"It doesn't like anything, Catherine. It's dead."
The younger woman shrugged apologetically, accepting the correction but unwilling to be convinced. "He keeps banging."
"Well, when you finish with number seven, decrease the power again. The last thing we need is accelerated tissue damage due to unauthorized motion."
"Yes, Doctor." She gently slid the brain out onto a plastic tray. The bank of fluorescent lights directly over the table picked up glints of gold threaded throughout the grayish-green mass. "It'll be nice to finally work with a subject we've been able to do preliminary setup on. I mean, the delay while we attempt to tailor the bacteria can't be good for them."
"Probably not," Dr. Burke agreed caustically and, with a last disapproving look in the direction of number nine's isolation box, strode out of the lab.
The pounding continued.
"Where to, lady?"
Vicki opened her mouth and then closed it again. She didn't actually have the faintest idea.
"Uh, Queen's University. Life Sciences." Her mother would have been moved. Surely someone could tell her where.
"It's a big campus, Queen's is." The cabbie pulled out of the train station parking lot and turned onto Taylor Kidd Boulevard. "You got a street address?"
She knew the address. Her mother had shown her proudly around the new building just after it opened two years ago. "It's on Arch Street."
"Down by the old General Hospital, eh? Well, we'll find it." He smiled genially at her in his rearview mirror. "Fifteen years of driving a cab and I haven't gotten lost yet. Nice day today. Looks like spring finally arrived."
Vicki squinted out the window beside her. The sun was shining. Had the sun been shining in Toronto? She couldn't remember.
"Winter's better for business, mind you. Who wants to walk when the slush is as high as your hubcaps, eh? Still, April's not so bad as long as we get a lot of rain. Let it rain, that's what I say. You going to be in Kingston long?"
"I don't know."
"Visiting relatives?
"Yes." My Mother. She's dead.
Something in that single syllable convinced the cabbie his fare wasn't in the mood for conversation and that further questions might be better left unasked. Humming tunelessly, he left her to relative silence.
An attempt had been made to blend the formed concrete of the new Life Sciences Complex in with the older, limestone structures of the university, but it hadn't been entirely successful.
"Progress," the cabbie ventured, as Vicki opened the back door, his tongue loosened by a sizable tip.
"Still, the kids need more than a couple of Bunsen burners and a rack of test tubes to do meaningful research these days, eh? Paper says some grad student took out a patent on a germ."
Vicki, who'd handed him a twenty because it was the first bill she'd pulled out of her wallet, ignored him.
He shook his head as he watched her stride up the walk, back rigidly straight, overnight bag carried like a weapon, and decided against suggesting that she have a nice day.
"Mrs. Shaw? I'm Vicki Nelson... "
The tiny woman behind the desk leapt to her feet and held out both hands. "Oh, yes, of course you are. You poor dear, did you come all the way from Toronto?"
Vicki stepped back but couldn't avoid having her right hand clutched and wrung. Before she could speak, Mrs. Shaw rushed on.
"Of course you did. I mean you were in Toronto when I called and now you're here." She laughed, a little embarrassed, and let go of Vicki's hand. "I'm sorry. It's just... well, your mother and I were friends, we'd worked together for almost five years and when she... I mean, when... It was just... such a terrible shock."
Vicki stared down at the tears welling up in the older woman's eyes and realized to her horror that she didn't have the faintest idea of what to say. All the words of comfort she'd spoken over the years to help ease a thousand different types of grief, all the training, all the experience, she could find none of it.
"I'm sorry." Mrs. Shaw dug into her sleeve and pulled out a damp and wrinkled tissue. "It's just every time I think of it... I can't help... "
"Which is why I keep telling you, you should go home."