The Extinction Event (14 page)

Networks of nerves seemed like spiderwebs. Charts showing spikes of chemicals in the blood seemed like mountain peaks he had to climb. A diagram of “an approach to the evaluation of diarrhea and wasting in AIDS patients” could have been a constellation on a star map. The two ghostly ovals in an illustration of radioactive iodine scanning of the thyroid gland hinted at the wings of fraudulent fairy photographs or ectoplasmic emanations from a nineteenth-century medium. A picture of a “perivenular area with dense collagen (progressive alcoholic fibrosis)” looked pitted like a stretch of dead coral near the seashore on the part of Andros Island Jack had visited.

From
Harrison's
and Mosby's, Jack went on to other standard medical textbooks, working backwards from symptoms to causes like, he felt, Hansel trying to find his way home through a mazy wood where the birds had pecked up the trail of bread crumbs. Headaches behind each eye made Jack feel as if he were absorbing Gaynor's symptoms.

“That's one way to figure out what Gaynor was suffering from,” Jack told Caroline at dinner, after his third day in the library. “Become her and look in the mirror.”

“Don't be in such a hurry to do firsthand research,” Caroline said. “Remember, Jean's dead.”

Sitting in the library at a computer terminal, books stacked on either side of the monitor, Jack scanned dozens of journals on line:
The New England Journal of Medicine
,
JAMA
,
Morbidity and Mortality Weekly
,
International Journal of Medical Science
,
The Canadian Medical Association Journal
,
Annals of Internal Medicine
,
Alcohol and Alcoholism
,
The Lancet
,
American Family Physician
,
American Journal of Psychiatry
,
Journal of Clinical Investigation
,
Archives of Internal Medicine
,
Archives of General Psychiatry
,
Archives of Neurology
.

Half of what Jack read, he didn't understand. Even after leafing back through
Harrison
, other texts, and
Stedman's Medical Dictionary
.

Jack got up and walked toward the stained glass window, hands behind him on his lower back as he stretched and searched the face of the seminaked woman in the shimmering glass grape arbor. His eyes burned.

*   *   *

“I'm not a doctor,” Jack told Caroline on Tuesday. “I flunked high school science. What the hell do I think I'm trying to do?”

“Solve three murders,” Caroline said.

“One certain murder,” Jack said. “Two maybes.”

“Probables?”

“Most of the books I'm checking are ten, fifteen years out of date.”

Jack gave himself to the end of the week. Then—

“What?” Caroline asked. “You give up?”

“I write off Gaynor's symptoms the same way the doctor at the hospital did,” Jack said.

“Why do we even assume whatever's wrong with her can give us a lead?” Jack asked on Thursday night.

“Because otherwise we've got nothing,” Caroline said.

“You haven't found anything in Frank's papers?” Jack asked.

“Not yet,” she said.

“Diary?” Jack asked. “Date book? Phone book?”

“The police must have all that,” Caroline said. “Along with his hard drive, his BlackBerry…”

“Safe-deposit boxes?” Jack asked.

“He apparently emptied everything out,” she said.

“He must have known—”

“That someone was going to kill him? Why would that make him empty out his safe-deposit boxes—where things would be safe?”

“Maybe he hid things in a safer place.”

“Or there's nothing there,” she said.

“Or someone else got there first,” Jack said.

“Where?” Caroline said.

“His office?” Jack said. “His files? Wherever he hid things?”

“I'm as tired as you are, Jack,” Caroline said.

Across the table Caroline's face was lit by the flickering candle.

Leaning across the table, Jack kissed her.

“You're going to set your tie on fire,” Caroline said.

Jack sat back in his chair.

“Tonight,” Caroline said, “I think, we should—”

“Go right home,” Jack said, studying her. “Me to mine, you to yours. That is what you were going to say, wasn't it?”

Caroline smiled and said, “You'll never know.”

The next day, Jack found the article about the dead cows.

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

1

The cow, brown and white, a Jersey—Jack thought—lay on its side, legs stretched out, udder flopped on the dirt like a semi-deflated balloon, cow shit round as croquet balls on the ground by its haunches. In the photograph Jack couldn't see its head.

The headline:
SAVE ANIMALS FROM ELECTRICITY.

Sub-head:
A SUPPORT GROUP FOR FARMERS WITH POWER QUALITY PROBLEMS.

The posting from a group called SAFE, Save Animals from Electricity, on
http://www.safe.goeke.net
by Nancy Bellville, dated March 14, 2001, said:

My name is Nancy Bellville; I am from Prescott, Mi. For the last 35 years, my husband Brian and I have been dairy farmers. In Dec. of 1998 we looked at our DHIA records and found that we had freshened 39 animals and had removed 45 animals. We no longer were able to maintain our herd size. We had 10 cows not milking waiting to gain enough weight to sell and 6 pens full of sick cows. We knew we had a problem and set about trying to discover what was causing such devastating losses. We discovered another farm in our area that was also experiencing the same symptoms that we were and he believed he had a ‘stray voltage' problem … When the utility company uses the earth as the pathway to transmit the unused electricity back to their substations, they cannot control where it might go and as a result it follows the path of least resistance which in our case is in our barns.

Jack looked back at the photograph of the dead cow, two other cows standing to the left of the picture turned away like bystanders who didn't want to know. On the right, in the background, was a live cow looking at the dead cow from a distance. Four other live cows stand by the dead cow, their heads lowered like gossipy neighbors discussing the strange death of a friend.

The stray voltage shocked the cows, which caused them to stop eating and drinking and to produce less milk. In some cases, the shocks shut down their immune systems, causing them to die.

A later posting on the same site said:

Along with sick animals there is also a human health epidemic.… No one wants to investigate why so many farm families and people in and around these farms are experiencing health problems.

The health problems included headaches, muscle aches, fatigue, dizziness, ringing in the ears, irregular menstruation, irregular heartbeat, hallucinations, difficulty in concentration.…

Jean Gaynor's symptoms.

2

Grotesque masks covered one wall: A Jew with a hooked nose, a drunken Irishman, a pinched German, an Italian, an African-American, a Swede.… The paint was faded and flaking. The mouths stretched up in ghastly grins or down in terrifying scowls.

“From vaudeville,” the professor of biology at Highland Community College explained. “Turn of the century. The last century. Performers wore them when they did ethnic humor.”

The professor—Dr. Matthew Shapiro—took down the mask of the Jew and held it in front of his face.

“A Jew comes home and finds his best friend screwing his wife.
Leo
, he says,
I have to, but you…!
”

Shapiro held the mask in his lap like a cat. “Nineteen-oh-one,” he said, “that used to kill them.”

“Electrical pollution,” Jack said.

“My grandfather was the Goldman half of Goldman and Webber,” Shapiro said. “Changed it from Gordon. Which was a Jewish name in Lithuania. Gordon. Don't ask. There were two famous Gordons in Vilna in the eighteen-eighties, sometime around then, both writers. A journalist and a poet.”

“I found some of your articles on electrical pollution online,” Jack said.

“Tell me, Mr. Slidell,” Shapiro asked, “why would a guy change his name from Gordon to Goldman? In America? In the late eighteen hundreds?”

“You were an expert witness in a lawsuit against Mohawk Electric,” Jack said.

“I helped bring the suit,” Shapiro said. Fondly, he looked at the mask in his lap. “Goldman and Webber were one of the biggest comic teams in vaudeville until Webber got shot. A guy came home and found him schtupping his wife. Killed him while he was on top of her.”

“I'm investigating a murder,” Jack said. “Maybe more than one murder.”

Shapiro swiveled in his desk chair away from Jack to face a window that opened onto the campus. The sky was low. A breeze that smelled of mud wafted in. In the window was Shapiro's face reflected, masklike. He leaned forward and pulled the window shut.

“My father started collecting the masks when his father, my grandfather, died,” Shapiro said. “My wife won't let me keep them at home. She finds them offensive.”

“I can see that,” Jack said.

“They're history,” Shapiro said. “People hear my grandfather was in vaudeville, they think,
How cool
, begin romanticizing the past.” Shapiro nodded at the masks. “Nothing romantic about them.” He swiveled his chair back to face Jack. “I'm sorry these people died, but I'm not a cop.”

“One of the victims was complaining of symptoms that sounded like electrical pollution,” Jack said. “Like what you reported in your research.” He flipped open his notebook and read, “Headaches, muscle aches, fatigue, dizziness, ringing in the ears, irregular menstruation, irregular heartbeat, hallucinations, difficulty in concentration…”

“A lot of things could cause those symptoms,” Shapiro said.

“I wish you could be more help,” Jack said.

“The last time I tried to help somebody prove electrical pollution,” Shapiro said, “I lost my federal grant.”

“This is life and death,” Jack said.

“And my job,” Shapiro said. “At Cornell. I'm lucky to have landed here. Since then, I mind my own business. And teach freshman courses. Twenty-six, twenty-seven in a class. Do you know how boring it is to teach freshman bio?”

“The girl with the symptoms was living under high-tension wires,” Jack said.

“When I was six years old,” Shapiro said, “I discovered the pond at the bottom of the backyard. In the dingle. I'd lie in the ferns at the edge of the scummy water and watch water skimmers, dragonflies hovering over the surface. Underneath the water were shiners, some gold, some silver with blood-red fins, their scales flashing in the sunlight, darters disappearing like fishy magicians under lily pads. Frogs and peepers, the hum of insects, the small sounds of the pond lapping the mud under my chin … Everything smelled full of life, a dark, rich, bitter, sweet stink I loved. Deep in the weeds, all around me, the sun looked green. I could feel my shirt and shorts wet against my skin, the heat on the back of my neck. On my lids when I turned over and closed my eyes. Everyone must have some heaven in their childhood. That was mine. I began studying pond life: the beetles that looked black until you saw the black was green and purple and red and gold. For my eighth birthday, I got a microscope. Not a fancy one. Through it I could see transparent creatures. I decided all I wanted to do with my life was study biology. Which I did. Until three years ago when I got involved in that lawsuit against Mohawk Electric.” Shapiro covered his face with the mask, which grinned horribly at Jack. “Suddenly, no more research. All my work shit-canned. And I'm teaching students who make fun of the subject. They make fun of me.”

Jack looked at the mask, which still hid Shapiro's face.

“I'm sorry,” Jack said to the grinning mouth, the hooked nose, the eyes blinking deep in the blank sockets.

He lifted his jacket, which he'd slung over the back of his chair.

At the door, Jack stopped at a sepia photograph of a burlesque dancer.

A beautiful woman naked to the waist, her left arm, in a black lace glove that reached her bicep, holding her tousled golden hair in a pile on her head, her gloved right arm bent, her fingers spread just below her breast, her thumb dimpling her side below the shaved hollow of her armpit. She was sitting in white feathers. A lavaliere of sparkling white stones hung between her breasts. Matching pendants sparkled from her long earlobes. Her lips were parted, revealing even, damp, gleaming teeth. Her nose was narrow, slightly snubbed, elegant. Her eyebrows were plucked and arched.

“My grandmother,” Shapiro said. “A big star at the Old Howard in Boston. Where my grandfather met her. Right after World War One. He was fifty-something. She was a teenager.”

Shapiro picked up a wooden-framed color photograph of an older woman in a peach sweater, cream-colored slacks, and pearls who looked shrunken underneath her big straw hat.

“My grandmother last year at Tanglewood,” Shapiro said. “Celebrating her one-hundred-and-third birthday.”

He held the recent picture up next to the burlesque picture.

“No stopping time,” he said.

3

The pylons supporting the electrical power lines straddled the hill behind the motel where Stickman's family lived, where Jean Gaynor had lived with Stickman. Before she moved to Rostyn Avenue. The two uprights, with the cross beams reflected in the pale moonlight, looked like the spinal column of some giant, turned to metal by a spell. An Atlas holding up the electrical world. Or a crucifix for an alien martyr with six arms in a lurid Frank Frazetta sci-fi book cover.

“Sorry about your nephew,” Jack said to Kipp, who shrugged.