The Vines by Shelley Nolden (ebook and pdf reader .TXT) 📕

as he began walking toward the patio. “The type that doesn’t involve climbing trees and screwing in lightbulbs.”

“Hmm.” Finn cocked his head. “How many doctors does it take to screw in a lightbulb?”

“Zero,” Kristian said without slowing. “I’ve got someone who does that for me.”

“Because you don’t know how!” Finn called out.

“Hey now, be nice,” she said, though she knew neither had been offended. As an only child of divorced parents, she couldn’t help but feel a little envious even of their continual verbal sparring.

“What happened?” Finn asked, leaning forward to inspect her knees.

She didn’t believe he hadn’t heard her hit the ground. Though, sometimes, when concentrating intensely, he did tune out everything around him. “It’s nothing.” She stepped away. “I just tripped on a log. What about you? You okay?”

From the set of his jaw, she knew he wasn’t. Clearly, he was bothered by that evidence of ongoing virology research.

But she couldn’t be the one to mention it and give away the fact that she’d been snooping. She could only hope he would bring it up. “What did you find?”

He shook his head and glanced toward Kristian, now more than ten yards away.

She doubted he could hear them. Either Finn was being extra cautious, or it was an excuse.

“You’ll tell me on the way home?” She wrinkled her nose at how desperate the question had sounded.

“It’s complicated.” He raised his hat to wipe his brow. “I know that’s not what you want to hear, but I need some time to process it.”

Her stomach ached; no way could she eat now.

Abruptly, Finn stopped.

As she strode past, he grabbed her upper arm, causing her to reel backward.

To steady herself, she clutched him, yet the relief that he wanted her beside him kept her dizzied.

Finn pressed his hand to hers. She felt something soft and looked down.

In her palm was a single bluebell blossom. She hadn’t noticed this breed of wildflower growing on the Gettlers’ property, nor had she seen him stoop to pick this one.

“It’s beautiful,” she whispered. “Thank you.”

“I’m sorry. What I found . . . I don’t know if my dad’s the man I thought he was, and that’s not exactly an easy thing to talk about. Okay?”

Sickened by the statement, she managed to nod. “I’m here when you’re ready.”

She tucked the stem under the strap of her dress, then brushed her lips across his cheek.

He entwined his fingers with hers, and they fell into step.

For the next two hours, she would have to interact with Rollie as if nothing were wrong, including smiling at all his cheesy puns, which she struggled to do under normal circumstances.

She didn’t blame Finn for his reticence in sharing what he’d found. Firsthand she knew that reality can be far harder to face than uncertainty.

One week later

August

n the darkness, Finn crouched among the wild grasses encroaching on the seawall. Even without the light pollution, he would have felt exposed beneath the waning gibbous moon, unthreatened by a single cloud. A storm system was expected to hit New York City early the next morning. By midnight, twenty hours from now, the chop of the river would become unnavigable. Long before then, he planned to leave this rock. Hopefully with the woman.

He repositioned a folded, inflatable raft and rope within the hull of his concealed kayak and scrutinized the horizon, still untouched by natural light. Within the pitch-black forest, this place was even more so “her island.” Until he convinced her that he was on her side.

Finn squirmed. Ever since he’d found that square of yellowed paper tucked in Rollie’s final journal entry, dated August 28, 2001, queasiness had been his constant companion. “You’re done with Riverside,” his mom had written. “She’s suffered too much already.”

Moments later, he’d heard a rustle behind him and ripped away the sheet, revealing the cage of bats. A horrifying range of possible connections among Sylvia’s declaration, the scarred woman who despised his family, and the evidence of ongoing research had snatched his breath.

Finally, he had insight into why Rollie had been so vocal and absolute in his decision. Yet the implications of his mother’s request had left Finn shaking. In all that he’d overheard as a child about catalysts, environmental studies, specimen samples, and antibodies, there’d been no mention of human test subjects.

Yet it hadn’t been uncommon for his parents’ conversations about Rollie’s latest site visit to shift from the dinner table to their locked bedroom, leaving Finn unable to finish his meal alone because of the pit in his stomach.

Now he couldn’t shake the dread that the woman he’d encountered was somehow involved against her will, and that his father’s efforts were possibly ongoing. Considering Kristian’s frequent rantings about government ineptitude in curbing outbreaks, as evidenced by the initial SARS-CoV response, he very well could still be involved, too.

His mother, a renowned feminist, had quit her paralegal job in the mid-1980s to attend women’s rights and peace rallies in Washington, DC. Even though she now couldn’t hold a pen, the fiery poems and essays she’d written for three decades had earned her a permanent place in women’s studies curricula at colleges across the country. If she’d known that the Gettler men’s “vital research” entailed involuntary human testing, she wouldn’t have stayed with Rollie. The note, however, implied that’s precisely what she’d done.

While retrieving the knapsack that housed the journals, wedged in the bow of his dad’s kayak, Finn had found a MetroCard with an expiration of 04/27/09. Evidently Rollie had recently visited the island. The easiest way to get a kayak to either of their launch points was by carting it on the subway.

Finn guessed the scarred woman was at most twenty years old, which meant she’d been a young teen back when Sylvia had penned that edict.

If Rollie had been using this woman, or a string of vagrants, to test the effects of various locally sourced chemical compounds on the immune system—while a day nurse tended to his wheelchair-bound wife—he couldn’t be doing so by