True-Life Adventure

before a terrible sadness would come. And now we were bringing her another sadness. Or perhaps two. If you got news of two deaths at once, was that two sadnesses or just one bad one? I mused on it a bit and forgot to yell “emergency,” but the fellow steering the raft was headed toward shore. They were going to stop.
    Lindsay was newly tanned and incredibly beautiful, in that way that women are after a week in the sun. But she looked very scared.
    She jumped out of the raft and embraced Sardis, holding her tight for a minute or two. Then Terry got out and kissed her auntie as well. She looked fine— like any healthy seven-year-old.
    I realized I was relieved. I’d expected her, I guess, to be pinched and scrawny-looking, maybe have some hair missing.
    “What’s wrong?” said Lindsay. “Is it Jacob?”
    Sardis shook her head, her eyes filling with tears as she realized what she had to tell Lindsay. “No,” she said. “But it’s real bad. Can we go somewhere and talk?”
    “Sure.” Lindsay turned around and spoke briefly with the captain, or whatever they call raft executives. Then she spoke with one of the women on the raft. She told Terry to stay with the woman. “I have an hour,” she said to us. “Who’s this man?”
    Sardis told her and we went to a quiet place on the river to talk. We started with the worst first, telling her that Brissette and Tillman were dead and letting her cry and try to absorb the shock before we went on to anything else.
    Then I took over and filled in, telling her about working for Birnbaum and getting the files stolen and surviving attempts on my life and believing Brissette was killed because she called him, and Tillman for some other reason that had to do with the case.
    Lindsay’s grief was at the point where misery gives way to anger. She turned red and hollered, “Jacob!” very loud, and then she hollered it some more, and I think she would have gone on, except that Sardis touched her face, very gently, with one finger. Whoever said you have to slap a hysterical person should consult Dr. Kincannon.
    Anyway, Lindsay cried some more, and then she calmed down and began to tell us her story, beginning, like the good reporter she was, with first things first: “Jacob is criminally insane.”
    “But is he capable of killing three men?” Sardis spoke gently. She didn’t want to believe it, I could tell.
    Lindsay’s eyes filled again. She spoke with the bitterness of a woman betrayed and disillusioned and a bit at her wit’s end about the blows life was dealing her: “You know what he was doing with Terry, don’t you? If he could do that, he’s capable of anything. I found out from her that it was going on— that he was giving her these phony ‘treatments’, I mean. And then I noticed how yellow she looked. And I fell apart.
    “I knew he was crazy. I guess I’d known it for a long time— probably ever since we were first married. But I couldn’t quite admit it to myself. I mean, lots of people are eccentric, aren’t they?”
    “Especially scientists,” I said. “People expect them to be.”
    “Exactly. So this funny quirk or that little oddity gets overlooked because the rest of us expect him to be different. And then when you get into bigger quirks and oddities, you think nothing of it. You’re used to expecting their minds to work differently from everyone else’s. You say, ‘Oh, that’s just Jacob; he’s a mad scientist.’ Only Jacob really is mad. He married me because I had the right genes.
    “He used to say that, as some sort of endearment, and I thought it was cute. I thought it was his little joke. And then it turned out he wanted a perfect child and I still never quite realized he was off his rocker. He started pushing Terry, teaching her math when she was three, and things like that, and I just let him. I thought: The man’s a genius; Terry probably is too. I liked having a precocious little daughter. But I guess it was too much for her, because we started having behavior problems with her. And I found I didn’t like being a mother and didn’t want to be one.”
    She looked straight at me, not at Sardis. Sardis had long since accepted her for what she was, and now she was looking to see if I would. “It’s not that I don’t love Terry. I love her more than anything and the thought of losing her— I mean, of her dying— is more terrible than the thought of myself dying. But I had her because Jacob wanted her and I’ve since