They reached the old house. Kim held the door open for Edward. He carried the painting into the parlor. When he held it up to the shadow over the mantel, it fit perfectly.
“At least we were right about where this painting used to hang,” Edward said. He left the painting on the mantel.
“And I’ll see to it that it hangs there again,” Kim said. “Elizabeth deserves to be returned to her house.”
“Does that mean you’ve decided to fix this place up?”
“Maybe so,” Kim said. “But first I’ll have to talk with my family, particularly my brother.”
“Personally, I think it’s a great idea,” Edward said. He took the plastic containers from Kim and told her he was going to the cellar to get some dirt samples. At the parlor door he stopped.
“If I find Claviceps purpurea down there,” he said with a wry smile, “I know one thing that information will do: it will rob a bit of the supernatural out of the story of the Salem witchcraft trials.”
Kim didn’t respond. She was mesmerized by Elizabeth’s portrait and lost in thought. Edward shrugged. Then he went into the kitchen and climbed down into the cool, damp darkness of the cellar. 3
Monday,July 18, 1994
As usual, Edward Armstrong’s lab at the Harvard Medical Complex on Longfellow Avenue was the scene of frenzied activity. There was the appearance of bedlam with white-coated people scurrying every which way among a futuristic array of high-technology equipment. But the sense of disorder was only for the uninitiated. For the informed it was a known fact that high science was in continual progress.
Ultimately it all depended on Edward, although he was not the only scientist who was working in the string of rooms affectionately referred to as Armstrong’s Fiefdom. Because of his notoriety as a genius, his celebrity as a synthetic chemist, and his prominence as a neuroscientist, applications for staff, doctorate, and postdoctorate positions greatly outnumbered the positions that Edward had been able to carve out of his chronically limited space, budget, and schedule. Consequently, Edward got the best and the brightest staff and students.
Other professors called Edward a glutton for punishment. Not only did he have the largest cadre of graduate students: he insisted on teaching an undergraduate basic chemistry course, even during the summer. He was the only full professor who did so. As he explained it, he felt an obligation to stimulate the young minds of the day at the earliest time possible.
Striding back from having delivered one of his famous undergraduate lectures, Edward entered his domain through one of the lab’s side doors. Like an animal feeder at a zoo he was immediately mobbed by his graduate students. They were all working on separate aspects of Edward’s overall goal of elucidating the mechanisms of short- and long-term memory. Each had a problem or a question that Edward answered in staccato fashion, sending them back to their benches to continue their research efforts.
With the last question answered, Edward strode over to his desk. He didn’t have a private office, a concept he disdained as a frivolous waste of needed space. He was content with a corner containing a work surface, a few chairs, a computer terminal, and a file cabinet. He was accompanied by his closest assistant, Eleanor Youngman, a postdoc who’d been with him for four years.
“You have a visitor,” Eleanor said as they arrived at Edward’s desk. “He’s waiting at the departmental secretary’s desk.”
Edward dumped his class materials and exchanged his tweed jacket for a white lab coat. “I don’t have time for visitors,” he said.
“I’m afraid this one you have to see,” Eleanor said.
Edward glanced at his assistant. She was sporting one of those smiles that suggested she was about to burst out laughing. Eleanor was a spirited, bright blonde from Oxnard, California, who looked like she belonged with the surfing set. Instead she had earned her Ph.D. in biochemistry from Berkeley by the tender age of twenty-three. Edward found her invaluable, not only because of her intelligence, but also because of her commitment. She worshiped Edward, convinced he would make the next quantum leap in understanding neurotransmitters and their role in emotion and memory.