Uh-oh, Jack thought. Do I sense another conspiracy theory in the making?
"All right," he said. "I'll bite: What's that supposed to mean?"
Canfield shrugged. 'That's the question Melanie has spent her life trying to answer. But just a couple of weeks ago she told me that with Professor Roma's help, she was getting close…and that she soon might have the key to her Grand Unification Theory."
Back to Melanie's theory again. All roads seemed to lead to that particular Rome.
"I'd love to hear this theory," Jack said.
"You and me both. Believe me, if a single event has shaped your life—or misshaped your life—you want to. know what it is."
"How exactly did it misshape Melanie?" Jack said.
"Sorry," Canfield said, shaking his head. "Better ask Lew. Good talking to you."
But I can't ask Lew, Jack thought. He's on his way out to Shoreham.
And then it occurred to him that the secret of Melanie Ehler's whereabouts—as well as her mysterious deformity—might not be here with the SESOUP loonies, but back in her home town. In Monroe.
Canfield had backed up his wheelchair and started to roll away.
"One more thing," Jack said. "What's your angle here?"
Canfield stopped and looked back. "Angle?"
"Yeah. UFOs? Satan and the End Days? The New World Order? The International Cabal of Bankers? The Cthulhu cult? Which is your baby?"
"Haven't you been listening?" Canfield said, then rolled away.
He knows something, Jack thought as he watched him go. The way he dodges the important questions—oh,yeah, he's definitely involved.
Jack looked across the common area and saw Evelyn step out of the hotel's business office and head for the elevators in the company of two suits with little brass name tags on their lapels. On their way to Olive's room, no doubt. Which meant the hotel would be crawling with blue uniforms in about ten minutes.
Maybe now was a good time to take another look around the missing lady's ancestral home.
12
Jack retrieved his rental car from the garage and backtracked out to the Long Island Gold Coast. He didn't have a map and wasn't sure of Monroe's exact location, but remembered it was somewhere at the end of Glen Cove Road. Along the way he spotted a road sign pointing him in the right direction. After that, he had no problem finding his way back to Melanie's family home. He also found himself glancing repeatedly in his rearview mirror, looking for a black sedan. He had a vague feeling that he was being watched, and he scrutinized every black car he spied along the way.
Melanie's old home was easily identified by the big oak and its oversize lot. Jack parked in the driveway this time, but went to the back door. The knob was a Yale; so was the dead bolt. Jack was good with Yales. Took him thirty seconds on the knob, less than a minute on the dead bolt, and he was in.
He wandered through the house again, rechecking all the photos. He began to see a pattern that had escaped him completely on his first pass: in not one photo was Melanie's left hand visible. In solo shots it was always behind her back; when with her mother or father she was always positioned so that her left lower arm was behind the other person.
A deformed left hand? That sort of jibed with the box full of dolls with mutilated left hands…
But so what? What if anything did that have to do with her disappearance?
Jack went downstairs to the basement. Yeah, the rope ladder was still imbedded in the cement. Did that have anything to do with Melanie's disappearance?
He stood staring at it, as baffled as ever, waiting for some sort of epiphany that would explain everything.
The only thing that happened was the front of his chest started itching again.
Damn, he thought. Must be allergic to something down here.
Still scratching, he went over to the desk and checked out the large amber crystals. He held one up to the light but saw nothing unusual about it.
He sighed. Deformed children, a missing wife, a mutilated corpse, black-clad tough guys, a gathering of paranoids…were they linked? He couldn't buy them as random and unrelated. But where was the common thread?
Frayne Canfield had said that something "unnatural" had happened in Monroe in late February or early March of 1968. Was that the link?
Jack had passed a public library in town. As long as he was here, why not check out what he could?
He made sure he relocked both the knob and the dead bolt before he left.
13
"Why are you interested in that particular period?" the librarian asked, giving him a close inspection. Then she added, "If you don't mind my asking."
Mrs. Forseman was straight out of Central Casting with her frumpy dress, wrinkled face, lemon-sucking pursed lips, and pointy-cornered reading glasses dangling from a chain around her neck.
"Just curious."
He'd asked to see the microfilm files of the Monroe Express for the first quarter of 1968. She clutched the cartridge in her bony hand, but hadn't offered it to him yet.
"Curious about what? If you don't mind my asking."
I damn well do mind, Jack thought, then decided she looked old enough to have been around then. Maybe she could save him some time.
"I heard about something called the 'Monroe Cluster' and—"
"Oh, no," she said, rolling her eyes. "You're not some writer planning to go digging into those deformities, are you? This town has had more than its share of trouble, especially those poor people, so leave them alone. Please."
"Actually, I'm a geneticist," Jack said. "If I publish anything it'll be in a scientific journal. Do you remember anything about the incidents?"
"I remember a lot of panic around the time those poor children were born, especially in all the other pregnant mothers in town, all terrified that their babies might end up the same way. We didn't have all the tests then that we have now, so there were a lot of very frightened families. It was an awful time, just awful. A research team from one of the medical centers came through and did a thorough investigation for the State Department of Health. They didn't find anything, neither will you."
Jack held out his hand for the cartridge. "You're probably right, but I'll never know until I look, will I."
"Suit yourself," she said, shoving the cartridge into his palm. "But you're wasting your time."
Turned out she was right.
Jack situated himself before a viewer and began paging through the back files. The Express was a small town paper, devoted almost exclusively to local issues. Took Jack no time to scan through two months' worth.
February 1968 was an uneventful month, but March turned out to be a whole different story—not a good time at all for the Village of Monroe: violent storms, protest marchers, and a man named Jim Stevens dying an ugly accidental death outside some place known as "the Hanley mansion." And then a few days later, mass murder and mayhem inside the same house.
And that was it. Not a hint as to what might have caused the birth defects that popped up nine months later, and certainly nothing to back up Melanie's "burst of Otherness" theory.
Jack returned the cartridge to Mrs. Forseman at her desk.
"Should have listened to you," he said, trying to soften her up. "Couldn't find a thing."
It worked. She actually cracked a smile. A tiny one. "Just trying to save you some trouble."
"I guess any way you look at it, sixty-eight was a bad year for Monroe."
"A bad year for the whole country," she said. "The assassinations of Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy came in the spring, followed by the riots in Chicago at the Democratic convention. And then the Russians invaded Czechoslovakia and slaughtered people in the streets." Her eyes got a faraway look. "Almost as if a dark cloud passed over the world that year and turned everything ugly."