True-Life Adventure

asleep until Spot jumped up in my lap and woke me up.
    I set the clock for seven o’clock and climbed into bed beside Sardis.
    At 7:05 the next morning, as soon as I thought I could speak, I called Jacob Koehler at home. We make a date for breakfast.

CHAPTER 16
    We met at the same Denny’s where I’d ordered the burger and walked out without paying after I got the news about Brissette. There aren’t a whole lot of restaurants in Emeryville and whatever Jacob wanted was fine with me. I just hoped nobody recognized me and chucked me out.
    Jacob’s big shoulders sagged a bit. He seemed diminished, somehow. A very worried man.
    He said: “I tried to get you yesterday. There isn’t much time, I’m afraid.”
    I found that a bit on the bewildering side. “I returned your call. I even came out to your office. The receptionist said you weren’t there.”
    “Oh? Well, I went in the back door. Maybe she didn’t realize.”
    “Somebody cut my brake lines while I was waiting for you.”
    “Oh, no! Not the best of neighborhoods, I’m afraid. I apologize.”
    The waitress brought coffee and we ordered man-sized breakfasts, both of us.
    I waited for Jacob to speak again. I couldn’t figure him. Did he really think cutting brake lines was garden-variety vandalism? He might. It would be just like a hotshot scientist not to know how a car works. But there was another possibility— maybe he was using his trademark vagueness to cover up the fact that he nobbled my car himself. The person who did it, I figured, had probably followed me to Kogene from the Chronicle. How else would they know what my car looked like? Jacob could easily have done that and then gone in the back door he’d just mentioned. “I’ve decided,” he said at last, “to make a public appeal for information about Terry’s whereabouts.”
    “Let me be sure I understand,” I said. “You’ve decided, after all, to go public with the story of the kidnapping?”
    “Yes.”
    “May I ask what prompted your decision?”
    “Time’s running out. Terry’s very ill, Mr. Mcdonald.” The lines around his mouth were about ten feet deep. “She has an incurable disease.”
    “Leukemia?”
    “Why do you think that? Because it’s a well-known childhood killer? It’s not, you know. In this country it hits more than twenty thousand adults every year, but only about twenty-five hundred children.”
    “I didn’t really guess it at all. Joan told me.”
    “Joan?”
    “Lindsay’s sister.”
    “Oh, yes, Joan. She would know, of course.”
    “Inspector Blick thought Lindsay might have taken Terry to an ‘alternative’ cancer specialist.”
    Koehler winced. His eyes were so full of pain there didn’t seem to be room for more. But when I said that, he looked even more hurt. “I know. I can’t believe it.” His voice broke and for a moment I panicked. Women crying were bad enough, but a giant Nobel laureate who looked more like a god than a man— that I couldn’t handle. Especially not at breakfast.
    But Jacob got control of himself and went on. “I don’t think she’d do a thing like that.”
    “She must not have,” I said. “The police weren’t able to find her at any of the obvious places.”
    “Oh.” Apparently, Blick hadn’t bothered to tell him.
    “Blick said you told him Terry wasn’t sick.”
    He looked embarrassed. “I thought it best at the time.”
    “How so?”
    “Terry doesn’t know how sick she is. I mean, she doesn’t know she could die. So I— Marilyn and I— thought we shouldn’t tell the police.” He looked very confused, as if he couldn’t quite remember his own reasoning process. “We thought she might find out, somehow.”
    “But how would she find out?”
    “The police might tell her. Just somebody might.”
    “But if the police didn’t think she was sick, they wouldn’t have looked for her and her mother at the cancer quack hospitals. And they might have passed up a chance to find her.”
    “But she wasn’t there.” Jacob looked almost belligerent. He attacked his eggs instead of me.
    “Where do you think she is, then?”
    “Mr. Mcdonald, if I knew that, I wouldn’t be talking to you. I wouldn’t have hired Jack Birnbaum. I’d have Terry back.”
    So far that was about the only thing he’d said that made sense.
    “Okay,” I said, “I understand. But if you were afraid the cops were going to tell Terry she has leukemia, why are you telling me for a newspaper article?”
    Jacob crashed