Grace blinked. “Actual drag races?”
“No, I mean at traffic lights, she used to look over at whoever was in the lane next to us, and then tell us to watch how she was going to beat them. Sometimes it would be some big macho guy. She’d wait crouched over the steering wheel until the light changed. Then she’d accelerate like crazy into the intersection. We’d look back at the car next to us and tell her how the person reacted. And then we’d all crack up.” He sighed, remembering. “Such fun. Things were so different, you know. She was always up for Frisbee and hide-and-seek after Steph and I got back from school. We used to roam around in the woods.” He rummaged through the photos in the tin, looking for one he remembered.
“Shall we look after dinner?” Grace said, eyeing the fettuccine tangled in the strainer.
“So what exactly did the new doc suggest?” he said as they sat down to eat.
Grace’s fettuccine squelched as she stirred it around in the sauce. “I told you. Aggressive treatments, which she admitted had risks, just to increase the chance of starting a pregnancy. She doesn’t understand why the miscarriages are happening any more than all the rest. I think it’s time to give up.”
Duncan tried not to show his dismay, but he could tell she’d noticed it anyway.
“Not give it all up,” she said, sounding defensive. “Just the ob-gyns.”
Duncan had been trying not to dwell too much on the new drug since the meeting with Weinberg. Could it change everything? He had to be careful not to build glass castles. But it was hard to choke back the thought that there could be hope, not just for his mother, but also for themselves. That he could play a part in making it happen.
“Tell me more about the hotshot,” Grace said, getting up from the table to get a dishcloth from the kitchen counter. “Did he say anything about what Salgado had been doing?”
Duncan knew she just wanted to change the subject. He had already told her a little about the meeting on the phone, when she called him about the doctor. He shrugged. “He had only met with Salgado once, apparently. They had been talking about writing this paper, but Salgado died before it got off the ground. Weinberg was okay. I think I’ll get along fine with him. A bit weird to be asked to coauthor an article with someone you only just met. But this isn’t academia. Probably happens all the time in industry.”
Grace wiped a dribble of sauce off the tabletop. “So what exactly are you going to write about? Do you get to decide?”
“We’re meeting again tomorrow. He’s going to give me a data set. Or at least that was what he called it. About fourteen hours of film footage. Clips of two different thovil ceremonies.”
“From?”
“The Galle area, he said. One film is of one group of exorcists doing a ceremony for a patient. The other film is of a different patient with a different group of exorcists.”
“Wait,” Grace said, frowning. “These are of real ceremonies? With real patients?”
“I know,” Duncan said, chewing a charred brussels sprout.
“This was in some village?”
Duncan nodded. He’d been incredulous too.
“But how? People are so secretive about all that. Even in the villages. All the stigma? Who would want to broadcast the fact that they’re having an exorcism?”
“That’s what I said,” Duncan said. When he had lived in Galle, it had taken months to earn enough trust to get the village folk to let him observe the ceremonies. He’d understood their concerns about having a foreigner in their midst. He had been careful to show his respect, remember that he was their guest. “But Weinberg said a local had filmed them, with a camera mounted at the scene.”
Grace shook her head, looking unconvinced. “At these things, aren’t people really worried about doing the ceremony properly and not getting possessed by demons and all that?”
Duncan pursed his lips, remembering Weinberg’s smirk when he’d expressed incredulity at the existence of the films. “Money talks, I guess. Weinberg didn’t say exactly that, but that seemed to be the gist of it. They compensated the patients’ families and the exorcists. You know thovil are really costly . . .” He smiled, realizing that Grace would have no idea about the cost of an exorcism ceremony. “Okay, right. The exorcists charge for their work, obviously. On top of that, they ask the family for a whole long list of materials for the thovil. All kinds of plants, incense, cloth, a rooster, pots for the offerings. A lot of other stuff. They need coconut leaves for weaving the offering baskets. Plantain tree trunks and coconut leaves for building the structures, the little hut-like things. You know, where the patient sits, where the demons are supposed to be confined. A lot of food has to be prepared, for the exorcists, the guests. Plus they need food for the offerings. All of it cost thousands of rupees, even back then. A lot more now, I’m sure. Anyway, Cinasat paid for all of it.”
Grace was still frowning, moving her fettuccine around on her plate. “Is that ethical? To offer so much money that people don’t have a choice? How can they refuse, even if they don’t like the idea?”
Duncan shrugged. That thought had made him uncomfortable too, at first. “Weinberg said they had ethical approval. They did a scientific study, so it had to go through an ethics review board. His justification is that the patients get to have the ceremony for free.”
Grace chewed another mouthful of pasta thoughtfully. “These are whole ceremonies? All-nighters?”
“Yeah. They’re long. They’re both Mahasona exorcisms.” Seeing her expression, Duncan explained, “You know there are different ceremonies for exorcising different demons, right? Depending on the patient’s symptoms. Different demons are responsible for different kinds of problems. These ceremonies are for Mahasona, the Great Cemetery Demon. One of the most powerful demons, responsible for a lot of bad stuff.” He grinned as she rolled her eyes. When he’d first met her, he had been steeped in the practices he had been observing in the villages near Galle. He had thought it strange that she knew next to nothing about demons and exorcisms, far less than he, a foreigner, did. It was only after he’d spent some time in the city that he realized her family was not unusual in being ignorant of all that, or in their disdain for the rituals village folk considered quite mundane.
“Why do you have to do this?”
“Cinasat wants me to take a close look at the mantra, the songs, the drumming, the dances, and so forth. Seems they’re trying to see what aspects of the ceremonies most affect the patient, across cultures. They’re also studying ceremonies in Indonesia and Thailand, apparently. I think it’s for a longer-term project. I don’t know why exactly. I’ll be told later, Weinberg said. It all sounds pretty secretive. A bit weird, but it’s because a lot of the information is proprietary. But for the moment, I am to just compare these two particular ceremonies.”
“But how could this possibly have anything to do with Cinasat?”
“You know I’m not supposed to talk about any of this. That nondisclosure agreement specifically mentioned spouses and partners. You know the penalty. The job, all the sweet benefits, all our stock options . . .”
“Come on, Dunc. You don’t really believe people don’t talk to their spouses.”
“Not that you’d tell anyone on purpose. But what if something accidentally slipped out in conversation? They’re apparently really rigid about the nondisclosure thing. That was one of the things Hammond beat into the ground at the party when I was talking to him in his study. We could lose everything.”
“As if,” Grace said, setting her fork down with a decisive thunk.
How would anyone know if he told his own spouse? It was absurd to expect people wouldn’t. “I don’t know a whole lot yet, anyway. They’re testing a drug. Apparently it does the same thing any healing ritual does.”
“I still find it hard to believe that a pharmaceutical company would accept that healing rituals even do anything,” Grace said.
“Weinberg said the same thing Hammond said back during the interview. That they hav
e empirical evidence that the rituals do help people. And that the rituals wouldn’t have been done for centuries, or who knows, millennia, if they didn’t do something for people.” Duncan shrugged. “The claim is that all these healing rituals work through the placebo effect, which they say is actually a biochemical reaction. Apparently this wonder drug of Cinasat’s takes a shortcut and makes this biochemical reaction happen.”
“What the hell?” Grace said. “Is that true?”
“Supposedly. They’ve apparently tested the drug—Symb86—multiple times, and it works. On a bunch of different conditions. Including CFS.”
Grace stared at him, and then at the tin of photos on the kitchen counter. “The photos. That’s why you were looking at them.”
“I’ve been trying not to get too hopeful,” Duncan said. He took her hand, trying to suppress the excitement he’d been feeling. “But Grace, imagine if it really works. What that would mean for her and Dad. After all these years. It would be like magic.”
He could see her skepticism. Grace, the scientist.
“What exactly does the drug do? Biochemically, I mean.”
Duncan shrugged. “We didn’t get into those details. It wouldn’t make much sense to me anyway. Weinberg said something about it mimicking the action of multiple neurotransmitters. But the point is, it works. They’ve demonstrated that it acts like a very effective placebo. Essentially, they’ve isolated the mechanism of the placebo effect. A regular placebo might work for thirty to forty percent of people, say. This would work for almost everyone.”
“How much evidence do they have?”
“A lot, apparently. They’ve gone through Phase 3 trials, which is pretty far along in the FDA approval process.”
Duncan watched her eyes widen. Evidently she knew more about what Phase 3 meant than he did. She blew out her breath in a long whistle. He could feel her excitement, the tightening of her hand in his. “My God,” she said. “Imagine if it is real. This could be the drug of the century. Of the millennium.”
“The best drug ever made,” Duncan said, grinning. He hadn’t been foolish to be hopeful. She saw how amazing this was too. He drummed his hands on the table. “That’s what I’ve been trying to tell you. I’m afraid to believe it, but if it’s true, and not just hype, then they’ve hit the jackpot. We’ve hit the jackpot.”
“My God. When’s it going to market?”
“Soon, apparently.”
“And how exactly is your work going to help?”
“Weinberg wants me to see if I agree that the two exorcisms are the same. These two patients are actually representatives of two groups of patients. One group got a drug that blocks our Symb86.” He could hear his own excitement. The drug really was theirs too. They had stock in the company, and he was going to be helping get the drug out. “Apparently, those patients didn’t get better. The patients in the other group didn’t get the Symb86 blocker, and they got better—most of them. In other words, when Symb86 is blocked, the ceremony has no effect. I think the idea is—that means the ceremony’s effect is the same as the effect of Symb86. Weinberg says there are other studies that also show this. But critics are going to say that the group with the blocker didn’t get better for other reasons—like they didn’t have a convincing ceremony done, not because of our blocker. So Weinberg wants to show—scientifically, he says, as if that’s the answer to everything—that both patient groups are having the same ceremony. That would be more support showing that our drug does the same thing that the ceremony does.”
“Hmm, okay, I guess if there’s already a lot of evidence, this could help clinch it. Can you tell if the ceremonies are the same?”
“Well, I’ve seen scores of Mahasona exorcisms, and I’ve studied the order of events in them, so theoretically, yes. But obviously, an experienced exorcist would be in a much better position to tell if the ceremony is being done right. I told Weinberg that, but he says they need someone who can write convincingly about the similarities, someone who can collaborate with a scientist. The problem is that I don’t think I can tell from just watching the films. You can’t see enough detail. But Weinberg wants me to try, as a preliminary effort. Later, as they said at the time of the interview, I’ll have to see some actual ceremonies. In Sri Lanka.”
“But that’s not for a while?”
“Yeah, not for months. There’ll be plenty to do here before that. Everything’s moving really fast. I’ll probably be putting in a lot of late hours. Every waking hour, probably. After watching these films, I have papers to write, and materials for the marketing campaign.”
“I don’t know,” Grace said, stacking the empty plates and dishes. “It’s all too good to be true, somehow. Like there’s a catch that’ll bring the whole thing crashing down. I’d want to see the data from all the trials. The medical data.”
Back down to earth. He could always count on Grace, Duncan thought. Sometimes he wished she would let herself, let them both, dream a little. But it was better this way. He had only been at the company two days. He should be cautious about the prospects for the drug. “There’s no way you’d get to see the actual data,” Duncan said. “I won’t be seeing much of it either. Just what’s relevant to what I’ll be writing. And even then, just the summaries, probably.” The actual data wouldn’t mean anything to him, anyway. He didn’t have Grace’s head for numbers and statistics.
He watched Grace carry the dirty dishes to the sink. “By the way . . . Did you, by any chance, tell Bent about the miscarriages?”
Grace jerked her head around. A serving spoon clanged onto the porcelain of the sink. “Of course not. When would I have done that?”
“I know, I didn’t think so. I just wondered.”
“Why?”
“I don’t know. This guy, Weinberg, he said the drug’s been shown to work for a whole lot of conditions, right? He mentioned CFS. And also infertility.”
“It works for infertility?” Grace stood still, her hands clenched around the chopping board.
“I just thought it was a bit of a weird coincidence. He just mentioned that in passing,” Duncan said. He wondered if he should have brought it up. “I’ll have to ask him more about it. I suppose it only works for some types of infertility, though. It can’t possibly fix a problem with the actual machinery, but then, so far everyone’s said your machinery’s fine.”
“It couldn’t fix a genetic problem,” Grace said. “Every miss at nine weeks. How can that be anything but a genetic problem?”
Duncan sighed. The thought passed through his mind again. Maybe she doesn’t want it to succeed. But she had been so miserable each time she miscarried. It was just that the misses had undermined her confidence, he thought. “All I’m saying is . . . there might be hope,” he said.
12
GRACE
Tuesday
“I forgot to tell you. I had lunch with Marla,” Grace said, over the clattering of the plates. “And then we found out something—”
The doorbell rang, a single long trill.
“Gordy, I bet,” Grace said, trying to order the dishes. No matter how much she tried to divert Duncan from the dishwasher, he always managed to get some dishes in while she was wiping the counters clean. Plates with bits of food still clinging to them were crammed in willy-nilly on the bottom rack. “He’s probably going to remind you again that the rear light needs to be replaced on the Honda.”
She heard Duncan’s surprised greeting. Evidently not Gordon Mann, their next-door neighbor. She wiped her hands and went out into the hallway. Standing on the doorstep was Mortensen, his stubbly blond hair glinting under the entry light. A middle-aged black man sporting a lush mustache and a lavender shirt stood beside him.
“May we come in?” Mortensen said.
Duncan waved the men into the living room. Again too late for a visit, Grace thought, glancing at her watch. She said nothing, focusing on trying to quiet the uneasy feeling in her chest.
“We are not disturbing you, I hope,”
Mortensen said in his soft voice, looking from Duncan to Grace.
The other man put out his hand. “Howie Dyson,” he said. “Internal Affairs.” Grace shook it, noting his authoritative air. His handshake, firm and a little abrupt, matched his manner.
“Internal Affairs?” Duncan said, looking perplexed. “You’re also part of the Ridgeville Police?”
Dyson merely looked gravely at Duncan. His tie, surprisingly for a cop, was patterned with arcs of psychedelic colors, although except for that, he was dressed conservatively enough.
“We have a couple of questions,” Mortensen said.
“What about?” Grace said. The uneasy feeling in her chest increased. She didn’t like the way Dyson’s eyes were resting on her.
“This is about Angie?” Duncan said.
“Our question is for Mrs. McCloud,” Dyson said. He made a little bow and corrected himself. “Dr. McCloud, is that correct?”
Grace felt her heartbeat accelerate. This had to be about Angie’s message. What was she going to say? She tried to compose herself, focusing on letting her breath out slowly. “Please sit,” she said.
Dyson settled on the edge of the sofa, his elbows on his knees. His trousers were gray and crisply cuffed, and his black shoes were polished to a sheen. “What did Ms. Osborne contact you about?” he said, his eyes fixed on Grace’s face.
“What do you mean?” Duncan said.
“You didn’t know,” Mortensen murmured. He had seated himself in one of the striped armchairs, dwarfing it with his height. He opened his notepad.
“There wasn’t anything to know,” Grace said. Then realizing she sounded defensive, she said to Duncan, “She just left me a message that morning, while I was still sleeping. It must have been after you left for your hike.” Standing there with her arms tight by her sides probably made her look defensive too, so she sat down next to Dyson, leaving as much space as possible between them.
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