CHAPTER 4 CLAIRE
1528 Words
Claire was seventeen and impossible and the best person Mara knew.
She said this to herself sometimes as a reminder on the days when Claire was specifically and creatively difficult, which was most days, because Claire had inherited from somewhere in the family tree an absolute conviction that she was correct about most things and a complete inability to be quiet about it, and at seventeen these traits were refined to a particular edge.
She was also, as a matter of fact, correct about most things. Mara had stopped arguing with this a long time ago and had arrived instead at a kind of reluctant peace with having a younger sibling who was sharper than her in specific ways.
Claire was at the kitchen table when Mara got home. She had a laptop open and a legal pad covered in notes and a half-eaten bowl of cereal that had been eaten some time ago and gone soft.
She looked at Mara.
"Tell me everything," she said.
Mara told her.
Claire listened without interrupting, which was her tell — she only stopped talking when something was important enough to require all her attention. She made two notes on the legal pad. She pushed the cereal away from her elbow.
When Mara finished, Claire said: "Geneva clinic. What's the name."
Mara told her.
Claire typed. She read. She read more. She turned the laptop to show Mara a page of clinical results.
"It's real," Claire said. "The success rate is accurate. I've been looking at alternatives for Mama since the trial was defunded. This clinic was on my list but the cost was—" She stopped. She looked at the cereal. "The cost was not possible."
They were both quiet for a moment.
"What does Harlow Industries have to do with pharmaceutical trials," Mara said. It was a question she had been sitting with since the lobby.
"Nothing official," Claire said. She had her thinking face on. "Their investment portfolio includes a biotech fund. Let me look." She typed. Read. Typed more. Her expression changed.
"What," Mara said.
"Their biotech fund acquired a pharmaceutical company four months ago." Claire looked up. "The pharmaceutical company that ran Mama's trial."
The kitchen was very quiet.
"Four months ago," Mara said.
"The trial was defunded six weeks ago." Claire's voice was very even, the way it got when she was managing something large. "After the acquisition."
Mara sat down.
She thought about Ethan Harlow's face across the desk. The composure. The precise offering of a file that contained her mother's medical record. The confidence of a man who already knew the answer to every question she might think to ask.
She thought about the recording. About the three deaths. About the journalist who had been dealt with.
She thought about her mother in a hospital bed and a trial that had been funded and then defunded and the specific timing of those two events.
"Claire," she said.
"I know," Claire said.
"He might have—"
"I know."
They looked at each other across the kitchen table, two women in a too-small apartment trying to understand the shape of something that was large and dark and might have edges that touched their family in ways they hadn't yet mapped.
"I still need the treatment," Mara said.
"I know."
"Whatever else is true, Mama needs the treatment."
"Yes." Claire closed the laptop. "So you go back in forty-eight hours and you sign. But Mara." She met her sister's eyes. "You keep the recording. Every copy. Every backup."
"I know."
"Whatever he says and whatever he offers, you keep every copy."
"I know, Claire."
"Because if his company is connected to the trial—"
"I know." Mara reached across the table and covered her sister's hand with hers. "I know. I have not forgotten what I heard. I am holding all of it at once. That is what this requires."
Claire looked at her for a moment. Then she turned her hand over and held her sister's back.
"I'm going to find out everything," she said. "Before you go back. I'm going to find out everything I can find."
"I know you will."
"And Mara." She squeezed her hand once. "You are not going in there alone. Whatever happens, whatever you sign. You are not in this alone."
Mara looked at her sister. At the legal pad full of notes and the soft cereal and the laptop full of pharmaceutical acquisition histories, at seventeen years old at a kitchen table trying to protect her family in the only way she knew how.
"I know," she said. "I never am."
The call came at nine on Wednesday night.
It was not from Kevin and it was not from Ethan Harlow and it was not from the clinic and it was not from anyone whose number Mara recognized. It was from a man named Gregory Webb who said he was the brother of Marcus Webb and who said he had been looking for someone to call for six months and had found, through a chain of events he described as too long to explain on the phone, her name.
She sat down.
"My brother," Gregory Webb said, "was looking into something. Before he disappeared. He had been working on a story about pharmaceutical acquisitions and clinical trial defundings and a pattern he had found across fourteen companies over seven years." A pause. "He sent me a file before he disappeared. I have not known what to do with it."
Mara looked at Claire across the kitchen table. Claire had stopped typing.
"What kind of file," Mara said.
"Spreadsheets. Names. Dates. Acquisition dates alongside defunding dates alongside patient impact reports." His voice was careful and level and she could hear in it the specific quality of someone who had been carrying something for a long time and was finally setting it down. "There is a name in the spreadsheets that appears more than any other. Connected to the most defundings. Connected to the trial that I understand your mother was enrolled in."
The kitchen was very quiet.
"What name," Mara said.
He told her.
She already knew it.
She had heard it four minutes and seventeen seconds into a recording she had made in a hotel corridor eleven days ago.
She said: "Can you send me the file."
He said: "I've been waiting for someone to ask."
She gave him Claire's email address because Claire's email was more secure and because Claire was already pulling up a new browser tab and looking at Mara with the expression she wore when she understood the scope of something and had already started thinking about what to do with it.
The file arrived in eleven minutes.
It was one hundred and forty-three pages.
Claire opened it. She read for four minutes without speaking. Then she looked up.
"Mara," she said.
"I know."
"This goes back further than the pharmaceutical company."
"I know."
"This is—" She stopped. She looked at the screen. She looked at her sister. "How deep do you want to go."
Mara thought about her mother's name on an enrollment document. She thought about four minutes and seventeen seconds of audio kept in three different places. She thought about a man who had sat across a desk from her and offered her a contract and had not once, not for a single moment, looked like a man with a conscience that troubled him.
"All the way," she said.
Claire nodded.
She started reading from page one.
She read until two in the morning.
By then she had gone through forty-seven pages of the file and had filled six pages of her own notebook with dates, company names, patient counts, and the specific arithmetic of how many people had been affected by the pattern Marcus Webb had documented before he disappeared. The number was not abstract. The number was specific and each unit of it was a person and each person was someone's mother or father or sister, and Claire sat with that for a while before she kept reading.
At two-fifteen she made tea and brought a cup to Mara who was on the couch with her own notebook and the expression she wore when she was building something in her head, the focused interior look that meant she was not available for conversation but was not to be disturbed from.
Claire set the tea down. She went back to the table. She kept reading.
At two-forty-seven she found the page she had been looking for without knowing she was looking for it. The page that connected the pharmaceutical company to a parent fund. The page that connected the parent fund to its managing partners. The page that had, at the top of the list of managing partners, a name she recognized.
She said: "Mara."
Mara looked up.
Claire turned the laptop toward her.
They looked at the screen together.
Outside, the city made its night sounds, entirely indifferent to the two women at the kitchen table and the file and the forty-seven pages and the name on the screen that connected everything to everything.
- Writer
