Chapter 14: What Dr. Pryce Keeps in the Locked Drawer

The hallway outside Pryce's office smelled different from the rest of the building.

Mara noticed it the moment Claudette pointed her toward the east corridor — not the antiseptic institutional smell of the administrative wing, that particular mix of floor wax and recycled air that made your sinuses feel scraped clean, but something older underneath it. Something mineral. She thought of her father's survey jacket when he came home from the field, the way limestone dust settled into the fibers and stayed there through multiple washings, a geological record of everywhere he'd been. The smell was faint enough that she might have invented it. She did not believe she had invented it.

The nameplate on the door said DR. E. PRYCE in block capitals on a brass rectangle. Below it, someone had taped a handwritten card that read RESEARCH COORDINATOR, which seemed to Mara, standing there in the dark with a penlight and her heart doing something irregular and inconvenient, like calling a loaded gun a door stopper. Technically descriptive. Fundamentally dishonest.