Mary smiled. It was domestic conversation, she knew, that dated from when the first humanoids themselves climbed down from trees. The man made a show of arguing but was quickly silenced by a sharp retort. He didn’t want to antagonize his wife. The traditional delicacy of monkey brains, eaten right from the skull, is reserved for the successful hunter’s family, and the woman of the house divvies up the portions.
Two of the village children ran over to Mary and took her hands. She was their favorite. Mary loved these simple, generous people, especially the kids. She wondered how long their way of life would survive. The rainforests were shrinking, though not as fast as on the east coast of South America. The Indians loved her back, admiring her fortitude. She could sit for days in a steady rain studying the plants and animals that fascinated her. Mary couldn’t explain to them that at least she was usually comfortable, unlike the many hours she spent shivering and hiding from her father back in Ocean Falls, off the coast of her own Columbia, British Columbia. The spelling was different, but Ocean Falls had almost as much precipitation as the Colombian rainforest, an average of 170 inches of chilling rain annually. To Mary, walking around with Chocó hunters during a downpour was as pleasant as taking a warm shower. In fact, she always carried a bar of soap with her and when alone stripped naked to wash.
One of children, the boy of about five, had a small sack in his hands, which he held up proudly. Mary knew what was in it but made a show of delight. A tiny frog hopped out, only to be snatched in mid air by the little girl and returned to the sack. Mary was momentarily startled until she saw that the little girl’s hand was wrapped in plantain leaves. Some adults handled a Rana Tóxico, the Spanish name for Poison Dart Frog, without even that rudimentary safety precaution. Just touching the skin of the tiny amphibian could be painful, as Mary knew from experience. She suspected that many of the hunters had built up immunity to the poison, at least externally. But when the toxin entered the bloodstream, via dart or ingestion, it was another matter. No animal was immune from its effects internally. Except for one local snake, anything that ate the brightly colored little frog died.
There are several varieties of Poison Dart Frogs in South America. Most are truly beautiful, with skins dappled with colors so bright they almost hurt the eyes. But none are as deadly as the one the little girl held, which had the scientific – and appropriate – name of Phyllobates terriblis. In fact, biologists consider it the most potentially lethal of all animals, its batrachotoxin even surpassing the potency of sea wasp jellyfish venom. One milligram of the thumb-sized frog’s skin-secreted alkaloid poison can kill 20 men or two bull elephants. The minute grooves in the darts used by the Indians contained a fraction of that amount and it had been more than enough for the unfortunate spider monkey.
When Mary got to her hut she carefully added her new frog to a small wicker basket containing a dozen others. Using techniques taught her by the villagers, she had been collecting toxin from her little captives for months. The villagers never asked her for any. The frogs were all over the jungle. She was due to go back home and knew she would have trouble taking any live frogs with her. There were plenty of South American dart frogs in North American research labs, and even in private hands. But they had limited use for the kind of research Mary wanted to do. The native frogs synthesized their poison from chemicals obtained from the bodies of specific insects, mainly forest ants and beetles, consumed locally. Once on a different diet in laboratories, such as fruit flies and crickets, Rana Tóxico became just another Kermit.
***
The Rev. Humphrey Naulls was waiting impatiently for his daughter in the Avianca terminal in the Vancouver International Airport on Sea Island. It took Mary more than an hour to clear customs. Fortunately, her academic credentials were iron clad, with letters from both Colombian and Canadian officials and colleagues explaining why the attractive woman scientist was allowed to bring in the clearly marked samples of various venoms into North America.
The vials were in a small lock box and officials made a show of counting them against a list that had been wired to them from Bogota. No one bothered to check the toothpaste tubes and face cream jars that contained the bulk of the toxins Mary had collected. In them was enough batrachotoxin to depopulate Canada’s Western Provinces.
Not that Mary planned mass murder. On the contrary, most of the venom would go into legitimate research to further her career. But she had planned ahead.
There would always be enough left over for selective murder.
When Mary finally greeted her father, there was no kiss, or hug, despite the fact that she’d been gone more than a year. A casual observer might have assumed that Mary’s recent conversion to Catholicism, the result of her time spent with a dynamic Catholic missionary from Spain who worked with the Chocó villagers, explained her father’s coolness. After all, Rev. Naulls served one of the largest Lutheran flocks in British Columbia, and was locally famous for flying his own plane to remote congregations. He did, in fact, consider her a traitor. But their personal schism ran deeper than religion. Mary Naulls hated her father, for what he did to her mother, and to her.
Her mother, a morally weak woman to be sure, was dead. The official cause was heart trouble. But Mary blamed her father for driving the woman to an early grave with his philandering. Not that Mary missed her mother, who had never lifted a finger when Rev. Naulls satisfied his urges with late night visits to his daughter’s bedroom that lasted until she went to college.
“How long will you be home for?”
It was the first words spoken by her father since they had climbed into his single-engine Cessna Skycatcher for the two-hour flight to Ocean Falls. Mary looked down at the waters of Queen Charlotte Sound while she answered.
“Just a few weeks. I start my new position in Ontario in September.”
“I had hoped you might stay longer.”
She looked at her father. At 70, with a full head of white hair and a ruddy complexion, he was still a handsome man, catnip, she was certain, to lonely widows in remote congregations. She smiled grimly to herself.
***
Once home in Ocean Falls, they maintained a polite civility. A week into her stay, Rev. Naulls told his daughter he had to make a pastoral visit to Masset, a small town on Graham Island, part of Nakoon Provincial Park, 200 miles to the northwest. He asked her to go along.
“I can’t, father,” she replied, thinking the timing couldn’t be better. “I have too much to do preparing for my new position. But let me pack a breakfast for you.”
Mary watched his plane take off due west over the Pacific Ocean. She wondered how long he would be able to resist the smell of freshly baked sausage biscuits. Then, smiling, she went into the house.
***
In his plane, 45 miles out and having reached the Cessna’s 14,000-foot cruising altitude, Rev. Naulls put a half-eaten biscuit on the seat next to him and started to make his scheduled turn to the north toward Graham Island. Much to his surprise, the Skycatcher, normally a nimble aircraft, responded sluggishly. He looked at his instrument panel to see what the problem might be. The dials were blurry. He blinked, but that didn’t help, especially since he had trouble blinking. He was also having a hard time concentrating, and he suddenly realized that it wasn’t the Skycatcher that was responding sluggishly. He was.
The minister’s lips and tongue felt numb and he had a strange sensation in his throat. It felt like the temporarily unpleasant feeling one has in the dentist chair after accidentally swallowing a topical gum anesthetic. Except this time the feeling didn’t go away. He tried to swallow, and couldn’t, succeeding only in dribbling biscuit and sausage bits down his chin.
The plane started to roll, but with an awkward lurch Naulls was able to hit the autopilot and it straightened out. Panicking, he tried to reach for his microphone but discovered that he couldn’t move his arm. A moment later, he couldn’t move anything at all and he was having trouble breathing.
With a top speed of 12
9 miles per hour and a range of 541 miles, the Cessna flew on for just under four hours before running out of fuel. It began losing altitude in a slow glide but with the autopilot now useless soon tilted on one wing and stalled at 12,000 feet. Nose heavy, it began a steep dive and smashed into the frigid waters of the North Pacific approximately one minute later.
It was a much longer plunge, resulting in an exponentially greater impact than experienced by a spider monkey falling in a rain forest. But, as with the monkey, it made no difference to Rev. Naulls.
He was already dead.
***
Because his intended destination was so close to the Alaskan border, the United States Coast Guard joined their Canadian counterparts in the search for Rev. Naulls, who, according to radar plots, had inexplicably flown almost 500 miles straight out over the Pacific until his plane presumably ran out of fuel.
The recovery effort was called off after three days, amid steadily deteriorating weather. A Canadian Coast Guard officer told Mary it was unlikely that either the plane or her father’s body would ever be found. As an islander, Mary knew that the Coast Guard took great pride in bringing closure to the relatives of those missing at sea. She wound up consoling the officer, who couldn’t know how really comforted she was by the news that her father’s body was lost.
There was, of course, a large memorial service that Mary found almost unbearable for reasons that would have shocked those attending. But she managed to convey a passable look of bereavement and a stoicism that impressed many and masked her disdain for words of praise she found hypocritical.
The next day, she informed LexGen, the company she was scheduled to start work for, that she now needed time to settle her father’s estate, for which she was the sole heir. Her new employers were very understanding. As one of the world’s leading experts in biological toxins, thanks to her work in South America, Dr. Mary Naulls was a valuable commodity to the startup pharmaceutical research laboratory.
A month later, flush with the proceeds from the sale of everything her father owned, plus a quick but generous settlement from an aircraft insurance company anxious to avoid litigation and publicity over the mysterious death of a well-known pastor, Mary Naulls moved to Ontario to start her new life.
***
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Lawrence De Maria began his career as a general interest reporter (winning an Associated Press award for his crime reporting) and eventually became a Pulitzer-nominated senior editor and financial writer The New York Times, where he wrote hundreds of stories and features, often on Page 1. After he left the Times, De Maria became an Executive Director at Forbes. Following a stint in corporate America – during which he helped uncover the $7 billion Allen Stanford Ponzi scheme and was widely quoted in the national media – he returned to journalism as Managing Editor of the Naples Sun Times, a Florida weekly, until its sale to the Scripps chain in 2007. Since then, he has been a full-time fiction writer. De Maria is on the board of directors of the Washington Independent Review of Books, where he writes a regular column:
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