“For example, we’ve recently learned that most people, when they enter what we’ve come to think of as our twilight years—the sixties, seventies and eighties—these people stop producing HGH. More important, when we give these same people regular injections of the Human Growth Hormone some interesting things begin to happen. They begin to increase bone density. They increase muscle tone. They lose an average of twelve percent of their body fat. And they find they have recharged energy levels.
“In essence, ladies and gentlemen, we’re able to chart an array of specific, measurable changes in these population groups that indicate something remarkable is going on. It appears that HGH, administered to the elderly, might actually bring about a process of age reversal.
“These people get younger.”
[113]
Walt was already awake when the alarm clock brought Teri out of her sleep at a couple minutes of six the next morning. She found him in the kitchen, sipping a cup of coffee, waiting for the toaster to finish its business with a slice of bread.
“Morning.”
“How long have you been up?” she asked, plopping down at the table, wishing she’d had another three or four hours. It didn’t come easy anymore, a good night’s sleep. The nights had started growing longer after Gabe had first shown up on her doorstep, and then again when they had taken him from her, and then, she supposed, one more time after the incident two nights ago with Boyle. The nights kept getting longer and the mornings shorter.
“I don’t know. Not long,” he said quietly. The tone of his voice struck her almost immediately as slightly foreign. He sounded as if he had slipped beneath a wave of sadness and the undertow was carrying him further out into the muddy waters.
“Are you all right?”
“I don’t know.” He looked at her, something frighteningly unfamiliar behind his eyes, and looked away. “I thought I had put it all behind me. But now…”
“What is it, Walt?”
“It’s not important. Really.”
Teri stared at him without saying a word.
“It’s just something that surprised me, that’s all. It’s personal. It doesn’t have anything to do with you or Gabe.”
“I can sit here all day if I have to,” Teri said.
Walt flashed a crooked smile, then took it back. “My father. He died three years ago, alone in a hospital in Nevada, at the age of seventy-three, after a bout with pneumonia. We didn’t get along terribly well, and I guess somehow, over time, I came to think of myself as not really having a father. I hadn’t seen him in eight or nine years.”
“I’m sorry,” Teri said.
“Today’s the third anniversary of his death. I guess I’m a little surprised it still comes after me.” The knob on the toaster popped and Walt took possession of the bread almost the second it appeared out of the furnace. He dropped it on a plate, slapped on some butter and strawberry jam, and carried it over to the table. “Here, a little something to get you going. You look like you need it.”
“Thanks.”
“You want some coffee?”
“Black?”
“Coming up.”
She took a bite of her toast and dropped it back on the plate. She really wasn’t that hungry. “Want to talk about it?”
“Not really,” he said flatly.
For the second time, she considered showing him the envelope that had arrived in the mail yesterday. It seemed ever more pertinent in light of the anniversary of the death of his father. Though there was a time and a place for everything, and in the end she decided to put it off a little longer.
“What do you think Childs does with them?” she asked abruptly.
“I don’t know,” Walt said. He placed the coffee cup in front of her and sat across the table in a chair that usually held a stack of newspapers. “It’s got something to do with some research project, I suppose. Probably something to do with aging.”
“I keep thinking about what he told me.”
“What was that?”
“About Gabe getting older.”
“Yeah, well, you’ve got to remember who we’re dealing with, Teri. This guy’s been using children as guinea pigs for the past twenty years. I’m not sure you should put too much credence in anything he’s said, especially anything about Gabe.”
“But if he was telling the truth…” She let the thought trail away, and it wasn’t because the thought had come to her incomplete and wanting.
“What?”
“If he was telling the truth, then that would mean… it would mean Gabe was dying.” It was out there now, plain to see. Ignore it or fear it or try to make do.
Walt didn’t say a word.
“And there’s something else,” she said. “Childs might be the only person in the world who can save him.”
[114]
Childs came out of the house, checking his watch. He dug into his right front pocket, pulled out his keys, locked the front door, and started down the walkway. He had parked overnight at the front curb instead of in the garage where he usually kept the car.
It was ten past eight.
Walt and Teri had been parked across the street, half-a-block up, for over an hour. She had found herself an oldies station on the radio and a song called Breakdown by Tom Petty & the Heartbreakers had just come on as Childs emerged from the house.
Walt tapped her on the forearm and pointed. “We’re on.”
She turned off the radio and buckled her seat belt. Between the coffee and the cold morning air, Teri had finally come fully awake and alert. Added to that now was a sudden rush of adrenaline. “About time. I was beginning to wonder if he was taking the day off.”
“Me, too,” Walt said, starting the engine.
They pulled out, went down the block a couple of houses, then pulled into a driveway and turned around. Childs was making a right hand turn, two blocks up, by the time they were headed in the right direction.
“Don’t lose him.”
Walt grinned. “I won’t.”
He had warned her that she was going to have to be patient, that Childs might not lead them anywhere except to the office and back. And not just today, but tomorrow and maybe the day after and maybe the day after that as well. It could turn out to be long and arduous, he had said.
But instead, Childs took them on a sight-seeing tour through a maze of neighborhoods and twice around the business district, something he wouldn’t be doing if he were going to the office or downtown to the mall or over to the Holiday Market to pick up some groceries. Even a careful man didn’t waste his time worrying about being followed if he were only making a trip to the market.
“What’s he doing?”
“Making sure no one’s following him.”
“He’s not going to the clinic, is he?”
“Nope,” Walt said.
“You think we hit a jackpot first coin in the slot?”
“That I do.”
It was almost nine by the time Childs finally pulled into the entrance of the Devol Research Institute. Walt slowed down out front and watched the Buick make the long straight line down the driveway to the parking lot. The sprinklers had come on sometime earlier. The landscaping glistened and there were a number of small puddles in the road that seemed to explode under the weight of the car’s tires.
“You were right,” Teri said, feeling a strange sense of dread settle over her. It was almost as if she had come to a fork in the road and deep in her heart she knew that neither of her options would take her to where she wanted to go.