Katharine felt a chill pass over her. “The dive?” she repeated.
“Mark went out with some other boys, and they had some trouble with their tanks. Some of the boys had to come up fast, and I guess it was pretty scary. Anyway, it scared me enough that I didn’t let Mark go again. And I still keep wondering if that was what started his breathing problems.”
Katharine’s chill worsened as she heard the last two words, and the knot of fear that had been in her stomach since last night tightened. The night after he’d gone diving, Michael had had breathing problems, and even last night—
And then she remembered. Kioki! What about him? Why had he died? And Jeff Kina. Had he come home yet? Or had the same thing happened to him that had happened to Kioki Santoya? But even as the questions tumbled through her mind, so also did a memory of Michael’s voice: “Aw, come on, Mom. They don’t even know what happened to Kioki!”
“Elaine?” she said, her voice quavering. “What about the other boys who went on the dive with your son? Do you remember any of their names? Or where they might have been from?”
“I don’t think I do,” Elaine began. “But maybe — wait! There was a boy named Shane, from New Jersey, who Mark palled around with a lot after the dive. Hold on a minute.” After what seemed an endless wait, Elaine came back on the line. “I found it,” she said. “Mark had it written down on a scrap of paper in his wallet. His name is Shane Shelby and he lives in Trenton, New Jersey.” As Elaine read her the address and phone number, Katharine scribbled it down on the back of the tag she’d taken from Mark Reynolds’s body. “Let me know if you find anything out, will you?” Elaine asked.
“I will,” Katharine promised. “Of course I will.”
Immediately, she dialed the area code and number Elaine Reynolds had given her. On the fourth ring a man’s voice answered.
“Keith Shelby.”
Katharine struggled to keep her voice from breaking as she asked her question. “Mr. Shelby, my name is Dr. Katharine Sundquist. Are you the father of a boy named Shane?”
A long silence echoed hollowly from the receiver, and for a moment Katharine was afraid the man had hung up. But then Shelby spoke again, his voice betraying uncertainty. “Who did you say this is?”
Once again Katharine identified herself. “I know it sounds strange, Mr. Shelby, but I have to know if your son is all right.”
There was another long silence — far longer than the last — and Katharine had a terrible premonition about what he was going to say. Finally, she said it herself. “He’s not all right, is he, Mr. Shelby?”
“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.
