It was black as pitch inside. She had to resist the sensation of being swallowed whole as she led them to her workstation by feel;Alexander’s hand light on her shoulder. She managed a full breath only when she’d found the gas lamp on the counter and lit it.
It flickered to life, and Alexander whispered, “What first?”
“Missing records,” she said. “I’ve looked over Horticulture. I’ll check Botany, and you can check Entomology.”
“I ought to check Mycology first. If we have to get out of here quickly, that’s more important.”
Saffron nodded hesitantly. She hadn’t a key for that room. She took another lamp from the counter to light it. “I’ll come do the door.”
“No need,” he replied, slipping a hand into her pocket. For some reason, it made her heart leap when he held up a pair of hairpins. “I practiced.”
Her mouth fell open. “When?”
“Not much to do on a long voyage from Brazil.”
Baffled and charmed, she stammered, “And you let me struggle with the kitchen door?”
“I had to let you try it.” He brushed a kiss on her forehead, took her lamp, and was gone.
She shook her head slowly. Alexander was forever surprising her. At least this time, it was a good thing.
Mycology fell into a strange no-man’s-land between botany and zoology, in Alexander’s estimation. Fungi were not plants, not animals, and were far too large to be included in his own personal realm of study, bacteria, but they shared a great many similarities. For one, the labs that studied them looked more or less the same.
The microscopes, glass plates, petri dishes, dozens of bottles and jars of liquids, and everything else made Alexander feel right at home. Every surface was covered in equipment and rows of dishes of growths in various stages of development. He wished for daylight, for he was sure there would be a rainbow of color contained within those plates.
But records were his priority, not the growths.
The filing cabinet wedged into the corner next to an incubator was his first destination. He set the oil lamp on the top and found thatthe lock had not been engaged. Saffron had mentioned a date in October. He pulled open the cabinet drawers until he found the correct time period and set to searching.
He’d read up more on mycology since Nick had come to town, talking of fungi. Still, unfamiliar terms filled his vision as he flicked back page after page. He kept his eyes on the dates instead, pausing whenever days were skipped. Some notes had numbered pages, which was useful, but others did not. Some reports were written in four or five different hands, others were typed.
He paused, hand ready to push the first drawer closed. Joseph Rowe had been found in Jeffery Wells’s house with actual lab reports, not copies. If Alexander were stealing information from a laboratory, he would copy the reports, not take them. Someone would notice—hadnoticed—that they were missing. Yet Wells had taken the papers themselves.
Then he remembered Saffron’s story from the previous evening. Alfie Tennison might have been the one receiving the reports, for use … in something. He could have worried Wells would copy them wrong, leave something out or get a measurement incorrect. He’d want the most accurate information possible.
Three files contained information from the two weeks or so in October. He saw a series of reports on a strain ofAlternaria alternataand its effect on pyrethrum, the flower the laboratory was studying. That genus of fungi was familiar; he’d seen it in the other files. Those files were complete, from what he could tell.
He dug further back, keeping his ears open to any sounds in the hall beyond. Saffron would have numerous places to hide should someone come around, but this room was tiny. There was no furniture to hide behind, and the closet was merely a series of shelves in an alcove. He’d be spotted the moment anyone crossed the threshold.
He took each file out one by one, scanning the papers for anything interesting. Saffron had explained how the lab worked with other research stations and farms around the country; reports and samples were sent in over the course of weeks and months. They were analyzed, and occasionally products developed by the lab were sent out for field testing. These papers did not detail those exchanges butthe actual work of the laboratory. The daily logs were written in neat, feminine script, occasionally interrupted by a brash, broad hand that Alexander guessed was the chief of mycology rather than his assistant. He found no references to the papers Joseph had.
Frowning, he opened the cabinet above it to search earlier in the year. August and September were jam-packed. A busy time for the laboratory given their areas of study. Only measurements of materials and dry descriptions of the growth of fungi, boring even to him.
One line of the daily log caught his eye, however. A dissection, done by N. Narramore, showed a sample from “Farm E” was discovered to have been infected by a fungus, Specimen No. 28923, and had been turned over to E. Sutcliffe for identification. Saffron had mentioned that specimen.
But as Alexander paged back through the reports of the following weeks, he found no further information regarding Specimen No. 28923. In fact, the records were missing entire days’ worth of notes: from the twenty-ninth of October to November twelfth, the exact dates of the papers found in Joseph Rowe’s possession.
He wanted to see the original reports and find out exactly what those insects had been infected with, and why Jeffery Wells and then Joseph Rowe had stolen the reports of it.
CHAPTER39
Although Saffron had already done a fair bit of creeping around the main area of the laboratory, it was something quite different to do so in utter, silent darkness. Light and shadow flitted over the rows of glass and metal equipment as she moved toward the rear of the lab to Entomology.
A soft ripping noise made her jump. She jumped, flinching away from the noise, and found she was being pulled back. Flailing, she staggered away, only to find it was her skirt, caught on a brass valve sticking out from a workstation. The wretched thing had ripped her skirt and nearly given her a heart attack to boot. Glaring at the valve, she turned away and hurried toward Entomology.
She hadn’t gone a handful of steps before she swallowed a terrified gasp. Something loomed out of the darkness.
Hand pressed to her thundering heart, Saffron forced herself to slow her frantic breath. The largest vivarium dominated the first workstation. Within lay a massive piece of driftwood, which, in the bleaching light of her single lamp, looked like an alien skull. Worse, it was crawling with insects.
