Spiral

Mel shook his head. “I truly don’t know. I’m pretty good at reading people, but your grandfather? I could never tell when he was having me on. He could tell me the moon was made of ice cream and I’d believe him.” He looked down, as if he’d find the answer in the baseboards of the floor. “He was a proud man. A gifted man. Age takes your gifts from you.” He shook his head again, touched his hands to his face. “Being old is… difficult. You slowly begin to fade. And at some point, there’s not enough left.”

“So you believe it was suicide?”

“Maggie, I’m sorry.” He put a hand out, touched her arm.

SHE TOOK THE FILE TO HER BEDROOM, PLACED IT IN THE center of her unmade bed. She stepped back, gathering herself up. Pop-pop had prepared this for her. Before he died.

He might have known he was going to die.

She found the letter right away. The envelope was white, blank except for her name, MAGGIE CONNOR, written in her grandfather’s familiar scrawl.

She ran her fingers across his handwriting, smearing the pencil strokes across the white paper. She could almost see him, hunched at his desk. He was a champion letter writer, practically wrapping himself around the words. He would go on for pages, including scientific ideas, snippets of words from anyone from Yeats to Beckett, little drawings. His letters were a wonder.

She didn’t want to look inside. It was likely the last physical object she would ever receive from her grandfather. It marked a kind of peak, a divide separating a past where Pop-pop was alive from a future where he wasn’t. She didn’t want to cross that divide.

She set the letter aside, just for a moment, and sorted through the rest of the folder. Inside was a stack of legal documents, nothing more personal than a property deed. She found the ledger Mel had mentioned. A spreadsheet on the opening pages listed Liam Connor’s stock holdings, including dates the stocks were purchased, the price, and annual tallies of liquidation value.

Maggie was shocked. Liam was not just a brilliant scientist-he was a brilliant investor. Starting with twelve hundred dollars in 1950, he had slowly built his portfolio with purchases of IBM, Intel, Apple, right up through Google. If she understood the numbers, Liam Connor’s estate was worth millions.

Maggie set the ledger on the bed. Is that what this was about? Money? She didn’t care about money. She didn’t want her grandfather’s money.

She didn’t care if he was worth ten billion dollars. She’d trade it all in a second to know why.

Maggie flipped through the rest, but there was nothing else that mattered.

Nothing but the letter.

She carefully unsealed the flap, her hands shaking. She took a few deep breaths, trying to steady herself. She couldn’t believe how afraid she was to open it. How afraid she was to find out if he really had planned to jump.

Calm down, Maggie. Buck up.

She removed a stationery-sized sheet of thin yellow paper from the envelope.

Maggie-

Tell Dylan that it’s one last trip to the moors.

Jake knows the territory.

Ask him where the elephants perch.

I love you so-

Pop-pop

12

“MY BOSS IS UNDER TREMENDOUS PRESSURE TO BRING THIS case to a close,” Becraft said as he and Jake rode up the elevator in Weill Hall, the brand-new, two-hundred-sixty-thousand-square-foot behemoth in the heart of campus. “To declare it a suicide and move on. You saw the reporters camped outside his office. And the provost is calling him almost hourly. We’re all working double shifts, trying to put it to bed, but the chief is resisting. Said it doesn’t smell right.”

Becraft was here to learn everything he could about the Crawlers in a Box project. He was talkative, his weariness opening him up. Jake decided to take advantage. “Does it smell right to you?” Jake asked.

“It stinks. We can’t find the woman on the bridge. We can’t find the Crawlers. And now we’ve got people from Fort Detrick on the way, unwilling to tell us anything.”

THE ELEVATOR DOORS OPENED TO THE THIRD FLOOR OF Weill Hall. They went past the atrium and down a corridor painted antiseptic white. Jake stopped at a door with a sign that said SYNTHETIC BIOLOGY-V. GLAZMAN above a series of standard yellow-and-black warning stickers about the dangers found inside. He pushed open the door. “Vlad?”

The Russian appeared, chomping on a mouthful of gum. Since he’d quit smoking, Vlad was an inveterate gum chewer, stopping only when he was drinking.

Jake did the introductions. Vlad pulled a box of Chiclets from his pocket, offered some to Becraft. He shook his head no. “You sure?” Vlad persisted. “Fruit flavor.” Rejected, Vlad tossed a handful in his mouth. “Come,” he said.

They passed lab bench after lab bench, each set up with the necessary tools for DNA synthesis, gene sequencing, plasmid transfection, and genome design. They followed the squat Russian until he stopped at a long table in the corner.