Laurie took the case, and beamed. “Thank you so much,” she said. She looked at me. “This is what Poppa was going to get for me the other night. He thought I didn’t know—he wanted to pick this purse up, at Jacob Stoltzfus’s farm, and surprise me for my birthday tomorrow. But I knew.” And her voice cracked and tears welled in her eyes.
Amos put his arms around her again, and I patted her hair.
“Mo would’ve wanted to get to the bottom of this,” I said to Lapp. “What can you tell me about who killed him—and Amos’s father?”
He regarded me, without much emotion. “The world is changing before your very eyes, Dr. D’ Amato. Twelve-hundred-pound moose walk down the main street in Brattleboro, Vermont. People shoot 400-pound bears in the suburbs of New Hampshire—”
“New Hampshire is hardly a suburb, and Mo wasn’t killed by a bear—he died right next to me in my car,” I said.
“Same difference, Doctor. Animals are getting brazen, bacteria are going wild, allergies are rampant—it’s all part of the same picture. It’s no accident.”
“Your people are doing this, deliberately?” I asked.
“My people?—no, I assure you, we don’t believe in aggression. These things you see here”—he waved his hand around the barn, at all sorts of plants and small animals and insects I wanted to get a closer look at—“are only to make our lives better, in quiet ways. Like Laurie’s handbag.”
“Like the fireflies that burn down buildings?” I asked.
“Ah, we come full circle—this is where I came in. Alas, we unfortu. nately are not the only people on this Earth who understand more of the power of nature than is admitted by your technological world. You have plastics, used for good. You also have plastic used for evil—you have semtex, that blows your airplane from the sky. We have bred fireflies for good purposes, for light and moderate heat, as you see right here.” He pointed to a comer of the barn, near where we were standing. A fountain of the sepiatone and starlight seemed to emanate from it. I looked more carefully, and saw the fountain was really a myriad of tiny fireflies—a large Mendelian lamp. “We mix slightly different species in the swarm,” Lapp continued, “carefully chosen so that their flashings overlap to give a continuous, long-lasting light. The mesh is so smooth that you can’t see the insects themselves, unless you examine the light very closely. But there are those who have furthered this breeding for bad purposes, as you found out in both the Stoltzfus and Buhler homes.”
“Well, if you know who these people are, tell me, and I’ll see to it that they’re put out of business,” I said.
For the first time, I noticed a smear of contempt on John Lapp s face. “Your police will put them out of business? How? In the same way you’ve put your industrial Mafia out of business? In the same way you’ve stopped the drug trade from South America? In the same way your United Nations, your NATO, all of your wonderful political organizations have ended wars in the Middle East, in Europe, in Southeast Asia all these years? No thank you, Doctor. These people who misuse the power of nature are our problem—they’re not our people any longer but they come originally from our people—and we’ll handle them in our own way.”
“But two people are dead—” I protested.
“You perhaps will be too,” Amos said. He proffered a bottle with some kind of reddish, tomatoey-looking liquid. “Here, drink this, just in case my sister gave you some slow-acting poison.”
“A brother and a sister,” I said. “Each tells me the other’s the bad guy. Classic dilemma—for all I know this is the poison.”
Lapp shook his head. “Sarah Stoltzfus Fischer is definitely bad,” he said solemnly. “I once thought I saw some good that could be rekindled in her, but now… Jacob told Mo Buhler about her—”
“Her name was on Mo’s car phone list,” I said.
“Yes, as someone Mo was likely investigating,” Lapp said. “I told Jacob he was wrong to tell Mo so much. But Jacob was stubborn—and he was an optimist. A dangerous combination. I’m sorry to say this,” he looked with hurt eyes at Laurie, “but Mo Buhler may have brought this upon Jacob and himself because of his contacts with Sarah.”
“If Poppa believed in her, then that’s because he still saw some good in her,” Laurie insisted.
John Lapp shook his head, sadly.
“And I guess I made things worse by contacting her, spending the night with her—” I started saying.
All three gave me a look.
“—Alone, on the couch,” I finished.
“Yes, perhaps you did make things worse,” Lapp said. “Your style of investigation—Mo Buhler’s—can’t do any good here. These people will have you running around chasing your own tail. They’ll taunt you with vague suggestions of possibilities of what they’re up to—what they’ve been doing. They’ll give you just enough taste of truth to keep you interested. But when you look for proof, you’ll find you won’t know which end is up.”
Which was a pretty good capsule summary of what I’d been feeling.
“They introduced long-term allergen catalysts into our bloodstreams, our biosphere, years ago,” Lapp went on. “Everyone in this area has it. And once you do, you’re a sitting duck. When they want to kill you, they give you another catalyst, short-term, any one of a number of handy biological agents, and you’re dead within hours of a massive allergic attack to some innocent thing in your environment. So the two catalysts work together to kill you. Of course, neither one on its own is dangerous, shows up as suspicious on your blood tests, so that’s how they get away with it. And no one even notices the final innocent insult—no one is ordinarily allergic to an autumn leaf from a particular type of tree against your skin, or a certain kind of beetle on your finger. That’s why we developed the antidote to the first catalyst—it’s the only way we know of breaking the allergic cycle.”
“Please, Phil, drink this.” Amos pushed the bottle on me again.
“Any side effects I should know about? Like I’ll be dead of an allergic attack in a few hours?”
“You’ll probably feel a little more irritable than usual for the next week,” Lapp said.
I sighed. “What else is new.”
Decisions… even if I had the first catalyst, I could live the rest of my life without ever encountering the second. No, I couldn’t go on being so vulnerable like that. I liked autumn leaves. But how did I know for sure that what Amos was offering me was the antidote, and not the second catalyst? I didn’t—not for sure—but wouldn’t Amos have tried to leave me in Mo’s house to burn if he’d wanted me dead? Decisions…
I drank it down, and looked around the barn. Incredible scene of high Victorian science, like a nineteenth-century trade card I’d once seen for an apothecary. Enough to make my head spin. Then I realized it was spinning—was this some sort of reaction to the antidote? Jeez, or was the antidote the poison after all? No—the room wasn’t so much spinning, as the light, the firefiight, was flickering… in an oddly familiar way.