The Immortalist Read Online Free

have meant so much to him.”
    There it is . The trump card. What Daddy would have wanted. The card everybody plays when they want to get their way. Cricket felt a tenseness about her mouth. But her answer was meek: “Yes, I’m sure it would.”
    â€œThink about it?”
    She shrugged. She was too tired to argue.
    â€œGood, good.” Gifford seemed to sense that one more word would have been a word too much. Hannibal, seeing him start for the golf cart, shot ahead and leaped into the backseat. As Gifford drove off, he called out to the guards, loudly enough that Cricket could not fail to hear, “Let Dr. Rensselaer-Wright through, gentlemen. Make sure she gets a Level I administrative pass, with a mag strip—not the ordinary visitor’s pass. She can go wherever she likes.”

    Acadia Springs Biological Research Institute had changed almost beyond recognition. As Cricket drove across the hundred-acre campus—a little finger of rock and sand on the southern edge of Mount Desert Island—she saw block after block of steel, glass, and concrete laboratories where only five years ago a carpet of hemlock and white pine had covered the virgin hills. The three high-rise labs on the west end, Dalton, Sobczak, and fourteen-story Rensselaer, cast a midmorning shadow that reached to Smuggler’s Beach, where clam diggers used to be seen at low tide. On the north side of the central quadrangle she barely made out the yellow gables of the old Cheville House lab, where she had worked as an undergrad intern sorting Drosophila flies for Erich Freiberg, the famous geneticist. Rising above Cheville were the white turrets of Weiszacker House, the sprawling mansion that served as administrative center and Director’s quarters—and that had been her childhood home.
    Weiszacker House. The verandaed, arbored Camelot of the princess of Acadia Springs. It seemed like a fairy tale now: the story of the little girl with patched pants who was on a first-name basis with the world’s top scholars of medicine and molecular biology. Other little girls had tea sets. She had a Zeiss binocular microscope, with a substage condenser and the finest achromat objective lenses, plus a rack of stains to color the specimens she brought home daily from the woods and shore. Bottles with names that even now sounded like poetry to her:
    Eosin
    Haematoxylin
    Sudan black
    Safranin O
    Prussian blue  . . .
    She tried not to think about Weiszacker House, nor about her mother and father who had passed away within its walls, nor about Charles Gifford, who now slept in her father’s grand four-poster bed and ruled over his legacy from his same mahogany-paneled study. She had one thing to focus on—and it led her well past the quadrangle, to an L-shaped block of shingled town houses at the western water’s edge, a place called Wabanaki Cove.
    She parked her car and went up a wrought-iron stairway to the second unit from the end. There she paused, listening for the sound of anyone at home. Her resolve weakened as she looked at the peeling gray paint of the door—paint that she herself had laid long ago. What am I doing here? she wondered. What makes me think I can go through with this? Wouldn’t everyone be better off if I just got back into the damn car and disappeared forever? But even as she wavered in her mind, her small hand, roughened by encounters with rocks and thorns and the equatorial sun, reached out and rapped against the door with a sound out of proportion to its size.
    She took a half step back, listening. Nothing—a reprieve. Then her heart sank at the sound of approaching footsteps, followed by the rattle of a chain. She drew a quick breath as the door opened. A tall, dark-haired man in a red-and-brown flannel shirt faced her in the entryway, his feet planted in a foursquare stance.
    â€œCricket!” he exclaimed. “What are you . . . Why didn’t you