The Vines by Shelley Nolden (ebook and pdf reader .TXT) 📕

Lily stole one last glance around the room, her gaze settling on the microscope, its stage clips still gripping the slide with the malignant tumor cell. The notion that this lab could produce a magic bullet for cancer seemed absurd. Yet the impossible did happen—somewhere—every day. She stepped into the transition space, and a sterilizing agent cleansed her biosafety suit.

Maybe it could happen here, she thought. And the speck of hope she’d been harboring, initially the size of a single cell, divided in two.

1946–1963

September 1946

tto.

Cora dropped her gardening hoe. From the field beside the coal house, she strained to see the man in the brown boater who’d just stepped off the gangway. At his feet rested a suitcase and a black physician’s kit that made Cora tremble.

The Bronx skyline behind him swayed.

To steady herself, she sat back on her heels. Ten years had passed without a single credible detail regarding his whereabouts. During the first two, when Ulrich had dominated her, she’d scrutinized every male who’d stepped off that ferry. Back then, Otto’s return, with his more humane methods, would have been akin to salvation. Following Ulrich’s departure, however, she’d been thrilled to be rid of them both, her exhilaration marred only by a nagging concern about her missing files. And she hadn’t yet found a new doctor she could trust.

Following Germany’s surrender, Cora had read in the papers about Ulrich’s role as a doctor in Hitler’s Schutzstaffel. Either through his imprisonment or hanging, she would be beyond his reach forever. Yet she hadn’t celebrated the news. For weeks she’d lain in bed, wishing that, back in 1938, she’d convinced him that he could better serve the Fatherland by advancing his research on her.

Now abandoning her effort to weed the field, Cora buried her face beneath her neckerchief and pressed her wide-brimmed hat farther down her forehead. Still, she felt too exposed.

Otto’s resumption of their project could assuage her guilt, she told herself. Especially if he succeeded in creating a cure-all for disease. Her stomach, however, heaved in disagreement.

Grasping her crucifix pendant, she studied the man.

No, it can’t be him, she realized, exhaling slowly. At seventy-eight, his stature would be stooped, whereas this man’s chest bulged in his white dress shirt.

A flaxen-haired boy of about four years ran down the gangplank, and the man swung him onto the dock.

Just another veteran and his family, she decided. For the past few months, they’d been carrying out a full-fledged invasion of the island. To accommodate the influx of ex-soldiers studying at New York City universities under the GI Bill, Riverside had been rezoned for student housing. Even the rooms in the tuberculosis pavilion, completed only five years earlier, had been converted to apartments. Thankfully, the colleges had retained her as a groundskeeper, which allowed her to continue living in the nurses’ residence.

The man hugged the child and offered his hand to a statuesque blonde. Hampered by their luggage and the spirited boy, the couple progressed down the pier, the man walking with a slight limp that favored his left side.

The back of Cora’s neck prickled.

He was staring at her.

Reflexively, her shoulders rounded forward.

He grinned.

Ulrich.

No, she thought, it can’t be. His war crimes . . .

Had he escaped from Nuremberg?

She clutched the grass, which suddenly smelled repulsively sweet. Like chloroform.

The blonde squeezed his shoulder and whispered into his ear.

He laughed, the harsh wind bringing the familiar, grating noise to Cora. And the revolting scent of his Foster’s hair gloss.

How Ulrich had persuaded President Truman to allow him reentry she couldn’t fathom, though she should have expected it. After all, she was convinced that he’d murdered his father and then worked the system to fill the empty position himself. He must be using a fake identity.

The pokeberry tea in her stomach felt like it was fermenting.

In her nightmares, she’d often contended with the prospect of his return, but he’d always arrived alone. Not with a ravishing wife and child, while Cora remained achingly single. Now, not only would he resume the torture, but he’d torment her with his happiness as well.

The child squirmed free of his mother’s grasp and ran toward the meadow. He was heading straight for her.

“Rollie,” Ulrich shouted, “halt!”

The boy reeled toward his father, a mischievous grin filling his chubby face.

“Diese Fraulein ist schlecht. Bleib weg.”

Ulrich was right: she was a danger to the boy. Hastily, she tossed the tools into her bucket. As much as she despised the father, the child was innocent.

Gently, Ulrich rotated his son and instructed him to run to his mother.

Cora slung her satchel over her shoulder and rose to flee.

“Miss McSorley, I didn’t dismiss you,” he called out as he strode across the field, seemingly unslowed by his limp.

Rollie reached his mother, who clutched him against her lipstick-red skirt.

A safe distance from Cora, Ulrich stopped and folded his arms.

Now that he was closer to Otto’s age at the time of his disappearance, Ulrich’s resemblance to his father was striking. A twinge of sorrow gripped her heart.

He stood there, she knew, expecting an apology.

It had been eight years since she’d last heeded him as her master; the required submissive demeanor no longer came automatically. Plus, now that he was a war criminal, why should she cower before him? She straightened her shoulders and looked him in the eyes. “I’ll tell them who you really are.”

He grinned, revealing his straight teeth, still pearly white. “They’re already fully aware.”

At a loss for words, she stared at him.

“The US government has absolved me of all alleged crimes.” He tipped his hat at the American flag, fluttering above the morgue roof. “They’ve recruited me for Operation Paperclip.”

Her temples pounding, she pinched her trousers to keep from putting her gloved hands to her eyes. None of the four newspapers she subscribed to had ever referenced a Project Paperclip. “What’s that?”

“Our new enemy is the Soviet Union.”

“What’s that got to do with the hundreds of people you exterminated during those immunization experiments at