“You know Jacob Stoltzfus?” I asked.
Sarah nodded, lips tight. “He was my uncle,” she finally said, “my mother’s brother.”
“I’m sorry,” I said. I could see that she knew he was dead. “Who told you?” I asked softly.
“Amos—my cousin—Jacob’s son. He has a phone shack,” she said.
“I see,” I said. What an evening. “I think Mo thought that those people—those others, like the Amish, but not Amish—somehow killed Jacob.”
Sarah’s face shuddered, seemed to unravel into sobs and tears. “They did,” she managed to say. “Mo was right. And they killed Mo too.”
I put down my plate, and reached over to comfort her. It wasn’t enough. I got up and walked jto her and put my arm around her. She got up shakily off her chair, then collapsed in my arms, heaving, crying. I felt her body, her heartbeat, through her crinoline shirt.
“It’s OK,” I said. “Don’t worry. I deal with bastards like that all the time in my business. We’ll get these people, I promise you.”
She shook her head against my chest. “Not like these,” she said.
“We’ll get them,” I said again.
She held on to me, then pulled away. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I didn’t mean to fall apart like that.” She looked over at my empty teacup. “How about a glass of wine?”
I looked at my watch. It was 9:45 already, and I was exhausted. But there was more I needed to learn. “OK,” I said. “Sure. But just one glass.”
She offered a tremulous smile, and went back into the kitchen. She returned with two glasses of a deep red wine.
I sat down, and sipped. The wine tasted good—slightly Portuguese, perhaps, with just a hint of some fruit and a nice woody undertone.
“Local,” she said. “You like it?”
“Yes, I do,” I said.
She sipped some, then closed her eyes and tilted her head back. The bottoms of her blue eyes glinted like semiprecious gems out of half-closed lids.
I needed to focus on the problem at hand. “How exactly do these bio-war people kill—what’d they do to Jacob and Mo?” I asked.
Her eyes stayed closed a moment longer than I’d expected—like she’d been daydreaming, or drifting off to sleep. Then she opened them and looked at me, shaking her head slowly. “They’ve got all sorts of ways. The latest is some kind of catalyst—in food, we think it’s a special kind of Crenshaw melon—that vastiy magnifies the effect of any of a number of allergies.” She got up, looked distracted. “I’m going to have another glass—sure you don’t want some more?”
“I’m sure, thanks,” I said, and looked at my glass as she walked back into the kitchen. For all I knew, catalyst from that damn melon was in this very glass—
I heard a glass or something crash in the kitchen.
I rushed in.
Sarah was standing over what looked like a little hurricane lamp, glowing white but not burning on the inside, broken on the floor. A few little house bugs of some sort took wing and flew away.
“I’m sorry,” she said. She was crying again. “I knocked it over. I’m really not myself tonight.”
“No one would be in your situation,” I said.
She put her arms around me again, pressing close. I instinctively kissed her cheek, just barely—in what I instantly hoped, after the fact, was a brotherly gesture.
“Stay with me tonight,” she whispered. “I mean, the couch out there opens up for you, and you’ll have your privacy. I’ll sleep in the bedroom. I’m afraid…”
I was afraid too, because a part of me suddenly wanted to pick her up and carry her over to her bedroom, the couch, anywhere, and lay her down, softly unwrap her clothes, run my fingers through her sweetsmelling hair and—
But I also cared very much for Jenna. And though we’d made no formal lifetime commitments to each other—
“I don’t feel very good,” Sarah said, and pulled away slightly. “I guess I had some wine before you came and—” her head lolled and her body suddenly sagged and her eyes rolled back in her skull.
“Here, let me help you.” I first tried to buoy her up, then picked her up entirely and carried her into her bedroom. I put her down on the bed, as gently as I could, then felt the pulse in her wrist. It may have been a bit rapid, but seemed basically all right. “You’re OK,” I said. “Just a little shock and exhaustion.”
She moaned softly, then reached out and took my hand. I held it for a long time, till its grip weakened and she was definitely asleep, and then I walked quietly into the other room.
I was too tired myself to go anywhere, too tired to even figure out how to open her couch, so I just stretched out on it and managed to take off my shoes before I fell soundly asleep. My last thoughts were that I needed to have another look at the Stoltzfus farm, the lamp on her floor was beautiful, I hoped I wasn’t drugged or anything, but it was too late to do anything about it if I was…
I awoke with a start the next morning, propped my head up on a shaky arm and leaned over just in time to see Sarah’s sleek wet backside receding into her bedroom. Likely from her shower. I could think of worse things to wake up to.
“I think I’m gonna head back to Jacob’s farm,” I told her over breakfast of whole wheat toast, poached eggs, and Darjeeling tea that tasted like a fine liqueur.
“Why?”
“Closest thing we have to a crime scene,” I said.
“I’ll come with you,” Sarah said.
“Look, you were pretty upset last night—” I started to object.
“Right, so were you, but I’m OK now,” Sarah said. “Besides, you’ll need me to decode the Amish for you, to tell you what you’re looking for.”
She had a point. “All right,” I said.
“Good,” she said. “By the way, what are you looking for there?”
“I don’t really know,” I admitted. “Mo was eager to show me something at Jacob’s.”
Sarah considered, frowned. “Jacob was working on an organic antidote to the allergen catalyst—but all that stuff is very slow acting, the catalyst takes years to build up to dangerous levels in the human body—so I don’t see what Jacob could’ve shown you on a quick drive-by visit.”
If she had told me that last night, I would have enjoyed the grapes and ham sandwich even more. “Well, we’ve got nowhere else to look at this point,” I said, and speared the last of my egg.
But what did that mean about what killed Mo? Someone had been giving him a slow-acting poison too, which had been building up inside both of them for x number of years, with the result of both of them dying on the same day?
Not very likely. There seemed to be more than one catalyst at work here. I wondered if Mo had told Jacob anything about me and my visit. I certainly hoped not—the last thing I wanted was that decisive second catalyst to in some way have been me.
We were oh the Turnpike heading west an hour later. The Sun was strong and the breeze was fresh—a splendid day to be out for a ride, except that we were going to investigate the death of one of the nicest damn people I had known. I’d called Corinne to make sure she and the girls were all right. I told her I’d try to drop by in the afternoon if I could.
“So tell me more about your doctoral work,” I asked Sarah. “I mean your real work, not the cover for your advisors.”
“You know, too many people equate science with its high-tech trappings—if it doesn’t come in computers, god-knows-what-power microscopes, the latest DNA dyes, it must be magic, superstition, old-wives-tale nonsense. But science is at core a method, a rational mode of investigating the world, and the gadgetry is secondary. Sure, the equipment is great—it opens up more of the world to our cognitive digestion, makes it amenable to our analysis—but if aspects of the world are already amenable to analysis and experiment, with just our naked eyes and hands, then the equipment isn’t all that necessary, is it?”