The Plague Doctor

by E. Joan Sims

  Cassie had met Ethan at the quilt exhibition. They struck up a conversation in front of a particularly beautiful, intricately quilted Log Cabin design. Ethan asked her to accompany him to the square dance at the high school, and she had invited him out to lunch the next day to meet her family. We had all liked him immediately—even Aggie. They had been seeing each other for at least some portion of every day since that first night.

  I never dared to ask Cassie how intimate their relationship was because it was none of my business. I yearned to know, but I had always tried to respect her boundaries. She had never been so serious about a young man before. Cassie wasn’t exactly fickle, but she did have very high standards and was usually bored with her gentlemen callers in a matter of days. She would probably have tired of Ethan had he not come to need her so desperately.

  When he’d arrived in Rowan Springs, Ethan rented a garage apartment behind the home of two of my late grandmother’s friends, the Parsons sisters. Miss Lolly and Miss Hannah were in their seventies. Their father had made a fortune in the 1920s selling lumber, and the sisters still lived in the big home Papa Parsons had built for the family in his heyday. Neither of them had ever married, although there were rumors that one of them had nurtured a secret obsession for a married man for decades.

  The Parsons’ house was covered with gingerbread millwork. Curlicues and arabesques dripped from every eave and soffit. The difficulty in later years was finding someone willing to paint all the doodads and what-nots. Gradually, the house deteriorated, and the sisters grew into suspicious old ladies who peered from behind frayed lace curtains as the rest of the world passed by.

  I was really surprised that Ethan had been able to persuade them to rent him the apartment. They seldom went out anymore and rarely opened their doors to strangers. I finally decided that Doc Baxter had arranged it. He was one of the few people they saw. Doc still made house calls for some of his older patients, and he was especially fond of the old ladies. Their mother had been a good friend of his mother’s. Ties of family and friends were strong in our little town, and people had long memories. That alone was reason to behave yourself and not do something “unforgettable.”

  Ethan’s apartment was above the garage and consisted of two rooms originally intended as servant’s quarters. The stairway to the entrance was discretely turned away from the main house so that neither master nor maid could observe the after-hours activities of the other. For this I was very grateful because I did not wish to be seen or questioned by anyone. Cassie apparently hadn’t thought beyond the immediate necessity of meeting Ethan’s request. I wanted to keep us from being implicated as accessories after the fact.

  Cassie reached up under the eaves on the landing and retrieved the door key. The room inside was sparsely furnished. A wooden table had been placed in front of a large window in the corner. That was the sunniest spot in the whole place. The rest of the living room and the smaller adjoining bedroom, really only an alcove, was shrouded in shadows and gloom.

  Cassie pulled me over towards the table by the window where some expensive computer equipment was neatly arranged. Most of the stuff was state of the art and very sleek and compact. The computer itself was a laptop like mine, but newer and with more memory. The printer was a dilly—small and portable, it looked more like a ladies black plastic purse. There was also a scanner and something very unusual on the floor next to the table—a paper shredder. I wondered if the sisters Parsons had rewired the place for all of Ethan’s electronic goodies.

  Cassie turned on the computer, and I sat down in a rickety old wooden chair next to her to observe as she tentatively pushed buttons.

  “I think I’ve done it right. I wish I weren’t so nervous.”

  She wiped her palms on her jeans and typed in Ethan’s password. I didn’t ask and she didn’t tell me what it was. The screen flashed with a network logo, and then the letters “CDC” and a menu. Cassie read each selection carefully before she made her decision.

  “Here we go.”

  She moved the mouse and pointed at one of the titles on the screen.

  “Infectious Diseases Branch of the NCEH.”

  Another menu popped up and she breathed a sigh of relief. “I’m in, Mom. Now I’ll just type in his e-mail password and his user ID, and then I can send the message to his supervisor. Damn!”

  “What, what?”

  “I made a mistake…wait, there I backspaced…okay!”

  Dr. Ethan David McHenry’s mailbox opened up like a neon rose. There were at least thirty entries, but Cassie ignored everything except the messages from a Dr. Eloise Haywood.

  I was surprised that his boss was a woman. I had assumed that like most government agencies, the CDC was an old boy’s club. I can be sexist, too.

  Cassie moused over to the most recent message from Dr. Haywood and clicked. A brief message flashed on the screen.

  “Ethan, here’s the info you requested. State’s getting antsy. Try to have something concrete for us ASAP, but CYA. E.”

  “Now Mom, here’s the part I’m not sure about. He said just ‘reply.’

  Where is…?”

  I squinted at the top of the screen and saw it as soon as she did.

  “Aha!”

  Another mousey click and the screen changed again. She got busy on the keyboard and typed in Ethan’s message.

  “Doing fine. Wish you were here. Hot on the trail. Let you know soonest. AC. E.”

  “That’s it? That’s the big message? That had to be sent this morning?”

  “Please, Mom, don’t freak on me. I have to exit the right way, or I’ll mess up.”

  I stood up and stretched my weary limbs. I was worn out and fed up. “Freak? Freaking message, that’s what,” I huffed under my breath.

  I glanced out of the window and saw one of the Misses Parsons peeking in Watson’s windows. Just at that moment, she turned and caught me staring back at her. I gave her a goofy grin and waved back, then, impetuously, I grabbed all of the floppy discs I saw on the table and stuffed them into my big leather handbag.

  “Quick, Cassie, unhook the modem and the laptop and put them in my bag. We’ve got company.”

  Chapter Five

  I descended the narrow staircase with as much dignity as I could muster. The old woman was standing next to Watson, her tiny little foot tapping out staccato displeasure on the brick driveway.

  “Miss Hannah?”

  “Heavens, no! It’s Lolly you’re talking to. I’m Lolly Parsons. Who are you?”

  I made a silent invocation to my grandmother’s spirit and asked for help with this nosey old bag. The last thing in the world we needed was for her to call the police.

  “I’m Paisley Sterling…John and Anna’s first child.”

  “Paisley Sterling. I remember you. You used to tease my cat. I never did like you.”

  I tried to smile but my lips were dry and they stuck to my teeth. “Oh, I am sorry about that. Children can be a nuisance sometimes. I’m sure I was a holy terror. How is your cat now?”

  “Dead.”

  “Oh.”

  Cassie came bouncing down the wooden stairs with my leather handbag slung over her shoulder. She looked like she didn’t have a care in the world.

  “Hi, Miss Lolly. My, don’t you look pretty today. Have you been to that beauty shop again?”

  She gave the little old woman a quick peck on the cheek.

  Miss Lolly beamed from ear to ear as she gave her cap of tight white curls a proud pat. I watched in amazement as she deftly avoided my gaze and smiled fondly at my daughter who was no more Southern than a turnip, but had learned from observing her grandmother how to walk the walk and talk the talk.

  “Cassandra, dear, how nice to see you. Won’t you come in and have some tea? Hannah has made some of that orange walnut bread you like so much.”

  “I do wish I had time, but Mom and I…have you met my mother, Paisley DeLeon?”

  Miss Lolly sniffed suspiciously, “I thought she sa
id her name was Sterling.”

  They went on discussing me as if I were not standing there like a display room dummy.

  “Sterling’s her maiden name. My grandmother is Anna Howard and my Grandad was John Sterling. You remember them?”

  “Why of course I do, child. They were fine people and so was your great-grandmother Howard. She was a good friend of mine when we were schoolgirls. And your great-grandfather was a fine figure of a man.”

  A faint blush covered her wrinkled old cheeks. “But I’m sorry to say,” she went on, “your mother was nothing like any of them. Bad seed, she was. Used to torment my poor Mr. Whiskers.”

  She glared in my direction. I smiled until my cheeks hurt but Cassie laughed. Pretty soon they were both laughing. Miss Lolly hid some very bad teeth behind her skinny old hand as she tittered away at my expense.

  I grabbed my leather handbag from Cassie, almost dropping it because of the unexpected weight of Ethan’s electronic goodies, and headed for Watson. I heard Cassie wisely covering our tracks as I climbed in the driver’s seat.

  “Looks like Dr. McHenry is not at home. I’ll be back later, and we’ll both come in for some of that wonderful bread. Tell Miss Hannah not to eat it all.”

  She gave the old bag a gentle hug and hopped in beside me. I stomped childishly on the gas and the tires squealed as we took off.

  “Whew! Looks like we got away with it. Head for home, Mom!”

  “Humpf.”

  She started laughing again. “Mr. Whiskers! What did you do to her cat? It must have been something really awful for her to hold a grudge this long.”

  I chuckled then. It was good to see Cassie laugh, even if it was at my expense.

  “I spray painted him from head to tail.”

  “Oh, my God, Mom. That is awful. The poor thing!”

  “I know.” Now I couldn’t stop laughing.

  “I probably shouldn’t ask, but what color?”

  “White. It was a black cat, and when it crossed in front of me one day I was sure I would have bad luck unless I did something. So I got some white spray paint and made a stripe down its back like a skunk. It seemed like a great idea at the time.”

  “How old were you?”

  “Eight or nine.”

  “You definitely were the bad seed.”

  “I know, I know.”

  When we got home, we took the contraband from Ethan’s apartment into the library and set it out on my father’s big desk. I had to move my own laptop and the notes for Leonard’s new book over to the library table to make room for all of Ethan’s equipment.

  “My goodness, Cassie, you brought the whole kit and caboodle!”

  “Why not? I knew there would be no second chance.”

  Cassie carefully plugged everything into the corresponding receptacles and I spread the floppy discs out.

  “Nothing is labeled. He just has them numbered,” complained Cassie.

  “Look closer. The numbers aren’t sequential, and they have too many digits. I bet it’s some kind of code. I bet he has the discs encrypted, too. Probably takes yet another password to read them.”

  “Why would he go to that much trouble?”

  “Probably no trouble at all to him—just standard operating procedure.”

  “What makes you say that?”

  “Think about it. Why would he leave all this out in the open where anybody could come across it if it were so easy to read?”

  “Mom, you seem to forget that all this was locked up in his apartment. Aren’t you being just a little melodramatic? After all, he’s not Superspy.”

  “Okay, turn it on and see for yourself.”

  Cassie sat down and went through the motions again. This time I watched closely to see if I could catch Ethan’s login password, but her fingers were too quick on the keyboard. She slipped one of the discs into the “A” drive and went to “File Manager.” A big red box appeared across the screen with a message in black letters “Enter Password.” Cassie typed in the password she had used to login. Another message flashed across the screen.

  “You are locked out. Please contact your supervisor.”

  “Wow! Looks like you weren’t kidding. How did you know, Mom?”

  “Leonard told me.”

  “Hah!”

  “Seriously. Our new book is all about industrial espionage. I had to read up. I learned a lot.”

  “I bet Leonard knows even more.”

  “Humpf.”

  We trudged into the kitchen where Mother was busy layering a lovely looking salad in a big glass bowl. Cassie sneaked a white mushroom cap and a hunk of Parmesan and went to the refrigerator for a drink.

  “Perrier, Mom?”

  “Sure.”

  “Gran?”

  “No thanks, dear; but I’ll take a glass of iced tea, if you don’t mind.”

  I was amazed at Cassie’s composure. Our little foray this morning seemed to have gotten rid of her anxiety, or a least gotten it under control. During lunch she regaled Mother with the story of Miss Lolly and my misadventures with her striped cat.

  “Paisley! What a naughty child you were. It’s funny, but I don’t remember anything about that particular incident.”

  “That’s because Granpa Howard hushed it up for me.”

  “You’re kidding?”

  “I think the old lady had a crush on him. Anyway, he made me fork over all my allowance. He pitched in the rest and together we bought her a dozen yellow roses. He said she would have misunderstood red ones.”

  “I should think so!” agreed Mother.

  “Am I missing something here, or is this some old-fashioned thing?”

  “You would do well to learn more about the language of flowers and love, my dear. Young people nowadays have no sense whatsoever of romance. It’s all slam, bam, thank you, m’am!”

  “Good grief, Mother. Not in front of the children.”

  Cassie went to her room after lunch to pick out a “visiting your boyfriend in jail where he is being held for a capitol offense” outfit.

  I helped Mother with the dishes. When we were done, we both decided a nap was the only way we would live to see another day. She went to her room and I headed back to the sofa in the library. Poor lonely little Aggie dusted my heels with her long white beard as she tagged along behind me.

  We had just curled up on the big, red chintz-covered sofa when Cassie entered. She was dressed in a soft, full-skirted yellow dress with a tiny pink flower print. Her long hair was tied back with a matching pink ribbon. She looked sweet and innocent and lovely—not at all like a gangster’s moll.

  “Do you want me to go with you, sweetie?”

  “No, Mom. I think I need to see Ethan alone.”

  “Oh, thank God. I’m exhausted.”

  “Sweet of you to offer, though. Maybe you can come with me tomorrow.”

  “Cassie, maybe he’ll be out tomorrow. This whole thing is probably one whopper of a mistake. Come home with some good news, okay?”

  “Sure thing, Mom. May I take Watson, for luck?”

  “Of course. And please pay some attention to this canine ragmop when you get home. She’s driving me crazy.”

  Aggie hopped up and traversed my prone body like a mountain goat. She lay down at my feet and started licking my toes, one at a time.

  Chapter Six

  I thought I would fall asleep immediately, but my mind kept nagging my body awake. Through heavy-lidded eyes, I stared at the bright red, yellow, and orange leaves as they danced and swirled in the wind outside the French doors. Fall was definitely here. I could already see the squirrels’ nests exposed to predators in the forks of the big old oak on the field side of the back fence.

  Mother had a fierce ongoing battle with each and every squirrel on the farm. She called them fancy rats with delusions of grandeur. She vowed that they were responsible for everything from house fires to the high unemployment rate.

  Last year she placed a wicked, evil-looking squirrel trap in the
back yard. When a poor furry soul wandered inside Mother called one of the army of high school students who worked for her to come and carry the cage far away and bring it back empty. I secretly believed that the crafty kid would let the squirrel out before he left the driveway—insuring himself a future phone call and another five bucks.

  Mother forgot to disarm the trap last May when we went to visit Cassie at Emory University. When we returned home we found a poor little dead squirrel huddled up on the bottom of the cage. It had obviously starved to death.

  The trap disappeared the next day. I haven’t seen it since. From the look of the size of the nests, we would be hearing lots of fancy deluded rats playing in the attic this winter. Mother was right about one thing, though. Squirrels carried diseases like all rodents. What was that word Horatio had told us about—vector?

  Squirrels were vectors and so were prairie dogs. Why was that so important? I fell asleep in a mild state of curiosity. I dreamed I was running and running on a wire wheel in a big cage and getting nowhere.

  I awoke fours hours later in a dark, chilly room with no furry little companion to keep my feet either wet or warm. I lay there puzzling for a moment, trying to get my bearings. Then I heard Aggie’s welcome home bark. Cassie was back.

  I stood and stretched, surprised to feel remarkably rested. And I was famished.

  I headed toward the kitchen to let Cassie in and feed my face.

  The back of the house was warm and bright with good smells coming from every corner of the kitchen. My mother’s answer to everything is “when in doubt, cook!” I opened the oven a tad to peek and got smacked on the behind with a wooden spoon.

  “Paisley Sterling, you’ll fall my cake!”

  I rubbed my smarting nether parts and opened the back door for Cassie. I knew better than to try and correct my mother’s grammar.