Free Has Anyone Seen Jessica Jenkins? by Liz Kessler Page B

to join him. He was trying to find a cure for . . .” Nancy cleared her throat. “Well, for all sorts of illnesses that there was no cure for. Only, it didn’t work. Then, when the funding got cut, James gave up. On everything.”
    “James?”
    “Dr. Malone. My colleague. For a long time, we didn’t even talk about it.” Nancy twirled a thick dreadlock around her fingers. “Just a couple of months ago, he approached me about starting up our research again.” She turned to look at us both. Her eyes seemed to have an extra sparkle in them. “James is one of the best doctors I knew. He’s done things others wouldn’t even attempt; he sees links that everyone else misses. The man is a genius. If he wanted to give it another try, I was in.”
    “What made him think it would work now if it hadn’t worked then?” I asked.
    “He didn’t know if it would or not, but he wanted to try. It was exactly ten years since . . . well, since everything had fallen apart. Plus, he’d come into some money, which meant he could restart the project without government support. He rented an office space, turned it into a lab, and we started working to catch up with where we’d left off.” Nancy paused.
    “And?” Izzy prompted.
    “And it was hard. When we’d abandoned the project a decade ago, James destroyed virtually everything to do with it. That meant we were starting from scratch. But then we had a breakthrough.”
    Nancy hesitated and glanced at me. “It was around your birthday,” she went on. “I’d been shopping for a present for you. I saw something nice in a shop in town.”
    “Tiger’s Eye?”
    Nancy nodded. “There were a few things that I liked. The necklace I gave you and a couple of bracelets. One with an amethyst in it, the other with a moonstone. I couldn’t decide which to get, so I bought all three and decided I’d give you one and keep the other two myself.”
    “Did you know there was anything . . .
special
about the crystals?” I asked, suddenly realizing it was possible that Nancy
still
didn’t know what the crystals did. Possible, but unlikely.
    “No,” she replied. “It was a couple of days after your birthday that everything changed. I’d left the two bracelets in the lab. James was on one side of the room, using the centrifuge in an experiment to separate isotopes so we could analyze the components of our serum.”
    I stared blankly at Nancy, wondering why she’d suddenly started talking in a foreign language.
    Nancy noticed my face. “Basically, he was working on a controlled experiment with lots of delicate items. Meanwhile, I was rushing around doing too many things at once and not concentrating properly on any of them.”
    “Sounds like an accident waiting to happen,” Izzy mused.
    “Exactly. James was at a crucial moment. He’d assessed the sedimentation principle with all the different variables, and — ”
    Nancy stopped as she looked from me to Izzy. “OK, basically, James had poured the serum into a special kind of bowl, and at that exact moment, I swung around, grabbed my hospital bag from a shelf, and knocked the amethyst bracelet into that bowl.”
    “Yikes!” I exclaimed.
    “Yes. James had spent hours getting to this point in his experiment and he wasn’t happy, but then something incredible happened. The bowl began to vibrate — ever so gently — and the serum inside it frothed and fizzed.”
    I felt the hairs on my arm tingle as Nancy talked.
    “And then, the strangest thing of all,” she continued, “the bracelet itself came right out of the bowl and hovered above it for a few seconds. A moment later, it fell back down, the serum stopped fizzing, and it was as though nothing had happened.”
    “Wow!” Izzy blinked at Nancy. “What did you do?”
    “To begin with, we stared at the space above the bowl, not speaking. I think we were both afraid to be the first one to say what we’d just seen in case the other one told us we were crazy.”
    Yup, I knew