go before Chief Joiner decides to visit Ethan’s room and confiscate his belongings as evidence.”
“Wow! I hadn’t thought of that. You’re right, Gran. Hurry up, Mom”
The shower helped and so did the Earl Grey with four teaspoons of sugar. If we were lucky, we’d be back home before I crashed from my sugar high.
I let Cassie drive Watson, my mean green Jeep Wagon. I’d bought it the year before, when we’d first gotten involved in what Mother called “capers.” It had all the necessary equipment for what I had imagined I would be needing for sleuthing. So far, all we had used was the oversized cooler under the jump seat in the back.
Dr. Ethan McHenry had been in Rowan Springs for about six weeks. He and Cassie had met in the beginning of August at our annual “Bright Leaf Festival.” Our town is in the middle of the most fertile tobacco growing country in the southern United States. We’ve celebrated our prosperity and good fortune every year since 1935 with a street festival, square dance, beauty pageant, and arts and crafts show.
This year an antismoking wag wrote a letter to the editor of the local paper suggesting that we add a phlegm spitting contest and a chest x-ray exhibition to the festivities. Even though I was amused, I had to agree. I’d given up cigarettes the minute I knew I was pregnant with Cassie. Nevertheless, we all dutifully attended each event and unashamedly enjoyed the ice-cold sparkling apple cider, tender delicious funnel cakes, and gloriously fat-filled, indigestible deep-fried corn dogs.
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
