SURFED LONG INTO THAT NIGHT, CHASING LOOPS INTO LOOPS into loops. I explored the history of the Tracadie leprosarium, or lazaretto in local parlance. I read personal stories. Educated myself on the cause, classification, diagnosis, and treatment of leprosy. Worked through shifts in public policy concerning the disease.

With regard to Tracadie, I learned the following.

In 1849, after five years of staggering mortality, the New Brunswick board of health recognized the inhumanity of forced quarantine on Sheldrake Island. A site was chosen in a backwater called Tracadie, and meager funds were appropriated for the construction of a lazaretto.

The building was a two-story frame, upstairs for sleeping, downstairs for sitting and dining. Privies were out back. Small and basic, the new digs must have seemed lavish to the seventeen individuals who survived the island.

Though still imprisoned, the sick now had some lifelines to the outside world. Families were closer and could manage visits. Over the decades, doctors showed varying degrees of commitment. Charles-Marie LaBillois. James Nicholson. A. C. Smith. E. P. LaChapelle. Aldoria Robichaud. Priests came and went. Ferdinand-Edmond Gauvreau. Joseph-Auguste Babineau.

Despite better conditions, the number of deaths remained high in the early years. Moved by compassion, a Montreal-based nursing order, les Hospitalières de Saint-Joseph, volunteered to care for the sick. Arriving in 1868, the nuns never left.

I stared at grainy images of these brave sisters, somber in their stiff white wimples and long black veils. Alone, in the dark, I pronounced their musical names. Marie Julie Marguerite Crére. Eulalia Quesnel. Delphine Brault. Amanda Viger. Clémence Bonin. Philomène Fournier. I asked myself, Could I ever have been so selfless? Would I have had the fortitude to sacrifice and to such degree?

I pored over patient photos, scanned from the archives of the Musée historique de Tracadie. Two young girls, heads shaved, hands hidden under their armpits. A bushy-bearded man with a concave nose. A babushkaed granny with bandaged feet. Circa 1886, 1900, 1924. Fashions changed. Faces. The expressions of despair remained ever constant.

Eyewitness accounts were even more heartbreaking. In 1861, a lazaretto priest described a sufferer’s appearance in the end stage of the disease: “…features are not but deep furrows, the lips are big running ulcers, the upper one greatly puffed and turned up towards the seat of the nose which has disappeared, the lower one hanging over the glossy chin.”

The lives of these people were too painful to imagine. Despised by strangers. Feared by family and friends. Exiled to a living tomb. Dead among the living.

Now and then I had to leave the computer. Walk the rooms of my home. Brew tea. Take a break before I could continue.

And, always, my thoughts were plagued by the question of Harry. Where had she gone? Why didn’t she phone? My inability to contact my sister made me feel restive and helpless.

The lazaretto was rebuilt three times. Repositioned slightly. Expanded. Improved.

Various treatments were attempted. A patent medicine called Fowle’s Humor Cure. Chaulmoogra oil. Chaulmoogra oil with quinine or syrup of wild cherry. By injection. By capsule. Nothing worked.

Then, in 1943, Dr. Aldoria Robichaud visited Carville, Louisiana, site of a four-hundred-bed leprosarium. The Carville doctors were experimenting with sulfas.

On Robichaud’s return, diasone treatment was introduced at Tracadie. I could envision the joy, the hope. For the first time a cure was possible. The postwar years saw more pharmaceutical breakthroughs. Dapsone. Rifampicin. Clofazimine. Multidrug therapies.

The final tally shows 327 souls treated for leprosy in New Brunswick. In addition to Canadians, the sick included patients from Scandinavia, China, Russia, Jamaica, and elsewhere.

Besides the fifteen corpses left on Sheldrake Island, 195 were buried in Tracadie, 94 in the founders’ cemetery, 42 in the church cemetery, and 59 in the lepers’ cemetery beside the final lazaretto.

Hippo’s girl had come from Sheldrake Island. Thinking of her, I scanned the names of the dead. Some were pitifully young. Mary Savoy, seventeen. Marie Comeau, nineteen. Olivier Shearson, eighteen. Christopher Drysdale, fourteen. Romain Dorion, fifteen. I wondered, Did I have another young victim in my lab? A girl of sixteen who died an outcast?

My eyes drifted from my laptop to my cell. I willed it to ring. Call, Harry. Pick up a phone and dial. You must know that I’m worried. Even you can’t be that inconsiderate.

The thing remained obstinately mute.

Why?

I left my desk, stretched. The clock said two-twelve. I knew I should sleep. Instead, I returned to the computer, horrified yet fascinated by what I was learning.

The lazaretto’s last patients included two elderly women, Archange and Madame Perehudoff, and an ancient Chinese gentleman referred to as Hum. All three had grown old in the facility. All three had lost touch with their families.

Though cured with diasone, neither Madame Perehudoff nor Hum ever chose to leave. Both died in 1964. Ironically, Archange never contracted leprosy, though her parents and seven siblings had had the disease. Admitted as a teen, Archange endured to become the lazaretto’s final resident.

Down to one patient, the good sisters decided it was time to close shop. But Archange posed a problem. Having lived her whole life among lepers, she was unacceptable to any senior citizens’ residence in town.

I didn’t cry when I read that. But it was close.

After much searching, a place was found for Archange away from Tracadie. One hundred and sixteen years after opening, the lazaretto finally closed its doors.

The year was 1965.

I stared at the date, hearing yet another subliminal whisper.

As before, I struggled to bring the message to clarity. My exhausted brain refused to process fresh data.

A weight hit my lap. I jumped.

Birdie brrrp-ed and rubbed his head on my chin.

“Where’s Harry, Bird?”

The cat brrrp-ed again.

“You’re right.”

Gathering the feline, I crawled into bed.

Harry was sitting on a carved wooden bench outside Obéline’s gazebo, the totem pole casting zoomorphic shadows across her face. She was holding a scrapbook, insisting I look.

The page was black. I could see nothing.

Harry spoke words I couldn’t make out. I went to turn the page, but my arm jerked wildly. I tried over and over, with the same spastic result.

Frustrated, I stared at my hand. I was wearing gloves with the fingers cut off. Nothing protruded from the holes.

I tried to wiggle my missing fingers. My arm jerked again.

The sky darkened and a piercing cry split the air. I looked up at the totem pole. The eagle’s beak opened and the carved bird screeched again.

My lids dragged apart. Birdie was nudging my elbow. The phone was ringing.

Fumbling the handset to my ear, I clicked on.

“—lo.”

Ryan made none of his usual sleeping-princess jokes. “They’ve cracked the code.”

“What?” Still sluggish.

“Cormier’s thumb drive. We’re in. You available to scan faces?”

“Sure, but—”

“Need a ride?”

“I can drive.” I checked the clock: 8:13.

“Time to make yourself useful, princess.” The old Ryan.

“I’ve been up for hours.” I looked at Bird. The cat looked back. Disapproving?

“Right.”

“I was online until three-thirty.”

“Learn much?”

“Yes.”

“Surprised you could stay awake after such rigorous physical activity.”

“Cooking pasta?”

Pause.

“You OK with last night?” Ryan’s voice had gone serious.

“What happened last night?”

“Headquarters. ASAP.”

Dial tone.

Fifty minutes later I entered a conference room on the fourth floor of Wilfrid-Derome. The small space contained one battered government-issue table and six battered government-issue chairs. A wall-mounted chalkboard. Vertical-slat blinds on one dingy window.

The table held a cardboard box, a phone, a rubber snake, a laptop, and a seventeen-inch monitor. Solange Lesieur was connecting the latter two pieces of equipment.

Ryan arrived as Lesieur and I were speculating on the provenance of the serpent. Hippo was two steps behind. Bearing coffee.

Seeing me, Hippo frowned.

“Brennan’s good with faces,” Ryan explained.

“Better than she is with advice?”

Lesieur spoke before I could think of a clever rejoinder. “No coffee for me.”

“I brought extra,” Hippo said.

Lesieur shook her head. “I’m already stoked.”

“What’s Harpo doing here?” Sideswiping the reptile, Hippo placed his tray on the table.

Lesieur and I exchanged glances. The snake’s name was Harpo?

Everyone sat. While Lesieur booted the laptop, the rest of us stirred powdered cream and/or sugar into the opaque brown sludge in our Styrofoam cups. Hippo went with two packets of each.

“All set?”

Nods around.

Lesieur inserted Cormier’s thumb drive. The PC bong-bonged.

“Cormier was security-conscious but amateur.” Lesieur’s fingers worked the keyboard. “Want to know his system?”

“Talk quick, this stuff is lethal.” Ryan pounded a fist to his chest.

“Next time get your own freakin’ coffee.” Hippo flipped Ryan the bird.

Ryan fist-pounded his chest.

I recognized the jesting for what it was. Morgue humor. Everyone was on edge, jittery about the images we might soon see.

“The best passwords are alphanumeric,” Lesieur began.

“Sheez.” Hippo doing derisive. “It’s the jargon not the coffee that’s gonna take us out.”

“An alphanumeric password is composed of both numbers and letters. The more random the combination, and the more characters included, the safer you are.”

“Don’t rely on your puppy’s name backward,” I said.

Lesieur continued as though no one had spoken.

“Cormier used an old trick. Pick a song or poem. Take the first letter of each word of the opening line. Bracket that string of letters with numbers, using the date of the password’s creation, day at the front, month at the back.”

The Windows screen opened and Lesieur entered a few more keystrokes.

“Generates a pretty good encryption chain, but a lot of us geeks are wise to the trick.”

“A double-digit, multiletter, double-digit pattern,” I guessed.

“Exactly.”

Ryan was right. The coffee was undrinkable. Sleep-deprived as I was, I gave up trying.

“Working on the assumption that the password was created this year, I checked music charts, created letter sequences from the opening lines of the top fifteen songs for each of the fifty-two weeks, then ran combinations of all month-day number pairs with all-letter strings. Hit with the program’s four hundred and seventy-fourth alphanumeric chain.”

“Only four seventy-four?” Hippo’s distaste for technology was evident in his sarcasm.

“I had to try both French and English.”

“Lemme guess. Cormier was hot for Walter Ostanek.”

Three blank looks.

“The polka king?”

The looks held.

“The Canadian Frank Yankovic?”

“You’re into polka?” Ryan.

“Ostanek’s good.” Defensive.

No one disputed that.

“You should know him. He’s your homeboy. Duparquet, Québec.”

“Cormier used Richard Séguin,” Lesieur said.

Hippo shrugged. “Séguin’s good, too.”

“The week of October twenty-ninth, Séguin’s “Lettres ouvertes” charted at number thirteen in Montreal. He used the opening line of a song from that album.”

“I’m impressed,” I said. I was.

“A fourteen-character alphanumeric code will keep the average hacker out.” Lesieur hit Enter. “But I’m not your average hacker.”

The screen changed to black. On the upper right was a graphic showing old-fashioned spool film, below it a playlist offering a dozen untitled selections. Digits indicated the duration of each. Most ran between five and ten minutes.

“The thumb drive contains video files, some brief, some with running times of up to an hour. I’ve opened nothing, figuring you’d want the first look. I also figured you’d want to start with the shorter clips.”

“Go.” Ryan’s tone was devoid of humor now.

“This is virgin territory, people.” Lesieur double-clicked the first listing.

The quality was poor, the duration six minutes.

The scene showed things I never imagined possible.