Rhonda shook her head. “He’s jealous of Dr. Kiel, I think, and so he tries to attack the people who work for Dr. Kiel. Try not to pay attention to him.”
“But Dr. Dolan said your husband’s name wasn’t in—in the Czech something, the magazine,” Abigail piped up, to Rhonda’s annoyance.
Elena didn’t speak for a moment; her face turned white again and she clutched the door jamb for support. “No, he is scientist, he reading articles, deciding is science good or not good? He telling editor, but only editor have name in journal, not husband.”
Dr. Dolan stormed out of Dr. Kiel’s office, his round cheeks swollen with anger. “You were quite a devoted wife, Elena, if you studied your husband’s work so much that you understand rickettsial degradation by lysosomal enzymes,” he said sarcastically.
“I married many years, I learning many things,” Elena said. “Now I learning how live with husband in prison. I also learn acid rinse glassware, forgive me.”
She brushed past Dolan and went down the hall to the autoclave room, where the pressure machine washed glassware at a temperature high enough to kill even the peskiest bacterium.
Over the weekend, Bob and the other graduate students took care of the animals. On Monday, Abigail hurried anxiously back to the lab after school. Bob was in the animal room with a strange man who was wearing a navy suit and a white shirt. None of the scientists ever dressed like that: they were always spilling acids that ate holes in their clothes. Even Mother had to be careful when she went into the lab—once Bob accidentally dripped acid on her leg and her nylons dissolved.
“But she has access to the animals?”
Bob was shifting unhappily from one foot to the other. He didn’t see Abigail, but she was sure the man in the suit was talking about her. She crept behind the cages into the alcove where the big sinks stood.
Bob was putting on a mask and gloves to go into the contamination room, but the man in the suit seemed to be afraid of the germs; he said he didn’t need to go into the room.
“I just want to know if you keep it secure. There are a lot of bugs in there that could do a lot of damage in the wrong hands.”
“You have to have a key to get in here,” Bob assured the man, showing him that the door was locked.
When the two men left, Abigail went out to the cages. Miss Bianca’s cage was empty. Her heart seemed to stop. She had the same queer empty feeling under her ribcage that she’d felt when Daddy said he was leaving to start a new life in California.
A lot of the cages were empty, Abigail realized, not just Miss Bianca’s. Bob and Dr. Kiel had waited until the weekend so they could steal Miss Bianca and give her a shot full of germs while Abigail wasn’t there to protect her.
Dr. Kiel had given Mother a set of keys when she started working for him. Abigail went back up the stairs to Dr. Kiel’s lab. Mother was working on Dr. Kiel’s expense report from his last trip to Washington. Abigail pretended to study Spanish explorers in the 1500s, sitting so quietly that people came and went, including Bob and the man in the suit, without paying attention to her.
Dr. Kiel was in his lab, talking to Elena as they stood over a microscope. The lab was across the hall; Abigail couldn’t hear what anyone said, but suddenly Dr. Kiel bellowed “Rhonda!” and Mother hurried over with her shorthand notebook.
As soon as she was gone, Abigail went to the drawer where Mother kept her purse. She found the keys and ran back down to the animal room. She didn’t bother about gloves and masks. At any second someone might come in, or Mother would notice her keys were missing.
There were so many keys on the key ring it took five tries before she found the right one. In the contamination room, it didn’t take long to find Miss Bianca: slips of paper with the number of the mouse and the date of the injection were attached to each cage door. 139. Miss Bianca. The poor mouse was huddled in the back of her cage, shivering. Abigail put her in her pocket.
“I’ll get you one of those special pills. You’ll feel better in a jiffy,” Abigail promised her.
When she got back upstairs, Mother and Dr. Kiel were inside his office. He was talking to her in a worried voice. Elena and Bob were in the lab. Abigail got the bottle of pills from the cabinet. The bottle said four a day for ten days for adults, but Miss Bianca was so tiny, maybe one tablet cut into four? Abigail took ten of them and put the bottle away just as Mother came out.
While Mother was preparing dinner, Abigail made a nest for Miss Bianca in a shoebox lined with one of her t-shirts. She took a knife from the drawer in the dining room to poke air holes into the box, then used it to cut the pills into four pieces. They were hard to handle and kept slipping away from the knife. When she finally had them cut up, she couldn’t get Miss Bianca to take one. She just lay in the shoebox, not lifting her head.
“You have to take it or you’ll die,” Abigail told her, but Miss Bianca didn’t seem to care.
Abigail finally pried open the mouse’s little mouth and shoved the piece of pill in. Miss Bianca gave a sharp squeak, but she swallowed the pill.
“That’s a good girl,” Abigail said.
Over dinner, Abigail asked her mother who the man in the suit had been. “He was with Bob in the animal room,” she said. “Is he spying on the animals?”
Rhonda shook her head. “He’s an FBI agent named Mr. Burroughs. Someone sent an anonymous letter telling the FBI to look at Dr. Kiel’s lab.”
“Because Elena is a communist spy?” Abigail said.
“Don’t say things like that, Abigail. Especially not to Agent Burroughs. Elena is not a spy, and if Dr. Dolan would only—” she bit her lip, not wanting to gossip about Dolan with her daughter.
“But she did give Dr. Kiel a potion,” Abigail persisted.
“Whatever you saw was none of your business!” Rhonda said. “Clear the table and put the dishes in the machine.”
If Mother was angry, she was less likely to notice what Abigail was doing. While Mother watched It Takes A Thief, Abigail cleaned up the kitchen, then brought a saucer from her doll’s tea set into the kitchen and put some peanut butter in it. Before she went to bed, she stuck some peanut butter onto another piece of the pill and got Miss Bianca to swallow it. When she brushed her teeth, she filled one of her doll’s teacups with water. The mouse didn’t want to drink, so Abigail brought in a wet washcloth and stuck it in Miss Bianca’s mouth.
She quickly shoved the shoebox under her bed when she heard Mother coming down the hall to tuck her in for the night.
Abigail didn’t sleep well. She worried what would happen when Dr. Kiel discovered that Miss Bianca was missing from the lab: she should have taken all the mice, she realized. Then the FBI might think it had been a communist, stealing their secret mice. What would happen, too, when Mother realized one of Abigail’s t-shirts was missing.
In the morning, she was awake before Mother. She gave Miss Bianca another piece of pill in peanut butter. The mouse was looking better: she took the pill in her little paws and licked the peanut butter from it, then nibbled the tablet. Abigail took her into the bathroom with her and Miss Bianca sipped water from the tap in the sink.
All this was good, but it didn’t stop Abigail feeling sick to her stomach when she thought about how angry Dr. Kiel would be. Mother would lose her job; she would never forgive Abigail. She put the mouse on her shoulder and rubbed her face against its soft fur. “Can you help me, Miss Bianca? Can you summon the Prisoner’s Aid society now that I’ve saved your life?”
The doorbell rang just then, a loud shrill sound that frightened both girl and mouse. Miss Bianca skittered down inside Abigail’s pajama top, trying to hide. By the time Abigail was able to extricate the mouse, she was covered in scratches. If Mother saw them—