Keith didn’t hire Jamal for his sensitivity. He took the card Jamal handed him and wrote the investigator a large check, plus bonus.
He was going to find out what had been done to Lillie, and why.
CHAPTER 3
Barbara hung herself in the bathroom of her apartment the day before Halloween, three days after Bill Brown moved out. Lillie found her. She called 911, then the police, then Keith. By the time he tore over to the West Side, the cops and EMTs were there, filling up the messy space. Lillie had been sent to her room. She sat on the edge of the bed with her hands folded in her lap, and the stoic resignation on her young face broke his heart. “Uncle Keith, I…”
He sat down next to her and put his arm around her shoulder.
“…I was too late to stop her. I stayed at the library too long.”
All the anger at Barbara that he’d never expressed tsunamied over him. Barbara’s irresponsibility, her selfish throwing of all her problems onto other people whenever things got tough, her obstinate refusal to consider Lillie instead of making Lillie consider her… The strength of his anger frightened Keith. He fought to hold himself steady to Lillie’s need.
“Honey, it isn’t your fault, not one little part of it is your fault. Your mother was mentally ill, she must have been to do this. Depressed. You aren’t to blame, Lillie.”
“I should have come home earlier from the library. But it wasn’t… good here.” She closed her lips tightly together and Keith saw that this was all he was ever going to learn about living with Barbara during the last weeks.
Damn her, damn her… God, his sister. Babs…
He said shakily, “You’ll come live with me now, honey. I’ve got a spare room. We’ll move your furniture and things.” His mind raced over practicalities, glad to consider moving trucks and dressers instead of considering Babs. Whom he’d failed as badly as Barbara had failed Lillie.
“Thank you,” Lillie said. “I think the police want to talk to me before we go.”
They did. Awaiting his turn at interrogation, Keith walked out into the hallway, turned a corner, and pounded his fists on the wall. It didn’t help.
He arranged for cremation of the body. He moved Lillie into his spare room, first throwing out the treadmill (no space) and emptying the closet of junk he didn’t even know he had. Through Lillie’s school he found a grief counselor whom Lillie saw every week. He informed Lillie’s school and pediatrician and the state of New York that he was now her legal guardian. The paperwork began its slow drift through various bureaucracies.
Lillie turned quieter, more somber. But she didn’t collapse into hysterics or start doing crack or run wild in the streets. Keith discovered that it was pleasant, when he turned the key in his lock after work at seven or eight or nine o’clock, to be greeted by Lillie’s smile and a warmed-up casserole. On Saturdays (but not Sundays) he conscientiously refrained from work and took her places, unless she was going out with friends. He met her friends. She met the women he casually dated. Gradually they created a routine that satisfied them both.
Quite abruptly, it seemed, Lillie’s body went into overdrive. One day she was almost as skinny as Barbara had been. The next day, she was wearing tight jeans and a midriff-baring top over a figure that made him blink. He found a box of tampons in the bathroom and pretended to not see them. Thirteen—was that early or late? There was no one he could ask. And Lillie seemed to be doing fine with her new body. Lipstick tubes appeared on the ornamental shelf under the foyer mirror, tubes with fantastic names: Peach Passion and Ruby Madness and Jelly Slicker. The names amused him.
And then on March 10, 2013, Keith came home and found Lillie lying on the sofa, staring into space, and no amount of shouting or shaking or anything else could bring her out of it. An ambulance arrived within ten minutes, and as the medics carried Lillie on a stretcher out of the apartment, they bumped into the shelves and all the lipsticks clattered to the floor.
Troy was an amazingly ugly city enjoying a huge economic boom because of technology invented at Rennselaer Polytechnic Institute and manufactured not far from the campus. Part of that manufactury, Keith knew, was parts for SkyPower, now being assembled in geosynchronous orbit. The Hudson River, a peculiar shade of sludge, flowed through the center of Troy.
Dr. Dennis Reeder lived in a far suburb, away from the factories, surrounded by semi-open fields. Keith had forgotten how beautiful spring could be away from New York. Tulips and daffodils and even daisies foamed around the Reeder house; everything bloomed earlier now that summers had become so long and hot. The driveway where he parked his rented car was littered with plastic toys. A powerscooter, unchained and unlocked, leaned against the garage.
“We keep our daughter at home with us,” Reeder told Keith. “My wife is a nurse. She quit working when this… happened to Hannah, and we’ve also hired an aide. Would you like a drink, Mr. Anderson?”
“Keith. Yes, please. Scotch, if you have it.”
Reeder did. The large, comfortable house seemed equipped with everything. Hannah’s mother, a strikingly pretty blond woman with tired eyes, joined them in the living room but drank nothing.
“Lillie is hospitalized,” Keith said. “I’m her only family.”
Reeder said bluntly, “You’re an attorney. Are you considering some sort of class-action suit?”
“No one to sue. If Miller were still alive, we’d pursue criminal charges. No, I’m here just as a parent.”
“So are the rest of us. There are twenty-one kids like Hannah, that we know of so far. We’ve set up a list serve with—”
“I’d like to be on it.”
“Certainly. With a flag program to scan the entire Net continually for news articles, medical references, personal letters, anything that relates to this situation. One of our parents is a programmer. We come from all segments of society, since Miller offered his services nearly free as part of a ‘clinical trial.’ “
Keith saw Barbara standing sideways, proudly showing off her non-existent stomach bulge. “This clinic is on a sliding income scale, very cheap. It’s because they’re part of some test.”
Reeder continued, “The families are wildly different, and so are the kids. Were, I mean. Male, female, good kids, troublemakers, academics, jocks, dropouts, everything. But every single one has that same quiescent growth in the frontal lobe and that same increase in cerebral neurons of as much as twenty percent and the same PLI firing patterns. Plus, of course, all those unknown genes on chromosome six.”
“Are they completely unknown? Don’t we know what proteins they code for?”
“Yes, in that codons only make twenty amino acids all together,” Reeder said patiently. Keith could tell he’d given this speech to non-scientists before. “But how those twenty then combine and fold—folding is the crucial part—can result in thousands of different proteins. Also, multiple alleles at multiple loci can influence gene expression. Hannah’s extra genes don’t seem to be making any proteins at all at the moment, or none that we can detect in her bloodstream.
“But remember, Keith, that if the brain cells are making proteins to induce the trance Hannah and Lillie are in, the proteins or neurotransmitters or whatever is responsible may be found only in the brain, contained by the blood-brain barrier. Sixty percent of all messenger RNAs are expressed in the brain at some point. However, there’s nothing odd that we could detect in Hannah’s cerebrospinal fluid, either.”