'I can't believe how nice you are,' she said as she opened the door. 'Either that or crazy.'
'Depends on who you ask.'
I stepped inside, pausing to look at framed photographs along the dark paneled entrance hall. Most of them were of people hiking and fishing and had been taken in long years past. My eyes were fixed on one, an older man wearing a pale blue hat and holding a cat as he grinned around a corncob pipe.
'My father,' Crowder said. 'This was where my parents lived, and my mother's parents were here before that. That's them there.' She pointed. 'When my father's business started doing poorly in England, they came here and moved in with her family.'
'And what about you?' I said.
'I stayed on, was in school.'
I looked at her and did not think she was as old as she wanted me to believe.
'You're always trying to make me assume you're a dinosaur compared to me,' I said.
'But somehow I don't think so.'
'Maybe you just wear the years better than I do.' Her feverish dark eyes met mine.
'Is any of your family still living?' I asked, perusing more photographs.
'My grandparents have been gone about ten years, my father about five. After that, I came out here every weekend to take care of Mother. She hung on as long as she could.'
'That must have been hard with your busy career,' I said, as I looked at an early photograph of her laughing on a boat, holding up a rainbow trout.
'Would you like to come in and sit down?' she asked. 'Let me put this in the kitchen.'
'No, no, show me the way and save your strength,' I insisted.
She led me through a dining room that did not appear to have been used in years, the chandelier gone, exposed wires hanging out over a dusty table, and draperies replaced by blinds. By the time we walked into the large, old-fashioned kitchen, the hair was rising along my scalp and neck, and it was all I could do to remain calm as I set the stew on the counter.
'Tea?' she asked.
She was hardly coughing now, and though she might be ill, this wasn't why she initially had stayed away from her job.
'Not a thing,' I said.
She smiled at me but her eyes were penetrating, and as we sat at the breakfast table, I was frantically trying to figure out what to do. What I suspected couldn't be right, or should I have figured it out sooner? I had been friendly with her for more than fifteen years. We had worked on numerous cases together, shared information, commiserated as women. In the old days, we drank coffee together and smoked. I had found her charming, brilliant, and certainly never sensed anything sinister. Yet I realized this was the very sort of thing people said about the serial killer next door, the child molester, the rapist.
'So, let's talk about Birmingham,' I said to her.
'Let's.' She wasn't smiling now.
'The frozen source of this disease has been found,' I said. 'The vials have labels on them dated 1978, Birmingham. I'm wondering if the lab there might have been doing any research in mutant strains of smallpox, anything that you might know…?'
'I wasn't there in 1978,' she interrupted me.
'Well, I think you were, Phyllis.'
'It doesn't matter.' She got up to put on a pot of tea.
I did not say anything, waiting until she sat back down.
'I'm sick, and by now, you ought to be,' she said, and I knew she was not referring to the flu.
'I'm surprised you didn't create your own vaccine before you started all this,' I said.
'Seems like that was a little reckless for someone so precise.'
'I wouldn't have needed it if that bastard hadn't broken in and ruined everything,' she snapped. 'That filthy, disgusting pig.' Enraged, she shook.
'While you were on AOL, talking to me,' I said. 'That's when you stayed on the line and never logged off, because he started prying open your door. And you shot him
and fled in your van. I guess you just went out to Janes Island for your long weekends, so you could passage your lovely disease to new flasks, feed the little darlings.'
I was beginning to feel the rage as I spoke. She did not seem to care, but was enjoying it.
'After all these years in medicine, are people nothing more than slides and petri dishes? What happened to their faces, Phyllis? I have seen the people you did this to.' I leaned closer to her. 'An old woman who died alone in her soiled bed, no one to even hear
her cries for water. And now Wingo, who will not let me look at him, a decent, kind young man, dying. You know him! He's been to your lab! What has he ever done to you!'
She was unmoved, her anger flashing, too.
'You left Lila Pruitt's Vita spray in one of the cubbyholes where she sold recipes for a quarter. Tell me if I don't get it right.' My words bit. 'She thought her mail had been delivered to the wrong box, then dropped off by a neighbor. What a nice little something to get for free, and she sprayed it on her face. She had it on her nightstand, spraying it again and again when she was in pain.'
My colleague was silent, her eyes gleaming.
'You probably delivered all of your little bombs to Tangier at once,' I said. 'Then dropped by the ones for me. And my staff. What was your plan after that? The world?'
'Maybe,' was all she had to say.
'Why?'
'People did it to me first. Tit for tat.'
'What did anybody do to you that's even close?' It was an effort to keep my voice controlled.
'I was at Birmingham when it happened. The accident. It was implied that I was partly to blame, and I was forced to leave. It was completely unfair, a total setback to me when I was young, on my own. Scared. My parents had left for the United States, to live here in this house. They liked the outdoors. Camping, fishing. All of them did.' For a long moment, she stared off as if there, back in those days.
'I didn't matter much, but I had worked hard. I got another job in London, was three grades below what I had been.' Her eyes focused on me. 'It wasn't fair. It was the virologist who caused the accident. But because I was there that day, and he conveniently killed himself, it was easy to pin it all on me. Plus, I was just a kid, really.'
'So you stole the source virus on your way out,' I said. She smiled coldly.
'And you stored it all these years?'
'Not hard when every place you work has nitrogen freezers and you're always happy to monitor the inventory,' she said with pride. 'I saved it.'
'Why?'
'Why?' Her voice rose. 'I was the one working on it when the accident happened. It was mine. So I made sure I took some of it and my other experiments with me on my way out the door. Why should I let them keep it? They weren't smart enough to do what I did.'
'But this isn't smallpox. Not exactly,' I said.
'Well, that's even worse, now isn't it?' Her lips were trembling with emotion as she recalled those days. 'I spliced the DNA of monkeypox into the smallpox genome.'
She was getting more overwrought, her hands trembling as she wiped her nose with a napkin.
'And then at the beginning of the new academic year, I get passed over as a department chairman,' she went on, eyes flaming with furious tears.
'Phyllis, that's not fair…'
'Shut up!' she screamed. 'All I've given to that bloody school? I'm the senior one who has potty-trained everyone, including you. And they give it to a man because I'm not a doctor. I'm just a Ph.D.,' she spat.
'They gave it to a Harvard-trained pathologist who is completely justified in getting the position,' I flatly stated. 'And it doesn't matter. There's no excuse for what you've done. You saved a virus all these years? To do this?'