When I get home, I watch a video that the college sent to the student body. What we really need amidst this turmoil is to see our president sitting in an armchair with a warm, comforting fire in the background. And, of course, a green leather-bound book on the table in front of him. We are still at an old, prestigious university. That is our purpose even when glitches like quarantines arise.
The president advises hitting the books, and that’s what I do. Sort of.
I look up everything that Zachary has ever published or any research he’s been associated with. The dense results fill in with scary beasts like Lambdapapillomavirus and Togaviridae and Bacillus...Oh my!
I open a few documents. I try to comprehend the abstracts, but I pretty much have to look up every other word. And then I have to take a few minutes really understanding the definition and the context before moving on.
I start running down the list of the seventy or so titles. Reports, texts, studies. How is any of this going to be useful? How am I supposed to find the germ of information in these that will tell me Zachary had something to do with all this? If I find the germ, what will I do with it?
After skimming the studies for four hours, I understand things more—I comprehend previously unfamiliar words—but I still don’t know what to do.
My head throbs as I read a transcript from a panel Zachary was on two years ago. “One thing to consider is that perhaps we don’t need white blood cells. Perhaps we could create something that is even more powerful than white blood cells.”
The other panelists’ remarks indicate that Zachary’s comments were probably accompanied by a fair amount of guffaws and chuckles, and eventually Zachary conceded it’s a pretty crazy idea.
Was this what Danny found? I lie down. I put my hands on my stomach and stare at the collage on my ceiling. I made it with my uncle. We used bits of magazines to make an image. A man and a girl. The figures both have long, luxurious shadows.
* * *
I wake to Mandy shuffling in the hallway.
She pops her head into my room. “Still sleeping? Are you sick or something?”
“I don’t think we get sick,” I mumble as I sit up and grab my phone. Ten o’clock. On a really good day, I can sleep as late as one, but that requires staying up ’til four or five.
“What’s wrong?” Her hand is still on the doorknob, as if the door is holding her up.
I grasp my phone with both hands and look at the ground. “Oh nothing, just you know, a friend of mine is dead and we’re stuck in a quarantine with some mysterious disease. No biggie.”
Mandy looks to the left and opens her mouth but doesn’t say anything. She nods.
I get up. I’m still in my dress from the vigil, but I don’t feel like showering or changing. I walk past Mandy. “I’m going for a walk.”
I don’t plan to walk to the police station, but that’s where I end up. I tense in front of the gray stone building. The rest of Allan is so quaint. Glorious old brick, actual white picket fences, houses painted dark green, even a log cabin looking cozy year-round on the corner of Dutch and Sixth Street. But the police station looks like its creator was intent on configuring the biggest eyesore in all of Allan.
Gray. Functional. Strong. Suffocating.
Luke is somewhere inside, maybe leaning over evidence, sketching notes while using his sharp eyes to take in every part of every crime-scene photo, every transcript, every scrap of material saved in plastic bags. He takes it in, it becomes his and it never escapes him. My palms sweat at the thought of his eyebrows furrowing and his frown smoldering when he sees me. But if I want to figure out what happened to Danny, I need to talk to Luke. And his car is shining prominently in the parking lot.
I push the glass door open and approach the cop at the front desk.
She gives me a warm, bright smile, like I’m entering Chuck E. Cheese’s. I recognize her from Danny’s crime scene. She has great big brown eyes and a mother hen demeanor.
“What you looking for, honey?” she asks.
I swallow and approach the desk. I grip the edge. “Can I please speak with Lu—Detective Peterson?”
She taps her lips and then my arm. A gleeful twitch emerges around the corners of her eyes. “You’re Luke’s girl, aren’t you?”
I’m not his girl. I don’t belong to him. Hasn’t anyone heard of DTR talks? And, anyway, Luke left me on the sidewalk. We’re done. The relationship is now clearly defined: it’s over.
So I sigh. “No, we went on a few dates, but that’s it.”
“Yeah,” she says. “You’re the art major, aren’t you?” she asks, a glint in her eyes, her lips turned up slightly.
“I’m not sure if I’m the art major, but yeah, I’m an art major,” I say, wondering simultaneously why Luke is telling everyone about me and why this cop needs some way to distinguish me from what’s apparently a host of other hypothetical girls.
“No, you would be the art major. The one.” She smiles and reaches her hand across the desk. “I’m Raven.”
“Quinn,” I say.
“Ah, yes, Quinn.” Her grip is warm and firm and she smiles as though she has met a super important person. But it’s just me. When the momentous handshake is done, Raven picks up the phone and winks. “Roy, is Detective Peterson back there?”
She nods and mmm-hmms, and then hangs up the phone. “Hold on just a second, honey.”
“Of course,” I say. I clutch the desk harder. My knuckles turn white. But my knuckles are getting it easy. It’s my stomach and my heart and my flushed face that have maniacal little cells prancing about at the thought of seeing Luke.
“He’s a really good guy, you know,” Raven says as she leans over the desk. “If I were you, I’d hold on to him and never let go.”
I want to be annoyed by her unsolicited advice, but I’m not. “Yes ma’am.”
She eventually has to get on with, you know, being a cop, and she pats my shoulder and moves back to the paperwork she was clicking away at on the computer.
The door opens. I spin away from the counter and actually slap my palm to my chest. Yeah.
A man comes out, but it isn’t Luke.
It’s Tommy, one of the cops who brought Natalie and me in. He smiles and sticks his thumbs in the loops of his belt. “Luke isn’t here,” he says.
But Luke’s car is outside.
He sends out cops to lie to me. That’s how much he doesn’t want to see me.