Spiral

“She wasn’t close to him when it happened. Professor Connor seemed to run ahead of her.”

“Did she try to stop him?”

“It’s hard to say for sure.”

“Let me see the video.”

“I don’t see what good that will do, Ms. Connor.”

“I don’t care. Show it to me.”

After five minutes of fighting, Stacker reluctantly opened his laptop.

Maggie watched, her heart pounding. The scene was grainy. The bridge was empty, swaying ever so slightly in the wind. A time stamp at the bottom said nine-thirty-two a.m.

“Oh, God. There he is.” The tears ran down her cheeks. She fought the urge to cry out loud.

Liam was slowly shuffling along, the unknown woman beside him. He had on his old brown overcoat, the one with the big wooden buttons. She could barely make out his face. “Oh, Pop-pop.” She put a hand to her mouth.

He continued to progress along the bridge, the woman beside him. She couldn’t tell if they were talking.

They approached the middle of the span.

It happened so fast. One minute he was shuffling along. The next minute he was running. Fast. Then he was up and over.

Gone.

7

FOR JAKE, THE NEXT FOUR HOURS WERE A LONG, SLOW WALK underwater. The first stop was Barton Hall, home of the Cornell police department. A lieutenant named Ed Becraft had led Jake to a dingy little room with plastic chairs and a white table. He looked to be in his late forties, with a wrinkled brown suit and tired blue eyes. He had a soft, high voice, incongruous, given his bulk and his job. When he told Jake the video camera on the bridge had caught Liam jumping, Jake was stunned.

Becraft showed Jake a picture of the woman who’d been with Liam on the bridge. “You recognize her?”

Jake shook his head.

Becraft nodded, then stood. “I need a minute,” he said. He gave Jake a voluntary statement form and asked him to fill it out, then left him alone.

Jake tried to get his head around it, but the whole episode didn’t register as real. Like a string of words said over and over until they lost their meaning and became just a stretch of sound: Liam Connor is dead.

He picked up bits of conversations in the hallway. Rumors were spreading, speculation about what could have made Liam kill himself. The leading theories revolved around an incurable disease, cancer or incipient Alzheimer’s, affecting either his health or his judgment. It was all noise, Jake knew-the desperate attempt of people’s brains to adjust to a suddenly shifted reality. Whenever something big happened, there was always a great deal of Sturm und Drang. Jake was trying to see through it. To pick the signal out of the noise. To understand why one of the greatest biologists of the twentieth century, a man surrounded by family and friends, all of whom adored him, chose to kill himself. And why would he do it in such a sudden, dramatic, out-of-character way, with absolutely no explanation?

When Jake was done filling out the form, he poked his head into the hallway. Becraft saw him and came back, a mug in hand. “You okay? You want coffee?”

“No, thanks. I’m fine.”

“Tea?”

“I’m fine,” Jake said.

“Let me just say again, I’m sorry for your loss.”

Becraft settled into his chair, picked up a pen. He made a couple of notes on a pad before looking up. When he did, it was all business, the questions coming fast. “Any reason you know of why Connor would want to end his life?”

“No.”

“Was he depressed?”

“No.”

“Was he sick?”

“No.”

“Any unusual behavior?”

“No. Nothing.”

“Was he tired? Slowing down?”

“You have to be kidding. He worked twelve-hour days. Nights and weekends, he’d be there, fiddling in the gardens.”

“Gardens?”

Jake gave him a quick rundown on Liam’s fungal research, the granite-topped tables in the Physical Sciences Complex. Becraft took copious notes. The interview went on for another ten minutes, but the only thing that Becraft reacted to was the information about Liam’s labs. He’d grabbed his superior, a police chief named Stacker, and they dispatched a team to seal it off.

Then they’d asked Jake to wait.

He drifted up to the main part of Barton Hall, a cavernous space so big you could park a 747 in it. In addition to housing the Cornell police, Barton was also the home of the ROTC, as well as an indoor running track. It had been an airplane hangar in World War I, an armory during World War II. At the time, it was the largest freestanding enclosed space in the world. Now undergraduates took final exams there en masse, row upon row toiling under the watchful eyes of TAs and professors. When Jake taught Physics 1112, this is where they took their final.

Jake stared out over the hall, imagining Liam running the track, eight times around for a mile. Liam had been a dedicated runner when he was younger, a good one. He’d gotten within fifteen seconds of the world record for the mile in the early fifties. Jake ran a bit himself, but he was more of a lifter. He liked the clarity of weights. The steel went up or it didn’t. Success or failure. With running, you were never done. You could keep going forever.