Between the first and second pots of coffee they had rejected the hard kitchen chairs and decamped to the living room, where they now sat cross legged on the plush rug in front of the gas fireplace, which was turned on high enough to provide a warm, dry heat but not so high that they’d be tempted to start pitching files into the flames.
Nick flipped open the next folder on his pile and scanned the pedigree. There were ten members in the family who had agreed to participate in the study, four of whom had been diagnosed with Fenton’s Ataxia in their twenties and thirties. The clinical notes were dry and concise, painting a picture of progressive tremors, declining motor coordination, and a life expectancy of no more than fifty years, even with the current drug treatments.
He couldn’t imagine why anyone would want to halt the research on such a disease. Find the gene and you might find a better way to treat Fenton’s. Find a cure. And then— Nick glanced at the blackened square on the pedigree that denoted an affected male—thirty-five-year-old Frank Knickerbocker might have a snowball’s chance in hell to see his daughters—three circles on the pedigree that bore question marks because they were too young to be diagnosed—grow up and have daughters of their own.
Flipping to the clinical coordinator’s notes at the back of the folder, Nick grimaced.
Frank Knickerbocker appeared sullen and hostile on the day of examination and did not want blood drawn. Would suggest follow-up consent without wife’s presence.
Scowling, Nick added Frank and his family to the smaller pile on the coffee table.
Genie glanced up. “Find something?”
“Not really. Guy whose wife made him volunteer for the study but didn’t want to give the blood sample. The clinical coordinator recommended a follow-up.”
“Knickerbocker.” Genie nodded and grinned at his surprise. “I’ve got perfect recall, remember? I think there’s a second consent form at the end of the file. It turns out he wanted to help, particularly since it looks like he passed Fenton’s on to at least one of the daughters. He’s just terrified of needles.”
Nick was foolishly relieved to move the Knickerbocker file off the Maybe pile and over to the Not Really pile. There was something about the coordinator’s notes that brought the study subjects away from circles and squares on a piece of paper and fleshed them out into living, breathing fathers and mothers and…people.
At Genie’s raised eyebrow, he tried to explain. “This is why I do mostly theoretical stuff. I love the lab. I love the techs and the machines and the way you can ask a complex question, design the experiments to look at your hypothesis, and then never be sure whether you’ll have an answer in a day, a week, a month, or even years. That’s when luck and synchronicity take over. But this…” He gestured at the hundreds of file folders and the hundreds more lives they contained in distilled black and white notations.
“They’re people.”
He nodded. Of course she understood. She was Genie. “Yeah. People. Not theories, or test tubes, or little circles and squares on pieces of paper. People. Families. And they’re sick. Dying. How can you stand it? Why do you do it?”
“Because they’re sick and dying. Because they need me.” She picked up a lone folder, old and worn from a hundred perusals, and handed it to him. “Because of Marilynn.”
Nick found the name on the pedigree. Marilynn Churchhill. Born the same year he was, diagnosed with Fenton’s Ataxia at eighteen. Her circle on the pedigree was blackened to show affected status. There was a slashing line through it to denote death.
It looked like one of the hundred other Fenton’s pedigrees he’d scanned that night except that it was so much older-looking, as if Genie had carried it with her for a long time.
“She was my friend in college, the sister I’d always wanted to have. The mother I never did. She patted me on the head and let me sit with her at dinner and kept the others mainly away when they wanted to pick on the geek.”
Nick was getting heartily tired of Genie calling herself that, but before he could say anything, she had rushed on.
“It wasn’t until the hand tremors got so bad she couldn’t play the piano anymore that I got her to see a doctor.”
“It was Fenton’s.”
Genie nodded and Nick wondered whether she was even aware of the single tear on her cheek. “I graduated that year and went into the research fast track, swearing to her that I was going to find a cure in time to save her. It was foolish. She had an incredibly severe case and was in a wheelchair by the time I took my medical boards.” Genie took a deep breath and wiped her cheek with an impatient hand. The wetness glistened orange and yellow with reflected firelight.
“She died a week before I defended my thesis.” Genie stared into the fire. “She was my friend.”
And for a friend—one of her few friends, Nick surmised—Genie had embarked on a crusade to cure a disease. That explained why she was at Boston General in a linkage lab rather than in some university think tank where they performed higher math with arcane symbols and exclamation points rather than numbers and variables.
Her attacker had picked the cruelest way possible to hurt her. He had not only threatened her person and her lab, he had threatened the very project that was her heart and soul.
Not for the first time, Nick wondered whether the stalker was after Genie personally.
Returning the dog-eared folder to its place, Genie gave a sad shrug and seemed to recall herself from the past. “Well, that was probably more than you ever wanted to know about me, huh?”
Nick shook his head. No, he couldn’t say that.
Madness.
“Going to tell me some deep, dark secret now?” she quipped. “Sort of a new collaborator’s tit-for-tat?”
Nick had a feeling she wouldn’t thank him for telling her his life’s story. Besides, he had something else on his mind—madness or not. His fingers itched to touch her and he wasn’t sure he could deny himself any longer. Wasn’t sure he wanted to. Seeing the love on her face when she’d talked of her friend only made him want her more. He shook his head and leaned toward her. “No, I don’t think so. How about we seal the deal another way?”
She didn’t mistake his meaning. Her restless hands stilled and he was pretty sure she stopped breathing. She leaned away from him. “Nick. Don’t. That is—” She gestured helplessly toward the fire, the house, the files that spilled across the soft rug like a rainbow. “Not a good idea.”
She stood, shedding papers as she rose to stand in front of the fire with her fists clenched at her sides. The orange and yellow light glowed through the thin fabric of his favorite shirt, outlining the dusky silhouette of her upper body in warm, pumpkiny tones.
Her arms were slender and the line of her waist shadowed against the light cotton was a sinuous dip and curve that made his palms itch to touch, to savor the feel of the smooth slide across her flat stomach, the hard bump of the nipples that peaked through the fabric as he watched.
He stood and faced her across the sea of colored folders, felt his heart pound in time with the throb of his burned shoulder. “Why not? We’re attracted to each other. We’re safe here. What could be a better idea than a little welcome-to-the-lab kiss? Or—” He stalked toward her. “Do I have it wrong that you’re feeling what I’m feeling?”
“No, not wrong. But look at this place.” Genie gestured helplessly at the room around them. “I don’t do Cinderella.”
“Meaning?” Nick laced his fingers at his back to keep from reaching for her. To hell with not wanting a relationship. He had to have her.
He’d deal with the rest later.
“Meaning that you live in a palace. Have you looked at the rug in the upstairs hall? It’s downright scary!”
Want tangled with something darker, uglier. “You don’t want me because I have an ugly runner?”
It sounded like something Lucille would’ve said.
Genie stomped her foot in aggravation and created a mini avalanche of folders. “Don’t be
stupid, Wellington. It’s a beautiful rug. I’m afraid to walk on it, and that’s what I’m trying to tell you. You’re out of my league. You’re the golden boy. The prince. And princes only fall for scullery maids in fairy tales. This is no fairy tale.”
Nick felt his temper—slow to catch on an average week—start to bubble. “Who said anything about leagues? We’re not talking about baseball. We’re talking about two mutually consenting adults. You and me.” He waved a hand at the fire as the hold he kept on the past stretched a little further.
“Well, maybe I’m not consenting, okay? I learned a long time ago not to believe in fairy tales.”
He scowled. “And you think this is about princes and castles, do you? Well let me tell you a fairy tale then. It’s about a brother and a sister and a mother who lived in a castle, but it was no damned fairy tale, because the king was one mean son of a bitch.”
Genie stopped staring into the fire and started looking at him. Finally. Her silence goaded him.
He cursed. “You want to share secrets? Bare our souls? Fine. But don’t complain to me when you don’t like what you hear. You think you had it so much tougher because you were smarter than everyone else? Poor little smart kid. Get over it, you were luckier than some. At least your father didn’t hit.”
She took a tentative step toward him and he held up a hand to stop her. “No, you can hear the rest of it. He didn’t just hit me—he went after my sister and my mother, too, and when I got in the middle of it he’d just step around me and laugh. He’d tell me I’d have to be better, smarter and faster to beat him—and that I never would be. I never was.”
The memory rolled greasily in Nick’s stomach, a familiar cocktail of regret, anger and guilt.
Genie made a small sound of distress. “You were a child.”
He cursed again. “I was eighteen when I left. I tried to take my mother and my sister with me, but they wouldn’t go.”
I love him, Nicky—you don’t understand. His mother’s words echoed in his head across the years and he fought the urge to hurl his coffee cup into the fireplace. “I couldn’t protect them. I thought I could. Then I thought I could take care of Lucille, but nothing I ever did was good enough for her either.”
Genie made another move toward him, but Nick held her off with a gesture. The last thing he wanted was her pity.
“Nick, I…”
When she faltered, he smiled grimly. “Not quite the fairy tale you expected, was it, Genius? Sorry to disappoint you. I’m not a prince. I’m just a man and my childhood wasn’t perfect, either. But you want to know the difference between the two of us? I didn’t let my childhood rule my life.”
He crouched down and tossed another log on the fire, not because it needed more fuel, but because he needed to do something with his hands before he wrapped them around Genie. “And you’re right. This was a bad idea. Forget I ever suggested it.”
He stared into the flames until he heard her leave the room.
Until he was alone.
ACROSS TOWN, THE WATCHER hunkered down between two furry pines and eyed the old Victorian house from the rear. Though several lights had popped on an hour ago, he knew nobody was home. He was just waiting for full dark. Waiting for the silly men in the black-and-white car out front to doze.
He was almost dozing himself when a pair of yellow headlights speared through the darkness and lit the forsythia bush six feet to his left. He cursed and shrank further into the shadows, hoping that the dark knit cap was low enough to cover the bandage that glowed beacon-white.
A car door slammed and a woman emerged. She crossed the lawn and he heard her voice rise sweet and high on the night air as she spoke to the two men in the cruiser.
She was here. He grinned and felt his blood heat in response to her nearness. This was an unexpected bonus—he could retrieve the evidence and have his revenge at the same time. He’d just have to be careful not to disturb the men out front.
He slipped from shadow to shadow, working his way to the back door and freezing when he heard high heels click on the walkway that wrapped around the old house.
“I need to get the spare key,” he heard her call toward the front. “I’ll just be a minute.”
Wonder of wonders. She was coming right toward him. He waited carefully until he saw her reach beneath a painted shingle and retrieve a key. Then he slid out from his hiding spot and grabbed her, clamping his hand over her mouth and his other arm around her body as he slammed her against the wall.
He smiled as she squirmed. They’d danced this dance before. Then a tendril of her hair swirled up into the glare of the feeble porch light and shone red-gold, not brown. He frowned and spun her around. Saw the sick recognition in her eyes. Cursed viciously.
And hit her.
Again and again.
“THE HELL WITH IT,” Nick muttered. He’d been staring at the fire for ten, maybe fifteen minutes. Long enough that his knees creaked when he stood. They popped in complaint when he crossed to the mountainous pile of clinical folders. “It’s probably best if we get her back to her real life as soon as possible, right, Q?”
“Mmrph.” The white tomcat didn’t seem convinced, nor was he pleased when Nick pushed him aside to grab a handful of files.
Q would get over his displeasure. Nick wasn’t certain he would, though.
Cassidy, Catzen, Cedars. Apparently he’d taken his handful from the beginning of the alphabet. He flipped through a couple of blue folders, seeing nothing suspicious in any of them. But what were they really looking for? A big yellow star next to one of the names? An arrow with the caption, really Bad Dude, Keep An Eye On This One?
Highly unlikely.
He heard the bathroom door open and shut upstairs and felt like ripping one of the blue folders to shreds, just for fun. She wasn’t going to come to him. She never would—particularly after his outburst. Talk about shattering a few illusions and a whole lot of self-restraint at the same time. He couldn’t believe he’d slapped at her for resenting her childhood—she had every right. But he’d taken a page out of the Senator’s book and aimed right where he knew it would hurt the most.
There were footsteps in the upstairs hall, and rather than be caught gawking up after her like a lovesick mule, Nick glanced down at the blue folder in his hands.
But it wasn’t blue.
The Collins folder was gray, with a yellow Post-it on the front that read, “Genie, here’re the clinicals on the new family. I got most of it from the Eye Center, though some of the information was lost in a burglary the other day. See the back pages for notes on another phone call I got the other day from the son—Richard Jr. From films FNTN-3 and FNTN-5, it looks like he’s an outlier, not a DNA mixup. And have a look at his wife—she seems related somehow, even though she’s a married-in. Weird. Steph.”
Nick glanced at the first page of the report and figured out that the folder was a different color because it belonged to a different study. The Collins family suffered from Gray’s Glaucoma not Fenton’s Ataxia.
Wrong disease. He was just about to put the folder in the reject pile when a name caught the corner of his eye. He could’ve sworn that it blinked. That there was a big yellow star and an arrow next to the name—
Fenton.
On an oath, he flipped to the pedigree. The Collins family showed Gray’s Glaucoma through four generations, and the second generation had two affected siblings, Mac and Patty Collins, each of whom had large families. The clinical notes on Mac and his family read like a rap sheet.
Mac was in county lockup for sexual assault. His sister Jenna was dead of an overdose, and of Mac’s five children, one daughter was in jail for prostitution, one was listed as “unreachable—teenage runaway,” two sons had no clinical notes by their names and the oldest daughter was a lawyer.
But it was Mac’s younger sister that gave Nick pause. Patty Collins had married a man named Fenton.
Richard Fenton.
The single note beside his name read simpl
y, “Popcorn tycoon.” It could have read, “One of the richest men in the northeast.”
Nick’s fingertips tingled and he fought the urge to curse as he flipped back and started from the beginning of the file. As he read, he became certain of one thing—
They had been looking at the wrong Fenton. It had never been about Fenton’s Ataxia. It was about Richard Fenton and his hundreds of millions of dollars. Nick smiled bitterly. If there was one lesson he’d learned well at a tender age, it was that money could make people do some pretty awful things.
He turned back to the Post-it on the front cover. Outlier DNA? He was going to need some help with the lingo. He raised his voice slightly. “Genie? Can you come down here for a minute?”
She spoke from the doorway. “I’m right here, Nick.”
“Genie, I need you to explain this note here…” He looked up. And froze.
She was standing just inside the living room wearing his favorite cotton shirt.
And nothing else.
GENIE HAD THOUGHT she was prepared to take this giant leap. She’d sat on Nick’s bed upstairs and given herself a good lecture until her shaking fingers unbuttoned the soft ivory shirt and pulled the sweatpants—his sister’s sweatpants, she reminded herself—down over her hips so she could kick them free.
She had forced her reluctant feet down the stairs, knowing that even though he said he wanted her, she wasn’t sure he still would. His delivery had stung a little, true, as had the knowledge that he thought she was shackled by her past. But could she honestly deny it? Even during her shopping trip with the girls from the lab, she’d begun to wonder how many of her habits were leftovers from the awkward, overbright child she’d once been.
She’d made a mental note to work on it, but hearing it from Nick hadn’t been what hurt the most. What had almost torn her apart was the bleakness in his face when he spoke of his father and his ex-wife. Somewhere, somehow, he believed he was at fault for both of them.
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