‘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.’