The Vesuvius Isotope (The Katrina Stone Novels) by Kristen Elise Ph.D. Page B
Authors: Kristen Elise Ph.D.
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Nobel Prize? Piece of cake. Softening up Doctor Katrina Stone? Virtually impossible. Nice job!”
She approaches Jeff and hugs him like an old friend.
“Are you OK?”
I turned to see a concerned Dante Giordano by my side, his eyes upon the cell phone still held to my ear. The message from Alexis had long since finished playing.
“He was shot in our home,” I said, more to myself than to Dante. “He was shot in our home and had lethal levels of morphine in his system. But the morphine was not a contributing factor to his death, which means he had built up a tolerance to it. Which also means he was on drugs. Now my daughter is frantically trying to get hold of him. I wonder if Lexi is somehow involved in whatever connected Jeff with Carmello Rossi.”
“Which would mean that she, too, is in danger,” Dante said.
“Yes.”
“The morphine—that’s why you were asking about the camorra running drugs.”
“Yes.”
“But it doesn’t make sense. Your husband would not have to come to Italy for drugs.”
“I know,” I said, and we stepped into the ruins of Pompeii.
A tour guide was leading a group and reciting a monologue in Italian. We attached ourselves to his group and followed him.
“He says that we are at the thermal baths,” Dante translated. “Romans would go through a few rooms: a cold bath, a warm bath, and a hot bath. The Pompeii baths were heated by slaves. Water would flow in from the aqueducts. Then the slaves put wood into a big heater under the floor to heat the water, and pipes carried the hot water to the baths for the Romans up on top.”
I nodded and silently passed beyond the bath complex. Dante remained quietly by my side as I began following the streets of Pompeii and my own thoughts.
It was a stark mental image—obscenely wealthy, hedonistic bathers sprawled lazily in the bright, luxurious baths, socializing and fornicating. Directly beneath them, the slaves—blackened from toiling in a smoky, soot-filled chamber to generate the appropriate water temperature for their masters. The “haves” above, and the “have nots” below. Heaven and Hell.
I am now one of the “haves,” after spending most of my life as a “have not.” The Heaven I shared with Jeff seemed like a reward for surviving Hell for so many years.
I married my first husband, Tom, while still an undergraduate. Alexis was born six months later. Motherhood and financial struggles delayed my undergraduate degree, but I finally finished college and entered a Ph.D. program at twenty-four, all the while working in addition to attending classes—I had run through a large assortment of odd jobs before settling on bartending for the exceptionally high graduate-student wage of ten dollars an hour plus tips.
When Tom and I divorced, I got virtually nothing from him, and I still had three years of a five-year Ph.D. program in front of me. Mercifully, my Ph.D. program offered waived tuition and a small stipend, which I continued to supplement by bartending. It was a decent income, but with a young child to support it was not sufficient to make ends meet.
My daughter was my reason for living but also my heaviest financial burden. I reduced Alexis and myself to such modesties as living in a garage for a full year and eating nothing but spaghetti for days at a time in order to meet the high costs of child care and living in San Diego. Financially similar is the story of nearly every Ph.D.-level scientist I’ve known. But very few of them were also single parents during their training, as I was.
Relentlessly, stubbornly, obsessively, I fought through the impossible double shifts and scraped by from paycheck to paycheck for an agonizing three more years. I graduated first in my class.
My hard work paid off. In my first few years as an independent researcher, I developed a treatment for a virulent form of anthrax, and the federal government paid me handsomely for it. Alexis and I were finally able to live
She approaches Jeff and hugs him like an old friend.
“Are you OK?”
I turned to see a concerned Dante Giordano by my side, his eyes upon the cell phone still held to my ear. The message from Alexis had long since finished playing.
“He was shot in our home,” I said, more to myself than to Dante. “He was shot in our home and had lethal levels of morphine in his system. But the morphine was not a contributing factor to his death, which means he had built up a tolerance to it. Which also means he was on drugs. Now my daughter is frantically trying to get hold of him. I wonder if Lexi is somehow involved in whatever connected Jeff with Carmello Rossi.”
“Which would mean that she, too, is in danger,” Dante said.
“Yes.”
“The morphine—that’s why you were asking about the camorra running drugs.”
“Yes.”
“But it doesn’t make sense. Your husband would not have to come to Italy for drugs.”
“I know,” I said, and we stepped into the ruins of Pompeii.
A tour guide was leading a group and reciting a monologue in Italian. We attached ourselves to his group and followed him.
“He says that we are at the thermal baths,” Dante translated. “Romans would go through a few rooms: a cold bath, a warm bath, and a hot bath. The Pompeii baths were heated by slaves. Water would flow in from the aqueducts. Then the slaves put wood into a big heater under the floor to heat the water, and pipes carried the hot water to the baths for the Romans up on top.”
I nodded and silently passed beyond the bath complex. Dante remained quietly by my side as I began following the streets of Pompeii and my own thoughts.
It was a stark mental image—obscenely wealthy, hedonistic bathers sprawled lazily in the bright, luxurious baths, socializing and fornicating. Directly beneath them, the slaves—blackened from toiling in a smoky, soot-filled chamber to generate the appropriate water temperature for their masters. The “haves” above, and the “have nots” below. Heaven and Hell.
I am now one of the “haves,” after spending most of my life as a “have not.” The Heaven I shared with Jeff seemed like a reward for surviving Hell for so many years.
I married my first husband, Tom, while still an undergraduate. Alexis was born six months later. Motherhood and financial struggles delayed my undergraduate degree, but I finally finished college and entered a Ph.D. program at twenty-four, all the while working in addition to attending classes—I had run through a large assortment of odd jobs before settling on bartending for the exceptionally high graduate-student wage of ten dollars an hour plus tips.
When Tom and I divorced, I got virtually nothing from him, and I still had three years of a five-year Ph.D. program in front of me. Mercifully, my Ph.D. program offered waived tuition and a small stipend, which I continued to supplement by bartending. It was a decent income, but with a young child to support it was not sufficient to make ends meet.
My daughter was my reason for living but also my heaviest financial burden. I reduced Alexis and myself to such modesties as living in a garage for a full year and eating nothing but spaghetti for days at a time in order to meet the high costs of child care and living in San Diego. Financially similar is the story of nearly every Ph.D.-level scientist I’ve known. But very few of them were also single parents during their training, as I was.
Relentlessly, stubbornly, obsessively, I fought through the impossible double shifts and scraped by from paycheck to paycheck for an agonizing three more years. I graduated first in my class.
My hard work paid off. In my first few years as an independent researcher, I developed a treatment for a virulent form of anthrax, and the federal government paid me handsomely for it. Alexis and I were finally able to live
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