Page 75 of Spiced!

“You hum now.” She shrugged without judgment. “It started about three weeks ago. It’s intermittent. I officially diagnose you with Intermittent Humming Disorder.” She shifted her bag. “I’m not asking about it, merely logging it for the record.”

“You’re logging it? I thought you were noting it.” My desk chair wailed as I leaned back.

“Sorry, I noted it. Marcus is logging it.” She pushed off the doorframe. “Go home before eight. You have a ferret who misses you.”

Without another word, she wheeled about, bag smacking my doorframe, and left. I listened to her say something to Marcus on the way out that made him laugh. Marcus almost never laughed during office hours. That might’ve frightened me more than the tapir situation.

The front door opened and closed, and the clinic settled into its end-of-day quiet.

I tried to refocus, hitting play on the tapir footage for the third, or possibly tenth, time.

There.

I nearly leaped out of my chair.

It wasn’t in her movement, exactly. Marisol moved the same way she always moved. Hers was the careful, grounded meandering of an animal who had been somewhere long enough to know its own terrain.

This was something smaller.

A quality of attention, maybe? I wasn’t sure what to call it.

In the brief window before the episode, she kept returning to the same corner of the enclosure, not urgently or with any visible distress, just repeatedly, as though something was drawing her back to a specific spot without her fully knowing why. It was the kind of thing you only caught if you were watching for something that didn’t belong.

I jotted it down, pulled up the second footage file, and found the same pattern in the same window.

I picked up my phone and called Peter. He answered on the second ring, which for Peter was the conversational equivalent of sprinting to the door.

“Brendan.”

“Peter, I have something.”

I walked him through it all, the footage, the behavioral pattern, the corner of the enclosure, and the timing relative to the episodes. He listened without interrupting, which was how Peter listened to everything, with almost myopic focus. When I finished, he remained quiet for a long, uncomfortable moment.

“The pulmonary density readings?”

“Yes?” I asked.

“Send me the imaging.”

“I’ll send it tonight.”

Another pause.

“This is a reasonable direction, Brendan,” he said, which from Peter was the equivalent of someone else saying, “Holy Jesus-in-the-Manger, yes, absolutely, you’ve got it! Well done!”

“I’m not ready to call it a theory yet.”

“It’s a theory, Brendan, a solid one,” he said in the tone of a teacher correcting a stubborn pupil. “Send the imaging.”

After we hung up, I sent Peter the imaging from my desktop, killed the lamp, and drove home with Marisol’s movements still turning over in my mind.

Puck was waiting at the door. Gerald was on the windowsill.

I fed Puck, checked Gerald’s soil, and ate dinner standing at the island.

Puck sat on the counter and watched me eat with the unfaltering attention only a furry friend possessed.

“The tapir case is moving,” I told him. “Peter wanted the imaging.”