CAT

Cat called in late May to invite me to lunch and said she would pay. That meant she had a job for me. Cat—Caitlin Alexis Thorne—and I had been friends ever since we roomed together at Penn State as freshmen, where we were, despite our pretensions of sophistication, two scared, small-town girls, fresh out of high school, each as aimless and ignorant as the other. Now, fifteen years later, she had made several award-winning documentaries and, while I was a researcher for various GUWs, Great Unidentified Writers, whose readers thought were geniuses, I was no less aimless than I had been earlier.

First thing that day in the restaurant she asked if I was in tow to a GUW. She never asked for a name. She knew I had to sign a confidentiality clause in my contracts.

“Yes. I’ll wrap it up in a couple of weeks, and then Warren and I are taking off for a vacation, a cruise in the West Indies, a week in Antigua, home. Tied up until late June, or even the end of June. What’s up?”

“You could take your laptop,” she said.

She very likely had never taken a vacation in her life. Thin when I first met her, perhaps even thinner now, she always acted as though driven by demons. Sharp, edgy, with a sort of careless, Katherine Hepburn beauty, and no time for vacations.

I shrugged it off. Maybe I would and maybe I wouldn’t take a laptop. What I was planning was to be less a vacation than a test. Warren was a sports writer, my sometimes lover, away as much as he was with me, and I had come to believe that the only reason we were still together at all was the fact that we were apart as much as we were. I no longer felt certain we could endure two weeks or longer together in a single room, a single cabin, a single island. He wanted to talk about sports—was someone or wasn’t he on steroids? How many RBIs would so and so make this season? I didn’t know and didn’t care, and he was equally bored if I brought up anything to do with the research I did. If it weren’t for our terrific reunions, we probably would have drifted apart a long time before, and never quite gotten around to drifting together again. Maybe it was time to start drifting and not look back. I wanted to find out.

“Hiram Granville,” Cat said. “Did you read any of his obits?”

I thought for a moment. “Inventor. Thousands of patents. Old, old, old. What else?”

“A modern Leonardo, an authentic American genius, reclusive, extremely rich, possibly crazy,” she said. “He never gave an interview in his life and neither has anyone in his family.”

A waitress came and we ordered, then sipped wine as Cat said, “I got interested in the old boy, the range of his inventions, and it seemed a natural since so little is known about him.”

She had picked up a few tidbits about Granville, enough to build on at least. He had never attended a university, or any other school as far as was known, and never manufactured a thing. He invented, patented, and collected royalties.

She also said that Jack Hynek would be on the team. Cracker Jack Hynek was a nerd’s nerd, a geek’s geek, a guy who knew how everything worked. Cat was going to have him start with the patents, the subsequent uses, whatever he could find.

My part was family, friends, employees, anyone who might know something about the Granville clan and be willing to talk about what they knew.

Antigua was wonderful, sunny, warm, romantic, and except for the fact that Warren flew off to watch a golf match in Scotland it would have been perfect. That was it, I decided, again. Done, kaput, finished. Even as I made that decision, I heard Cat’s caustic voice in my head: “For God’s sake, Mercy, marry him. It’s easier to ditch a spouse than a boyfriend.” She had two exes, while Warren and I had been not quite semi-engaged for nearly five years. Everyone else called me Mercedes, but Cat made her own rules. For her I was always Mercy.

So, free of Warren, done with the GUW, I went to work on the Granville business, and it wasn’t long before I decided that for once Cat was after the wrong bird in the wrong tree. I called her to say so.

“He was nuts,” I said, “and so is the entire bunch. You can’t do a documentary about a family of crazies.”

“Crazy or not, first him, and now his son John, two of the richest men in the country, in two completely different areas,” she murmured. “Isn’t that interesting?”

John apparently was as much a genius as his father had been, but his energies were focused on investments and it appeared that he had an infallible instinct about when to buy and sell.

“Cat,” I said, “listen up. The family lives on a great big estate, half of Pennsylvania big, and they don’t come out and don’t let outsiders in. They have seizures or something, maybe they stash the nuts away in their own hospital. They have their own landing pad and helicopter, and no one’s seen them in public since the Flood. There aren’t even any pictures of them available. Nada.”

“Keep digging,” she said and hung up on me.

I cursed her, and dug deeper.

By the end of August I was ready to give Cat a formal report on what little I had learned, and I was ready to quit and go after another GUW where my research yielded real results even if I never had any credit acknowledged. Warren and I were back together. He was writing a book about sports, probably baseball. He didn’t talk about it and that was wise of him.

When I called Cat, she told me to come out for a day or two for a conference. A few years before, she had inherited a house from her aunt. It was old and a bit shabby but comfortable and, best of all, with no rent and no mortgage, in a small town in New Jersey with mountains all around, about an hour by train from New York.

I was a little surprised that Cracker Jack met me at the station. He was five feet eight inches, slender, with auburn hair down past his shoulders. He had a crooked nose, and a bad complexion, and probably lived on candy bars, chips, and cheese. When he wasn’t working, he was almost as twitchy as Cat, but as any just-off-the-drawing-board electronic marvel previously unknown to humanity, he was as focused as a laser beam. He scorned manuals, just looked at whatever the thing was, felt around it, examined connections, and then made it do its thing. And he did not have an iota of the same intuitive sense about people. His first words to me were, “Hi, Mercedes, gained a few pounds, haven’t you? Looks okay, though.”

I had gained about five pounds, but now that Warren and I were trying it again, I’d shed them. It was a familiar pattern.

“I hope you’re having more luck than I am,” I said, ignoring the insult. Might as well, I knew. He’d just be puzzled if I held it against him.

“Better believe it,” he said, motioning toward Cat’s Civic that she used for local trips. It wouldn’t have occurred to him to help with my overnight bag or laptop.

Then, driving, he didn’t say another word. He paid attention to his driving with the same kind of concentration he showed deciphering a spaghetti mass of wires.

Cat’s house was at the edge of town, which I always thought of as Netskinny. Beyond her house there were two more, then a field, and woods that started uphill on the Kittatinny Mountains. Compared to that brutally hot summer in the city, it felt cool in the country, and the air smelled clean and sharp, pine-scented. Her house needed painting, as always, and the grass was unkempt, more weeds than lawn, but asters were in full bloom, a purple and violet tsunami rising above the sea of weeds.

Cat had converted most of the first floor of the house into an extended studio: a computer room with a lot of gear, video cameras, still cameras. There was a screening room, an office with piles of papers, boxes of miscellaneous items, and rows and rows of boxed CDs and DVDs, cassettes, videos in every format possible on floor-to-ceiling shelves. The living room, dining room, most rooms were for business, but the kitchen was untouched, as was a small breakfast room and three upstairs bedrooms. That early evening good food smells were coming from the kitchen. Dorothy, a village woman, was there cooking. She was an indifferent housekeeper, but an excellent cook. Cat didn’t cook. I suspected that she subsisted on Dorothy’s leftovers and, when they ran out, peanut butter and sardines.

Cat waved a greeting and said, “We’ll talk after dinner.”

But she was all business when we got down to it later that night. “You first,” she said to me.

“There’s nothing there. The old man, Hiram, was an only child, doting mother, father a well-to-do farmer. Hiram had seizures, maybe epilepsy, that kept him out of school. And he began inventing things as a kid and didn’t stop inventing until he was in his eighties. Died at ninety-one years of age. They lived about twenty miles outside of Allentown until he was fourteen, when they built a big house back on the farm property and moved. Later they erected a fence around the entire acreage. The original house was converted into a museum for Hiram’s inventions. He married Elaine Courtney at an early age. Four kids, John, the financial wizard, in his sixties now, and three daughters. Mary, possibly afflicted with the same epilepsy, or whatever it is. It, or something, killed her when she was a teen. Daughter Audrey, a suicide at age fourteen, and Shirley.

“Three grandchildren by way of John and his wife Suzette. Stephen, Cynthia, a suicide or fatal accident at age fourteen, and Lorraine. Hiram’s daughter Shirley married Matthew Scanlon, divorced twenty-three years ago, and they produced three more grandchildren: Felice and Grace, and a son Cary.” I looked up from my notes. “Cat, no one sees them. No one knows them. No one who works up there goes to town to talk about the family. Maybe they import help from the Philippines. Maybe they have robots. Maybe they don’t live up there at all.”

“You must have talked to someone,” Cat said, “to have learned as much as you did.”

“Their births and deaths are a matter of public record. And there’s not a word about what goes on from the one event to the other. Everything else is the sum total of rumors. I located one old woman in a retirement home in Philly, the daughter of a housekeeper who worked for the family before they moved. Everything I got from her is in the notes I sent you. Nothing direct, only a couple of anecdotes from her mother.”

She nodded. “Jack hasn’t heard any of it. Just go over it again.”

Exasperated, I reported it fast. “All she could tell me was what she remembered her mother saying. Things like Hiram was clever with his hands from the time he was very small, made things like paper clips, but he had seizures, she called them fits. They’d put him to bed and keep him there a couple of days. They took him to the hospital a few times and to doctors in Philadelphia, then just had a doctor come to the house when he was having a fit. Mrs. Skaggs is eighty-three and barely remembers him.”

I glanced at my notes again. “Shirley’s ex lives in Florida. Both unmarried since the split. He had a Fiat that he took to a mechanic in town now and then before Shirley booted him out. The mechanic, Joe Federico, is the source of all rumors, and they all came from the ex, who, he said, had taken to drink.” I closed the notebook and leaned back in my chair. “And that’s it.”

Cat turned to Cracker Jack. He had been fidgeting a lot while I talked. “I’ve got a pretty exhaustive list of Hiram’s inventions,” he said, “and a funny thing about them is that most, if not all of them were patented just ahead of someone else who had the same idea, often in a patent-pending situation, sometimes just days ahead, sometimes months. And the stuff he patented almost always was taken up by someone who knew how to make use of it within the next few years. Sometimes a patent sits there for half a century before it gets put to use. Sometimes it never does, or at least hasn’t yet. Perpetual-motion-machine kind of thing. Granville’s inventions found users unusually fast. It didn’t matter who had the patent-pending gizmo, Joe Blow, a basement inventor, or a great big group that had been doing the research for a long time. Granville skipped all that and went straight to the key patent. He was investigated more than once for possible industrial spying. Nothing ever came of it.” He looked dreamy-eyed, as if Hiram Granville had been his kind of guy.

“Let me tell you about the son, John Granville,” Cat said. “Investigated for insider trading several times, never charged. He just happened to be on hand within a year and a half ahead of stock splits, or mergers, or a plummeting stock. I talked to some brokers, always the same story. They began to follow his example even if it went against the grain. They said he never lost a cent. And made the right investment decision up to eighteen months ahead of time. Without fail.”

I shrugged. “Luck, good memory, paid attention to trends. That’s what a good investor does, isn’t it?”

Cracker Jack was eyeing Cat narrowly, as if confronted with a gadget he had not instantly understood. “Straight to the basic principle, without the research,” he said after a moment. “Beating the competition every time, without fail. Anticipating mergers, stock splits months in advance, without fail. You can’t do that in the real world.”

“For crying out loud,” I said. “Knock it off! So they made a pact with the devil. Hard to film a done deal like that, signed in blood at midnight in a cemetery.”

Cat shook her head, smiling slightly. “No one can predict the market eighteen months ahead of time with infallibility. No one. And no one invents gadgets there’s no use for only to find an overwhelming demand for them within a few years. Everything Jack’s come up with so far is in that category. No pact with the devil, but there’s something going on there.”

I stared at her, then at Cracker Jack. He had stopped fidgeting, his brow was furrowed, and his eyes looked almost blank, as if he had withdrawn mentally. Cat’s Mona Lisa smile was infuriating. She was as serene as a cat on the hearth.

She got up and walked from the room, returned with a bottle of bourbon, ice cubes, and glasses. “There’s wine or coffee, mixers in the kitchen. Help yourselves.”

We shared the bourbon and she plotted our future for the next few weeks. We would go to Florida in her SUV, take her equipment, and interview Matthew Scanlon. After that, we would visit the old woman in the nursing home. Get her on tape. And Cat would write to Stephen Granville, John’s son, to request an interview, a tour of Hiram’s laboratory, or workroom, whatever he had used, and permission for a private viewing of the museum in order for her to videotape it. She would also try to get a glimpse inside the Granville Enterprises offices in Allentown, interview some of the patent attorneys, other attorneys, managers, brokers, whoever worked there.

“John never goes in,” she said. “He conducts business from the estate, and if they have to meet, his people get in the helicopter and go out there.”

She stood up. “So, kiddies, we have our schedule. For now we keep the focus on Hiram’s inventions, nothing else. A human interest story about an American genius.”

We drove down to Florida in her SUV, taking turns at the wheel, changing our seating arrangement with each shift. The back seat was confining, the entire back of the SUV crammed full of Cat’s cameras and other gear. I had questioned why so much and she had said to impress Scanlon. The more equipment you set up, the more it impressed interviewees with their own importance.

It was steam-bath season, hurricane season, thunderstorm weather all the way, and when they came, they dumped hail like ice cubes spilling from a freezer, and torrents of rain like a waterfall. Driving was a nerve-wracking, exhausting business. Finally, from her hotel room in West Palm Beach, Cat called Matthew Scanlon to confirm that we would be there the following day.

He lived in a high-rise condo a few blocks from the ocean in Palm Beach, an expensive neighborhood, with expensive cars on the streets, expensive shops, expensive dogs on leashes, and expensive fees in a parking structure with valet service.

Scanlon was on the sixth floor. His apartment was decorator anonymous, without a touch of a human personality. The floor was polished pale wood with scattered white shag rugs, cream-colored walls with a few nondescript pictures, and pale rust-colored sofas and chairs. Automobile magazines were on a coffee table. All very neat, as if a housekeeper had left only seconds before we arrived.

Scanlon was fifty-nine, a big man, six feet tall and massive, too fat to be healthy. Deeply tanned, with thinning gray hair, glasses in his shirt pocket, and tremors in his hands, bloodshot eyes, and a rosaceae rash on his nose and cheeks. It was obvious that he had already been drinking that day.

Cat made a show of finding just the right spot to start taping, keeping up a flattering chatter as she began to arrange her diffusion screen, test the lighting, make suggestions to Cracker Jack about where to set up a still camera and the sound equipment he would monitor. They made sure it would be out of Scanlon’s sight when we started.

“It’s so good of you to allow us to tape an interview,” Cat said. “So many people are camera shy and uncomfortable doing it. But I can tell you’re not like that. You exude self-confidence.” She smiled at him, an expansive smile that could be dazzling. “Such a lovely apartment, with such a stupendous view. It must give you great pleasure to be here. It’s a pleasure to share it with you, however briefly.”

He was nodding in agreement with everything she said.

We had worked out exactly what I was to ask him, making sure that simple yes/no answers would not be an option. I was the interviewer, to be edited out entirely, leaving only what we hoped would be revealing monologues. “We’ll work slowly, no rush, stop for lunch, let him have a few drinks, and go on from there,” Cat had said.

That’s how it went. What did he like about living in Florida after spending most of his life in the north? How did he feel about living in a hurricane-prone area?”

Innocuous and vacuous questions and answers for about an hour, with him getting more and more complacent and pleased with the whole business. Finally Cat called for a break. “Mr. Scanlon,” she said, “would you be offended if we ordered some food in? Sandwiches or something? On me,” she added quickly. “I didn’t stop for breakfast this morning, I’m afraid.”

“Honey,” he said, “you should call me Matt, like my friends do. And you should not skip meals. You don’t have the build for it. Keep up your strength, that’s what I always say.” He patted his ample belly and laughed.

Cracker Jack ordered sandwiches and beer.

“After lunch, I want to ask you how it was to work with a genius like Hiram Granville,” Cat said. “I understand that such a man can be extremely difficult to get along with.”

“Nah, not him. Pussy cat. But that Elly, she was a dragon! His wife,” he said. “You wanted to keep out of her way.”

“Oh? No one has mentioned her before,” Cat said almost indifferently. I knew that her tape recorder would pick up a heartbeat a room away, and no doubt Cracker Jack had an even better one out of sight somewhere. The real interview was starting.

“She was the force behind him,” Scanlon said. “You know he had a sickness, they all do. Narcolepsy, some variant that doesn’t respond to medications. He’d be out for a day, two days, and when he came awake, she’d be on him like a D.A. going after a Mafia member. Or so I was told,” he added swiftly, as if he had stepped over a forbidden line.

Cat shrugged. “Wives can be like that, I guess. But why on earth would anyone grill a man who’s been asleep for a couple of days? I sure don’t want to hear about someone else’s dreams. Too boring.” She crossed the room to gaze out the wide windows. “Another storm moving in.”

Scanlon’s expression had turned sullen at her apparent indifference. “Elly wasn’t asking about his dreams,” he said stiffly. “There was something else on her mind. He’d be talking, eating, anything, and just fall over, dead out. They’d haul him off to bed in the hospital, and she never left his side. Had trays sent in, wouldn’t let anyone else near, except the doctor and nurses. Tubes, intravenous drip, who knows what all? They’d call Gorton, a patent attorney, and he’d hang around. Then Granville would wake up and she’d send for more food, and Gorton would be right there in the hospital with them, and that’s where the three of them would stay closeted a couple more days. The maid who took the meals out told the cook they kept asking him questions, making him draw things. I heard her tell the cook.”

Cat had turned, a silhouette against the sky. She made me think of a pencil with one of those add-on bulbous erasers. Her backdrop was of black roiling clouds erupting like a volcanic explosion of ash and smoke, not anything formed of water vapor and wind.

“Maybe he dreamed of things to invent,” Cat said. “She was helping him to remember. We do tend to forget most dreams, after all. And he really was a genius.”

“Genius! That man was as dumb as a doorknob. He belonged behind a plow. Couldn’t hold a conversation, couldn’t understand a simple electrical circuit. He didn’t know what the hell he was doing most of the time. That’s what Gorton was for, to understand what he was up to.”

The food arrived, and no more was said.

Scanlon drank three of the beers, the first one downed without stopping. He set two cans on the coffee table, but simply tossed the third aside. It rolled partway across the room before it came to rest against a shag rug.

We resumed the interview, and soon he was talking about the job he had landed at the Granville estate. He had been found by a headhunter. “I thought it was going to be an island off in the Pacific or Gitmo, something like that because they didn’t want anyone taking off for weekends, but it was just the estate in Pennsylvania. The guy said we’d fly in, and I had to stay until the job was done, and then fly out again. Didn’t work out that way for me.”

“You trained as an electrical engineer,” I said. “What was Granville building that required expertise like yours?”

“The headhunter said they were putting up a couple of buildings, maybe a new lab and workshop, and they needed someone with expertise in industrial wiring, electricity. My job. But it was all a lie, every word of it. They already had outbuildings, even a hospital, for God’s sake. And they didn’t need a lab. No researchers in sight up there.”

“Didn’t Granville explain what he wanted you for?”

“He didn’t,” Scanlon said. “Gorton told me what they needed. When I got there they didn’t know what the hell they were doing.”

“I don’t understand. Granville must have known what he was after. Was he making a prototype of whatever he had in mind? Something like that?”

“He didn’t make prototypes,” Scanlon said. Abruptly he stood up. “Time out. Gotta go piss.”

Cat turned off her camera, stood up, and stretched. “Bet he’ll bring another drink,” she said.

Cracker Jack leaned back from the sound console that had not needed monitoring. “Give us about twenty minutes,” Cat said to him, and went to the window again.

The whole sky had turned black and the wind was picking up, whipping palm fronds. Erratic lightning ripped through the clouds in darting sideways streaks, the black mass shot through with violet and brilliant white and yellow that flamed the growing thunderheads. Thunder rumbled, muted by distance and the thick glass of the window.

Scanlon took a long time, and when he returned, he was carrying a coffee mug. I smelled scotch. He set it down on the table and we all returned to our seats. Cat turned on her video camera.

“They had a gadget they were working on and couldn’t figure it out,” Scanlon said. “That’s what they wanted me for. Bob Gorton was my boss, the patent attorney. I worked with him and hardly ever saw Granville.”

He changed the subject then, and talked about the estate, the layout. Now and then he took a drink from his coffee mug, and he became more rambling, sometimes touching on Hiram, or John Granville. He had detested John. “All he read was financial reports, junk like that, and he had nothing to say to anyone. Nothing. Suzette hated him. He read financial pages, books, whatever, and the old man read only books on patents, always the latest patents, studied the pictures, even those he had invented, studied them like a kid cramming for midterms. Crazy, both of them. And Elly like a prosecutor, grilling them. Crazy.”

At some point Cracker Jack quietly walked out.

Scanlon had met Shirley Granville after a couple of days on the job. She was pretty and lonesome, and began hanging around. They went for walks in the evenings. He avoided John, Shirley’s brother, and seldom saw his wife Suzette. She took off in the helicopter, stayed away for months at a time. “Paris, London, somewhere like that,” he said, waving generally toward the ocean. “Lonely life out there. Didn’t blame her. Shirley wanted to go with her, but Elly nixed that idea. Suzette wasn’t good company for a kid. They got that right. Elly was on John’s case exactly like she was on Hiram’s. They both had attendants. Guys who never left them. They fell down, maybe two, three times a year, but you never knew exactly when it was going to happen. Both of them,” he said. He picked up his coffee mug and upended it, then pushed himself from the sofa and mumbled, “Be right back.”

He took the mug with him and brought it back when he returned. He sat down and said to Cat, “Honey, why don’t you turn off that thing, come over here and get comfortable. Too much work, not good for you.” He patted the sofa next to him.

“Matt, we’re almost done here,” Cat said, turning on her smile again. “You’re doing great, one of my best interviewees yet. I’m getting wonderful images. Your face is so expressive!” There were times when I hated her. Scanlon was not a pretty drunk. Drooling, wiping his mouth on the back of his hand, shaking noticeably, spilling his drink on his shirt, slurring words… He started to ramble again. He seemed not to notice when the storm hit with furious rain that opaqued the windows, and gusts of wind that shook them, or when Cracker Jack returned to the console.

Scanlon married Shirley, and for two years it was one long honeymoon, travel, plenty of money, no worries. Then she got pregnant. Their daughter was born. “Prettiest little thing,” he said. “Fuzzy. Didn’t know babies could be fuzzy like that.” He drank deeply. “She fell down when she was three and Shirley was pregnant again. Cursed, just like the old man and John. Not narcolepsy, a curse, that’s what it was. Suzette told me about Shirley’s sisters, two sisters, dead, they had fallen down a lot, too, and babbled and sometimes had screaming fits. Suicide. Fourteen fucking years old, a suicide! Cursed. Family curse. Shirley’s sisters, and I didn’t even know she’d had sisters. John and Suzette’s daughters, cursed. One a suicide. They called it an accident, Suzette said she jumped off a cliff. One disappeared, just walked out or something. Thirty now, but gone. Probably dead. And my sweet baby Felice, cursed.” He began to cry. “Another baby, Grace. Cursed. Whole fucking family. Didn’t want any more kids, never again, but Shirley… She said try just one more time, and she had Cary.” He had become practically incoherent, sobbing, oblivious of the camera, Cat, me, everything. It was as if he’d had this torment pent up for years, and once vented, there was no stopping it. “My boy. My fuzzy little girls. Why didn’t they tell me before… ? Why didn’t they tell me? I said no more. Never again, and I wouldn’t go near her. She threw a fit and yelled to get the hell out. Why didn’t they tell me?” He was choking on great gulping sobs.

I felt frozen in my chair. Cat turned off the camera and went to sit by him. She took him in her arms and stroked his back as he wept and continued to babble, sometimes coherently, sometimes not.

It was a long time before his voice began to fade and the weeping stopped. Finally he passed out, slumped against Cat. She eased out from under him. “Help me,” she said to Cracker Jack. Together they moved him all the way onto the sofa. Cracker Jack took off his shoes and Cat went looking for a lightweight cover to throw over him. We left him sleeping on the sofa.

No one spoke until we were back in Cat’s mini-suite. “Now we piece together a narrative out of all that shit,” she said.

“I’ll go to my room and see what I can dig out about Suzette Granville and Bob Gorton,” I said when they began to unpack gear and start plugging in things.

Cat nodded. “And Elaine Granville. She gets more and more interesting, doesn’t she? Take one of the keys and come over in the morning. I’ll order some breakfast from room service.”

When I left, neither she nor Cracker Jack glanced up from what they were doing. Later I ordered dinner from room service, and it was after one when I went to bed to have troubled dreams, and a restless sleep that left me jittery the next morning.

Cat and Cracker Jack looked the way I felt when I joined them. I poured coffee and glanced at the pastries she had ordered. They were repulsive.

“You first,” Cat said. “Anything?”

“Elly, Elaine Courtney Granville,” I said. “Born 1905, ten years before Hiram. Master’s in psychology, working on her doctorate, a real rarity for women then. Married him in 1936 and dropped out of school. They must have invited her to the estate since he never was known to have left it. And that’s it. Died in 1987.

“John Granville’s wife Suzette lives in Paris most of the time. Sixty years old, patron of the arts, shops in New York and Milan, and likes opera. Period.

“I couldn’t find a trace of Lorraine Granville, other than the fact that she was born.

“Robert Gorton, born in 1914, studied physics, switched to law, worked for a law firm, in the patent department, left to start his own office in 1937, and his only client was Hiram Granville. He and his associates branched out, formed Granville Enterprises, and the associates still oversee the Granville investments and patents.”

“When did Gorton kick?” Cracker Jack asked.

“1980. Fatal heart attack.”

“Granville didn’t apply for a single new patent after 1980,” he said. “There were some things still pending, but nothing new.” He looked satisfied and helped himself to a bear claw as big as a dinner plate.

“Cat,” I said, “where are you going with this? You know it isn’t documentary material.”

“First you tell me something,” she said after a moment, leaning forward, her gaze intent. “What bothers you so much about it?”

I drank coffee and thought about it. “It’s dirty,” I said. “That family has a serious mental affliction, obviously one passed on from Hiram, and they’re trying to deal with it. Bringing up rumors of possible industrial spying, insider trading, is too exploitative. Titillating cocktail material. For what purpose? You can’t use that tape from Scanlon. A sloppy, fat, ruined man blubbering in his scotch. Teens committing suicide… And so is Scanlon. It’s just a slower process for him. The whole thing’s dirty, Cat. What’s the point?”

“I know it’s filthy,” she said. “The real question is how did they get that wealth? So a guy, Joe Blow, is ready to patent something, applies, and someone slips in and files for it first. Maybe Joe’s worked on it most of his life. Gone. That’s what’s filthy. And John. Insider traders get sent to jail. What if he’s doing something even worse?” She drew in a breath. “I think they have a way of glimpsing the future. Maybe when they go to sleep, they dream about the future.”

I shook my head. “Crazy. And impossible. That would be even worse than just dirty. It would be the world turned upside down. Nothing we believe would be true. All illusion. A changed world that is monstrous. Besides, the idea is preposterous, a fairy tale.”

“The world doesn’t change,” Cat said. “Only our perceptions and understanding do. It’s the same old world. We just don’t know the whole truth about it, or about ourselves. Maybe we never will. I don’t know where I’m going with this, but I intend to keep going. Do you want out?”

She knew me too well not to recognize my indecision and didn’t push it. “Let’s pack up and head for home. We’ll stop early tonight and get some sleep. We’re all beat. But first, let’s have a look at an interesting time line Jack came up with.”

He brought it up on his laptop, a horizontal line with dates, and text slanting from them. He explained it as he pointed to the dates. “Scanlon hired, 1971, married Shirley, daughter Felice born 1974. Okay, now along the same line for Granville until let’s say 1970, or maybe even seventy-one.” A new screen came up, this one with an arc from one spot to another. “About here,” Jack said, pointing to the beginning of the arc, “Granville had a spell, dead out for two days, and then back. But they were having a problem figuring out what he brought with him. Enter Scanlon. And in 1974 there’s a new patent. They called it a highly focused directed light beam.”

He grinned at me. “The key, the principle behind every laser device in existence. Scanlon must have figured it out from what Granville and Gorton told him. And they got there first, without a lab, without a research team, and while a great big group had a patent pending. I bet a bunch of patent lawyers got their tails whipped for missing a previous patent when they did their search.” Another screen came up and he grinned broader. “I like this one,” he said. The same time line, but now the entire line was scalloped, with arc after arc overlapping, each one spanning about five years.

“Scanlon couldn’t have jumped to such a conclusion,” I said. “No reasonable person would make the kind of assumption you’re making.”

“Maybe, but he knew something was wrong, and not just with his kids,” Cat said. “Tell her what you found when you went prowling,” she said to Cracker Jack.

“Papers, tax forms, stuff like that in a locked desk drawer. He’s getting eighty-five grand a year for his share of the royalties.”

Of course, a locked drawer wouldn’t have slowed Cracker Jack down. But eighty-five thousand! Reason enough for Scanlon to keep his mouth shut, regardless of what he suspected.

“Whether he knew or even suspected doesn’t matter,” Cat said. “He’s in it with them. And he knows damn well that you don’t go straight to the jackpot each and every time.” She drew in a breath. “Good God, if he’s getting eighty-five thousand for just a few years, what’s their take?” No one spoke in the next several seconds. Cat shook herself. “Let’s get wrapped up and out of here. Three days to get home again.” Then, looking at me, she added, “Think about it and tell us what you decide when we get there. Okay?”

I could think of little else on the long drive home. Almost every thought I had was prefaced or followed by the phrase: if she was right. If she was right, what real difference did it make? Disappointed inventors, disgruntled research teams, fired patent attorneys. Enormous wealth for one family and their lawyer. And crazy, suicidal kids, I added.

Elly must have been a dynamo to have made it through the old boys’ school system as high as she had in those days. Brilliant, determined, forceful? No doubt. Probably they hired her to treat Hiram, cure him of his seizures. Instead, she married him, and brought in a patent attorney, her life-long work cut out for her. I wondered how many patent attorneys she had to interview before she found exactly the right one.

I didn’t try to figure out what it meant, if Cat was right, for the financial world. I suspected that in the coming weeks we’d be interviewing and taping financial gurus. I bit my lip. I wasn’t even sure I’d be around for the next few weeks.

What were they doing with all the money? I wondered then. They hadn’t set up a foundation. They had not bought or even invested in other businesses, except for John’s forays into the market. They hadn’t done a thing with their money that I had been able to find out. And where was Lorraine, John’s daughter? About thirty, vanished. Where? No death had been recorded. At least not under that name, Lorraine Granville. She must have escaped the narcolepsy gene, or whatever the affliction was. I rejected that. She probably had the gene, but it had not affected her the way it did the others. Just a carrier. A silent gene.

I had researched material for a GUW who was writing about evolution, mutations, genetic manipulation. Most mutations are self-extinguishing, I had read. Most are harmful and most often result in a miscarriage, or the carrier dies young, or fails to reproduce, and the gene dies out. If they are beneficial they usually persist and spread. If benign but don’t express and do anything that harms an organism, they often persist anyway. Hiram must have had a mutated gene, a twist in his DNA, that he passed on to his progeny, and it persisted and expressed an uncanny knack to anticipate the future. How many of them so far had survived to adulthood? Possibly more important, how many of them were capable of reproducing? Screaming fits, babbling, falling down. That didn’t seem like good mating material. Was it in the process of self-extinction? Even if Lorraine had escaped the effects of it, was she the carrier of a silent gene that could become active in her children, or theirs?

Then an alarming thought came to mind and, driving, I veered, straightened out, and slowed down. An air horn blasted from behind the SUV.

“Pull over,” Cat said in a strained voice. “Your stint just ended.”

I pulled onto the shoulder of the interstate.

“What if they intend to set up their own research lab, learn how to control it more than they do?” My hands were shaking.

“More?” Cat said. “What do you mean?”

“What you’re suggesting means that Hiram and John were able to learn what they were supposed to, however that works. Maybe Elly’s doing. She could have trained them, then debriefed them. The kids seem out of control and go crazy, become suicidal. But they know that some control is possible. What if they gain more?” I hated what I was thinking, what I was saying, but the words formed and spilled out.

“Good thinking,” Cat said after a moment. “Now, out. My turn to haul ass.”

She knew, and so did I, that I was in all the way.

I still hadn’t really accepted it, believed it. But the questions in my head refused to be silenced. What if she was right? And the follow-up question I’d had before: what difference would it make, except to the family itself?

Later, trying to get comfortable in the back seat, with Cat driving and Cracker Jack snoring in the passenger seat, I asked, “What made you go off the deep end like that in the first place? Make such a wild assumption?”

“You did,” she said. “The story about the paper clip. I’d been hearing from Jack, and I’d talked to financial people, and that paper clip seemed to pin it all together and make sense.” She began to pass a string of trucks, and I didn’t ask anything else.

I remembered the story about the paper clip. Mrs. Skaggs, the housekeeper’s elderly daughter in the retirement home, had told me.

“I hardly remember him,” she had said that day, sitting in sunlight on a screened porch overlooking a small flower garden. “I was just a little girl when they moved up on the property and I never saw him again. He must have been about thirteen or fourteen when they moved and he never did pay any attention to me before that. I didn’t pay much to him, either.”

“Your mother must have known him pretty well. Did she ever talk about him?”

“A little. She thought he was real clever with his hands, made things no one had ever seen before, but he had fits and couldn’t go to school or anything. Falling down fits.”

She was vague about that part of her life. It was a long time ago, she repeated several times. She was frail and shrunken-looking but lucid, and what she remembered she talked about fluently; there simply was very little to recall. I asked what sort of things he made with his hands.

“Ma had a lot of receipts. You know, she’d cut them out of magazines and she kept losing one or another. She only had one cookbook back then. So one day she was going through the receipts looking for something and they were all over the table and Hiram came in. He said why didn’t she pin them all together, and she said she just laughed at the idea, but he went out and came back with a wire thing he had twisted around. He called it a paper pin, and showed her how to pin the papers together with it. She always called them paper pins after that. It was a paper clip, but no one in that house had ever seen such a thing before. That was back, oh, maybe in 1920. I wasn’t even born yet. Ma liked to show off that paper pin to folks.”

He had not invented the paper clip, I told myself. They had been around for decades before he was born. But, another part of my head responded, they had not made their way into that small farming community in rural Pennsylvania. That little boy couldn’t have seen such a thing, except that he had.

We went to tape Mrs. Skaggs the following week, just Cat and I in the Civic this time. She took only her video camera and a 35mm camera with a digital picture attachment and a printer. She didn’t want to appear intimidating with a car-load of equipment. There was an air of excitement in the retirement home that day, with residents dressed in their finest, milling about with their walkers, in wheelchairs, settled into lounge chairs. Mrs. Skaggs even had on lipstick.

She had nothing more to tell us than what I had already learned, but now it was on tape, on record. Cat took many pictures of the residents, printed them, autographed them, and made a lot of people quite happy that afternoon.

At times I hated her, but there were other times when I loved her more than I could say. Seeing the delight on the lined faces of her admirers was such a time.

Driving back to her house, I said, “When you get an appointment for the museum, and an answer from Stephen Granville, let me know and I’ll come around. Otherwise, I’ll go back to my GUWs or maybe do some fact-checking, or something. You know, income? Rent money, little things like that.”

That’s how we left it. I went home, and got a job fact-checking a magazine article. Her call came in October.

The Granville Museum was displayed in a turn-of-the-century farm house that must have been the envy of most neighbors back then, and now was no more than a comfortable, two-story frame structure, with a deep porch, bay windows, some leaded glass, some stained glass. The grounds were parklike, with well-spaced maple trees, picnic tables, restrooms discreetly off to the side. The park was reached by a road that led to the fenced Granville property, where it ended at a high metal gate. That Monday morning in October had brought in a cloudless sky, warm sunshine, cool air with little wind. Beautiful Indian summer weather. Leaves had turned, creating a rosy ambient light that tinged the house with a pink glow.

Cracker Jack parked the SUV close to the porch, and we got out. No car was in the parking lot off to one side, and no car was in sight. The door to the museum was locked.

*