Chapter Sixteen #2
“Not I, oh wonderful Master Cornelius,” Heather cooed sweetly, waving the skeleton key in front of her where Master Cornelius couldn’t see it, but the audience could.
They laughed and snickered in reaction. “I would never lock you up and throw away the key. Even though you have folded me into a tiny box, and stabbed me with swords, and cut me in half, and”—as the list grew longer, Heather began to lose the sweet tone in her voice and sound like an angry harridan—“stretched me, and twisted me. But maybe I should have.”
Mel sneaked up behind Daniel and pulled off her cape, tossing it over his shoulder as the laughter died down.
“Hold this for me, please, sir?” she said as he spun around.
“How do you do that?” he asked, laughing.
She stepped out from behind him and wiggled her fingers under her chin. “Just a little magic.”
Her father, who had been biding his time by detailing Heather’s lack of positive attributes, spotted Mel and yelled at the audience, “My daughter has done this! Where is she?”
Mel jumped up on the bench in front of Daniel and called out loudly, pointing at her dad, still chained and pilloried on the stage.
“That is for chaining me up every night, Father dear! I have found my prince at last!” She gestured to Daniel, who looked adorably bemused.
“Should I run away with him?” she asked the audience.
Naturally, all the children yelled “YES!” at the top of their lungs, while one very woman yelled, “If you don’t, I will!”
She laughed, gave them a Missy wave and leaned on Daniel’s shoulder as she jumped to the ground.
“Run or we’ll be mobbed,” she said, taking his hand.
So they ran.
They eventually skidded to a stop beside a vendor selling fairy wings and decorated wands, both out of breath.
“I’m getting too old for this!” Mel gasped.
“You were great! So’s your dad. He’s quite the showman.”
“Magic is all about the stage presence, and Dad has that in spades.”
“You’re not so bad yourself.” Daniel looked her over from her glittery slippers to her flowery crown. “I really like the outfit.” He reached out a gloved finger to her cheek. “Especially the face paint.”
“What are you doing here?”
His smile faded a bit. “You left your jeans behind.”
She planted her hands on her hips. “You flew to Texas and drove to the middle of nowhere to bring me a pair of jeans?”
He looked around at all the people passing by. “No. We need to talk. Somewhere private.”
His expression was troubling. Despite her promise to herself to stop reading his emotions, she was tempted.
“Come on,” she said, leading him toward a row of shops.
They passed between two of the shops, and she glanced into the dim interior of the one that bore the sign Madame Amelia ~ Tarot. Her mother had a client.
“My mother’s shop,” she said, motioning past it.
They went down a series of log-and-earth steps to a tiny, covered bridge that spanned a creek.
On the other side, another set of steps led up to a mill with a huge paddle wheel.
The little bridge always seemed to be suspended in time to her.
From here, the sound of the festival was muted.
All they could see were the tree-lined creek bed, its tiny trickle of water and, at the top of each bank, the backs of the shops.
Mel looked around. “How’s this?” It was her favorite place at Scarborough to catch her breath. A lot of fairgoers didn’t know about this oasis in the center of the festival because of the more accessible bridges over the creek.
She led him to a log on the edge of a cleared area above the creek.
“There.” She sat, patting the place beside her. “You caught me without my recorder, so I guess this is really off the record.”
Daniel didn’t smile. “Maybe you’ll get a chance to write about it, but right now we can skip the note-taking.”
Mel frowned. He sounded intense and serious. She dropped her shield.
Excitement. Worry. Curiosity. Cold sweaty fear and the warmth of hope.
“What is it? What’s wrong?”
Daniel turned to her. Attraction. Fear. Frustration.
“Remember those origami honeybees you gave Jamie? You said a reluctant and uncooperative doctor in Italy made them?”
“The bees?” she repeated.
“Yes, the bees you gave Jamie.”
“Wait, this is about origami bees?”
He was getting agitated now. Fear. Frustration.
“Yes. All right. The bees.”
“Who was this reluctant doctor of yours?”
She opened her mouth to answer, then reconsidered. “A source.”
Daniel took a deep breath. “A source,” he repeated in a calm voice. Anxiety. Worry.
Mel nodded.
“Fine. I don’t need to know his or her name.”
“His,” she said.
“But I need to know if you know where he actually works or if he was some kind of intermediary.”
“He’s an academic—a… uh… virologist. Whatever his job was, it was temporary.
A consultant. But he was a whistleblower who wouldn’t whistle.
” Mel realized that she was reacting to what Daniel was feeling.
Whatever it was, it was chilling. “He was afraid that whoever hired him would find out that he was talking to me. I got the feeling…he was terrified. He…” A muscle twitched in Daniel’s jaw.
“He contacted me directly. He said he had something important that he needed to get to the right people. I flew all the way to Milano and met him, but then he wouldn’t tell me. ”
Daniel clenched his hands. He wasn’t wearing his gloves.
“I tried everything, but he just shut down. Talked about the bee viruses he’s been working on—Chronic Bee Paralysis Virus, to be specific,” she went on. She suddenly realized why he was asking about origami. “But he did show me how to make those bees.”
“Out of paper that he had with him?”
She nodded. “That’s why…” Then it clicked. “He was passing me notes, wasn’t he? And I missed it.” Too busy dealing with his overwhelming fear and dread.
“Did he tell you who he was consulting for? Where he was before he met with you?”
Mel tried to remember. Dr. Ricci had mentioned something about where he had been. Something about… “It was, or…he thought it was CREA, the Research Center for—”
“Cereal and Industrial Crops. But you don’t think it was?”
“I just got the feeling… On the phone, he had said it was the Campania CREA. He knew where their location is outside of Foggia, but said something about having to drive to a new lab way out in the hills—”
“Near Foggia?”
She nodded.
“Who was he, Mel?”
She sighed. “He was really frightened. I don’t want to—”
“He’s already in danger. You won’t make it worse, and he needs to be protected.”
“Dr. Giovanni Ricci. He—”
Daniel pulled out his cell. “I know who he is.”
“Wait. He… He told me he had information about a new virus. But… Why would a new bee virus make him so frightened?”
Daniel nodded at her. “Trust me, this one would. Hold on.” He punched in a number.
“I’ve got it. Dr. Giovanni Ricci. He’s a virologist. Whoever it is, they’re near Foggia.
A new lab out in the hills.” He paused, listening to whoever was on the other end.
“I know that’s lots of hills.” He sighed and looked at Mel. “Anything else you can remember?”
Mel took a deep breath, closed her eyes, and fished her pendant out to rub the stone. She tried to remember. They had been talking about her flight and how she didn’t enjoy—
She opened her eyes. “He said something about seeing people hang gliding as he drove there.”
“Did you hear that?” Daniel said. “Yeah, let me know how it goes.” He disconnected.
“What do you think he was he trying to tell me?” Mel asked.
“Your Dr. Ricci apparently got brought in to analyze it,” Daniel said. “Grace calls it a novel virus.”
“But not a bee virus? Not… Is it a human one?” she said.
He nodded. “Human. It was never a bee virus.”
“That’s not good.”
“No. It’s not.”
Mel stiffened. The sounds of the fair receded into the background. “What… What was on those papers?”
Daniel fished around in his jacket. He pulled out an envelope, handing it to her. “Nick kept the originals and wasn’t even happy with me carrying these copies around. But I figured you needed to see them.”
There were graphs and bar charts with handwritten notes in the margins. She could see the origami folds visible as faint lines. None of it made any sense to her. She peered at the notes, but they were the usual cryptic doctor shorthand, and in Italian. She shook her head.
“Yeah, I know, but once we translated it, Grace understood why Dr. Ricci was so frightened.” He took the papers and folded them back up, holding them out to her.
Mel waved them off. “You keep them.” She felt a chill of fear remembering the attack in Florence. “What is it?”
“Grace said it looked like a virus designed intentionally to have a neurological effect,” His voice sounded strange.
“You mean as a…weapon?”
“No way to know, but what Ricci saw and analyzed was brain tissue plus all of this data.” He patted his pocket. “He must have made some assumptions, based on what he saw in the tissue he examined.”
“This sounds unbelievable.” She looked around her little retreat. Suddenly, the trees seemed full of sinister shadows.
“The notes suggest it was designed to be delivered via the nose and was concerned it could mutate into an airborne virus,” Daniel said.
Mel realized she was breathing too shallowly and gulped in air. “What does this virus do?”
“We can talk about it later.”
“No. I need to know.”
Daniel blew out a breath. “He was looking at fetal brain tissue and was pretty sure this virus would impact a developing brain…fatally.”
“A developing…” Mel had to think about that for a moment. “Wait, a virus that impacts fetuses? Unborn babies?”
“We think that’s what Ricci thought. And trust me, Grace looked terrified.”
“That’s…horrible. Why on earth would…?” Mel shook her head and took a shaky breath. “Who… Who did you call just now? Was it Nick?”
Daniel nodded. “He has a network of old friends in high places.”
“But it couldn’t be CREA, could it?” Mel said.