Ashes were already falling, not as yet very thickly. I looked round: a dense black cloud was coming up behind us, spreading over the earth like a flood. "Let us leave the road while we can still see," I said, "or we shall be knocked down and trampled underfoot in the dark by the crowd behind." We had scarcely sat down to rest when darkness fell, not the dark of a moonless or cloudy night, but as if the lamp had been put out in a closed room.
-Letters of Pliny the Younger (ca. 61-112 CE)
Thousands perished in the ashes the
day the darkness fell as if the lamp had been put out in a closed room. So,
too, was buried a medical breakthrough that today, nearly two millennia later,
could save thousands. Six weeks ago, it emerged.
The person who rediscovered the
ancient isotope did not at first realize the magnitude of the find. Except for
the curious property of restoring life, it is inert. It is harmless to
humans—indeed, to all living things. It survives for only moments. Yet, despite
its transient nature, it appears to bring death as well as life; a trail of
cadavers has followed the isotope through the centuries.
Is it magic, as believed by the
ancients? As a scientist in 2023, I have a more logical hypothesis. But when it
comes to murder of the strictly mortal variety, I must admit, empirically I know
for certain of only one. My husband, Jeff.
When I find it, or recreate it in a
lab as the case may be, I will name the isotope Vesuvium. I think Jeff would
appreciate that. Like the erupting volcano, in fact, like Jeff himself, it is
as majestic as its lifespan is fleeting.
He was my world. I loved him more
than anything. I hope he would forgive me
for all that I have done.
Part I:
The Ancient Remedy
You
could hear the shrieks of women, the wailing of infants, and the shouting of men;
some were calling their parents, others their children or their wives, trying
to recognize them by their voices. People bewailed their own fate or that of
their relatives, and there were some who prayed for death in their terror of
dying. Many besought the aid of the gods, but still more imagined there were no
gods left, and that the universe was plunged into eternal darkness for
evermore.
-Letters
of Pliny the Younger (ca. 61–112
CE)
Chapter One
There is a crash.
I feel wetness, and pain. I see a thousand memories.
My husband was
naked the first time we met. The image of him at that moment has not faded from
my mind in our five short years together. Now, as I feel myself slipping
beneath the surface, there is another image as well—of the last time I saw my
husband. He was lying dead from two gunshot wounds. Again, he was naked.
*****
The first time I saw Jeff, I was
sprinting along Black’s Beach in La Jolla, California. The secluded strip of
coastline is world-renowned as a runner’s paradise, with its intense four-mile
loop of steep mountain switchbacks and deep sand. Black’s has long been my
favorite place to jog, despite the fact that it is a clothing optional beach.
That morning, as I rounded the corner
into a nook beside a jutting shoreline cliff, I almost crashed into him before
managing to change course. My first impression was beach bum, not nudist as I
later liked to teasingly call him. At five o’clock in the morning, the beach
appeared totally abandoned. I assume he thought he was alone and, therefore,
felt comfortable stripping out of his wetsuit to dress after his morning surf
session. Black’s was, after all, a nude beach.
He was no more than five feet away
from me, so nothing escaped my attention. Seawater was running down his lean
surfer’s body as he tossed a dripping wetsuit onto a boulder beside him and
then reached for a towel lying next to a pile of clothing.
He glanced up. As he did, a lock of
sandy hair fell over his forehead. His eyes met mine, and then he flashed a
mischievous grin of straight white teeth.
“Whoops, that’s embarrassing!”
The handsome nude man with the smoky blue eyes chuckled while belatedly
bringing the towel up to shield himself.
“Morning,” I said casually,
continuing past him with a smirk.
*****
Less than a month later, it was my
turn to be caught off guard. I was at the International Conference on Emerging
Infectious Diseases delivering a lecture about biological terrorism. The
conference was held in Paris that year, and attendance was at an all-time high.
I was at the podium in the main lecture hall speaking to an audience of
approximately five thousand. In the midst of my speech, I glanced up from the
microphone, and one audience member sitting front row center of the auditorium
caught my eye.
My voice faltered when I saw him. The
handsome, well-dressed man with the smoky blue eyes looked familiar, but I
couldn’t place him. Then he flashed that mischievous grin, and our brief moment
on Black’s Beach returned to me.
I completely lost my train of
thought.
My presentation trailed off
mid-sentence. A few people in the audience cleared their throats. I felt my
face flush. I took a few well-rehearsed steps to recover my composure—three
deep breaths, a sip of water from my glass on the podium, another deep breath.
“Whoops, that’s embarrassing!”
I said into the microphone. I could feel myself smiling.
Later, as I sat sipping coffee and
reviewing my notes between sessions, he approached me. This time, with the
advantage of seeing him coming toward me, I was prepared.
“Dr. Stone,” he said with a
professional nod.
“Naked surfer,” I said and nodded
back.
A pair of women at an adjacent table
glanced toward us. He acknowledged them with a smile before returning his
attention to me.
“I’m surprised you recognized me,” he
said.
“I was looking at your face,
for the most part.”
It was then that I noticed his
conference-issued name badge. Jeffrey Wilson had been granted the Nobel Prize
in Chemistry a few years prior for the creation of a new chemical element, one
of the very few so-called superheavy elements in existence at the time. He had received
the Nobel both for creating the new element and for the ground-breaking method
by which it was created.
I remembered the media circus that
surrounded his winning the Nobel. The majority of press attention was
concentrated at The Scripps Research Institute where Jeff was a principal
investigator. That facility is less than a mile from Black’s Beach.
*****
Jeff must have known immediately that
he would die.
The shot to his back passed all the
way through his body. The bullet had to have come from within our bedroom.
He was still standing. The waist-high
wrought iron railing enclosing our bedroom terrace stopped him from falling
forward. As he stood naked, leaning against the railing, with a bullet hole
through his middle, a steady red river gushed from the exit wound. The blood
gathered along the edge of the railing and then trickled down, tracing the
intricate ironwork like lava flowing through a vertical maze. A small crimson
pool formed on the edge of the terrace’s natural stone floor, but the majority
spilled over.
Down it poured, past the second and first floor windows of our
house and onto the forward deck of my yacht.
Jeff’s right hand went first to the
exit wound in his bare stomach and then to the terrace railing, where it left a
bloody handprint. It must have been at that moment that he turned to look at
the shooter behind him.
The second bullet hit him in the
upper chest, sending my husband—the most handsome, brilliant, kind, charming,
Nobel laureate chemist in the history of the prize—plunging backward over the
terrace railing to his death.
*****
The yacht was a gift from Jeff for
our first wedding anniversary, but I always teased him that Teresa was
as much his gift as mine. While the small yacht was easily maneuvered by one
person, Jeff and I almost always took her out together.
I was standing on our bedroom terrace
enjoying the panoramic view of the Pacific Ocean when I first saw her. I was
wearing a backless evening gown of shimmering royal blue, a color Jeff loved on
me for the way it accentuated my blue eyes and long auburn waves. The dress was
floor length and fitted to my slender, petite frame. A single alluring slit in
the gown exposed my left leg to the thigh.
Jeff stepped out of our bedroom and
joined me on the terrace. His standard attire of jeans, T-shirt, and tennis
shoes had been transformed, and Jeff was dashing in a black jacket and tie. The
thick sandy brown hair that almost always fell over his forehead was now
smoothly slicked back. In each of Jeff’s hands was a glass of champagne. He
handed one to me and appreciatively ran his eyes over my dress before pulling
me close for a kiss.
“Happy anniversary,” he said. “You
look gorgeous.”
I set my champagne down on the
terrace railing to embrace my husband with both arms. “Where are we going for
dinner?” I whispered between kisses.
Instead of answering, Jeff stepped
away from me and leaned casually against the railing. He glanced down at the
water below, and his face lit up with the same mischievous grin I had first
seen three years earlier on Black’s Beach.
“You know what has always bugged me?”
he said.
“What’s that, love?”
“That we had a boat dock but no
boat.”
Instead of thinking to look down, I
looked at Jeff. He dipped his eyes downward once more. This time mine followed,
and I saw her for the first time.
The yacht was directly beneath us,
moored unassumingly in the formerly empty space as if she had always been
there. On Teresa’s forward
deck was an elegantly set table for two. Standing next to the table was a man
in a chef’s hat who announced, as if on cue, that dinner was served.
*****
It was upon that very same spot on Teresa’s deck that Jeff’s body landed
after falling from our bedroom terrace three years later.
*****
The front door was unlocked, so I was
certain my husband would be there. “Jeff,” I called as I entered the house,
“I’m home.” I was not surprised there was no answer. If he was still in the
shower, he would not have heard me. Or maybe he was out on our private terrace
lost in his own thoughts. Or perhaps he had simply ignored me.
I dropped my purse and my laptop on
the living room sofa and began climbing the stairs.
It had been a chilly three days
between us. We had barely spoken since the biggest fight of our marriage, and I
now wondered if our relationship could ever return to the way it had been. A
part of me wanted so badly to just forget the events of three days prior and to
surprise him on the terrace in the nude, as I had done so many times before.
I opened the bedroom door, and I was
stopped in my tracks. On the floor near my nightstand was a small metal object.
The back of my neck came alive with chills.
I recognized the gun immediately. It
was mine.
I stepped timidly toward it as a
light breeze ruffled the curtains framing the French doors to our terrace. A
sudden gust of wind brought the curtains billowing into the bedroom. One of
them kissed the pistol lying on the floor before shrinking back again.
I glanced up. The glass doors were
standing wide open, as if beckoning me out between them. Slowly I moved toward
the terrace.
There I saw it. The blood on the
metal railing, framed theatrically by the ruffling curtains. It had already
begun to congeal. The pools along the top of the railing and upon the stone
floor beneath it were a brighter red than the thinner traces down the vertical
metal. The handprint smeared along the top rail was a sickening blotchy swirl
of multiple hues. It appeared to be the exact size of my husband’s hand.
My mind was not my own as I stepped
forward and crossed the terrace.
*****
Naked and vulnerable, Jeff’s body was
displayed in the center of Teresa’s forward
deck. All four of his limbs were jutting out unnaturally from his torso. Also
radiating out from the center of his body were two overlapping ovals of varying
shades of red, one from his chest and the other from his abdomen.
The expression on Jeff’s face was one
of horror, and there was something else there as well. I think it was sorrow.
I could make no sound. I could only
stare. I have no idea how long I stood there.
A flash of light roused me. Another
gust of wind had just blown past, and the boat was now rocking gently. A single
ray from the setting sun danced mockingly into my eyes, drawing them to the
small object from which the light was ricocheting. Until that moment, I had not
noticed the pistol silencer lying beside Jeff’s body. It was nearly concealed
within the pool of blood that had flowed from my husband’s heart.
The message to me was clear: Be
quiet.
*****
It was perversely fortunate that
Jeff’s body had landed on the yacht. Our dock was built on a private, narrow
canal that led directly out into the Pacific Ocean. It would be surprisingly
easy, albeit very expensive, to hide his body. And I knew I had to hide his
body.
So I bribed a mortician.
*****
I pulled Larry Shuman’s information
from a hasty Internet search on one lone criterion: his business was still open
that late in the evening.
Shuman greeted me with a professional
handshake, but his eyes were sympathetic as he offered condolences for my loss.
He then ran a pudgy hand through the sparse hair on his head and motioned for
me to sit across from him as he sat behind his desk. He looked at me
questioningly, as if wondering what I had not said on the phone.
The easiest way to explain what I
wanted from Shuman was to show him. I opened my purse and pulled out my iPhone,
where I had stored a collection of photos. Shuman examined them academically
for quite some time before speaking. “Why, may I ask,” he said finally, “did
you call my funeral home instead of the police?”
I took a deep breath before
answering. “Because I need this to remain unreported for a short period of
time. You can still do the necessary post-mortem work-up, but I’m asking,
please, do not report this. Not yet.”
Shuman stood up from his desk so
abruptly that his chair tipped over backward behind him. He pulled the receiver
of his desk phone off its cradle and began to dial.
“I have heard quite enough, Dr. Stone.”
I lunged forward.
Shuman jerked back in an effort to
escape my clutching hand, but I was quicker than he was. My hand closed around
his, and we began to struggle for the telephone receiver. As we did, the
unclasped purse dangling from my arm banged across Shuman’s desk with
sufficient force to spill its contents.
Several thick wads of rubber banded cash fell out onto the desk.
Several thick wads of rubber banded cash fell out onto the desk.
My strength was no match for his, but
Shuman replaced the receiver of the phone, his eyes dropping once or twice to
the cash on the desk and then returning to meet my own. Finally, he reached
backward and righted his chair to sit down again.
“Dr. Stone, I know who you are. I
have read about you and your husband several times over the past few years. Your
biotechnology company, founded on the very science that earned Dr. Wilson the
Nobel Prize, is among the most successful in the history of the industry—”
“And today,” I interrupted, “I became
its sole surviving founder, and one of the wealthiest individuals in
California.
“Mr. Shuman, the murder weapon is my
own gun. The only prints on it are certain to be mine. The murderer walked into
our home through an unlocked front door. And if the police are called, they will
quickly discover the same thing that I myself have recently discovered . . .”
My voice cracked, and I paused and
looked down at my lap for a moment before continuing. “I have reason to believe
that Jeff might have been having an affair.
“I don’t know with whom, but I
believe that if I can find that person I might be able to identify Jeff’s
killer. I’m not asking you to cover this up indefinitely, only to allow me a
brief sliver of time to come to terms with the loss of my husband. And to find
some answers.”
“Absolutely not,” Shuman said,
reaching again for the telephone on his desk. “At best, I would be interfering
with a criminal investigation. At worst, I would be aiding and abetting a
murderer.” He began dialing.
“One million!” I shouted. Shuman
hesitated and looked up. I reiterated, this time calmly, “One million dollars. With
proper preservation of the body and no cause for suspicion after your
examination, that sliver of time will make no difference to you whatsoever. Except,
of course, that you’ll be a million dollars richer.”
Shuman replaced the receiver once
again. He glanced around the dingy office as if regarding it for the first
time. He looked back down at the money lying on his desk, and then he met my
gaze again.
“And what if I personally doubt your
innocence, especially given that you are now attempting to bribe an
undertaker?”
“You say you know who I am. If you
should doubt me for even a moment, then, by all means, turn me in.”
Shuman shook his head. He looked
weary and sad. “Dr. Stone, I don’t believe you are behaving rationally, which
is completely understandable under the circumstances. I may know who you are,
but you don’t know anything about me. You have no idea what I might do. Why
would you deliberately put yourself at this kind of risk? Your reputation? Your
career? Your very freedom?” He rubbed his face with his hands and sighed. “Please,
just follow the rules. Report your husband’s murder.”
“Mr. Shuman, if you know my history
as you claim to, then you should already understand why that is something I
cannot do.”
*****
I next saw Larry Shuman at two
o’clock in the morning. We met that very night on Fiesta Island, a small
stretch of barren coastline within San Diego’s Mission Bay. I pulled Teresa
as close to the shore as I could, and Shuman collected my husband’s body.
I had covered Jeff with a blanket,
and I was grateful that I did not have to view him again in that condition. I
turned away as the chubby middle-aged man grunted while hoisting Jeff’s body
onto a gurney. He then heaved the gurney through knee-high waves and onto the
shore.
“You have two weeks,” he said, and,
not waiting for my response, he returned to his hearse.
Without looking back, I turned Teresa
and sailed out beyond the edge of the bay, where I cast the silencer overboard.
I will not remain
quiet.
*****
It was seven days ago that I placed
my trust and my husband’s corpse, only weakly insured by a million dollar
bribe, in the hands of a total stranger. Now, as I feel myself slipping beneath
the surface, my two weeks have been cut short. I am out of time to find Jeff’s
killer because the authorities have just found his body.
Caesar
married Calpurnia, the daughter of Piso, and got Piso made consul for the year
following.
-Lives of the Noble Grecians and Romans
Plutarch
(ca. 46–120 CE)
He
had seen him favoured by the woman whom he imagined he loved, and whose
possession he had been promised by the secret science of the Egyptians, whose
power to unveil the mysteries of the future he firmly believed.
-Cleopatra
Georg Ebers (1837–1898)
Chapter Two
There are hundreds
of them, thousands. Agonized, nameless faces and ransacked bodies writhing in
desperation on white mattresses. An IV drips into one arm of each.
The beds are
clean, the facilities immaculate. The glaring lights upon the brilliant white
beds only accent the appalling conditions of the patients. They are crammed
together, side by side and end to end. Thousands of adjacent hospital beds.
A phone is
ringing. I ignore it and walk like a zombie down the rows of beds; my eyes cast
from one face to the next. Beside me, a feeble plea comes forth from a teenaged
voice.
“Please . . .”
*****
I jerked awake. The familiar dream
began to fade. I could feel a rocking motion beneath me, and I rolled over onto
my back. Directly above me was the underside of our bedroom terrace. I slowly
became aware that I was on my own yacht, lying in the center of the pool of
dried blood that was now all that remained of Jeff. I could not remember how I
got there.
My left hand hurt, and I realized my
fist was tightly clenched. As I opened it, four tiny trickles of blood seeped
from indentations in my palm as my husband’s wedding ring fell from my hand. The
boat rocked again, and a subtle rattling broke the early morning silence as the
small gold circle rolled across the smooth wood of the yacht’s deck.
*****
I sobbed endlessly as I scrubbed
Jeff’s blood from our terrace floor and the wrought iron railing. While sopping
up the blood on Teresa’s
deck, twice I had to pause to vomit into the bucket I was using to clean. When
I had finished erasing the evidence of my husband’s death, I began clawing
through our home in search of clues to his life.
I rifled through the pockets of
Jeff’s work attire in our walk-in closet. I yanked his weekend clothes from our
dresser drawers and shoved the upper mattress from our bed to examine the space
beneath it.
I began ransacking the entire house,
pulling out every drawer, climbing shelves in every closet to access the
highest nooks, shoving items haphazardly to the ground. I bored through dusty boxes in our garage and clambered over old
furniture in our attic, using a flashlight to peer into every dark corner.
I scoured Jeff’s side of the ocean
view office we shared. I had never looked anywhere in Jeff’s desk except the
front center drawer where he kept a checkbook and some house money. This time,
I frantically tore through his desk, his file cabinets, and his bookshelves. Nothing.
I began looking through the files on
his computer desktop, and then I realized that his iPhone had been sitting on
the desk the entire time. How stupid! Here was the true record of his most
recent, most personal activities. My hands were shaking as I picked up the
phone.
*****
I had never previously suspected that
Jeff was cheating. His behavior had never been that of a cheater. In recent
weeks, he seemed distracted, but that was not unusual for a man so dedicated to
his work that he retained his academic position even while leading a successful
biotechnology company.
But even in those recent weeks, Jeff
did not exhibit the sudden, complete detachment of someone who is straying, the
obvious physical revulsion in the presence of a woman he used to love. I never
would have considered my husband capable of infidelity. Until three days before
his murder.
*****
Three days before his murder, I was
clearing our dinner dishes from the table when the phone rang. Jeff had just
retired to the living room with a stack of paperwork, and I could hear the
sounds of a football game coming from our large-screen TV. I put the plates I
was holding into the sink and reached across the kitchen island for the
telephone receiver.
“Well, hello, my lady,” said a
familiar voice. “And how are you doing this evening?”
“Hi, John. I’m great!” I said to my
husband’s best friend. “You?”
“I’m fine . . . except . . . well . .
. I have a lot of patients these days asking about the latest advancements in
superheavy-isotope-based therapeutics. Especially the people that—you
know—have, uh, failed other therapies and don’t have many options left. So I
was really looking forward to Jeff’s presentation at the conference in Seattle
last week.
“When Jeff didn’t speak, and then
when I couldn’t find him anywhere, I went to the conference organizers to ask
if his time slot had changed. They said he had not checked in . . .”
*****
The cheers coming from the living
room TV grew to a roar as a touchdown was scored. Two commentators began
shouting over each other.
I, too, wanted to scream. The
familiar background noises of our home, normally so comforting, had just become
unrelenting cacophony.
I slid off the barstool at the
kitchen island where I had sat down in a daze while listening to John. I felt
sick to my stomach. I took a few deep breaths, but they did little to quiet my
nerves.
I stepped out of the kitchen.
Jeff was in sweatpants, a T-shirt,
and socks, reclining beneath a blanket on the living room sofa. In his lap was
a stack of papers. His eyes moved up and down between his work and the football
game on the TV mounted on the wall.
I took another deep breath. “That was
John,” I said.
Jeff’s face paled, and he looked up
from his papers. “What did he need?”
“He was calling about the conference
in Seattle. He was wondering why you missed your lecture.”
Jeff’s eyes dropped back down to the
pages in his lap, and he continued to shuffle through them. His complexion was
now changing quickly from white to red. “I’ll be sure to call him back.”
I stood motionless.
“GO!” Jeff shouted suddenly at the
TV, and the audience in the football stands began to cheer wildly. The redness
on Jeff’s face deepened.
“So why did you miss your lecture?” I pressed, and he paused before
answering.
“I decided my presentation wasn’t
ready for prime time yet.”
“Since when are you unprepared to
deliver a lecture, especially one scheduled months in advance to be given to
several thousand people?”
Jeff tossed the papers onto the
coffee table and sat up. “What is this, Katrina, the third degree?”
“Of course not. But why didn’t you
tell me? I thought you were really looking forward to presenting. You love
presenting! And it’s not like you to flake out without even extending the
courtesy of canceling.”
“I’ve had a lot on my mind,” Jeff
said with a shrug. “I guess I just forgot.”
“You just forgot?”
“Yes.”
“You just forgot that you skipped the
entire conference?”
Jeff’s eyes flashed. “What the . . .
this is unbelievable! You checked up on me?”
“I didn’t check up on you,” I found
myself explaining. “John blurted it out. He said he started looking around for
you when you didn’t speak and ultimately found out that you had never checked
in at the registration desk. He obviously didn’t think you would have lied to
me about your whereabouts. He was just worried about you. And now, so am I. Frankly,
I’m also worried about the future of our relationship! What were you doing in
Seattle all that time? Did you even go to Seattle? Did you even intend
to go to Seattle?”
Jeff stood up from the sofa and
switched off the TV. “Of course I intended to go to Seattle!”
It was the first time I had ever
heard my husband shout in anger.
“I registered for the conference,
Katrina. Do you want to see my receipt? Is that how it’s going to be now? I had
every intention of going . . . it’s just that I . . . I . . .”
“Are you cheating on me?”
“No!” he shouted. “Absolutely not! Of
course not!” His voice softened. “Honey, listen. Don’t you remember those
nights? Don’t you remember talking to me every night like we always do when one
of us is away? Sometimes we talked late, late into the night. Long
conversations. Remember?”
I did. I also remembered that he had
looked tired.
Jeff and I used video calls to keep
in touch when one of us was away on business. At that moment, I distinctly
remembered that when Jeff was allegedly in Seattle he looked exceptionally
tired.
I remembered lying in bed one night,
my bare breasts covered with our comforter, and watching him through my phone’s
video screen. I remembered Jeff leaning his own iPhone against something so
that he could speak to me while also rubbing his eyes, his shoulders, his
temples. And behind him, I remembered that I could see the nightstand of his
hotel room with a Marriott
welcome package upon it.
I remembered him smiling, shaking his
upper body as if shaking off a rough day, and asking me what was beneath the
blanket . . .
*****
“Come on, Katrina!” Jeff began
shouting at me again in our living room. “Use logic. Ask yourself if I am
behaving like a cheater.”
“You mean like disappearing for four
days solid?”
Jeff swallowed and looked down. Then
he approached me and put both hands on my shoulders. He looked into my eyes,
and in his I thought I saw desperation for the first time since meeting him.
“I meant that a cheating man is not
interested in the conversations we had while I was away,” he said quietly. “A
cheating man is eager to get off the phone with his wife.”
“Sure,” I scoffed, “unless his lover
knows he’s married! Maybe she’s also married and has something to lose. Maybe
she would sit there and wait for you to talk to me. Maybe she was off somewhere
talking to her own husband at the same time. You’re not stupid, Jeff! You would
know exactly how not to get caught. God, I can’t believe we are actually having
this conversation!”
But in my heart, I also could not
believe Jeff would want that, any of that. It was not Jeff. Either I was wrong
now, or I had been wrong about my husband all along.
“Where were you for four days, Jeff?”
He let out a sigh and sank back down
onto the living room sofa. There were tears in his eyes.
“Sweetheart, listen,” he said
quietly. “I can’t tell you. I am sorry for that, I really am. I have never lied
to you before. I have never kept anything from you. I am sorry for lying to you
about the conference. I hate myself for that. But I can’t tell you now, either.
Please, you just have to trust me . . .”
*****
Four days later, the silence of the
empty house was maddening. Apart from my own ragged breathing and the steady,
persistent ticking of our grandfather clock—a nagging reminder of the
transience of time—there was only a void where a couple in love had lived.
I sat down heavily on the carpeted
floor next to Jeff’s desk in our office. My eyes were burning from a morning of
almost constant crying. My fingers were swollen and sore from scrubbing Jeff’s
blood from our terrace and the yacht, and they trembled as I scrolled through
the screens on Jeff’s cell phone.
In Jeff’s recent call history was an
international phone number. I did not recognize the country code, and I might
not have noticed the number at all—except for the fact that it appeared
fifty-six times over five weeks.
The record began with an incoming
call to Jeff. After that, both incoming and outgoing calls between Jeff’s cell
phone and the international number occurred daily, sometimes several times
daily, with the exception of a single four-day time span.
I recognized the dates immediately. They
were the same four days as the conference in Seattle. This was the number of
the person Jeff was with over those four days.
For a few long moments, I only stared
at Jeff’s phone as if the number itself would suddenly speak, explaining to me
the inexplicable. Finally, I dialed the number.
“Dr. Wilson!” a woman answered with
an excessive enthusiasm that made me prickle. Her voice held a barely
perceptible accent.
“Actually, this is Dr. Stone,” I said
coolly. “Jeff Wilson’s wife. With whom am I speaking?”
There was a long pause, and when the
woman spoke again the enthusiasm was gone. “I’m sorry, Dr. Stone,” she said. “This
is Alyssa Iacovani. I am an old classmate of your husband’s from UCLA.”
Jeff had done his undergraduate work
at UCLA, and we kept in touch with several of his college buddies. None of them
had ever mentioned an Alyssa Iacovani.
“I am the director of the Piso
Project,” the woman went on. “This is an antiquities research project with Il Museo Archeologico Nazionale, the
National Archeological Museum in Naples, Italy. I apologize for my sense of
urgency, Dr. Stone, but I was expecting a call from your husband several hours
ago, and he has not called. I was just about to phone him instead. I must see
Jeff immediately.”
For a moment, I struggled to
comprehend her audacity as well as her statements. Antiquities research? Italy?
What could she possibly need to speak to Jeff about?
“I’m sorry,” I said finally. “My
husband has been called away on family business and will be unavailable for at
least the next couple of weeks.” Another lengthy pause ensued, and I began to
wonder if she was still on the line.
“In that case,” the woman said at
last, “Dr. Stone, I apologize again, but I must see you immediately.”
