The Real

by James Cole

  “I don’t think it’s appropriate for you to be snooping through June’s personal belongings, especially considering the circumstances,” retorted Dr. Cain.

  Hoping to remind his boss that there once was a time when his presence here was legitimate, Jeremy said, “You know, June and I were able to finish up the viral prep that she and I were working on before she – well, you know…”

  “Died?” Dr. Cain had no trouble articulating the word even if Jeremy did. “Yes, I know. June informed me of that at least two weeks before she died.”

  Jeremy could think of only one reason why Dr. Cain would make an issue of Jeremy’s hesitancy to speak directly of June’s dying. He, like the police, must believe that Jeremy had something to do with her murder, and he meant to rub Jeremy’s nose in it.

  “I was just making sure you knew,” mumbled Jeremy.

  Jeremy waited for Dr. Cain to say something. The crushing silence forced Jeremy to carry the conversation. He asked, “Will you be reassigning June’s research to someone else?”

  “To tell you the truth, I really haven’t given it much thought.”

  “Well,” Jeremy began, trying in vain for some sort of reconcilement, “if there’s any way I can assist you, let me know. I would be glad to work with whoever takes over June’s project.”

  “I don’t think that will be necessary,” came the curt reply.

  “Well then, allow me to clean up my mess here and I’ll be on my way.” Jeremy reached down to put the rest of the papers back into the drawer.

  Pointedly, Dr. Cain spewed the words, “If you don’t mind...,” and placed a surly hand on Jeremy’s shoulder.

  There was no mistaking the threatening intent of the gesture. In an evasive motion Jeremy twisted from Dr. Cain’s grasp and stood up. Executive director or not, Jeremy could no longer conceal his fast-rising anger.

  “You know, Dr. Cain, I am just as devastated as I’m sure you are over what happened. June and I were the best of friends.”

  “For your sake, I hope you can convince the police of that.”

  Jeremy stood defiantly in the face of the executive director’s accusations, wanting to lash out but trying to hold back. In a quivery voice, Jeremy finally said, “I didn’t do it.”

  “I think you should leave now.” The flush of Dr. Cain’s face matched his red hair.

  Jeremy maintained his position in the face of his accuser. Enunciating every word for emphasis, he said, “I did not do it!”

  In a growling tone, Dr. Cain said, “Get the hell out of here.”

  “Whatever you say, boss,” replied Jeremy with a tone absent any deference whatsoever.

  Jeremy high-tailed it out of the lab, sorry that he had ventured here in the first place but more sorry he had been caught. For perhaps the first time, Jeremy realized the magnitude of the trouble he was in. Would everyone turn against him?

  *****

  Back at home, Jeremy found it difficult to settle his emotions. He paced from one room to the next and fretted over the confrontation he had just endured with Dr. Cain. Why did he not think of a better excuse to be snooping about June’s desk beforehand? He should have prepared for the possibility that someone might confront him. Still, Jeremy was astounded to receive such a hostile response from the executive director.

  Jeremy wondered if his days at the Facility were now numbered. Had the countdown to the day he would receive his termination letter begun? Jeremy assumed his standing in the department to be primarily dependent on his status as a suspect in June’s murder. In spite of the bad blood just spilled between him and Dr. Cain, Jeremy could see no reason why he could not continue in the pursuit of his degree, once all this was behind him.

  And, after everything, Jeremy had failed to place his hands on June’s research notebook. Unfortunately, he could only assume that it would eventually wind up in the hands of the police. Once discovered, with Dr. Cain acting to decipher it, they would figure out that the work contained in it was unrelated to June’s official research. And, because it also contained annotations in Jeremy’s handwriting, it would only be a matter of time before they connected him to it. The police would then, no doubt, work to weave those findings into the larger tapestry of their case against him.

  In retrospect, Jeremy realized he should have been forthcoming with the police regarding the unauthorized research. He considered whether or not he should come clean with them now but decided it was too late for that. He could only hope that they would discover other clues and that those would lead them in the direction of the real killer.

  But what if they don’t? he asked himself frankly. What if they continue down this path and charge me with June’s murder?

  Shell-shocked at what he saw as a progression toward that, the worst possible outcome, Jeremy stared blankly off into space. If they charged him, what would he do? Would he face it? Would he run? There were no easy answers.

  When the focus of his eyes returned, his gaze settled on the short stack of papers in the tray of his printer. Absentmindedly he retrieved the pages and thumbed through them. They belonged to the purple lotus article, the one authored by Claire, her boss – Dr. Nevins – and the other person whom Jeremy knew nothing about, Maurice Anthony.

  The article contained two reproductions of photographs. One was a close-up of a purple lotus bloom. In the caption of the other picture, a wide shot of a swampy area awash with the plants, he noticed something quite intriguing; something he had missed before. The caption read:

  Figure 2: Habitat of newly discovered variant of the water lily family, Nymphaeaceae.

  The base word of Nymphaeaceae was, coincidentally, nymph, one of the same words Grady had used in reference to the strange goings-on of Reefers Woods. However, that wasn’t the point of primary importance. Several weeks had passed since Jeremy first read the article. At that time, he had assumed it to be largely irrelevant to his quest to unlock the mystery of the hippie queen. She discovered some new plant – so what?

  Now, however, realizing that the terms lotus and water lily refer to the same family of plants shed a blinding new light on the subject. Jeremy’s prior analysis of the Unreal had turned up a potential connection between it and certain compounds found in the flowers of water lilies. Initially, he assigned no significance to that finding, but remembering the Unreal’s lavender (purplish) tint and perfumed (flowery) smell and learning that Claire discovered a purple water lily, or lotus, in Reefers Woods, begged the question: Could the purple lotus discovered by Claire, the hippie queen, be the source of Monika’s Unreal?

  *****

  Reefers Woods – September, 1969

  (Thirty-nine years ago)

  The Fruit

  What in the hell is this?

  Claire couldn’t believe her weary eyes. The sun was rising, and she and her mates were just going to bed after partying all night. On her bed was what could only be described as a small branch. From its leaves and purple flowers she easily recognized that it came from a lotus plant. Judging by its size, it came from a quite large specimen, bigger than any she had ever seen. Her first reaction was one of anger at the boy. Certainly he had left it here for her to find, but why did he damage what was obviously such an unusual and pristine plant? All she needed were the blooms.

  Carefully she picked the flowers and placed them with the other blooms on the drying tray she kept hidden on the floor behind her bed. None of the others, save the boy, knew of Claire’s growing stash of the dried flowers. She expended a great deal of time and energy canvassing the woods and, though they worked independently of each other, she employed the boy to do the same. He worked diligently and became quite good at finding and harvesting the increasingly hard-to-find blooms. She paid him in the currency of hard candy, chocolate and soft drinks.

  Earlier in the summer, the supply of healthy plants and of the flowers they produced was plentiful. Most of the lotus plants grew in a series of shallow backwater pools in a location the hippies called the main swamp. Initi
ally, Claire and her friends had more than enough flowers to meet their requirements, but as the summer of the first harvest wound down, so did the availability of the blooms.

  Now it was September and the hippies could no longer indulge themselves as frequently as they had become accustomed. They spent more and more time scouring the swamps for the dwindling supply. Inevitably, the plants and their habitat suffered, so much so that Claire declared the swamps off limits to everyone, save herself. She could only hope that the plants could rejuvenate themselves and that next year’s harvest would not be impacted.

  Claire undressed for bed. When she went to move the plant from her bed, it hung on something. What she saw next did not compute. Concealed under her pillow was some sort of strange fruit, about the size of a large orange, but deep purple and with a slightly oval shape. Astonishingly, the fruit was connected to the limb of the lotus plant, as if it had grown there.

  Is this some kind of joke? she asked herself.

  Was this really a fruit produced by one of her lotus plants?

  Had she only been exposed to the lotus plants for this one growing season, she might have come to the conclusion that she and her friends simply picked every lotus bloom before it had the chance to begin to mature into fruit, but that was not the case. She first discovered the swamps late last year, after the plants had grown unimpeded all summer, and in all that time, she had not once come across anything resembling this.

  Where in God’s name had the boy found this?

  Claire could not wait to find out, but when she went into his room to rouse him, she found his bed empty and neatly made. The boy was not there.

  Chapter 31

  Wednesday, December 3

  Jeremy studied Claire’s article well into the wee hours of Wednesday morning. He had missed the lotus-lily connection on his first read-through and he did not want to overlook any other important details, but nothing else popped out.

  Even after he turned out the light, he could not get to sleep for thinking about the possible implications. If the Unreal was in fact derived from the purple lotus, who figured it out? Who knew where the lotus fields were located, and who was aware that the blooms of the plants possessed the euphoria-inducing drug? Might Monika have accomplished all of this or was someone else supplying the Unreal to her?

  The morning sunlight, sliced by the slats of the vertical blinds, summoned Jeremy to the waking world. He had not meant to sleep all night on the couch. The music of the antiquated clock radio in his bedroom was barely audible and had not been enough to wake him on time. Jeremy had missed his organic class but he didn’t really care. This morning he had in mind a task separate from his school work.

  Without bothering to shower or shave, Jeremy got dressed and left his condo. He rode his ‘Busa past the Facility and parked on the sidewalk beside the biology building. He wanted to look up Maurice Anthony, the last of the three authors listed in the purple lotus article, as he was the only one about whom Jeremy still knew nothing.

  Even though it had been two months since his one-and-only visit to the biology department, Ms Lang, the perky old secretary, recognized Jeremy the moment he walked into the front office of the biology department.

  “I knew you’d come back for me.” Ms Lang smiled and flipped her gray hair back in an exaggerated motion. “No one can resist my charms for long.”

  “You’ve got that right,” replied Jeremy, playing along. “I only hope you think of me half as much as I do you.”

  “Flattery will get you anything you want,” she said, clearly enjoying the banter. “Now, tell me, what is it that you want?”

  “Like last time, just to borrow your key to the old file room in the basement…”

  “Be my guest.”

  After spending half the morning in the musty old file room, Jeremy finally hit pay dirt. Just as he suspected, Maurice, like Claire, worked under Dr. Nevins. He attended the University for two years, starting in the fall of 1969 and, like Claire, did not receive a degree. The handwritten notes scribbled at the tattered base of his transcript were almost illegible. Jeremy worked to decipher the words but the best he could come up with was, “Student disappointed on 9/1.”

  It wasn’t until Jeremy solicited Ms Lang’s help that they were able to figure out what it actually said: “Student disappeared on 9/1.”

  “That’s odd,” commented Ms Lang. “What could they mean by that?”

  “I’m not sure,” replied Jeremy, “but I’ve got to go now. Thanks again, Ms Lang.”

  He hustled out of her office with his head down and his mind racing. Though he chose not to disclose it to Ms Lang, the annotation on the transcript jostled something in Jeremy’s memory.

  Back at his condo, Jeremy searched though the folder containing the archived articles he had printed out that included any news that happened in or around Reefers Woods during the last 40 years or so. Specifically, he was looking for those that told of the two men who, separately, ventured into Reefers Woods but never returned, at least not alive. The first he ran across told of one who committed suicide in his car at Sticks River Landing. Jeremy put that article aside and skimmed the headlines of the other articles until he found the one that read, SEARCH SUSPENDED FOR MISSING HIKER. The hiker, who disappeared in the same general area, was last seen on September 1, 1970. Though the article included only sketchy personal information, it gave enough: He was a biologist – actually, a graduate student – who worked at the University. Below that, written in the stark contrast of black over white was the missing hiker’s name: Maurice Anthony.

  This explained the note – student disappeared – scribbled at the bottom of the transcript from the biology department. Maurice Anthony, the biologist who worked under the same research advisor as Claire, was the same Maurice Anthony who went missing late in the summer of 1970 while hiking in Reefers Woods.

  On a roll, Jeremy directed his attention to the suicide victim claimed by Reefers Woods. It didn’t take much investigation to reveal that the deceased, a Dr. Zachary Taylor, also had a connection of sorts to Claire and the other hippies. He was identified in several of the earlier articles as the medical examiner at the time of the commune fire. It had been his job to identify the victims’ burned bodies.

  According to the old newspaper article, the medical examiner shot himself in December of 1970, two months after Maurice Anthony disappeared. Claire and the other hippies met their demise on December 21, 1969. Was it only happenstance that all these people – Claire and the hippies, the biologist, and the medical examiner – died in Reefers Woods during the span of one year? The only obvious common thread that wove all this misfortune together was the area itself.

  A superstitious man might steer clear of Reefers Woods. Jeremy wondered if his interest in the area might also end badly, especially in light of Grady’s warnings, but it was far too late for Jeremy to divorce himself from his interest in Reefers Woods.

  *****

  There was only one means to prove Jeremy’s hypothesis, one method to verify that Monika’s Unreal heralded from Claire’s purple lotus: Analyze the purple lotus for the presence of the Unreal. But to do that, Jeremy would first have to find the purple lotus. He carefully reread Claire’s article but it gave no specific location of the lotus swamp other than its placement somewhere within Sticks River National Forest.

  If Jeremy meant to prove his hypothesis, he would have to find the purple lotus on his own. He needed maps, detailed enough to demarcate any wetlands within Reefers Woods. Jeremy searched on the web, starting with the keyword phrase Sticks River National Forest Maps, until he uncovered a site that offered high resolution aerial photographs of the area. Best of all, he could view them for free.

  Jeremy spent the next hour poring over the overlapping slides. The bird’s-eye view made it easy to follow the ribbon of Sticks River Road from Grady’s house to the gravel parking lot of Sticks River Landing. By zooming all the way in, even the rickety old pier was discernable on the high-resolution p
hotograph. Jeremy retraced the route of his and Tavalin’s trek along the shoreline from Sticks River Landing to the secret beach. Sticks River flowed into the lake a few miles north of the beach, and he easily pinpointed the rapids of The Devil’s Crotch at the only place where the river split in two. It required a little more time to pick out the interiorly-placed cemetery and the ruts that linked it to Sticks River Road.

  The most useful feature was that the coordinates of any spot on the map could be ascertained. In this fashion, Jeremy was able to record the latitude and longitude values for a handful of sites that might potentially harbor Claire’s purple lotus. Among these were several small inland lakes and a string of swampy areas that roughly paralleled Sticks River. He should be able to navigate to each water body of interest by plugging the coordinates into his portable GPS unit.

  The only problem Jeremy could foresee was the likely difficulty of passage through the rough terrain and dense forest. With a chuckle he wondered if he might bump into Maurice Anthony, still lost after 40 years inside Reefers Woods. It occurred to Jeremy that Anthony might have gone there for the same reason that Jeremy now contemplated going. At the time he disappeared, Anthony and his boss were writing the paper that would be published sometime the following year. Might he, in his capacity as a biologist, have ventured into Reefers Woods to search for the purple lotus swamps first discovered by Claire? With Claire dead, might he have gone there to obtain additional lotus samples for their research? Though pure conjecture, Jeremy thought the scenario to be reasonable. What better reason could Maurice Anthony have had for traipsing around Reefers Woods?

  In lieu of all the work laid out before him, Jeremy wondered why he couldn’t just ask Monika if she knew of any connection between the Unreal and the purple lotus blooms. If she did, and admitted as much, he would have his answer and would have saved himself a heap of trouble. As reasonable as this idea seemed on the surface, Jeremy had to acknowledge the pitfalls of any contact with Monika. Just being in her presence, as he had been in the ice cream shop, was almost more temptation than he could resist. In the end, Jeremy decided against contacting Monika as he did not want to risk letting Jinni down again, loving her as he did.