Chapter 2 - The Bottle She Could Read
The girl’s name, I eventually learned, was Lucy Mercer.
Dr. Hale insisted she was frightened and confused.
“Nathan, she’s been through something difficult. Children make associations. She probably recognizes the warning symbols.”
Maybe.
But Lucy hadn’t looked at the symbols.
I had watched her eyes move across the characters.
“Bring me another vial.”
Hale’s face tightened.
“I can’t release restricted medication.”
“Then I’ll have one tested independently.”
“That isn’t necessary.”
Those three words bothered me more than anything else he had said.
I looked at Claire.
For eighteen months I had accepted every explanation because I wanted desperately to believe the people caring for her knew more than I did.
Suddenly I wondered whether trust had become an excuse not to ask questions.
Before the staff could clean the floor, I collected several pieces of glass with a towel and sealed them inside an empty specimen bag.
Then I called my attorney and an old college friend named Daniel Brooks, who now worked as an investigator for the county.
That evening Lucy finally began telling us about herself.
Her parents, Emily and Grant Mercer, were American teachers who had spent several years working at an international school in Taiwan before returning to Pennsylvania. Lucy had attended a bilingual elementary program there and had learned enough Mandarin to read simple signs, labels, and warnings.
Her grandfather had also worked for a company supplying industrial cleaning products, and whenever Lucy visited his workshop, he made a game of teaching her warning labels.
Months earlier, Lucy had become separated from her parents under circumstances investigators were still trying to understand. She had been kept inside a house with several adults she didn’t know, later moved to an old storage building, and eventually slipped through an unlocked side door one night.
She walked until she found a delivery truck with its rear door partly open.
She hid among empty boxes.
When the truck stopped near our property the following morning, Lucy climbed out, saw workers nearby, panicked, and hid behind the abandoned loading dock.
The place where I happened to find her.
Just before midnight, my phone rang.
The independent laboratory had analyzed residue from the broken vial.
The chemist spoke carefully.
The substance was not the nerve-recovery medication Dr. Hale had described.
It contained compounds capable of producing profound weakness and neurological symptoms when administered repeatedly.
My stomach tightened.
“Could repeated exposure make someone appear as though an existing neurological condition wasn’t improving?”
There was a pause.
“Yes.”
“For how long?”
“Potentially for quite some time.”
I sat outside Claire’s room staring through the glass panel in the door.
Eighteen months.
Eighteen months of waiting.
Then my phone rang again.
Everett.
I looked at his name on the screen for several seconds before answering.
Daniel had given me a small digital recorder earlier that evening.
I switched it on.
“Nathan,” Everett said warmly. “Hale told me things got strange today.”
“You could say that.”
He sighed like a concerned brother.
“Listen, you’ve been carrying too much. Claire needs you. The company needs someone fully present. We’ve talked about this before. Sell me your shares and walk away for a while.”
He had, indeed, been suggesting exactly that for months.
I remained silent.
Then I said quietly:
“Maybe you’re right.”
There was another pause, but this one sounded different.
Relief.
“That’s what I’ve been trying to tell you.”
“Come to Hawthorne tomorrow morning. Nine o’clock. You, me, and Hale. We’ll work something out.”
“I’ll be there.”
After we hung up, I sat beside Claire until nearly dawn.
May you like
For the first time in months, I didn’t tell her everything would be fine.
I simply held her hand.
