Syndrome by Thomas Hoover (read along books txt) 📖

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and more like an utter dunce. She hadn’t caught any of this in Grant’s come-on, but now… Nina was right about that sixth sense.

But what could the real story be? Grant was more a simple con artist than some embodiment of evil. Think the Music Man in designer threads, not Darth Vader. Evil was surely too strong a word He was just the consummate self-promoting hustler. The troubling part was, he was so damned good at it.

“Mom, you’re wonderful today. Why don’t we all three go somewhere for brunch now? Right now. There’s a new French place just down Columbus that needs checking out.”

She had an eerie foreboding it might be their last chance.

“No, honey, you brought some smoked fish, didn’t you? That’s all I want.” Nina dismissed the idea with a wave of her hand. “Besides, no one in this town knows how to brew a proper pot of tea.” Then, the next thing Ally knew, she was back to musing out loud about Grant. “I can’t stop wondering. He said this doctor he knows might work a miracle for me. What am I supposed to think?”

Ally was trying to decide whether a glimmer of hope, even though it was almost certainly false, might be a healthy tonic for Nina just now.

“Mom, Grant gave me some materials about that doctor. I’ll read them tonight, I promise.” She was listening to the Janacek quartet soar, and it was bucking her up. “Let me see what I can find out.”

“He wants me to start in right away,” Nina pressed. “I think he said there are some studies going on at this clinic, but they’re almost over. It’s free now, and unless I go soon, I can’t get in the program. He said he would take me out there Monday morning if I wanted. But if I go with anybody, I want it to be you.”

He’s such a bastard, Ally thought.

She glanced at Maria, who’d been watching from the kitchen door and listening to all that had happened. She was looking very upset and she motioned Ally toward the doorway with her eyes.

“Let me get a glass of water, Mom.” She headed for the kitchen.

“Did you hear all the things she’s talking about?” she asked when they were out of earshot.

Maria nodded. “A lot of what your mother said is true. It was very strange. At the time she acted like she didn’t understand him. Now I realize she did. Or maybe it all just came back to her.”

“What do you think is really going on?” Ally was studying her, hoping to get at the truth. “She seems a lot better today.”

Maria paused a moment. “Miss Hampton, I don’t believe your mother is going to be with us much longer. I saw my own go through much the same thing. There’s always a glimmer just before…” She looked down and stopped.

“You said Grant asked her something about me. What—”

“I don’t think she remembers. He was asking her about your blood type. It seemed a very strange question.”

Ally couldn’t think of any reason why he would be asking that.

“Maria, what was your impression of him? Overall?”

“Just that he seemed very nervous. Very uneasy.” She hesitated, as though uncertain how to continue. “He wanted something, Miss Hampton. That much I’m sure about. But this doctor he wants to take her to. It sounded to me like he does things that are against the laws of nature.”

“Grant wants me to go out to that clinic too.”

“Whatever you do, just stay close to her,” Maria said finally, picking up the tray with its smoked fish and teapot covered with a knit cozy. “She may not have that long.”

Maria had a seer’s mystical bent that sometimes troubled Ally. What if she was right? It was moments like this when Ally truly missed having someone special in her life.

Chapter 5

Sunday, April 5

3:19 P.M.

The afternoon was waning when Ally finally headed back downtown. Days like today she couldn’t help coining away buoyed, feeling her mom was going to be cogent forever.

In fact, Ally was more worried about herself just now. About two o’clock she’d started feeling that sensation in her chest again, but she hadn’t wanted her mother, or Maria, to know she was using vasodilator medication. She casually said her farewells and got down to the car and was sitting behind the wheel before she popped a nitro tab. She immediately felt okay again, and as she drove down Broadway, heading for her office, she reviewed all that had happened.

After their brunch of smoked fish and onion chutney and soda bread and a pot of double-strength Earl Grey, she’d tried to sell her mother on a trip to the Bahamas, with Maria joining them. Soon, maybe at the beginning of summer. She wanted Nina to spend some time thinking about it, but she didn’t want to wait too long. Was this just going to be a distraction at the end of Nina’s life? God, she didn’t want to think so. She wanted to think of it as a rebonding.

Nina had always liked to revisit the Devonshire countryside of her childhood in midsummer-when Arthur could take time off-always for just a week, but it was as intensively planned as a major military campaign. Her favorite thing was to trek among the hedgerows and stone fences, making charcoal sketches on opened-out brown bags. In the evenings they would dine en famille at a country inn. They went with local favorites, like kidney pie. Then they would stroll the country lanes in the moonlight as a family. No TV, and she and Grant hated everything about the trips. Booooring.

But that was long ago and far away, when she and Grant were still kids. Now her mom would surely want something restful. And some guaranteed sunshine wouldn’t hurt either. Already she had an idea: why not rent a house with a private pool, say on Paradise Island where Nina could spend a couple of hours each afternoon in the casino? She’d always loved casinos, and never missed a chance to hit the blackjack tables if she was anywhere near one. Her loss limit was a hundred dollars, but she actually beat the house more often than not. The teatime scotch hadn’t impaired her card-counting skills.

Nina appeared to like the idea, so Ally had started making up a schedule in her head. The beginning of summer would be off-season in the Caribbean and there should be some real bargains to be had. She made a mental note to ask Glenda, her assertive, gum-chewing travel agent at Empress, to start trolling for a package.

What was Ally really thinking, hoping? She was fantasizing she could heal Nina all by herself. She so desperately wanted to, she had a premonition she could will it to happen. When she saw her mom on good days, she always found herself believing she could somehow make all her days good. She was sure of it, against all odds.

What she wasn’t sure about was what her mother really thought about Grant’s proposal to enroll her in this clinic in New Jersey. Was this doctor’s “miracle” stem cell cure based on a real medical advance, or was he some kind of charlatan?

The first thing to do was to find out more about this supposed medical magician, Karl Van de Vliet. The envelope Grant gave her was still lying there on her breakfast bar, unopened. She told herself she’d read it the minute she got home tonight, when the day’s work was over and she could concentrate….

The Sunday office. The interior-design job she had on her mind was behind schedule and she was feeling a lot of pressure. It was for a Norwegian couple in their mid-thirties. He was a software programmer working in New York’s restructured Silicon Alley, and she was teaching at the Fashion Institute of Technology. Together they pulled down over 250 thou a year and they’d decided to stop throwing away money on obscene New York rents.

They bought an entire floor, actually three small apartments, of what was formerly a tenement in the West Fifties, an area once known as Hell’s Kitchen but now much gentrified and renamed Clinton. They had dreams of an open-space loft of the kind made famous in SoHo when artists took over abandoned factory buildings and gutted the space, taking out all the walls.

Because they had combined three apartments, they had to file their plans with the NYC Department of Buildings and modify the building’s Certificate of Occupancy to reflect the change in the number of dwelling units.

So far so good, but then a woman who was the local member of the District Council got wind of the project and sent someone from her office to look over the place. The next day, the Department of Buildings’ approval of their plans was abruptly withdrawn.

It turned out that there was an obscure law on the books concerning Clinton, one that even the Department of Buildings was only vaguely aware of. It said that in order to preserve the “family character” of the neighborhood, no renovation could alter the number of rooms in a residential building. Not the number of apartments, mind you, just the number of rooms.

That was when they showed up at CitiSpace in despair. They wanted Ally to help them by doing some kind of design that would satisfy the law and also give them the open, airy feeling they had set their hopes on. On the face of it, their two goals seemed mutually contradictory and impossible.

He was short and shy and she was plump and sassy and Ally liked them both a lot. Sometimes in this business she sensed she was helping people realize their dreams and that was a very rewarding feeling. Real estate was an emotional thing. Your home was a part of you. She always tried to get to know people before she did any designs for them. Sometimes design was more psychology than anything else.

But this time she had to solve a problem before she could wax creative. If their plan for open space could be stopped by some obscure local provision that even the Department of Buildings was fuzzy about, then maybe there was some other obscure law in the Housing Code that could be used to fight back. The full code had recently been put on the NYC Web site, so she wanted to go over every page and see what she could come up with. And she wanted to do it in the office, undisturbed with all the architectural plans close to hand.

The office was deserted when she cruised in and clicked on the lights. She got on the expansive NYC Web site and started poring over the Housing Code, though she was still obsessing about Nina. What if this doctor in New Jersey actually could do something for her?

Finish here, she told herself, and then go home and read the guy’s CV.

A pot of decaf coffee later, she came across a little-known fact, which she now vaguely remembered from her days as a practicing architect. If you installed a fifteen-inch drop across a ceiling, that was technically a wall in the eyes of the NYC Department of Buildings. The space on each side became a separate “room.”

As they say in the movies, bingo.

In fact, why not do a honeycomb ceiling that would actually simulate the industrial look they were seeking, anyway? The ceiling was over eleven feet high; there was plenty of vertical space. Nobody would know it was just a sneaky way to get around a funny local aberration in the Building Code.

I’m brilliant, she thought. Yes! Dad would be proud.

She made some sketches, and by that time it