Into the Inferno - Earl Emerson [86]
A noise in the corridor cut her talk short. She stood, smoothed her skirt, and walked around her desk. “You can use my office.” When I stood, she grasped both my hands in hers and said, “Jim. You run into any roadblocks, call me. I can make phone calls, use my connections in the industry, whatever.” Tears puddling her eyes, she tightened her grip. “I’m so sorry about this. Nobody deserves this. Especially not somebody with the heart you have. I really am sorry.”
Not knowing what else to do, I nodded dumbly. She left the room in a swelter of emotion, then stuck her head back in and said, “I thought it was them, but it was the painters. I’ll go see what’s holding up the show.”
I had no idea where she got that business about my heart, whether it was something Holly told her or a trait she thought she’d detected on her own. People were dying, you said all kinds of silly crap hoping they would buy into it. Much as I hated to admit it, I didn’t have any kind of heart. The petty details of my life had swallowed every waking moment of my days. I’d been consumed with details since I was born. Except for my daughters, I’d never had time for others. Stephanie—working her ass off for a man she barely knew and didn’t like—now that was heart.
After we were alone, Stephanie said, “At least we won’t be overwhelmed by technicalese if this all turns out to be chemical in origin. I’ve had plenty of chemistry, but not like them.”
“And we can ask them about those people from San Jose.”
She reached over and patted my hand.
37. ACHARA
Twenty minutes later Donovan came back carrying a fat manila folder. The young woman accompanying him carried a yellow legal pad and a pen.
With a name like Carpenter you’d expect Anglo-Saxon roots, perhaps a tall Nordic blonde, but she was Asian. Later, we learned her father was an American serviceman who’d married a Thai woman. Achara Carpenter was five-five and slim, in a hip-hugging purple skirt and red silk blouse, a daring color combination that was stunningly beautiful on her. Her black hair was cut short and was incredibly thick. She didn’t look the way I thought a genius should look, but then, what did I know?
Smiling graciously, Achara Carpenter stared at me half a beat too long, a sign that she’d been told I was dying. After a few moments of shuffling papers, Donovan said, “Oh, shoot. This won’t take long. Don’t start until I get back.”
His reticence from the earlier meeting seemed to have evaporated.
“If you don’t mind,” Carpenter said, picking up a purple pen that looked huge in her delicate brown fingers, “I wonder if you could go over the symptoms. I understand they’re not flulike?”
“Not at all,” Stephanie said.
“One would expect headaches, nausea, dizziness, shortness of breath, possibly chest pains in the short term. In the long term, cancer, brain damage, miscarriages, heart problems. Maybe death.”
“Why would you expect that?” I asked.
“Environmental diseases are wide-ranging, but their effects always center around just a few ailments.”
Giving a detailed account of her sister’s current condition, Stephanie salted her sentences with medical phrases, some of which I understood and some of which I did not. Nobody stopped to explain them to me. The more high-tech this got, the more left out I was going to be. “I’m assuming the other patients are in a similar state to my sister,” Stephanie said, “although I’ve only seen one at this point.”
“How many other patients are there?” Achara asked.
“Not counting Jim, three here and two in Tennessee.”
“I’d like to visit all of the patients . . . eventually,” Carpenter said, darting her dark eyes in my direction. We both knew by the time she got to Tennessee and back I’d be in a warehouse for the dim-witted. “Scott filled me in on the thing in