“That’s a good coping mechanism.”
“Thing is,” he said, “I think she believed it. I think she was even a little jealous of it, if you want to know the truth. The stories she used to tell me, the way she talked about him. She made him seem sort of magical. She made him sound like he was lucky.”
“What do you remember about him?”
“The first time I met him I was just a kid. My mother took me to visit him in some halfway house or something.”
“And?”
“And he was sitting in the dark in this room and he didn’t turn to look at us. He just stared at the wall and talked to us with his back turned. It seemed to me at the time that he must have had eyes in the back of his head.”
“That must have been a little frightening to a young boy,” she said.
“Not really, because my mother just talked to him like it was all perfectly normal, carrying on a whole conversation while he was turned the other way. And I asked him what he was staring at, if he was looking at the fairies, and my mother yanked my arm so hard I thought I’d fall over. But I really wanted to know. I remember that. After everything she’d told me, it seemed like a logical question.”
“And what did Uncle Charlie say?”
“He laughed,” Jeremiah told her. “He laughed so hard he started coughing and hacking. My mother went over to him and tried to calm him down. I just stood there, where she’d left me, wondering what to do. So finally, I went over to him, too, and he turned and looked at me and said, ‘Yeah. The fairies. I’m looking at the fucking fairies. Don’t you see them, kid?’ And then he leaned in close to me and grabbed my face in both his hands and started laughing again.”
“Did that scare you?”
“Not really,” Jeremiah said, remembering it so vividly in that moment that he could almost smell Uncle Charlie’s vinegary breath and the sweat coming off his clothes. “What scared me more was my mother’s reaction. She pulled at his hands and slapped them away and told him never to touch me again. She loved him, you know? But it must have scared her when he grabbed me like that. He told us to leave and we did.”
“And what did your mother say about it?”
“Nothing,” he said. “We never talked about it. I didn’t see him again until I was much older—eighteen, maybe—my first summer home from college. He was at our house for a barbecue and I had a beer with him and listened to him talk about flies.”
“Flies?”
“Yeah, for a good hour. How they see things in overlapping, fractured images because of the way their eyes are, so they can look at a person and see him from different angles at the same time. He said they know more because of the way they see things. He said he’d like to have eyes like a fly.” He shook his head and smiled at the memory. “He was a real whack job. But at that age, I found him kind of intriguing. I never saw him again after that.”
“Why not?”
“Because,” he said, “a few weeks later he jumped in front of a moving train.”
Chapter 12
Later that same afternoon, Natalie came into his room and asked if he was all set to go.
“Go where?”
“You have an appointment with Dr. Pike today. I’ll walk with you.”
Jeremiah snickered. She made it sound like they were going for a coffee. She was, he knew, more guard than companion.
“Sure,” he said. “That would be lovely.”
They were a good five minutes early for the appointment and arrived to find the door to his examination room closed. As there was no waiting room, they stood in the hallway.
“Who’s in there?” Jeremiah asked. As far as he knew, he was Pike’s sole patient. Natalie shrugged her shoulders and looked at her shoes.
When the door opened a minute later, Jeremiah was surprised to see Charles Scott come out of the room, his suit jacket draped over his arm and his shirtsleeves rolled up above his wrists. Pike was at his elbow and both men looked momentarily flustered to find them there.
“Mr. Adams,” Scott said, straightening his shoulders and assuming his usual air of supremacy in seamless transition. “Why on Earth are you loitering in the halls?”
“Sorry,” Natalie said. Jeremiah noted that she seemed slightly rattled, as well. “Mr. Adams has an appointment. I think we’re a few minutes early.”
Scott offered her a cool expression. “You would do well,” he said, “to adhere to your exact schedule.”
She nodded and retreated back down the hall. Pike invited Jeremiah into the exam room with a flick of his hand, and Scott took a moment to button the cuffs of his shirt. As Jeremiah stepped around him to get into the room, he noticed a fresh cotton bandage adhered to the back of Scott’s neck, at the base of his skull. About two inches in length, it was difficult to miss.
“I didn’t know you were Dr. Scott’s doctor,” Jeremiah said when Pike closed the door hastily behind him.
“I’m not. He just comes in periodically for vitamin injections. He’s something of a health nut.”
Last Jeremiah knew, vitamins weren’t typically injected into someone’s skull.
He hoisted himself onto the table and watched with interest as Pike covered and then cleared away a metal tray holding implements that he’d presumably just used on Scott. Judging from the serious size of the needle and the amount of blood-soaked gauze, he was fairly confident Pike was lying to him.
Two hours later, alone at the computer in his rooms, Jeremiah thought he’d discovered the truth. A rudimentary search revealed the startling possibility that Dr. Pike had injected Scott’s brain with stem cells. There was little else it could have been. There
