The Mirror Man, стр. 41
“Leave? I’m afraid we simply cannot permit it. No. We are on a very strict timeline here, as you know.”
“A strict timeline? This is my mother, for God’s sake!” He was astonished. Anger rose up in his throat and nearly choked him. “I need to be at the funeral! You can’t keep me from that!”
“I am sorry,” Scott said, rising. “I understand you are upset, Mr. Adams, but the contract clearly states that you are to remain in the lab for the period of one full year. Under no circumstances are you allowed to leave this facility. I’m afraid that includes the death of your mother.”
“Dr. Scott, I am her only family. I’ve got to make the arrangements. I need to be there.”
“The clone will take care of everything as well as you would do yourself. I am certain that the whole affair will be handled precisely to your satisfaction.” Scott got up and walked to the door, opened it and then turned again, as though a thought had just occurred to him. “This might actually be a unique exercise for the project,” he said. “I wonder if you might write down the details of how you would make the arrangements for your mother’s funeral. You know, the readings, the music, that sort of thing. Maybe the photo you’d choose for the obituary. It would make an excellent test, to see the comparison. I think it could be quite fascinating. I’m certain our investors would be interested.”
With a great deal of difficulty, Jeremiah managed to be silent, but wanted nothing so much at that moment as to punch Charles Scott in the teeth. Once Scott was safely out the door, he settled for punching the living room wall instead. He didn’t even make a dent in it, but felt the sting in the knuckles of his hand, which he ignored.
He picked up a lamp and threw it hard against the far wall and watched shards of blue ceramic scatter onto the floor and couch. Seething, he surveyed the room for something else to break, but there was nothing in the immediate vicinity except a computer monitor, which was bolted to the table, so he started on a stack of books, hurling them one by one against the locked door. And then, spent for the moment, he fell back down onto the couch, and put his face in his hands.
No one was supposed to die while he was in here. That wasn’t part of the deal. Why had the damned clone agreed to let her take the Meld? If this was suicide, it had to be connected to that, he thought. His mother would never have done it. There was no way. It may have been in her genes, but suicide wasn’t in her character. No matter how upset she might have been about the move, her memory, all of it, there was simply no way he could reconcile that she’d killed herself. She’d always been one of the most contented people he’d ever known, almost to a fault. There was no way.
Jeremiah ruminated on the clone’s visit with his mother when she hadn’t even recognized him. He had no way of knowing for sure whether the clone had seen her again since then, but he found himself hoping their final moments together weren’t clouded by her failing mind. The Meld had shown she didn’t have dementia, but there was surely something wrong.
What occurred to him next was so shocking it made him bolt upright again. Charles Scott had heard the conversation about what the doctor had seen when she took the Meld. He must have been monitoring these viewings, either in real time or taped playbacks. And so he knew Patricia Adams hadn’t recognized the clone. She had looked right at the thing and declared that it wasn’t her son. Scott must have seen it. If not, all of it, every word of it, was in Brent’s report.
And now she was dead.
If it wasn’t suicide—and he couldn’t accept that it was—then what was it?
Standing frozen in the middle of the room, still in his underwear, surrounded by the mess he’d made, a kind of dread washed over Jeremiah. He wanted to vomit. He retched and heaved, but it was no use. There was nothing inside him.
Charles Scott was desperate that this experiment continue without interruption. But was he desperate enough to kill? By getting involved with all of this, had Jeremiah sacrificed his own mother?
Chapter 21
Days 106-109
When he was a child, Jeremiah had loved his mother ferociously. Without a father, she had, by necessity, filled many roles for him—hero, teacher, best friend. She’d done a good job at all of it. They had been close, and she made sure to teach him things a father might have taught a son. Most of which she likely had to learn first for herself. By the time he was fifteen, he could fix a toilet, drive a stick shift and sweet-talk girls, and all with guidance from her. He could talk to her about anything, and she was always honest with him—except for the one thing that came to matter more and more as he grew up.
“It doesn’t matter why your father left,” she’d told him once. “The only thing that matters is that he isn’t here, and that’s his loss, not yours.”
How she managed to stay so optimistic, so full of life, even with the hand she’d been dealt, Jeremiah would never fully understand. But his mother had a real knack for making even the most commonplace things seem extraordinary and full of possibility.
They used to play a game she called “Imagine,” which involved her scavenging the house for three random objects and hiding them in a shoebox. She’d run past him, in and out of rooms, giggling and marveling at the treasures she’d collected, and Jeremiah could hardly contain his excitement. When she was finished, she’d present the box to him with a flourish, and he would close