And that’s exactly what it was. A coincidence.
What else could it be?
Chapter 2
Maggie rubbed her eyes and craned her neck. A sea of brake lights stretched out beneath the morning sky. It had been a long night of sleep fractured by images of the woman on her phone. Now it looked like it was going to be a long morning.
Maggie opened her car door and stepped out to see why traffic had stopped. A long line of vehicles stretched out before her. She squinted. In the distance, she saw picket signs bouncing up and down. She and her fellow commuters were adrift in the latest wave of demonstrations.
Maggie was surprised that she was surprised.
Even before she’d moved to the big city, news of increasing disquiet had traveled from Greenville to Collinsburg with breathless alacrity, bringing reports of pockets of unrest that spread like prickly heat across the blistering city.
Maggie just didn’t think she’d find herself in the middle of it. On the way to her second day of work.
She checked the dashboard clock. 7:48. Twelve minutes to get there.
A tightness traversed her chest. This was supposed to be the honeymoon phase of employment, where she wowed management and coworkers with her dedication, competency and work ethic.
Pretty much the opposite of showing up late on the second day.
She thought about her father. The restaurant with its peeling paint and empty parking lot. A surge of bile threatened to climb up her throat.
Come on, come on, come on, she pleaded silently to the line of cars. Move.
As if in response to her plea, brake lights blinked off ahead of her. The line of cars crept forward, a reception line moving toward the union of two busy intersections.
Progress. Slow, yes. But at least it surpassed glacial.
Maggie slumped against her seat as she idled forward. The traffic jam had a silver lining: now she had plenty of time to relive the embarrassment of the night before.
Spurred by a desire to escape the unnerving newscast she’d just witnessed, Maggie had charged toward The Office’s entrance. The moment she’d reached the pub’s rough-hewn door, however, it swung open to admit a new stream of after-work revelers.
Maggie lost her balance and pitched forward. She stumbled, ankles turning in new sling-backs, and fell clumsily against a man. She had tried to right herself, hands scrabbling for purchase, then slipped again, pulling the man’s pants down with her.
“Whoa.” The man grabbed the waistband of his khakis as they slid down his hips. He took Maggie by the elbows and righted her against the door.
Nearby patrons looked at her like she’d grown another head. Across the bar, she could see Zartar and Roselyn pausing mid-drink to take in the scene, their mouths tiny Os of shock.
“Are you okay?” the man had asked.
Maggie widened her stance to regain her balance and stared at him. The man smiled, his broad mouth revealing two crooked eye teeth. She wanted to look away, to answer his question. It would be the polite thing to do. The normal thing to do. But she felt stunned, as if an electric jolt had coursed through her body.
His grin broadened, dimples sprouting on cheeks. “I’ve had women fall for me, but never quite like this.”
She had opened her mouth, closed it, opened it again, trying to find her voice, trying to find something witty—or anything at all—to say. Then the crowd surged forward and swept the man into the warm embrace of the bar as he smiled and waved at her.
Now trapped in morning gridlock, Maggie felt her face grow hot with the memory. She gave herself an inner eye-roll and mental face-palm. Another tick in the column for Maggie, Queen of the Socially Awkward.
But it wasn’t like she was going to see Captain Handsome again. She was free to move on to other uncomfortable thoughts. Like the woman who had appeared on her phone then ended up dead.
Maggie couldn’t imagine why she had received a reminder for a meeting with Elsa Henderson. She didn’t know her. She hadn’t even set up any appointments in the app. Maybe the reminder was intended for someone else. Or maybe it was a preview of coming attractions, an electronic crystal ball that offered a glimpse into the future.
Maggie knew that was ridiculous, but her stomach hadn’t gotten the message. It flip-flopped in her belly, sending a surge of acid into her esophagus. She opened the glove box and shook out two antacids from an old film canister.
She chewed slowly.
There had to be a rational explanation, and she’d find it. She was a woman of science, after all. The fact that the same stranger who’d appeared on her phone was now lying in the morgue was just some strange quirk of fate, a technological glitch or both.
Or maybe it was—
Suddenly a man lunged from the sidewalk and pounded on her passenger window. “Death to capitalist pigs!” he yelled.
Somewhere in her brain she registered the lack of originality of his rallying cry, and it irritated her. At least make an effort.
But there were no catchy catchphrases or rousing songs to accompany these protests. What had begun as a peaceful Occupy Main Street demonstration to decry a proposed salary freeze for government employees had devolved into a me-too movement that attracted the generally-disgruntled as well as the directly affected. Tempers matched temperatures for heat and intensity. There wasn’t much room for creativity. Or kindness for drivers on their way to work.
Maggie flinched at the angry voice, her arm accidentally hitting the horn.
The man’s face purpled, his mouth twisting first in surprise, then in rage. He heaved his sign over his head and brought it down on Maggie’s windshield. An image of Porky Pig dressed as Uncle Sam crashed against the glass. Maggie ducked as if the sign had struck her head.
The man raised the sign and swung again. The traffic light turned green. Maggie put the car in gear and stood on the gas pedal. The car bucked, throwing Maggie back in her seat, then lurched forward, knocking the man’s sign from his hand. He stumbled and fell to the ground.
Maggie sped away. At a whopping eight miles per hour.
She glanced into her rearview mirror. The man gave her a one-fingered salute but didn’t seem interested in pursuing her.
Fecking ass, she thought, using the Irish-ized version of the F-bomb her father, and therefore Maggie, had always preferred. She flipped the man off in her head, hoping she’d magically developed a Carrie-like telekinesis that would jab him in some secret lobe of his brain, then concentrated on the matter at hand: getting to work on time.
Her mind wandered back to the woman on her phone.
Could her death somehow be a result of the protests? Was the hit-and-run driver a protester who was angry about the media coverage? Someone exacting revenge for an unflattering portrayal of the conflict? The protests had been the top story for weeks, especially after sanitation and transportation employees had joined the fray, leaving the city still and reeking like a corpse rotting in the sun. Maybe frustration had boiled over, sweeping Elsa Henderson away in its frothy rage.
Maggie shook the thoughts from her mind. Her theories were pure conjecture, made out of whole cloth and half-assed ideas. She was getting caught up in emotion. And there was no time for that.
Maggie willed her pulse to slow, concentrating on loosening the muscles that banded her stomach like steel ropes. Six minutes later, Maggie arrived at the company parking lot.
She took a deep breath and looked up at her new professional home.
Ensconced in a hulking steel monolith, Rxcellance loomed over its neighbors like an officious landlord.
A spinoff of Dulton Pharmaceuticals, Rxcellance played Apple to Pfizer’s IBM. Small. Agile. Innovative. With one miracle drug under its belt and rumors of more in the queue, Rxcellance was on the tipping point of greatness. Whispers of an IPO, once met with derisive snorts, had risen to the unmistakable rumble of t
he inevitable.
Rxcellance was going to be big, and Maggie was going to be a part of it.
Maggie parked and checked her teeth in the rearview mirror. That poppy seed bagel had been a mistake.
Maggie took a tiny flathead screwdriver from the glove box and gently wedged it between the seed and her right canine tooth. The poppy seed went flying. She grinned to the mirror in satisfaction. And Pop wonders why I’m single.
Maggie climbed out of the car and examined the hood. No damage from the jerk who’d assaulted her vehicle. She rubbed the fender. “My faithful chariot,” she whispered.
The 1960 Studebaker was cherried out. Custard exterior, crimson interior. Original everything, including three-on-the-tree manual transmission. Maggie and her dad had restored it the summer she turned twelve. The summer cancer had planted a flag in her mother’s liver and colonized her body until there was no room for a heartbeat.
She clicked across the parking lot, rode the elevator to the third floor and deposited herself in a cubicle covered in a tan fuzzy fabric that rivaled particle board for shade and luster.
Her stomach had gone back to churning. A metallic taste had seeped into her mouth, replacing the bitter taste of bile. Either her adrenaline was still in overdrive, or she was on the brink of a serious illness. Maggie resisted the temptation to palpate her glands, which she was sure were swollen. She figured she was coming down with something because of the stress of the morning. Like the flu. Or the bubonic plague.
Maggie logged on and waited for the computer’s applications to load. Her eyes roved the cubicle, which was furnished with an ergonomic chair, a set of wire mesh in and out boxes, a desk phone and a small flowering plant desperately in need of a drink.
She stretched and yawned. Despite her jangled nerves, she was tired from what qualified as a late night in Maggie World. She needed caffeinated fortification, stat. She just hoped her sour stomach wouldn’t rebel.
Maggie took the stairs down to the second floor and headed to a small kitchen she’d been introduced to on her official Day One tour. The tiny room housed an industrial-sized coffeepot and a small microwave and refrigerator. The wall to the left of the refrigerator was papered with company memos, Bureau of Labor and Industries notifications and a poster that told her to Keep Calm and Research On.
Maggie’s eyes zeroed in on the coffeepot. Empty. She groaned.
It was going to be that kind of day.
She opened a white Formica cupboard above the microwave, retrieved a box of coffee filters and studied the coffee options: regular and decaf. Judging by the labels and a startling lack of reference to actual coffee beans, Maggie was pretty sure they’d both taste like topsoil. But any port in a storm, right? She scooped regular coffee into the machine and waited.
“I love the smell of napalm in the morning.” The man who Maggie had crashed into at The Office Bar & Grille leaned against the doorjamb, thumb in his pants pocket, a crooked grin lighting his face.
The mortification from last night’s spectacular stumble returned. Evidently Captain Handsome wasn’t a one-time run-in. Maggie felt her cheeks grow hot and prayed she wasn’t blushing as ferociously as she felt she was. Unlike other gingers who pinked charmingly beneath a dusting of freckles, Maggie turned the approximate shade of a rutabaga.
Not exactly Jane Austen material.
Bar Guy took a deep breath of the room’s acrid aroma, choked, then dissolved into a paroxysm of coughing. He crossed the room and ran the tap into the “Chemists Are Worth Their Weight in Au” mug in his hand and drank deeply. He wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. “Good stuff,” he wheezed.
He was funny. Funny was good. And he was more gorgeous than Maggie had remembered. Maybe today she’d do more than stare and open and close her mouth like a cod.
Captain Handsome, a.k.a. Bar Guy, extended his hand. “I’m Ethan Clark. I think we met yesterday. Bumped into each other is more like it.”
Maggie forced herself to look nonchalant, as if the memory of their brief encounter was slowly coming to mind. “The bar last night, right? I’m Maggie O’Malley.” They shook hands.
“I know. I hear you’re working with Jon’s crew,” he said.
Maggie was surprised. “Word travels fast.”
Ethan tapped the ID badge hanging from his lanyard. “We management types know everything.”
Management? So much for a good first impression.
Maggie wanted the earth to swallow her up. When that didn’t happen, she tried for casual. “So what do you manage?”
“To stay out of trouble, mostly. And I head up Bioanalytics.”
“Lots of great work being done in that sector these days. Real innovations. You must be out there on the bleeding edge.”
“We’re making some pretty exciting advances, especially lately.” He checked his TAG Heuer watch. “Damn. I’m late. Well, back to the salt mines. It was nice to officially meet you, Maggie.”
He thrust out his hand again. Maggie extended her own, then realized she was still holding the carafe and placed it back on the coffeemaker. “And it was…officially nice to meet you,” Maggie stammered, her cheeks flaming again.
She watched him round the corner, catching a glimpse of herself in the reflection of the glossy refrigerator door. A giant coffee stain squatted in the center of her company issue button-down shirt like a fat spider.
Nice.
Maggie’s phone chirped. She looked at the display. Constantine.
“Miss me yet?” he asked when she answered.
“Yes, I’m in the final stages of Constantine withdrawal,” she said, a smile spreading across her face.
“Well, I am pretty addictive.”
Maggie walked to the stairwell and began climbing to the third floor. “I’m glad you called. I mean, other than the fact I get to hear your voice.”
Constantine affected a deep baritone. “Really?”
“Yeah, there’s something weird going on with my phone. Did you get my text?”
“Something about a reminder?”
She emerged from the stairwell and crossed the hall to her desk. She waved to a couple of colleagues whose names she had learned but couldn’t quite remember. “Yeah, I got this weird reminder on an app I didn’t know I had for a meeting I never scheduled with someone I’ve never met.”
“I’d say that qualifies as weird.”
She thought about mentioning the dead woman. The fact that she was killed so soon after she appeared on Maggie’s phone definitely dialed up the weird-o-meter. But was it anything more than strange timing? She didn’t see how it could be.
“I’m wondering if you could take a look at it when I’m at Pop’s this weekend to get the last of my stuff,” she said. She paused, tried for nonchalant. “How is he?”
“You mean in the seventy-two and a half hours since you last saw him? Grouchy and foul-mouthed. You know, the usual.”
Maggie remembered how her father had looked the last time she’d seen him. Hollows nestling beneath his cheekbones. Angles announcing bones at the shoulder and elbow. It took time and pressure to change the land. Could the geography of the body be much different?
Maggie suddenly realized Constantine had asked her a question. “I’m sorry, what was that?”
“I was asking about the new job. Have you made any friends? Cured any diseases?”
“No to the second, yes-ish on the first. I actually went out for drinks with a couple of coworkers last night.”
Constantine whistled. “Drinks with coworkers on the first day? Sounds like you’ve loosened your policy on new relationships. What’s next, vegetables with dinner?”
“French fries count, right?”
“Absolutely. See you Saturday?”
Maggie closed her eyes and pictured her father’s wide, weathered face. “I’ll be there.”
; Chapter 3
They were squatting in her mind again. Charlene could feel them moving around in the whorls and folds of her brain. Whispering. Cursing. Giving greasy, ruinous advice.
The doctors said she was sick, that something was wrong with the way her neurotransmitters talked to each other. But with all the voices in her head (and there were five now), she was pretty sure her brain didn’t have a problem making conversation.
Charlene crouched beside a dumpster, looking over her rounded shoulder into the blackness that pooled in the shadows of sleeping buildings. She drew up her slack jaw, her cracked lips disappearing into a thin line.
She would not submit to the mind control of her doctors, the charlatans who sold the snake oil that made her calves twitch beneath the black plastic bags she wore over her stained clothes. Things were changing. She was changing.
She scratched her shoulder blades against the dumpster’s rusty, ragged edge. “My wings are sprouting. Angel wings,” she said, hugging herself. “Just as he promised.”
A cone of light bore into the inky night. Charlene shielded her eyes. The line of her mouth twitched, rose at the corners. He had come.
Maggie arrived at Rx early the next morning and took the elevator to the second floor, emerging onto a long hallway carpeted with practicality in mind. The corridor was studded with photographs that marked the timeline of pharmaceutical advancement. Maggie studied the men in the pictures—men because there was not a woman among them until the late 1970s—who alternately held up test tubes to the light or peered into microscopes, shirtsleeves rolled up to show they meant business.
Forearms = Successful Corporation
Maggie’s lab stood at the corridor’s terminus. She opened the large glass door and peered inside, feeling the same little thrill as the first time she saw the lab.
The laboratory was at once spare and impressive: one thousand square feet of white walls, white vinyl and black counters, banked with workstations stocked with scanning electron microscopes, microplate readers, isolators and an extended family of vitreous containers. The center of the room was dominated by a centrifuge and HPLC.
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