Darryl dragged two more stools over to the counter, where a microscope with a dual eyepiece and a video monitor stood. “I’ve got to say one thing for the National Science Foundation,” he said. “They don’t skimp. This microscope, for instance, is an Olympus CX, with fiber-optic technology. The video monitor’s got five-hundred-line resolution.” He gazed at the equipment with genuine fondness. “I wish I had this kind of setup back home.”
Charlotte, who could barely stifle a yawn, exchanged a look with Michael, and Darryl must have caught it. Like a magician pulling a rabbit out of a hat, he produced the wine bottle, the cork sticking up from the top, and said, “Dr. Barnes, perhaps you would care to do the honors.”
Twisting the cork back out, she said, “I hope you’re not planning to drink this stuff.”
“Not after you’ve seen what I have.”
With another flourish, he handed her a clean pipette and said, “Could I ask you to remove a few drops of the liquid from inside this bottle?”
Both Michael and Charlotte wrinkled their noses at the smell from the bottle, but she did as she was asked.
“Now, leave a drop on one end of this slide.”
The moment she had let one drop of the viscous fluid touch the slide, Darryl expertly drew another slide across it, leaving a deep purple smear that was thicker at one end and thinner at the other. Then he took an eye dropper and let several drops of alcohol fall on top of it. “In case you were wondering,” he said to Michael while closely attending to his work, “we’re fixing the smear.” He glanced up at Charlotte. “Remind you of med school?”
“That was too long ago,” she said.
He continued to narrate the proceedings as he let the slide dry, then applied something called Giemsa stain. “Without the stain,” he explained, “many of the features would be impossible to see.”
“Features of what?” Charlotte asked, a note of irritation creeping into her voice. “Merlot? Cabernet sauvignon?”
“You’ll see,” Darryl said.
Even Michael was getting antsy. It had been a very long day, his wrist still ached from the cold, and all he wanted to do was get into bed with the covers over his head. He needed time to process what he had done, and what he had seen, and he knew that he was starting to make some unhealthy connections between Kristin back home and the so-called Sleeping Beauty here. He knew it, but he still couldn’t stop it. Maybe all he needed was a solid eight hours in the sack.
But Darryl was still chattering away, about stains and smears and something else, called Canada balsam, and Michael finally had to interrupt the flow long enough to say, “Okay, Darryl, enough with the hocus-pocus. You ready yet?”
“Not really. If this were being done by the book, we’d first let it set overnight.”
“Fine,” Michael said, starting to get up, “then we’ll come back tomorrow.”
“No, no, wait.” Darryl mounted the slide under the microscope, and after examining it himself and adjusting the focus several times, he got up off his stool and invited Charlotte to have a look. Wearily, she moved over, bent her head down, then stayed very still.
Darryl appeared gratified.
She fiddled with the focus knob again, then finally leaned back, a puzzled look on her face.
“If I didn’t know better,” she began, but Darryl put up a hand to stop her.
“Let Michael have a look first.”
Michael now assumed the center seat, and when he looked down through the binocular eyepiece, he saw a pink, particle-filled field; most of the field was dotted with free-floating circles. Some of the circles were round and fairly uniform in size and shape, though slightly depressed in the middle, like cushions that had been sat on. Others were larger, grainier, and more misshapen. Michael was no scientist, but for this you didn’t have to be.
“Okay,” he said, “it’s blood.” He looked up from the microscope. “You put blood in the wine bottle. Why?”
“Oy,” Darryl exclaimed, throwing up his hands. “You were underwater too long. I didn’t put anything in the wine bottle. Or on the slide. That’s why I had you two come here and do the experiment for yourself. To see what I saw. That wine bottle, as you call it, is filled with blood. And I’ll bet that the others that came up in that trunk are filled with it, too.”
Neither Michael nor Charlotte knew what to say.
“The perfect little circles you saw,” Darryl went on, “are red blood cells—erythrocytes. The bigger ones are leukocytes, or white cells. Some of the tiny matter you see between them is what we call neutrophils.”
“Those are a kind of phagocyte, right?” Charlotte said. “They eat bacteria and die.”
“Exactly—med school is coming back to you, I see.”
“Don’t be a smart aleck.”
“But there are a lot more neutrophils than there ought to be,” Darryl added.
He let that sink in, but when no one jumped to the next step, he said, “Which means that before this blood ever went into the bottle, it was tainted.”
“How? By what?” Michael asked.
“Offhand,” Darryl said, “I’d say it came from seriously sick or injured people. People with wounds, perhaps, that were seeping pus.”