"But that was only while you were a baby."

"I'm adopted. That's what this is all about. You adopted me and my real parents want me back."

"No, no, that's not it."

"Yes, it is. That's why I'm short."

She felt the absurd impulse to laugh. "Brett, honey, I've told you the God's honest truth. You're our son. I gave birth to you. Please believe me. You can see your resemblance in Dad, the shape of your face, your eyes and features… and you're not short."

Brett looked as if he were suddenly trapped in a whirlpool and grasping for low-hanging branches. "How old am I? For real," he shouted. "How old am I?"

"You're fourteen. You'll be fifteen in November. You were born in-"

"That's not me in the photograph I gave you, is it?"

"No… it was your brother who died before you were born. His name was Ricky."

"I knew that wasn't me, but you said it was. You lied. You lied!"

Before she could explain, he jumped to his feet and cried out, "I don't believe this." His face was flushed and beginning to crumble.

"I know how hard it is coming at you all at once-"

He turned toward her, his face wild. "Dad's a freak," he cried. "He's a freak. He can't grow old like everybody else. He's a freak, and you're criminals."

Laura came toward him with arms, but he recoiled. "Don't friggin' touch me!" he screamed. "I don't even know who you are."

"I'm your mother. I've always been your mother."

Frantically he looked around the room again as if for the first time. "We're going to be put in prison. Dad's probably already in prison."

"You just talked with him. He'll be here tomorrow."

Then Brett snapped his head toward her again looking at her as if she were alien. "How old are you? The truth! How old?"

She knew this would scare him even more than Roger's condition-that his mother was suddenly fifteen years older than he had believed. "Fifty-five. For real."

She barely got the words out when he dashed into his room. The door slammed like a gunshot through her heart.

Inside she heard the muffled sounds of him crying into the pillow.

Roger returned late the next night in sleeting rain. For the last week, unseasonably cold air had poured down from Canada and turned spring into winter.

After leaving Madison, he had driven to a wooded area and waited until nightfall for his drive to Minneapolis.

For most of that day Brett had stayed in his room, sleeping on and off, refusing to interact with Laura. He was in bed when Roger arrived.

The look on Roger's face made Laura shudder.

"Wally's in jail," he said. He knew that she could not care less about Wally at the moment. He was somebody from thirty years ago. He was somebody associated with Elixir.

But she bit down on all that. "Is there anything you can do?"

"I tried." And he told her.

"You could have been killed."

"I couldn't leave him."

"What does that mean?"

"It means he's going to die if he already hasn't."

"Oh, God. Can't something be done?"

"No."

"But he's your friend. You got him into this. You got him on the stuff, now he's dead or dying."

"Look, I feel shitty enough about this. I did what I could. And don't talk to me like I'm some dope peddler."

She walked to the window. A hard white moon sat in the eastern sky setting the last of the storm clouds in motion. "I'm sorry," she said. "I'm just scared."

"So am I."

"What do we do?"

"Nothing." It wasn't a good answer, but for the time being the condo was as safe as anywhere. Until that changed, they could hole up for a couple weeks, with Brett doing the food shopping and running errands. It was their faces that would be all over the media, not his. "How much did you tell him?"

"Everything."

He nodded. "I suppose it's best."

Silence filled the room.

"Roger, I want us to turn ourselves in. I told you that I would not go on the run again. I will not put him through this."

"Would you prefer Brett grow up with his parents on death row?"

"You don't know that. We might get off. Even so, Brett can live with Jenny."

"Jenny isn't emotionally stable enough to handle another teenage kid."

"She is his aunt, after all. And it's better than moving from place to place in the middle of the night. Think of him."

"I am thinking of him." Once the media got hold of this, the same people who bombed the plane could get back on their trail. People more interested in Elixir than justice-people who could use Brett to get to it. "We stay here for a week or two, then move out."

"No, we're going to find a lawyer."

"And put our fate in the hands of the judicial system?"

"It's better than what we've managed on our own. We're innocent, and we just need to find the right people to believe us."

"We can't prove a negative."

"Their job isn't to prove Quentin and his people are guilty. It's to make a case that we're innocent. And they have no evidence that links us to explosives."

"For thirteen years we've fled prosecution, stolen property, forged credentials, and violated every mail-fraud law on the books."

"They can't execute us for that."

"No, but they could give us life in prison. Wouldn't that be the ultimate irony?"

"If you don't do this I will."

He looked out into the black and thought about it. "It could mean a witness protection program-new names, new locale, new identities."

"What else is new? But at least we won't jump at every cop car."

"That's if we could make a case."

"We have no other choice. He's not growing up undercover."

She was right: Brett needed his parents, but more than that he needed the semblance of a normal life.

"And what about the stuff?"

She looked at him in dismay. "I don't care about it. Take what you need and dump the rest."

"I meant the scientific benefits."

"There are no scientific benefits!"

He said nothing.

"We have to get out of here," she said. "Even if nobody noticed, I'd go nuts cooped up like this."

"For a few days till things cool down. Then we move out and find some good lawyers."

"And what do we do for a place to stay?"

"There's always Aunt Jenny's, after all."

30

"I don't know how he died. I've never seen anything like it before. It was like hypertrophic melanoma accelerated a hundred times."

"In English," Eric Brown said.

"Skin cancer gone wild." Ben Friedman was Madison's chief medical examiner. "There was squamous cell carcinoma all over his body and tumors in his stomach and intestines. It was like he exploded in cancer."

"The guard said his head didn't look human, that it was twice the size and covered with growths."

Friedman shook his head in total bafflement. "I don't get it either," he said. "My best guess is a speeded-up form of Werner's syndrome."

"What's that?"

"A chromosomal defect that causes people to age abnormally fast and die before they reach forty. Except this guy appeared to have aged literally overnight."

"You're saying that's impossible."

"I'm saying that whatever happened to him has to my knowledge never occurred before. Besides the wildfire cancer, his body was riddled with diseases associated with advanced aging-arteriosclerosis, malignant neoplasms, osteoporosis, cataracts, liver and kidney morbidity. If I didn't know better, I'd say the man was in his ninth or tenth decade of life."

Brown had laid out the fingerprint matches of Wally Olafsson taken when he was booked the other day and after he died. "It's the same man, birthdate February 13, 1943."

"That's the impossible part," Friedman continued. "Because that would mean that in a matter of hours his body experienced a total and cataclysmic decline. Just how beats the hell out of me."