“He’s dead, Dr. Sundquist,” Keith Shelby said, his tone one of utter defeat. “It was his lungs. They never found out exactly what it was. The best guess was that it was some new kind of virus or something. I don’t know anything at all about things like that, but they tell me those things mutate all the time. We thought maybe he picked it up on the flight back from Maui. After that, he was never really very well.”
When the call was finally over, Katharine sat numbly, staring out the window.
What on earth was going on?
Was Shane Shelby’s body hidden away somewhere on the estate, too?
For several long minutes Katharine sat gazing out the window into the garden, but she saw nothing. Her mind was starting to feel fogged, partly with the exhaustion of the last two nearly sleepless nights, but just as much with strange bits and pieces of information that floated just out of her grasp, parts of a single puzzle that she couldn’t quite fit together.
Think! she told herself. The answers are here. Find them!
Pushing her fear and exhaustion away, Katharine went to work.
In the conference room at the Hotel Hana Maui, Takeo Yoshihara felt the cellular phone in his jacket pocket vibrate. Stepping out into the corridor, he flipped the phone open and held it to his ear. “Yes?” He listened for a moment, then spoke again: “Exactly whom did Dr. Sundquist call?” he asked the caller who had just interrupted his meeting with his associates in the Serinus Project.
As he broke the connection several seconds later and returned to the conference room, Takeo Yoshihara was already considering the most efficient way to deal with Katharine Sundquist. And her son.
From the moment he woke up that morning, Michael hadn’t felt right. His chest felt tight, and his whole body hurt, but he didn’t want to complain to his mother, who would hustle him back to Dr. Jameson. So instead of saying anything, he’d taken the bus to school, where the first thing he’d done was hunt for Josh Malani.
Josh was nowhere to be found. Finally, Michael called his house. His father — sounding as if he were still sleeping off a binge from the night before — growled that Josh wasn’t home, but when Michael asked if he’d been home at all last night, Sam Malani only mumbled something about not caring where the hell Josh was and hung up. Through the rest of the morning, Michael grew more and more worried about Josh, and his chest kept getting worse as well.
During third period, when he was starting to wonder if maybe he was going to have an asthma attack, he’d barely been able to breathe. Trying to work the tightness out in gym class didn’t do any good.
At lunchtime Rick Pieper tried to convince him to see the school nurse, but Michael knew what would happen if he did — the nurse would call his mother; his mother would come pick him up and haul him to Dr. Jameson, who would start jabbing needles in him and sticking things down his throat.
And he’d feel worse than he already did.
After lunch he barely made it through his last two classes. Fortunately, the windows of both rooms were wide open, and in both classes he sat close to them, struggling to suck as much of the fresh air into his aching lungs as he could.
By the time the last bell rang, his chest was still hurting and he was starting to feel kind of weak. Dizzy.
Maybe he should just skip track practice and go home.
He rejected the thought in an instant, as old memories rose in his mind. There had been times back in New York a couple of years ago when the asthma was so bad he’d had to catch a taxi just to get the five blocks from school to their apartment. Well, he’d worked for too long to get past that to let it start screwing up his life again. He’d grit his teeth, ignore the pain and the weakness, and break through it on the track. He’d start running, and keep going until the pain either went away or he couldn’t feel it anymore.
As the clanging of the bell faded away, Michael packed his books into his bag and joined the throng of students pushing their way out the door. Emerging onto the covered walkway that edged the building, he had to pause to catch his breath before trusting himself even to make it to the locker room next to the gym.
Pulling open the door, he stepped into the humid room. The air was redolent with the mingled odors of perspiration, soap, disinfectant, and half a dozen other chemicals. Michael went to his locker, opened it, and, stripping naked, pulled on the gym clothes that were still damp from his fourth-period workout. Then he fished around for a pair of clean socks, unwilling to subject his feet to the stinking pair he’d used earlier in the day.
As he put on his track clothes, he began to feel a little better, and flushed with pride for resisting the urge to skip practice. Finished dressing, he headed toward the rest room.
It was as he was standing at the urinal that he became aware of a new odor drifting into his nostrils. Instinctively, Michael expanded his chest, drawing it deep into his lungs. The pungency of the scent almost made him dizzy, but the constriction in his chest immediately eased and he felt some of the fatigue leave his body.
Glancing around, Michael searched for the source of the odor, but all he saw was the closet in which Josh Malani had found the bottle of ammonia yesterday. The door was slightly ajar. Finished at the urinal, Michael adjusted his shorts and pulled at the lever that flushed the porcelain basin. He moved to the sinks, which stood between the urinals and the closet, and the scent grew stronger. Unable to contain his curiosity, he approached the closet and pulled the door wide open.
The cleaning supplies were lined up on the shelf, just as they’d been yesterday. There were nearly a dozen different containers, holding chemicals ranging from window cleaner to scrubbing powder, from toilet cleaners to solvents powerful enough to remove practically anything from the school’s walls, be they painted, tiled, or bare concrete. But there was nothing that could account for the peculiar odor he’d been breathing for the last couple of minutes.
His eyes fell on the ammonia bottle that Josh had been sniffing. Almost without thinking, he reached out, picked it up, unscrewed its cap, and sniffed at it.
The odor grew stronger, and he felt a heat spread through his body.
Frowning, Michael studied the label. Something had replaced the familiar acrid ammonia odor he would ordinarily have recognized.
All the label contained was the usual list of warnings against using the product in an enclosed area, inhaling its fumes, or ingesting it.
Picking up the bottle’s cap to screw it back on, he hesitated. His frown deepening, Michael held the bottle to his nose and took another sniff, breathing more deeply this time. The warmth spread through him, setting his whole body tingling.
Was this what Josh had felt yesterday? Glancing around the rest room as furtively as if he were about to shoot heroin into his veins, Michael sucked the fumes in again, and then yet again. With each breath he felt more strength surge into his body, and the last of the fatigue and pain he’d been feeling all day evaporated. He drew a dozen more breaths, and was still holding the bottle in his hand when the rest room door slammed open.
“Jesus! It stinks in here!”
Quickly putting the cap back on the bottle, Michael stepped out of the closet to find himself facing the janitor. “Someone left the cap off the ammonia bottle,” he said.
“Musta been Joe,” the janitor said, so quickly that Michael was sure that Joe — whoever he was — got the blame for anything that went wrong in the maintenance department. “Christ! How can you stand to even be in here?” Obviously neither expecting nor wanting an answer to his question, the janitor propped the door open to let the fumes out of the rest room and started pulling supplies out of the closet.