The Plague Doctor

by E. Joan Sims

  I was shocked. The prison in Teddyville had the reputation of being a dreadful place. It was almost a hundred years old. Built of huge limestone rocks, it sat high on a hill in the middle of a narrow peninsula that reached down into the Cumberland River. The area was flooded when the TVA dams were built fifty years ago, and the powers that be in the state penal system had decided that it would make a perfect home for the most incorrigible prisoners. The guards reportedly had carte blanche to discipline the men as they chose. There had been more than one charge of brutality made since I had returned to this area a year ago. Why in the world had they sent a man who had not even been tried for his crimes to that awful place?

  I helped Mother down from the tractor, and we walked back up to the house as she filled me in with the reason.

  “Andy says that a very nasty crowd gathered in town this afternoon in front of the jail. He was afraid he couldn’t guarantee Ethan’s safety here in Rowan Springs. That’s why they moved him.”

  She stopped and looked at me, her eyes shimmering.

  “Cassandra is devastated. What are we going to do, Paisley?”

  A big yellow butterfly danced in front of my face and flew away. Rafe had always believed that butterflies brought bad luck. I could never bring myself to think that anything so beautiful could be a harbinger of misfortune, but it wasn’t too late to change my mind.

  I squeezed Mother’s hand and pulled her toward the patio. The sun was hovering over the horizon, but it was still warmer outside than in the chilly house.

  “It’s almost time to turn on the furnace.”

  “I guess so,” she answered distractedly.

  “Look Mother, if Joiner took Ethan to Teddyville, it was the right thing to do. I trust him implicitly. He’s a good man. I’m sure Ethan will be all right. I didn’t mention it before, but I saw the mob when I was in town. There were some ugly threats being bandied about. Ethan’s better off in Teddyville, believe me.”

  “I suppose you’re right, dear.” She smiled at me. “You usually are.”

  I grinned back. “Yeah, except when I’m too cheeky, or too smart-alecky, or too full of piss and vinegar.”

  “Paisley!”

  “Or cursing,” I added.

  The sun sank slowly, leaving the sky awash with a gold and crimson hue. Mother looked look ten years younger in the rosy glow. I hoped I did, too. I was going to need some youthful energy to get us out of this mess.

  “I’m starving! What gastronomic delight have you planned for dinner tonight?”

  “The truth is…let’s go out. My treat.”

  “What about Cassie?”

  “Oh, you are so right. We can’t leave her.”

  She looked to the heavens for some inspiration.

  “I think I have some flounder in the freezer.”

  “Ugh! Frozen fish. Think of something else.”

  We had finally given up and gone in the kitchen to peruse the cupboard when we heard Aggie barking. I went out to the porch and unhooked the screen door for Cassie as she wiped her sneakers on the doormat.

  “Boy! The lane is muddy. I’d better take off my shoes, Mom. Gran will get mad if I get mud on the kitchen floor. She won’t feed me for fussin,’ and I’m about to die of hunger. What’s for dinner?”

  She pushed past me and my open mouth before I could remind her that the puppy’s feet were probably muddier than hers. I expected her to return with a face swollen with tears. I thought she might barricade herself in her bedroom for a week—tear her hair and wear sackcloth and ashes. She never ceased to amaze me.

  Mother managed to put together a wonderful Welsh Rarebit, something Cassie had never eaten and I remembered only from my childhood. Cassie ate every bite and licked her plate. I watched in amusement as Mother tried her best not to reprimand her granddaughter. Cassie finally burst out laughing.

  “Gran, I can’t believe it. I thought you would have a cow. You really are getting tolerant in your old age.”

  “Humpf.”

  I could stand the suspense no longer.

  “Okay, Cassie, I give up. How come you’re not locked in your room crying like a baby?”

  “You said it, Mom, ‘like a baby.’ Well, I’m not a baby any more. If Ethan is to get out of this mess, he needs our help. I can’t let him down.”

  She put her hand over mine. “You aren’t going to either, are you, Mom?”

  “No darling, of course not.” I smiled and leaned over to kiss her on the forehead. “I’ll do my best.”

  “Leonard, too?”

  “You can always count on Leonard.”

  Chapter Eleven

  Mother dismissed my piece of cardboard, calling it “puny,” and brought out a big white poster board instead. It was just the ticket. She also found a couple of black and some colored magic markers. Since she printed more legibly than either Cassie or I, we elected her to make our little organization chart.

  She divided the chart into columns: one for each floppy disc, with spaces for the files underneath. There was still plenty of room to add notes and comments. We were in business.

  Cassie brought us a big pot of tea and some chocolate biscuits. She and Mother sat in front of the fire munching while I worked on the computer and Aggie lay comatose at their feet. Not even the possibility of falling cookie crumbs could rouse the exhausted puppy after her afternoon romp in the woods.

  The disc I chose first had the lowest sequence of numbers written on the label. I had no idea what they meant and probably never would, but I had to start somewhere.

  Disc number one turned out to be Ethan’s log book. The file manager only read that one location on the disc. The last entry had been the day of his arrest. It was a big file, and I had only just begun to read it, but it would have to wait until later.

  “Oh, Mom, by the way, Ethan said to tell you, ‘look for the lambs.’”

  “What the hell does that mean?”

  “What lambs, dear? Paisley, language, please.”

  “I don’t know, Gran. He couldn’t explain with the Gestapo listening to our every word.”

  “Okay! Mother, for what it’s worth, that’s our first clue. Write it on the top of the poster in quotations.”

  “I thought the abortion clinic in Morgantown was our first clue.”

  “What abortion clinic? I thought this was about miscarriages and stillbirths, not about stupid people murdering babies.”

  “Is that really how you feel, Cassie?”

  I don’t know why I was surprised at her attitude. After all, she had been brought up Catholic, like Rafe’s family.

  “I certainly do! I cannot imagine anyone in their right mind having an abortion for any reason. Not even to save the mother’s life. The baby comes first.”

  I saw Mother pulling herself up to give her little lecture. I tried to head it off at the pass. The last thing we needed tonight was an argument about abortion rights.

  “I found the medical dictionary on the bookshelf today. Apparently the term ‘abortion’ is applied to fetal loss depending on the number of weeks from conception. Up until twenty weeks a fetus is ‘aborted’ either naturally or through intervention. After that it is ‘stillborn,’” I added weakly.

  Nobody was paying me any attention at all. Mother was sitting upright on the edge of her seat and just itching to sermonize. Cassie, however, was not yet ready to give up her soapbox.

  “Too many females of my generation think of abortion as just another means of birth control. It’s not birth control at all. It’s murder due to lack of self-control.”

  “You certainly make a good point with that, dear, but don’t you think…”

  “Murder plain and simple,” interrupted my darling daughter. “Have you ever seen a little fetus, Gran? It has tiny little hands and…”

  “Cassie.”

  “…feet. What, Mom?”

  “Mother, you too. Let’s cool it, okay? If the Supreme Court has trouble with this decision, how in the world can you two hope to
change each other’s minds? It’s way too emotional a subject for us right now, and it won’t help Ethan at all. Let’s put our energy into helping him.”

  “Certainly, dear. You’re right as usual.”

  She smiled sweetly—too sweetly, and continued, “Cassandra, you could learn a few things from your elders.”

  I tried again, “Mother, could you please get us some more tea? The pot’s gone cold.”

  “Never mind, Mom! You can’t cut her off that easily. I’ll get the tea so my ‘elder’ won’t wear herself out.”

  “Cassie, that’s enough!”

  “Well, I never! No tea for me, Miss Cassandra. I’m going to bed. You know how we old people like our sleep. Good night, Paisley!”

  They stormed out side by side and almost got stuck in the doorway. I started laughing, and they turned in unison to glare at me in fury. I laughed even harder and woke up the puppy. She raised her head sleepily and glared at me too, then, dragging her furry little tail tiredly behind her, she followed her mistress to bed.

  And so I was left alone again to do the sleuthing. I wondered if Holmes ever had this much trouble with Watson and had just kept the knowledge of the domestic discord to himself.

  I sighed and slipped the second disc into the computer. Once again I saw the columns and columns of numbers and formulas. This time I looked more closely and suddenly realized that they were laboratory results. The long numbers at the top of each column probably represented a patient. Each one had a red cell count and a white cell count. I recognized kidney and liver function studies, but there were some others I could not understand. The library in town would probably have a book on how to interpret medical tests. I could send Cassie down tomorrow—that is, if she would speak to me.

  The third disc was more of the same, and so was the fourth, but the fifth held a little surprise. I found Ethan’s “lambs.”

  Dr. McHenry had apparently visited the medical library at the CDC before he left Atlanta. He had included excerpts from several toxicology manuals and journals in his notes. They were in a file entitled “possible causes.” It was not even written in caps. He obviously felt the information was of little significance.

  There were three entries from environmental journals with cases of abortions in hazardous work environments—two in paint factories and one in a plant that manufactured plastics. They contained words that I could not even guess the meanings of and more columns and figures similar to the ones on the other discs.

  It was not until then that I realized Ethan was planning to write a paper on the abortion cases here in Lakeland County. The laboratory results would make no sense to anyone but other professionals in his field.

  I got up immediately and put the discs with the lab data in an olivewood music box on the library shelf. They would be safe there. I would be horrified if anything—a vicious puppy with sharp little teeth, for instance—happened to all of Ethan’s hard work.

  The next article was from a dental journal. It addressed the suspicion that dental assistants had a higher rate of fetal loss than other health care workers, but there was no definite conclusion made. We only had two dentists in town, and both of them had several young women working in their offices. I imagined that Mother would know their names. I could find out if any of them had lost a baby recently.

  The most interesting entries were from a book on poisonous plants. Ethan had made several notes about crop plants with a high nitrate content, which was known to cause abortion in cattle and sheep. And there was a really gross entry on fescue seed used for lawns and gardens which contained “nematode galls.” I had no idea what they were, but I decided to tell Mother we should pour concrete on the backyard posthaste. Yuck, nematodes! Not to mention galls.

  Goldenrod was the culprit in an article about abortion in cattle in Virginia. I made a note of that because goldenrod was our state flower, although I personally thought of it as a weed.

  Another of Ethan’s entries was also close to home. I wondered if he realized that this part of the state was called the Pennyrile because of the abundant growth of the pennyroyal plant. That little jewel was noted to have been used by the American Indians as an abortifacient. The article added that it was a volatile oil, a colorless liquid that evaporated quickly at room temperature. Apparently enough to cause abortion would be lethal to the mother. Just breathing a little bit could cause seizures and coma.

  Nematodes and seizures. I was getting nauseous.

  Finally, there was the article about the lambs. This was what Ethan had told me to look for, and I read it with anticipation. Here again was a poisonous plant, Veratrum californicum, otherwise known as the skunk cabbage. It caused congenital malformations when fed to pregnant ewes during the second and third week after conception. The resulting “monkey-faced” lambs were usually aborted. Those that were carried to term always died shortly after birth, since their facial deformities prevented them from breathing and eating. The upper jaw and nose were poorly developed, and the eyes were usually joined into one big cycloptic organ. They were normal otherwise. Ha, I thought, how normal can a cycloptic “monkey-faced” lamb be? But this plant grew in the high mountain valleys of the Pacific coast and the Rocky Mountains, nowhere near us.

  There was another Veratrum viride which grew in open woods and pastures throughout North America. This plant, Indian poke, had been used as an insecticide in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Its toxicity was unpredictable. It had fallen into disuse until the 1950s, when an alkaloid it contained was found to have hypotensive properties. It was now used in some antihypertensive drugs such as Veratramine.

  What part of this was supposed to mean something to me, or Leonard?

  I went to bed and dreamed of lambs who ate bananas and climbed trees. It was a funny dream. I smiled in my sleep until I saw their big single eyes staring at me from behind the tropical leaves.

  Chapter Twelve

  When I awoke the next morning, I found Cassie and Aggie in bed with me. I must have slept very soundly because I had no idea when they had crawled under my covers.

  Aggie was whining to go out for her morning walk, so I slipped on my beloved old Cole-Haan moccasins, opened the French doors, and stepped outside.

  The air was balmy, almost springlike, but the sky was a dirty pewter grey. And there was the slightly metallic smell of rain on the light breeze blowing from the south.

  Aggie took her own sweet time. She puttered around endlessly under my grandmother Howard’s big crepe myrtle and sniffed daintily at the tiny little wild violets she had planted at the edge of the driveway fifty years ago. I got impatient. I started to call her, but the wind picked up suddenly, lifting the thick soft fur on the dog’s back until it stood straight up like a ruff. She raised her ears and eyebrows in a comical parody of alarm and scampered back to my side.

  I looked to the south and saw big blackish-green thunder clouds boiling over the horizon. We were in for quite a storm if the wind kept blowing in this direction.

  I stepped back inside and Aggie hurriedly squeezed in between my ankles. She hated thunderstorms and was a fairly good little barometer. I decided to batten down the hatches.

  I unplugged Ethan’s computer and mine, too. And just to make sure that Cassie would not try to turn it on during the bad weather, I stuck Ethan’s in the big drawer of my father’s desk. No sense taking any chances with government property. Thanks to Leonard’s success I had plenty of tax dollars at work

  Cassie was already up and dressed. She was cavorting with Mother in the kitchen, their feud over abortion rights apparently forgotten, as they danced and harmonized on “Dream a Little Dream With Me.”

  I sat down at the table and drank a glass of orange juice while I watched them frolic around the big kitchen looking for all the world like Fred and Ginger—or Ginger and Ginger.

  When they finished, I clapped, Aggie barked, and they bowed. Quite a pleasant way to begin the day. Then I had to go and spoil it.

  “Tut, tut, it
looks like rain.”

  “The weatherman says ‘no,’ dear.”

  “Aggie says ‘yes.’”

  They turned to look at me.

  “Oh! I’d better close the windows in my bedroom. How about yours, Cassie dear?”

  “I’ll get them, Gran. And I’ll move Watson into the garage.”

  “Paisley, can you unplug the television and the microwave?”

  “Sure thing.”

  I turned and winked at Aggie. “Wow, you’ve got some reputation, dog.”

  Aggie’s prediction was correct. The storm was a dilly.

  In Manhattan, I never noticed big electrical storms. It had just rained and gotten everything dirty and wet and nasty. Here on the farm, the force of nature could truly be seen in all its awesome power. Lightening flashed and thunder roared, to put it mildly. In the country, it was easy to understand why primitive man cowered in his cave and wondered what he had done to bring the wrath of the gods down on his poor head.

  We three gathered in front of the big bay windows in the living room to watch as the fury of the storm play out before us. At times the old logs in the walls shook and the floor trembled. It was awesome.

  Aggie perched miserably on the back of the sofa behind Cass with her head tucked between her paws. She yelped at a particularly loud clap of thunder and dove under the sofa as the lights went out.

  “Damn!”

  “Language, dear.”

  “Oh, Mother, for God’s sake.”

  “Now is certainly not the time to blaspheme, Mom.”

  I got up to look for the flashlights muttering something about how you could take the girl out of Catholic school, but not the Catholic out of the schoolgirl, or some such nonsense.

  I crossed the hallway and was opening the door to my bedroom when I glanced out the front door. I was amazed to see a car backing rapidly out of our driveway.

  “What the hell?”

  “Paisley!”

  I felt the wind coming from the open doors in the library just as Aggie crawled out from under the sofa and started barking.

  “Oh, terrific! You’re a great watchdog after the fact!”