Warren Murphy: Air Raid

The slipper went flying as Amanda shot up in bed. "I was completely out of line, Daddy!" Amanda insisted. Her free hand clutched a panicked knot of pink sheets. "Is Abigail there? No. Honeymoon. She'll be in the islands. I'll fly down, Daddy. I promise. I'll apologize in person. I'll even wear that damnable dress to do it."

"You will do no such thing," Daddy Lifton said. "You were most impressive yesterday. And you have no idea how much it takes to impress your father."

"Let me find another way," she said fearfully.

"Too late. I've decided to take you up on your exciting little challenge. You are going to be our own little lab experiment, Amanda. You are going to be the first Lifton in more than five hundred years to have to actually go out and earn a living. Isn't that just thrilling, princess?"

"Is Mother there?" Amanda asked weakly. "She's with the man from Tidwell Vintners. Problem with the '91, don't you know. But she sends kisses and a hearty 'job well done.' This will be our last chat for a while, I expect. The phone company will be terminating service after I'm through."

"Daddy, you can't do this," Amanda pleaded. "I can't go out and make a living. I don't know how." Her father laughed in that constipated, ultrarefined way of his that sent shivers down her spine. Amanda had only heard him laugh two other times in his life. Once when Gran Lifton had been found face-down in the azaleas, and once during the stock-market collapse of 1987.

"You'll show us all the way, Amanda," Daddy said.

And with that, the line went dead. There wasn't even a dial tone.

Amanda stared at the eerily silent phone.

"I don't want to show anyone the way," she cried to the pink papered walls of her bedroom. "I'm an heiress."

The walls cared as little for her plight as Daddy and Mother Lifton. A moment later there came a pounding on her apartment door.

Amanda slipped a fluffy pink bathrobe on over her shimmering pink silk pajamas and answered the door. On her doorstep was her landlord, four movers and a pair of highly paid Lifton family lawyers.

Amanda Lifton was on the street six minutes later. Daddy let her keep her wardrobe. Everything else went back. Credit cards, jewelry, furniture. The works. She never had a savings account. Never needed one.

Her checking account was vacuumed clean by Daddy's shysters.

Penniless, Amanda found herself on the outside of an empty apartment surrounded by suitcases filled with a lifetime's worth of clothes.

Actually, it was worse even than that. The clothes were only a month old. She had thrown the older stuff out when she'd gotten her new spring wardrobe. As she trudged the streets of Boston, she found herself wishing she'd kept a few of those older things. Maybe some rag merchant somewhere gave cash to indigents for old Versace.

Her endless, terrible wandering proved to be the most dreadful eight minutes of her entire life. She had heard an awful rumor that there were people who stayed out here all the time. She had no idea why. Probably a tax dodge. There couldn't be that many spiteful daddies out there.

Half a block from her apartment Amanda spied a familiar sight. The call letters of the local PBS affiliate shone down on her from the front of an office building like a beacon of hope.

For years Amanda had been volunteering at the station answering phones during its annual pledge drive. Like all good blue-blooded Boston liberals, Amanda Lifton was no hypocrite. For one hour one night a year-whether convenient or not-she actually practiced what she preached. It was her way of staying grounded.

She staggered into the foyer of the station under the weight of a dozen Gucci suitcases and demanded a job. And, in the great PBS tradition of wasting money and not caring, the woman with zero qualifications and a stack of luggage that was vomiting Armani and Christian Dior all over the lobby was hired on the spot.

She started as a receptionist. A day later, when the station manager discovered she was a Lifton, she was promoted to producer of a local-affairs talk show. Two days later, when the same man learned that she was indeed one of those Liftons, she was promoted to public-relations director, where her duties consisted of looking out the window and long lunches. Sometimes she was trotted out to wine and dine the various celebrities who showed up at the station, usually around pledge time. One such celebrity was the famous and respected astronomer Sage Carlin. Although it had happened six years ago, Amanda remembered it as if it were yesterday.

Carlin arrived in an old corduroy suit jacket with patches on the elbows. He had a comb-over that looked like a helmet of hair, an overbite, no chin and black-rimmed buzzard's eyes.

In spite of his creepy appearance and his vague odor of fish, Amanda knew Dr. Carlin was brilliant. She wanted to prove to him that she was no intellectual slouch herself.

Amanda explained how she had graduated at the top of her class at Yale. She had taken her degree in botany to the Massachusetts University of Technology, where she received doctorates in morphology, cytology and palynology. Dr. Lifton had been actively courted by some of the biggest pharmaceutical and biotechnology companies in the country. But because Liftons frowned on women in the workforce, Amanda had been encouraged to turn her attention to finding a man of adequate social standing and sire a male Lifton child. "To begin this wretched mess all over again," Daddy had said in one of his more honest moments.

Now all that was gone thanks to her silly outburst at Abigail's wedding.

She was happy during her long diatribe on the travails of her life to find that Sage Carlin was a terrific listener. The whole time she spoke, the famous scientist never took his eyes off her. Granted, he was staring at her chest and not her eyes, but you really couldn't blame him. In addition to being brilliant and beautiful, Amanda Lifton knew precisely how to fill out a sweater.

"I'm sorry to go on like this, Dr. Carlin," she apologized. "It's just that my daddy has been very, very mean to me."

"No need to apologize," Sage Carlin said. "Of the billions of people on this overpopulated planet, you're the one I most want to talk to right now. What's morphlology?"

"You mean morphology," she replied with a smile. "It's the branch of biology that concerns the form and structure of plants and animals."

"Plants?" Carlin asked, intrigued.

"That was a particular interest to me. That's why I went on to palynology and cytology. Palynology is the study of mold and spores-cytology is cell structure and function." She suddenly realized whom she was talking to. "But of course you know that already," she said, face flushing red. "I'm humiliating myself, aren't I?'

"Not at all," Sage Carlin said. "I do some work for a group called the Congress of Concerned Scientists. Perhaps you've heard of it? If you're interested, I might have a job for you."

It was, according to Sage Carlin, a one-in-a-billion chance meeting. That very afternoon he hired Amanda as a palynologist for the CCS.

The team in Geneva soon learned how lucky it was. All her life Amanda had been hiding her light under a bushel basket. She was a natural in her field. In her first months in Geneva, her brilliance put her fellow scientists to shame.

She helped lay the groundwork on the C. dioxa. It was she, along with Dr. Brice Schumar, who improved and refined the seed design. The last two seed cycles had only gotten better.

But the greatest victory was personal. She had done what she had-albeit inadvertently-set out to do. She had proved to Daddy, Mother, Abigail and all the rest of the Lifton family that she could stand on her own two feet.

But, sadly, her success was marred by tragedy. Dr. Carlin passed away. While tragic, it was five years old now, and truth be told, he had always given Amanda the willies. A more recent death and one far more disturbing was the unfortunate accident of her team leader, Dr. Schumar. How he had gotten himself locked in the C. dioxa greenhouse was a mystery to everyone. He above everyone else at the CCS in Switzerland should have known enough not to go inside the greenhouse with the skylights closed. The police were saying it was suicide. Amanda had reluctantly accepted their conclusion. Until the next body turned up.