The Reach

***

The burial was held on Wednesday morning, in a graveyard in Wellesley adjacent to a white clapboard church. About fifty people gathered under a drizzling rain, their faces matching the color of the sky. Black umbrellas clutched in white-knuckled fists held off the worst of it. The expressions of those in the first row were blank, or tired, or bored.

They probably barely knew her.

But as Jess Chambers looked more closely she began to see familiar faces. A few of the mourners were colleagues; she recognized Professor Thomas with a younger woman, who clung to his arm with one hand and clutched a handkerchief in the other. Some of those gathered along the right were students, red-eyed and blowing their noses into white tissue as Jean Shelley's casket swung and scraped against dirt on its way down.

The casket was a symbolic gesture. They had been unable to recover anything at all from the wreckage of the fire. The inferno in the observation room had blazed so hot and strong that even Shelley's bones had been reduced to dust, every trace of her existence erased and blown away.

Evan Wasserman, or what they thought was left of him, would be laid to rest tomorrow in the plot adjacent to Jean Shelley, as his will had requested.

She searched the faces again, looking for those who might appear to be a bit more out of place. She recognized two of the investigators who had already spoken to her at length at the hospital, and another younger man who might be a plainclothes cop. But nobody else stood out. Anyone left from Helix or the Wasserman Facility would be too smart to come here, she thought. Their business with Sarah was done, and Shelley's and Berger's deaths had probably thrown everything into chaos. They would wash their hands publicly of the entire mess. If there was anyone left at all who knew the full truth.

The whole story was still coming together in bits and pieces, very few of which the investigators had shared with her. But they clearly didn't know everything either. What was clear was that Jean Shelley, with a large portion of the significant holdings she had inherited from her father's steel business, had founded Helix Pharmaceuticals nearly eight years before with at least two other players. It was a privately held company specializing in gene therapy and small-molecule drug discovery, and had remained fiercely independent and guarded until recently, when rumors had begun to float about an investment opportunity. It was said that the company was offering a significant stake in a particularly exciting preclinical program, before an IND had even been filed. They would need a large cash infusion to move into clinical testing. None of this had been confirmed yet, but it was likely only a matter of time before more details came to light.

Why someone with a fortune as large as Shelley's would have taken a job on the faculty of a small graduate school wasn't immediately clear. The most obvious explanation, that Shelley had planned the whole thing even as far as five years back, raised other unsettling questions that Jess would rather not explore. It was more likely that she had done it simply because she could, and because it left her closer to where Sarah was being held.

For the past two days, Jess had been struggling to come to terms with a new image of herself, and it wasn't pretty. She had let Jean Shelley play her like a fine baby grand. The professor had manipulated and controlled her nearly every step of the way.

The fact that Shelley was an authority figure should not matter in the slightest, Jess told herself. She was being trained to notice just this sort of deceit in other people. She should have been more aware of what was happening.

She felt unbalanced, unsure of herself or her own motivations.

But this wasn't the only thing she was struggling to understand. Another part of her mind had yet to face something even more unsettling. Shelley and Gee had told her she was a psi carrier. What's more, she had been dosed with some son of drug. Were they telling the truth, and if so, what exactly had it done to her? What did it all mean, if anything?

The minister said his last few words and closed his Bible with a snap, hunched against the wind and drizzle. When the ceremony was finished and the mourners had begun to file away, Charlie gave her a gentle hug, careful to avoid the painful spots. Then she held her at arm's length and looked her over. Jess knew she was pale and rumpled, out of sorts. 'You're the walking wounded, girl. Should have stayed in that hospital bed.'

'I had to come, Charlie.' / had to see her into the ground. Even if she s not really in there.

'Don't I know it. But that doesn't mean a whit to your poor old body.'

'I'm fine, really. Just some scrapes and bruises. I'm like one of those dumb lucky miracles, people who get hit by lightning and walk away with barely a scratch.'

'Are you done with the talking?'

'I've got interviews later today. They let me off the hook to come here, but they're itching to get back to it.'

'What are you telling them?'

'Nothing really. They don't know a thing about Sarah. Children's Services had her as deceased for years. As far as the government's concerned, she doesn't exist, and I'm not going to do anything to change that.'

The official theory so far of the destruction of the Wasser-man Facility was a rupture in the ancient gas line that ran all the way from Blue Hills to the old Boston State Hospital complex. Pockets of trapped gas had gathered in various locations underground, and when one of them was sparked by an electrical short the explosion caused a chain reaction, taking Wasserman's building down along with the surrounding brush and half the street.

How that explained the rest of it, Jess had no idea. There were too many dead men at the scene, along with the pieces of the destroyed helicopter scattered among the debris. Someone would have to be held accountable.

'You done good,' Charlie said. 'I know it might not seem like it right now, but what happened is the way it had to be. Someday you'll see it the same.'

'Maybe, Charlie. Maybe you're right. But it doesn't keep me from feeling pretty damn guilty. A lot of people died. I could have done something differently, gotten her out somehow without causing her to tear the whole place to shreds. You know?'

'They would have killed you, to keep her,' Charlie said. 'You know it as well as I do. There was nothing that could have changed that. It was fate. That and the almighty dollar.'

Jess looked out across the cemetery to the street. For some reason, she thought about Maria's face. Embrujado. Haunted. Something shiny winked in her eyes, and then was gone. 'I don't know what to think anymore,' she said.

'What you need is a hot bath, lots of bubbles, and someone to scrub you raw.'

'I'm going to disappear for a while, Charlie,' she said. 'I'm leaving Thomas Ward. I just can't bring myself to care about the degree anymore. This whole experience has changed my perspective. I don't know if psychology is the field for me.'

'Take your time, sweetheart. Don't make any rash decisions. The mental health field will be a colder, darker place without you in it. Can I see you back to the hospital?'

'I've got an errand to run first, a couple of them actually.'

'I'll go with you, then. You blew up my car, I can't go anywhere else right now anyway.'

Jess looked at Charlie and saw that there would be no changing her mind. She smiled, insanely glad at that moment to have such a friend, and wondering how on earth she had earned the honor. 'We'll take a taxi,' she said.

***

Over one hundred yards away, Philippa Cruz lowered the binoculars and handed them to the driver standing to her right, and he switched the umbrella he was holding to his other hand to take them.

Droplets of water spattered the shoulders of her suit jacket. She rubbed at her eyes to get the grit out. She'd forgotten the last time she had slept. Her hair was lying limply across her face and the fine lines around her mouth and brow had become more pronounced. It had been a very long couple of days.

They were parked among a row of other cars and far enough down the street to remain unnoticed, but she had a clear line of sight to the graveyard and the small group of people gathered there. With the high-powered binoculars, it was almost as if she stood shoulder to shoulder with Jess Chambers.

'No sign of her,' Cruz said. Not that she had expected the girl to be there anyway. They would be keeping her out of sight for a while, maybe forever. That is, if she was still alive.