Dr. Spirova, although only thirty-two, is something of an expert on infectious diseases herself: she worked in the Soviet bioweapons installation in Těchonin, in eastern Czechoslovakia, before making her escape during a conference in Belgrade in 1981. It was a journey worthy of John le Carré: she fled with the clothes on her back to Vienna, flew to Montreal and made her way across the border into the United States on foot.

“Is true, I am coming to this country not quite legally,” Dr. Spirova said in her charmingly accented English. “I am needing political asylum. If returning to home country, to Czechoslovakia, I am in prison as traitor. Dr. Kiel obtained for me temporary residency permit; I can be part of his research family as well as his wonderful American home.”

Spirova must have seen the same thing Larry and Stuart Kiel had—Shirley’s drunken rages, incessant fights between Shirley and Nathan. She was a refugee, though, and Kiel was her lifeline; she had turned Shirley and Nate into the all-American family.

The Herald had included her picture, a small, slender woman with fair hair pulled into a loose knot at the back of her head, curls falling out to frame an elfin face. In the photograph of Dr. K’s Fighting Germs, Spirova was in the first row, her arm around Kiel. Camaraderie in the moment of victory, no doubt.

I couldn’t find any other references to Spirova. I came on a September 1984 interview with Dr. Kiel, part of a series called “Hill and Valley,” which presented alternating university and town personalities. Dr. Kiel was passionate about his work, about play, and about human rights. He and his wife, Shirley, had been involved in open-housing initiatives in Lawrence, but he had also opened his lab to a refugee from Communism—neither the refugee nor the country mentioned by name. His children got similarly short shrift: two sons away in college, nothing at all about Sonia, the bi-polar bear.

I hunted for Spirova’s name in scientific databases. She’d co-authored four other articles with Kiel, the latest in April 1983. And that was the last mention I could find: no news stories, no work on phosphorylation, no membership in professional societies.

Shirley said she thought she’d been rid of Magda for good. Maybe Shirley had reported her to the FBI or INS and made sure she’d been sent back home, where she would have been incarcerated. The wheel turned; in 1989 Czechoslovakia became independent and political prisoners were being freed. If Magda had popped back up in Lawrence, though, why was it a quarter century after Czechoslovakia’s Velvet Revolution?

My databases only skim the surface of international queries. They didn’t turn up an M. Spirova at any Czech or Slovak research facilities. Magda could have gone underground, or changed her name, or married and taken her husband’s name—this was fruitless. I closed the apps.