Kelley Armstrong - The Gathering

We didn’t find anything else. When we were done, I went back into the study to make sure we’d left it the way we found it.

“We should double-check that number you wrote down.” Daniel clicked through the recall list. “Hey, it tracks calls out, too. The last five.”

“Grab those.” I handed him a pen.

He started writing down numbers, then stopped and stared down at the display.

“Daniel?” I peered over at the number.

“It’s my mom’s cell.” He blinked and pulled his gaze away. “Or it was. Dad got it from the lab files, and he used to call it when he was drunk. She changed it a few months ago.”

I didn’t ask how he recognized the number. I could picture him, writing it down from redial, then sitting in his room, phone in hand, preparing for a call he’d never make.

Daniel didn’t get emails from his mother. Didn’t get calls. Didn’t even get birthday cards. I don’t think he ever got an explanation either. She just left.

I don’t know how anyone could do that to a kid, but I especially don’t know how anyone could do it to Daniel. We used to joke that he was so good he made the rest of us look like brats. I’m sure he wondered what he’d done to make her leave and not look back. I think that about my birth mother, who’d never had a chance to know me, so he must think it about his mom.

“You okay?” I said.

“Course.” He shrugged it off as he put the phone back. “But I’m wondering how Mina Lee got that number, and more important, why she’d be calling it. At least twice.”

“Because, other than Serena’s parents, your mom is the only employee who ever left Salmon Creek. Serena’s parents still work for the St. Clouds. Your mother doesn’t. Which might make her more willing to talk about problems.”

“And if there were problems, she might know.” Dr. Bianchi had been a chemist at the lab. “We could check her old computer. My dad’s probably passed out by now.”

“Let’s do that.”

Daniel’s father wasn’t passed out. We could tell that as soon as we rounded the corner and heard the TV blaring through the open kitchen window. But he was too engrossed in his TV show to notice us as we sneaked inside. Daniel waved me to his mom’s study while he closed the window. The neighbors never complained about the noise, but it embarrassed him anyway.

His mom’s office looked exactly the way it had when she’d taken off. Although the company had left her desktop computer for Daniel, his dad wouldn’t let him use the office, making him do his homework at the kitchen table.

I slipped in, waited for Daniel, then closed the door behind him. He turned on the computer. He knew her password—she’d given it to him once when his laptop was acting wonky. It was 19Curie11, after the scientist Marie Curie’s 1911 Nobel Prize in chemistry. That password said a lot about Dr. Bianchi and what mattered in her life.

“We probably won’t find anything,” Daniel said as he logged on. “I know she had to do all her work on the company network and save the files on their servers. They shut that connection down after she left. I’m hoping she saved something to the hard drive, though. Dad told them he wiped it so I could use it, but since I never got to, I don’t think he bothered. He doesn’t come in here.”

Someone had cleared the hard drive, just not very well. Whether it was his mother before she left, quickly deleting files, or his dad doing a cursory wipe in case the St. Clouds checked, I don’t know. The documents and email folders had been emptied, but not wiped from the trash.

Most of what was in it was garbage. Family schedules. Shopping lists. Personal emails to college friends and colleagues. Then an email from a colleague that wasn’t personal.

It was a chain of messages that ended shortly before she left. The last one told Dr. Bianchi to do what she wanted with the information, just make sure she printed the correspondence, then deleted it.

Daniel scrolled down to the previous message.

“Perfect,” his mother had written. “They won’t try to hold me to my contract now.”

Beneath that, her correspondent had written, “Fine, here’s the list. Good enough? It better be. Don’t ask me for anything else. We’re even now.”

A list of names followed. Under that was the beginning of the email chain. I need more, Mike. Damn it, you owe me. Telling them I know the experiment went wrong won’t help. I need proof. Give me the names of the failed subjects. They screwed up in Buffalo and I’m not sticking around until the same thing happens here.

I reread the emails in sequential order, figuring it out aloud as I did. “Your mom discovered that the St. Clouds were hiding a failed project in Buffalo, where Dr. Davidoff works. Whatever research they’re doing here, she expected the same thing to happen, and she wanted out before it blew up in their faces. She blackmailed them with the details in order to get out of her contract.”

Ever since Mrs. Bianchi left, people in Salmon Creek had whispered about how she broke her contract. The most popular theory was that her husband had been abusing her. Wouldn’t it have made more sense to get rid of him, though? He was in the business office; she was the valuable scientist.

We searched for the earlier emails, where she’d gotten the details about the failed study. They were gone. She must have been careful about permanently erasing them but got careless with the last messages, eager to leave.

Daniel scrolled the email back to the list of names.

“Project Genesis,” he said. “Have you ever heard of it?”

“No, I—” I stopped and stared at a name on the list. “Elizabeth Delaney.”

Daniel frowned. “Is that a relative?”

“Not that I know of.”

“Well, no one in your family works for the St. Clouds, so it must be a coincidence. Common enough last name, isn’t it?”

I nodded.

“Make a note of it, then. We should write down all—”

A crash made us both jump.

“Daniel?” His dad called from the kitchen. “You here, Danny? I need some help.”

Daniel let out a puff of breath. The nickname and the plaintive tone told him his dad was at the far end of a drinking bout, past the anger.

“Danny?” Footsteps approached the study.

Daniel swore as we realized the light was on. He motioned me back, then opened the door and slid out. I took out my house keys and plugged my key chain thumb drive into his mother’s computer.

“Hey, Dad. Did you drop a plate? Let me clean that—”

“What were you doing in your mother’s office?”

“Looking for a stapler.”

“You know I don’t like you in there.” An edge seeped into Mr. Bianchi’s voice.

“It’s okay, Dad. Everything’s all right.”

“I don’t—”

Daniel’s voice took on the same tone that had convinced the old woman to tell us what yee naaldlooshii meant. “Everything’s all right. You can go lie down. I’ve got it under control.”

I turned off the computer, then peered through the door crack. Daniel stood eye to eye with his father. Mr. Bianchi shifted uneasily, like he was trying to break eye contact but couldn’t.

“Just go watch TV, Dad. Everything’s all right.”

Mr. Bianchi nodded, then shuffled back into the living room. Daniel waited until he was gone before coming back to me.

I lifted the thumb drive. He nodded and waved me out.

“Close one,” I said. “Thank God for your amazing powers of persuasion.”

“Yeah, if only they worked when he was really pissed. And really pissed off.”

“Still, you need to teach me how to do that sometime, so I can use it on my dad, get whatever I want.”

“Like you don’t already.”