Part 1: October 2024
Neve sat stunned, perched in the chair at a desk in the bohemian study of Talulah’s Everglades sanctuary, the cassette player clicking and whirring as it played the message for the twelfth time. Outside, Spanish moss swayed like pendulums in the late afternoon breeze, casting elongated shadows across the weathered cypress planks. The lingering early October humidity pressed against the windows, condensation beading, then tracking down the panes of glass like tears.
“I hope to see you soon, Nomo.” Her father’s voice crackled through the ancient speaker once more. Hearing her childhood nickname made her heart clench with longing. It was an unsettling sensation that added to the mounting tension.
Neve’s fingers hovered over the rewind button, wanting to listen again. The white strands of her hair were braided into neat plaits, dampened with sweat despite the air conditioning laboring against the afternoon heat.
Perry paced along the edge of the desk, his talons clicking a nervous rhythm on the rough, reclaimed wood. He let out a squawk and then fluttered his wings in exasperation, tilting his head to fix Neve with a critical stare.
“Well, this is productive,” he muttered, his voice chirping with sarcasm. “Maybe try playing it backward for hidden messages? Or perhaps you can isolate a distinctive background noise and pinpoint his exact location? At least, that’s how these things work for David Caruso in CSI: Miami.”
Neve’s blue eyes, rimmed with red, flashed in irritation toward the parrot. “You’re free to leave whenever you want, Perry, but I need time to process,” she said, her tone flat. “Dad’s speech patterns, his breathing, the background noises, they are all clues and might contain important information that could help us locate him.”
“A man clearing his throat and ice clinking in a glass?” Perry retorted in disbelief. “It’s hardly the rock-solid intelligence necessary to break a missing person’s case wide open.”
When the cassette clicked to a stop, the abrupt silence was more jarring than the static had been.
Neve stood. The floorboards creaked under her weight as she finally emerged from the study, the cassette player clutched in her hands. She couldn’t bear to let it out of her sight. A few steps down the hall, the living room was a kaleidoscope of color from Talulah’s collection of tapestries and crystals that caught the fading sunlight streaming through the windows, casting prisms on the walls.
Talulah sat cross-legged on a cushion by the low coffee table, her flowing sage dress pooling around her slight frame. She looked up at Neve’s approach, the lines around her eyes deepening with concern.
“I made some chamomile tea with lemon balm,” she said, gesturing to the steaming pot on the table. “I brought your favorite mug from—”
“Where is he?” Neve interrupted, refusing to be distracted by her aunt’s niceties. The question was a demand. Hearing her father’s voice lit a fire that burned through her veins, incinerating any further attempts at polite conversation.
Talulah’s frail shoulders drooped. Her fingers trembled as she reached for a weathered manila envelope tucked beneath a crystal paperweight on the table. The paper was yellowed with age, the edges soft from handling.
“This is the last address I have for him,” she said, her southern lilt more pronounced with emotion as she slid the envelope across the smooth surface. “He moves often, never stays in one place too long.”
Neve stared at the envelope as a chaos of emotions raged through her. Hope, anger, longing, and desperation. It was a heady mix she wasn’t accustomed to, and she was desperate to dispel the nervous energy that accompanied them.
“When was the last time you saw him in person?” Neve demanded as she paced the length of Talulah’s living room. She’d positioned herself between two large windows, turning to catalog every detail of her aunt’s reactions to make sure they aligned with the truth.
“Last September,” Talulah replied with a whisper, fidgeting with the amethyst beads around her wrist. “He came here for three days. He looked…” She hesitated as if at a loss for words, “…exhausted, honey bee. Bone-weary.”
Neve shot her a scowl at the nickname. “Stop it. You’re using a childhood nickname to create an emotional connection. It won’t work.”
Talulah gulped and held up her hands in defeat. “Okay,” she finally whispered, giving up all desire to calm down her niece.
“Did he mention where he was going next? Any contacts? Lab facilities he might be using?” Neve fired the questions in rapid succession, her hands fluttering up to the ends of her braids to tighten them as she began to pace again.
Perry watched from his perch on a bookshelf filled with crystals and leather-bound tomes on numerology. “Talulah is not the enemy,” he murmured. “We are all on the same side. We want the same outcome.”
“Thank you, Perry,” Talulah said, then she closed her eyes and pressed her fingers against her temples, trying to tap into the psychic abilities that had made her a celebrity on social media. “The spirits have been quiet, but I don’t believe he’s crossed the veil. He’s my only sibling; I would feel it.”
Neve’s jaw clenched. “I don’t need your metaphysical platitudes. I need facts. Concrete, verifiable facts.” Her tension increased with each word, frustration bleeding through her usually controlled demeanor.
“Darlin’, if I had those kinds of facts, don’t you think I would’ve shared them already?” Talulah’s sweet lilt carried an edge now. “Ellis lives in the shadows. That’s how he’s stayed alive.” She reached over, slid open a drawer on an end table, and removed a notebook, handing it to Neve. “But this might contain some answers.”
“What is it?” she murmured, flipping it open.
Where Ellis’s cancer research from the notebooks in her attic had been written neatly and organized into a logical progression, these pages exploded with frenzied calculations and diagrams scrawled at odd angles. Quantum field equations spilled across margins. Sketches of electromagnetic waveforms intersected with charts tracking Mercury’s retrograde cycles. One page contained nothing but the number 23.5 written dozens of times in increasingly agitated handwriting, underlined so hard the pencil cut through the paper.
Perry hopped closer, tilting his feathered head at the strange entries. “A psychic break perhaps, or…?”
“Or what?” Neve prompted when the bird trailed off.
Perry rustled his feathers. “Or he was working on a top-secret project no one knew about.”
Neve turned to a page where Ellis had drawn a series of concentric circles labeled with cryptic notations. Arrows indicated energy flow through points that had nothing to do with cellular biology. In the margin, his notes were barely legible: “Physical presence unstable. Consciousness remains intact.”
“This doesn’t make sense,” Neve muttered. “None of this correlates with cancer research.”
She continued through pages of calculations beside drawings of crystalline structures. The notations grew increasingly erratic: “Natural conduit when aligned” and “Duration dependent on intensity.”
The final entries disturbed her most:
“Third failure. The window closes too quickly.”
“Cellular integrity compromised.”
Beside it, in the margin, he’d written a personal note: “Must protect Nomo from the consequences. Some doors, once opened, can never be closed.”
Neve closed the notebook, her analytical mind unable to form a coherent theory from such disparate elements. Whatever Ellis had been working on privately, it extended far beyond the boundaries of cancer research.
“What were you really working on, Dad?” she whispered to herself, and thunder rumbled in the distance.
* * *
Later that evening, the ceiling fan spun in a lazy circle overhead, stirring the scents of sage and jasmine that permeated the house. Outside, the Everglades hummed with cicadas droning, frogs calling, and the occasional splash as swamp creatures entered or exited the murky waters.
“Thirty-two years,” Neve said, her tone dangerously subdued as she gripped the back of a chair after they’d eaten a late dinner in awkward silence. “Thirty-two years, I thought he was dead. I grieved him. You took me to visit an empty grave.” Her knuckles whitened as she balled her hands into fists. “And you knew. Every time you saw me cry for him, you knew he was still alive.”
The accusation hung heavy in the air.
Talulah’s bright eyes dimmed with deep regret. “I did,” she whispered. “And it broke my heart every single time.”
“Did you laugh about it? The two of you? Poor, gullible Nomo, so easily distracted by her stupid drawings?” The self-loathing jab tasted bitter on Neve’s tongue, but she couldn’t stop herself from uttering it.
“No!” Talulah stood abruptly, her small frame vibrating with conviction. “God, no. He wept at the lost time. Ellis was devastated that he had to walk away.”
Perry flapped over to perch on Neve’s shoulder, burrowing his feathered head into her neck in an attempt to comfort her.
“If you’re such a powerful medium,” Neve challenged, her voice cracking under the strain, “why can’t you just ask the universe where he is now? Call upon your spirits? Wave your crystals and sage around and tell me where he is?”
Talulah crumpled, tears finally spilling down her cheeks, carving paths down the wrinkles of her face. “We’ve been over this again and again. It doesn’t work that way,” she cried in exasperation at the circular nature of their recent conversations. “Despite everything I can do, everything I know, I have no idea where Ellis is right now or if he’s even still alive!”
The silence that followed Talulah’s outburst was broken only by the rhythmic drip of water from the kitchen sink. With her worst fear confirmed, the room seemed to tilt beneath Neve’s feet. She laced her fingers into a tight ball and then grumbled through gritted teeth, “I need more information.”
“A year ago, he missed our scheduled check-in call,” Talulah continued, her voice quavering. “First time in twenty-seven years. Then he missed the next one, and the next.”
Outside, darkness had fallen across the Everglades, and a stray flicker of lightning illuminated the swampland that surrounded Talulah’s house.
“His research…” Talulah hesitated, glancing toward the windows as if checking for eavesdroppers. “It evolved. He was convinced he’d discovered a treatment that could do more than cure cancer. It could potentially reverse aging itself.”
Perry, who had been grooming his feathers, suddenly perked up. “Reverse aging?” he echoed, waving one gray wing at Neve’s prematurely white hair. “I don’t want to name names, but a certain someone we all know should volunteer for the clinical trial.”
Ignoring his weak attempt at humor, Neve’s mind raced, connecting dots with lightning speed. “Reverse aging?” she muttered as she sank into her chair again.
Talulah nodded, her expression grim. “I believe someone finally figured out what he was doin’. And they want it, bad enough to make him disappear for real this time.”
* * *
The next morning, dawn broke over the Everglades in a riot of pinks and oranges, painting the mist that hovered over the water in cotton candy hues. Neve hadn’t slept more than a few hours. She stood on Talulah’s wraparound porch, hands cupped around a mug of steaming coffee, watching an osprey circle above the cypress trees.
The screen door creaked open behind her, and Perry hopped through the opening, fluttering up to land on the railing beside her.
“You’ve got that look,” he observed, his head cocked to one side. “The one that means we’re about to do something either very brave or very stupid.”
Neve didn’t crack a smile. Her face remained impassive, though her eyes burned with newfound purpose. “We’re going to find him.”
“Ah, so the latter then,” Perry quipped, though his sarcasm lacked its usual panache.
The door creaked again as Talulah joined them, wrapped in a silk kimono swirled with patterns of moonlight and stars. Dark circles shadowed her eyes, evidence of her own sleepless night.
“Perry and I are going home after breakfast,” Neve declared, taking the last sip of her coffee.
Talulah’s eyes welled with tears, her small frame seeming to shrink further as she stepped toward Neve. “Please,” she whispered, her voice breaking. “I need to come with you. I need to make this right.”
Neve turned away, unable to bear the raw regret consuming her aunt’s features. “You had thirty-two years to make it right.”
“I know.” Talulah sank onto a teak chair, her beaded bracelets clinking together as she clasped her hands. “What I did was unforgivable. I betrayed your trust. I watched you suffer when I could have eased your pain.” A whimper choked in her throat. “But I can help you. I know Ellis’ movements, where he’s been.”
Talulah remained seated, tears tracking silently down her face. “I understand if you can’t forgive me,” she said. “But please, let me help you find Ellis. After that, I’ll disappear from your life if that’s what you want.”
Perry fluttered from the railing to Neve’s shoulder, his weight a familiar comfort. “She does have a point,” he chirped near her ear. “Having a local witch-doctor on our team might prove useful. Especially one who knows all the major players.”
Neve shot him a suspicious glance. “Since when are you the voice of reason?”
“I’m evolving,” Perry replied with a dismissive wing flap. “Personal growth and all that jazz. Besides, more people around means more snacks for me.”
“You’re not evolving. You want something.” Neve narrowed her eyes at the parrot. “What is it?”
Perry’s feathers ruffled in what might have been avian indignation. “Can’t a bird suggest a sensible course of action without ulterior motives? Perhaps I’ve developed compassion. Empathy. Those human traits you’re always yammering on and on about.”
“No,” Neve replied. “There’s always an ulterior motive with you.”
He rolled his round eyes, then cleared his beak and admitted, “Maybe being in this avian body is changing me for the better.”
Neve was quiet as she considered their reasons. Morning sun filtered through the cypress trees, casting dappled light across the three figures on the porch. In the distance, an alligator hissed at a smaller one, the territorial squabble echoing across the water.
Neve closed her eyes, her logical mind warring with the hurricane of emotions. “Fine,” she finally said to Talulah. “We leave in an hour.”
Relief washed over Talulah’s face as she rose. “Thank you. You won’t regret—”
“I’m not forgiving you,” Neve cut her off. “I’m being practical. But I expect total transparency from now on. You must agree to share every detail, no matter how trivial.”
Talulah nodded, her gray-blue eyes solemn. “I swear on my life.”
As Talulah hurried inside to pack, Perry remained on Neve’s shoulder, his feathers puffed up with terror as the alligator squabble increased to a full-out war. “I should have stayed in Aura Cove,” he muttered. “Nice, safe Aura Cove, where the only life-threatening danger is dying of boredom.”
A shadow passed over the porch outside, too large for a bird, too swift for a cloud. Neve shaded her eyes from the morning sun and caught a glimpse of a drone hovering at the edge of the property, its camera lens glinting in the light before it darted over the cypress trees.
Perry let out a long slide whistle and shook out the tension in his feathers. “Huzzah! It appears we’re being watched.”
