LITMIR.BIZ

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and strangely relaxing: sitting on a wooden stool about where Ryan was now, my head leaning against the cow, eyes shut, the milk rhythmically splashing into the bucket. That gentle noise was now replaced by the hum of vacuum suction. I looked at the cows and felt sorry that none of them had ever felt a human hand-milking them.

      “Where’s Mac?” I asked again.

      “He’s got some kind of flu bug again.”

      Mac had seemed less vital recently and I realized with alarm that he must be pushing seventy-five. What would we do without him? Ryan couldn’t run the operation on his own. He was too often away on business, and Rose, his wife, had two preschoolers to care for. The thought left me cold, yet life is defined by death. If we lived forever, life could not be the same. Death gave it meaning, where immortality could not. Death made it leaner, meaner, infinitely more exciting, because every second was precious. God. Even eternity was weighing on me today. Where the hell did these thoughts come from?

      Now that I was here with Ryan I suddenly felt tongue-tied, my thoughts everywhere but where they needed to be. Problem was I didn’t know where to start. I wondered if my theory was just crazy nonsense, and I didn’t want to hear Ryan tell me as much. I was so easily deflated when I was in this kind of mood. But a theory was better than the alternative — nothing — and I couldn’t sit around waiting for the police: they’d as much as told me they couldn’t do anything.

      Ryan disconnected the tubes, disinfected the cow’s teats, and moved to the next cow. After he’d hooked her up he leaned against the barn wall and grinned at me. “How’s the city?” Ryan seldom had occasion to go into Ottawa. He had a lab and a darkroom behind the barn, and with a fax machine and computer he was able to conduct much of his business from home, run the farm, and have lunch with his family all at the same time. I hesitated, and Ryan looked up and saw the worried look on my face.

      “What’s up, Cor?”

      I fiddled with the ear of the cow Ryan had been milking. It flipped its head and tried to nuzzle my fingers. “Some jerk broke into my lab and killed all my insects.”

      “Oh lord.” Ryan looked at me, searching my face. He reached out for me, held me close. “I’m sorry, Cor. All that work.”

      The warmth of Ryan’s body made me want to melt into it and forget all my troubles. Hugs had that effect on me. Horrified, I felt tears stinging my eyes and pulled away, turning my back to Ryan. All I needed now was to cry like a blithering idiot.

      “Why would anybody want to do that?” said Ryan, jumping into the awkward silence I had created. “I can understand it if you worked with cute cuddly things and some bozos thought you were mistreating them, but insects? Who would ever dream of championing insects?”

      I struggled to get my voice out of the bubbly crack-ly stage that preceded full-fledged tears and said nothing.

      “Can you salvage any of your experiments?” Ever the practical Ryan.

      “That wasn’t the worst of it, Ryan.” I paused and turned to him. “They took all my backup disks and drenched the computer in formaldehyde, wiping out all my data — maybe three years of work, four papers — all my backups. The computer tech people aren’t holding out much hope and neither are the cops. Whoever it was did a good job, wore gloves and all those spy-type things.”

      Ryan’s jaw sank down around his knees. “But you have paper backup?” He looked down at my face. “Oh no, Cordi,” he whispered. “Tell me it isn’t so.”

      I looked down at my feet.

      “No paper backup for some of my raw data,” I said bitterly, “and the disks were in the lab too.”

      “Dear God, Cordi. What are you going to do?”

      I could have hugged him for not reminding me how many times he had told me about making sure I had backup. Even so, I couldn’t still the urge to defend myself.

      “I thought I had it all organized. The backup disks were in my office far away from the lab in case of any accident. I guess I should have brought a copy home.”

      “What happened?”

      “When I was backing up last week — you know how slow it can be — I asked Greg if he’d turn off the computer, put away the disks in my office, and lock up when it was finished. Unfortunately my office was locked and he didn’t have my key, so he took the disks back up to the lab and put them in the drawer under the computer, meaning to return them to my office this week. He forgot, and I never noticed.”

      “Can you salvage anything?”

      “Yeah, but I’ve lost most of my raw data. And I need it to do revisions for Animal Behaviour. They may give up on me. The Dean won’t be pleased either. He’s under pressure to have his staff perform, and having me basically lose maybe a year’s work puts me behind the line for publishing. I can’t understand why all this happened in the first place.”

      Ryan scrunched up his brow, the worry lines tickling his eyes.

      “Oh damn! The cow!” He leapt into action. The tubes were trying to suck out the milk that was no longer there, and the cow was doing a bit of a jig. Ryan scooted around darting in to pull the tubes off, and I found I couldn’t help laughing. Ryan emerged from the side of the cow looking sheepish.

      “At least I made you laugh,” he said as he moved down to the next cow. “But I don’t see it, Cordi. Maybe they mistook your lab for someone else’s. Are any of your colleagues in biology or entomology doing any controversial stuff that environmentalists or animal rights activists might be offended by? Even bugs are getting their sympathy these days.”

      I hesitated and ran my hand down the backside of the cow, who was moving about restlessly, her udder painfully distended as Ryan moved in with the tubes. He’d been late in starting the milking.

      “Ryan, there’s no reason for it that I can see. No animal rights activist would come hounding me when there are other, more photogenic critters to stalk.”

      “Have you failed any student lately? Or what about Hilson?”

      I shook my head, “No. I don’t think he has the guts to take things that far. And I haven’t failed anyone who’d be a likely candidate. No, there’s simply no reason for it that I can see unless it has something to do with this Jake Diamond guy.”

      Ryan looked bewildered, reached for some words, hesitated, reached for others, and finally said, “Diamond. That’s our dead body, eh?”

      “Yeah, turns out he was the guy causing all the trouble up there over the logging, a guy with a quick temper apparently.” I filled Ryan in on Diamond’s biography, or what I knew of it, and then told him about the larvae and how only the specimens from Dumoine had been taken.

      “So, in the space of a week we find a dead body, almost get killed, and then your troubles begin. The dead larvae from the canoe trip are stolen along with all your disks, some of which had data from the trip already entered.” He looked at me for confirmation. I nodded. “Also your hard drive is toast.”

      “That’s right,” I said, “and the only link that I can see is the larvae. They came from Diamond’s body. So it must to be related to Diamond’s death, my disks, the larvae. He seems to have made a few enemies, Ryan, especially among the loggers. There are a number of people out there who might be quite happy he is dead.” Ryan looked at me in astonishment.

      “His death was an accident, Cordi,” he said, reading my mind and not liking what he saw.

      “Was it?” I asked.

       chapter seven

      Ryan slammed the gearshift back down to second and braked as the grey Jeep ahead of him came to a sudden stop.

      “How the hell can you go through this every day?” I looked up from reading the newspaper and eyeballed the snaking line of rush hour cars ahead of us on the Champlain

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