The morning after the aborted séance, Iris's phone starts ringing at the ungodly hour of… nine-thirty in the morning. Groaning, it takes her three tries to successfully answer it.
"Hello?" she mumbles, face still pressed to her pillows.
"Hi, this is Dr. Jesse Chambers, recipient of your very cryptic voicemail. Am I calling at a bad time?"
"Huh? Oh, no, now's fine." Iris feels a lot more awake than she did a moment ago. "You got my message?" she asks, and immediately wishes she could take the words back. Because Dr. Chambers literally just confirmed she that she had. "Um never mind. Just let me get the coffee going."
"I know it's pretty early where you are, especially for a weekend." Dr. Jesse Chambers' voice is soft yet clear. "Your voicemail sounded urgent so I wanted to call as soon as I could."
Iris flushes. "Oh, I - I'm sorry about that. I had a whole speech planned that went right out the window as soon as I heard the beep, hence the babbling." She'd tracked down Dr. Wells' daughter earlier that week, which took some doing, since Jessica had moved out to Philadelphia and taken her adoptive family's surname, Lawrence. Then she'd married John Chambers and changed her name yet again; it was a wonder Iris managed to find her at all.
Dr. Chambers laughs, and Iris relaxes a bit. She measures the coffee grounds and adds them to the filter. "That's quite alright. Probably worked out for the best – it was odd enough that my secretary brought it to my personal attention; otherwise I might have missed it entirely. I'll admit, I'm curious what an off-the-clock reporter in Central City could possibly need my help with. You're not out to steal my research, are you? Because I'm mostly doing the CEO gig nowadays; you'd have better luck trying to bamboozle the R&D department."
"No, nothing like that. It's about… well, it's about digging up old history, so if you tell me to hang up and lose your number I'd completely understand, but I sincerely hope you'll hear me out - because I think my friend might be in trouble."
"Iris – can I call you Iris? – just go ahead and ask whatever it is you want to say."
"I'm sorry, I didn't mean to – " Iris cuts herself off and takes a deep breath. "Dr. Chambers, do you know how your father died?"
There is a sharp intake of breath, and a long pause. Iris would worry that the line has gone dead, except she can still hear breathing.
"Well." Dr. Chambers says. "Well. I have to admit, you've managed to surprise me, and at my age, after the things I've seen, there is very little that can do that. Though I might have guessed, when you said you were from Central City. My advice to you: let sleeping dogs lie."
Iris grips her phone tightly. "I'm afraid I can't do that. Things aren't adding up, and it might be important. I just… I know this matters."
"My father died sixty years ago; I fail to see how this is relevant today. Why were you even looking into him in the first place?"
"My best friend is an intern at STAR Labs. He and his friends, they found Dr. Wells' old notes, and they're trying to complete his final work."
Dr. Chambers' sharp intake of breath rattles down the line. "Oh, oh dear. In that case, yes, I'll tell you what I know. Do you have a pen and paper handy? I hate having to repeat myself."
"If it's alright, I'd like to record this phone call. Completely off the record."
"Yes - off the record. I'll only talk off the record. Whatever else my father was, he was a brilliant man. I'd hate to see his name dragged needlessly through the mud, so many years after his death."
"The thing you must understand about my father, the one truth without which nothing else makes sense, was that he firmly believed the ends justify the means. Which was rather ironic, given how theoretical much of his research was – you'd think he'd have gone in for the applied sciences – but he would have been bored to be anywhere other than on the cutting edge, and to make the impossible possible you have to dare to imagine.
"That's one of the few things I remember about him, before – the way he had stars in his eyes. That didn't last. He wasn't the same after my mother died. That's to be expected, but he was fundamentally unable to move on, to take even basic care of himself, let alone a newly motherless child. He became fixated on things…" she hesitates, then continues her story more slowly. "For a time, he absolutely believed that time travel was the answer, that if he could generate faster-than-light particles"
"Tachyons," interjects Iris, pleased to know the proper term.
"Right. He thought they would be the first step to creating a workable time machine. He was going to go back in time and prevent my mother's death."
Iris takes a moment to absorb the implications. "You said he believed it 'for a time.' Did he finally realize it wasn't going to work?"
Dr. Chambers snorts. "If by 'realize' you mean he abandoned one theory in favor of an even more outlandish one, then yes.
"I don't think he knew that I knew what he was up to. I was reading advanced calculus textbooks by the time I was nine; polysyllabic titles enticed me, rather than deterred me." She breathes quietly, lost in the memory. "I could only sneak peeks for so long before he caught me at it. He was so angry when he saw what I was reading, but he should have known better than to leave a book where I could reach it. I only wanted to help him, after all. That's all I ever wanted to do. And for the first time in months he looked at me as though he could actually see me."
"What was the book?"
"It was called the Necronomicon… He was trying to raise the dead, Iris," she explains gently. "From what I can gather, by trying to summon a demon."
Dread pools in Iris's stomach and her throat goes suddenly dry. Demon-summoning. What the actual literal Hell… Pieces are sliding together in her mind and she is absolutely terrified at what the conclusion might be.
Dr. Chambers is still talking. "There's no good that can come of trying to finish his research, Iris, he… he cracked, at the end. His final notes are the senseless ramblings of a mad man, you can't possibly use them for any serious scientific endeavor."
"oh. I see." Iris hesitates before returning to her first question, which, as helpful as Chambers has been, still hasn't been answered. "Dr. Chambers… how do you think your father died?"
"How do I think? It's all there in the autopsy report, isn't it?"
"I wouldn't know. But what I have been able to find has been full of inconsistencies."
Dr. Chambers' voice is much less nostalgic and much frostier when she replies. "His heart failed. There's no doubt about that." There's another long pause before she continues, so softly Iris has to strain to hear, "You wouldn't think that would be a particularly painful way to go, but… he died screaming."
Unnerved, Iris sinks slowly into a chair. "How do you know that?"
"I have the recording of his final journal entry. Puts a very- a very exact time of death on the whole affair. The officers investigating the case asked that it not be submitted as evidence."
"What?! Why?"
"Too upsetting, they said. Unnecessary, they said. Really, I think they just didn't have a way to explain it. And before you ask… I've stopped trying to explain it myself. Of course I know what it sounds like, but at the end of the day, it changes nothing. My father brought about his own end – not on purpose, of that I am sure – but whether it was by stress, over-taxing his body, or by… other means… what does it matter?" Dr. Chambers' voice is heavy with years. "What does it change? He'd already left me even before he died. The best thing I could do was close that chapter of my life; I wasn't going to become obsessive the way he had, repeat his mistakes. And so I moved on. I kept the recordings, because… well, for posterity's sake, maybe. For intellectual curiosity, maybe – I don't know. I can send you a copy. Of his last few entries – I saved them to my computer. Share it with your friends, and maybe they'll stop their fool's errand before somebody gets hurt."
Iris thanks her for her time, and gives her email address. When she hangs up she feels shaky all over, and it is a very tense forty-minute wait for her inbox to ping, during which time she sips lukewarm coffee inattentively and tries - unsuccessfully - to get ahold of Barry.
A/N: Since the show has already mucked about with family trees, giving us Jesse Wells in place of Jesse Chambers, I figured I could follow their lead; in the comics, Libby Lawrence was Jesse Quick's mother, and in this story Jessica is a Lawrence by adoption.
Libby Lawrence's character Liberty Belle is closely tied to WWII. She was living in Poland in 1939, and in recognition of this my backstory for Tessie Morgan is that when her family came to the U.S. from Poland, their last name was Anglicized as they came through Ellis Island (I remain undecided whether it was originally "Morga," for being the most similar, or "Moczygemba," because the immigration official was just that lazy.)
In this fic, Jessica Wells became Jesse Chambers when she married John Chambers, who in the comics was her father. Nothing incestuous is meant by this, in this story Wells is her father and she is no blood relation of John Chambers. The company mentioned is Quick Start Enterprises.