Fever Dream (33 page)

Judson Esterhazy spent the next fifteen minutes leaning against the fire tower, smoking his pipe and thinking. Finally he
reamed it out and knocked the dottle onto the iron strut. Then he stuck the pipe back into his pocket, took one last look
at the light dying away in the west, then turned and made his way down the trail toward the road on the other side of the
hill.

Baton Rouge

E
XACTLY HOW MUCH TIME HAD PASSED—FIVE
hours or fifty—Laura Hayward wasn’t sure. The slow succession of minutes blended with a strange fugue of loudspeaker announcements,
rapid hushed voices, the bleating of instrumentation. At times, Pendergast was at her side. Other times she would find him
gone. At first she willed the time to pass as quickly as possible. Then—as the wait grew longer—she only wanted time to slow
down. Because the longer Vincent D’Agosta lay on that surgical table, she knew, the more his chances of survival dwindled.

Then—quite abruptly—the surgeon was standing before them. His scrub blues were creased and wrinkled, and his face looked pale
and drawn. Behind him stood Father Bell.

At the sight of the priest, Hayward’s heart gave a dreadful lurch. She had known this moment would come. And yet—now that
it was here—she did not think that she could bear it.
Oh, no. Oh, no, no, no
… She felt Pendergast take her hand.

The surgeon cleared his throat. “I’ve come to let you know the operation was successful. We closed forty-five minutes ago
and we’ve been monitoring closely since. The signs are promising.”

“I’ll take you to see him now,” said Father Bell.

“Only for a moment,” the surgeon added. “He’s barely conscious and very weak.”

For a moment, Hayward sat motionless, stunned, trying to take it in. Pendergast was speaking but she couldn’t understand the
words. Then she felt herself being raised—the FBI agent on one side, the priest on the other—and she was walking down the
corridor. They turned left, then right, past closed doors and halls full of stretchers and empty wheelchairs. Through an open
doorway they came to a small area enclosed by movable privacy screens. A nurse pulled one of the screens away and there was
Vinnie. A dozen machines were attached to him, and his eyes were closed. Tubes snaked beneath the sheets: one containing plasma,
another saline. Despite D’Agosta’s hefty build, he looked fragile, papery almost.

She caught her breath. As she did so, his eyes fluttered open; closed; then opened again. He looked up at them silently in
turn, his eyes at last looking into hers.

As Hayward stared down at him, she felt the last vestiges of her self-control—that commanding presence of mind she so prided
herself on—crumble and fall away. Hot tears coursed down her cheeks.

“Oh,
Vinnie
,” she sobbed.

D’Agosta’s own eyes filled. And then he slowly closed them.

Pendergast put a steadying arm around her, and for a moment she turned her face to the fabric of his shirt, yielding to the
emotion, letting sobs rack her frame. Only now—when she saw Vinnie alive—did she realize just how close she had come to losing
him.

“I’m afraid you’ll need to leave now,” the surgeon said in a low voice.

She straightened up, dried her eyes, and took a long, shuddering, cleansing breath.

“He’s not out of the woods yet. As it is, his heart has been severely damaged by the trauma. He’s going to need an aortic
valve replacement at the earliest opportunity.”

Hayward nodded. She detached herself from Pendergast’s arm, took one more look down at D’Agosta, then turned away.

“Laura,” she heard him croak.

She glanced back. He was still lying there on the bed, eyes closed. Had it been her imagination?

Then he moved faintly and his eyes fluttered open again. His jaw worked but no sound came.

She stepped forward and bent over the bed.

“Make my work here count,” he said in a voice that was barely a whisper.

Penumbra Plantation

A
FIRE HAD BEEN KINDLED IN THE GREAT
fireplace of the library, and Hayward watched the old manservant, Maurice, serving after-dinner coffee. He threaded his way
between the furniture, an ancient figure with a curiously blank expression on his lined face. She noticed that he had been
careful not to stare at the bruise on Pendergast’s jaw. Perhaps, Hayward mused, over the years the old fellow had grown used
to seeing his employer a little dinged up.

The mansion and grounds were exactly as she pictured they would be: ancient oaks draped with Spanish moss, white columned
portico, faded antebellum furnishings. There was even an old family ghost, the ancient manservant had assured her, who haunted
the nearby swamps—another predictable cliché. The only surprise, in fact, was Penumbra’s general state of external disrepair.
This was a little odd—Pendergast, she assumed, had plenty of money. She put these musings aside, telling herself she was completely
uninterested in Pendergast and his family.

Before leaving the hospital the night before, Pendergast had asked her—in some detail—about her visit with Constance Greene.
Following that, he offered her lodging at Penumbra. Hayward had refused, opting instead to stay at a hotel near the medical
center.
But another visit to D’Agosta the following morning had served to underline what the surgeon told her: his recovery
would be slow and long. She could take time off from the job—that wasn’t a problem, she’d accrued too much vacation time as
it was—but the idea of cooling her heels in a depressing hotel room for days on end was unendurable. Especially because, at
Pendergast’s insistence, Vinnie was going to be moved to a secure location just as soon as medically possible, and—for the
sake of security—she would be forbidden to visit. That morning, in a brief interlude of consciousness, Vinnie had once again
implored her to pick up the case where he’d left off—to help see it through to the bitter end.

And so, when Pendergast sent his car round to pick her up after lunch, she’d checked out of the hotel and accepted his invitation
to stay at Penumbra. She hadn’t agreed to help, but she’d decided to hear the details. Some of it she knew already from Vinnie’s
phone calls. It had sounded like a typical Pendergast investigation, all hunches and blind alleys and conflicting evidence,
strung together by highly questionable police work.

But back at Penumbra, as Pendergast had explained the case—starting at dinner, and then continuing over coffee—Hayward realized
that the bizarre story had an internal logic. Pendergast explained his late wife’s obsession with Audubon; how they had traced
her interest in the Carolina Parakeet, the Black Frame, the lost parrot, and the strange fate of the Doane family. He read
her passages from the Doane girl’s diary: a chilling descent into madness. He described their encounter with Blast, another
seeker of the Black Frame, himself recently murdered—as had been Helen Pendergast’s former employer at Doctors With Wings,
Morris Blackletter. And finally, he explained the series of deductions and discoveries that led to the unearthing of the Black
Frame itself.

When Pendergast at last fell silent, Hayward leaned back in her chair, sipping her coffee, running over the bizarre information
in her mind, looking for threads, logical connections, and finding precious little. A great deal more work would be necessary
to fill in the blanks.

She glanced over at the painting known as the Black Frame. It was lit indirectly by the firelight, but she could nevertheless
make out details: the woman on the bed, the stark room, the cold white nakedness of her body. Disturbing, to put it mildly.

She looked back at Pendergast, now attired in his signature black suit. “So you believe your wife was interested in Audubon’s
illness. An illness that somehow transformed him into a creative genius.”

“Through some unknown neurological effect, yes. To someone with her interests, this would have been a very valuable pharmacological
discovery.”

“And all she wanted with the painting was confirmation for this theory.”

Pendergast nodded. “That painting is the link between Audubon’s early, indifferent work and his later brilliance. It’s proof
of the transition he underwent. But that doesn’t quite get to the central mystery in this case: the birds.”

Hayward frowned. “The birds?”

“The Carolina Parakeets. The Doane parrot.”

Hayward herself had been puzzling over the connection to Audubon’s illness, to no avail. “And?”

Pendergast sipped his coffee. “I believe we’re dealing with a strain of avian flu.”

“Avian flu? You mean, bird flu?”

“That, I believe, is the disease that laid Audubon low, that nearly killed him, and that was responsible for his creative
flowering. His symptoms—high fever, headache, delirium, cough—are all consistent with flu. A flu he no doubt caught dissecting
a Carolina Parakeet.”

“Slow down. How do you know all this?”

In reply, Pendergast reached for a worn, leather-bound book. “This is the diary of my great-great-grandfather Boethius Pendergast.
He befriended Audubon during the painter’s younger days.” Opening the journal to a page marked with a silken strand, he found
the passage he was looking for and began to read aloud:

Aug. 21st. J. J. A. spent the evening with us again. He had amused himself throughout the afternoon in the dissection of two
Carolina Parakeets—a curiously colored but otherwise unremarkable species. He then stuffed and mounted them on bits of cypress
wood. We dined well and afterward took a turn around the park. He took leave of us around half past ten. Next week he plans
to make a journey upriver, where he professes to have business prospects.

Pendergast closed the journal. “Audubon never made that journey upriver. Because within a week he developed the symptoms that
would eventually land him in the Meuse St. Claire sanatorium.”

Hayward nodded at the journal. “You think your wife saw that passage?”

“I’m sure of it. Why else would she have stolen those specimens of Carolina Parakeet—the very ones Audubon dissected? She
wanted to test them for avian flu.” He paused. “And do
more
than simply test them. She hoped to extract from them a live sample of virus. Vincent told me all that remained of the parrots
my wife stole were a few feathers. I’ll head over to Oakley Plantation in the morning, retrieve those remaining feathers—carefully—and
have them tested to confirm my suspicions.”

“But all that still doesn’t explain how those parakeets are linked to the Doane family.”

“It’s quite simple. The Doanes were sickened by the same disease that struck Audubon.”

“What makes you say that?”

“There are simply too many similarities, Captain, for anything else to make sense. The sudden flowering of creative brilliance.
Followed by mental dissolution. Too many similarities—and Helen knew it.
That’s
why she went to get the bird from them.”

“But when she took the bird, the family was still healthy. They didn’t have the flu.”

“One of the diaries in the Doane house records—in passing—the family coming down with the flu shortly after the bird arrived.”

“Oh, my God.”

“And then, rather quickly, they manifested signs of creative brilliance.” He paused again. “Helen went there to get the bird
away from the Doanes—I’m sure of that. To keep it from spreading the disease further, perhaps. And to test it, of course,
to confirm her suspicions. Note what Karen Doane wrote in her diary about the day Helen took the bird. She wore leather gloves,
and she stuffed the bird and its cage into a garbage bag. Why? Initially, I assumed the bag was simply for concealment. But
it was to keep herself and her car from contamination.”

“And the leather gloves?”

“Worn no doubt to conceal a pair of medical gloves beneath.
Helen was trying to remove a viral vector from the human population.
No doubt the bird, cage, and bag were all incinerated—after she’d taken the necessary samples, of course.”