Having children wasn’t their only reason for quitting, though. Several weeks before, Michael the Second had taken the kind of trip that very few people ever came back from. He had come back from it, but he had not come back all the way. As far as she knew, he was still swimming in a world of nightmares and twisted images. The last she had heard he was staying at Agnew State Hospital. That had been before it had changed to the Agnew Developmental Center. To this day, as far as she knew, Michael the Second was still a faceless soul, one of the disappeared, living in a strange alienated world that belonged only to him.
“Yeah, I know,” she said sadly. “Anyway, what’s important is that Peggy told me Childs was the only supplier for the drug.”
“For Genesis?”
“Yeah.”
Walt fell suddenly quiet on the other end of the line. Teri reached for the lamp behind the clock on the night stand. The room brightened. It felt like an old sweatshirt, soft and familiar, and she realized she had begun to feel comfortable here.
“You know what this probably means, don’t you?”
“What?”
“Teri, this guy wasn’t trying to help you enjoy a little recreational mind tripping. He was using you. You and your friends, you guys were all guinea pigs. That’s how this whole thing got started.”
“My God,” Teri said softly. She took in a breath that felt cold and foreign, and expelled it as quickly as she could. The next breath came a little harder. “And whatever it was he did to us, we passed it on to the children.”
“It looks that way.”
“How could anyone…” The thought fell away naturally, because there was no sensible way to finish it. Some things, some people, simply defied understanding. It wasn’t bad enough that this man had kidnapped their children; he had somehow managed to poison them as well.
Except that wasn’t the entire truth, now was it? If she were going to be honest with herself, there was a point here where she needed to take responsibility for her own misdeeds. The late Sixties and early Seventies had been her playground, a time of naiveté and taking chances. It was Woodstock and Easy Rider. Don’t trust anyone over thirty. And bumper stickers that said: Tomorrow is canceled due to a lack of interest. She had played recklessly and with abandon, as had Michael and most of their friends. And now it was Gabe who was paying the price.
So, yes, she hated what Childs had done—what he was still doing—but there was little saving grace for her own actions.
“What do we do now?” Teri asked.
“Take a look in the bottom drawer of the nightstand and see if there’s a phone book in there. I want you to look up the Devol Research Institute. See if they happen to have a local listing.”
The phone book was buried beneath a stack of old Time magazines. Teri dug it out and spent a minute or two thumbing through the yellow pages, wondering in the back of her mind where Walt had stumbled across the name Devol. “What do you want me to look under?”
“You better try the white pages.”
“Devol? Right? D-e-v-o-l?”
“Yeah.”
When she couldn’t find it under Devol, she tried Devole, and then finally Devoule. The results were all the same. The closest she came was Devon’s Dry Cleaning off Hartnell Avenue. “Sorry, I can’t find anything even close. A research institute, you said, right?”
“Just to make sure, after you hang up will you do me a favor and call the operator and see if maybe she has a listing?”
“Sure.” She opened the top drawer of the night stand and rummaged through the books and old magazines until she came up with a pencil and a piece of paper. On the paper, she wrote DEVOL RESEARCH INSTITUTE in bold, block lettering. “So what’s this place supposed to be?”
“It’s where we ended up after our flight. Childs went straight there, like a spaniel to water. There’s not much to see from the street. It looks like just another business building from the outside.”
“Maybe it is.”
“Now there’s a story for the papers. Idiot private eye tails suspect halfway across the country while the suspect attends a seminar on the proper filing of Medicare forms. God, it better be more than just a business building.”
Teri grinned, and it struck her how lucky she was to have this man on her side. He had, indeed, just flown halfway across the country for her. How many people did she know who would do that for her? Only one that she could think of.
“Go to bed, Walt.”
“Why? Am I starting to sound crabby?”
“Definitely.”
[100]
Teri did as she had promised.
After she hung up, she called directory assistance and told the operator that she needed a number for the Devol Research Institute in the 9-1-6 area code. The clickety-clackety patter of computer keys sounded in the background.
“Could you please spell that?”
“D-e-v-o-l,” Teri said.
“I’m sorry. I have no listing for the Devol Research Institute.”
“Could it be an unlisted number?”
“As I said, I have no such listing.”
“In other words, you can’t tell me.”
“That’s correct.”
Teri stewed for awhile after she had hung up. She got out of bed, went into the kitchen, and rummaged through the refrigerator for something to eat. But she wasn’t really hungry. She was upset. And when she couldn’t find anything that would satisfy the upset, she headed back to bed.
She was on the verge of falling asleep again when something occurred to her that was so obvious she had almost overlooked it. Of course the number was unlisted. If there had been no such number at all, no such place as the Devol Research Institute, the operator would have said so. But since the number was unlisted, the operator was in the position of having to protect that fact.
Of course!
Two calls later, Teri had learned that there were no listings for a Devol Research Institute in either the Houston area or the St. Charles area. Since she knew there was an institute in St. Charles and certainly had reason not to conclude there might be one in Houston as well, it was a short leap to suspect there might also be one here in the local area. And if that were true, then Gabe had to be somewhere close by.
That little piece of knowledge renewed the sense of excitement inside her and for awhile, unable to sleep, Teri was forced to do some reading before finally turning off the light. She rolled over, her eyes still wide open, and gazed through the thin veil of the bedroom curtains, out into the night sky. A picture of Gabe floated to the fore of her thoughts and she said a little prayer to God that tomorrow would be the day she would be reunited with her son.
Gradually, sleep began to overtake her.
Teri closed her eyes, a moment of pure tranquility settling over her.
Then she heard a noise from the living room that brought her completely awake again.
[101]
“In the sixties, endocrinologists began to understand the true nature of chemical messengers in assisting the release of hormones in the body. It wasn’t long after that, that we were able to synthesize these chemical messengers and thus trigger specific hormonal reactions. Somatostatin, which inhibits the pituitary growth hormone, is an example of these messengers. Today, we can already see synthetics playing a role in everything from diabetes control to fertility drugs.
“More recently, as we’ve come to discover the role that our genes play in the natural process of aging, we have to wonder how much longer it will be before similar synthetics will be used to artificially trigger the functions of these genes. It is not outside the realm of possibility that by the end of this century we will be able to manipulate the on/off switches responsible for the onset of aging.