The Passage - By Justin Cronin Page 0,9

to her voice. She liked how she was with Amy, the way she looked at her eyes when she talked to her.

“I was racing to get her to school, you see,” Jeanette said, “when that old car of mine? The thing just kind of gave out.”

The woman nodded. “Please. This way.”

She led Jeanette and Amy through the hallway to the kitchen, a big room with a huge oak dining table and cabinets with labels on them: CHINA, CANNED GOODS, PASTA AND RICE. Jeanette had never thought about nuns eating before. She guessed that with all the nuns living in the building, it helped to know what was where in the kitchen. The woman pointed to the phone, an old brown one with a long cord, hanging on the wall. Jeanette had planned the next part well enough. She dialed a number while the woman got a plate of cookies for Amy—not store-bought, but something somebody had actually baked—then, as the recorded voice on the other end told her that it would be cloudy today with a high temperature of fifty-five degrees and a chance of showers moving in toward evening, she pretended to talk to AAA, nodding along.

“Wrecker’s coming,” she said, hanging the phone back up. “Said to go outside and meet him. Said he’s got a man just around the corner, in fact.”

“Well, that’s good news,” the woman said brightly. “Today is your lucky day. If you wish, you can leave your daughter here with me. It would be no good to manage her on a busy street.”

So there it was. Jeanette wouldn’t have to do anything else. All she had to do was say yes.

“Ain’t no bother?”

The woman smiled again. “We’ll be fine here. Won’t we?” She looked encouragingly at Amy. “See? She is perfectly happy. You go see to your car.”

Amy was sitting on one of the chairs at the big oak table, with an untouched plate of cookies and a glass of milk before her. She’d taken off her backpack and was cradling it in her lap. Jeanette looked at her as long as she would let herself, and then she knelt and hugged her.

“You be good now,” she said, and against her shoulder, Amy nodded. Jeanette meant to say something else, but couldn’t find the words. She thought about the note she’d left inside the knapsack, the slip of paper they were sure to find when Jeanette never came back to get her. She hugged her as long as she dared. The feeling of Amy was all around her, the warmth of her body, the smell of her hair and skin. Jeanette knew she was about to cry, something the woman—Lucy? Lacey?—couldn’t see, but she let herself hold Amy a moment longer, trying to put this feeling in a place inside her mind, someplace safe where she could keep it. Then she let her daughter go, and before anybody said another word, Jeanette walked from the kitchen and down the driveway to the street, and then kept right on going.

TWO

From the computer files of Jonas Abbott Lear, PhD

Professor, Department of Molecular and Cellular Biology, Harvard University

Assigned to United States Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases (USAMRIID)

Department of Paleovirology, Fort Derrick, MD

From: [email protected]

Date: Monday, February 6 1:18 p.m.

To: [email protected]

Subject: Satellite linkage is up

Paul,

Greetings from the jungles of Bolivia, landlocked armpit of the Andes. From where you sit in frigid Cambridge, watching the snow fall, I’m sure a month in the tropics doesn’t sound like a bad deal. But believe me: this is not St. Bart’s. Yesterday I saw a snake the size of a submarine.

The trip down was uneventful—sixteen hours in the air to La Paz, then a smaller government transport to Concepción, in the country’s eastern jungle basin. From here, there aren’t really any decent roads; it’s pure backcountry, and we’ll be traveling on foot. Everybody on the team is pretty excited, and the roster keeps growing. In addition to the group from UCLA, Tim Fanning from Columbia caught up with us in La Paz, as did Claudia Swenson from MIT. (I think you told me once that you knew her at Yale.) In addition to his not inconsiderable star power, you’ll be happy to hear that Tim brought half a dozen grad assistants with him, so just like that, the average age of the team fell by about ten years and the gender balance tipped decidedly toward the female. “Terrific scientists, every one,” Tim insisted. Three ex-wives, each younger than the last; the