Five
Dressed in a white blouse, black slacks, and a blue sweater she’d borrowed from one of the mothers, Dr. Nancy Joyce stood alone at the edge of the parking lot. She was waiting for her assistant, Marc Ramirez, and the batresistant Nomex safety suits he was bringing up from the zoo. Designed to protect the wearer from bat droppings as well as from claws and fangs, the suit was typically used to explore caves where there could be as many as a million bats.
When she first spoke to Westchester wildlife commissioner Cliff LoDolce-he reached her in the van as the TV crew was driving down-Joyce hadn’t expected to need the outfit. From LoDolce’s description of the attack, she assumed that Tom Fitzpatrick had disturbed a small bat maternity roost or harem, prompting the assault. Female bats could be extremely protective and a little cross, especially early in the evening when they hadn’t yet fed. Until she saw some home video footage shot by one of the parents, Joyce hadn’t realized that the bats actually had charged the boy and his father. Unfortunately, she couldn’t speak to either of the victims about what had happened. Both were still in intensive care and heavily sedated.
The scientist looked up. Against the near-black sky she could see bats zipping here and there in perfectly normal fashion. A pass over the woods in a police helicopter had failed to tell her anything because of the darkness and heavy leaf cover. She would have to go in on the ground.
She glanced out at the grandstand, which was partly lit by two large spotlights well behind first and third base. A large pack of reporters and TV crews was huddled there, along with resident state trooper Bill Anderson and six other troopers. Initially, the Little League parents and children had been there as well. Most of them lived in wooded areas and were afraid to go home. But when the crowd began to grow, Bill Anderson had had enough. He consulted with LoDolce and Joyce, who agreed that people stood a greater chance of being attacked here in the open than in their homes. The trooper then imposed a curfew and told everyone to leave. He made sure that people who didn’t have a ride got one.
The scientist was glad when everyone left. Not only was it quieter, but she’d felt pressure while they were there. She’d caught the glances, the nervous smiles, the pointing fingers. She’d volunteered to go in becauseshe needed to know what was going on. Now everyone was waiting for her to give them answers. One of the reasons she’d stayed apart from them was that she didn’t want to speculate. Privately, she didn’t believe a disease was behind this. Once in a while nature whipped up a mutated virus or bacterium. One of her two colleagues, Dr. Carla Kelly-a specialist in veterinary diseases-had gone back to Columbia University with blood, fur, and guano samples. The blood came from the boy’s wounds; if they could find traces of bat saliva, that might tell them if there were a new kind of illness. But Nancy didn’t think that was the case here. From all accounts the open-field attack had been coordinated and demarcated. Healthy or sick, bats were smart. But notthat smart.
The other colleague who had come up here was Dr. Herman Berkowitz, who added nothing to their limited body of knowledge. Dubbed “überputz” by the people who worked with him, the self-promoting, German-born zoologist from the Central Park Zoo had come up with one of the other camera crews. After doing his TV bit, talking about how gentle bats normally were, he headed back to his third wife’s Central Park West penthouse. He was not a man who liked to dirty his hands with science.
The other reason Joyce stayed by herself was that as long as she had to think, this was how she enjoyed doing it. Alone, outside, in the dark.
Joyce grew up on eight isolated acres in the hills of Cornwall, Connecticut. Whatever the season she’d walk the wooded grounds after twilight. She would watch bats in their crooked flight and listen as foxes moved through the crickety silence. She marveled at the great horned owls-big birds with deep, throaty hoots-and at the smaller, faster screech owls. She had never seen a field mouse get away from one of those birds. Never.
The kids at school thought Joyce was spooky and avoided her. Her teachers and guidance counselor and Father Joseph thought she was troubled. Her mother worried because her fascination with nocturnal predators wasn’t ladylike. Her father, a local GP, was concerned because she was always using vines to rappel into deep gullies to catch frogs, wading through lagoons because the swirling silt felt cool around her toes, or climbing high ledges to see how trees grew out of them. He absolutely forbade her from doing any of that; she did it anyway and got punished.
Only her grandmother understood. The older woman once confided that she never felt as free or as important as when she and her parents were fleeing from the Bolsheviks. She said that sleeping beneath the stars or clouds in woods and on hillsides made her feel like she was part of all nature. Compared to that, being a member of the aristocracy faded to insignificance.
Grandma Joycewicz also taught her that it didn’t matter what other people thought. Joyce liked what she liked. And what she liked was dangerous, compelling nighttime. Old books, just like her grandfather had. Solitude. Candy corn, which she wished she had a bag of right now.
Joyce looked back across the picnic area just as Marc Ramirez arrived on his motorcycle. The wiry graduate student stopped on the other side of the baseball diamond, killed the engine, dropped the kickstand, and slid off. Even before he removed his helmet-which was black, save for a large gold bat silhouette just above the visor-he began unstrapping the silver case from the large luggage rack behind the seat.
Joyce walked over.
“Hey,” Marc said.
“Hi.”
The young man hefted an armful of aluminum case to the ground. Camera crews and reporters, followed by the police chief, the wildlife commissioner, and the health inspector, hustled toward them.
Marc pulled off his helmet. He used his fingers to comb his short black hair as he looked at the cameras. “How are the victims?”
“Critical.” Joyce bent and unlatched the top of the case.
“What happened?”
Joyce removed the folded headgear. She nodded toward the parking lot. “They walked in over there and didn’t walk out again. Four volunteer firefighters in helmets and fullface masks had to go in and pull them out.”
“Were the firefighters attacked?”
Joyce nodded. “And they were there for only a few seconds.”
“Amazing,” Marc said. “A bat line in the sand. Any idea why the bats pack-attacked?”
Joyce lay the floppy headpiece and gloves on the ground. “My guess is there’s something in the woods. A bear or a big cat might cause a bat frenzy. Or a chemical contaminant like amyl nitrite or some kind of amphetamines might have made them disoriented, aggressive.”
“You mean the bats could’ve gotten into someone’s stash?”
“Don’t laugh. The police chief said that people go into the woods to do drugs.”
“I’m not laughing. I’m actually wondering how many of those people were in the grandstands tonight giving statements to the police.”
Dr. Joyce frowned. The twenty-four-year-old Queens native was an enthusiastic zoologist-in-the-making. Though he hadn’t quite outgrown his MTV sense of priorities, at least he’d limited his visible body piercing to one ear and one nostril.
Marc picked up the rubbery suit and shook it out. “Anyway, drugs wouldn’t explain the boundaries those bats set. Or the timing. Why now?”
“I’m hoping the bats will give us some of those answers when I go in.”
With the bright TV lights on and the news cameras turning, Joyce took off her shoes. Then she slipped into the leggings and built-in boots. Though her mind was on the bats, there was no ignoring the invasive cameras and the hot white lamps. They answered a question her unlamented, was-I-really-that-lonely boyfriend Christopher had asked over and over and over. Getting dressed and-especially-undressed on camera was not something she could ever get into.