I TOLD EVERYONE WHAT

I thought. They were silent, but they knew I was right. I knew I was right. In trying to develop a cure for what was making people sick, she’d just made them sicker. If she’d been alive, she’d still be trying.

And as we watched deeper and deeper into the night, we found out that once she’d tracked down my grandmother as being a known carrier (by methods she never specified), she’d started watching my family. Everything had been arranged, planned—Jude and Claire’s move to Rhode Island, enrolling them in my school so Jude and Claire could get close to me—all of it. Daniel even found records that showed a subsidiary of Horizons LLC, paying for 1281 Live Oak Court, the address that I’d once thought was Jude’s. Whoever Noah had met there weren’t his parents, but they were liars.

“She couldn’t have done all of this on her own,” Daniel said. “We know she didn’t—she was recording these interviews for someone, using research she didn’t come up with herself. Someone was supporting her, funding her, making everything she did possible.”

“Lukumi,” I said.

“We think,” Jamie added.

Daniel rubbed his eyes like a little kid. “This is much, much bigger than just us,” Daniel said. “I mean, look at the archives. There are millions, maybe billions of pages in there. And what Kells said before, about tracing the gene back to our grandmother? There are other carriers out there. Like you,” he said, looking at me. “But what doesn’t make any sense is, if that’s true, why hasn’t anyone else discovered you guys by now?”

No one understood the answer to this better than I did. “Because if we tell anyone the truth, people just think we’re crazy.”

“Okay, well, at this point you’re right, Mara. All roads are leading to Lukumi,” Daniel said. “He’s the only person whose name keeps coming up.”

“Actually, that’s not his real name,” I said.

“Uh, what?” Stella had been reading something, but looked up.

“Noah and I looked for him,” I explained. “We went back to Little Havana, we did the requisite Google search. ‘Lukumi’ is the name of some Santeria case that went to the Supreme Court.”

Jamie nodded. “Of course it is. That doesn’t make this harder at all.”

“Whoever he is,” Daniel started, “he’s the only one who can actually prove that you’re innocent.”

Well, not innocent exactly.

“He’s the only one who knows about you.”

The only person alive, anyway.

“Which means that if I were a betting man, I’d bet he knows about Noah, too.”

I was betting on that too.

We watched interviews and read papers and worked all night, combing through everything we’d brought with us from the archives. Property records, the deed to my parents’ house, the bar admissions certificate of the man who’d referred my father to the Lassiter case, medical records from the sixties, medical records from the nineties, pictures of scarring on the inside of Jamie’s throat. (“What in fresh hell?” Jamie said.) But there were still so many pieces of the puzzle missing.

My thoughts hung like loose threads, frayed and tangled. It didn’t help that I was exhausted. I leaned my head in my hands, staring at the documents in front of me. The words on the page arranged themselves into an incomprehensible shape as I fought to stay awake, and lost.

BEFORE

Date: 2015-01-29; view: 645