The Vesuvius Isotope (The Katrina Stone Novels) (18 page)

I am twenty-six, and Alexis is seven.

A phone rings. I jerk up from studying for my Ph.D. qualifying exams and quickly dance around the toys in the living room to answer the phone before it can ring a second time. The call is from Tom. He is cheating on me, and I have just caught him red-handed. I slam the phone down.

I bite my lip to contain the rising tears. I cannot let them come. Not yet.

I walk down the hall to my daughter’s room. Slowly, carefully, I open her bedroom door. I expect her to be sleeping.

Alexis is on the floor, playing with her ponies. She looks up at me and smiles, and I remember promising at least an hour ago that I would join her. With a guilty pang, I send Alexis to brush her teeth, and I promise to tuck her in when she is finished.

I walk out of her room and step across the hall to the other door. I hold my breath and hope that the door will not squeak and wake the sleeping child inside.

My son.

Christopher is asleep. He makes a soft cooing sound when I open the door, but then he is quiet again. I watch him for a moment. He is five years old.

Christopher’s blonde curls spring wildly from around his angelic face, his chubby little fist resting against a flawless rosy cheek. The blanket has pulled down in his sleep, and his pudgy belly peeks out from beneath a soft flannel pajama top. I tiptoe to him and pull up the cover.

I blink back tears.

Christopher and his sister will now grow up in a broken home. They will divide their time between two parents who can no longer live together. They will learn, at five and seven years of age, that parents can stop loving each other.

Christopher’s innocence breaks my heart.

I quietly slip into the bathroom and splash cool water on my face to calm my nerves. I fulfill my promise to tuck Lexi in for the night. I make up an answer to her question about where her daddy is. And then finally, finally, I am able to run down the hall into my own bedroom, lock the door, and break down into the quietest sobs I can manage.

And then I hear a gunshot. And the shattering of glass.

And there is Christopher lying on the floor of the living room in a pool of blood.

I scream.

And there is Alexis.

The Naples traffic was dizzying around me as I heard Alexis pick up the phone in San Francisco.

“
Jeff!
” she shouted. Her voice was sheer desperation.

“Alexis, are you sick?” I asked, and I could hear the same desperation in my own voice.

Alexis began to cry. A wailing, anguished cry. When she finally tried to speak, she could barely get the words out. But I already understood everything. Perfectly.

Cancer cluster.

“Oh, God, Mom, what’s wrong with me?” She sobbed and gasped for breath. “I can’t… I can’t stand it! The pain… it’s worse… every day… and the morphine… it’s not working anymore… I need more… and John… John won’t let me have any more. He says I’m taking too much… he… he says he has never… never seen anything like this… but all of a sudden… it’s popping up all over the place. He has dozens… maybe even hundreds of patients. He can’t find anything… anything we have in common… and we… we all just keep getting worse. It keeps spreading. It’s all through me already…”

I heard her words, but one single phrase was what resonated through my mind.

Cancer cluster.

The phrase makes us think of radiation, power lines, something toxic in the local water, some common thread among those who have the same disease.

But Jeff and Alexis don’t even live in the same part of the state.

“Alexis, listen to me,” I said forcefully. “Just calm down. Relax. I’ll fix it. Pack a bag and go stay with Aunt Kathy. She will take care of you. Just hold on, and trust me! I’ll fix it! I swear to God, Alexis! I will find what you need!
I will not lose you too…
”

Part II: Resurrection

There are two kinds of nardus. The one is called Indian, the other Syrian. Not that it is found in Syria, but because one part of the mountain where it grows turns towards Syria and the other towards India… Applied they stop discharges of the womb and the whites… A decoction (taken as a drink with cold water) helps nausea and stomach rosiones, those troubled with wind, sickness of the liver or head, and painful kidneys… They are mixed with antidotes.

There is also another kind of nardus called Sampharitic from the name of the place—very little, yet great-eared, with a white stalk sometimes growing in the middle, very much like the smell of a goat in scent. This ought utterly to be refused.

-De Materia Medica

Dioscorides (ca. 40–90 CE)

Chapter Twelve

My son is gone. My husband is gone. My daughter is slipping away.

There are currently one hundred thirty elements on the periodic table. Of these, thirty-two are man-made. Jeff and I have patented twelve of them.

As I hung up the phone, the desperate wailing of my daughter still resonating in my ears, I was ready to crawl through Hell for the thirteenth.

I called Alyssa Iacovani and asked for her help in picking up where she and Jeff had left off. Twenty minutes later, I climbed into her car.

“Tell me what we are looking for,” she said.

“I doubt you remember the acronym CHNOPS from your freshman chemistry class,” I began explaining. “It stands for carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, oxygen, phosphorus, sulfur. These six chemical elements are by far the most abundant elements in the world. The CHNOPS elements constitute an estimated ninety-nine percent of matter. The remaining one hundred twenty-four elements on the periodic table make up less than one percent of life. We are looking for a place that contains these rare chemical elements.”

“So, we are looking for less than one percent of the matter existing in the world?” Alyssa asked.

“It’s worse than that. We are not even looking for an element that actually exists. Instead, we need to find the appropriate building blocks, and then we need to identify a rare reaction between them that can generate an isotope so transient that it will be difficult to detect, even briefly, and even more difficult to prove the existence of.”

Alyssa shook her head. “That sounds impossible.”

“It almost is,” I replied.

She plunged into the chaotic traffic of downtown Naples, and her driving reminded me of the previous day’s cab ride. “I see you’ve been living here long enough to have attended the Naples School of Kamikaze Driving, and graduate with honors.” Alyssa only grinned fiendishly and waved a middle finger at another driver she had just cut off.

After a brief stop for supplies, we hurtled out of the city and began winding our way southward down the coast.

“I know a lot of places that may fit your criteria of rare elements,” Alyssa said. “Have you read Dante’s
Inferno
?”

“Uh, yeah. Why?”

“Dante Alighieri was from Florence, but it is rumored that he got the idea for his
Inferno
from an area very near here. Today this area is called the Phlegraean Fields.

“Within the Phlegraean Fields there is a whole series of large, shallow volcanic craters shooting geysers of steam, hot springs that are now underwater, smoking caverns, and a huge sulfurous cavity called Solfatara, meaning sulfur—the ancients, of course, called this element brimstone. There’s also Lake Avernus, which was thought for centuries to be the entrance to Hades.

“The geothermal activity in this region, together with our natural landscape, is unlike any in the world. And, of course, the source of it all is Mount Vesuvius.”

“Then let’s start there,” I said, and she nodded. “But first, I need to know more about the plant. What is a nardo? Where does it come from?”

“Nardo might be spikenard,” she said, “which is native only to the Himalayas. It was a very rare luxury in ancient Rome and Egypt. The upper classes valued spikenard for the perfume oils extracted from it.”

“Then why would they have had it at the bedside in a hospital room?”

“Only if they believed in its medicinal value.”

I nodded agreement.

“Alternatively,” Alyssa offered, “the text from Herculaneum might have been describing lavender, which was termed ‘naardus’ by the ancient Greeks and is, of course, quite abundant throughout Italy.”

“Great,” I said. “There must be a million varieties of lavender in this world. So we are looking either for a magic plant that only grows on the highest mountain range in the world or for a quite ordinary one that could have adorned hospital rooms simply for its sheer abundance and nice smell. That narrows it down.”

“Exactly,” Alyssa said. “But I think the historical record has narrowed it down for us. I believe it is spikenard—
vaffanculo
!” Alyssa shouted as we rounded a curve.

Alyssa slammed on her brakes and jerked the steering wheel, and we narrowly missed crashing into a massive pile-up of halted vehicles. Her small car jumped onto a narrow shoulder. We screeched to a halt, and a cloud of dust engulfed us.

I gulped. “Oh, my God. Are you OK?”

Alyssa coughed and nodded.

I peered across the landscape of cars haphazardly strewn before us, and then I saw the accident. An overturned car was still smoking. Neither police nor medical help had yet arrived. I glanced around, and, as if on cue, a siren began wailing behind us.

After the fire truck passed by, the restless motorists began to coordinate with each other, and traffic slowly resumed. Alyssa shifted her car into gear, and we fell into funereal single file behind a small sedan.

We reached the accident just as a uniformed police officer was laying a sheet over a human body. A small river of blood flowed from beneath the sheet and down a gentle slope in the road. Lying parallel to the body were two others, also covered. One of them looked very small.

I glanced over at Alyssa and was surprised to see her sobbing uncontrollably.

Alyssa pulled her car out of the slow single line of traffic and onto the shoulder once again. There she parked and leaned her forehead against the steering wheel, crying.

I placed an awkward hand on her shoulder. “Do you want me to drive?” I felt stupid as soon as the words escaped my lips, but I could think of nothing else to say.

She only shook her head and continued crying.

A few moments later, her sobs abated, and she leaned past me to reach into the glove compartment. She withdrew a pile of napkins and began blowing her nose and wiping her eyes. She consulted the rearview mirror for a moment and brushed a wisp of hair from her cheek. Then she sat quietly, sniffling for a moment. She stared straight ahead, her hands on the steering wheel.

“My family was killed in a car crash,” she said. “It was only a few weeks ago. When I arrived at the scene, it looked something like that.”

I opened my mouth to say another stupid thing, but this time I caught myself.

“You’re wondering how I am functioning,” she said. “The answer is that I have no choice. It was just after the incident I told you about when my brakes went out along the Amalfi coast. I narrowly avoided crashing. The same thing happened to my husband. His brakes went out, but he couldn’t avoid the crash. That’s when I realized that neither occurrence was an accident. But the police wouldn’t listen to what they considered the crazy conspiracy theory of a grieving wife and mother. They ruled the crash that took my family an unfortunate accident.”

Alyssa took a shaky breath and exhaled noisily. She turned and looked at me, and her green eyes were exhausted. Only then did I notice the bags beneath them.

“The only thing that kept me going was Jeff. He returned my call at just the right time. If I believed in such things, I would have thought he was sent to me, an angel. He convinced me that the nardo holds the key to saving a lot of lives.”

Alyssa gave me a determined look, and I suddenly felt that I knew her. She was as driven as I was.

“Help me find this goddamn plant,” she said.

A few moments later, we were breezing along the Campania coastline again as if nothing had happened.

“Why do you think it is spikenard?” I asked.

“Because several species of spikenard are described as nardo in an ancient text,” she said. “The book is
De Materia Medica
. The author, Dioscorides. This man was a traveling physician with Nero’s army, and even today
De Materia Medica
is still considered one of the most complete reference books for organic medicine in history. It is the closest thing we have to a contemporary eyewitness account of the plant species we are looking for.

“Furthermore,” she went on, “this text was never ‘rediscovered.’ It never
left
circulation from the time it was written in the first century CE. It was the first written account of medical botany and the extant authority on herbal medicine all the way through the sixteenth century. For almost two millennia, it was the
Physician’s Desk Reference
, utilized consistently by the best doctors in the world. So if this text says nardo is spikenard, I’m inclined to go along with it.”

We turned off of the highway and wound our way up a short hill. Moments later, we pulled into a large parking lot at the base of Mount Vesuvius. A few buses and vans were also in the lot, and tourists were wandering around, photographing the volcano.

“I hope you’re in shape,” Alyssa said, examining the mountain from below.

“I’ll race you,” I challenged.

She was right. The climb was steep. But I estimated it would take no more than about fifteen minutes to reach the top. I charged forward, breathing steadily. Alyssa kept pace with me, and we quickly overtook a family who had paused for a small child to rest. I could hear Alyssa’s breathing become somewhat labored as we climbed. She was in good shape, but not a runner like I was.

“Much of Dioscorides’ knowledge came from his own travels during campaigns with Nero’s army—but much of it did not. His text mentions plants from all regions of the world, many of which Nero’s campaigns never brought him to. Dioscorides describes many, many species that there is no way he saw first-hand.”

Alyssa glanced behind her to confirm that the nearest tourists were out of earshot. “Experts agree that these species were discovered on the campaigns of Alexander the Great. Dioscorides must have learned of them from Alexander’s records. So isn’t it interesting that Cleopatra destroyed these records long before Dioscorides was ever born.”

We reached the top of the volcano, and I stood for a moment to stare into the mouth of the killer. The crater looked so quiet, so innocent, but it is still an active volcano.

I imagined the destruction that Mount Vesuvius had unleashed in 79 CE. And I realized that it would happen again. I looked toward Naples and the bay. The boats. The castles. The shops, the restaurants, and the homes. At any moment, it could all be gone.