is one thing…” he said. I stopped and turned. He was leaning against the door frame watching me. “You better learn to identify a chimaera before you switch to fish.”
It wasn’t until I was out of sight down the dead-end corridor that I heard the door to the museum close.
Elaine’s name was embossed on a metal plate just to the side of her lab door. That must give her a thrill, I thought, after all those years of graduate school and post docs. I tried the door, but it was locked. I banged on it, but there was no answer, so I let myself in with the keys Elaine had given me. Inside the lights were on.
“Dinah? Hello?” Still no answer.
The lab was a big open space, but so crowded with equipment that it looked like a rummage sale for used aquarium supplies. In the middle there were four huge tanks, the size of above-ground pools, swirling with water. To the left there was a glassed-in room with a large apparatus sitting in the middle. It had a dissecting microscope mounted on a mobile arm at one end, a delicate measuring device at the other end, and a bank of electronic equipment attached, including a computer and several oscilloscopes. Elaine’s single-cell recording equipment, probably.
The environmental chamber sat like a parked airstream trailer near the wall to my right. As an undergraduate I’d worked in one of those chambers over a frigid Winnipeg winter. We’d been raising jumping wabeens, a bizarre little unisex fish from the Florida everglades, so the temperature and humidity were set to tropical. The light inside was a soft blue, filtered through the water and glass. I would spend my days wrapped in the silent warmth of the chamber, cleaning aquariums, hovering over sick fish, preparing and doling out brine shrimp. Then every afternoon I would exit to the brilliant white of the prairie at twenty below. It made me wonder why people live in Canada.
Elaine had said that the offices were behind the chamber, and that took me by the big tanks. The first two were empty, just swirling water. I moved to the tanks behind, curious to see what might be in them. The one to my left was empty, but on my right, a dark, motionless form sat at the bottom of the tank. With the frothing water it was hard to make out what it was, and I leaned over. It looked like a seal. Without warning, the thing turned and shot straight up at me. I leapt back. There was a flash of scarlet, and something large broke the surface where my face had been, spraying water. Then the form split in two, half going around one side, half going around the other, to reconverge again at the bottom of the tank. I clutched my chest. What had looked like a single body was in fact an undulating school of large sockeye salmon, maybe ten to fifteen housed in the vat. I let out my breath and dropped my hand. Really. For a bunch of fish. I had been in Ottawa too long.
Just then, the door of the chamber opened and a man, with his back to me, lifted two buckets of gravel and started to walk out, holding the door open with his hip. I cleared my throat, but the noise of the water covered it.
I tried again. “Hello.”
The person at the door looked back, still holding the buckets, and registered my surprise. What’s more, she knew exactly why. She turned slowly and, looking mildly amused, said, “Can I help you?”
I scrambled to reorganize my response. The woman was an Amazon. I’m not wimpy. At five-eight and with years of karate behind me I have exceptional physical strength for a woman, but those buckets of gravel must have weighed sixty pounds each. I could lift one, but I certainly couldn’t heft one in each hand and stand there casually carrying on a conversation.
When I had recovered my composure I said, “I’m looking for Dinah.”
She lowered the buckets, taking her time, showing me she wasn’t in any hurry, then she straightened up and crossed her arms, shifting her weight to one foot. She must have been over six feet, and the attitude made her look taller.
“What can I do for you?” she said cooly.
“You’re Dinah?”
“Mmm.”
While she might be mistaken for a man from the back, nobody would ever make that error head on. Her auburn hair was cut short, but gently feathered around her face. With her pale, lightly freckled skin and delicately sculpted features she could have been strutting the fashion runways of Paris and Milan. Her eyes, though, were her most startling feature: large, clear, and a dark topaz, and right now they were trained on me. It was like being assessed by a timber wolf.
“Elaine said you’d direct me to Cindy’s office.”
She cocked her head slightly. “Cindy isn’t here. She doesn’t usually come in until around ten, but you can leave a message on her desk.”
“I could, but I don’t think she’d get it. She’s gone to New Zealand. I’ll be using her office while she’s away.” I started to move forward.
At the news, Dinah’s eyes widened, then her cool shifted into surprise and something else I couldn’t read. She put her hand on my shoulder to stop me.
“What did you say?”
“Cindy’s gone to New Zealand. Her mother’s in the hospital.”
Dinah’s eyes narrowed. “When?”
Oh. Now I could identify that emotion. Raw and burning anger. “When what?”
“When did Cindy leave?”
I shrugged. “Last night? This morning? I’m not sure. You’ll have to check with Elaine.” I looked pointedly at her hand on my shoulder and said, “Do you mind?”
Dinah sucked in her breath then exhaled the word “Fuck.” She glared at one of the buckets, pulled back, and kicked it so hard that it skittered across the cement, tottering precariously before finally coming to a halt… fortunately upright. When I turned back to look at her she’d covered her face with her hands, but not quickly enough to hide the tears welling in her eyes. Her final statement was halfway between a curse and a sob.
“The bitch,” she said, and she took off out the door.
chapter nine
I managed to find Cindy’s office on my own, although it looked more like a recycling depot than a place of learned thought. It also stank of formalin.
When I pulled out the desk chair, the cushion was greasy and wet. I wiped my finger across it and sniffed. At least that explained the odour. Cindy must have dropped a sample before leaving the lab the night before. Formalin is a diluted form of formaldehyde and equally as toxic. Short-term exposure in an enclosed space, like this office, could cause brutal headaches, nausea, and blurred vision. With long-term exposure you were headed for the cancer ward.
On the side wall, running just below the ceiling, were three blacked-out windows. I pushed aside the papers and empty coke cans, climbed up on the desk, and managed to pry one open. Clean, cool air spilled into the office like a sacred, healing force, and I surveyed the scene from above. I read in a book once that a messy office is the sign of a brilliant mind; someone who does-n’t require external order to keep all their thoughts lined up and in focus. If it was true then Cindy was a genius.
As soon as I had wheeled the chair out into the lab, I began to gather up all the papers on her desk. Most of it looked like scrap paper, but there were several unmarked file folders buried at the bottom. Out of curiosity I flipped one open. Inside were raw data sheets, “massaged” data, where the raw data had been run through
