Up in Smoke

by Ross Pennie

  Zol felt his whole body flush with anger. His throat tightened.

  He planted his feet on the carpet and felt the resolute firmness of the floor beneath him. “We’ll be certain to be respectful, sir.” He paused and swallowed hard. “But we’ll be thorough. And don’t expect me to be timid.”

  “As I say, you could be looking at a powder keg. Consider yourself warned. Officially.”

  Elliott York hung up, and two seconds later Zol’s cellphone buzzed against his belt.

  Now what?

  “Hamish? What’s up?”

  “Let me put it this way. I’m hopeful.”

  Hamish was rarely hopeful about anything. “Seriously?”

  “Went zebra-hunting this afternoon. We may have bagged a zinger.”

  “Bagged it with what?”

  “EM.”

  “Plain English?”

  “An electron microscope.”

  “And?”

  “Let me set the stage.” Hamish was the master of the grand entrance, even over the phone. Zol pictured his friend in his spotless white lab coat, his pompous finger raised to its professorial position.

  Hamish recapped the scenario. Fifteen people, half of them teenagers, presenting with large blistering lesions on their lips and fingertips unresponsive to treatment. No fever, fatigue, malaise, or organ malfunction except for two Erie Christian Collegiate students who’d succumbed last Friday from lightning fast liver failure.

  “Okay,” Zol said. “I’m up to speed.”

  “You ready?”

  “Zing me.”

  “Fragments of itty-bitty matchsticks. With helical elements.”

  “Hamish, you’re toying with me.”

  “Not at all. Wilf Dickinson, a basic-science researcher down the hall from me, called me to his lab a few minutes ago. He spent this afternoon looking at the blisters from eight of my patients under his electron microscope. He was sure he’d find only junk, but there they were, clear as day. In all eight patients. Thousands of tiny broken matchsticks, each with a central spiral core.”

  “Does he know what they are?”

  “He won’t say. His expertise is Alzheimer’s, not microbiology.”

  “Did he hazard a guess?”

  “He won’t go out on a limb at this stage. Says he wants to try a variety of tissue staining techniques and run the specimens again tomorrow. But . . .”

  There was a lot of Oscar Wilde in Hamish’s voice. He was bursting with something he could barely contain. “Hamish, I know you too well. You and your colleague have got a pretty good hunch. No point in denying it.”

  “We . . . we think they may be infectious particles.”

  “Bacteria?”

  “Way too small for that.”

  “So you’ve seen them too?”

  “Yes.”

  “So what do you think they are?”

  “Nothing I’ve ever seen before. Not in a patient, not in a textbook. Something strange, but hopefully not contagious enough to become a plague.”

  A plague? Zol’s heart catapulted into his throat. Was Hamish serious or grandstanding? Everyone was getting under his skin today. He warned himself to keep his tone measured. With the first hint of derision, Hamish would hang up and pout for a week. “For heaven’s sake, man. Give it to me straight. I promise not to shoot the messenger.”

  “Microbiology class. U of T. Our second year. A Friday. You were snoring behind me. The prof was speculating about plagues and mutant organisms of the future.”

  Thursday nights at medical school had been pub nights, Friday mornings a write-off. But how could he have slept through a lecture on plagues? “We’re dealing with a — a plague? Ebola? The Black Death? Germ warfare?”

  “No, no. Put your loonies back in your pocket. At least until we’ve got more information. Sorry. I spoke too soon. But I didn’t want to keep anything from you.”

  “These matchstick things, are they responsible for the liver failure?”

  “Too soon to say. But probably not. Only one of the eight cases Wilf examined under his machine is a liver failure patient. That means almost ninety percent of people with those blisters have not come down with liver disease.”

  “I was hoping for a breakthrough on the liver thing.”

  “Stay tuned. We’ll talk tomorrow.”

  They hung up. He grabbed his paperwork and car keys. Forget the spaghettini with clams, he’d be heading straight for the Balvenie. Well, after he’d made his daily check-in call to Mum. She’d seemed a lot stronger when they’d spoken yesterday. Had even made it to church for the first time in weeks. It was as if getting the black-eyed loon pipe out of the house had taken a huge weight off her psyche.

  He paused as he reached for his coat. Was it a relief that ninety percent of Hamish’s blister cases were showing no signs of liver disease? More to the point, was the electron microscopy report a critical clue demanding a thorough understanding, or a confusing confounder irrelevant to the primary investigation? He had no idea. And despite Hamish’s expertise in the realm of microbiology, he wasn’t certain, either. Zol hated the anxiety that churned inside him during the early days of an outbreak. Lives were at stake, dozens of questions hung unanswered, and there was too little information of substance. God, he hoped the team would mine some answers tomorrow at that Christian school.

  CHAPTER 10

  A tall, gaunt man greeted Colleen at the front door of Erie Christian Collegiate the next morning. He was wearing cream chinos and a corduroy jacket in warthog brown. He was also wearing a mauve striped shirt, black dress shoes, and a bright green belt. She reckoned he was either colour blind or the art teacher. Not even a maths teacher could be that sartorially challenged. He asked for her ID and checked her name against a list attached to the clipboard he was brandishing like a shield-bearing Zulu. Natasha had warned her to have her ID ready; this morning’s meeting was restricted to teaching staff, students, families, and health-unit personnel. Good idea. People clammed up in the presence of strangers, and when you were prospecting for clues, the last thing you wanted were tied tongues.

  Colleen had come early and alone so she could observe the audience arriving for the nine a.m. meeting. The most productive tidbits often came before proceedings started; people said the most revealing things as they took their seats and chatted with their neighbours, thinking no one was listening.

  There was nothing wrong with her hearing, but she’d inserted a hearing aid into each ear before leaving home. They were top quality instruments and practically invisible, made in Denmark. And being medical devices, they were perfectly legal to wear. The remote control she kept in her purse allowed her to crank up the volume.

  When she’d started as a private eye seven years ago, an old hand had suggested she learn to lip read. She took courses at the Hearing Society and didn’t disabuse them of their assumption she was going deaf. Though she mastered the technique, she came to realize that even the best lip readers mistake half the words in a sentence because so many words look identical but sound different. On the lips, lock the door looks like take the car. But by supplementing lip reading with the Danish hearing aids, she could get an accurate gist of most conversations from a distance of ten metres.

  Being the first to arrive, she picked a seat at the end of the third-last row. From there she would be able to see most of the audience and hear the throwaway comments from the back of the room, where people with the most to hide usually sat.

  She pulled a partially knitted scarf from her handbag. She’d used the same coarse olive wool for the past seven years, ripping out and starting again each time she ran out of yarn. No one paid attention to a woman with her hair wound in an old-fashioned braid, sitting quietly in a grey housedress, wearing no jewellery or makeup, knitting a scarf.

  She watched a trio who looked around the nearly empty auditorium t
hen chose seats at the far end of a row halfway down. She didn’t miss a beat of her knitting and they didn’t acknowledge her. None of them was happy to be here. The mother held her lips tight across her teeth, the father kept turning around and looking at his watch, and the girl sitting between them texted on her mobile with the focus of a concert pianist. The bandage on the tip of her right index finger flashed in the overhead lights, but didn’t slow her down. Every half minute or so she used the phone’s screen like a mirror and fussed with a zit at the corner of her mouth.

  “Stop touching it, Emily,” said the woman.

  “But it’s so gross,” said the girl, peering into her mirror.

  “If you leave it alone, no one will notice. Keep fussing with it and you’ll rub your concealer off.”

  The girl glanced around to be sure no one was looking, dug a stick of something from her purse, and dabbed it on.

  The woman frowned at her husband. “I know it’s the cafeteria,” she said. “That new company they hired. They don’t care about nutrition.”

  The father shrugged. “So? Neither do the kids.”

  “I’m serious, Bob. I heard they’re using cheap ingredients imported from China. Doing the fries in some kind of tropical nut oil.”

  “Let’s wait and see what the doctors have to say.”

  As the auditorium filled, the noise level increased and, between Colleen’s hearing aids and her lip reading, she caught concerns about the safety of the science lab, complaints about a gym teacher, and more worries about the cafeteria. Anger and anxiety oozed from the parents. The students projected sullen hostility, as if mortified to be seen in public with the dorky adults beside them. Of course, with six of their classmates sick or already dead, the teens were bound to be frightened. But it seemed they weren’t about to share their true feelings with anyone but their peers, and only via text messages.

  As she observed the petty disharmonies playing out in the families around her, her mind wandered and she wondered how she would have coped with motherhood. She and Liam had three false starts — three miscarriages in as many years. If the babies had lived, by now she’d be a single parent to three kids under ten, with no living grandparents, aunts, or uncles to offer moral support or lend a hand. And she wouldn’t be earning her living as a private investigator. Single mothers didn’t do all-night stakeouts. Would she have been a patient mum, or would her overly practical nature have turned her into a nag, crabby and exhausted from obsessing over every little problem?

  It was easy with Max. She wasn’t his mother. Like a favourite aunt, her role was to be upbeat and understanding. When things got fractious, she could withdraw to her own space. Not that she felt the need very often, but it was wonderfully reassuring to know that her condo — her private retreat and emotional safety valve — was always waiting for her. She’d lose that flexibility if she gave up her place and moved in with Zol and Max, especially if Zol went so far as to ask her to marry him. What would be her answer? That depended on how she coped with the question that plagued her every day: why had everyone she’d ever loved — even those little lost babies whose hearts had barely begun to beat — been taken away from her?

  As the minutes ticked toward nine o’clock, she realized she was witnessing a phenomenon that in South Africa had seemed so natural as to go unnoticed. The audience was segregating itself into a Canadian-style apartheid. White divided from Native. The Native families occupied the back left corner. There were fewer men than women among them, and they were quieter that the Whites, but she suspected they were no less anxious. The Native kids were texting with the same fervour as their White peers.

  Shorty before nine, a florid-faced man in a baggy suit led Zol and Natasha to the front row. From Natasha’s description, Colleen knew he must be Walter Vorst, the gum-chewing principal with the oversized painful feet. Zol turned and caught Colleen’s eye as he took his seat, careful not to give her away.

  At five past nine, Vorst stood up. He faced the back of the auditorium and studied the stragglers searching for seats, then pointed at several available places and invited them to sit down. His tone was halfway between friendly and authoritative. A moment later, he leaned toward Zol and told him they may as well get started. He spit his gum into a tissue and climbed to the stage. He grabbed the lectern with both hands and looked out over the audience, his expression grave, his forehead glistening with sweat. You could have heard a meerkat fart. She turned down the volume on her hearing aids with the remote hidden under her knitting.

  Vorst introduced Zol and Natasha and motioned for them to stand. Zol looked particularly handsome in his black blazer, his hair fixed in that semi-dishevelled look she knew took longer to achieve that one might think. Natasha looked adorable in her pixie cut, black and white shift, and skin the colour of Darjeeling tea with a jot of Jersey cream. Natasha never wore pants. Always a dress or a skirt with darling shoes. A cute package that kept her intelligence non-intimidating and her government-initiated investigations non-threatening. If the girl didn’t have such obvious chemistry with her surgical resident beau, Colleen might have worried she had designs on her beloved Dr. Zol.

  Zol took the stage, cleared his throat, and reviewed the situation for the audience. He was suitably serious but not dour, clear without being condescending, and brief. Unlike Vorst, whose sincerity seemed manufactured, Zol’s came across as one hundred percent genuine. He explained the importance of finding the hidden factors linking the students with liver disease in order that the cluster — he always avoided the e-word, epidemic — could be stopped and no one else would fall ill. Promising to provide plenty of time for questions in a few minutes, he passed the microphone to Natasha, who started with a warm greeting and explained the detailed questionnaire she needed everyone to complete at home tonight and return to the front office at nine tomorrow morning. She apologized for the short deadline, but said she knew that everyone wanted to get the liver issue solved as soon as possible. Like Zol, she never let the word epidemic cross her lips.

  When the question period began, the tension in the room trebled. Colleen stowed her knitting and slipped through a side exit.

  She’d heard enough from the audience — Zol and Natasha were hearing a good deal more — and it was time to have a look round for physical evidence.

  It was clear that this school had little in the way of an outdoor sports program. The schoolyard was too small for rugby, soccer, or gridiron football. It was large enough for volleyball, but there was no sign of a net. The spotty field was mostly gravel with patches of withering grass and dandelions past their prime. Dozens of gum wrappers, a few pop cans, and the occasional sheet of discarded homework lay where they’d blown against the perimeter chain-link fence. She followed the fence to the northeast corner of the schoolyard, where she found a large gap through which a well-worn path led into an abandoned property. She followed the path as it wound to the far side of a stand of spruce. Beyond the trees, the trail led her to an empty clearing littered with broken beer bottles. This teen hangout wasn’t visible from any of the school windows, but its existence would be obvious to anyone with more than a passing interest in the comings and goings of the student body. The ground was covered in cigarette butts and gum wrappers, the air heavy with the stench of tobacco and stale beer. She picked up a battered plastic box about the size of a deck of cards. The teens wouldn’t be playing bridge here. Blackjack, perhaps? Dozens of empty cigarette packages, faded and muddied, lay trampled into the dirt. She picked up two and examined them. She’d never heard of the brand: Hat-Trick. She put the plastic boxes, the cigarette packs, and a handful of butts into the large resealable plastic bag she always had handy in her purse. She didn’t bother with the beer bottles.

  So much for the fundamentalist dogma expounded by this Christian school, which the principal had promised Natasha was free of drugs, tobacco, and alcohol. It seemed he was prepared to overlook Moses’ commandment about bear
ing false witness. The ninth, was it? And his students were clearly disregarding the fifth, the one about honouring their fathers and mothers with respectable behaviour. What other lies were Vorst, his staff, and his students hiding here?

  CHAPTER 11

  Zol shut the dishwasher and turned it on. Bacon and eggs made for quick cleanup after a long day of collective nail biting at the Simcoe Health Unit. He’d spoken to Hamish, but Wilf Dickinson was still fiddling with the blister specimens and couldn’t say if or when he’d have more definitive results from his electron microscope. The guy sounded like a perfectionist. Every time a phone rang at the health unit, the staff froze, fearing the call was from an Emerg doc reporting more teens with liver failure. So far, so good, but waiting until Natasha finished her analysis of this morning’s questionnaires from Erie Christian Collegiate was killing him. She promised she’d have something to tell him by tomorrow. He didn’t know what he would do if there was no beef in her results.

  He was about to ask Colleen whether she wanted to finish off with a peppermint tea or a shot of Amarula when he heard the rumble of ten-year-old feet entering the kitchen behind him.

  “Hey,” he said. “You’re supposed to be in bed.”

  Max made a face. “I can’t sleep.”

  “Have you tried?”

  Max cocked his head and pouted. “Why can’t Colleen read me a story?”

  “Because it’s past your bedtime. What will Mrs. Rivers say when you start snoring in class?”

  “Da-ad.”

  “You need your full ten hours.”

  “Awhhh, just a quick one?”

  Zol checked his watch and threw Max a wink. “Tell her I said no longer than nine and a half minutes.”

  Max beamed and threw his arms around Zol’s chest, the soft, pyjama-clad torso pressing into him with firm, exuberant warmth. In came waves of the same soothing energy, the same indelible connection, that had overtaken him, filled him with love, when he’d held Max for the first time at a minute of age. How long would it be before Max stopped wearing pyjamas, and teenage angst tore the two of them apart? This morning, Erie Christian Collegiate’s auditorium had been raw with contempt and hostility. Was a cold war between parents and their teens an unavoidable by-product of impatience on one side and the craving for emancipation on the other? If he worked on being more flexible and less cranky than his own dad had been, would he and Max stay close, no matter what?