Elementary, My Dear Watkins

by Mindy Starns Clark

  Though Mr. Bashiri seemed disappointed that Luc would be the one going with him to the Congo rather than Danny, he was gracious about it. All Danny told him was that he had a personal matter back in the States that needed attending to, and that since it didn’t look like his visa for the Congo was going to come through in time anyway, he was going to bow out from this trip now and fly home as soon as possible.

  “There will be other photo shoots, other trips,” Mr. Bashiri said to Danny, nodding his head. “I feel certain that this is not the last time you and I will work together. And Luc, with his language skills, will be an asset of a different kind, of course.”

  “Thank you, sir. I appreciate your understanding.”

  Danny got the number of a local travel agent from the receptionist and then made the call from a telephone in the warehouse. She told him that his only choice for today was a flight leaving from the Zurich airport at 1:45 PM, with one seat left in business class, if Danny wanted it. According to the travel agent, he would have to change planes in Amsterdam and then fly straight to the JFK Airport in New York, arriving at 8:32 tonight, local time. The next available flight wasn’t until Saturday afternoon.

  “I’ll take the one forty-five today,” he said, not even wanting to hear the price. He was willing to pay whatever he had to. He’d just have to figure out some way to cover the cost on his credit card later. “And rent a car for me in New York too, would you? The cheapest thing you can find.”

  Giving her his credit card number over the phone, Danny looked across the room at Luc, who was trying to pack up all of the extra equipment. The Frenchman was already looking overwhelmed with having to assist Mr. Bashiri by himself, not to mention rather green around the gills after all of those shots on top of a nasty hangover. Finally, the reservation complete, Danny called for a taxi, and then he crossed the busy room to say his goodbyes.

  “Listen, before you go,” Luc said under his breath, “would you please tell me why this is the tripod Mr. Bashiri keeps insisting we need to bring to Africa rather than any of the others? The others have so many more features, and they’re all so much lighter than this one.”

  Danny thought for a moment and then reached out for the tripod in question, flipped it upside down, and showed Luc the bottoms of its feet.

  “My guess is because this one has solid legs,” Danny said. “All of the others are hollow.”

  “So? That is what makes them so light!”

  “Yeah,” Danny replied, putting it back down. “But in the conditions you’ll encounter in the Congo, that’s also what makes them fill up with dirt or mud every time you use them.”

  Luc slapped a flat hand against his forehead, as though he couldn’t believe he hadn’t figured that out on his own. Danny knew his friend had a lot to learn about the practicalities of in-the-field photography, but he had a feeling that spending this time with Mr. Bashiri, the consummate professional, would have a great influence on him.

  Suddenly, Danny felt a pang of reluctance over what he was about to do. He had paid way more than he could afford to hop on a plane and fly to America without so much as a single conversation with anyone there, all based on secondhand information, leaving behind the best job he’d ever had and the professional opportunity of a lifetime.

  It made no sense.

  But what did make sense was the feeling that had been growing in his gut ever since Luc said the name of Helen Tulip. Maybe it was the Holy Spirit’s leading, but somehow Danny simply knew that he needed to be home with Jo, even if he didn’t understand why.

  Danny’s final words with his traveling companions were bittersweet. He thanked Luc for coming to him and telling him the truth.

  “Listen, man, about the money…” Danny said, a sly smile on his lips.

  “The hundred thousand that I have to give back?”

  “Yeah. Helen was paying you to get me fired, so that I would go home to America, right?”

  “Right.”

  “Well, the way I see it, I’m on my way home. The finer details aside, it sounds to me like that’s money you earned. I’d plan on keeping it, if I were you.”

  Luc seemed to think about it for a moment as his own smile grew.

  “Oui!” he said finally, giving Danny a strong hug. “I do believe you have a good point, mon ami. She achieved her end goal, which was to get you home. Ultimately, that’s what she was paying for.”

  Luc seemed very happy as he returned to his work. Danny stepped toward Mr. Bashiri. This goodbye would be much more difficult, as Danny didn’t expect to see him again any time soon. He was so grateful for the man’s patience and instruction and gentle nature. If he could, Danny would like to be just like Mr. Bashiri throughout every level of his career.

  He was flattered when the photographer offered to walk him out front to wait for the taxi. As they went, Danny tried to think of a way that, again, he could apologize for simply taking off like this. But when he tried to put it into words, it just came out sounding stupid. He babbled something about his girlfriend needing him, but that she was much more than just a girlfriend, she was also his best friend and more than likely soon-to-be fiancée.

  “Let me tell you a little story,” Mr. Bashiri said, interrupting him. “One I do not share often.”

  Danny nodded, listening, glad to see as they stepped outside that the taxi had not yet arrived.

  “Many years ago, when my four children were small, I spent much time away from them, working hard to succeed in my field. My wife was a very capable woman, so I knew they were in good hands. Through my work, at least I was able to provide for them well. Eventually, I even bought for us a beautiful home on a beautiful hill, but I was gone so much it was almost like I did not live there at all.”

  “You were working hard,” Danny said. “Earning a living.”

  Mr. Bashiri shook his head.

  “In my country, a man does not just provide for his family, he also defends his family. This I did not do. I was not there to do that.”

  At the corner, Danny could see a taxicab waiting at a red light, heading in their direction, and he willed the light to stay red just a little longer.

  Mr. Bashiri continued, his eyes very sad and faraway.

  “Rebel forces came through our village one day, with the goal of eliminating anyone with ties to the government or with obvious signs of prosperity. Because of our beautiful home on a beautiful hill, my entire family was murdered.”

  Danny looked away, a sudden heat threatening at the back of his eyes.

  “I was deep in the jungle at the time, on an extended shoot. No one could reach me for two weeks. By the time I came home, my family had already been buried. I was not there to spend time with them, I was not there to protect them, and I was not there to bury them. I was only there to mourn them.”

  After what that woman had said last night, Danny had assumed there had been some sort of accident or minor tragedy in Mr. Bashiri’s family, but nothing on a scale of this magnitude. He took in an uneven breath and tried to think of how to respond.

  “Your wife and four children,” he said quietly. “How did you manage to go on after that?”

  “I did not manage, not for a long time. But eventually, the preacher in our village led me to Jesus Christ. He said that while I was gone, before the massacre, my whole family—except for me, of course—had come to faith and had been baptized in the river. Me, I had always scoffed at Christians, but after talking to the preacher I came to understand that the only way I might see my beloveds again was to join them in heaven. And I know that I will, when that time comes. Truly, God pulled me from the pit of my sorrow and gave me the strength to carry on.”

  Danny was stunned.

  “Thank you for sharing that with me,” he said finally as the light on the corner turned green and the cab made its way over to the curb.

  Mr. Bashiri seemed to snap out of his daze, shaking his head and lightening his posture. Danny thanked him again, shook his hand, and reached for the h
andle of the cab. He opened the door but paused before getting in, to hear Mr. Bashiri’s final words.

  “I say this only as a cautionary tale, Mr. Watkins: Threats come in many forms. There may not be rebel forces in Pennsylvania, USA, but there is still good reason to stand at the side of the one you love in times of trouble. If you do not, the cost may simply be too high to bear.”

  18

  In the wake of Winnie’s outburst at the breakfast table, Jo and her grandmother finished their meal in relative peace and quiet. After Jo took her last bite, she wiped her mouth with her napkin, set the napkin beside her plate, and looked over at the empty spot where Alexa had been sitting the morning before.

  “May I ask you a question, Gran?”

  “Certainly.”

  “I don’t mean to be nosy, but I’ve been wondering about Alexa. What’s really going on with her living here? You have to admit, the situation is a little odd.”

  Rather than answer Jo’s question directly, Eleanor pushed away her plate, placed her napkin on the table, and suggested that Jo come to her office in an hour or so, where they could speak about it privately. Then she simply reached for her cane, got up, and left the room.

  Obviously, the subject was closed for the time being.

  Now feeling even more curious than before, Jo decided to use the hour until their meeting to set up her work area. She asked Fernando to retrieve the two heavy suitcases from her room, and then she went out to the studio with the bodyguard. Fernando showed up with the bags soon after, just as the bodyguard was giving Jo the all clear.

  She stepped inside the empty building, impressed with the renovation. The studio had always been her favorite of the estate’s several outbuildings anyway, a charming remnant of days past. Now, she saw that the room had been expanded and enhanced with a gorgeous piano, plenty of workspaces, and a beautiful old wooden easel set up near the floor-to-ceiling windows.

  Eager to unpack, get organized, and get down to work, Jo chose a table that was out of the main area but not too far from the sink. She didn’t want to get in the way of where Alexa usually had her lessons, but there seemed to be plenty of room, and she would gladly work around the girl’s schedule.

  Jo unloaded her supplies, one by one, until she was set up and organized. Glancing at her watch, she decided she still had time to go on a toaster hunt. If she was going to test some cleaning techniques, she needed a few guinea pigs.

  With the bodyguard tagging along behind and Chewie giving a few friendly barks every time they came past his pen, Jo collected toasters from all over the estate. Consuela gave her two from the main kitchen and one from her apartment over the garage. As Jo lined up the toasters along her worktable, she realized that she was just happy to be doing something, anything, that might propel this case forward and give her at least some sense of control. It might not be safe for her to pound the pavement and question subjects or examine evidence, but at least she could try to establish a relationship with the one person who might be willing to come forward, Toaster Man, if only she could only get him to keep writing back.

  Danny’s eyes were glued to the window as the airplane landed in Amsterdam. He wished circumstances were different and that this was just an ordinary trip and that he could take the time to explore what looked like yet another beautiful and unique European city. More and more, he had been thinking lately about backpacking through the Continent once his internship with Scene It was finished. Living in Paris—not to mention having visited Zurich—had whetted his appetite to see more of the countries he’d always wanted to visit. He wondered if Jo might ever consider making a trip like that with him after they were married.

  After they were married. How funny that he thought of it that way almost all the time these days. Never “if,” always “when.” He hoped she was starting to think the same way too.

  Once Danny was off the plane, he headed toward his next gate, relieved to find a bank of payphones on the way. He had several calls to make, so he decided to start with the most difficult: his boss, Georgette, who was not going to be happy when she learned that he had abandoned his charge in Switzerland and was now on his way to America. It took a while to figure out how the use the phone, but once he finally got it he was connected with Scene It and then with Georgette.

  His pulse surging, Danny decided to launch right into it the moment he heard her voice.

  “Georgette? This is Danny. I know this may sound crazy, but I’m calling you from Amsterdam.”

  By the time Jo’s appointment with her grandmother had rolled around, her curiosity was definitely piqued. She showed up promptly on time and then took the seat her grandmother indicated.

  Sighing wearily, Eleanor told Jo that the whole story of Alexa was quite confidential, but that she was willing to share it now as it had some bearing on Jo’s situation as well.

  “You’ve probably already guessed that Alexa comes from a rather unstable background,” Eleanor said. “Absentee father, mother on and off drugs and alcohol, poverty-level existence.”

  “I gathered it was something like that just from the things she said.”

  “What she didn’t tell you is that for the first thirteen years of her life, Alexa also suffered from a severe case of attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder, or ADHD. I’m sure you’ve heard of it.”

  “Of course. I had a few of those in my home ec classes at the high school, both the ones who couldn’t sit still and the ones who spent most of their time just staring out the window, off in another world.”

  “According to school records and other information, Alexa was just about the worse case of ADHD they had ever seen—extremely hyperactive, unable to concentrate, sometimes unable even to complete a full thought in conversation before her mind had already flitted off to something else. Needless to say, she barely passed any of her classes. According to her mother, they pushed her through the system anyway, but by the ninth grade she could still barely read and was doing math at about third grade level.”

  “I don’t understand,” Jo said. “The child you’re describing is nothing like the girl I met yesterday morning at breakfast. Did they finally find a good ADHD medication for her? I know there are supposed to be some out there that work pretty well.”

  “Just wait. I’m getting to that.”

  Jo sat back and listened, unable to fathom where this might be leading.

  “A little over a year ago, late one night, Bradford was passing through Newark on his way to a meeting, and he happened to see something very disturbing on the side of the road: a young teenage girl, lying on the ground.”

  Bradford? A little over a year ago? That was just about when he and Jo first started dating.

  “Of course, he stopped to check on her. She was conscious but groggy and disoriented. Her speech was slurred, and when he tried to help her up, he realized that she had no control over the right side of her body. There was no one else around, and he didn’t think he should waste the time waiting for an ambulance, so he put her in his car and drove her to the nearest hospital.”

  Jo ran a hand through her hair, feeling like Alice in Wonderland gazing down the rabbit hole. Shouldn’t this have come up in conversation at some point during six months of dating and engagement? Why had he never mentioned it?

  “By then Bradford was rather invested in the situation, as you can imagine. He waited as the doctors did some tests and determined that the girl had had an aneurysm in her brain that had ruptured. Alexa was able to tell them her name and address, and Bradford himself rushed to the girl’s home to retrieve her mother. They only had about a four-hour window of opportunity, you see, to get her started on the right medication. Bradford had a feeling that she was a perfect candidate for something called Fibrin-X, a new stroke drug being developed by one of our subsidiaries that had just moved into the final testing phase. Fortunately, the neurologist at the hospital concurred.”

  Jo nodded, knowing that one of Bradford’s responsibilities at Bosworth Industries had
been to monitor a group of subsidiaries that included a large pharmaceutical company.

  “I won’t bore you with the details, but suffice it to say that Alexa’s mother gave permission for the medication, they got the IV started in time, and her symptoms showed rapid improvement. Within several days, Alexa was speaking normally and had regained some control of her right arm and leg.”

  “That’s wonderful.”

  “Amazingly, she also no longer exhibited any symptoms whatsoever of ADHD.”

  Jo blinked, looking at her grandmother.

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean she was cured. More than that, she was not the first person in the country with a similar scenario. Doctors involved in the phase three trials of Fibrin-X were watching for off-label-use situations, and it was rapidly becoming apparent that the drug might eventually be prescribed not just as a stroke medication but perhaps primarily as a cure for ADHD.”

  “Currently, there is no cure for the disorder?”

  “No, none, so you can imagine the impact something like this might have. The company decided to bring Fibrin-X back to animal studies, in order to determine the mechanism that was making it work. Until this happened, doctors weren’t even sure what caused ADHD, so of course they hadn’t been able to cure it. But by working backward and starting with the cure, they have been able to trace out the cause. Next month, Dr. Stebbins is expected to announce his preliminary findings at a medical symposium. I hate to speak prematurely, but according to our experts, his work thus far is extremely important, perhaps even of Nobel Prize caliber. Not only will his announcement have a tremendous impact on the treatment of ADHD, but on the whole field of neurology and eventually a host of other brain disorders as well.”

  Jo was impressed with the story, impressed with the doctor—even impressed with Bradford for his role in the story.