Interference

by Brad Parks

The first person I saw in Neurology was Yvonne, the nurse I had befriended on my previous visits. I could tell she recognized me.

  When I stopped in the hallway, she stopped too.

  “Hi,” I said. “I know this sounds ridiculous, but Dartmouth-Hitchcock seems to have lost my husband. Is he here by any chance?”

  She said something in reply, but her head was turned, so I couldn’t hear it. I repositioned myself so I could see her mouth.

  “I’m sorry, what did you say?” I asked, feeling stupid.

  “I haven’t seen Dr. Bronik,” she said loudly and slowly.

  “Would you mind checking the computer for me?”

  Maybe someone, somewhere, had finally thought to log him in.

  Yvonne went behind a desk.

  And no.

  Still no Matthew Bronik.

  “Maybe check with Dr. Reiner?” Yvonne suggested.

  I thanked her for the idea, then found a quiet spot in the corner of the Neurology waiting area. I hated having to make important phone calls on my cell phone. It had the same kind of captioning as my landlines, but I couldn’t read and listen at the same time. I had to stare at the screen, wait until I was sure the person was done talking, then respond. It made it like I was on satellite delay.

  Nevertheless, the office manager was patient with me. And once I explained what was going on, she agreed it was troubling and volunteered to get Reiner on the line.

  Finally, some help. Surely, if anyone could cut through medical bureaucracy, it would be an insistent doctor.

  I walked Reiner through my journey from the information desk, to the ER, to the ICU, to Neurology. When I was done, there was nothing on my screen for a short while. Then the words started coming.

  “Well, I’m sure he’ll turn up. I’m going to have my office manager keep Matt’s record open. If there’s a new entry, we’ll know immediately and we’ll call you, okay?”

  I momentarily returned the phone to my lips to say, “Thank you.”

  He started talking again. I was getting tired of the screen and the delay, so I just mashed the phone’s earpiece against my hearing aid and hoped for the best.

  “In the meantime, why don’t you check with Hanover Emergency Medical Services?” he suggested. “I’m sure they’ll have a record of where they took him.”

  “That’s a good thought. Thank you, Doctor.”

  “Let us know when you find him, okay? I want to be able to see him immediately.”

  “Thank you, Doctor,” I said again, then hung up.

  I looked up the number for Hanover EMS. When a man answered, I explained my situation.

  His answer was definitive:

  “We haven’t made any pickups at Dartmouth today.”

  He was a natural shouter. I didn’t need my screen.

  “Are you sure?” I asked.

  “I’m the dispatcher, ma’am. I know where all our units are, all the time, and I haven’t sent any squads to Dartmouth. I’m sorry.”

  “Is it . . . is it possible a different ambulance service picked him up?”

  “Your husband works at Dartmouth?”

  “Yes.”

  “Not UMass Dartmouth. Dartmouth College in Hanover, New Hampshire?”

  “Yes,” I said, exasperated.

  “Well, then I don’t know what to tell you. We’re the only game in town. We cover Hanover, Norwich, Lyme, the whole area. If your husband was picked up by an ambulance, it would have been us. But we haven’t made any trips to Dartmouth today.”

  “Do you have any idea where he might be?” I asked, aware I sounded frantic.

  “I’m sorry. All I can tell you is, he’s not with us.”

  I ended the call, now damp everywhere from sweat. I finally shed my down jacket, stood up, and took a few deep breaths.

  Then inspiration struck: Matt had the Where’s My Phone app. My phone was programmed to track his.

  I pulled out my phone, swiped, and prodded. But elation was soon followed by disappointment.

  The blue blob was centered on Wilder Hall. It had been left behind.

  Just in case, I called his number. It rang twice; then my screen read: “Hey, Brigid. It’s Sheena.”

  “Hi,” I said into the mouthpiece, keeping my eyes on the screen. She was soft spoken.

  “If you’re looking for Matt’s phone, he left it on his desk in the lab.”

  I grunted to signify my disgust.

  “But I don’t think he was working on the virus,” she added.

  “What makes you say that?”

  “Because I came up here not long after he made his departure and the laser was cold. If he had been using it, it would have been warm. It takes a while for the thing to cool down.”

  “Oh,” I said.

  “I’ve been keeping an eye on him like I told you I would. I just didn’t want you to think he had gone behind your back or anything.”

  “Then why did he get sick?”

  “Who knows? Maybe there are still some traces of the virus around that he accidentally came into contact with?”

  “But you’ve never gotten sick,” I pointed out. “And you’re in there all the time.”

  “Maybe I just didn’t touch the same things or my immune system fought it off,” she said. “How’s he doing anyway?”

  “I, uhh, I don’t know. They . . . can’t find him.”

  Just saying the words made me feel crazy.

  “Isn’t he at the hospital?” Sheena asked.

  “No, I’m here now. They have no record of him. His doctor doesn’t know where he is. The ambulance people say they haven’t done any pickups at Dartmouth today.”

  “But how is that possible?”

  “I’m trying to figure that out. Sheena, did you actually see Matt get taken out by the EMTs?”

  “Well, yeah. It was kind of a big thing, you know?”

  “What, exactly, did you see?”

  “I . . . I was in my office and I heard . . . kind of a commotion. Then someone said, ‘Oh no, Professor Bronik must be doing that thing again.’ Everyone was sort of gathered on the stairs. He was strapped to the stretcher and just completely out of it. Exactly like last time.”

  “And you saw him on the stretcher?”

  “A bunch of us did.”

  “Did you see him get loaded into the ambulance?”

  “No, I just went back to my office, but . . . Brigid, what’s going on?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “I just don’t know.”

  Sheena offered me the same reassurances as everyone else. I quickly chased her off the phone.

  Then I turned toward the window in the waiting room and looked out on a world that was still spinning at its usual thousand miles an hour, oblivious to the terror I was feeling.

  Beppe Valentino and Sheena Aiyagari were brilliant scientists, not people prone to delusions. They had both seen the same thing: Matt taken out of his lab on a stretcher.

  From there . . . well, from there, the trail ended. No one, it seemed, knew anything.

  It was giving me the same feeling I sometimes got when Matt talked about his work. And every time I said “I’m not sure I get it,” Matt just smiled and replied, “Don’t worry. Neither does anyone else.”

  The most famous and venerated proof of quantum mechanics is the double-slit experiment. By demonstrating that light acts as both a particle and a wave, it neatly shows what’s known as quantum superposition—the head-scratching fact that a single particle can seem to exist in multiple places at the same time.

  Which is utterly baffling.

  Except it was still less baffling than what was suddenly going on with my husband.

  He didn’t seem to exist anywhere at all.

  CHAPTER 10

  Without even realizing it, Emmett Webster was staring at the picture. Again.

  It was the one of the Leisure Travel Vans twenty-four-footer, which he and Wanda should have been in right now. They probably would have been poking their way through the C
arolinas, looking for the ultimate roadside barbecue, luxuriating in early spring weather that wasn’t even a rumor yet in New Hampshire.

  Instead, here he was, sitting in a cubicle at New Hampshire State Police headquarters, the result of a series of decisions that no one besides him seemed to like very much.

  The first was that he wasn’t going RVing. He couldn’t really afford it anymore—their calculations had involved two pensions, not one. Plus, traveling the country with Wanda felt like an adventure. Doing it by himself felt like being a long-haul trucker.

  This was much to the distress of his children, who thought Dad was giving up on his dreams.

  The second was that he wasn’t retiring. Maybe a little of that was also financial. It was mostly that he had already seen what having too much time on his hands looked like.

  This was much to the distress of his bosses, who had been hoping to get him out of the way.

  There was a new colonel in charge of the New Hampshire State Police, some young guy who had come in from Massachusetts to allegedly clean house, even though Emmett thought the house was just fine the way it was.

  The colonel had already promised Emmett’s job in Major Crime to someone else, another guy from Massachusetts, which had resulted in Emmett being reassigned to Missing Persons.

  It had been a week and a day since he had started there. He had, at first, been quietly hopeful. There was something about Missing Persons that felt like it could be a calling. After all, he missed Wanda every damn second.

  Except, like so many other units, Missing Persons had a new captain: Angus Carpenter, another Masshole brought here by the colonel.

  So far Carpenter had made it clear he hadn’t wanted this transfer to happen, that he had fought it and lost, and that therefore he considered Detective Webster’s presence as welcome as hemorrhoids.

  The captain hadn’t bothered to find out that Emmett had the highest homicide clearance rate in Major Crime three out of the last four years, or that he performed better than most of the new recruits on the PT tests, or that his marksman scores were as good as anyone’s on the whole force.

  Worse, the guy hadn’t given Emmett a case yet. How was Emmett supposed to prove he wasn’t some deadweight dinosaur if he didn’t actually get some work to do?

  So there he was, staring at that picture, when in walked Captain Carpenter, the buzz-cut bastard, and began his idea of an exchange of pleasantries.

  “Detective,” Carpenter said.

  “Captain,” Emmett replied.

  “We have a report of a person missing from Hanover.”

  Emmett took a clean notepad out of his desk drawer. The younger cops put everything on computer. Emmett was an analog guy, and would remain so as long as someone, somewhere, was still making pens.

  “The name is Matthew Bronik,” Carpenter continued. “He’s a physics professor up at Dartmouth. His wife called Hanover PD, saying her husband was taken away in an ambulance after having some kind of seizure, but now no one can find him. Hanover PD checked with Hanover EMS and with Dartmouth-Hitchcock, then called us. I’m sure it’s some kind of paperwork screwup.”

  “Got it, Captain,” Emmett said. “I’ll run it down.”

  Carpenter left without another word. Emmett was already a little deflated. This professor was probably at the hospital as a John Doe. Or Dartmouth-Hitchcock spelled his name wrong. Or it was something else benign and obvious.

  Something that couldn’t possibly turn into a real case.

  Which was why Carpenter gave it to Emmett.

  Still, he started making calls. He leaned heavily on Dartmouth-Hitchcock, getting a high-level administrator who knew all the tricks with the patient database. They went through every possible spelling of Bronik, and Matthew or Matthews as a last name instead of a first name, and all the other permutations they could think of.

  Nothing hit. And there were no John Does in any of their facilities.

  His next call was to Hanover EMS, where he got a dispatcher who said, “I heard from the wife already. We haven’t seen the guy.”

  Emmett made him double-check anyway. And, in fact, every single one of their rigs was accounted for.

  Then Emmett called every other hospital on both sides of the Connecticut River, large and small, within an hour drive of Hanover.

  And the urgent care centers.

  And the other area EMSs.

  Nothing. Nothing. Nothing.

  Cops develop instincts, especially after thirty years. And Emmett was getting the feeling something strange was going on. There were certain kinds of people who had an unfortunate tendency to slip through society’s cracks. People who were addicted to substances. People who didn’t have homes. People who suffered from mental illness. People who lacked documentation. They vanished largely because the system wasn’t set up for them, and maybe—when Emmett was being cynical—because the system didn’t care about them as much.

  None of that applied to a Dartmouth professor.

  Dartmouth professors didn’t just disappear.

  An hour later, Captain Carpenter was again standing at the entrance to Emmett’s cubicle.

  “Found him?” Carpenter asked.

  “Not yet, sir.”

  Carpenter’s face registered annoyance.

  Before he could say anything, Emmett added, “But I will. Don’t worry, Captain. I got this.”

  CHAPTER 11

  Would it be six hours this time?

  Or eight?

  Or longer?

  Beppe’s call had come in at 1:57. It was now closing in on eight o’clock.

  I was sitting in our living room, distractedly swiping at my phone. I had that irrational worry that if I didn’t keep the screen lit, I might miss an incoming call.

  From the corner, a grandfather clock—a family heirloom that ended up with me when no one else wanted it—seemed to be ticking slower than usual.

  It reminded me of one of Matt’s favorite Einstein quotes, his famous tongue-in-cheek description of relativity: Time moves a lot faster when you’re sitting with a pretty girl than when you’re sitting on a hot stove.

  This was pure hot-stove time.

  Really, where was Matt?

  It wasn’t like he had been stricken and then wandered off, doing his zombie walk. Nor was he lying in a ditch somewhere, undiscovered.

  He had been taken away by trained medical professionals. They were taking care of him, weren’t they?

  I was at once furious—someone had to know something—and out of my mind with worry.

  That he wouldn’t come out of it this time.

  That some doctor or nurse had screwed something up badly, and now some health care executive was trying to figure out how they were going to explain it to Mrs. Bronik in a way that she wouldn’t sue them.

  Except I should have heard from one of those people by now. I had made it clear to everyone I could think of that, whatever was going on with Matt, I wanted to know.

  After the hospital, I had visited the Hanover Police Department, where an officer promised to “look into it.”

  Then I made another round of phone calls, checking all the places I had already checked, making sure everyone was on high alert.

  After that, I went home. Aimee was there to greet me, having met Morgan when he got off the bus, then parked him in front of apple slices and math homework.

  She was just as stymied as I was about Matt’s disappearance, which only unnerved me further.

  Aimee was competence personified, the kind of person who had a solution for everything. We had been typical sisters growing up: mortal enemies 2 percent of the time, best of friends the other 98—pretty much, whenever we weren’t bitterly fighting about something.

  We drifted apart for a while after college as we went our own separate directions. Then our relationship went through a metamorphosis in our late twenties and early thirties.

  Within the span of a few years, our parents died way too young and unexpectedly—a car crash for M
om and an aneurysm for Dad. Then Aimee went through a hellacious divorce, and I started losing my hearing. At every traumatic turn, we leaned on each other until it became our only way of getting by.

  After Morgan was born, she was coming up from her home in Connecticut so often to help out I finally convinced her to move here. She made her living as a forensic accountant. Most of her work was online or over the phone. There was no reason she couldn’t relocate.

  Having her so close bonded us further. Sometimes we’re so simpatico I swear we’re thinking with the same brain. It can get a little silly at times. Like, for example, there was my down jacket. The first time I wore it, Aimee scrutinized it, then burst into laughter. She had ordered the exact same jacket, in the exact same color (black), from the exact same catalogue (L.L.Bean), two days before I had. We called them our twin jackets.

  Our running, if macabre, joke is that I’d walk through fire for her, and she’d take a bullet for me.

  She was not only my best friend; she was Morgan’s de facto second mother—except more fun than the first one.

  She was also the person I automatically turned to in times of crisis. So when not even Aimee could guess what had happened? I was adrift.

  I had tried to distract myself with chores, but I couldn’t even concentrate enough to fold laundry.

  Dinner, likewise, had been pointless. I made mac and cheese for Morgan and ordered takeout for Aimee and, ostensibly, for myself. Except I was too nervous to eat anything.

  As I got closer to the six-hour mark and still had not heard from anyone, I was mostly just counting on Matt. He was going to come to—somewhere—and immediately ask to call his wife.

  Or maybe it would be eight hours. But it would happen. Eventually.

  Over the last half hour, my vigil had become especially quiet. I didn’t dare reach out to anyone else because, one, I had contacted everyone I could think of already; and, two, I didn’t want to miss Matt’s call.

  So I just sat there in silent misery, swiping and fidgeting.

  At 8:05, Morgan padded softly into the room, with Aimee just behind. She had been keeping him distracted, but the magic of Uno and Monopoly had slowly worn off.

  Our normal bedtime routine started at eight. Morgan should have been under the thrall of Matt’s narration of Harry Potter by now. They were in their third rereading of the series and had once again reached book five.