Chris Jordan - Measure of Darkness

“So it was a romantic involvement.”

Clare shrugged. “I’m not sure Joseph really understood romance, but for sure he was under her spell. A real manipulator, that one.”

“So you got to know her?”

She shakes her head. “Only from what Joseph told me. He wanted to marry Ming-Mei, and help her establish a career in America, but she claimed to already be married to a man who had abandoned her and that she had some difficulty obtaining a divorce. Joseph believed her, but I didn’t. You understand about him, right? His problem?”

“There was some allusion to Asperger’s syndrome.”

“Yeah, well, the poor man could have been a poster boy for high-achieving autistics. He knew everything there is to know about quantum physics, but nothing about people in general, and certainly less than nothing about women. My opinion, in her real life Ming-Mei might have been an escort or prostitute. But that’s just a guess, from the way she acted. At the very least she’s a gold digger. She very conveniently got pregnant within a few months of arriving in Boston.”

“How did Professor Keener react to that?”

“Hard to tell-you’d have to have known him to know how hard-but I think he was pleased in that he assumed it meant Ming-Mei would marry him. Oddly enough-although not odd for Joseph-he didn’t assume they would actually live together when married. At one point he was shopping for another home in his neighborhood, a house that would be for Ming-Mei and the baby. He was quite specific about the impossibility of sharing a house with anyone, even the mother of his child.”

“Because of his Asperger’s.”

Clare shrugs. “Or his shyness, or his being a genius, or whatever. Despite what was obvious to me and to most people who knew him, Joseph didn’t believe he had Asperger’s. He always said it was just that he preferred to be alone most of the time.”

“The baby, Clare. Where was he born?”

She shrugs. “The Cambridge Birthing Center. And no, Joseph didn’t attend. I could have told her that-he found the whole idea of the actual birth process very icky.”

Keener hadn’t attended the birth of his son. Assuming Ming-Mei hadn’t wanted to name him as the father for some reason, that would explain why his name was never associated with the boy in the official birth records.

“So did he buy her that house nearby?”

“Not then, no. A month or so after the baby was born she returned to Hong Kong so that relatives could help her care for the infant. At least that was her story. And the odd thing is, Joseph wasn’t as upset as you might expect. He was freaked out whenever baby Joey cried or soiled his diaper, and seemed to be satisfied with video versions.”

“The video version?” I say, thinking of what Shane had mentioned.

“Clips attached to his email. Typical new-mother stuff. The baby eating, the baby cooing and so on.”

“Which he shared with you.”

Clare’s look tells me I’ll never understand her relationship to the professor and I should probably quit trying. “He’d put them up on his computer screen and then leave his office while I watched. Which was typical of Joseph. He wanted to share but he didn’t want to be there when it happened.”

“If he did have something like Asperger’s, he might well have found loud noises intolerable,” I point out. “A baby’s cry can be very loud. Very…disturbing.”

Clare concedes the point. Joseph did indeed find the baby’s crying quite difficult to handle, and he remained content with being a video dad for the first year or so.

“He never visited Hong Kong?”

She shakes her head. “Not then, no. And when Joey was a year old Ming-Mei came back and set up house in an Arlington condo. I helped Joseph pick it out-you won’t be surprised to hear he couldn’t stand dealing with the real estate people. He gave her that condo, too. He insisted that the title be in her name.”

“You really don’t like her,” I say.

“That phony bitch?” Clare crosses her plump, freckled arms. “Why would I?”

All of which I repeat to Naomi. “My opinion, she loved the guy,” I add.

Naomi leans back in her seat at the command center, tents her fingers. “Nothing about the man sounds particularly lovable.”

“Since when has that stopped anyone of the female persuasion? Or the male, for that matter? Okay, think of her as an office wife. There’s no doubt Professor Keener relied on Clare, and unless she’s an amazing liar, he confided in her. Told her things he apparently told no one else.”

“Clare Jeanne O’Malley,” Naomi says, sounding skeptical. “Teddy’s running a background as we speak.”

“I’ll bet you a box of sugar donuts she comes up clean.”

“I don’t eat sugar donuts,” she says with a shudder.

“No, but I do.”

“So, what happened next, did they ever move in together?”

“Well, according to Clare, things are peachy for a couple of years. The professor has his house in Cambridge. Ming-Mei and the baby have their place in Arlington. Clare has the impression he rarely if ever visited them there, that by arrangement they visited him. This was apparently at Ming-Mei’s insistence. She ran the show. The professor danced to her tune, according to Clare, who thought at the time that Ming-Mei was trying to get him used to having people in his house. Sort of preparing the ground so she could eventually move in, or persuade him to buy a much bigger and grander house where they’d all live together. Which he was resisting. Professor Keener liked things just the way they were. He may have danced to the lady’s tune, but he was also very stubborn. Liked things distant but close. Again, Clare’s impression, and her words, ‘distant but close.’ Recall she never actually met Ming-Mei, and got this in bits and pieces from a man who wasn’t exactly a great communicator. So her version is very one-sided.”

“Understood.”

“My impression: some of his strangeness rubbed off on her. Clare, I mean. Anyhow, she convinced herself, Clare again, that the hot romance aspect had cooled once Ming-Mei was pregnant, and over the years the relationship evolved into something else entirely. Keener still wanted to marry her, but only to legitimize the boy. Maybe that was Clare’s wishful thinking, maybe not. But she was very definite about what happened next.

“When Joey was about three, Ming-Mei insisted, out of the blue, that she and the boy needed to visit her family in Hong Kong, right away. This was fine with the professor-naturally he financed the trip, had Clare arrange for last-minute first-class tickets. She distinctly recalls the airline, Cathay Pacific, and the price, a little over fourteen thousand, round-trip. Clare was outraged on his behalf-what was wrong with business class, why did she have to fly first? — but the professor didn’t bat an eye. So off they go to Hong Kong, mother and son, but the thing is, they never return. The ticket is open-one reason it was so pricey-and the visit, which was supposed to be for a few weeks, stretched into months. The professor started getting antsy-there had been no emailed video clips to amuse him during this interval-and six months into the separation, he flew to Hong Kong intending, or so he told Clare, to persuade Ming-Mei to return.

“The visit did not go well. Clare doesn’t know the details-he clammed up even more than usual-but when he got back he was so upset that he canceled his lectures and refused to leave his house for a couple of weeks-Clare had to have his work messengered back and forth. Keener had returned a changed man, more difficult than ever, and started spending more and more time at his lab at QuantaGate. As a consequence, Clare saw less and less of him, and can only guess at what was really going on. Nothing good, was her conclusion. She surmised the breakup had been final-maybe there was another man, maybe not, Clare couldn’t tell-and Ming-Mei was making it difficult for him to see Joey, or even to communicate with the boy. Then, about a year after Ming-Mei returned to Hong Kong, one of her relatives-Clare thinks it was an aunt-called the professor with devastating news. Joey had been kidnapped. Snatched from an upscale mall while Ming-Mei shopped, gone in an instant when she looked away. The aunt and everybody else in the family-and the local police, too, apparently-assumed the boy had been stolen by one of the mainland gangs that procure replacement kids for parents who lost children in the earthquake.”