2024
“That was my grandma Milly, all right. Used to call herself ‘Miracle Milly’ and always claimed that an actual angel appeared to her, in the form of a kindly doctor in scrubs, and cured her by giving her a blessed pill straight from Heaven.” Todd Coates shrugged. “Not sure I buy that he was literally an angel, but you know what? I don’t have a better explanation.”
No surprise, Mildred Coates was now deceased, having apparently lived a long and happy life after regrowing her kidney back in 1986, but her family still lived in the Bay Area. Her grandson, Todd, sat across from Melinda and Dennis on the back deck of his house in Oakland. A screen door, along with an obliging husband, kept his kids and the dog from raising too much of a ruckus in the background.
“Neither do I,” Melinda admitted. “Yet.”
“An angel, though?” Dennis scoffed. “No offense to your grandma, but I think we can safely rule that possibility out.”
Never mind that he had his own theories involving extraterrestrials, alternate universes, top-secret bioweapons labs, “Big Dialysis,” or some combination thereof. Personally, Melinda found those notions only slightly less plausible than the idea that Gillian had joined forces with a genuine angel to rescue an alleged Russian spy. And if so, did that mean that the injured Chekov was really a heavenly operative as well? And the man in the white robe, whom, come to think of it, Sister Mary Michelle had described as somewhat otherworldly? And what about his companion, the one Gillian had dinner with? Did angels like pizza?
And how completely flummoxed am I that I’m actually asking myself these questions?
Meanwhile, where did the whales fit in? Could humpback biology hold a clue to regrowing organs in humans? Some species of reptiles could regenerate lost body parts, Melinda knew, but whales? According to Bob Briggs, George and Gracie had fallen off the radar the same day Gillian did, but was that just a coincidence? At this point, she didn’t know what to think.
“But you do remember this one guy coming around soon afterwards,” she asked, “wanting to know all about Milly’s new kidney?”
“You bet,” Todd said, confirming what he’d told her over the phone earlier. Blond, blue-eyed, and in his early fifties, Milly’s grandson would have been around twelve back then. “I mean, that alone wasn’t too surprising. For a while there, we were constantly hearing from doctors and clinics and foundations wanting to examine Grandma one more time, but she wasn’t having any of it. She had her beliefs, which satisfied her, and she didn’t want to be poked or prodded anymore. Can’t say I blame her, especially after the initial rounds of testing didn’t turn up anything useful. I like to think that she would’ve gone along with more studies if she’d actually believed they might lead to other people getting cured, but… who knows? Maybe she was just fed up with doctors, hospitals, and procedures at that point. She stopped cooperating and they got the message, eventually.”
“Or maybe,” Dennis said, lowering his voice, “somebody made them back off. To bury the story and keep anyone from looking too deeply into where that cure really came from.”
“You think?” Todd asked, intrigued. “Like who?”
“Just brainstorming, that’s all,” Melinda said, jumping in to keep the interview from being sidetracked by her partner’s more out-there conspiracy theories. “Anyway, as you were saying, most everybody gave up trying to put Milly under a microscope, except for this one guy? Young, bald, deep voice, very persistent?”
Todd had not recognized Gillian from her photos or the Pizza Date from the artist’s sketch. Not that Melinda had really expected him to, since Todd hadn’t been anywhere near the hospital on that day, but she had hoped that maybe, just maybe, Gillian or one of her supposed partners in crime might have checked in on Mildred after gifting her with that miraculous kidney pill. No such luck, alas, but Todd had reacted when she told him about the unidentified young dude who had pressed Jane Temple for info on the incident. That had rung a decades-old bell in his memory.
“He was determined, I’ll give him that, and intense. I was just a kid then, but I still remember him showing up uninvited at our house one afternoon, after Grandma had ignored all his calls and letters. He wasn’t about to take no for an answer, even offering serious money to let him study Grandma for as long as it took to find out how exactly that pill had worked. I think my mom was tempted to work out some sort of deal, but not Grandma. By then, she bristled at any suggestion that science could explain her miracle, considered the very idea downright sacrilegious, so she basically told him to take his heathen dollars and shove it.”
“And how did he take that?”
“That’s the part that really stuck in my mind. Instead of retreating, he doubled down by offering to purchase Grandma’s body after she eventually passed away in the fullness of time, with a substantial bonus if her kidney was still in good shape by then. He even slipped my mom a business card when Grandma wasn’t looking.” He shuddered. “Creeped me out at the time.”
Melinda could see that. “I have to ask: Did your mom take him up on his offer when the sad occasion came around?”
“Never had the nerve to ask her, to tell the truth, but our finances did take an upswing after Grandma passed away in 1997. We paid off the house, my college loans went away, Mom got a new car and stopped fretting about bills. She spoke vaguely about coming into some money from Milly’s estate, but she never wanted to talk about it.” He looked down, embarrassed. “And I didn’t really want to know.”
Melinda murmured sympathetic noises and gave Todd a few moments before getting to the question she was aching to ask.
“About that business card. Did you find it?”
Shaking off his somber recollections, he nodded. “Took some digging, but fortunately Mom was a bit of a pack rat. Kept all the correspondence and paperwork regarding Grandma’s miracle, including…”
He took out his wallet and, with a flourish, produced a somewhat well-worn business card, a bit crumpled around the edges. Inspecting it, Melinda could all too easily imagine Todd’s mom turning it over and over in her hands, worrying it as she pondered her options. A name was printed above a solitary phone number:
WILMER OFFUTT
No email or web address, she noted. Not in 1986.
“Thanks! This is great. More than I expected, actually.”
“Glad to be of help. Would you like to borrow the rest of my mom’s files from back then?”
“I was about to ask.”
She wanted to call the number on the card right away, as soon as they got back to their rental car, but Dennis insisted on looking up “Wilmer Offutt” first before they went further. It was a reasonable, if frustrating, precaution, but no way was she going to wait until they drove all the way home, so they compromised by pulling into a roadside diner with free Wi-Fi and setting up shop in a corner booth surrounded by retro 1950s décor. Melinda treated herself to a milkshake and fries while Dennis searched the internet via his laptop. Jukebox oldies played in the background as she waited impatiently for the results.
“Anything?”
“What’s the rush?” he replied. “That card is almost forty years old. Chances are, that number hasn’t been good since before we were born.”
“Probably, but I still want to know who this Wilmer Offutt character is. Might be somebody we want to track down, if possible. What have you found on him so far?”
“Next to nothing, which is more than a little suspicious. Not a lot of dudes with that name cited online, and most of them don’t seem like a match for the guy the nurse and Todd remember. Wrong ages, appearances, backgrounds, et cetera.” Dennis squinted at the laptop’s screen, multitasking as he spoke. “Granted, I’d need to put in a lot more hours before I could reach any definite conclusions, but I’m going to go out on a limb and surmise that ‘Wilmer Offutt’ was not this guy’s real name.”
Okay, that has potential to make for a good ep, she thought. “You think he was using an alias when he was sniffing around for that kidney pill back in the eighties?”
“Maybe, probably.” A worried expression conveyed that this didn’t exactly put Dennis’s already anxious mind at ease. “Why would he want to conceal his identity? What was he hiding?”
“That’s just what I want to know.” She wiped her greasy fingers off with a napkin before picking up her phone and the borrowed business card. “I don’t know about you, but knowing that ‘Offutt’ was going under an assumed name makes me all the more eager to try this number, just in case.”
Dennis gulped. He’d hardly touched his own order, which was going cold beside his laptop. “You sure that’s a good idea?”
“Like you said, the number’s probably long-dead anyway, so where’s the harm?” She saw him start to open his mouth. “Never mind. Don’t answer that.”
Before he could spin any worst-case scenarios, she entered the number and held the phone to her ear. To her surprise, the call was picked up on the first ring and a recorded voice responded:
“Please leave a message at the tone.”
The voice was James Earl Jones deep, the prompt as bare-bones as possible. Caught off-guard, she needed a moment to compose her thoughts before answering.
“This is Melinda Silver in San Francisco. I produce a popular podcast titled Cetacean. I’m seeking information about the… unusual… events that took place at Mercy General Hospital back in 1986. You can reach me at the following number.”
She managed to get out most of her contact info, including the show’s email address, before another beep cut her off. Putting down the phone, she looked across the booth at Dennis, who stared back at her in amazement laced with visible apprehension.
“You got their voice mail? For real?”
“Loud and clear.” The more she thought about it, the more remarkable that seemed, given how many decades had passed since the enigmatic Wilmer Offutt had given the card to Todd’s mom. “Go figure.”
Her partner picked fitfully at some onion rings. “So now what?”
“Now we wait to see who has been waiting, all this time, for a call.”