Nick of Time (A Bug Man Novel)

by Tim Downs

  “You already have a cake picked out,” he said to her.

  “So?”

  “What if I wanted a different one?”

  “Do you?”

  He shrugged. “I don’t even like cake.”

  “Then what are you whining about?”

  “My steering wheel doesn’t work.”

  “What?”

  “When I was five years old, my mom took me to Kennywood—it’s an amusement park near Pittsburgh. I wanted to get on the bumper cars, but when they started the ride I kept crashing into everything.”

  “Nick, what are you talking about?”

  “I grabbed the little steering wheel and started turning, but nothing happened. Then it dawned on me: The steering wheel didn’t work—it was just something to hold on to while I smashed into things.”

  Both women just stared at him.

  “Why don’t you girls go ahead,” he said. “I’ll be over here if you need me.”

  2

  ENDOR, VIRGINIA

  But the wedding is in less than a week,” Alena said.

  “I know,” Nick said, “and I’ll only be gone for one day.”

  Alena slumped low in the passenger seat of Nick’s ’94 Plymouth Sundance with her bare feet pressed against the dashboard and her knees almost against her chest. Just above the glove compartment there was a crack in the plastic; when she pushed against it she could feel it pinch the heel of her leathery foot.

  “But why do you have to go now?”

  “I told you—they only meet once a month, on the last Tuesday. That’s today, so I have to go.”

  Nick’s car sat idling in the wide gravel driveway in front of Alena’s double-wide trailer in the secluded mountains above Endor. The car’s heater, set to low, was just enough to take the chill off the morning air. Outside, a light mist was beginning to lift from the ground, revealing the bluets and trillium and columbine in their brilliant spring colors. Across the gravel driveway, Alena’s dogs pressed their noses against the kennel fence, watching the conversation shift back and forth between their master and her husband-to-be as if they were the gallery at a tennis match.

  “You could at least turn off the engine,” Alena said.

  “I don’t have time. The meeting’s at noon and it’s a threehour drive to Philadelphia.”

  “So you’re just going to drive off and leave me with all these wedding details?”

  “What details?”

  “There’s always details before a wedding—everybody knows that.”

  “Like what?”

  She turned and glared at him. “Details. Do I have to itemize them for you?”

  “You’ve got your dress. The cake’s being delivered. Gunner’s setting up the church and Rose is bringing the flowers. All we’ve got to do is show up.”

  “Well, that just shows what you know.” Alena sank even lower in her seat. She wished she could think of some major complication Nick’s one-day absence would cause, some last-minute detail that would make it impossible for him to leave—but she couldn’t. She hated to admit it, but Nick was right; it was a small and simple wedding, and there was very little left to do. She just despised the idea that Nick would want to leave. She wanted him to be there, with her—not because he had to, but because he wanted to.

  But all she could think to say was, “But you just got here.”

  “Alena.”

  “Who drives off and leaves his fiancée the week of the wedding? Who does that?”

  “Alena, we’ve been over all this. Do we really have to go over it again?”

  “Yes. We do.”

  Nick groaned.

  “Stop moaning,” she said. “You sound like one of my dogs.”

  “I feel like one of your dogs.”

  “Just tell me again—what’s so important that you have to drive to Philadelphia less than a week before our wedding?”

  “I’m a member of an organization called the Vidocq Society,” Nick said slowly. “I have been for several years. The organization was named after a famous nineteenth-century Frenchman named François-Eugène Vidocq, a pioneering detective who—”

  “Skip the history lesson,” Alena said. “Just get to ‘why.’ ”

  Nick let a moment pass before starting again. “The Vidocq Society is a group of volunteers from all over the world, representing more than seventy different forensic specialties. We’ve got pathologists, odontologists, psychophysiologists, fingerprint experts, blood spatter analysts, homicide reconstruction specialists, explosives experts, and even a forensic entomologist—me. Once a month we all meet for lunch at the Public Ledger Building in downtown Philadelphia, and after lunch we review cold cases for law enforcement agencies all over the country—cases that have left them stumped. We help solve those cases by bringing our various forensic disciplines to bear. To remain a member of Vidocq, I’m required to attend at least one meeting per year—and my schedule hasn’t allowed me to attend in months.”

  “So go next month,” Alena said, “or the month after.”

  Nick reached into his jacket pocket and took out a folded piece of paper. “And as I told you before, a couple of weeks ago I received a letter from an old friend of mine—a fellow member of Vidocq. His name is Peter Boudreau; he was at Penn State when I was doing my doctorate there. Pete is a forensic botanist—Pistil Pete, we used to call him. He wrote me this letter, and he asked me to attend today’s meeting. This is what he wrote—”

  Alena took the letter from his hand. “I can read, Nick.” She opened the letter and looked at the single paragraph of handscrawled text. It said:

  Hey Nick,

  Haven’t seen you at Vidocq the last few months. Where have you been? Probably out picking maggots off a corpse somewhere. Too bad—we’ve really had some interesting cases the last few months. I’ve been working on one since last fall and I think it’s about to come together—but I could really use a bug’s-eye view on this one. You’re the man, Nick—I think you could help me crack this one wide open. Don’t miss the May meeting, OK? Help me wrap this one up—it’ll give us a chance to catch up too.

  Pete

  P.S. Heard you’re getting married. Condolences to the missus.

  Alena looked at Nick. “Is that what this is about? Professional pride? ‘You’re the man, Nick.’ ”

  “It’s about helping an old friend,” Nick said. “And yes, it’s about professional pride too—what’s wrong with that? He needs a bug man, and I happen to be one. It’s what I do.”

  Alena looked at him. “Do you love me as much as I love you?”

  “What?”

  “You heard me.”

  “What kind of a question is that? There’s no possible way to quantify—”

  “Stop that!”

  “Stop what?”

  “Thinking about everything. There are different kinds of questions, Nick. Some questions you’re supposed to think about and some you should just feel. Can’t you tell the difference?”

  Nick paused. “That doesn’t make any sense.”

  “Does everything have to make sense?”

  “It helps.”

  Alena shook her head. “Man—you are a piece of work.”

  “I can’t argue with that.”

  Alena looked at Nick’s eyes—the soft brown orbs that seemed to float behind his lenses like the undulating globules of a lava lamp. The thick lenses of his glasses made his irises look enormous; Alena thought they looked like drops of chocolate that might melt and drip away at any moment, leaving the lenses empty and white.

  “It’s just for one day,” Nick said. “I’ll be back by noon tomorrow.”

  “I know,” Alena said.

  “Then what’s the problem?”

  Alena fumbled for the words. “It’s like our cars have been headed down this road together, you know? Then all of a sudden I look up and your car is pointed toward Philadelphia. You’re there, I’m here—it just makes me nervous, that’s all. I won’t even be able to talk to you.
”

  Nick smiled. “That reminds me—I got you something.”

  Alena sat up straighter. “You did? What?”

  Nick opened the center console and took out a shiny new iPhone.

  “You got me a cell phone?”

  “So we can stay in touch while I’m gone. You don’t have a landline up here, and I worry about you sometimes.”

  “You worry about me?”

  “Sometimes.”

  Alena grinned.

  “You like it when I worry?”

  “Worrying means you care. I like it when you care.”

  “So the more I worry, the more I care; and the more I care, the more you like it. In other words, the more miserable I am, the happier you are.”

  “Pretty much.” She punched a few buttons and watched the screen. “I’ve never owned one of these . . . It looks complicated.”

  “If it’s too technical, get one of your dogs to explain it to you.”

  “Funny.”

  “You’ll get the hang of it. You don’t need all the bells and whistles for now—it’s just so we can stay in touch. I entered my cell phone number as a ‘Favorite.’ If you want to call me, all you have to do is push this and this.”

  She did as Nick instructed, but nothing seemed to happen.

  “It doesn’t work,” she said.

  “Well, there’s a small problem. There’s no cell tower way up here in the mountains.”

  “You bought me a phone that doesn’t work?”

  “It works—it just doesn’t work up here. But I tested it down in Endor, and you can get reception down there.”

  “So I have to go down to Endor every time I want to make a call? Nick, you know I hate those people.”

  “You’re not going down there to talk to them, Alena; you’re going down to talk to me—you just need a signal, and Endor is the closest place. So here’s the deal: I’ll call you tonight at exactly nine o’clock. All you have to do is drive down to Endor and wait for my call. Okay?”

  She looked at the phone. “So what you’re saying is, if I fall and break my leg up here, all I have to do is drag myself down to Endor and dial 9-1-1.”

  “Pretty much.”

  “Thanks for worrying about me.”

  “Any time.”

  “Seriously,” she said, “it was sweet of you to think of it.

  So . . . nine o’clock tonight, right?”

  “Nine o’clock.”

  “What if you’re gone more than a day?”

  “I won’t be.”

  “What if you are?”

  “Then I’ll call you at nine o’clock the next night and every night I’m gone. Okay? Now let me get out of here, will you? The sooner I go, the sooner I’ll be back.”

  3

  Nick headed east on I-66 and tried to enjoy the few remaining miles of quiet country scenery before he reached the creeping suburban sprawl from the capital that began around the town of Manassas. After that the land would smooth and flatten and the majestic century oaks would gradually disappear, replaced by flowering crepe myrtles and slender maple saplings planted in the front yards of seemingly endless subdivisions. What is it about the human species? Nick wondered. In less than a hundred years they’ve gone from living in a one-room farmhouse on fifty acres to a three-story colonial on a quarter-acre lot.

  And the traffic—Nick knew that by the time he reached the beltway the cars would be bumper-to-bumper at seventy miles an hour, racing into the city like bees toward a hive. He would have to slug his way north around the beltway to the I-95 exit near Knollwood, then wade through the morning mire of traffic in downtown Baltimore, Newark, and Wilmington before he would finally reach Philadelphia. He checked his watch; he figured he could just make it if there were no major accidents or road repairs. That’s a big “if,” he thought.

  Nick shook his head. Why did I waste so much time with Alena?

  He opened his cell phone and punched in a number from memory.

  After a single ring a voice responded: “FBI. Nathan Donovan.”

  “Can you explain something to me about women?”

  There was a pause on the other end of the line. “This isn’t a call-in show, Nick. I’m kind of busy here.”

  “I just had a strange conversation with Alena.”

  “The first of many, trust me.”

  “There’s something I don’t understand about women.”

  “Does that come as a surprise? You don’t understand the entire human race.”

  “I have a Vidocq Society meeting in Philly today. I got a letter from Pete Boudreau a couple weeks ago inviting me up. You remember Pete, don’t you?”

  “Yeah, Pete Boudreau—some sort of pathologist, isn’t he?”

  “No, Pete’s a forensic botanist—a palynologist, to be exact.”

  “A what?”

  “Sorry—I forgot the FBI dictionary is limited to two syllables. Palynology—the study of pollen and spores. Forensic botany is the use of plant anatomy and ecology in legal investigations, and palynology is a subdiscipline of botany. Actually, there are several subdisciplines of forensic botany . . . There’s limnology and dendrochronology—”

  “Nick, you called me forty-five seconds ago and I’m already bored. I think that’s a new record.”

  “Well, anyway, Pete’s a palynologist and we go way back. I met him when I was doing my doctorate at Penn State and he was a professor in the botany department. I bumped into him for the first time there in DC, at the U.S. Botanic Garden over on Maryland Avenue. They had an Amorphophallus titanum on display, and I drove all the way down from State College to get a look at it.”

  “I know I’m gonna hate myself for asking this, but . . . they had a what?”

  “The titan arum, they call it—a carrion flower. Ever heard of it? It’s the world’s largest flower, and it only occurs naturally in the rain forests of Sumatra. The flower has to grow for years before it ever blooms, and then it only blooms for a single day— two at the most. Then the whole thing collapses and you have to wait years to see it again.”

  “Since when have you been interested in flowers?”

  “I’m not—but the amazing thing about the titan arum is that it smells just like rotting meat. Isn’t that amazing? A plant that pollinates itself by attracting the same blowflies and flesh flies that are attracted to a decomposing body. I just had to see that.”

  “Gee, I hope you took some pictures.”

  “I did better than that—I told them I was doing research for my doctorate and they let me test the thing with a temperature probe. Guess what? The plant generates heat—it not only simulates the scent of a decaying body, but it simulates the temperature too!”

  “The wonders of nature. I need some coffee.”

  “Of course, I was interested in the plant from an entomological perspective, but Pete was fascinated by it as a botanist.”

  “Nick.”

  “Pete was a real pioneer in forensic botany, you know; the field barely existed before he did some of his research.”

  “Nick.”

  “What?”

  “You said you had a question about women, remember? This is turning into a book report on People Who Are as Weird as I Am.”

  “Oh, right. Well, Pete asked me to meet him in Philadelphia today and I’m headed up there now. I told Alena about the meeting weeks ago and she seemed fine with it then—but this morning she practically begged me not to go.”

  “Nick—you’re getting married in less than a week.”

  “So?”

  “So she probably wants you around.”

  “Why would she want me around? There’s nothing for me to do.”

  “You’re asking me? I still can’t figure out why she’s marrying you.”

  “She just wasn’t being reasonable.”

  “Reasonable—you want her to be reasonable.”

  “I’d appreciate it, yes.”

  “Let me tell you something, Nick. When Macy was pregnant with our f
irst we did the whole Lamaze routine—the childbirth classes, the breathing techniques, the whole nine yards. So when the baby was about to pop we headed for the hospital, and there I was in my powder-blue scrubs and my hairnet—and I had nothing to do. And it was taking hours, because the kid had a head like a bowling ball—and I still had nothing to do. So I casually mentioned that there was a game on in the lounge . . . You know what that’s called, Nick? That’s called being reasonable. Thank God I left my handgun in the locker.”

  “Is this story supposed to encourage me?”

  “No, it’s supposed to make you think. Give up on reasonable, Nick—there’s no such thing. ‘Be reasonable’ just means ‘Think like I do’—and she doesn’t. But hey, don’t let that bother you; I don’t think there’s anybody on the planet who thinks like you.”

  “Give up on reasonable,” Nick said. “That won’t be easy— I’m a very reasonable person.”

  “Are you kidding? You’re the most erratic and unpredictable person I’ve ever met—who’s not in prison. And that could always change.”

  “ ‘Erratic and unpredictable’? Seriously?”

  “You’re engaged, aren’t you?”

  Nick stopped to consider Donovan’s words. He had a point—proposing marriage to Alena was probably the most unpredictable thing Nick had ever done, and everyone who knew him was flabbergasted by the news of his engagement. Some of them actually broke out in laughter, while others simply refused to believe. Everyone who knew Nick seemed absolutely convinced that pigs might fly, and the Cubs might win the Series, but the Bug Man would never, ever take a mate.

  “Is that what I’m doing?” Nick wondered aloud. “Being erratic?”

  “Now stop right there,” Donovan said. “Let me tell you what’s happening, Nick. It’s a week before your wedding and you’re starting to second-guess yourself. Everybody does that— men and women alike. ‘Am I doing the right thing? Do I really know this person? Am I about to make the biggest mistake of my life?’ ”