Like so many other farmhouses of its era, this one had been built to house a large family, and it consisted of many small rooms, made even more claustrophobic by the clutter. She saw piles of old newspapers and magazines, bundled grocery sacks, crates filled with empty bottles. In

the hallway she had to turn sideways to navigate a narrow tunnel between stacked books. Such hoarding was usually a sign of mental illness, but Warren had organized his clutter in a logical fashion, the books segregated from the magazines, the brown paper bags all folded and bound together with twine. Perhaps this was merely Yankee frugality carried to an extreme.

It provided plenty of cover for a fugitive cat.

She’d made a complete circuit of the downstairs without spotting Mona. The cat must be hiding in one of the upstairs rooms.

She started up the steps, then halted, her hands suddenly sweating.
Deja vu,
she thought. I have lived this before. A strange house, a strange staircase. Something terrible waiting for me in the attic
.

But this was not Scotty Braxton’s house, and the only thing lurking upstairs was a frightened animal.

She forced herself to continue climbing as she called out, “Here, kitty!” if only to prop up her faltering courage. There were four doors on the second floor, but only one was open. If the cat had fled upstairs, she had to be in that room.

Claire stepped through the doorway and turned on the light.

Her gaze was drawn at once to the black and white photographs— dozens of them hanging on the wall or propped up on the dresser and nightstand. A gallery of Warren Emerson’s memories. She crossed the room and stared at three faces smiling back at her from one of the photos, a middle-aged couple with a young boy. The woman was round-faced and plain, her hat tilted at a comically drunken pitch. The man beside her seemed to be sharing in the joke; his eyes were bright with laughter. They each rested one hand on the shoulders of the boy standing between them, physically claiming him as their own, their shared possession.

And the boy with the cowlick and the missing front teeth—this must be young Warren, basking in the glow of his parents’ attention.

Her gaze moved to the other photographs and she saw the same faces again and again, different seasons, different places. Here a shot of the mother proudly holding up a pie. There a shot of father and son on a riverbank with their fishing poles. Finally, a school photo of a young girl, apparently Warren’s sweetheart, for at the bottom someone had

drawn in a heart containing the words
Warren and Iris forever.
Through tears, Claire stared at the nightstand, at a glass of water resting there, half full. At the bed, where gray hairs had been shed on the pillow. Warren’s bed.

Every morning he would wake up alone in this room, to the sight of his parents’ photos. And every night, the last image he’d register was of their faces, smiling at him.

She was crying now, for the child he once was. A lonely little boy trapped in an old man’s body.

She went back downstairs to the kitchen.

There was no sense chasing after a cat that didn’t want to be captured. She would simply leave food in the dish, and come back another time. Opening the pantry door, she found herself staring at dozens of cans of cat food stacked on the shelves. There was scarcely anything in the kitchen for a man to eat, but pampered Mona was certainly well-supplied.

Today she’ll be expecting tuna.

Tuna it would be. She emptied the can into the cat dish and placed it on the floor next to the bowl of water. She filled another bowl with dried cat food, enough to last several days. She cleaned out the litter-box. Then she turned off the lights and walked out.

Sitting in her car, she glanced one last time at the house. For most of his life, Warren Emerson had lived within those walls, without human companionship, without love. He would probably die in that house alone, with only a cat to witness his exit.

She wiped the tears from her eyes. Then she turned the car around and drove down the dark road for home.

That night Lincoln called her.

“I spoke to Wanda Darnell,” he said. “I told her there may be a biological reason for her son’s actions. That other children in town have been affected, and we’re trying to track down the cause.”

“How did she react?”

“I think she’s relieved. It means there’s something external to blame. Not the family. Not her.”

“I understand that perfectly”

“She’s given permission for you to interview her son.”

“When?”

“Tomorrow. At the Maine Youth Center.”

A long row of beds lined the wall of the silent dormitory room. The morning sun shone in through windows above, one bright square of light spilling down on the boy’s thin shoulders. He sat on the bed with his legs tucked up against his chest. His head was bowed. This was not the same boy she had seen four weeks ago, cursing and thrashing. This was a child who’d been beaten down, hopes and dreams trampled, only his physical shell remaining.

He did not look up as Claire approached, her footsteps echoing on the worn planks. She stopped beside his bed. “Hello, Taylor. Do you feel like talking to me?”

The boy lifted one shoulder, barely a shrug, but at least it was the semblance of an invitation.

She reached for a chair, her gaze falling briefly on the small pine desk next to his bed. It was a badly abused piece of furniture, its surface gouged with four-letter words and the initials of countless young residents. She wondered if Taylor had already carved his mark into this permanent record of despair.

She slid the chair to his bed and sat down. “Whatever we talk about today, Taylor, is just between us, okay?” He gave a shrug, as if it hardly mattered. “Tell me about what happened, that day in school. Why did you do it?”

He turned his cheek against his knees, as though suddenly too exhausted to hold up his head. “I don’t know why”