Suddenly, Logan froze. The beam of his flashlight stopped, in its transit of the room, on two figures, standing silent and motionless in a corner. One of them was Laura Feverbridge. She was holding a shotgun, and it was pointed at Logan. The other was an elderly man, very tall and gaunt, with a heavy salt-and-pepper beard and a shock of white hair — the man Logan had seen in the photo on the lab table.
Chase Feverbridge. Laura’s father — who had fallen to his death while hiking six months before.
19
For a moment, all three of them stood as if frozen. Then, slowly, Laura Feverbridge lowered the shotgun.
“Would you mind taking that light out of our eyes, Dr. Logan?” she asked.
Logan aimed the light away. There was another rumble of distant thunder outside.
Now Logan understood: the sudden barking of the dogs had alerted the two, and they had turned out the lights in hopes of not being discovered. But that was the only thing he did understand. Nothing else about this situation made any sense.
The elderly man looked at Logan through the indirect glow of the flashlight, his expression a mixture of confusion, surprise, and something else. “You know this man, Laura?” he asked. His voice was deep and resonant, with the faintest touch of an English accent.
“Jeremy Logan. He visited the lab a few days ago.”
“Well, you might as well turn on the lights,” the man continued. “No point chatting in the dark.”
She looked at him questioningly. “Father?”
“Why not? If he’d brought the cavalry with him, they’d be here by now.”
After a moment, Laura Feverbridge reached over and flicked a switch. An overhead light came on, illuminating the lab.
She smiled a little wanly at Logan. “After you left, Kevin told me about the unusual nature of your work. I wondered if our paths might cross again. But I didn’t expect it would be here.”
Logan nodded at the shotgun. “What’s that for?”
“You’re kidding, right? After what happened to Mark?”
“Fair enough. But this is your father — correct?” Logan turned to the man. “You’re Chase Feverbridge?”
The elderly man did not reply for a moment. Then he nodded slowly. His eyes were a piercing blue, and they seemed to see right through Logan. “If you don’t mind,” he said, “I’m going to sit down.” And he walked over to a nearby worktable, took a seat on a lab stool.
Laura hesitated a moment, then seemed to come to a decision. “I guess I’d better explain all this to you,” she said. “In fact, it looks like I don’t have a choice. It’s either that… or shoot you.”
“I’d rather it was the former,” Logan said.
At this, the older man gave a ghost of a smile. “Laura,” he said, “under the circumstances, don’t you think it would be better if I—”
“No, Father. Let me do it.” She drew in a deep, shuddering breath. Then, using the muzzle of the shotgun, she motioned Logan to follow her out of the building.
They emerged into the cool night. Laura closed the door softly behind them as Logan turned off his flashlight. She took a few steps away, toward the edge of the small clearing, and he followed. No sound came from the main camp, and Logan could see no lights through the trees.
There was a sudden spike in the distant whining and yowling of the dogs. “What’s with them?” he asked.
“Toshi and Mischa? I’ve begun keeping them in that run at night — if there is a rogue bear or wolf on the loose, I don’t want them to encounter it. And the truth is they’ve been acting strangely — as if some unfamiliar animal is nearby in the woods. That’s the only reason I can think of for the way they’ve taken up snarling and whimpering after dark.”
She stood in the wash of obscured moonlight, shotgun cradled in her arms, collecting her thoughts. Then she looked straight at Logan, her expression determined, even defiant. “Look. I’ve already told you why we established our lab here. Not only is it an ideal place for our research, but it helped shield my father from the relentless criticism his work had been subjected to. And all that was true. But it wasn’t enough. Even here, the criticism reached us — by Internet and e-mail. My father is a very proud man… but he’s also troubled, vulnerable. Despite his brilliance, he’s always been emotionally fragile. After our arrival, he continued to grow increasingly distraught. ‘Deterioration’ might be a better word. I know you can understand, Dr. Logan, because I imagine you’ve had a taste of it yourself — it’s one thing to face rejection, but quite another to be an object of scorn, even condemnation, from those who should be your peers. And then, he published those last two articles… but he did it prematurely, submitted without my knowledge, promising much in the text but without the necessary scientific underpinnings and relevant data. I guess he was lashing out at his detractors, trying to prove his point. The result was precisely the opposite he’d hoped for — he was subjected to academic ridicule even more severe. It was then that he… tried to kill himself.”
“What?” Logan said. “Here?”
She nodded. “I came into the dormitory just as he was about to hang himself. Another five minutes, and I’d have been too late. As I was cutting the rope, he told me not to bother; he’d just find some other way to take his life.”
She chewed her lip. “I didn’t know what else I could do. I’d brought us to this utterly remote place — and yet even that wasn’t enough. I felt helpless. I went out one day for a walk, down one of Mark’s favorite paths. I needed to get away from the lab, try to think, try to figure out what to do. And that’s when it happened. About two miles from the lab, I came upon a body — a human body. It lay at the bottom of Madder’s Gorge, at the base of the waterfall. It was a man, maybe sixty or seventy….I couldn’t tell for certain, he was too broken up and bloodied. It must have just happened. It was awful.” She shuddered at the memory. “What was clear was that he’d fallen from a height of land overhead. There were rocks strewn around him, and I could see the spot above where the cliff face had given way. I was horrified, about to turn and run for the authorities — but for some reason I didn’t. See, an idea came to me, I don’t know from where. But all of a sudden, I thought that maybe — just maybe — I’d found the answer I was looking for.”
She took another deep breath. “Near the body was a backpack. I rifled through it. It contained what you’d expect — food, cooking equipment, sleeping bag… and a diary. I paged quickly through that diary. It turned out the corpse was that of a survivalist, a nomad. He’d been living off the grid for years. The journal was a sort of confessional; a catalog of his personal convictions, his charges against civilization. This was a man with no relations to speak of, certainly none that he cared for or that cared for him; a man who had unplugged himself from the world, turned his back on everything he’d known, and spent years roaming the North American wilderness, letting whim guide his feet, bedding down where he pleased.”
She fell silent. The silence stretched on so long Logan realized he’d better continue the story for her.
“In short, a man nobody would miss,” he said.
She nodded. “He was about my father’s height, and build, and age. Beyond that, he was… unrecognizable. It was like a gift. A strange and terrible gift. I’d walked out, looking for an answer — and here one lay, literally at my feet. I ran back to the camp. It took some convincing, but eventually my father agreed — especially when I explained that this was the best way, the only way, to free him once and for all. I took my father’s wallet, ran back to the waterfall, and exchanged it for the dead man’s few pitiful papers. I retrieved the backpack and buried it out in the woods behind the lab. I burned the journal. I installed my father here, in this remote outbuilding, where nobody would bother him or discover him. And the next day, I reported to the authorities that he was missing. I knew it wouldn’t be long before somebody found the body — a cop, or a ranger, or Mark on one of his hikes. And that was exactly what happened. Naturally, when they found my father’s wallet they asked me to identify the mutilated body. I did — at least, I said I did. A week later, they returned his ashes to me. I scattered them around the base of the waterfall. And I duly reported his death to the scientific community. I ordered extra equipment, installed it here myself when no one was looking. I rewired the building to the electrical grid. I came out to see my father, to bring him food, to assist in his work, but only late at night — after Mark and Kevin had gone to bed.”