Douglas Child - Fever Dream

"I was there this morning. The place was a madhouse, everybody mobilizing for Azerbaijan."

Kendall nodded. "Ah, yes. The earthquake. Many feared dead, I understand."

"There wasn't a face there over thirty--and nobody who took a minute to speak with me had the least recollection of my wife."

Kendall nodded again. "It's a job for the young. That's one of the reasons I left DWW to teach women's health issues." The desk phone rang. Kendall ignored it. "In any case," she said briskly, "I'm more than happy to share my memories of Helen with you, Aloysius--though I find myself curious as to why you should approach me now, after all these years."

"Most understandable. The fact is, I'm planning to write a memoir of my wife. A sort of celebration of her life, brief as it was. Doctors With Wings was Helen's first and only job after she obtained her MS in pharmaceutical biology."

"I thought she was an epidemiologist."

"That was her subspecialty." Pendergast paused. "I've realized just how little I knew of her work with DWW--a fault that's entirely my own, and something I am trying to remedy now."

Hearing this, the hard lines of Kendall's face softened a little. "I'm glad to hear you say that. Helen was a remarkable woman."

"So if you'd be kind enough to reminisce a little about her time at Doctors With Wings? And please--don't sugarcoat anything. My wife was not without imperfection--I'd prefer the unvarnished truth."

Kendall looked at him a minute. Then her eyes traveled to some indeterminate spot behind him and grew distant, as if looking into the past. "You know about DWW--we worked on sanitation, clean water, and nutrition programs in the Third World. Empowering people to better their own health and living conditions. But when there was a disaster--like the earthquake in Azerbaijan--we mobilized teams of doctors and health workers and flew them into the target areas."

"That much I know."

"Helen..." She hesitated.

"Go on," Pendergast murmured.

"Helen was very effective, right from the beginning. But I often had the feeling she loved the adventure of it even more than the healing. As if she put in the months of office work just for the chance to be dropped into the epicenter of some disaster."

Pendergast nodded.

"I recall..." She stopped again. "Aren't you going to take notes?"

"I have an excellent memory, Ms. Kendall. Pray continue."

"I remember when a group of us were surrounded by a machete-wielding mob in Rwanda. There must have been at least fifty of them, half drunk. Helen suddenly produced a two-shot derringer and disarmed the whole lot. Told them to chuck their weapons in a pile and get lost. And they did!" She shook her head. "Did she ever tell you about that?"

"No, she didn't."

"She knew how to use that derringer, too. She learned to shoot in Africa, didn't she?"

"Yes."

"I always thought it a little strange."

"What?"

"Shooting, I mean. A strange hobby for a biologist. But then, everyone has their own way of relieving the stress. And when you're in the field, the pressure can be unbearable: the death, cruelty, savagery." She shook her head at some private memory.

"I'd hoped to see her personnel file at DWW--to no avail."

"You saw the place. As you might imagine, they aren't big on paperwork--especially paperwork more than a decade old. Besides, Helen's file would be slimmer than most."

"Why is that?"

"She was only part-time, of course."

"Not... her full-time job?"

"Well, 'part-time' isn't exactly correct. I mean, most of the time she did put in a full forty hours--or, when in the field, a great deal more--but she was often gone from the office, sometimes days at a time. I had always assumed she had a second job, or maybe some kind of private project she was working on, but you just said this was her only job." Kendall shrugged.

"She had no other job." Pendergast fell silent a moment. "Any other recollections of a personal nature?"

Kendall hesitated. "She always struck me as a very private person. I didn't even know she had a brother until he showed up at the office one day. Very handsome fellow he was, too. He's also in the medical field, I recollect."

Pendergast nodded. "Judson."

"Yes, that was his name. I imagine medicine ran in the family."

"It did. Helen's father was a doctor," Pendergast said.

"I'm not surprised."

"Did she ever talk to you about Audubon?"

"The painter? No, she never did. But it's funny you should mention him."

"Why, exactly?"

"Because in a way it reminds me of the one and only time I ever caught her at a loss for words."

Pendergast leaned forward slightly in the chair. "Please tell me about it."

"We were in Sumatra. There had been a tsunami, and the devastation was extensive."

Pendergast nodded. "I recall that trip. We'd been married just a few months at the time."

"It was utter chaos; we were all being worked to the bone. One night I came back to the tent I shared with Helen and another aid worker. Helen was there, alone, in a camp chair. She was dozing, with a book open in her lap, showing a picture of a bird. I didn't want to wake her, so I gently removed the book. She woke up with a start and snatched it from me and shut it. She was very flustered. Then she seemed to recover, tried to laugh it off, saying I'd startled her."

"What sort of bird?"

"A small bird, quite colorful. It had an unusual name..." She stopped, trying to recall. "Part of it was the name of a state."

Pendergast thought a moment. "Virginia Rail?"

"No, I'd have remembered that."

"California Towhee?"

"No. It was green and yellow."

There was a lengthy silence. "Carolina Parakeet?" Pendergast finally asked.

"That's it! I knew it was strange. I recall saying at the time I didn't know there were any parrot species in America. But she brushed off the question and that was it."

"I see. Thank you, Ms. Kendall." Pendergast sat quite still, and then he rose and extended his hand. "Thank you for your help."

"I should like to see a copy of the memoir. I was very fond of Helen."

Pendergast gave a little bow. "And so you shall, as soon as it is published." He turned and left, riding the elevator down to the street in silence, his thoughts far, far away.

18

PENDERGAST SAID GOOD NIGHT TO MAURICE and, taking the remains of a bottle of Romanee-Conti 1964 he had opened at dinner, walked down the echoing central hall of Penumbra Plantation to the library. A storm had swept north from the Gulf of Mexico and the wind moaned about the house, worrying the shutters and thrashing the bare limbs of the surrounding trees. Rain beat on the windows, and heavy, swollen clouds obscured the full moon.

He approached the glass-fronted bookcase housing the family's most valuable books: a second printing of the Shakespeare First Folio; the two-volume 1755 edition of Johnson's Dictionary; a sixteenth-century copy of Les Tres Riches Heures du Duc de Berry , in the original Limbourg illumination. The four volumes of Audubon's double elephant folio edition of The Birds of America were accorded their own private drawer at the bottom of the case.

Donning a pair of white cotton gloves, he removed the four giant books and laid them side by side on the refectory table in the center of the library. Each one was more than three feet by four feet. Turning to the first, he opened it with exquisite care to the first print: Wild Turkey, Male . The dazzling image, as fresh as the day it was struck, was so life-like it seemed as if it could step off the page. This set, one of only two hundred, had been subscribed directly from Audubon by Pendergast's own ancestor, whose ornate bookplate and signature inscription still graced the endpapers. The most valuable book ever produced in the New World, it was worth close to ten million dollars.