Authors: Carolyn Nash
The landing gear clanked up under us and I began to hear
people rustling around, speaking quietly, but not a sound came from the seat
next to me. I slanted my eyes over. Dr. Richards’ hand gripped the armrest
between us. His knuckles were white.
“It’s not that I’m a total coward,” he said. “I just hate
take-offs.”
I rubbed at one pink-polished fingernail and looked back out
the window.
“I feel like such a coward, but I can’t help it.” He sighed.
“I guess I just don’t believe that a piece of equipment as heavy as a jet
airplane can possibly lift off the ground. And fly through the air? Insanity.”
My eyes involuntarily flicked his way as I heard my thoughts
echoed.
He grinned sheepishly and shrugged.
I ducked my head and scratched at a tiny fleck of pink
polish adhering to the cuticle of my left pinky.
“I for one believe firmly in that old saying: If God had
meant us to fly, he would have given us turbine engines.”
I turned toward the window again. He could turn on the charm
all he wanted. All I was interested in was watching LA through the scratched
plastic as it and its blanket of smog began to fall away beneath us.
“Look,” he said, “I really would like to explain what’s
going on.”
“It isn’t necessary.” I watched the sky turn from grey-brown
to blue as we rose through the pollution.
“There is a good reason.”
The white and grey buildings of Los Angeles passed beneath
us. To the west the ocean was sparkling in the late afternoon sunshine. “If
there is,” I said, “that’s your business. We’ll just fly to San Francisco, you’ll
go your way, I’ll go mine. When we get back to the University, it never
happened. Deal?”
There was a long silence. “As you wish,” he said finally.
He sat back in his seat and I reached for the airline
magazine stuck in the pouch of the seat in front of me. I began to leaf through
it, casually scanning the pages of merchandise.
Oh yes, here’s a bullet-proof
briefcase with a small explosive device that will destroy anything inside if
the case is tampered with.
Dr. Richards moved his hand from the armrest to his knee.
Just what I need to carry
those important biochemistry notes to and from class.
His hand gripped his knee and relaxed, gripped and relaxed.
I shifted in the seat, got more comfortable and flipped the
page to a short blurb on the expanded flights to Seattle. I read it with
fascination.
Dr. Richards turned in his seat. He looked back down the
aisle toward coach, then up toward the curtain that closed off the small galley
in the front of the plane.
I finished the article on Seattle and turned to a two-page
spread on finding the right pet sitter. There were some cute pictures of a
long-haired mutt laughing up at his mistress just before she was to leave him
at a kennel. The kennel looked several steps in grade above my own apartment.
Someone swished through the curtain behind us and Dr.
Richard’s hand tightened on his knee until the knuckles were white. He ducked
his head and tugged at the brim of the cap until the black-haired flight
attendant passed and had gone through the curtains in front. I looked down at
my magazine again, no longer seeing the pictures.
Maybe he is in some kind of
trouble. Maybe real trouble.
A man rose from a seat behind us and made his way forward
toward the toilets. Andrew drew away from the aisle and pressed his hand to his
forehead as if nursing a miserable headache. I looked around the small
compartment. A man of the size and appearance of Andrew Richards was going to
find it tough to hide. If he had traveled to San Francisco often, some of these
people might remember him. I knew the women would, even through the sunglasses
and the tacky tourist outfit.
The curtains parted in the front and the black-haired flight
attendant backed out, pulling a drink cart being pushed by a steward. Andrew
took a deep breath and tried to hunch down in the seat further, but he was too
tall for it to do any good. I didn’t give myself a chance to think why. I just
reached over and touched his arm. “Trade seats with me,” I whispered.
“What?”
I nodded at the approaching flight attendant. His eyes
widened, then he nodded quickly, and I raised the seat arm, slid across, and he
stepped over me. He dropped down into the window seat, adjusted his cap, turned
over on his shoulder, and closed his eyes. I flipped the magazine open again
and bent over it.
“More champagne, Miss?”
“Oh, no. No, thank you.”
The flight attendant reached down and took the glass from my
hand. “Oops,” she said. “Forgot to collect this, didn’t I?”
I smiled and shrugged.
She looked toward Andrew. “Something for..?” She stopped
when she saw that he appeared to be sleeping. “Oops, again,” she whispered. She
smiled, shrugged and she and the steward moved the cart on to the next block of
seats.
I turned the magazine page slowly, and then pivoted to look
around the seat down the aisle. The steward was handing a juice box to a little
girl, the flight attendant a bloody Mary to the girl’s mother. I looked back at
Andrew. He was watching them through the division between the seat backs. “Thank
you,” he said in a low voice.
“No problem.” I turned back to the magazine.
“I don’t know why you’re helping me after that idiocy in the
car.”
I shrugged and turned the page. “It’s nothing.”
“Melanie, I wish you’d give me a chance to explain. You
deserve an explanation, and frankly, I need you to know. You know who I am, you
know where I’m going, and I need you to understand why so that later, when you
see the newspapers, you won’t tell the police.”
I dropped the magazine and it slid off my lap into the
aisle. I fumbled it back into the seat pocket. “Police?” I cleared my throat. “Newspapers?”
He took off his sunglasses and fiddled with the earpiece,
staring down at his reflection in the slightly mirrored surface. He folded the
glasses, hooked them over the neck of his t-shirt, then looked at me. “Yes, I’m
afraid so. Will you listen?”
I studied his face for a long moment. “Yes,” I said, “I
will.”
He sighed. “Good. Thank you. Look, I am sorry I got you
involved in any of this. I don’t usually drag my students into my personal
life, especially into a mess like this.” He inched around, pulled up on the
denim of his jeans, and drew up one long leg so that he could sit looking
directly at me. Through the window the sun had lowered to the south and west. The
light coming in behind him picked up the gold highlights of the red-blond hair
on his arms.
But I was too involved in what he was saying to notice.
He lifted his cap, raked his hair back and rubbed briskly at
his scalp, then tugged the cap back down again. “You know, it’ll help to talk
about it, to lay it all out, get it straight in my mind.” He looked beyond me
for a minute then continued. “It started long before this morning, really, now
that I think about it, in grad school. You know anything about my work?”
“Some. I’ve read your books, but start at the beginning.”
“Well, you know if you’ve read my books that developmental
biology fascinates me. How and why does one cell--the human egg--divide and in
dividing differentiate to become lung, bone, heart, brain? Of course, we know
the pattern is in the DNA, but how is it read? If all cells have the same
chromosomal information, why does this cell become lung, but it’s sister cell
becomes liver? Why does this cell become blood vessel, and not just any blood
vessel, but one that feeds this section of this heart muscle? How can anything
as intricately designed as the human body come from what is really just a
single, tiny sack of organized chemicals? And why does something sometimes go
so terribly wrong and a cell begins to divide uncontrollably until it chokes
the life out of the body it was once meant to support?”
I was nodding and grinning involuntarily. This was it. This
was why biology had drawn me to it, and why I had headed for the University
after reading Dr. Richards’ first book.
“If you can decipher even the tiniest portion of the puzzle,
that portion can become a key. Find out why a cell turns on, and you can turn
it off if things go haywire and it becomes cancerous. Find out how a liver
becomes a liver, and maybe when someone comes in to a hospital with damage
caused by disease, or accident, no problem! Just zip in there, correct the
problem, and let the repaired cells gradually and naturally replace the damaged
ones. Oh, I know this is simplistic, but it’s the dream.”
“And?”
He grinned. “Yes, there is an ‘and.’ It appears that we’ve
found something.”
His voice was casual; his eyes were not.
I leaned forward. “So, are you going to tell me, or do I
have to shake it out of you.”
“Now, there’s the Melanie I’ve seen at the lab with Chuck.” He
started to laugh, but it caught in his throat, and he turned away.
“What?” I asked.
“My lab,” he said. After a long silence, he continued: “The
explosion took out all of the files. All the lab notebooks are gone. All the
records. The sprinklers took out the computers.”
“Oh no,” I said, remembering the sodden, blackened papers
and the twisted metal that were all that remained of the file cabinets.
“A device, a bomb was planted in the files.”
“I heard it was a bomb. But why?”
“Well, the police think I did it in an attempt to destroy my
work to cover up the fact that there was no work. That it had all been a fake. That
I’m nothing but an empty-headed rich-boy playing at being a scientist. That… Well
you get the idea.”
“But that’s absolutely outrageous!” I said. “I mean, I haven’t
known you long, but even I can see that that’s patently ridiculous. So what if
you’re rich and look like a Greek go...” I stopped, blushed a shade between
bright scarlet and purple and turned forward.
Oh God, I’ve never asked for
anything before. I’m asking now. Please, please let the plane crash.
There was a long, awkward silence.
“Melanie.” Dr. Richards cleared his throat and started
again. “Thank you for, well, believing that I couldn’t have done it. After the
day I’ve had...”
Oh good. We’re going to
pretend he didn’t hear.
“Of course I believe it,” I said. “What I can’t figure out
is why anyone would think you would plant a bomb in your own lab. The entire
idea is ludicrous. Why would anyone blow up a biology lab anyway?”
“I’ve been thinking about nothing else,” he said. “I told
you we’d found something. We’ve isolated a clone of a gene that appears to be
significant in the control of the development of blood tissue. If we’ve found
what I think we’ve found, we’re talking about a major discovery. Chuck and
Lance and I have been working on it for a year and a half now, keeping it quiet
because I didn’t want anything to get out prematurely, you know, Cure for
Cancer Found, The Secret of Life Discovered. I get enough garbage from the
tabloids without that.”
I nodded. I’d seen the spreads, not so many at first, but
since he’d started dating Caren Granzella, he couldn’t look cross-eyed without
some checkout line throwaway splashing it across the cover. He was right. If
this got out, they’d have a field day.
“Besides that, the first drug company that gets their hands
on this could make millions, billions even. That much money makes people forget
a lot of things.”
“But who did it then? Who else knew about your work?”
Dr. Richards started to speak, but he couldn’t seem to get
the words out. He pulled his leg down and turned to face forward again, a look
of utter weariness on his face.
“If there is a worst part of this whole mess--besides what
happened to Lance--that’s it,” he said finally. His voice was low. “There was
only one other person who knew. My major professor in grad school has been
working on the same project. We’ve been collaborating, sharing resources. I’ve
been confiding in him, asking his advice. I’d heard rumors in the last year or
two that his ethics weren’t what they should be, but I defended him at every
turn. John Philip Harrison was only one small step from sainthood, as far as I
was concerned.”
“Oh, no,” I said, shaking my head. “Wait, Dr. Richards.”
“Andrew, please.”
“Andrew. You’re talking about J. P. Harrison. I mean, he
almost won the Nobel Prize a couple of times, didn’t he? I’ve seen him on talk
shows. He just couldn’t be, I mean, he just isn’t the type. Look, maybe it was
someone else who found out about your work somehow. Somebody in his lab.”
“Melanie, I’ve known J.P. for about seven years now: four
years grad school and three since. For the last several months, well, something
has been different, wrong. All of a sudden J.P. had a new Mercedes, was taking
flying trips everywhere, showing up at fundraisers where I knew good and well
that the tickets topped a grand, hobnobbing with very wealthy people. At first
I thought, great. The guy deserves some fun. But it escalated and then I
started hearing little comments, choice little remarks about me that appeared
to come from him, questioning the value of my work. I tried to talk to him
after I’d heard four or five things, but he was always unavailable, always had
just stepped out, or just gone into a conference.”
“Maybe it was just coincidence.”
“Was it coincidence that it all started, after the
discovery? After I’d FedExed him thumb drives holding the bulk of our results?”
“Oh.”
“Yeah, ‘oh.’ So, I stopped sending him any information. And
after a couple of weeks, he called me.”
“And?”
Andrew shook his head. “I was straight with him. I told him
I’d heard some disturbing things, and that I didn’t feel that it was right to
continue our collaboration until we’d had a chance to talk. He blew. He started
accusing me of holding out on him, trying to steal the thunder, to steal his
work.” Andrew looked at me. “It was my work.”