“Amos is a friend of Jacob’s?” I asked.
“His son,” Mo said.
“Well, I guess you can’t very well call him on your car phone,” I said.
Mo shook his head, frowned. “Most people misunderstand the Amish—think they’re some sort of Luddites, against all technology. But that’s not really it at all. They struggle with technology, agonize over whether to reject or accept it, and if they accept it, in what ways, so as not to compromise their independence and self-sufficiency. They’re not completely against phones—just against phones in their homes—because the phone intrudes on everything you’re doing.”
I snorted. “Yeah, many’s the time a call from the captain pulled me out of the sack.”
Mo flashed his smile for the first time since we d left Jacob Stoltzfus’s farm. It was good to see.
“So where do Amish keep their phones?” I might as well press my advantage, and the chance it would get Mo to talk.
“Well, that’s another misconception,” Mo said. “There’s not one monolithic Amish viewpoint. There are many Amish groups, many different ways of dealing with technology. Some allow phone shacks on the edges of their property, so they can make calls when they want to, but not be disturbed by them in the sanctity of their homes.”
“Does Amos have a phone shack?” I asked.
“Dunno,” Mo said, like he was beginning to think about something else.
“But you said his family was more open than most,” I said.
Mo swiveled his head to stare at me for a second, then turned his eyes back on the road. “Open-minded, yes. But not really about communications.”
“About what, then?”
“Medicine,” Mo said.
“Medicine?” I asked.
“What do you know about allergies?”
My nose itched—maybe it was the remnants of the sweet pollen near Strasburg.
“I have hay fever,” I said. “Cantaloupe sometimes makes my mouth burn. I’ve seen a few strange deaths in my time due to allergic reactions. You think Jacob Stoltzfus died from something like that?”
“No,” Mo said. “I think he was killed because he was trying to prevent people from dying from things like that.”
“OK,” I said. “Last time you said that and I asked you to explain you said never mind. Should I ask again or let it slide?”
Mo sighed. “You know, genetic engineering goes back well before the double helix.”
“Come again?”
“Breeding plants to make new combinations probably dates almost to the origins of our species,” Mo said. “Darwin understood that—he called it ‘artificial selection.’ Mendel doped out the first laws of genetics breeding peas. Luther Burbank developed way many more new varieties of fruit and vegetables than have yet to come out of our gene-splicing labs.”
“And the connection to the Amish is what—they breed new vegetables now too?” I asked.
“More than that,” Mo said. “They have whole insides of houses lit by special kinds of fireflies, altruistic manure permeated by slugs that seek out the roots of plants to die there and give them nourishment—all deliberately bred to be that way, and the public knows nothing about it. It’s biotechnology of the highest order, without the technology.”
“And your friend Jacob was working on this?”
Mo nodded. “Techno-allergists—our conventional researchers—have recently been investigating how some foods act as catalysts to other allergies. Cantaloupe tingles in your mouth in hay fever season, right?—because it’s really exacerbating the hay fever allergy. Watermelon does the same, and so does the pollen of mums. Jacob and his people have known this for fifty years—and they’ve gone much further. They’re trying to breed a new kind of food, some kind of tomato thing, which would act as an anti-catalyst for allergies—would reduce their histaminic effect to nothing.”
“Like an organic Hismanol?” I asked.
“Better than that,” Mo said. “This would trump any pharmaceutical.”
“You OK?” I noticed Mo’s face was bearing big beads of sweat.
“Sure,” he said, and cleared his throat. “I don’t know. Jacob—” he started coughing in hacking waves.
I reached over to steady him, and straighten the steering wheel. His shirt was soaked with sweat and he was breathing in angry rasps.
“Mo, hold on,” I said, keeping one hand on Mo and the wheel, fumbling with the other in my inside coat pocket. I finally got my fingers on the epinephrine pen I always kept there, and angled it out. Mo was limp and wet and barely conscious over the wheel. I pushed him over as gently as I could and went with my foot for the brake. Cars were speeding by us, screaming at me in the mirror with their lights. Thankfully Mo had been driving on the right, so I only had one stream of lights to blind me. My sole finally made contact with the brake, and I pressed down as gradually as possible. Miraculously, the car came to a reasonably slow halt on the shoulder of the road, and we both seemed in one piece.
I looked at Mo. I yanked up his shirt, and plunged the pen into his arm. I wasn’t sure how long he’d not been breathing, but it wasn’t good.
I dialed 911 on the car phone. “Get someone over here fast,” I yelled. “I’m on the Turnpike, eastbound, just before the Philadelphia turnoff. I’m Dr. Phil D’Amato, NYPD Forensics, and this is a medical emergency.”
I wasn’t positive that anaphylactic shock was what was wrong with him, but the adrenaline couldn’t do much harm. I leaned over his chest and felt no heartbeat. Jeez, please.
I gave Mo mouth-to-mouth, pounded his chest, pleading for life. “Hang on, damn you!” But I knew already. I could tell. After a while you get this sort of sickening sixth sense about these things. Some kind of allergic reaction from hell had just killed my friend. Right in my arms. Just like that.
EMS got to us eight minutes later. Better than some of the New York City times I’d been seeing lately. But it didn’t matter. Mo was gone.
I looked at the car phone as they worked on him, cursing and trying to jolt him back into life. I’d have to call Corinne and tell her this now. But all I could see in the plastic phone display was Laurie’s strawberry blonde hair.
“You OK, Dr. D’Amato?” one of the orderlies called.
“Yeah,” I said. I guess I was shaking.
“These allergic reactions can be lethal all right,” he said, looking over at Mo.
Right, tell me about it.
“You’ll call the family?” the orderly asked. They’d be taking Mo to a local hospital, DOA.
“Yeah,” I said, brushing a burning tear from my eye. I felt like I was suffocating. I had to slow down, stay in control, separate the psychological from the physical so I could begin to understand what was going on here. I breathed out and in. Again. OK. I was all right. I wasn’t really suffocating.
The ambulance sped off, carrying Mo. He had been suffocating, and it killed him. What had he been starting to tell me?
I looked again at the phone. The right thing for me to do was to drive back to Mo’s home, be there for Corinne when I told her—calling her on the phone with news like this was monstrous. But I had to find out what had happened to Mo—and that would likely not be from Corinne. Mo didn’t want to worry her, didn’t confide in her. No, the best chance of finding out what Mo had been up to seemed to be in Philadelphia, in the place Mo had been going. But where was that?
I focused on the phone display—pressed a couple of keys, and got a directory up on the little screen. The only 215 area code listed there was for a Sarah Fischer, with an address that I knew to be near Temple University.
I pressed the code next to the number, then the Send command.
Crackle, crackle, then a distant tinny cellular ring.