Chapter 21
Chinese food probably shouldn’t be paired with bottled red wine, but she didn’t really care about etiquette at this point. Fern was all about comfort, anything to get through this nightmare. She had tried to sleep once London left but couldn’t stop her mind from racing. She had been up for over thirty hours straight now.
The latest update from Grant had said Reggie’s latest email wasn’t suspicious other than the fact that Reggie couldn’t stop it.
Fern called his admin at the conservatory. “Rebecca, still no word from Reggie?”
The other woman sniffled. “No, not one word. Did you hear about Pam Akers?”
Fern winced. “Yes, I did. I’m so worried about Reggie.”
“Me too. They were planning a holiday soon. It’s so sad. I know Pam was hoping Reggie would ask her to marry him after all these years.”
“Oh, dear, that just adds to the sadness.”
“I know.”
“Where were they planning on going?”
“A cabin on an island just off the Oregon coast. Reggie said it’s been in his family for a long time.”
“Any idea of its whereabouts?” She tried to keep her voice calm, casual, but inside she wanted to scream. Maybe that’s where Reggie had gone. “I keep thinking that, if his world was just too darn crazy, he might’ve gone into hiding, like he always does.”
“I know,” Rebecca murmured. “I was thinking the same thing.”
Fern hung up and immediately phoned London, passing along the cabin information. “Can you get it checked out?”
“Will do.” London hung up.
She stared at the phone. His tone was testy. But he had been up over thirty hours straight too, plus was back at work, something she’d lost her perspective about. She’d pushed back going to England for now with London being in her life again, and Brent had confirmed the Alnwick Garden job remained open for her with no time frame limit. That was one less thing to worry about.
She picked up her tea and walked into her basement. She couldn’t stop thinking about the room she’d spent so many years in. Deciding to go in again without London here to hold her hand, she opened the door and stepped into her prison. It was really strange that, after all the years she’d been in here, she didn’t blame her parents—as if she’d bought into their propaganda. They had just left her with a really twisted childhood. Still, she was different now. The scientist in her, although fascinated, wouldn’t have done that to any child.
Whenever they had strapped her in the chair to watch for symptoms, she’d been terrified. She cried to be released many a time. And always her parents told her it wasn’t safe. She had wondered about that. Was she not safe in the world or it wasn’t safe from her? She remembered her mother getting very sick at one point and her father blaming Fern for it. For the longest time, she’d been trying to figure that out but never found a decent answer. Her memories were hazy. She didn’t know if the experiments caused that or if her mind willingly forgot.
Lab notes. She really needed all her parents’ research. That would explain some of the early memories Fern had, as well as the progress her parents may have made with the poisons and the antidotes. Even though she’d searched after their deaths, she had never found anything. Which wasn’t surprising when the police had said how her parents’ vehicle, involved in the fiery crash, was full of paperwork. She’d wondered if her parents had been transferring their lab notes to a storage unit when they’d had the accident.
She’d never found a storage unit, and, according to the cops, the papers in the car had helped turn the fire into an inferno.
Maybe they were taking the boxes to their rented lab space? Storage lockers were there. She’d not been given access to her parents’ lab after their deaths so had no idea. She’d understood why at the time but hadn’t liked it. She’d been only sixteen at the time and up against many powers, and all of them had vetoed her.
AMAX must have had access as her parents had been under contract with them. How could she get that information? How could she find out if AMAX had anything to do with her parents’ death? This was what she really wanted to know.
She stood inside the basement, wrinkling her nose at the smell—wet earth in dark places. She walked through the room, looking for anything that would tell her about her parents’ research. They’d used computers and storage devices, but she’d never found anything with their work on it. The place was empty outside of the hydroponics equipment and the bedroom. Out of the dungeon again, she closed the door and walked back upstairs.
Inside her home office, which had been her father’s, she sat and surveyed the space. A large walnut desk dominated most the room. She opened the desk drawers and went through papers she’d already seen many times. It was all hers now. Papers to do with the property and more having to do with her guardianship.
She didn’t have her own research work here. She kept that all in cloud storage. But her parents’ deaths were before that technology, although disks were reasonable. Full bookshelves were on the far side of the office, including her parents’ music collection. She remembered hearing music through the house when her parents had been alive.
Not remembering much about the kind of music it was, she walked over to the stack of CDs, slowly going through them. The first one was classical music.
Unable to help herself, she opened and closed every disk cover, checking nothing was hidden inside. When she got toward the end of the CD cases, she found one unmarked disk. She pulled it out and checked the last three cases in the row. All were unlabeled. She grabbed an external CD drive and plugged it into her computer and popped in the first CD. It was empty.
She popped in the second one—also blank. The third one opened to say it was full. She clicked on its contents to find dozens and dozens of folders. Her excitement built as she read the names on the folders, finding some with her name thereon, and realized each of her folders represented one year of her life. She’d been sixteen when they died. She had been two when she had found her parents’ basement lab and all the pretty flowers. There were fourteen files. That tracked perfectly.
She opened the most recent file and found her parents’ research. At least as far as she could tell. Charts, data and images. She quickly sorted through the information. It covered a calendar year. It started on her birthday and went through until the day they died. Finally proof of them running tests on her …
Did she really want to know all the things they had done? Yet something useful could be here. How could she not look?
She clicked on the last month to see what they had been working on. She frowned as she read the entry.
That was a brutal plant. It can create blisters that would form for years and years. I haven’t had a chance to do much testing on her yet. She stares at me, huge tears in her eyes, begging for her freedom. For the first time in a long time I’m staring at my own consciousness and wondering how I could even consider this. To do this to another person—my own daughter. I might not be emotionally stable enough to go through all the testing …
For my wife, Fern ceased to be a person. For me, well, I’d hoped my deception hid my love for her. But I’m afraid, in the search for scientific knowledge, I’ve lost even that little bit of humanity.
For that Fern was grateful because she couldn’t imagine having to deal with the blisters. Particularly if she was locked up downstairs. Although she remembered some similar symptoms. So maybe they’d tried it on her after all.
She scanned through the information and closed that folder, opening the first one. She’d been through it physically. She already knew the general accounting of what had happened when she was two. She read the first entry, like hearing her mother’s voice from when Fern had been sixteen.
Today was the first day of the rest of our lives. Life will never be the same after this.
Fern was missing for most of the afternoon. We panicked, called in friends and neighbors, but nobody could find her. The police were the next step. I was about to call them when Joseph wondered if there was any chance she was in our hydroponic room.
When we found her, she was lying cold on the floor surrounded by belladonna flowers clutched in her hands. Berries and petals in her mouth, which she had eaten when she’d gotten hungry. Just like any toddler, she’d picked and put in her mouth everything she could possibly grasp. We thought for sure she was dead. She was cold, still, lifeless. We knew we’d be in trouble because we had left the poisons accessible. We didn’t know if any laws stopped us from growing these plants, but we’d not safeguarded our daughter.
How could we have been so irresponsible, so lacking in parental instincts that we allowed our little girl to make it into the room full of toxic plants? I picked her up and carried her upstairs to the bed, screaming for Joseph. He wanted me to call the police, but I told him that we would be charged with manslaughter at the very least. No way this could be covered up.
Of course what we did was wrong. But never in our wildest dreams could we have considered our toddler finding her way into our lab. For that very reason a tall step precedes the actual footing before the door, so that she couldn’t get over it and inside. The door was also higher up, so she could not reach the doorknob. And the door was heavy and latched, so then she couldn’t open it. We have no idea how she got in.
We told everyone she was safe, that we found her sleeping in the basement and called off the search. A small lie. But not very small because it had been the basement. But we didn’t tell them how she had just eaten enough poison to kill several healthy adult males. We knew we were in trouble. We didn’t know how to get out of it. Fern was upstairs in my bed, while I lay crying, weighted down by my foolishness and irresponsibility for allowing something to happen to our beautiful little girl.
Distraught, we just held her limp form in our arms. Joseph had been devastated and had fallen into an exhausted sleep beside us.
Her body was so cold. There weren’t enough tears to wash away our mistakes. Nothing could cleanse our souls. This was just something too big, too horrific to ever recover from.
Until …
Fern rolled over and opened her eyes. I screamed, but it wasn’t in joy. Fern had had no heartbeat. Fern had had no pulse. Her skin was beyond cool; it was cold. But she rolled over, opened her eyes and looked at me. She just looked at me; she knew me. She opened her mouth and said, “Hello, Mommy.”
Bolting off the bed, terrified and screaming, I pointed at Fern. By now she sat up, her own fear triggered by my screams, and she blundered off the bed, her arms out, wanting to be picked up. I couldn’t touch her.
I couldn’t get anywhere close to her. Joseph rushed over and picked her up and held her in his arms. He turned to me and said, “She must’ve just gone into a coma. There’s no other explanation.”
I shook my head. “She was dead. I know she was dead.”
“But there was no rigor.”
“That must’ve been delayed by the poisons. But she was not alive. No breath came from her chest.”
I stared at the child who was now alive, looking back at me as if nothing had happened, but I knew nothing would ever be the same again. I wanted nothing to do with her. I hated her. I wanted to have my little chubby toddler back again. But I did not want this unnatural replacement in my house. Joseph tried hard to talk some sense into me. But I couldn’t accept his explanation. Finally he said we needed to learn from this. We needed to understand how she’d done what she had done, and it could be the answer to so much more. My scientific mind agreed. It was the only answer to dealing with this nightmare.
I’d never have done anything to my beloved Fern. But this wasn’t my baby. Not any longer.
As I grieved and tried to comprehend the enormity of what happened, my mind couldn’t let go of Joseph’s words. He was right. Something miraculous had happened.
We needed to find out what that was.
We ran the tests on her. We checked her saliva, gathered urine and blood samples, even took tissue samples. Everything we could possibly do to figure out how she’d survived this. And that was just the start.
She would never be my daughter again. I tried to feel something for her. I tried hard. But I couldn’t. Because she wasn’t my little Fern. She was this poisonous little baby, and, as she grew older and older, I knew I would have trouble with her. We kept her locked up most of the time—taking her out enough so the neighbors would not be suspicious. But we never took her to the doctor, and I knew she could never go to school.
Fern raised a shaking hand to her temple and thought about what her life was like back then. Images were in the next file. She clicked on them, and there she was at two years old, nude, skin pale, her eyes light-green in color. She glanced through the pictures. She was obviously alive, but, for all intents and purposes, she looked completely dead. “Did I know back then what my life would be like?” she asked bitterly. She shook her head and kept looking.
She skimmed through every year, checking the notes, looking to see little personal tidbits. When she got to her fourteenth and fifteenth years, things changed. Her parents had become more fearful of getting caught. She fought through the homeschooling to advance to online college courses, which was the only way they would allow her to learn.
Her appetite for new learning was unheeded by any other distractions. She didn’t need anything else. And then, when she insisted on having a computer, she had leverage of her own to use.
Her father’s notes at this time were more terrifying.
Fern is growing in leaps and bounds as a person. We’re heading into a difficult time, Bethany and I; we’ve created a monster. We have no idea how to stop this roller coaster.
We’ve added more locks to the doors. And now I’m forced to add another one to her basement. To keep her in. To keep ourselves safe. She’s threatening to leave us, to expose us. We’re not sure how to handle it. The one thing we do know is we can’t poison her. Poison doesn’t kill her. And we’ve tried. How is that a thing to even write down here? Bethany’s never been the same since Fern’s death and rebirth. She’s been distant, incapable of giving Fern a hug. Bethany will hold Fern’s hand in public but hates to be around her the rest of the time. I’ve spent my life bringing food up and down the stairs, spending time teaching Fern, helping her to feed her scientific mind. But I know I have failed her in a way that’s so monumental I can never be forgiven. I don’t know how to step off this path. It’s not what I dreamed of and cried for when we first found out that Bethany was pregnant.
We had had such high hopes. And intellectually Fern is so fast and so far beyond what we have accomplished. Her brain so superior to what we have that we must wonder if the poison or maybe her limited lifestyle didn’t enhance it. Either way it’s fascinating—and I hate to say it—but my mind is intrigued. Would the result be the same with another subject? Or the combination of the poisons and the lifestyle? Or is it because she came with the best genes possible from the two of us?
After Fern read the notes, a terrible cold descended on her. Cold to the touch, cold inside. Her parents had completely morphed into paranoid scientists, wondering how to preserve their own lives against her and how to stop her from telling the world, destroying their reputations and all the work they’d done.
Her father’s last entry was the worst.
We must do something. We must do something about it soon. She needs to die. God help me. I need to kill my daughter. I can’t see any other choice.
*
“How long will you be?”
London stared at the phone in his hand. “Another hour maybe?”
Nothing but silence was her response.
“Unless I need to be there sooner?” He frowned, recognizing the stress in her voice. “Is something wrong?”
“No, nothing that can’t wait until you get here.”
“I need to tie up a few things. Then I’ll pick up dinner.”
“Okay,” she said, her voice forceful. “That works.”
“You sure?”
“Yeah, I’m sure.” And she hung up.
As he put down his phone, another text came in. Dr. Sartain.
Any news?
Frowning, hating the duplicity of this aspect, he quickly texted back.
No. Nothing.
“Hey, you okay?” Steve asked. He lifted a to-go coffee and said, “Picked you up one. Looked like you were working hard here.”
London snorted as he checked his phone, but no response came from Dr. Sartain. Good. He turned back to Steve. “Thanks. So much here just makes no sense. I’ve been going over the court transcripts, looking for anything, but I keep getting hung up on Derek’s testimony.”
“Sorry. I was friends with him for a long time, but I don’t recognize the man Derek is today.”
“Neither do I. Neither do I.” He lifted the coffee, took a sip and shuddered. “Why the hell is the coffee so bad lately?” He shut down his computer and hopped to his feet. “I also can’t get anywhere with the threatening email that brought Fern running from England. The email address is no longer valid.”
“Figures. Where are you going?” Steve asked, stepping out of London’s way.
London froze. “Damn. I need to send someone to check out a possible location for Reggie.”
“I can do it. Give me the deets and I’ll send someone. You obviously have other things on your mind.”
“Thanks. Appreciate it.” London quickly passed over the information. “I’m off to dump his coffee then to pick up dinner.” He flashed his partner a grin and walked out of the station. As soon as he was outside, he checked his watch. He should be staying longer at work, but his intuition’s insistent prodding said he should get to Fern’s side. He didn’t like leaving her in the first place—Stefan’s warning always in the back of his mind.
But Fern had already proven adept at looking after herself—only it wouldn’t do to become complacent. And given a choice, he would stay by her side forever.
It wasn’t up to him.
Unfortunately.
But hopefully he’d convince her to let him take up that role soon enough.
*
He needed progress. He was chafing at the bit—wanting so much more. It was bad enough he had waited a dozen years to take this step, but now that he understood what Fern was, who she was, he had no compunction about moving forward. In fact, he was damn pissed at having waited this long.
Enough now. Progress. And fast. Or he would have to take drastic steps. Yet look at what he’d already found out about her.
The girl could withstand lethal doses of poisonous gas. And possibly save others around her. How?
He needed to know. He was desperate to know. Unimaginable applications needed her skills, her knowledge.
She couldn’t be allowed to keep this to herself.
Not any longer.