House of Stone

by T. K. Thorne

  “You got it. And that’s how everything works, except for the pure research that universities and nonprofits do, including the pharmaceutical companies. The drug companies fund the research into their own new drugs.”

  “That sounds a bit creepy.” I say. “How can you trust the results?”

  “Exactly. And that’s what the university data people do on private research data—they do meta-analysis, studying the studies, correcting for biases in particular samples and measures or anything else that jumps out at them. A simpler way to put it is they go over the research that was funded by businesses that have a direct interest in the results.”

  “Glad to hear someone does,” Tracey says. “I’d hate to think all those almonds I eat were a waste of nutrition.”

  I surreptitiously step on his toe.

  “That’s fascinating.” I say. “Can we see the offices?”

  “Sure.”

  “We’re particularly interested in the ongoing study about diabetes.”

  “Which one? There are several.”

  “The one about the drug zahablan,” I say.

  “Well, lucky day for you.” He consults his watch. “You’ve got fifteen minutes.”

  “What happens in fifteen minutes?” I ask.

  “Deon Segal is out the door at noon, no matter what is happening.”

  “Maybe he doesn’t like eating lunch at his desk,” Tracey says.

  “I don’t ask his business. It’s his lunch break.”

  Enslen leads us to a hallway and a row of cubicles, knocks, and opens a door. “Hi, Segal. Mind if we bother you for a minute?”

  “No, not at all.”

  We step into the room behind Enslen. A fine-looking young black man sits at a computer console. His hair hangs in a single, thick braid of woven dreadlocks down his back.

  “This is D. Segal,” Enslen says, “probably our top data guy. I think he hacks into NSA on his lunch break.”

  “Now Mr. Enslen, you know I wouldn’t do that.”

  Enslen chuckles at his own joke. “Segal, these folks are detectives from the Birmingham Police Department. Detective Lohan and Miss—?” He looks at me for help.

  “Detective Brighton.”

  “Right, sorry.” He turns back to Segal.

  Enslen’s cell phone rings, and he pulls it off the clip on his belt and answers it.

  “Yeah, right. Sure.” He looks up at us. “You need me for anything else? I have a meeting.”

  Tracey looks at me and I shrug.

  “We have your number,” Tracey says. “We’ll call if we do.”

  Enslen waves at Segal. “He can answer any questions you might have. He’s in charge of data collection management for the project you mentioned.” He puts the phone back to his ear. “I’ll be there in five.”

  Segal looks to us when Enslen is gone. He appears too young to even have to shave, with his long hair and eyebrows that seem perpetually quizzical behind half-inch-thick glasses.

  “Deon Segal?” I say, writing his name in my notebook.

  “Yeah, but everybody calls me Segal. What are you investigating?” he says. “If it’s okay to ask.”

  “We’re working on a homicide,” Tracey says.

  “Cool.”

  Tracey turns to me. “You’re the computer geek. Ask away.”

  I’m pretty certain calling me a computer geek compared to Segal is like calling a donkey a thoroughbred, but I guess I’m the one with the questions.

  “What do you do?” I ask and hastily add, “In general terms.”

  “Me? I mostly go over data, look for anomalies and biases in test reports, things that don’t agree or raise a red flag. I dig into the nitty-gritty, you might say.”

  “What can you tell us about the testing on zahablan?”

  “Yeah, that’s my project. I mean, not my project. I’m only a data guy, but I can tell you about it. It’s really exciting.”

  Tracey looks about as excited as a man watching cement set, but I nod. “Just talk about it, and we’ll stop you if you go over my head.”

  “Sure.” He pushes away from his computer. “We’re trying to establish whether zahablan is a TXNIP inhibitor in human beta cells.”

  “Stop,” Tracey says. “I’m drowning.”

  “Oh, sorry. Okay, let’s start here—beta cells live inside the pancreas. They’re critical to producing insulin. And I’m sure you know that the body’s failure to produce insulin naturally is what Type 1 diabetes is all about. That’s why people with the condition have to take artificial insulin.”

  I nod.

  “There is a protein,” he continues, “called TXNIP in beta cells and when there is too much of it, it kills the beta cells.”

  This is what Laurie Stokes told me, but I haven’t told Tracey that I spoke with her after our initial interview or that I interviewed Crompton’s wife.

  “And the body can’t produce insulin?” Tracey asks.

  “Right. Am I going too slow?”

  “No,” Tracey says. “You’re just right. Go on.”

  “Zahablan is a common blood pressure medication. It’s been around for a long time, but a researcher discovered that it can lower TXNIP in mice models, and the beta cells recovered and produced insulin on their own.” He looks up at us to see if we get the significance.

  “If it works,” he says, his voice hushed with awe, “it may not be just a treatment, it would be closer to a cure.”

  Chapter Eighteen

  The next Saturday presses down on me, overcast and dreary as if the sky was sinking. The cats all seem to want attention at once, and Alexander has cut a nice groove in my arm that smarts. Becca and Daniel are playing hide-and-seek and screaming.

  “Why don’t you take them somewhere?” Alice asks. “It’s not healthy for them to be cooped up in the house. Becca has not been out since her ‘accident.’” That’s what Alice calls the Ordeal.

  “Not today,” I need some time alone. Selfish. I promise myself I will take Becca and Daniel somewhere soon. Nora doesn’t seem inclined to go anywhere other than the couch and the bedroom as far as I can see. Next year, if they are still at Alice’s, Daniel will have to go to school.

  I need some time to myself, but not in my room. I’ve spent enough time in my basement bedroom the past four months. There are no windows, and the door just leads to an unfinished portion of the basement. I’m naturally a bit claustrophobic anyway.

  “And we won’t tell anyone that we sleep with a light on, will we?” I say softly, grabbing a raincoat and scooping up Angel.

  It’s only a short walk along the cracked sidewalks in the rain to my own house, but I suddenly have to fight a bout of anxiety that rises unbidden and unwanted. Regardless of whether it is totally in my mind or not, I feel eyes on me and quicken my steps.

  The wind buffets. This is the time of year when tornados are prone to form, when the mix of hot and cold temperature fronts collide in a whirl of death. The image, I think, is more an internal reflection than a weather prediction.

  But I’m not more than a half a block away when my neck prickles, adding to the feeling of being watched. I tell myself it’s because this is approximately where I was a few months ago—on the same route from Alice’s house to mine—when a car barreled down the street that intersects here and tried to run over me. That was my first stay in the hospital.

  Dizzy, I lean against a nearby light pole. I’ve read up on panic attacks. They’re sudden episodes of intense fear with no apparent cause. Even so, I do a three-sixty, my body certain of imminent danger. No car lurks with the engine running and evil intent. A man is walking a black Labrador in the opposite direction. An elderly woman with a purple scarf is getting into her car. I press Angel closer to my chest. She meows in protest. My heart is thumping hard. My chest hurts. I make myself release the pressure
on Angel. She would be well within her rights to add to Alexander’s scratch on my arm.

  Just a panic attack, I tell myself, fighting the lightheadedness. My free hand fumbles inside my purse, wrapping around the butt of my gun. I concentrate on that. If some bad guy is watching me, he is going to be surprised. I don’t care who he is. Magic is not going to stop a bullet. It doesn’t work that way.

  Nothing happens. I take several shaky breaths, willing calmness, and start walking again, the need to be within the safety of my own house propelling me forward. Raindrops begin to fall.

  Opening the door and entering my abandoned house calms the runaway, out-of-control storm that battered me on the street, but it isn’t the psychological balm I had hoped for. It is opening Pandora’s box, only the contents are not evil spirits, but my personal past. Maybe they are one and the same.

  I pull Angel from the interior of my windbreaker where she has curled against my chest. As soon as I set her down, she begins exploring, tail aloft, as if it’s a totally foreign environment. It feels a bit that way.

  After being released from the hospital, I went on a cleaning jag before I moved in with Alice. The house is unrecognizable. Let’s just say housekeeping is not my best trait, other than taking care of the bathroom. My adoptive father was Marine-strict about that, and I can clean a toilet. In fact, I once had to clean it with a toothbrush when I let my grades drop.

  “I thought you could use a break, too,” I tell Angel. “Now you have a whole house and me to yourself, at least for a while.”

  I haven’t been back here since Angel and I moved in with Alice to help care for Becca, but this is my refuge, my house. I sit on the worn couch, and Angel immediately returns and jumps into my lap, purring happily. I stroke her, revving the amazing engine inside that tiny body.

  Maybe coming here wasn’t a stupid idea. Angel seems happy. Walking in the woods has always been a solace, but now being outside seems to trigger the panic attacks, and the woods around here have dark associations now. Besides, it’s the kind of rain that settles in like a fat gray doom for the afternoon.

  A fresh wave of guilt washes over me about leaving Alice alone again taking care of Becca and Daniel. Alice has to stay in that house with them all day. I don’t know how she does it. But Alice has laid a lot on me. I want to think about what she told me about the Houses and the implications of an entire race going extinct, not about my past. Naturally—genius that I am—I came straight to the place where a bunch of that past was born.

  The brown reclining chair opposite me is where Becca took out her contacts and confessed she was an albino. And six months ago, sitting alone on this faded couch, I downed an entire bottle of wine after Alice’s “death,” unaware that she had given herself some exotic drug that slowed her heartbeat to almost nothing. After only knowing me as an adult for a short while, she decided dramatic performance was not my forte. She feared if she gave me advance notice of her intentions, I wouldn’t act shocked enough when I encountered her body.

  I was plenty shocked. To my hermit self’s surprise, I was also devastated. She was the last of my family. My real family.

  Alice is alive. I have to remind myself, even now. It had seemed too real.

  I was at her funeral!

  I haven’t forgiven her for that. I’d already lost my birth family to murder, my adoptive mother to a car accident and my father to an IED. I thought I was steeled against caring about anyone else, but losing Alice so soon after finding her was hard, much harder than I could have imagined.

  Aside from watching her casket (not knowing it was empty) lowered into a grave, I had to look at the names of all my immediate family on gravestones in that cemetery . . . including my own.

  Alice had faked my childhood death seventeen years ago. She’d arranged things so that the world, and more importantly, House of Iron, believed I had died in the fire that consumed my birth family. Then she quietly sent me off to be fostered. I was adopted through an agency that kept everything anonymous. I didn’t find out who I really was until I knocked on Alice’s door as an adult.

  I have to admit, faking our deaths did keep House of Iron from killing us for real. No sense in hunting down deceased persons. Of course, now they know I’m alive, but Alice remains “dead.” I hope.

  I lift Angel from my lap and put her down. Tail askew, she pads down the hall, straight to the bedroom where I’m sure she will jump onto my bed and curl into a ball in her “spot.” I follow her and confirm her intentions. That is precisely where she went the first night she invited herself into my house and my bed.

  That night she woke me. It took me a minute to remember why a cat was in my bed and realize that she was hissing at the window. It was convenient to keep my duty weapon in the holster on my utility belt. Easier to have all the equipment there when it was time to put on my uniform. But even before the Ordeal, I disliked the feeling of being trapped under sheets and kept an extra gun under my pillow. Something about Angel’s arched back and fierce hissing that night raised every hair on the back of my own neck. I snatched the gun and held the window at bay until she let me know the threat was gone. Footprints in the muddy ground the next morning proved her worth as a guard kitty, and I named her Angel.

  Angel is clearly suggesting a nap in “her” bed is called for, but I’m not ready to stop poking at memories. The worst place to look is not the bedroom or the hall where I encountered Paul and his milk-stained mustache and purloined cookie, but the kitchen.

  Although she is actually asleep at the end of my bed, for a moment, I “see” Angel draped along the kitchen windowsill, which doubled as her scratching post and bears the scars of it. One gray paw is dangling, tail switching lazily in the morning sun. Paul is at the oven, opening it to proudly reveal homemade biscuits. The smell of bacon and eggs and the promise of a life with another human being scared the bejesus out of me.

  I couldn’t handle it. I told myself I was protecting him, but it was me doing the same push-people-away I had practiced into a fine art. As I’ve already determined, it’s because I don’t want to let them down. Maybe it’s also so I don’t have to lose them. I’m not good relationship material. Becca just wouldn’t go when I pushed. Despite my well-honed skill at aloofness, she insisted on being my friend and pushed right back . . . and into my life.

  I don’t deserve her.

  She doesn’t deserve what happened.

  To keep my mind from digging deeper into that dark mental groove, I focus on Angel, who has just realized I’m in the kitchen and has abandoned her nap plans. She paces back and forth along where her empty food dish sits. She knows there are cans of tuna fish in the cabinet. Why not? She has gotten a little thinner since the trauma of living in a house full of territorial cats and a little boy who bounces off the walls. I open a can for her. She catches the aroma instantly and stitches herself through my legs until I place the can on the floor, not bothering to dump it in her bowl. The electric can opener leaves smooth edges. No point in having to clean something.

  There’s another room I want to visit. The reason I came. My private room where no one, not even Paul, was allowed.

  The wooden door has swollen and sticks. I have to shove it hard with my shoulder before it opens, revealing its secrets. I chose it for its great light. It was originally a sunroom with east and north windows. The play of dust motes reminded me of my younger sister, Amber. As children, we sat beneath a window in a house that was next to Alice’s, a house that no longer exists, where we both were born. We would pretend the gleaming motes were dancing fairies. The warmth of that memory melts, as it always does, to the one of Amber under a blood-soaked Cinderella blanket, courtesy of Theophalus Blackwell. I jerk back to the here and now, forcing myself to answer the question of what to paint.

  Most of the paintings, now stacked in the closet, are of fire parted by the vertical black streak representing my family’s murderer before I had
a name for him. I don’t particularly want to look at them. I consider the easel, canvas, and my colors. What will I paint, now that my subconscious doesn’t need to express demons I have laid to rest? I have laid them to rest, haven’t I?

  Do the mind’s demons ever rest?

  I put a fresh canvas on the easel and open the paints, dabbing bits of red, blue, and yellow on their places on the palette. The blank white canvas stares at me. I even dip my brush into a color, a blue. I won’t paint flames anymore. Maybe water. The sea.

  I start out with a restful blue, but my mind returns to the conversation with Alice, the burden that she placed on me—to bear a child, children. Unfair. This is my body, my life. I get to say whether I want children, and I don’t.

  The peaceful turquoise water becomes a storm-wracked blue-black. Waves cresting foam. Bloated, angry clouds.

  After an hour, my cell plays the chorus from “Purple Rain.” I look at it for several measures before answering.

  “Hello, Jason.”

  “What are you doing?”

  “I’m painting.”

  “A room?”

  “No, a canvas.”

  “Ah, something I didn’t know about you, il mio amore. Art is one of the great mysteries. Why do you suppose you do it?

  “Because it relaxes me.”

  “Is that all? A glass of wine could accomplish that.”

  “Maybe so.”

  “I imagine the paints let you express yourself in a way that words cannot, no?”

  “What do you want, Jason?”

  “I have been thinking about you.”

  I’m silent. There is no magic forcing my heart into a gallop, but my breaths come short and shallow.

  “I would like to see you,” he says.

  “I know.”

  “What about dinner? Tomorrow night?”

  “No.”

  “Why not?”

  “I’m not— Just ‘no.’”

  “You do know I am not giving up that easily.”

  “I know,” I say quietly and end the call.