“I’m going out. Your dad is arriving at Kansas City on the five-fifteen from San Jose. He’ll be here around seven. If you need me in the meantime, text, but you can call Lyft or Uber to get around.”
I wasn’t sure she’d heard me, but I stuck the doxycycline in my jeans pocket, pulled my computer, iPad, chargers together in my Faraday cage, and gathered various changes of clothes so I wouldn’t have to come back here if I got wet and muddy.
Peppy and I ran a five-mile loop down near the river. By the end, some of my anxiety had eased and I felt better able to think.
The FedEx store across from the Hippo sold me paper. Inside the coffee bar, I sponged off and changed into my jeans in their washroom, then sat down at the counter to work.
I divided my sheet of paper in two: 1983 and today.
1983: The air force is annoyed that the protesters are outside the Kanwaka missile. They want to drive them away. The army is funding Kiel’s research into Y. enterocolitica; why not spray some over the protesters, send them all vomiting into the local emergency room, and then burn the camp after they’ve left?
1983: When Doris went over to the field that August morning with food for Jenny and the baby, she’d seen the signs warning of hazardous waste. The signs had implied radioactive waste, but maybe that was a convenient cover.
1983: Unless Sonia’s memory had become more melodramatic over time, Matt Chastain had died in the fire that swept through the protesters’ camp. Cady Perec had looked for traces of Chastain in the cell-biology department files and come up empty. If a mother or sister had ever written Kiel wanting information about Chastain, those letters had been discarded.
Today: Doris McKinnon had found bones that she’d delivered to Dr. Roque. Baby bones, but maybe my invaders thought they were Matt Chastain’s remains. Is that what they’d been looking for—in my place, at August’s home and workplace? They were covering up his death?
Today: Dr. Roque died of pneumonic plague. Had he contracted it from the woman whose body I’d found in Doris McKinnon’s kitchen when he started the autopsy? That didn’t make sense. He’d sickened and died within hours of starting the autopsy, which even for Y. pestis must be a speed record.
Assuming it was Magda Spirova whose body I’d stumbled on, where had she gone after the calamity of 1983? Why had she come back now?
I put my pen down and went to the bar to order another coffee.
1983: Someone, likely Magda Spirova, switched plague bacteria with its less toxic sister. Kiel tested it at the Kanwaka commune. The army called Dr. Kiel to Washington to explain what went wrong, and he explained himself so satisfactorily that the president and his defense secretary had themselves photographed with Kiel.
If pneumonic plague had killed people back in ’83 and was still killing people today, how had the organism survived all these years? Lotty had said it didn’t last long outside, not like anthrax, so there’d have to have been a way to save a sample in a lab. I pictured Spirova carrying a cage full of infected rats with her wherever she went, a medieval witch with her rodent familiars. It was a discomfiting image, woman scientist as witch. Not my favorite stereotype. Anyway, if Magda had been involved, she’d done something modern, technically savvy. Maybe she’d stuck a test tube full of Y. pestis in a freezer and thawed it out when she reappeared in Lawrence.
However it happened, that was the secret that no one wanted me to uncover. They’d used plague on human targets, they’d successfully covered it up for over a generation, they didn’t want it coming to light now. And who were “they”? Had to be the quartet I’d encountered in the hotel bar Thursday evening.
49
Baby Blues
I started to text Aanya again, to see if she knew anything about plague storage and preservation. Before I finished typing, a message came in from her, asking me to call:
i have much news for you, so in case it isn’t safe to talk on this phone, i’m going to skype you from the same place you skyped me last week. can you get there now?
I took that to mean she would be at a library in Kansas City and wanted me to go back to the Lawrence library. I finished my coffee, put Peppy in the car, and walked the four blocks to the library.
When the video screens came up, I could tell that Aanya hadn’t been sleeping. Her dark eyes had sunk into their sockets, and her narrow face looked even smaller, more pinched.
“Are you eating?” I asked.
A ghost of a smile flickered. “You and Ruby both. Ruby brought me her family’s chicken-barley soup. She was so hurt when I turned it down, but I’m a vegetarian.”
“Lentils,” I said. “Come to Chicago when all this is behind us. I’ll make you my mother’s lentil soup. What do you have for me?”
The autopsy on Dr. Roque had been completed last night. “He had contracted plague, and perhaps that would have killed him, but he collapsed in the lab because somebody had stabbed him. The killer knew how to stay away from the cameras monitoring the autopsy room, so there is no recording of the attack. It is not possible to know who went into the lab and attacked him.”
“You said you were listening to him as he was dictating,” I reminded her.
“This person moved quietly. Dr. Roque did not cry out or say anything. Maybe it was even someone he was used to seeing.”
If that was the case, it should make it easier for the police to find a suspect. “They wanted to remove the dead woman before Dr. Roque worked on her so that she couldn’t be identified,” I added, thinking out loud.
“Is that a reason enough?” Aanya flashed back. “The only consolation Dr. Madej could give me was to say that Dr. Roque was spared a painful death from the plague. And Dr. Madej thinks he and Dr. Hitchcock may both have contracted the illness from the soil samples.”
“So someone deliberately contaminated the soil that Doris McKinnon collected?” I asked.
“Not necessarily deliberately. Since it came from a farm, if infected rats or chickens or even prairie dogs were nearby, they could have left plague in the ground. The organism occurs naturally in the wild. It isn’t only the product of some diabolical plan to spread disease. It can sometimes survive in soil up to three months after an infected animal dies.”
I told Aanya what I’d been thinking this morning, about Kiel’s old experiment and the possibility of someone—Spirova—switching the bacteria.
“It is possible, yes, that such a thing happened thirty-five years ago, but believe me, Vic, those old microbes would not be still alive in that woman’s farm. Three months or less would be a maximum lifetime for them outside a live host, and that is under the conditions that are most ideal for the bacillus.”
She stopped for a minute to look at her notes. “Still, it is strange that so many people are contracting plague in Douglas County right now. Strange and worrying. I showed Dr. Madej the photos that Dr. Roque took of the woman whose body was stolen. Her body—her skin—was so damaged he didn’t want to be on record with his opinion, but he didn’t believe there were any signs of plague. However, he must inform the Centers for Disease Control and also local health authorities on account of Dr. Roque and Dr. Hitchcock.”
“Yes, of course. Dr. Herschel in Chicago is also doing so, and she thinks the Cleveland Clinic has already notified them,” I agreed. “If Spirova showed up ill at McKinnon’s farmhouse, could she have infected August Veriden and Emerald Ferring? Have they died in hiding?”
“If she coughed on them, maybe,” Aanya tried to reassure me. “If they ran away without being in direct contact with her or with fleas that had bitten her, they should be safe. After all, the woman who died in the truck, it was her house, am I right in saying this? And she did not die of plague.”
“No, a bullet to the back of the head,” I agreed grimly. “Guaranteed results, nothing as chancy as hoping a flea would bite the target.”
We were both silent, depressed by the story we were uncovering. I started to end the conversation, but Aanya said, “I almost forgot: I have your DN
A results.”
“And?”
“Neither woman is related to the baby. But they are closely related to each other.”
“Mother and daughter?”
“No. Siblings.”
I sucked in a breath. “Sisters? But then—who is the dead baby?”
“I do not know. Until you send me more DNA from different people, I cannot make any guesses at all.”
“Does this mean they have the same father or the same mother?”
Aanya shook her head, her smile glimmering briefly again. “That I cannot tell you. I am only a lab tech, not the archangel Gabriel, who oversees conception.”
“What an unpleasant thought! Angels in the room at such a moment—as if surveillance by the NSA weren’t enough of a burden.”
At that Aanya actually laughed. She stopped, looking stricken. “I did not think I would ever smile again, but here I am, laughing.”
“It’s human, or life,” I suggested. “We can’t reside in grief forever any more than in joy.”
“I know.” The Skype video showed tears in the corners of her black eyes. “I know we cannot stop life from flowing on, we cannot reside always in grief, but I do not want to abandon Dr. Roque, not just yet.”
When she’d hung up, I sat back in my chair, exhausted. I’d been so sure the baby would prove to have been Sonia’s, or a twin to Cady. But this news—Cady was Shirley’s or Nathan’s child? Or could Sonia and Cady actually be Gertrude Perec’s daughters? Did that have anything to do with the plague years, or was it just collateral damage?
I opened my eyes: Phyllis Barrier, the head librarian, was looking down at me.
“We’re glad that the library can be helpful even to strangers, Ms. Warshawski, but I do keep wondering what service we provide that you can’t find elsewhere.”
I smiled and stood up. “Libraries are refuges, Ms. Barrier. And yours is particularly welcoming, even in the middle of the night.”
She bit her lip, wondering how to react. I delved into my backpack and produced a thin packet wrapped in tissue paper.
“One of your patrons left these at Doris McKinnon’s farm. Please let her know that at night the lights in the basement are reflected onto the parking lot. Your board probably worries about the electric bill.”
“I . . . You . . .” Barrier turned the packet over and over in her hands.
“Ms. Albritten moved your photo after the first time I visited her. She didn’t want me to connect you to her. Maybe you were right not to trust me—I couldn’t have kept them safe. In answer to your question, I come here to Skype to minimize the risk of outside ears hearing what I have to say.”
I walked away without waiting for a response and returned to the Hippo, my mind on Cady and Sonia, not Emerald and August.
Could Cady be Gertrude’s child instead of her granddaughter? I did sums in my head. Gertrude had been born in 1939 or ’40; she’d have been forty-four when Cady was born. By no means out of the question. Maybe she’d had an affair with Kiel, didn’t use protection because she thought she was postmenopausal, then pretended the child was her daughter’s. Jennifer had died, so no one could question Cady’s parentage. In that case, where was Jennifer’s child? With Matt Chastain, either in death or in hiding?
It was a story, which meant it was only that. I drove to Gertrude Perec’s house, where I found her working in her front yard. She looked up at me, but her expression was not full of love.
“Now what?”
I squatted on the ground next to her. “A complicated story. A difficult question.”
She studied me without speaking, then sighed and put down her trowel. “Come into the house. Dog stays in the car.”
Peppy was leaning out the car window, grunting her wish to be with me. I made the “stay” signal and followed Gertrude into the house, or actually the screened-in porch where I’d first met her last Wednesday.
“Are you ever going back to Chicago?”
“I hope so. I want to leave as much as you want me to be gone. The sheriff has ordered me not to leave until Doris McKinnon’s murder is resolved. And of course until the people I’m looking for are accounted for. Maybe they contracted plague and died. It’s been happening a lot lately.”
She nodded, half to herself. “Word gets around.”
“The county health department is supposed to issue an advisory. I don’t know if they have yet, but the pathologist who was starting the autopsy on Magda Spirova had contracted pneumonic plague, which also killed Spirova.”
“Magda! I thought—” She gasped.
“Thought what, Ms. Perec?” I said sharply when she broke off in midsentence. “Thought Dr. Kiel’s friends got rid of her body before Dr. Roque could examine it? Or thought, like Shirley Kiel, that you were rid of her for good when she disappeared in 1983?”
“I don’t have to answer your questions, about Magda or anything else.”
“True.” I sat back in the wicker chair and steepled my fingers. “You might want to answer Cady’s.”
“How dare you! I’ve never seen such arrogance, coming into a town of strangers and thinking you can tell us how to live. Last time you were here, you insulted the memory of my daughter with stories about Matt Chastain. Now you have a new theory? Do you make them up at night when you’re lonely, just to poison the lives of people who have families?”
I flinched. Her rage had some kernels of truth in it.
“There’s some evidence Matt Chastain died in a fire at the silo protest back in 1983.”
“You’ve been listening to Sonia,” Perec said scornfully. “Although I thought she was in a coma and couldn’t speak.”
“Everyone talks to everyone in this town,” I complained, “but they don’t talk to me, and they get peeved when I find things out on my own.”
“What things have you found out?” Perec’s throat contracted, strangling the words.
“Sonia Kiel and Cady are sisters.”
“No! No, no, no!”
Her rising scream reached Peppy in the car, which made her start barking. I stood and signed at her to be calm, but it was several minutes before both she and Gertrude quieted enough for me to speak again.
“Doris McKinnon was digging up dirt samples on the land that the air force took from her and sold to Sea-2-Sea. She’d been told the land was too contaminated to farm, and then she saw that Sea-2-Sea was farming it anyway. She sent it to Dr. Roque to be tested—he was the black-mold specialist, so she figured he could sort out radioactive poisoning.”
Perec was clutching the arms of her chair so tightly I could see the pulses in her wrists, but she didn’t speak.
“While she was digging up samples, Ms. McKinnon came on part of a skeleton of a baby, probably born around the same time as Cady. She sent that to Dr. Roque along with the soil. I wondered if Cady had a twin who died or if Sonia’s emotional problems might have been triggered by a pregnancy. She was fourteen that summer. I got DNA samples from both women. Neither is related to the dead baby, but the two are sisters.”
“How did you trick Cady into giving you a sample?”
“I asked her for it.”
“No,” she said again, but it was a whisper. An instant later she started to cry, terrible jagged sobs that shook her whole body.
She would not welcome comfort from me. I went into the house and found the kitchen, found glassware, found water in the refrigerator. I filled two glasses and brought them with a box of tissues to the porch.
Perec took a glass from me. She gestured at a small round table. I moved it next to her chair and sat back down. Her sobs had already diminished; she sipped at her water and dabbed her face with a tissue, leaving muddy streaks across her cheeks.
I drank my own water: my throat was dry and raw from the stress. Or from incipient pneumonia. I surreptitiously felt my lymph glands.
“I wondered if you might be Cady’s mother,” I ventured.
“What?” The suggestion outraged her enough to bring some strength back
to her voice. “My husband died when Jenny was a toddler. I thought you knew that—you know so much, busybody that you are.”
I felt a perverse relief in her insulting me again—it meant she was recovering. “Sonia and Cady had a parent in common, perhaps two. I don’t suppose the Kiels had a baby that you adopted.”
She looked fierce, briefly, and then her face crumpled. She didn’t start to cry again, but she collapsed back in her chair.
“I love Cady as my own,” she whispered. “I do, I truly do, but—”
I waited, sitting still, making myself part of the porch furniture.
“I was so angry when Jenny got pregnant, and with Dr. Kiel’s least promising student to boot. She was bright, outgoing, people followed her lead: she could have done anything with her life.
“Science—she was gifted, even Nathan—Dr. Kiel—who judges everyone harshly, saw how gifted she was. He got the university to offer her a full scholarship, and she started, in physics and international politics, and then she got sucked into the anti-nuke movement. Of course she met Matt Chastain through me—through my working for Dr. Kiel, I mean—and what she saw in him I’ll never know!”
Her face worked, but she drank more water and managed to keep talking. “Jenny helped organize the protest at the silo. She had this ambition to make it like the one in England, and we fought over that, like we fought over everything the last year of her life. Oh, the nights I still lie awake tormenting myself with regrets. My darling, darling girl, all I did was fight with you. Why couldn’t I show a little support? I knew you were right about the weapons, even if you were wrong about Matt.”
She hugged herself; the wind was picking up, and she was feeling frail. I took a blanket from a settee and placed it around her shoulders. The only other thing I could offer was platitudes; those I kept to myself.
“She gave birth out there in that field, and those two women, Lucinda Ferring and Doris McKinnon, you’d have thought they birthed her themselves, they were so proud, so solicitous. I could have murdered the two of them, bringing Jenny here to show off little Cady, as if they were the grandmothers and I was some ignorant old-maid aunt. She had a strawberry birthmark on her left shoulder, just like Jenny’s.”
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