The Plague Doctor. E. Joan Sims
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about that. Remember the other night when Horatio was here? He was telling us about Ethan’s work in Africa and his search for the host of the Ebola virus.”
“Yes.”
“Remember the word he used?”
“I do. Dear Horatio was quite informative. The word was ‘vector.’”
“Well, Mother, I think that our young doctor is very intelligent, but not so creative. He probably uses words that are very common and familiar to him like ‘vector’ for encrypting all of his medical research. I imagine he is annoyed that he has to do it at all. Most doctors I know feel a little superior to the general public. And, excuse me for saying so Cassie, but Ethan is probably no different from the rest of the genus ‘white-coatis superiorus.’”
“Most people, myself included, wouldn’t understand any medical terminology at all. Why would he take it one step further and bother encrypting his work in the first place, dear?”
“As I explained to Cassie earlier, the government probably has rules for everyone across the board, from the Department of Defense to the CIA. I’m sure there are generic mandates to protect information.”
“Okay, Mom, if you’re so much smarter than Ethan, let’s see you try.”
“Not me—Leonard. If I’m going to waste the remaining little grey cells in my cerebrum on this, then Leonard and I get a story out of it. Deal?”
“Deal.”
“Now, what’s Ethan’s password?”
“He changed it to ‘Cassie’ when we met.”
“I rest my case.”
I plugged away on Dr. McHenry’s computer for three hours. Cassie fell asleep on the sofa, and Mother kept the teapot full of Queen Anne. I tried everything I could think of from “vector,” to “Ebola,” to “Kinshasa,” to “Tarzan,” with no luck.
And it took forever. Every time I tried a new word and got kicked out I had to log on again. To say it was frustrating was definitely an understatement.
“I could have sworn it would be ‘vector.’”
“You had me convinced, dear. It was a good thought. Very creative and…”
“Stop it, Mother. You’re just saying that to bug me. Bug! Bug! Maybe that’s it.”
And so it was.
When I got in, I yelled, “whoopee” loud enough to awaken Cassie. She inadvertently kicked Aggie, who nipped her hard on the foot.
“Ouch! Damn dog! Ouch! Did you really do it, Mom, uh, Leonard?”
“Look for yourself.”
They both came to peer over my shoulder at the columns of medical data whizzing across the little screen of the laptop.
“Shouldn’t we stop it, or print something, or something?” asked Cassie.
“Beat’s the hell out’a me.”
“Language, Paisley, dear.”
“Sorry, Mother. But I don’t know what all this means.”
“Maybe I could ask ‘white-coatis superiorus.’”
“Very funny, Cassie. No, I don’t think we should let the good doctor know we have breached his security until we manage to save his butt.”
“Paisley!”
“Oh, Mother, for heaven’s sake.”
“Exactly.”
It was getting late in a long hard day. My afternoon nap had given me a false sense of energy. After the initial euphoria of finding my way into Ethan’s computer wore off, so did my vim and vigor. I slumped over the desk and watched the bytes of information I did not understand speed past. My eyes watered with the strain of my efforts and the screen blurred in front of me.
“Sleep, I need sleep.”
“I think we all do, dear.”
“But, Mom, poor Ethan.”
“Sorry, Cassie, I can’t think anymore. I’ve shot my wad.”
“Common and vulgar pronouncements not withstanding, Cassandra, think of your poor Mother for a change. You’ve had her up and going since one o’clock this morning. That’s almost twenty-four hours. Let her go to bed, dear. She’ll function much better in the morning.”
They made me sound like a machine.
But Mother was right, as usual. Early the next morning I was back at the desk trying to puzzle out Ethan’s discs.
Cassie brought me tea and toast, which she nervously devoured while watching me flip through the screens of data.
“Understand anything, yet?”
“Don’t get crumbs on the keyboard!” I responded testily, “And I’m hungry. Where’s my toast?”
“Gran will probably bring you some.”
“I may have to go on strike if…”
“Anyone for some more toast and jam?”
Mother came in with a tray of lovely looking dishes of jam and butter and two racks of warm toast. She sat down on the sofa next to Cassie and they served themselves breakfast.
“And me?”
“Oh sorry, Paisley, dear. Here, have a slice.”
She extended the plate of buttered toast but Aggie got there before me. With a beautifully executed leap that would have put the Flying Wallendas to shame, she took the toast from the plate and was out of the room before we could say a word.
“Never mind. I’ll wait until lunch,” I grumped.
“Umm, you want this last half of mine, Mom?” asked my gluttonous child with her mouth full.
“And lunch had better be good!”
Chapter Eight
Cassie left around ten to visit Ethan. Mother had some shopping to do. I hoped she was planning to buy something good for lunch. They left me and my loving canine companion to decipher the computer discs alone. We were not doing too well. I finally divided them into three piles, “difficult,” “impossible,” and “you’ve got to be kidding.”
I had never taken any courses in statistics, but I’m sure that even if I had, I would have been just as lost trying to understand the endless columns and charts.
Ethan was an epidemiologist—a medical doctor who studied disease and its prevalence, and thereby, its prevention. I was a single mother, a former writer of children’s books, who collaborated with a fictitious detective named Leonard Paisley on a series of mystery novels. The twain would never have met if it had not been for my lovely daughter. And that’s what kept me going. I had to help Ethan to make Cassie happy.
When I finally came across Dr. Ethan McHenry’s journal, I could hardly believe my good luck. The first entry was six weeks ago, the fifth of August. He had made an appointment to meet with the two medical doctors in town, Ed Baxter and Winston Wallace. Wallace had showed up, but Baxter had canceled with the excuse of not feeling well.
Ethan had been immediately put off by Wallace’s attitude of self-importance and his disinterest in the problem at hand. Wallace made the firm assertion that the high fetal death rate was just a seasonal thing and of no real importance. He arrogantly insisted that the CDC would find that their statistics were off. They were simply exaggerating the situation, and as soon as they got their noses out of his business everything would return to normal. Ethan explained that he had been called in by the state epidemiologist. If he left, someone else would just take his place.
Wallace left their meeting in a huff.
There