There were no signs of forced entry. He fitted the key into the padlock, opened it, swung the door, and stepped inside.
It was as he had left it—meticulously clean.
But someone had been there. He knew that immediately because of the smell. The cabin did not smell mildewed, as it would have if it had been boarded since April, when he’d left. It smelled fresh and clean, like the early October night outside. And that couldn’t have happened by merely opening the door. An effort had been made to air the place out.
He shone the light around. On the table was a vase of wild flowers just beginning to wilt. Next to it was a hand-lettered sign on typing paper that read: WELCOME HOME! He recognized the script as his sister’s. Charlie smiled broadly. He’d given Ginny a key to the cabin, told her to use it anytime she wanted. Thank you, Little Sis, he thought warmly.
Charlie lit a lantern, went to the sink, pumped the water until it was clear of rust, washed his hands, and splashed it across his face. After the long drive it was cool, good, smelled purer than the stuff from truckstop bubblers. He went to the fireplace and opened the flue. He’d arranged kindling and wood in the wood stove before leaving last spring, and the fire caught with a single match. He slumped down in his favorite chair—a La-Z-Boy recliner—and lit a Marlboro.
The fire crackled cheerfully, perfuming the cabin with birch smoke. Charlie looked at the fireplace mantel, a ponderous creation he’d hand hewn from a single oak. On it was the only article anywhere in the cabin that could pass as decoration: a framed photograph of Charlie and his father when Charlie was fourteen or fifteen years old. Except for the age difference, they could have been twins. Both had long, black, braided hair and sharp, narrow eyes. Both were tall and thin. Both were unsmiling—but were not frowning either. Across each of their faces was written the look of quiet, unassuming intelligence, a look of wisdom and common sense and maturity, even in the young boy.
The power of blood, Charlie thought, and there was no small degree of pride in the thought. No matter what else you do in this life, no matter where you go, what you profess to believe, you can’t escape the power of blood.
Yes, he was his father’s son. Part-time gypsy. Full-time survivor. Like Dad, an educated man with only a high school education. A man whose soul required the outdoors.
He looked at his father, and the memories were strong, good.
George Moonlight had introduced his only son to the woods before Charlie could walk. He’d taught him to hunt, trap, fish, make squirrel stew, skin a deer, build a birchbark canoe, construct a wigwam for shelter, distinguish the edible mushrooms from the poisonous ones, start a blazing fire without matches, find his way through fifty miles of virgin forest without compass or map. He’d taught him to appreciate the sound of a mother quail protecting her babies, the rich smell of a fall day, the crispness of a winter night, the majesty of a hawk soaring across a cloudless sky, the gentle tranquility and harmony of snow blanketing a field. He’d taught him to respect Mother Earth, drilling into his head the Quidnecks’ three commandments: Take only what you need; use all that you take; leave something for tomorrow.
Like George, who had been a Merchant Marine, a carpenter, a butcher, a guide, a mechanic, a farmer, a taxidermist (“jack of all trades, master of none,” Mrs. Fitzpatrick still said), Charlie knew early on he would never fit comfortably into the white man’s world. There could be no nine-to-five desk job with two weeks’ vacation and a Rolex watch come retirement.
Charlie needed room. He needed to travel. He needed to be alone. If he’d been another race, he would have been called a free spirit. Another generation, and the word would have been “hippie.”
The power of blood.
That had been George’s lasting lesson. To illustrate it, to make sure he could never forget, he had told and retold the stories passed down from George’s grandfather to George’s father to George—told them so many times, and in such vivid detail, that Charlie still knew them by heart almost thirty years after cancer had silenced the father he so desperately loved. Tales of the proud heritage of their people, the Quidnecks, a heritage the white man’s bulldozers continued to carve up and destroy in their quest for the only god developers worshiped, the almighty dollar.
There were limits. George had taught him that, too. Unlike some of his tribal brethren, who tried to turn the calendar back three centuries—a hopeless task, a pathetic one—Charlie was not totally scornful. Too many of his people had self-destructed trying to fight the tide of history—a history, granted, rife with loathsome and despicable chapters (George never let him forget how loathsome). Too many had wound up alcoholic, or destitute, or depressed, or chronically ill, with broken families and broken hearts. He himself had learned that lesson bitterly more than a decade ago, when he’d thrown himself into the land suit.
So he would not wage war. Like a scout working enemy territory, he would blend in where he could, quietly retreat when he could not. He would take the white man’s dollar, and he would smile while counting his winnings. He would live in the white man’s woods—especially since the suit, which had dashed all hope of a Quidneck reservation. He would have white friends if they were worthy. He would indulge himself in what he considered their civilization’s greatest contribution to mankind: modern machines. He would own a truck or two, a chainsaw, a snowmobile, a power auger for ice fishing, the Honda power generator he’d finally broken down and bought (it was still in the back of his truck). He would own a wide-screen TV and a remote-control VCR and a La-Z-Boy recliner. He would own them and make no apologies.
There was another factor regarding his accommodation—his treason, as some of his brethren considered it. A more important factor.
Blood was blood, and half of his had flowed from County Cork, Ireland. George had always reminded him of that. He was his mother’s son, too. Mother, a full-blooded Irish Catholic. He had not embraced her religion, but he had taken to heart her philosophy of life. Mrs. Fitzpatrick believed in judging a man not for the color of his skin, but for what he was; if she hadn’t believed that, she never would have married his father, a man her family considered dirt. In her blood flowed kindness and an ample love for children; that blood flowed in Charlie, too, although fate had not seen fit—yet—to send him children of his own.
He stamped out his cigarette. He was exhausted.
But he didn’t relish sleep.
Since late August he’d been having dreams. Bad dreams. Long, dark dreams, like tunnels that go on and on interminably toward an unknown end.
Like his ancestors, like his father, Charlie believed that what happened in dreams was as real as what happened awake. If someone spoke to you in a dream, it was that person’s way of telling you something he was thinking when awake. If an animal appeared, that animal was real. Spirits inhabited dreams, just as they inhabited the waking world. To them, both states were interchangeable. They could doom a man or help save him. They could guide a man to greatness, could steer him to great trouble.
It meant that lately, when he dreamed of a wolf, an evil wolf, Charlie didn’t believe it was a symbol for some unresolved fear lurking in a shadowy corner of his mind. It meant there was a real wolf, and if there were any questions to be answered, it was why this particular wolf was interested in him, and where this wolf could be found in the waking world, and how its evil was going to manifest itself.
The last few weeks had not been happy. He’d thought coming home would change that, but it hadn’t. The closer he’d driven to Morgantown, the more disturbed he’d been. He had a headache now. He sensed that whatever was causing his upset—whatever was sending the message to him—was here.
More strongly than ever, he sensed it involved his nephew.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
Friday, October 10
Maureen McDonald was appreciably worse.
She was back in Bostwick’s office this morning, two weeks and two days after her last visit. Her mother was on the verge of panic. Bostwick didn’t b
lame her. If she’d been his child, he’d have been there, too.
Because things didn’t look good. Things didn’t look good at all. Maureen’s temperature was 103.8, and she was enveloped by a faint, sweaty odor, an odor not dissimilar to garlic—the exact same odor, Bostwick thought with a chill, that terminally ill patients get as their days are winding down. She was still congested, still occasionally experiencing sharp abdominal pains (“like a knife,” she said, “stickin’ in my stomach.”). Every lymph node he touched was swollen and tender.
But he hadn’t needed an examination to conclude there was something really frightening going on with this child. He’d sensed that the instant she’d come into his office, shuffling listlessly, her head down, her shoulders hunched, as if the world no longer held any interest for her. A little more than two weeks ago she’d been under the weather, but if you peeled back the aches and pains a bit, you could still see her spirit, alive and well. Now there was barely a hint of that spirit. Now her eyes had a lifeless, distant glaze to them, as if she’d grown tired of seeing. The eyes especially bothered him. He’d learned there was more than a grain of truth to the old adage that eyes were windows to the soul.
If it hadn’t developed so quickly, he would have suspected cancer . . . or AIDS.
He hated what he had to subject her to, but there was no choice. It was time to go on a medical fishing expedition.
“Can you be in Pittsfield this afternoon?” he asked Susie when her daughter had shuffled back to the waiting room to claim the lollipop her eyes said she didn’t care if she had or not.
“Yes,” Susie said.
“Good. I want you at Berkshire Medical Center at one. I’ll call and make the arrangements. She’s going to need additional tests.”
“What kind of tests?” Susie sounded as if she’d just been sentenced.
“Blood tests. X-rays. Possibly a liver scan. I’ll have a better idea after consulting with Dr. Miller. He’s an internist at Berkshire Medical. Also a personal friend. A very capable physician.”
“Doctor?”
“Yes?”
“What do you think it is?” Bostwick could tell she was close to losing control. His eyes avoided hers, and the examining room suddenly seemed too small, too quiet, too warm. He’d been here before. Oh, yes. Ordering tests for suspected leukemia cases evoked this mood. Getting positive test results back and delivering that horrible news evoked it, too.
“I don’t know,” he said. “And I’m being completely candid. I just don’t know.”
“You don’t think it’s a cold, do you?” Susie said, allowing herself only the faintest trace of hope. “Like a really long cold?”
“No. Not anymore.”
“Is it a—a virus?”
“It could be. We’ll know better after this afternoon. I’m ordering her workup stat.”
Susie was silent. In the last two minutes Bostwick had seen the color drain from her cheeks. “You don’t think it’s—you don’t think it’s cancer, do you?” She pronounced that word superstitiously, as if saying it too loudly might jinx her.
“I’d be very surprised if it were. It’s very rare that cancer—any kind of cancer—develops so quickly.”
“It’s been two months almost.”
“And that seems like a long time—and it is, in terms of what you’ve been through—but disease-wise, two months is a snap of the fingers.”
“Doctor?”
“Yes?”
“She’s going to be all right, isn’t she?”
In all his years of medicine—years in which he had had a distressing amount of practice in delivering the grimmest possible news—he’d never learned how to answer this question without feeling like the world’s biggest asshole.
“I hope so,” he said. “Now I want you to get going. The sooner you’re there, the quicker you’ll be home.”
For two weeks he’d been trying to piece things together.
Something’s going on. Something I’ve never seen in almost a decade of family practice.
That much was indisputable now. This wasn’t your basic infection taking the scenic tour through the local youth, a bout of unusually stubborn rhinovirus that sooner or later would be put off the bus by said youths’ immune systems. It had gone on too long. On Morgantown’s scale, this was as close to a public health crisis as anything in Bostwick’s experience.
Because there were too many sick kids out there. Not a townful, or a schoolful, but seventeen kids (he’d counted) with no history of chronic disease or unusual susceptibility who all of a sudden were sick as dogs. Seventeen kids, up from a dozen two weeks ago, all with a common set of symptoms, all with parents getting more uptight by the minute. Some—roughly half, Bostwick calculated—seemed to be getting progressively sicker. A smaller group appeared to be on some kind of strange disease seesaw: flat on their backs one day, chipper as you please the next. A couple, Jimmy Ellis among them, seemed to have recovered and not relapsed—if that was the word. There seemed to be no rhyme or reason.
For two weeks he’d puzzled over it, so intensely that his wife and children had started to comment. For two weeks he’d done his homework. Taken out the case folders each evening and gone over every iota of information with a magnifying glass. He’d done follow-ups on every child, which had meant house calls in a couple of instances. Maureen was the first he’d referred to Berkshire Medical. He knew she would not be the last.
It could be almost anything.
That’s what was beginning to give him chills.
It could be bacterium. It could be virus. It could be some kind of obscure but cumulatively lethal poison. It could be something in the water at school. It could be something in the food. Something in the air. Something well documented in the public health texts. Something utterly unprecedented.
It could be the bloody Martians, for all he knew, dropping down to field-test their latest extraterrestrial bug on the unsuspecting inhabitants of Planet Earth.
If he’d been unable to pinpoint the cause, he’d at least uncovered some potentially valuable common denominators. All the children were prepubescent. All except for two preschoolers went to Morgantown Elementary, and both those preschoolers had older siblings who did. All lived on the same side of town, the side near Thunder Rise. There was something else, too, although he wasn’t sure how much significance he should attach to it. Nightmares. Each kid had reported frequent nightmares. Probably the fevers would explain that. Kids with temps not only had nightmares but could actually hallucinate.
So could brains poisoned with certain chemicals.
“Will you call me as soon as you get the results?” Susie asked on her way out.
“Immediately,” Bostwick promised.
“Thank you, Doctor.”
For what? he wanted to say. For telling you in so many words that your kid’s slowly going down the tubes, and I don’t have a clue why? For suggesting between the lines that if somebody doesn’t come up with something soon, little Maureen McDonald could actually . . . die? And as things stand at this very moment there’s not a blessed thing we can do about it?
“You’re welcome,” he said, and again he had to avoid eye contact. He felt defeated.
When she had closed the door, he picked up the phone and called the Boston headquarters of the Massachusetts Department of Public Health.
“Epidemiology,” he told the operator.
His question was if anything like this had been reported recently anywhere else in the state. The answer was not comforting. The answer was no.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
Friday, October 10
Evening
Abbie was upstairs in her room, finally asleep. Brad and Thomasine were in the living room. In the kitchen the dishwasher clanged and gurgled as it progressed through its final wash cycle.
They were drinking wine. Earlier there’d been some enthusiasm for watching Terms of Endearment, the film Brad had rented, but that idea had gone by the board without a whisper of
protest. The cassette was still in its case, which was still unopened on top of the VCR. A fire burned low but hot in the fireplace. The crackle of burning wood and Brad’s and Thomasine’s lowered voices were the only sounds in this cavernously comfortable house.
This was the third evening Thomasine had been over for dinner. The first time she’d fabricated some excuse and left shortly after coffee and dessert. The second time, just last weekend, she’d lingered over wine—one glass only, consumed in twenty minutes—she on the couch, he in an armchair. Tonight they were together on the couch. Not touching, although only two or three inches separated them. Just taking things as they come, Brad thought.
What had come so far was bowling him over.
Am I falling in love?
He couldn’t answer that. He wasn’t sure what that meant anymore. He’d known at seventeen, of course, the first time it happened.
Her name was Cissy, and just being in the same English class with her had made his whole body tingle, his tongue twist into a dry, sandpapery knot. But now, at age thirty-six, bearing the fresh scars of an ugly divorce, in the middle of raising a desperately loved child, swamped by the demands of a high-powered (if low-paying) career . . .
Maybe now he wouldn’t know what it felt like, the crazy business of falling off the world for someone. Maybe wouldn’t let himself know.
He wondered where Thomasine stood. Whether she was going through any of this same soul-searching about the nature and prospects of their relationship. Whether she thought she, too, might be . . . falling. She’d been at the paper a lot lately for her research, and it had been a good common ground for things to happen. And they’d been happening. There had been several lunches, three dinners, and they were getting to know each other pretty well. His divorce, for instance. She knew about that. Just as he knew bits of her past, including the most recent chapter in the romance section, a man from her stockbroker days she’d come within inches of marrying. She wasn’t eager to share details, but it didn’t take Sally Jessy Raphael to deduce that her relationship with a certain Paul Ingersoll had ended bitterly.
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