She shook away the thoughts and headed back into the kitchen. In a vague trancelike state, she stirred a little more milk into the porcelain server. The set was Sheila’s birthday gift—an eight-piece collection in porcelain and hand-painted with birds and flowers. It had cost her over four hundred dollars—expensive, but exquisite. Besides, Malenko would be paying her the finder’s fee soon. Fifty thousand dollars.
She placed the pot of chocolate on the tray along with the chocolate-chip cookies she had baked earlier. For a brief spell, Sheila paused at the rear door to take in the scene of her daughter sitting outside.
Harry would have said you’re in a state of denial, she thought. That our daughter is a little monster.
Lucinda was sitting at her table with her back to the house under the magnolia.
Not so! And Harry was dead.
Her guests looked on as Lucinda regaled them nonstop. Sheila couldn’t hear Lucinda’s words because her portable CD player was blaring music. Her Disney album—“A Very Merry Unbirthday to You” from Alice in Wonderland.
She’s brilliant. IQ 150. Superior intelligence range.
Incandescent mind.
Sheila took a deep breath and stepped outside with the tray of cookies and hot chocolate.
The air was clear and keen. She crossed the brick walk onto the spread of lawn that connected their splendid little greenworld to the vast, manicured carpet of yardgrass that rolled from neighborhood to neighborhood all the way across the vast green continent.
The closer she got, the clearer Lucinda’s voice. She was fully animated, demonstrating something with her hands. Meanwhile, the music was bubbling out of the player like champagne.
An absolutely magical scene, Sheila thought.
The table had been set for eight, seven places occupied by stuffed animals. Lucinda’s favorite sat to her right: a big old Dumbo they had bought last year at Disney World—a doll that had jumped out at her the moment she laid eyes on it. Sheila still recalled how Lucinda had frozen in place—unmoved by all the Mickeys, Minnies, and other stuffed cartoon characters—as if seeing an apparition.
Sheila moved within a few feet of her daughter’s back. She looked like a peony in her pink dress. The music continued playing, and Lucinda was chattering away to her guests, giving instructions.
For a moment Sheila thought she would drop the tray. But some instant reflex caught her, stunning her in place.
Sitting on the table in front of her was Rachel’s Miss Tabitha doll in pink. Sheila’s first thought was that her daughter had fashioned a punk hairdo for Tabitha. But then it came horridly clear.
With a pair of scissors, Lucinda had cut all the hair off the doll down to its rubbery skull, and with Sheila’s new chrome wine-bottle opener, she had methodically corkscrewed holes into its skull through which she had stuck colored cocktail toothpicks.
“Lucinda … Wha-wha … ?”
Lucinda turned. Her face was an implacable blank. “Oh, how splendid. Mommy brought the chocolate and the cookies. Miss Tabitha is going to be delighted. Aren’t you, Tabitha?”
Then, before Sheila could say something, Lucinda’s voice became some squeaky alien thing: “Yes, I am because it’s my birthday, too.”
“Lucinda … why did you … ?” Then something around the doll’s neck stopped her cold. “What’s that black thing?”
“Oh, it’s Tabitha’s boa,” Lucinda proclaimed. “It’s just like yours, Mommy.”
Sheila reached for it, but her hand froze. It was the kitten’s tail. She could see the white bone cut at the end. Lucinda had colored the fur black with her markers, though the orange still showed at the roots.
“I made it, but it doesn’t fit right,” Lucinda said, and she took the thing in her hand and bent it into a circle—the cracking sounds sending barbs of horror through Sheila. “That’s better,” Lucinda said, fitting it in place.
Sheila tried to catch her breath, but before she did, Lucinda shot her a look of wide-eyed pride. “I’m going to be a doctor when I grow up. So is Miss Tabitha. Aren’t you, Tabitha?”
“Yes, I am,” Tabitha replied. “I’m going to be an anesthesiologist. What kind of doctor do you want to be?”
“Lucinda, what—” Sheila began.
But Lucinda cut her off. “Mother, please don’t interrupt.” Then she turned to Tabitha again. “I want to be a surgeon, because I would like to see the insides of people’s bodies, especially their heads.” Lucinda pushed another pick into Tabitha’s crown. “Did you know that the average adult brain weighs approximately three pounds and an elephant’s brain weighs thirteen pounds?”
“I didn’t know that. How much does my brain weigh?”
“You’re just a newborn, so yours weighs less than a pound, but it’s going to grow very, very fast.” And she stuck in another pick just above the eyebrow.
“That tickles,” Tabitha squealed. “But it’s okay because I’m going to be a smart little girl just like you.”
“And make tons of money, right, Mommy? RIGHT?”
39
Lucius Malenko slid open the glass doors on the balcony and let the cool Atlantic breeze flush over him.
From his perch on the granite cliffs a few miles below Portsmouth, the glittering blue filled his vision. In the gauzy distance, sailing vessels made their way toward the harbor past the small humps of Big Frog and Little Frog Islands. It was a million-dollar view. Or, more exactly, four million, bought and paid for by the upper end of the bell curve.
Malenko took in a cool deep breath of assurance that he had it all—a home by the sea, a remote country estate in the woods, and a fifteenth-century villa in Tuscany where in three weeks he would relax for a month. He had nearly every mode of transportation. On the walls behind him hung original seascape oils by Marshall Johnson, Thomas Birch, and Winslow Homer. Atop pedestals and on shelves sat various objets d’art from his foreign travels. Lighting up the computer monitor in the adjacent room were his investments showing cumulative capital valuations of over forty million dollars. What he called his “Smart Money portfolio”—pun intended.
His was the good life, to use the hoary old American expression—a life that was far beyond the meager earnings of a consulting senior neurologist working two days a week at Nova—and a life that was light-years beyond where he had come from in the Ukraine.
As he stood on the balcony sipping his morning coffee, with the sultry ocean air combing through his hair and the warm sun on his face, he recalled the dark and twisted road that had led him here from the dismal, concrete-poured flats of the Kiev State Research Center of Neurosurgery.
It was the early 1970s, and he had headed up a project with the long-range goal of alleviating the effects of certain human neurological afflictions. The radically new approach involved the transplantation of healthy animal brain tissue into like regions in other animals with various neurological defects. The theory was that primitive rat or monkey brain cells could “reseed” those areas of nerve degeneration and take their cues from existing brain matter to mature into the needed cell types. This way, human neurological diseases—including multiple sclerosis, strokes, or multi-infarct dementia—might eventually be treated by neurotransplantation.
But in the early stages of his research, Malenko made a series of astounding side discoveries. He had located areas of the cortex and hippocampus that affect memory and cognitive performance and which energize other brain systems. When he treated those areas in a control group of newborn mice with a dopamine-protein mix that promoted neuron connections, he discovered that their long-term memory was superior to that of untreated mice. Not only did they run their mazes faster, but also they could speed through complicated new structures as if radar-guided.