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?’
The teakettle was whistling shrilly. I got up and turned the burner off.
‘It’s not the only exotic disease I’ve had in my research archives. I’ve been collecting,’ she said. ‘I actually thought I might do an important project someday. Study the world’s most feared virus and learn something more about the human immune system that might save us from other scourges like AIDS. I thought I might win a Nobel Prize.’ She had gotten oddly quiet, as if pleased with herself. ‘But no, I wouldn’t say that in Birmingham my intention was to one day create an epidemic.’