The Timer Game (29 page)

Part of Katie’s shirt had been eaten away. The pixels chewed.

It was after three when she pulled into a gas station in Lodi and bought a Snickers and a pack of Camels from a cashier dressed as Oscar the Grouch. The can she was wearing clanked as she pointed Grace in the direction of the Wingers’ farm. Green miles of cotton, pistachio, and garlic stretched to the horizon, punctuated by toiling laborers and huge machinery.

Grace drove slowly down a dirt road surrounded by vast groves of almond trees bristling with gray-green hulls. A shaker moved through the shivering trees, gripping trunks with hydraulic vises that rattled the almonds into blitzing sheets. Not far from the parking lot she spotted the administration building, and a security guard pointed her toward a beige corrugated building that vibrated with sound.

She found DeeDee Winger wearing a trim jumpsuit and clear goggles, standing on a viewing platform in a room the size of a hangar. The medical chart put her current age at twenty-four. Almonds roared down an angled path of belts in front of her.

“Cattle padding,” DeeDee yelled over the noise. She gestured at thin paper shells, hurtling down into a compactor that pressed them into a soft, grayish block. “Livestock bedding. Nothing’s wasted.”

“Could we go someplace a little less noisy?”

DeeDee checked her watch. “I can break in five.”

__

The company lunchroom was a low, Spanish-tiled building, air-conditioned and clean. Grace followed DeeDee to an empty table near a window as they put down their trays. At a long table by the window, farmworkers hunkered over trays, speaking Spanish. Out of uniform, DeeDee was plumper, wearing peach-colored shorts and a flowered shirt, sleeves rolled up.

“Know much about almonds?” DeeDee cracked open a milk carton and poured.

“Just that an Almond Joy wouldn’t be much without one.”

DeeDee grinned briefly and closed her lips over a crooked front tooth. “The Central Valley, we move more than 600 million pounds a year.”

Grace made the appropriate noises as she dug into a chicken salad.

“Know who’s snapping them up right now? China. We send out twenty-five million pounds just to them. Amazing, considering the almond probably originated in China.”

Grace kept eating and she could feel DeeDee rein back her enthusiasm. “You didn’t come to talk almonds. Tell me again, I couldn’t hear much over the sorters. Of course, at this point, I can’t hear much at all. We’ve been at this twenty-four-seven since August. Thank God harvest ends today on Halloween. So what do you need?”

DeeDee looked at her, her face trusting and open. Grace took a long swallow of her drink. “I’m getting a master’s at San Diego State—”

“No kidding, that’s where my husband went.”

Grace nodded. “Well. I’m getting a psych MA, focusing on neonatal issues. Exploring the lengths to which expectant parents will go, in order to save the baby’s life. My prof unearthed names of patients who’d had troubling sonograms that fit that category. You’re just the first one I’m contacting.”

“Oh.” DeeDee took a delicate bite of tomato. “I’m confused. How did you find me?” Grace nodded, prepared. “Your husband’s TA job. They update their former employee records.” She shrugged. “Probably find my shoe size on the Web, look in the right place.”

“That explanation doesn’t make sense.”

“It would if you Googled yourself. You’d be amazed.”

“Medical records are sealed.”

“You signed a release at the Center for BioChimera.” Gambling that if the Frieze couple had signed one, so had the Wingers. “It allowed your record to be shared for medical purposes.”

DeeDee ate in silence. A flush crept up her neck. She put down her fork.

“My whole record?”

Grace shook her head. “A very narrow document. Your name. The troubling sonogram. A notation that you’d signed a release form. That’s it. But the release was signed shortly after the sonogram and the Center is a prominent research facility, so my guess was, you’d signed it to try something experimental. Something you hoped would save your baby’s life.”

“Fred didn’t want us doing it, but I felt like we didn’t have any choice.” Her eyes suddenly brimmed with tears. “I’m sorry, I didn’t expect that, it’s been so long.”

Grace reached for her hand and DeeDee grabbed hold. Her hands were hot.

“Okay. What do you need to know?”

“I guess basics first.” Grace took out her notepad and opened it to a fresh page. “Kids?”

DeeDee slid her hand away. “Two. Freddy’s only six months, and Diane’s almost three. They stay with Mom the days I work.”

The oldest was almost three. So the fetus DeeDee Winger was carrying five years ago didn’t make it. “Forgive me for taking this into a painful area. Five years ago, you were pregnant.” Grace’s voice was gentle. “And a sonogram revealed a heart anomaly. I’m curious. What happened at the Center after you signed the release?”

A long moment went by.

DeeDee ducked her head. “This is confidential. Don’t use it with my name, okay?”

“Absolutely.”

DeeDee glanced around the room and lowered her voice. “I have epilepsy. The ob-gyn told me later maybe the drugs I take to control it, maybe that caused it. Epstein’s anomaly.”

Grace nodded.

DeeDee swallowed, looked away. “Both my kids are adopted. I never wanted to risk—”

“You miscarried,” Grace said quietly.

“Not right away. They explained it. How drugs that today are routinely prescribed to save lives, once were experimental. How if we agreed to go forward, it was free.” She looked at Grace, her eyes shot with pink. “I never would have agreed, if I’d thought there was any chance—”

“They told you it was free. You were trying to do the right thing to save your baby.”

DeeDee nodded miserably. “We knew she’d need a transplant. That’s why we were at the Center. It was a girl. We found out that much.” She plucked at her paper napkin, ripping it.

“What was the doctor’s name?”

“Dr. Michael Yura. Gave us his card. That’s how I remember.” She spelled it. “The nurse called him Mike and she told us her name but I didn’t write it down.” She swallowed hard. “We were young and so afraid, and we’d just gotten such terrible news about our baby’s heart.”

“You still have the card?”

“Not anymore. After we adopted, I tossed it. Didn’t see the point in keeping it anymore.”

“Where did you meet them?”

“They followed us out to our car. They said they could do something that would radically increase our baby’s chances of being matched to a donor without hurting her. All we had to do was come back later that night for a second sonogram. Said we’d be working through the research side of the facility, not the hospital side, and that most assuredly our ob-gyn would not approve, so if we decided to return, we needed to know that it was experimental, not accepted procedure, and to keep it quiet. That was the main thing we agreed to. Not to tell.”

Her voice caught. The tissue was a small pile of snow next to her untouched plate. “Some warning went off; I mean, why late at night? But I was too afraid to ask. Fred and I were going through a hard time. He was stressed; we were kids, broke, all I heard was the part about how maybe they could do something that would help save our baby.”

“Do you remember what they looked like?”

“That’s just it, we never saw them again. And I was crying so hard I don’t really remember. When we came back that night, somebody different met us in the lobby. A young woman in a white lab coat. Knew our names. I thought at first she was just a little kid. Couldn’t be old enough, and she told us she wasn’t, she was just the messenger.”

The messenger. That’s what Jasmine called herself. “Remember what she looked like?”

“Really beautiful black hair, I remember that. Looked almost Indian.”

She had to be describing Jasmine. A schizophrenic woman in her teens, that’s how old Jazz was five years ago, involved in something sinister at the Center. Warren’s business had become too complex for him to properly oversee, and now it could cost him everything.

But the cost to Grace was much greater.

“They kept saying it would be safe. They stressed that part. That’s the only reason why we did it. We thought it was like—”

“A second opinion.”

“Yes. We followed her to the research side and down to the basement. It was a small examining room, almost thrown together. God! I hear myself saying this and I can’t believe it.”

“People do desperate things to save their kids,” Grace said. She took a long drink of water and finally looked up. “You met the doctor downstairs. What did he look like?”

“It was a woman. Solid. Older than me, so that covered a lot of ground. Her hair was kind of, I don’t know, bland, like she didn’t take care of it.” She swallowed again. “Said her name was Dr. Margaret Moyerson. Not a medical doctor, she stressed. A bioresearcher dealing specifically with transplant issues in neonatals.”

DeeDee gazed into the distance and Grace waited.

“She had a sonogram table right there and she had a gown waiting, and I changed and lay down, and she put the gel on me and hooked me up. Fred held my hand. I saw my baby’s heart beating, tripping like a little bird.” She choked and went on. “It was so big, the needle. She acted surprised that Dr. Yura hadn’t told me there’d be an injection.”

A bell blasted. Workers shuffled to their feet, depositing trays and moving outside.

“Wait, Dr. Moyerson injected something?”

DeeDee nodded. “Directly through the uterine wall.”

“What did it look like? The injection?”

“Cloudy pink. I remember thinking, a girl color for my little girl. I felt it immediately, this sharp pain. I could see it on her face, a kind of alarm. It didn’t happen for another week. Cramps. Fever. Nausea. I wasn’t even sure it was connected to the injection, you know? It took me a month or so before I put things together in my mind, and by then, it was too late.”

“What do you mean?”

“We checked the AMA directory after I miscarried. Dr. Yura wasn’t listed.”

“And the Center didn’t have a researcher listed named Dr. Moyerson.”

“That’s just it. They did. Only it was a woman in her late sixties, grouchy and upset that somebody had stolen her identity. As soon as we saw and talked to her, I gave up even trying to explain what we had done. By then, I just wanted to get out of there and put it behind me. But finding that out, that’s what made me think that maybe it wasn’t my body, with all its problems, that made me lose the baby. Maybe the injection had something to do with it.”

DeeDee stood and scooped the napkin onto the plate of untouched food, scattering the napkin bits like snow.

“When you were leaving the examining room, do you remember if there was another couple, waiting to come in?”

Dee Dee frowned. “What does that have to do with anything?”

Grace shrugged. “I’m just wondering if they were doing the same thing to other couples.”

Dee turned even paler. “You mean experimenting? God, I hope not. We almost divorced over it, it was so bad. It’s safe with you, right? I mean, you won’t use my name?”

“It’s safe.” They cleared the trays and walked outside.

“I’m just wondering how the researcher—Dr. Yura? Was that his name? Figured out your baby had a heart defect in utero.”

“I asked myself the same thing, when I thought about it. They just appeared, you know? Followed us right out of the Center. They were both in hospital whites. It was a research hospital,” Dee Dee said again. “World-renowned. We thought she’d be safe.”

Chapter 33

All Hallows’ Eve, 3:42 p..m.

Grace took the timer from her bag as she raced to the parking lot, the sour taste of anxiety in her mouth. Katie’s shirt was gone. The tips of her caramel-colored pigtails were shifting, the pixels swarming as if alive. Bit by bit the face she loved the most was disappearing.

Ere midnight tolls, I cut your heart.
It was already almost quarter of four.

Central Valley spread out in long shadows of neat green fields, the heat of the day hanging heavily in the air. Plumes of dust roiled in localized spots, marking areas in the fields where heavy equipment was in use. The car was where she’d left it, parked at the edge of the lot.

Where was the next clue? Where did he want her to go? He always had the next clue waiting. There was nothing stuck under the windshield wiper. Nothing under the tires. How could she save Katie if she didn’t have the next clue?

Two workers trudged down the road speaking quietly in Spanish, and Grace waited until they passed, until she was sure they weren’t delivering the next stage of the game. His silence was unnerving, but even worse was the timer. She kept compulsively looking at it, and every time, it seemed that a small part of Katie had been erased. She’d burned up so much time, driving away from San Diego. Was it all a waste? Would she watch helplessly as Katie vanished before her eyes? She stole a look. The tips of her pigtails were gone.

She rechecked her watch. Jeanne would be at the gas station now, waiting for her. She slid the timer resolutely into her bag as she drove by a group of day laborers on the side of the road, waiting for their ride out.

One of them held a ball hammer carelessly in his hands, and he squatted in the dirt and idly smacked apart stones. Attached to the wooden rail fence on the right side of the road hung a series of painted signs, bearing a homely ad in a jingle rhyme, the kind she remembered seeing in a Walker Evans photo for Burma Shave, signs spaced just far enough apart to whet the interest of everyone driving by. She slowed down and read:

To track a monster you must ask

She slammed on the brakes and veered off the road. Her heart banged against her breast pan. These signs were for her. She waited as a battered truck barreled past her down the road, dust boiling in its wake. She eased her car back onto the road. There were three more signs paced a distance apart:

The questions that rip off the mask.

Head south again. It’s time you knew