The doorbell rang again. Mother was getting up. Abigail ran back to her bedroom and put Miss Bianca into the shoebox. She peeped out of her room. Mother was tying a dressing gown around her waist, opening the front door. Dr. Kiel was standing there, the vein in his forehead throbbing.
“Did you do this?” he demanded, shaking a newspaper in Mother’s face.
Mother backed up. “Dr. Kiel! What are you—I just got up—Abigail! Put some clothes on.”
Abigail had forgotten to button her pajama top. She slipped back into her room, her heart pounding. Dr. Kiel had come to fire Mother. Her teeth were chattering, even though it was a warm fall day.
She flattened herself against the wall and waited for Dr. Kiel to demand that Mother turn her daughter over to the police. Instead, Mother was looking at the newspaper in bewilderment.
“‘Reds in the Lab?’ What is this about, Dr. Kiel?”
“You didn’t tell the paper that the FBI was in the lab yesterday?” he demanded.
“Of course not. Really, Dr. Kiel, you should know you can trust me.”
He slapped the paper against his hand so hard that it sounded like the crack of a ball against a bat. “If Bob Pharris did it—”
“Dr. Kiel, I’m sure none of your students would have called the newspaper with a report like this. Perhaps—” she hesitated. “I don’t like to say this, it’s not really my place, but you know Dr. Dolan has been concerned about Elena Mirova.”
Dr. Kiel had been looking calmer, but now his jaw clenched again. “Elena is a refugee from communism. She came here because I thought she could be safe here. I will not let her be hounded by a witch hunt.”
“The trouble is, we don’t know anything about her,” Mother said. “She seems to know a great deal about your work, more than seems possible for a dishwasher, even one whose husband was a scientist.”
Dr. Kiel snarled. “Patrick Dolan has been sharpening his sword, hoping to stick it into me, since the day he arrived here. He’s not concerned about spies, he’s studying the best way to make me look bad.”
He looked down the hall and seemed to see Abigail for the first time. “Get dressed, Abigail; I’ll give you a ride to school.”
Dr. Kiel drove a convertible. Susie Campbell would faint with envy when she saw Abigail in the car. When she started to dress, Abigail realized her arms were covered with welts from where Miss Bianca had scratched her. She found a long-sleeved blouse to wear with her red skirt. By the time she had combed her hair and double-checked that Miss Bianca had water, Mother was dressed. Dr. Kiel was calmly drinking a cup of coffee.
Abigail looked at the newspaper.
The FBI paid a surprise visit to the University of Kansas campus yesterday, in response to a report that the Bacteriology Department is harboring Communists among its lab support staff. Several members of the department work on micro-organisms that could be used in germ warfare. The research is supposed to be closely monitored, but recently, there’s been a concern that a Soviet agent has infiltrated the department.
The newspaper and the FBI both thought Elena was a spy. Maybe she was, maybe she really had given Dr. Kiel a magic potion that blinded his eyes to who she really was.
“Rhonda, we’re going to have every reporter in America calling about this business. Better put your war paint on and prepare to do battle,” Dr. Kiel said, getting up from the table. “Come on, Abigail. Get to school. You have to learn as much as you can so that morons like this bozo Burroughs from the FBI can’t pull the wool over your eyes.”
Abigail spent a very nervous day frightened about what would happen when she got to the lab and Bob Pharris accused her of stealing Miss Bianca. She kept hoping she’d get sick. At recess, she fell down on the playground, but she only skinned her knees; the school nurse wouldn’t let her go home for such a trivial accident.
She walked from school to the bacteriology department as slowly as possible. Even so, she arrived too soon. She lingered at the elevator, wondering if she should just go to Dr. Kiel and confess. Bob Pharris stuck his head out of the lab.
“Oh, it’s you, short stuff. We’ve been under siege all day—your mom is answering two phones at once—someone even called from the BBC in London. A guy tried to get into the animal room this morning—I threw him out with my own bare hands and for once Dr. Kiel thinks I’m worth something.” He grinned. “Number 19 cannot get a PhD but he has a future as a bouncer.”
Abigail tried to smile, but she was afraid his next comment would be that he’d seen that Number 139 was missing and would Abigail hand her over at once.
“Don’t worry, Abby, this will blow over,” Bob said, going back into the lab.
Dr. Kiel was shouting; his voice was coming up the hall from Dr. Dolan’s lab. She crept down the hall and peeked inside. Agent Burroughs, the bozo from the FBI, was there with Dr. Kiel and Dr. Dolan.
“What did you do with her?” Dr. Dolan said. “Give her a ticket back to Russia along with your mouse?”
Abigail’s heart thudded painfully.
“The Bureau just wants to talk to her,” said Agent Burroughs. “Where did she go?”
“Ask Dolan,” Dr. Kiel said. “He’s the one who sees Reds under the bed. He probably stabbed her with a pipette and threw her into the Kansas River.”
Agent Burroughs said, “If you’re hiding a communist, Dr. Kiel, you could be in serious trouble.”
“What is this, Joe McCarthy all over again?” Dr. Kiel said. “Guilt by association? Elena Mirova fled Czechoslovakia because her husband was imprisoned. As long as she was in Bratislava, they could torture him with the threat that they could hurt his wife. She was hiding here to protect her husband. Your jackbooted feet have now put her life in danger as well as his.”
“There was no Elena Mirova in Czechoslovakia,” Burroughs said. “There are no Czech scientists named Mirov or Mirova.”
“What? You know the names and locations of everyone in Czechoslovakia, Burroughs?” Dr. Kiel snapped. “How did you get that from the comfort of your armchair in Washington?”
“The head of our Eastern Europe bureau looked into it.” Burroughs said. “The Bratislava institute is missing one of their scientists, a biological warfare expert named Magdalena Spirova; she disappeared six weeks ago. Do you know anything about her?”
“I’m not like you, Burroughs, keeping track of everyone behind the Iron Curtain,” Dr. Kiel said. “I’m just a simple Kansas researcher, trying to find a cure for Q Fever. If you’d go back to the rat hole you crawled out of, I could get back to work.”
“Your dishwasher is gone, whatever her name is, and one of your infected mice is gone,” Burroughs said. “I’m betting Mirova-Spirova is taking your germ back to Uncle Ivan and the next thing we know, every soldier we have below the DMZ will be infected with Q Fever.”
Abigail’s bookbag slipped out of her hand and landed on the floor with an earth-ending noise. The men looked over at her.
Dr. Kiel said, “What’s up, Abigail? You think you can be David to all us angry Sauls? Play a little Bach and calm us down?”
Abigail didn’t know what he was talking about, just saw that he wasn’t angry with her for standing there. “I’m sorry, Dr. Kiel, I was worried about the mouse.”
“Abigail is the youngest member of my team,” Dr. Kiel told Burroughs. “She looks after our healthy animals.”
The FBI man rounded on Abigail, firing questions at her: Had she noticed Elena hanging around the contamination room? How hard was it to get into the room? How often did Abigail feed the mice? When did she notice one of the mice was missing?