You don’t want to know what I think. “So, your parents are rich, huh?” She cursed herself; Thomas would be better at this. And Jonas would be masterful at it. But the crumb had disappeared and Thomas was ass-deep in lab work. And Artur would probably scare the hell out of this twit. “Old Boston family and all that?”

“Umm-hmm.”

“So what brings you here?”

Her big blue eyes got, if possible, bigger. “Oh, Dr. Bimm, I’ve just wanted to work with dolphins since I was just a kid.”

“Since the Dark Ages, huh?” Fred watched the younger woman dabble her long pink fingers in the water. Hope one of the turtles mistakes those for a shrimp, she thought viciously. “You’re aware there are no dolphins at the NEA?”

“Huh?”

“There. Are. No. Dolphins. At the NEA.” You. Fucking. Idiot.

Madison smirked. “Not yet.”

“Oh.” Fred thought that one over. “Your folks are buying you dolphins and plunking them into a new tank in the NEA?”

“After they fund the new habitat.”

That made sense. It was stupid, but it made sense. “So that’s why you’re here?”

“Of course!”

“But what if it takes longer than the length of your internship?”

“Oh, Dr. Barb said I could, like, volunteer here as a long as I wanted.”

“Of course she did. Your folks haven’t, uh, built a new hotel and designed the bathroom pipelines to empty into the bay, have they?”

“ Ewwwwwwwwwwww!”

“Interview over,” Fred said, bored, and left. The strains of “Part of Your World” followed her all the way down the stairs, out the door, and onto the cobblestones.

Chapter Twenty-Six

She pounded on Jonas’s door for the third time, pressed her ear to the wood, and—yep, she was positive. Someone was rustling around inside.

“Jonas, open the damned door! It’s been three days! If I find you dead in there it’s going to be a huge inconvenience for me!”

More sinister rustling.

“Jonas! You have until I count to one. Then I’m kicking your door in and you’ll lose your security deposit. Ready? One—”

She raised a foot just as the door swung wide. Jonas stood there, wrapped in the goose down quilt from his bed. His blond hair stood up in clumps, not the carefully moussed waves he usually spent hours coaxing to life. His eyes were bloodshot. And for the first time in recorded history, he wasn’t wearing Aramis cologne.

“My God. You look like the run half of a hit and run. Where the hell have you been?”

“Dying,” he said hollowly.

“Well, it’s going around because Dr. Barb’s got it, too.”

She’d been following him past piles of takeout boxes and nearly walked into him when he stopped short. “She has? I mean, she hasn’t been coming to work?”

“Yeah. Which makes it easier to sneak the guys in, but it’s seriously weird not having her there. Nobody can remember her ever being sick. I mean, it’s gotta be a plague of some sort.”