Page 46 of If Anything Happens To Me

“Doctor Constance Martin,” Minerva said. “You could have made her proud.”

“Idomake her proud,” he said.

“Right. By telling people you’re going to find a cure. But Fitch, you’re really just trying to reverse the curse. Good old Sibylline magic. Here you are, stealing the dust I sweep off my workbench. The ore, the spent tailings, the leftover grindings of all that precious gold . . . for what? For a new spell? Next you’ll be wanting wool of bat and eye of newt.”

Fitch muttered something, and I heard the shop door slam behind him. I strained to hear, finally letting myself sneeze as the Jeep revved and drove away.

“He’s gone,” Minerva said, letting us out of the closet.

“Why did you say I didn’t have to explain about Fitch, that you get it?” I asked her.

“Because he’s obsessed, in a way that hurts people,” she said. “He’s brilliant, but he’s got problems. He’s so focused on this ‘cure,’ but it’s just as much about proving himself to his mother.”

I knew that part, about his mother, but until I’d learned all these unfolding truths, it had just made me feel sorry for Fitch—a kid worried about his sister, whose mom left them alone too much.

Minerva took a deep breath. “I love my aunt Constance, but she’s so preoccupied. In a way it’s understandable, dealing with the gene that only affects the women of our family. Daphne—our great-aunt—says it’s like the Sword of Damocles.”

There were songs about the Sword of Damocles. My parents had a record where someone sang about the sword about to fall. But it was the Greek parable that affected me most: a deadly weapon hanging over your head. You might escape it forever, or it could crash down at any moment. Like an evil monster hovering above, biding his time, deciding whether to take you or not.

“So all of you have the gene, but not everyone gets the disease?” I asked.

“Yes,” Minerva said. “And we don’t know who it will hit—whose gene will mutate into the full-blown disease. That’s the thing about Abigail. She’s had the antibodies for a long time, but the disease didn’t manifest till she was almost a teenager.”

“It’s progressed?” Iris asked.

Minerva nodded. “Every night she’s at risk of dying,” she said.

That stabbed my heart. I ached to think of anyone losing their sister. But what part did kidnapping girls play in Fitch’s search for a cure?

“Why did Fitch apologize for hurting you?” Iris asked. “What did he do?”

Minerva’s face twisted with remembered pain. “An experiment. I’d like to forget about it,” she said.

“But you lived to tell,” Iris said.

“Of course I lived, it wasn’t life-threatening. What do you mean?” Minerva asked.

“Fitch kidnapped my sister and me,” Iris said sharply. “Gale—Abigail—was with him. They shoved us into a van and took us somewhere.”

“Took you,” Minerva said, looking into the distance as if at a bad memory. “Earlier, you asked me about the blue van.”

“And you said it belonged to a family foundation,” I said. The detective in me knew even before she spoke what she would say.

“Yes, the Agassiz Foundation,” Minerva said, and I nodded.

“Fitch loves to talk about that foundation,” I said. “He makes it sound so important.”

“The van is registered to the foundation,” Minerva said.

“It’s his kidnap van,” I said, watching the color in Minerva’s face drain away.

“What did he do to you and your sister?” Minerva asked Iris.

“I remember everything now,” Iris said, looking determined. “He took us to the attic that had those panels—the ones of the Sibylline sisters. He told us we were doing something good for humanity. We were going to save the goddess. Then he took blood samples to make sure we were AB negative, like his sister.”

“Like all the girls in our family who carry the gene,” Minerva said. “It’s my blood type, too.”

Mine too, I thought. If Fitch’s research required girls with AB negative blood, was I on his list? Why couldn’t he have taken me instead of Eloise? I wished he had, so she could still be alive. I would have fought him off, hurt him before he could kill me or my sister.

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