“That’s right. The ones from you know what,” she said with one of her meaningful looks, “as well as all the larvae from your succession experiments. Only the larvae were touched, and whoever it was was very, very careful. They didn’t miss a single larva. My guess is they dumped the contents of each cage into a bag and then swilled out the cages.”
“Why would they do that?”
“Maybe they figured you wouldn’t try to catalogue all those dead insects, that you’d just count your losses, pitch them all, and start again, that you’d never notice the larvae were missing.”
I thought for a moment. “But why would they want me to think that?”
I just might have done that too, but I needed those samples for the lab work because of the lost collection on the river. But why would they be interested in the larvae at all? Who could possibly get anything from destroying those larvae? What was so important about the larvae that they had been stolen, and why had the rest of my insects been fumigated?
“Maybe someone’s found a cure for cancer in blowfly larvae.” Martha caught my venomous glance. “Just kidding.”
“What about my pickled larvae, in the jars near the door?”
“They’re all there except for the two I labelled ‘Dumoine.’ They’ve vanished.”
“Only the stuff from the canoe trip. What about the live larvae in the other room?”
“They’re still there. It was the first thing I checked.”
“Put new labels on them will you, Martha? I don’t want them to go missing. They might hold the answer to this whole mess.”
“What do you mean by that?”
“I’m not sure, but whoever did this was interested in the insects I brought back from Dumoine, and some of those came from Diamond’s body. Maybe there’s a link: dead body, a ransacked lab, stolen insects and disks. No bookie would bet on odds that this is all coincidence. There’s got to be a link among the insects, the body, and my stolen disks.” Not to mention a probable attempt on my life, I thought morosely. Martha opened her mouth.
“Don’t say it again, Martha. I don’t want to hear it. Whoever it was could have dumped formaldehyde on top of my disks just as they did with the laptop. They didn’t. They stole them instead, so there’s a chance they’re still around.” I was angry and a little bit scared, if I had the guts to admit it, which I knew I didn’t. At least not to Martha, anyway. I couldn’t bear the thought of what it would do to Martha’s face to know I was scared.
“But, Cordi, the cops have nothing to go on. They’re not optimistic they can find out who did it. No one saw or heard anything.”
I heard myself in her words. She was usually the optimist, me the pessimist, but I couldn’t afford to give credence to my pessimistic thoughts. Hearing them coming at me from Martha almost dissolved my resolve, but then I thought about what would happen to me if I didn’t fight and I rallied my wits.
“I don’t care what the cops say. I’m damned if I’m going to let someone screw my career without going down fighting. I’ve worked too bloody hard to see it slipping through my fingers.”
Martha cleared her throat and looked at me.
“Now what?” I asked, feeling like my balloon had just been pricked and I was mentally hunting around for the ragged bits of wet rubber to try and put it back together again.
“I know it’s a bad time, but the editor of Animal Behaviour emailed asking about your revisions.”
“Oh, Jeeesus, Martha. Stall him. Tell him I’m working on some last-minute stuff. Don’t let on that I’ve got no data! I need more time.” I pulled my hair. “I can’t lose this. It’s too important a publication, and if I don’t publish, the team in Calgary will surely beat me to it, not to mention kissing my job goodbye. He says they’ve already approached him but I’m first as long as I can deliver. Damn it to bloody hell. Why is it always me?”
After Martha left I tried to compose a letter to the funding people explaining why my quarterly report would be late, asking for more time. But I couldn’t concentrate. My mind kept wandering back to my ransacked lab. What was so important about the larvae and my disks? To put me off the scent? What scent? I sat, stocking feet propped on my desk, thinking about it, and then took the rest of the day off, I was so discouraged by it all. I needed to talk to Ryan. Even that was discouraging. I had to make do with my brother, ever since Luke had left. Not that I didn’t appreciate bouncing ideas off Ryan, but he had his own family and I was aware that they came first. I wanted another Luke, or did I just need another Luke to lean on? Depressing thought, because Luke had actually been a bit of a jerk and a lot of a prima donna. Surely next time I could want a companion that I didn’t need? Had that ever happened? Stop thinking!
I grabbed a cold juice from among all the frozen specimens in the little fridge in my office. I needed activity to keep my thoughts at bay until I could bounce them off Ryan, before they bounced me into more and darker thoughts. I scooted out of my office, hoping to get across the Champlain Bridge to Aylmer before the federal civil servants flocked out of work and created a half-hour wait.
Usually I loved the drive past Aylmer, where the country really began and the tree-clad cliffs of the Eardley Escarpment rose above the river valley, which once had been a shallow inland sea. But my thoughts blocked out the beauty of the land and I saw it only vaguely through my self-doubts. Twenty-five minutes later on the straight two-lane highway I crested a hilltop and the Ottawa River spilled across to the horizon, and for a precious moment my thoughts deserted me as I took in the sparkling water that beckoned me. Shortly after, I turned right onto a dirt road that weaved past several houses and then through an old farm gate into the valley that had been my home off and on all my life.
At the crest of the hill I stopped the car, determined to get a grip on myself. It was my elixir after a long day’s work. Spread out at my feet were rolling fields planted with corn and hay, stretching to the escarpment, which swung up over my head. The barns stood at the end of the road by the cornfields. The old stone farmhouse where I had grown up, and where Ryan and his family now lived, was catching the late afternoon sun, rosy and warm. My little cabin lay out of sight, out behind the barns.
I wheeled my car in past the farmhouse and pulled up in front of the dairy barn. Ryan’s car was parked there, although he usually parked in back near the entrance to his office. I got out as the hum of crickets, the heat of summer, the feeling of the dried earth, and the smell of manure and hay mingled in the air with my thoughts. As if they needed fertilizing, I thought sourly — there were enough of them already.
I opened the heavy wooden door and walked into the darkness of the barn down a long narrow corridor, then through a second swinging door into the barn proper. Three lines of fifteen stalls ran the length of the barn and the cows were all in and ready for milking, their impatient lowing matching the full stretch of their udders.
I caught sight of Ryan on the far side, hauling the milking equipment to a cow, the black snake-like tubes with the shiny vacuum cylinders looking like a modern-day Medusa.
“Hiya. Where’s Mac?” I was amazed at how normal my voice sounded. My whole career was ready to whirl down the drain and here I was asking about Mac. I looked down the aisles for the tall, thin, rake-like figure of Macgregor with his mane of milk white hair. He’d run the farm since my parents had retired to Ottawa and France, but recently Ryan had been doing more.
Ryan had the milking stool strapped around his waist so that when he stooped to collar the teats he had something to lean against and save his knees. I watched as he pulled on the long black tubes and expertly hooked the milking unit onto the cow’s udder. I’m not sure I’ll ever feel comfortable with this vacuum pump stuff. I’m always afraid I’ll suck off the cows’ teats when I do it. Being a woman, it kind of makes my skin crawl to see those teatcups clamped down like that. The whole thing was so different from when