The Madrona Heroes Register: Echoes of the Past (17 page)

“
What are you talking
about?” Binny’s question punctured the conversation like a needle
taking the air out of a balloon.

“
Excuse me?” Julie asked,
taking the tone of a parent lecturing her daughter on being
rude.

Binny paused and
regrouped. “What is all this talk about a study and a treatment?
What did you mean when you said
he
,” gesturing roughly at Dr. Huitre
“was responsible for our very existence.”

“
I had something to do
with it too.” Jay interjected and Huitre laughed.

Binny’s face remained
serious.

Huitre turned in his seat to face
Binny, “There are some prospective parents who really want children
but nature does not always comply. I am not just an obstetrician, I
am a fertility doctor. Your parents came to me to help give nature
a shove in the right direction.” Huitre was smiling down at
Binny.

Binny wanted to
give
him
a shove
in the ‘right direction’.

“
What was your partner’s
name again? Travida? Pravida? Oh, it doesn’t matter. We had another
fertility doctor at first but her husband got some incredible
once-in-a-lifetime job opportunity across the country. We were so
worried about having to start the search all over for a new doctor,
but Dr. Huitre,” she glanced at the Doctor, “I mean Henry,” Julie
smiled, “was her partner and convinced us to stay. He had the
chance to include his patients in the study of a new fertility drug
and we got to participate by staying on.”

“
You took an experimental
drug in order to get pregnant with us?” Binny asked, incredulous.
In every corner of her brain little puzzle pieces were falling into
place.

Zach was definitely alert now, sitting
up a little straighter and listening intently.

“
Oh, it was not all that
experimental,” Huitre laughed condescendingly. “It was a late stage
trial, and your parents fit the profile. The FDA does not let us
give anything too ‘out there’ to human beings.” He smiled at Binny
as if to indicate that he’d answered her question
satisfactorily.

Binny was about to reply when she felt
a gentle but insistent elbow from her brother. By the time she
looked back at the adults, they’d already moved on to some boring
discussion about the price of neighborhood real estate.

§

Zach and Binny were about to slink off
when the adults stood up from their seats to wind down their
impromptu gathering.

“
We can’t thank you enough
for keeping an eye on Cassie.” Julie said.

“
It was really no problem.
I was just getting back to the house from walking Rembrandt when I
ran into her. I did have to distract her with junk food but only
because I was finishing up a call for work. I brought her over as
soon as I completed the call.” Huitre explained.

“
I promise there won’t be
any more uninvited visits,” Jay motioned over to where Cassie had
fallen asleep on the couch in the family room.

“
I am afraid the sugar
crash is probably my fault.” Huitre chuckled.

Binny really didn’t like how friendly
everyone was being. “Oh Dad,” she interjected, “Dr. Huitre lives in
that house you always comment on when we take walks in the
woods.”

Jay’s eyes darted angrily towards
Binny, and then a smile plastered on his face he added, “Oh yes.
The design is so interesting and modern. So nice to get a break
from the more conventional architecture in this
neighborhood.”

Dr. Huitre made his exit and goodbyes
were said. Jay made dinner, they woke Cassie, and the family ate
together. Like everything was normal. Like nothing had
happened.

But things had happened. Just not
necessarily the things Binny thought. Her sister had disappeared.
The man had made a suspicious phone call. He hadn’t hurt Cassie.
That was a good thing of course. But it was strange to all of a
sudden meet someone who was there at Cassie’s birth. He was there
at Binny’s and Zach’s births, too. Giving their mother experimental
drugs! Was her sister the result of a medical experiment with
unintended consequences? What about Zach? What about Binny
herself?

The day had been such a whirlwind,
Binny hadn’t had time to consider even more minor things. Like how
did Zach know the alarm code at Huitre’s house? And how could she
have been so wrong about Penny?

But most of all, Binny couldn’t help
but wonder where Cassie’s power had come from in the first place?
She hadn’t had time to think about it earlier with all the tumult,
but now she was worried. Somehow it all seemed less, well, magical
than it had at first.

Zach didn’t say much during dinner. He
seemed more worried than he should be now that Cassie was safe and
the mystery of the man’s identity was solved.

Binny inquired when her parents were
away from the table for a moment. All Zach said was, “When Huitre
gets home, he’ll know it’s us that broke in.”

“
How? How can he know it
was us?” Binny whispered a little too loudly.

“
Fingerprints? I don’t
know. He’ll just know.”

This realization crossed Binny’s face
like a wave crashing on rocks. Any minute the phone was going to
ring. Her father would answer it. And his face would get
progressively more angry and disappointed as Huitre calmly
explained that Binny and Zach had broken into his house and
vandalized his back door. She could deal with her father getting
angry. That happened often enough. But Binny was filled with dread
at the thought of disappointing him.

It was hard enough to digest her food
while considering all the news of the day, but thinking about what
was all but guaranteed to come next made her sick to her
stomach.

But the call never came.

13

Just over a hundred years earlier, the
house where the Jordans currently lived had been designed with a
variety of features not typically found in modern homes. Most were
tailored to accommodate the presence of servants – a button in the
floor of the dining room where the lady of the house could tap her
foot to call her housekeeper, a small bedroom where the housekeeper
would reside, and a back staircase from said room to the kitchen
for ‘commuting’ to work without using the main staircase. That was
reserved for the family’s use only.

Over the years, the Jordan’s house has
undergone many renovations, bringing its features more in line with
modern expectations. The button in the dining room floor, no longer
needed, was hidden under a rug. The tiny room had been expanded and
was now occupied by Zach Jordan, the oldest of the Jordan children.
And the extra set of stairs had been split in two and repurposed
into a pair of closets.

There remained an unused bit of square
footage – a small stretch of hallway buried between Zach and
Binny’s room that led to the former back stairs. Over the years the
remodels left it walled off and now it was only accessible through
small panels in the back of Zach and Binny’s closets. This
forgotten space was now home to various pipes and wires that needed
to travel hidden behind the walls of the Jordan house. It was also
home to cobwebs. Lots and lots of cobwebs.

“
Yuck.” Binny found
herself scraping at her tongue with her hand, hoping that what
she’d just inhaled wasn’t a spider.

“
Shhhh.” Zach worried they
would be heard.

“
Don’t worry, they think
we’re asleep.”

When Zach and Binny had been younger
they’d often played in this secret hiding place. Their parents
weren’t thrilled about it as it didn’t seem safe, but that didn’t
stop the kids. As Zach and Binny played together less and less, the
space remained mostly unused. By the time Cassie had been old
enough to want to know about it, neither Zach nor Binny had told
her, because they didn’t want her traipsing around either of their
rooms to get into it.

Zach and Binny spent most of their
evening reviewing the day’s events and trying to realign their
understanding of the new world in which they lived.

“
We need a new hideout.”
Zach was trying to get the dust and cobwebs out of his hair, not
liking the idea of having a spider walk on his face any more than
Binny did.

“
Yeah, I’ll get to work on
that right away,” said Binny sarcastically. “Aren’t you freaked out
by what just happened?” Zach seemed a little too focused on making
sure his hair was spider-free, and not enough on what
mattered.

“
What
happened?”

“
Let’s see. Our baby
sister has a super power. Some creepy guy has been stalking
her.”

“
Maybe if one of these
spiders bites me,
I’ll
get a super power.”

“
Zach!” Binny was getting
exasperated.

Finally Zach acquiesced, “He’s a
doctor. He’s Mom’s doctor!”

“
Exactly! He’s been
stalking Cassie, all of us, since even before we were
born.”

Zach laughed.

Binny shot him a look cutting his
laughter short. She continued, slowly now, lowering her voice,
“Don’t you wonder?”

“
Wonder what?”

“
Wonder how Cassie
got
this
power?”

Before Zach had a chance to respond,
Binny continued, “Apparently Mom had trouble getting pregnant –
which by the way I’m not sure why nobody ever told me that – and
went to this scary doctor to get experimental drugs. And now Cassie
can turn herself invisible and the doctor who gave Mom the drugs is
on the phone having equally scary conversations with some guy named
Sam. Something is not right here.”

“
Mom and Dad seem to think
everything’s fine.” Zach countered. Zach’s tone had softened from
its usual antagonistic tone since he and Binny had been on their
adventure earlier in the day.

“
Well sure, thanks
to
you
they think
everything’s fine!” Binny raised her eyebrows.

“
Right. Sorry.” Zach was
contrite.

“
Well, I’m not sure they
would have believed us even if you had backed me up. They seem to
be lost in their own universe these days.”

Binny’s musings had spilled out in a
rush. A quiet lull descended on their conversation as neither was
sure quite what to say next.

Finally, Zach broke the silence,
“Maybe we’re imagining all this?”

“
Did we imagine Cassie
disappearing? Did we imagine the man talking about ‘danger’ and
‘not scaring the parents’ on his phone call?”

“
He could have been
talking about something else.”

“
He
wasn’t
.”

“
How can you be so
sure?”

“
I don’t know. I just am.
He was talking about Cassie. I know it in my heart.”

Binny continued, “That man. That
doctor. I don’t care that he knows Mom and Dad. I don’t trust him.
He scares me. I think he’s hiding something.”

“
He’s French, of course
he’s a bit ‘mysterieuse’” Zach said in his best French
accent.

Zach and Binny broke into
laughter.

“
Is that what that name
is?” Binny asked.

“
I looked it
up.”

“
French or otherwise, I
don’t trust him. And until Mom and Dad understand that he’s part of
the problem, Cassie is in danger.”

“
Well tonight made things
worse. He brought Cassie back safe and sound, and now Mom and Dad
trust him completely.”

More time passed as the
kids pondered their dilemma. This time it was Binny’s turn to break
the silence. “Then it’s our job to make them
un
trust him.”

“
How do you propose we do
that?”

“
I’m not sure yet, but I
know who to ask.”

§

“
What makes you think he
can help us?” Zach asked.

The next morning had arrived. It was
all Binny and Zach could do to get out of the house quietly without
Cassie noticing and insisting on tagging along. Penny, who had been
in one of her usual perches across the street, attached herself to
Zach and Binny’s orbit like a small moon.