The Darwin Conspiracy Read Online Free PDF Page B

drop to the water far below, then sat back with her eyebrows raised in fake alarm. It was high tide so the surf rode over the rocks and plunged out of sight into the hollow underside of the cliff, then a second later shot straight back, as if the island were pumping bilge. Off in the distance where the currents were rough the waves churned and exploded in tiny whitecaps.
    “So this is where you come to get away from it all,” she said.
    “Yes.”
    “I can understand that—the noise, the filth, the crowds.”
    “Nigel.”
    She threw him a quick look, a slight frown.
    They discussed the island and the study and then began, for the first time, to talk personally. He asked her about herself—and what brought her to the island. She sat cross-legged, resting her elbows on the insides of her thighs.
    “Me . . . ,” she said, making it sound like a riddle. “Let’s see. Where to start?” And she told him about growing up in the American Midwest and how at first she loved it but then began to feel out of place there, almost like a pariah as she went up through the ranks of public school.
    Finally she escaped to Harvard, the only kid from her high school class to go there. She graduated and went to Cambridge, got her graduate degree in evolutionary biology and worked for a bit in London, then got fed up with life there and signed up for the project. And now here she was, before she knew it, about to hit thirty.
    “I felt I was at a bit of a dead end,” she said. “That’s why I’m here, really, to get away for a while, think things over.”
    “And your parents?”
    “They’re still in Minneapolis. They’re both teachers. We’re in touch often—or we were until I came here.”
    They were silent for a spell.
    “I heard you were married,” he said.
    She gave a start and looked him in the eye. “Nigel told you.”
    “Yes.”
    “Well, I was. In England. It was a mistake. I knew it pretty much from the beginning. I tried sticking it out, but it just didn’t work. We couldn’t make a go of it, as they say. There were some good times but always some bad mixed in, and then the bad got worse and more and more frequent.”
    “Nigel said your husband was a depressive.”
    “He certainly talks a lot, doesn’t he?” She shook her head. “My husband did suffer from depression but it wasn’t his fault that we split up.
    We were both at fault.”
    She gazed out toward the ocean. Hugh looked at her hand resting on the ledge, close to his own. Her presence was so strong—it seemed to make the air shimmer.
    “I shouldn’t be talking so much about myself,” she said finally. “I’m sorry Nigel told you.”
    “Well, as you say, he talks a lot.”
    “He does. But he’s a good man.”
    She asked Hugh about his childhood and what he had done in his twenty-eight years.
    “Not a lot, I’m afraid. I grew up in Connecticut, a little town in Fair-field County. I actually liked the suburbs when I was young—camping out in the woods, Little League, hitchhiking to the beach, the whole deal. Then I went away to prep school, to Andover. I did all right at first but then I fell off the rails. In my senior year, about a month before graduation, I was expelled. . . .”
    “What did you do?”
    “Nothing all that dramatic. They have what they call four major rules and one weekend, to celebrate getting into Harvard, I broke them all— went off campus, had a drink. I’d signed in to my dormitory so they got me on lying. The fourth rule—conduct unbecoming a gentleman—they threw that in too, which I objected to but without success.”
    “So what happened?”
    “I took a train home—the longest trip of my life—and when I arrived, I was in disgrace. My father could barely look at me.”
    “And Harvard?”
    “They dropped me. I applied later but I didn’t get in the second time around. I ended up going to the University of Michigan.”
    He talked about his parents—his father, a successful New York lawyer, and his