Petrified (14 page)

Ed Freiburg said, ‘I tested it with phenolphthalein and it's blood. Discolored, of course, from soaking into the limestone and drying out. But there's no doubt about it. Some time recently, our statue was used as a means of inflicting an injury on somebody. Impossible to say how serious an injury, but it was enough to break the skin.'

Jenna frowned at it for a while and then handed it back. ‘So how do you use a statue to inflict an injury?'

‘I guess you grab hold of your intended victim and ram them up against it, hard. There's no way you could lift up the whole statue and hit them with it. Not unless you were Superman, or the Incredible Hulk.'

‘God, Ed. This just gets wackier and wackier, doesn't it?' She watched him while he photographed another lump of broken stone. ‘Come to that – how's the convent statue coming along?'

‘Slow, very slow. But I warned you it would. We've already counted more than eighteen hundred fragments and it's not even as if we have any idea what the finished statue is supposed to look like.'

‘Maybe it looked like this one. An ugly angel.'

‘Well, maybe. There's definitely a strong resemblance. Same type of limestone, similar carving.'

She looked around and saw that Dan was steering an elderly woman toward her. The woman was wearing a clear plastic rain-bonnet and a purple quilted waterproof coat and for some reason she strongly reminded Jenna of her own late grandmother. In fact, if she had claimed that she
was
her grandmother, resurrected eleven years after the family had interred her at Laurel Hill, Jenna would almost have believed her.

‘Jenna, this is Mrs Nora Blessington. She was visiting her sister's grave when she saw the statue fall.'

‘Hi, Mrs Blessington. I'm Detective Pullet. Thank you for coming to talk to me.'

Mrs Blessington looked up at Jenna with unconcealed belligerence. ‘You may think that I'm suffering from senile dementia, Detective, but I can assure you that I'm as sane as you are.'

‘Excuse me? What makes you think that I think that? Because I don't. At least, I don't see why I should have any reason to.'

‘There you are, you see! You have your suspicions already!'

‘Mrs Blessington, I can assure you that I don't have any suspicions about your sanity at all.'
Well, I didn't
, she thought,
not until we started this conversation
. ‘All I want is for you to describe what you saw.'

‘Hmh! I don't know if I ought to! You'll probably think that I'm making it all up, even if you
don't
think that I'm doolally.'

‘Why don't you let me judge for myself?' Jenna told her. ‘Believe me, I've been given some eyewitness accounts that made my jaw drop when I first heard them, but in the end they turned out to be one hundred percent accurate. And also very helpful.'

Mrs Blessington hesitated for a moment, clutching the strap of her purple pocketbook in both hands as if she were afraid that somebody was going to snatch it away from her. Then she said, very quickly and breathlessly, ‘I felt a drop of rain and then I felt another drop of rain so I looked up to see how bad it was starting to cloud over because I didn't want to get myself soaked and catch my death. I didn't want to visit my sister and end up lying next to her.'

‘OK,' said Jenna, as patiently as she could manage.

Mrs Blessington looked upward, and off to her right, which was a clear indication to Jenna that she was probably telling the truth. Witnesses who tell lies almost always look downward, and off to their left.

‘I only saw it for a split second before it flew straight into the clouds, and at first I thought it was a bird like an eagle or a turkey vulture or something. But then it came back out of the clouds and I could see that it didn't look like any kind of bird at all, even though it did have wings. It had wings but it was more like a dog, or a monkey, maybe, or even a dwarf.'

‘A
dwarf
?'

‘You asked me to tell you what I saw and I'm telling you. Whatever it was, it was beating those wings but the beating got slower and slower and slower and it seemed to be having a whole lot of trouble keeping itself up in the air. It disappeared into the clouds again and I'm sure that I heard it screaming. It was a terrible scream, like when somebody knows that there's no hope for them. I only heard a scream like that once before in my life, and that was when the Keilty Department Store was burning down and there was two women and a man trapped up on a ledge and no chance of getting them down.'

‘Go on,' Jenna coaxed her.

‘Well, that was that. The screaming stopped and then this stone statue dropped out of the clouds and hit the road and smashed into smithereens.'

‘OK. But after the statue fell into the road, did you happen to see the creature fly away?'

Mrs Blessington stared at her as if she were retarded. ‘You don't understand, Detective. The statue
was
the flying thing.'

‘I'm sorry, Mrs Blessington. I don't quite get it. This statue was carved out of solid limestone. It had wings, for sure, but there was no way that it could have used them to fly.'

Mrs Blessington gave Jenna a dismissive sniff. ‘There! I told you that you wouldn't believe me.'

‘I'm sorry, Mrs Blessington. I'm just finding it very hard to make any sense out of this. First of all you saw a dog or a monkey or a dwarf, with wings, flying through the clouds?'

‘That's right. It was very high up, so I couldn't be sure exactly what it was.'

‘Then you heard screaming and the statue fell out of the sky and into the road?'

Mrs Blessington nodded.

‘But you didn't see the flying thing fly away, and you're trying to tell me that the statue looked exactly like it?'

‘It didn't
look
like it, detective. It
was
it. It flew into the clouds and somehow it turned to stone.'

‘In mid-air?'

‘Yes.'

Jenna looked at Dan and raised her eyebrows. ‘Thank you for your help, then, Mrs Blessington. Maybe we'll need to talk to you again, but on the whole I think not.'

‘Because you think I have senile dementia? That's it, isn't it?'

‘No, Mrs Blessington. I don't. But, you know, sometimes our senses can play tricks on us. We perceive things in a different way from the way they really are. You know, like mirages in the desert, seeing water where there is no water. Optical illusions.'

‘It was one and the same creature, Detective, only it had turned into stone. I would swear to that on the Holy Bible, in a court of law. That was what happened. That was what I saw. But I don't have to explain it. Explaining it, I thought that was your job.'

Dan escorted Mrs Blessington back to the cemetery. Jenna looked at Ed Freiburg and Ed Freiburg was grinning.

‘
What
?' Jenna demanded.

‘Don't take it out on me,' said Ed Freiburg. ‘I'm only the guy who puts the bits back together.'

‘It's a statue, Ed. Statues cannot flap their wings and fly. Period.'

‘Of course not. But I think you've got to look at this whole thing differently.'

‘What are you talking about?'

‘You shouldn't be asking yourself: how come these statues are falling out of the sky? You shouldn't even be asking yourself how they got up there in the first place, because the fact is they
did
get up there, and there has to be some kind of logical explanation for that. What you need to be asking yourself is,
why
are they up there?'

‘How the hell should I know why they're up there? Maybe they've decided to migrate to Florida for the winter, like the birds.'

‘If you could fly, just by flapping your arms, would you?'

‘Of course I would.'

‘Why?'

‘Because I could, that's all.'

‘Precisely, Jenna. Right answer.'

FOURTEEN

Wednesday, 9:17 p.m.

N
athan opened his eyes to find Grace sitting next to him. Usually, she was so placid and composed that she reminded him of one of those medieval paintings of angels. This evening, though, she looked angry and agitated. Her short brunette hair was all messed up and her green-gray eyes were as dark as a stormy sea.

‘Hi,' he slurred. He was still recovering from the general anesthetic. He lifted his left hand and saw that it was covered by a large polythene glove. Inside the glove, his fingers were mottled red and tightly curled over, although he wasn't feeling any pain. A cannula had been inserted in his right wrist and connected to both a saline drip and a morphine dispenser.

‘Why the
hell
did you do it?' Grace snapped at him. ‘There are plenty of ways to win an argument without setting yourself on fire.'

‘Not this argument.'

‘I don't understand this at all. Haven't you always said that you get your own way by persuasion, not by violence? You've told Denver that often enough.'

‘This wasn't violence. I didn't hurt anybody else.'

‘It
was
violence. It was violence against yourself, and Ron Kasabian, and most of all it was violence against me and Denver. How are you going to make a living with only one hand?'

‘I won't have to, believe me.'

‘Oh, no? I talked to Doctor Berman after your operation and he said that the burns were so deep that your hand is going to be permanently scarred and contracted. It could take
months
for you to heal, and I'm still going to end up with a husband who has one hand and one monkey's paw.'

‘Grace, sweetheart, I knew exactly what I was doing, believe me. Ron was going to pull the plug on us. We got as far as creating the phoenix, for sure, but the whole project is going to be meaningless unless we can show what the phoenix is
for
.'

Grace shook her head. ‘You're crazy. You're crazy and you're thoughtless and I'm very, very angry with you. In fact I
hate
you for doing this.'

Nathan reached out and tried to take hold of her hand, but she snatched it out of reach.

‘Don't you believe in me any longer?' he asked her. ‘For all of these years, you've always believed in me. Even when I couldn't find funding. Even when every research institute between here and Seattle turned me down flat.'

Grace's eyes were crowded with tears. ‘Supposing
I
set fire to myself? How would you feel about that?'

‘Not very happy, it's true. But this is different. Ron Kasabian refused to pay for any clinical tests on burns patients, so what option did I have?'

‘What are you telling me, Nathan? You mean you deliberately turned yourself into a guinea pig?'

‘Come on, Grace. I couldn't ask anybody else to do it, could I?'

‘Do you know something? You're much crazier than I thought. I thought you did this because you were angry. I thought you did it to shock Ron Kasabian. But you didn't, did you? You did it coolly and calmly and deliberately.'

‘Well, I wasn't exactly cool and calm. And it hurt like hell.'

‘I don't know what to say. You've left me speechless.'

‘Don't say anything yet. You can give me a hard time if this doesn't work out, but I can promise you that it will.' He paused, and then he repeated, ‘I
promise
you.'

Grace tugged a tissue from the box beside Nathan's bed, and wiped her eyes. He felt terrible, hurting her like this, but Ron Kasabian hadn't given him any other choice, apart from abandoning the cryptozoological program altogether, and that would have been like asking Vincent Van Gogh to give up painting.

‘Do you have your cell with you?' he asked her. ‘I want to call Aarif.'

‘You don't have to call Aarif. Aarif is right outside – and Kavita, too.'

‘I'm touched. I really am.'

Grace gave him a tight, humorless smile. ‘Yes. Touched. I guess that's one way of putting it.'

Aarif and Kavita came into the room. Kavita was carrying a bouquet of purple orchids and a box of maple candies, while Aarif had brought a selection of books and magazines, including
Playboy
and
National Geographic
. They dragged chairs over to his bedside and sat looking at him with a mixture of admiration and disbelief.

‘How does it feel now, Professor – your hand?' Aarif asked him. He was wearing a brown knitted skullcap and a floppy brown sweater, and he looked more like a member of the Taliban than a research zoologist.

‘It's starting to throb some,' Nathan admitted, in a hoarse, whispery voice. ‘But I have morphine on demand if it starts to hurt too much. How's Torchy?'

‘Oh, Torchy's
fine
,' said Kavita. Her glossy black hair was parted in the center and braided, and she was wearing a black turtleneck sweater and at least a dozen Navajo bead bracelets. ‘He's eating well, all of his vital signs are excellent, and he really seems to have adapted to his environment. He's even started to warble. I've made some recordings.'

Aarif said, ‘We are not being closed down immediately. Mr Kasabian is giving us a month to wind up the project and finish up all of our notes.'

‘Oh, very generous of him,' said Nathan. ‘Hopefully, that's as much as we're going to need.'

‘You should not have burned yourself, Professor,' Aarif told him, in a grave tone. ‘You should have thought of what they say in Egypt, that the barking of a dog should not disturb the man on a camel.'

‘I understand what you're saying. Unfortunately, this particular dog happens to finance my camel.'

‘I've told Nathan myself that it was a crazy thing to do,' Grace put in. ‘Crazy, and selfish.'

‘But it is done now, Doctor Underhill,' said Aarif. ‘We cannot extinguish a flame that is now only the memory of a flame. We have to do everything we can to restore Professor Underhill's hand. I presume, Professor, that you will be wanting me to extract stem cells from the phoenix and bring them here.'