Invisible Page 34

  She stared at him. “But we can’t,” she said, helpless. “We’re not the same people.” They couldn’t be that man and that woman who fell in love at that insanely crowded party; they couldn’t be that naive twosome who thought finding each other was the hard part. She tried again. “We do love each other.”

  “I know.”

  He sounded so sad. She hated this. Couldn’t he understand she was doing the best she could? Couldn’t he be happy with the way things were now?

  He slowed to take the exit toward Columbus. They passed a cluster of gas stations, then a series of strip malls.

  “But Thanksgiving’s next week.” A stupid thing to say. Who cared about that? She clenched her fists in her lap. It wasn’t about Thanksgiving. It was deciding whether to go with his mom’s traditional stuffing or her mom’s walnut-apple. It was picking out the Christmas tree, loading the dishwasher, and bringing in the mail. It was waking up in the middle of the night, hearing the person breathing next to you. About knowing you weren’t alone.

  “We both need to move on,” he said. “We can’t live like this, two people afraid to be real with one another. I love you. I’ll always love you.” His voice was low but relentless. “I’m just not in love with you anymore.”

  She didn’t want to hear this. She sat back and stared numbly through the glass. This was one of those hideous things that happened to other people. The fabric of her life shredded just like that, all the truths she’d clung to now melted into nothing. Everything she was or thought she was, everything she thought they were, had vanished as though they’d never been.

  Another house appeared, tucked among the golden trees by the roadside. Someone was there, crouched and working in a garden. A woman. Ann watched as she straightened, lifted a hand to shade her eyes to watch them shoot past, the four of them entombed in a blue minivan and hurtling toward the unknown.

  ONE YEAR LATER

  AVIAN INFLUENZA — SITUATION IN SOUTH KOREA

  FIVE MORE PEOPLE HAVE BEEN HOSPITALIZED THIS morning in Seoul with avian influenza. Early tests confirm it as the same strain that killed two people in Singapore earlier this week. Health officials have been unable to determine how and where these people may have contracted the disease. To date, a total of 670 cases of human avian influenza have been confirmed worldwide, resulting in 328 deaths.

  World Health Organization

  Epidemic and Pandemic Alert and Response

  ONE

  PETER HEARD THE LOW MUTTER OF A MOTORBOAT somewhere out there in the cold fog. He rolled down his truck window and listened. The sound swelled into a grumble, someone evidently headed in to shore. Already? The sun wasn’t even up yet. He fitted his cup into the holder, reached for his toolbox, and climbed out of his truck.

  A muffled hiccup as the engine cut off. Water lapped the wooden piles and unsettled the pebbles along the shore. The squeak of fiberglass against rope. Fog rolled back across the water, revealing the frosted grass beneath Peter’s boots, a section of pier stretching before him, patches of dark water, the thin, gray sky. Now he could see the motorboat and the two figures working within it.

  One of them looked up as Peter approached. Broad face, small mouth, a curl of pale hair beneath a dark cap. The other man turned and revealed himself to be a younger version of the first, possessing the same mouth and squint but with brown hair instead of white. Father and son. They wore heavy brown camouflage jackets, rubber waders, thick gloves with the fingers snipped off. Peter had met so many people these past few weeks that they more or less merged into one wary, jostling group, but he remembered this pair. He’d examined their chocolate Lab, a big, slow-moving dog with white on his muzzle and tail, and a spreading rash across his ribs.

  “You again,” the son said. He tossed a rope over a pile and tied a knot. “The vet.”

  More university researcher than veterinarian, but Peter didn’t correct him. “Any luck?”

  “Not much,” the father replied. “Couldn’t flush any out.”

  The son gave the rope a vicious tug. “The ones we did were crappy.”

  The father rested his hand on the side of the boat and looked at Peter. “I suppose you want to see for yourself.”

  Peter waited. He had no jurisdiction here. The NSF grant paid for lab work and his graduate student, but that was all. Hunters didn’t have to comply with his requests.

  The man shrugged. He reached into the center of the boat, lifted out a bundle of feathers, and set it onto the pier. Peter crouched to have a closer look.

  Four small ducks, all of them brown-and-cream with a telltale blue patch along the wing. The white crescent around the eye revealed three of them to be male. It was uncommon to find blue-winged teal in Ohio in mid-November. Usually by now they’d taken themselves down the Mississippi to South America or across the Great Lakes to the Chesapeake Bay for the winter.

  Their presence here was odd, and so was their appearance. Where were the sleek, domed chests? These birds looked deflated, their wings overlarge for their shrunken torsos. He opened his toolbox. “How were they flying?”

  “Low and slow.” The father looped rope over a second pile and pulled the boat up against the pier. “Like they were drunk. Hardly any challenge.”

  Teal normally flew fast and erratically. Peter snapped on a pair of gloves, picked up the first teal, and cradled it in his hand.

  “Got to be global warming.” The son stepped onto the pier and squatted beside Peter.

  “Looks poisoned to me.” The father was watching Peter. “What do you think?”

  “Could be,” Peter said.

  Botulism would account for the birds’ labored flying. Peter lifted tail feathers to check for signs of diarrhea and found none. He turned to the small tucked head and gently palpated. Here was a worry. Facial edema and, yes, petechial hemorrhage inside the eyelids. He laid the bird down, picked up another male. The edema was more pronounced in this one. He reached for his penlight from the tray of his toolbox. Prying open the duck’s bill and tilting back its head, he shone the beam of light down its throat. Blossoms of red against the pale membrane.

  “What?” the father said as Peter put the bird down and reached for another.

  The eyes of this one were almost swollen shut. Peter couldn’t imagine how he’d been able to fly at all. The female showed less swelling about her face, but when Peter checked the inside of one eyelid, he saw bright red. These birds had suffered. He ran a gloved finger along the female’s wing. The speckled brown-and-cream feathers were dull, as if they’d lost hope.

  “It’s either a viral infection or exposure to an environmental contaminant,” Peter said. “I’ll have to run some tests.”

  “That’s what you’re here for, isn’t it?” the son said.

  True, but he hadn’t thought it would be necessary. Naturally, he’d hoped for the opposite. Peter unscrewed a test tube. He peeled the paper back from a sterile swab.

  “We can’t eat them if they’re poisoned,” the father said. “Can we?”

  “I’m telling you, Dad—”

  “You think everything’s global warming.” The father leaned back and put his hand on the gunwale. “You find anything the other times you been out?”

  He was talking to Peter.

  “No.” Peter dropped the swab into the test tube and twisted on the lid. No one had, not that he knew of. But it was still early days yet. Duck season was just gearing up.

  “Poison.” Turning, the father spat into the water. “We should’ve left them where we found them.”

  “Mind showing me where that was?” Peter said.

  Father and son exchanged a glance.

  Duck hunters were a unique breed, willing to endure freezing temperatures, sleet, snow, and bitter wind, and secretive as hell about their prime hunting spots. These two were worried he was going to steal their spot, though there was no threat of that. He didn’t hunt. Not anymore.

  “I need to take water samples.” Peter made his voice mild and nonth
reatening, the sound of the professor, not the hunter.

  The son scowled at the horizon. The rising sun was beginning to thin the fog and cast a general yellow glow over the marsh. The father busied himself in the boat.

  “We don’t find the cause, the whole season could be like this.” Peter indicated the ducks lying on the pier.

  A quick glance from the father.

  “You try that ointment I recommended?” Peter said. “For Gus?” He hoped he’d remembered the Lab’s name.

  The son said, “Yeah. His rash is getting better.”

  Peter nodded. “He should be able to get in the water in another week.”

  Father and son looked at each other. The father rubbed his chin and then shrugged. “Come on, then. It’s a piss-poor spot, anyway.”

  They motored through the reedy water. Peter sat in the middle, the father at the stern, steering. The son knelt in the prow. Once they were out on open water, the father revved the engine and they bounced across the polished silver surface.

  Cold wind buffeted Peter’s hair. Spray whipped across his face. The shoreline opened up on both sides, lined by sycamores and red maples blooming gold and crimson and reflected between sky and water. Spangles of sunlight below, bright sky and a wisp of cloud above. Flapping geese lifted themselves from hiding, sounding mournful echoing honks. It was nice to be out here. Uncomplicated.

  The son shouted something to his father, stretched out his arm and pointed. The father yelled something unintelligible back.

  Peter turned his head and saw a distant dark shape. Another boat trolling these same hunting grounds. The father made a wide loop, watching the other boat as it chopped past, then opened up and headed north.

  After a while the engine shifted into a lower gear, and their boat, turning, cut through the waves, rolling in its own wake. The engine slowed even further, thrummed. Around another curve, and there was the duck blind. Wooden poles rose from the water, their tops shrouded with branches, to form an unlikely tree house in the middle of the lake. The two men had taken care constructing it, weaving the branches in a dense mesh, leaving a space high enough to allow them to slide their boat inside.

  They slowly circled the structure.

  “See?” the son said. “Nothing.”

  Peter unstoppered a tube and leaned over the side to dip it into the icy water.

  “How’s it look?” the father said.

  “I won’t know anything until I get back to the lab.” But the tea-colored water appeared clean enough. No scum or creeping algae that would indicate bacterial overgrowth, no white froth or oily bubbles that would suggest a chemical spill. Peter pressed the stopper on top, looked around. It was a peaceful, beautiful morning. Despite it, he felt a growing unease. “Where were the ducks when you found them?”

  The son turned around in his seat. “Over there.” He pointed to where the shoreline bulged out into the water.

  “Waited for two hours,” the father said. “And then those four showed.”

  “Let’s take a look,” Peter said.

  “It’s all the same lake,” the father said.

  “There could be something over there, though, that’s not over here.”

  “Like a dead animal?”

  Peter shook his head. “Teal don’t feed on carrion, but maybe it’s a localized contamination, someone dumping something where they shouldn’t.” That’d be a welcome sight—a big old rusted barrel sticking out of the water and disrupting the delicate harmony between bird and environment. Even a discarded paint can would do.

  The father brought the boat around and sliced through the marshy water.

  “Fish look okay,” the son said, staring down into the water. “There’d be floaters otherwise, right?”

  “Some things can affect one species and do nothing to another,” Peter answered. “There are plenty of diseases that are fatal to birds that pass right through fish. And vice versa.”

  “Where again?” the father said.

  “Around there,” the son said. “Careful. Water’s getting shallow.”

  The engine dropped to a slow chug. Another tight turn. The engine stuttered, then stopped. All three men stared at the sight before them.

  On the clear water, surrounded by golden reeds, bobbed a legion of blue-winged teal, hundreds of them, mottled brown and cream, every one of them silent and turned the wrong way up.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  CARLA BUCKLEY was born in Washington, D.C. She has worked in a variety of industries, including stints as an assistant press secretary for a U.S. senator, an analyst with the Smithsonian Institution, and a technical writer for a defense contractor. She lives in Columbus, Ohio, with her husband, an environmental scientist, and three children. She is the author of Invisible and The Things That Keep Us Here, which was nominated for a Thriller Award as a best first novel and the Ohioana Book Award for fiction. She is currently at work on her next novel.

  Visit the author’s website at www.CarlaBuckley.com.

  Also by Carla Buckley

  The Things That Keep Us Here

  AN ORION EBOOK

  First published in Great Britain in 2012 by Orion Books.

  This ebook first published in 2012 by Orion Books.

  Copyright © Carla Buckley 2012

  Reading group guide copyright © 2012 Random House, Inc.

  Excerpt from The Things That Keep Us Here copyright © 2010 Carla Buckley

  The moral right of Carla Buckley to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act of 1988.

  All characters and events in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means without the prior permission in writing of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published without a similar condition, including this condition, being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

  A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

  ISBN: 978 1 4091 1312 6

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