Chapter 24: The Chair

On the first of the month I sat down in the chair at the head of the black glass table.

It was the chair Desmond had kept warm for thirty years.

Nineteen directors watched me do it.

Four of them had resigned by the end of the week.

The rest had learned to say Miss Thornbury before they said anything else.

"I'd rather be called Doctor," I said. "Dr. Kincaid. Keep it simple."

"Doctor Kincaid," said the director who had cried at the dinner.

"The first item is the defense division," I said. "We're selling it."

Nobody spoke.

"Lab 4 is closed as of this morning. The Inspector General has the keys, and the buyer is a firm that doesn't make nerve agents."

"And the proceeds, Doctor?"

"A research institute on the Norfolk waterfront. Neurology only. We'll start with the illnesses nobody funds."

I looked down the table.

"The man who ran Lab 4 under my mother will lead it. He has been waiting forty years for somebody to ask him."

They voted.

It was not close.

The ribbon was cut a month later, on a gray morning with a wind off the water.

The new wing was glass and pale brick, three stories, with a ward on the first floor and a lab on the second.

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