Gerrie Nelson - Lab Notes

Still not grasping the distinction, but not wanting the hilarity to go away, Diane said, “Oh, I see.”

Diane and Gabriel burst into the hotel lobby amid the stares of the few night owls still lounging there. Giggling their way to the elevator, they brushed off each other’s dirt-covered clothing.

Gabriel stepped off the elevator at Diane’s floor, insisting he deliver her safely to her suite only a few steps away. Arriving at her door, he looked down at the key in her hand. Then slowly his glance moved up to her face and remained fixed there. His eyes held an unmistakable question.

Diane was struck motionless, caught in the white heat of his gaze. For an eternal moment, her heartbeat was the only sound interrupting the silence. Then an elevator chimed its arrival at a lower floor, jolting her back to her senses. She turned away.

Gabriel leaned in, gave her a brotherly kiss on the cheek and said softly, “Sleep tight, Diana.” Then he walked away.

Diane slept fitfully. Her dreams were a montage of herself and Olimpia running through mountainous jungles, of Gabriel Carrera’s intense glance and Vincent’s angry one, of Latin America’s marble corridors of power.

Gabriel Carrera’s private jet was on its final approach to Houston’s Hobby Airport. Diane tightened her seat belt and watched through the small window as the ground lights grew larger. They were not a welcome sight. When the wheels touched down, she would be thrust back into the tense reality of her personal life. And the Bellforts weren’t making things any easier.

To Diane’s dismay, when Charlotte Bellfort discovered Gabriel Carrera was accompanying them back to Houston, she planned a last minute dinner party “for the travelers.” She sent a message to Diane saying that she will be sure to call and invite Vincent also.

Diane wanted to see her husband alone. They needed to resolve their differences about Peruvase, and discuss his lunatic plan to sail off by himself. But now, with the dinner invitation, she and Vincent will be unhappily reunited at the Bellforts’ home. And their marital discord will loom as large over the diners as Charlotte’s crystal centerpiece, limiting eye contact and stilting the conversation.

On top of that (judging by the vibes at breakfast in Quito this morning), the dinner atmosphere will be charged with the current crackling between her and Gabriel Carrera, generated by their mutual awareness of his unspoken request last night and her silent rebuff.

She suspected that she had, quite literally, been saved by the bell. Sometime in the middle of the night (after the Jivaro state of happiness wore off) she had analyzed the situation and concluded that the natema was the culprit, and she was willing to put the incident behind her. But something in Gabriel’s manner told her that, as far as he was concerned, the matter had not yet been settled.

Returning from the Friday evening sailboat races, Vincent walked into the living room, peeked under the lid of the baby grand, then headed upstairs to his telescope with Huck at his heel. He climbed the spiral stairs to the cupola, flipped on the light and studied the room’s celestial wallpaper.

Dark blue stick figures, representing the galaxies, covered the light gray background above the windows and tumbled down into the spaces between them. Interspersed among the stars; astrolabes, telescopes and sextants floated through space.

Vincent ran his index finger past Perseus, then along the configuration of Andromeda to Pegasus. Down one leg of the winged horse, he found what he was looking for: Hidden in the busy wallpaper pattern was a series of faint numbers recorded by a careful hand.

Vincent had studied the copious jottings a few nights earlier. Checking them against his star chart, he discovered that some of them were dates and coordinates of right ascension and declination, representing the space addresses of celestial bodies. The numbers had obviously been placed there by Dr. Harry Lee.

At first, it seemed a bit macabre exploring the universe with a dead man as a guide. But Vincent soon developed a sense of astral kinship with the murdered scientist. After all, he occupied Harry Lee’s office and laboratory and lived in the house originally built for him.

Until now, Vincent had set his telescope to the hand-written celestial coordinates, but he had not yet tried the single numbers—obvious earth-bound compass headings—listed below them.

As for the strings of numbers and letters lightly penciled low on the wall, close to the baseboard, he had no clue. But their decoding would have to wait for another day. Tonight was the night for the compass headings.

Vincent stepped over the dozing dog and peered closely at the wallpaper. “Let’s see here: three hundred twenty degrees.” He swiveled the powerful telescope toward the far shore of the lake, then switched off the light. After giving his pupils time to dilate in the darkness, he looked through the eyepiece.

Ever-so-slowly he angled the lens downward, all the while reporting his progress to the dog lying at his feet. “Nothing, nothing…nothing…There!” he shouted. He had located the blurry horizon. Then after a series of infinitesimal moves, he picked up a nebulous cluster of ground lights. He reached for the focus knob and moved the lights in closer…closer…

At the far edge of his consciousness, a telephone rang. But the blurred lights out there commanded his attention.

Vincent played with the adjustments for several seconds before he realized he was holding his breath. He straightened up, exhaled and scratched his chin through his beard. “This is like asking an elephant to tiptoe,” he told Huck.

The phone stopped ringing.

After what seemed like hours of incremental adjustments to the telescope, a psychedelic array of lights appeared before him. On the other side of his lens, human arms and heads bobbed in and out of view in a frenzied environment of flashing colors.

Vincent pulled back his focus slightly to get the broader picture. Then he chuckled. “What do we have here?”

A distant ringing began again.

Vincent sharpened the focus. And before his amazed eyes appeared a lakefront two-story floating bar and dance floor called The Pelican Club —according to a red neon sign on the roof. The second-story writhed with hyper animated bodies. From Vincent’s vantage point, it appeared like a bacchanal of flexing Adonises and undulating Aphrodites moving to the rhythms of colored strobe lights. Vincent chuckled again. “You devil, Harry.” Obviously, Harry Lee had enjoyed observing terrestrial bodies as well as celestial ones.

The ringing stopped.

Vincent’s eyes watered and he realized he had forgotten to blink for some time. Stepping away from the telescope, he wiped his eyes and switched on the light.

Again he checked the numbers on the wall. “Two hundred twenty-five degrees.” Vincent swiveled the telescope toward the opposite side of the lake, then switched off the light. “Let’s see what else caught your eye, Harry.”

Almost immediately, Vincent observed a blue blur through the powerful optics. Slowly, slowly he brought the lights in closer, resisting the urge to make large corrections.

Even before he achieved perfect focus, he recognized the glowing blue “H” on the Hilton Hotel at the far end of the lake. After further adjustment to the angle and focus, he was amazed to see a man knotting his tie in one of the hotel rooms. Obviously, the man didn’t feel the need to close his drapes on the seventh or eighth floor overlooking the water.

“Looks like our friend Harry might have had some voyeuristic tendencies, Huck.”

Keeping the telescope at two hundred twenty-five degrees, Vincent angled it closer to ground level and pulled back the focus slightly. He hoped to find something else on that heading to squelch his suspicion that Harry Lee was peeping at hotel guests.