boy lumbered after him. She hesitated in the doorway at the top. ‘Don’t bother coming down,’ the young man called. ‘We’ll only be a minute.’ Catherine hovered at the top of the staircase watching them.
‘We’ll be here around three-thirty tomorrow afternoon,’ Manuel said when they came back up. He stowed his tape measure in his jeans’ pocket. ‘You don’t have to stay home if it’s not convenient. Just leave us a key.’
But Catherine had no intention of letting anyone into her home when she wasn’t around. ‘I have plenty of work I can do here,’ she said. She dismissed as imagination the shadow of annoyance she saw flit across his narrow face.
Catherine smiled as she looked out of the kitchen window and sipped her morning coffee. The heat haze had evaporated and the sky shone with a luminous blue. Fluffy white puffs of cloud lazed against the robin’s egg background while closer to earth the tree tops rustled conversationally. Catherine leapt up, threw open the window and stuck her head out. Breathing deeply, she listened to the chirps of the wrens and the whistles of the blue jays who made their home in the cedar hedge.
From next door she heard Mr Steimann scolding one of his cats. ‘What yer think yor doin’ ye divil? Why can’t yer behave like Duke here?’ His wheeze turned into a cough and he spat up phlegm. Catherine’s nose wrinkled.
‘Mom?’
Catherine pulled her head in. ‘Good morning, honey. Looks like a gorgeous day.’
‘Whoopie,’ her daughter said, slumping into her chair and pouring milk on the cereal her mother had put out for her.
‘Oh, honey, I know you’re upset.’ Catherine crossed the kitchen to squeeze the girl’s shoulders. ‘It’ll be OK. That dance is completely irrelevant in the scheme of life.’ She ruffled Morgan’s hair. ‘We’ll go into London for a movie that night. Your choice.’
Morgan refused to be comforted. ‘If Jason had only said why he couldn’t go … But he just turned and ran!’ Her anxious eyes searched her mother’s face. ‘He must know about us. And Dad.’
Catherine began clearing away the breakfast dishes. ‘I don’t see how he could. Only Martha at Agromics knows and she promised me her lips were sealed. I’m sure no one connects us with the Kingsport mess.’
‘They will,’ Morgan predicted gloomily.
‘But they haven’t yet.’ She put her hands on her hips and looked at her daughter. ‘Let’s face it. When one person finds out, everyone will know.’ She paused and the familiar shadow fell across her face. ‘And when everyone knows … we’ll know it.’
‘It was in all the papers … On television …’ Morgan said in a small, miserable voice. ‘With our names.’
Outwardly Catherine remained perfectly tranquil, belying the anxiety within. She knew it was only a matter of time before the cat got out of the bag. ‘Edison is a very common name, Morgan, and people have short memories – much shorter than you credit them with.’ Again she put her arms comfortingly around her daughter. ‘If our past catches up with us, we’ll deal with it, but there’s no point in worrying about it now.’
Letting go, she moved briskly back to the window. ‘Time for you to go to school. It’s so nice out, I’m going to do some field work.’
As she tidied up the kitchen and packed her field kit she reflected on the path which had brought them to Atawan. Back in the early summer, when she had decided to ask for an unscheduled sabbatical from her university post, she hadn’t cared where she went or what she did. Wanting only to get away, she wrote to the first person who came to mind – Martha Morin, a former associate and now a scientist at Agromics. Martha had been more than accommodating. ‘We’ve plunged into biotechnology,’ she’d said. ‘That’s where the money is now. If you come you can play around in my lab and learn about DNA sequencing and RFLPs and all that high-tech stuff.’ Now that she was calmer, Catherine was still pleased with her decision. It had been a good career move.
Catherine slammed the front door behind her and tripped lightly down the steps slinging her sample bag over one shoulder. One of the aspects she liked best about her job was the opportunity to spend time outdoors and today was a perfect day for sample collecting. She wanted at least a few samples from ecosystems other than cultivated fields and mature forest and the vacant land behind her house intrigued her. If it had been neglected for decades, as old Mr Steimann implied, the fungal population was bound to be different from that of the surrounding farmland.
She burrowed through the thick cedar hedge at the back of her yard, expecting to emerge through the belt of trees on to the land leased by Connolly Chemical. Instead, once past the trees, she was confronted by a ten-foot-high soil embankment topped by a barbed wire fence. Undaunted, she climbed the hill and edged along the fence, looking for an opening. Behind Mr Steimann’s house she found a hole through the central portion of the fence. From the way the cut ends glinted in the sun she guessed the opening had been made recently. Was this the way the old man entered to continue his clandestine patrols? She shook her head and smiled. The managers at ConChem didn’t know how dedicated their former employee was. He’d probably keep an eye on the property until he died – or until Mr Grant built his housing development.
She glanced back the way she’d come – she could just make out the chimney of her house. She took her bearings, climbed through the opening and skittered down the slope. Despite Steimann’s claim that ConChem had ignored the land, she could tell the company hadn’t completely forgotten about it. In twenty or thirty years a young forest could have grown up if nothing had been done to discourage it. But instead of trees, all she saw were scrubby sumach and juniper among the weeds and volunteer wheat. She idly wondered what method they’d used to keep down the regrowth.
The landscape wasn’t beautiful but it was peaceful and pleasant so Catherine walked farther than she intended, stopping from time to time to bag a leaf or scoop up a soil sample with her small trowel. She hummed as she worked. As she approached the centre of the field, she began noticing the occasional bald patch of ground where nothing grew. The spots, of irregular sizes and shapes, exposed dull brown earth under a thin covering of yellow grass and dead leaves. She dug a small hole, shovelled out some of the deeper soil and poured it into a small jar. She labelled it simply with a question mark and the date.
As she stood up, the sound of a rapidly approaching vehicle startled her. A four-wheel-drive jeep skidded to a halt just a few feet away.
She shaded her eyes with her hand as she watched a man climb from the driver’s seat. A frown of concentration furrowed her brow, then cleared as she recognized him. It was Ernie Grant, the real estate agent who’d arranged her lease. She moved forward, hand held out in greeting.
‘What are you doing here?’ the man growled, ignoring her proffered hand. ‘This is private property.’ As he hitched his pants up over his beer belly, Catherine couldn’t help noticing the spreading dark patches of sweat on the underarms of his shirt. At the moment he didn’t look much like the urbane businessman she had dealt with.
‘I’m just taking a walk,’ Catherine replied, letting her hand fall to her side. She glanced over her shoulder to be sure her pack lay invisible in the grass. ‘It’s such a beautiful day.’
Grant seemed to relax a little. ‘Don’t mean to be rude, Mrs Edison, but there are prettier places to walk,
