“And I appreciate it. But we’re fine here.”
“Okay. Whatever you say. I’m just offering.”
“Thanks. But while I have you on the line, I want to ask—”
“Call me later. Gotta go.” He cut the connection.
What had she been going to ask, anyway? Why are you bankrolling me and my family for a copywriting job that a thousand others could do at a fraction of the cost? Although maybe she wouldn’t have asked it anyway. Marianne could probably support herself and the boys, but she could never afford Ryan’s care. Much as she hated the fact, she needed Jonah Stubbins.
If she hurried, maybe she could be out of the apartment before Tim returned. And she would not bring her cell.
The taxi left her at the fortified gates of Columbia University, which she had no clearance to enter. “Look,” she told the conspicuously armed guard, “just call Dr. Harrison Rice and tell him I’m here. Dr. Marianne Jenner. He’ll clear me.”
The guard looked skeptical. “Dr. Rice doesn’t give interviews.”
“I’m not a journalist. Just call him! He will be unhappy when he finds out I was here and not admitted.”
“Why doesn’t he know you’re here? Why didn’t you tell him you’re coming so he could put you into the system?”
Because I didn’t want to give him the chance to refuse. “Just call him, please! Dr. Marianne Jenner!”
She waited. The September air held the smoky promise of autumn. “Okay,” the guard finally said. “You’re cleared. It’s building—”
“I know where it is.”
Familiar and yet strange—it had been two and a half years since she’d been here. The Columbia campus looked less shabby. Perhaps alumni donations had increased as the economy picked up. But it was a shock to find a soldier with an AK-47 in front of the building containing Harrison’s lab.
He met her in the lobby. “Marianne. Good to see you.”
“Hello, Harrison.”
Familiar and yet strange. They shook hands awkwardly as two sets of images played in Marianne’s mind: she and Harrison drinking wine in bed, her naked leg thrown over his, both of them sated after sex, talking and talking about research. And Harrison the night Sarah had killed herself and Tim brought him home drunk, barely conscious, sodden and mumbling and stained with vomit.
“You look good,” he said. Marianne doubted that was true of her—she’d dressed quickly and hardly combed her hair—but it was true of him. His hair, now completely gray, hadn’t thinned much more, and his intelligent face was craggy in that handsome way aging men had and women did not. In his eyes, however, she could still see pain over Sarah, just as hers must be shadowed by Ryan and Noah.
“Thank you. Harrison, can we go somewhere to talk?”
She felt rather than saw his quick startlement, and so she added, “It’s not personal. It’s connected with your research. Something I think you should hear.” So—now she knew. His interest in her had not renewed. Had she hoped it had? But, of course, she was with Tim.
She had his professional attention. “Come to my office.”
It was the same preternaturally neat, impersonal environment she remembered so well. Harrison never kept around the framed plaques or silly mementos that other scientists did. Marianne had never even seen his Nobel medal.
In careful, precise sentences, she told him about Colin: the small earthquake on the Linden fault, Rudy’s testing of Colin in infrasonic and ultrasonic ranges, what the child had told her about managing the constant bombardment of sound by “putting them in rows in my mind.” As she talked, she watched his face—such a well-known face, such a stranger. She saw that he had already known about the hyper-hearing, which meant there must be other children like Colin. But his attention sharpened and he leaned forward in his chair at the “putting in rows.” He had not known that.
“He taught himself to do that?”
“Yes, although I don’t think it was as much self-teaching as unconscious compensation. How many more kids have you found with hyper-hearing?”
“It seems to be about five percent of the population, but it’s difficult to tell because so many parents use this damn Calminex to quell sensory overload. Compensators like Colin are a small percentage of that, but Colin is the first I’ve heard describe the mechanism, even metaphorically.”
“What progress have you made in identifying the genes and proteins involved?”
“We have the genes. Not yet how the proteins fold.”
She was intensely interested in this, plus the steps his team and other teams around the world were taking to discover more. It felt so good to be talking about science again, to be straining to follow a mind better than hers.
They talked for a long time. Harrison finished with, “Marianne, more good news—the mice are returning.”
“How? Where? What evidence? Or are you seeding immune specimens?”
He smiled at her eagerness, raised his hands palms up, let them drop in a gesture of humorous resignation. “Not our specimens, nor anybody else’s as far as we can tell. Which means that all our breeding programs were pointless. The returning mice developed immunity to R. sporii all on their own, or maybe a small number always had it and now they’re multiplying like—well, like mice. Mus musculus and P. maniculatus have each been captured in three states. Apparently nature will find a way.”
She heard an echo of Tim talking about grief softening over time: “It’s just life going on, you know?”
“I know,” she said.
“It’s all interconnected,” Harrison said, as if this were a new thought. Maybe, to a mind that focused with laser intensity on one scientific problem at a time, it was new. “The spores, the mice, the ecology, the children, and the solutions to all four.”
“I know,” she said again. “Stay in touch, Harrison. I’d like to know how your research is going.”
“Okay. Nice to see you again, Marianne.” He turned away.
Outside her building on the East Side, Marianne took out her key to open the vestibule door. A man came up behind her, spun her around, and shoved a gun into her chest.
“Don’t scream,” he said quietly, “or I’ll shoot.”
She glanced wildly around. No one on the street, although it was midmorning on a Tuesday. A wave of nausea swept up her throat; she fought it down and tried to think.
“Here, take my purse. I won’t say anything to anyone.”
He didn’t deign to answer this stupidity. Marianne studied him, memorizing what she could. He wore a ski mask—in September!—but she could see his eyes: deep brown. Pale thin lips, the bottom of a light-brown mustache. About two inches taller than she was, broad shoulders, thick neck, jeans and black leather boots and a light green nylon jacket zipped to the neck, clear latex gloves.
“I don’t want your purse,” he said. “I want you out of New York. Be gone by the end of the week, Marianne Elaine Jenner. You alien-loving motherfuckers have ruined this country and we don’t want you polluting this city.” He dropped something at her feet and ran.
Marianne fumbled with her key, dropped it, picked it up, shook as she put it in the lock. Only when she was inside did she realize she’d also picked up his dropped article. What if it was a bomb? No, it was just a thin piece of cloth, a patch of some sort. What if it was imbued with anthrax, or tularemia, or a genetically altered microorganism? But she’d already touched it, so she kept it in her fingertips as she ran up two flights of stairs, avoiding the elevator from some crazy fear that either it would harm her or the patch would harm it, to her apartment. She rang the bell with her other hand.