Up in Smoke

by Ross Pennie

  A tallish young man — mid-twenties, a handsome round face, wavy dark hair gelled back off his forehead — rose quickly from a chair. Blue jeans hugged his slim hips. He was wearing a dark sweatshirt and a matching nylon windbreaker featuring automotive logos. Embroidered on the front of the jacket was MECHANICALLY SOUND: MATT HOLT. He looked exhausted and didn’t speak, just shot out his hand, gave Hamish’s a quick shake, and sat down again.

  The older couple, mid-fifties or a bit beyond, grimaced and creaked as they shifted in their chairs. Between them, they were packing an extra hundred pounds, and wore them with subdued dignity. A large, dark handbag sat on the floor at the woman’s feet. Dangling from the handle was a miniature pair of white figure skates along with an embossed metal disk of some sort. It was several centimetres across and whether it was bronze or deep gold, he couldn’t be sure. He wasn’t good with colours. Was that Donna’s provincial skating championship medal?

  “We’re Tammy’s and Donna’s family,” the woman said. There was a kindness to her eyes, but worry and fatigue were trapped in the wrinkles and dark circles. “I’m their mother, and this is their father,” she said, gesturing to her husband seated beside her. She glanced across the room at the younger man. “And Matt there, he’s their brother.”

  The older man raised his eyebrows and touched his chest. “Vernon,” he said. “She’s Leona.” His voice was flat, barely more than a murmur, his accent straight off the reserve.

  “How’s Donna doing?” Hamish asked them.

  Matt shook his head. “They’re transferrin’ her. To Toronto.”

  “Tonight?”

  Matt raised his eyebrows. The rest of his face was impassive.

  “But, Doctor,” Leona said, “where did Donna get this from, this liver coma? She’s always been active and healthy. And we don’t drink. None of us.”

  Vernon’s eyes narrowed. “Must’ve got it from a patient. They don’t protect their paramedics, you know. The gloves they give ’em don’t fit right.”

  “Those scabs around her mouth,” said Leona, “are they gonna leave scars?”

  Draped across Leona Holt’s lap was what Hamish now realized was her daughter’s skating-coach jacket. GRAND BASIN FIGURE SKATING CLUB was embroidered on the back.

  The maternal way that Mrs. Holt was caressing the garment reminded him of something he’d seen before. He couldn’t place it, and of course he’d never experienced such motherly tenderness directly. The frustrating vagueness of the image at the back of his memory nagged at him. What was he thinking of? A painting? A statue?

  Matt was out of his chair again, his face taut. “You gotta tell us somethin’, Doc. No one’s givin’ us no answers.”

  “That’s because they don’t have any. It’s as simple as that.”

  Vernon heaved himself from his chair and strode forward, almost stepping on Hamish’s shoes. “There’s teenagers with this liver thing,” he said. “White kids. I’ll bet you’re doin’ a better job for them.”

  Suddenly, the tiny room felt like a coffin, its dingy walls pressing inward. The anxious trio in their heavy fall clothing were sucking every molecule of oxygen from the air. Hamish stumbled backwards. He felt for the door handle behind him and grabbed it like a lifeline. He took three yogic breaths and willed his shoulders, his spine, his gut to relax. Then he asked everyone to sit down and dropped into the remaining chair himself.

  His tongue was too dry to form any words. After a swallow of ginger ale he was able to say, “We’re trying our best for everyone, Mr. Holt.”

  Vernon laid his arms across his oversized belly and stared at his sneakers.

  Hamish took another steadying swig. “Actually, I was hoping . . . to get some answers from you.”

  “We told the doctors everythin’ already,” Leona said.

  Vernon’s round face was a stone mask. “I’d say we’re done answerin’.”

  Hamish found himself counting the jagged nicks and scratches in the wall behind the senior Holts. Why were hospital rooms often so desperate for a fresh coat of paint? “Can we talk about Tammy for a few minutes?”

  “This has nothin’ to do with her,” Vernon said. “She left us more’n a year ago.”

  “You said you were a doctor,” Leona added, “not a detective.”

  Matt leaned forward and caught Hamish’s eye. “My parents have had it up to here with police officers,” he explained. “And their endless questions.”

  “Well, I am a doctor,” Hamish said. “In fact, Tammy and I worked on the same floor at Caledonian Medical Centre. Our research labs were practically side by side.”

  Leona looked surprised. “So . . . you knew our Tammy?”

  “Saw her almost every day.”

  “She bake you one of her famous cakes?” Leona said. “You know, for your birthday?”

  He nodded. “Covered in dragonflies and grasshoppers. Maybe you saw it?”

  Leona thought for a moment, as if trying to picture a cake crawling with icing-sugar insects. She threw her husband a look that seemed to say This guy’s okay, then turned back to Hamish. “So, what d’you wanta know ’bout Tammy?”

  “Careful, Mother,” Vernon told her.

  Careful about what? Did the family have a theory about their daughter’s death? “I’d like to know what you think happened to her. Tammy’s death was a terrible shock to everyone at Caledonian.”

  “Then you know she were murdered,” Vernon said. “And that’s pretty well it.”

  “Do you have any idea why she was killed?”

  “Nope,” said Vernon. “And no idea who done it, neither.”

  Leona glanced at her husband, hesitated, then told Hamish, “But whoever done it stole her . . .” her face crumpled and her shoulders heaved, “her . . . great-grandma’s pendant.”

  Hamish felt sick. He knew how Tammy had cherished that antique, beaded medallion, the centre of which featured an eight-pointed star. He’d never seen her without the Native heirloom suspended from a leather thong around her neck.

  Anger flashed into Matt’s previously well-controlled face. “Stealing Great-Grandma’s pendant wasn’t the only violation she . . .”

  “Stop it,” Vernon said. “Not in front of your mother.”

  “No, Dad. We have to tell him.” Matt turned to Hamish. “She was raped, Doc. There’s no other way to say it.”

  “I said stop it,” Vernon said. “You know how your mother hates that word.”

  Leona stiffened and gave her husband a look that said Don’t pin your hang-ups on me.

  “Do you have any ideas about a motive?” Hamish asked.

  “That’s police business,” Vernon said. “Got nothin’ to do with you.”

  “I don’t like coincidences,” he told him, “unless I can explain them. And what I see here is a huge, unexplained coincidence.”

  “What do you mean, Doctor?” Leona said.

  “Let me put it this way,” he said, not certain how to proceed in the face of such pent-up emotion. “Donna is suffering from a serious and unexplained liver condition. And . . . and last year, her only sister was killed shortly after her principal research project was cancelled.”

  “What’s one got t’do with th’other?” Vernon said. “Except we made sure they both got fine educations and good jobs off the rez.” He gaped at his son, as if terrified that Matt was headed for the same fate as his sisters.

  Leona adjusted Donna’s leather jacket weighing heavily on her lap and took a tissue from the table beside her. As she quietly wiped her nose, Hamish remembered the source of the half-forgotten image. A postcard from Rome. Saint Peter’s. The Pieta. Neither the Madonna nor Leona Holt could hide her tears.

  He had to press on. “Did any of you learn why Tammy’s research got cancelled? Or why some mysterious heavyweights came and cleaned out her lab?”

  “At
the university,” Leona said, “she was Dr. Holt. And on the rez, just plain Tammy. We didn’t know nothing about her work.”

  Something about the way Matt’s lips twitched said he didn’t agree with his mother. Did Tammy’s brother know more about her research projects than her parents?

  Hamish held Matt’s gaze and said, “There was a rumour going around Caledonian — maybe you heard it — that a drug Tammy was testing ran into problems.”

  “She wasn’t testin’ no drugs,” Matt said.

  “Are you sure about that? I know her research was being financed by a large pharmaceutical company.”

  “She wasn’t testing nothing,” Matt repeated.

  “No?”

  Matt stared at his hands in his lap and offered nothing more.

  “I need some help here,” Hamish said. “If you know she wasn’t doing any testing, you must know what sort of work she was doing.”

  Matt’s clam-shell face opened a crack. “I promised not to tell.”

  “Why?”

  “She signed a confidentiality agreement and was scared of the big company she worked for.”

  Hamish paused and forced himself to think. With the father angry, the mother in tears, and the brother holding back, he was going to lose them all unless he chose his words carefully. “If . . . if something about Tammy’s cancelled project led to her death, wouldn’t it be perfectly appropriate to talk about it?”

  “Not if it got me killed too,” Matt said.

  Hamish took another swig and let that sink in. “Surely you can tell me something. I’d be grateful for anything that put me on the right track.”

  Matt flashed a glance at his parents, as if asking for permission to open up.

  Hamish leaned toward Leona, who was trying to dab her eyes with a shredded tissue. He handed her a fresh one from the box. Five centuries of broken promises stood between them, but he hoped she could feel that his sincerity was genuine. “What we all want to do tonight is help Donna,” he said. “And if there’s something important you’re not telling me . . .”

  Matt exchanged another glance with his mum and paused as if debating with himself. A moment later, he narrowed his eyes and stood up. “Doc, we gotta step out into the hall. Just you and me.”

  Matt led him away from the buzz of the emergency department and into the hospital’s front lobby. Soon they were standing opposite the gift shop, dark and deserted at this time of night.

  Matt looked around, then relaxed his shoulders, apparently satisfied they were alone and out of earshot. He smelled of aftershave, auto-shop grease, and just the right amount of manly sweat. “Okay — Tammy was working with a virus that attacks tobacco plants.”

  “Tobacco mosaic virus?”

  He shrugged, and a curl of his thick, black hair dropped onto his eyebrow. “I forget the name, exactly.”

  “What was she doing with it?”

  He pushed the errant lock back onto his scalp. “Some sort of genetic engineering. Molecular biology. I’m not intimately familiar with the details. I’m a mechanical engineer, not a biologist.”

  Matt was now speaking like a high-priced professional. He’d dropped the rural dialect and flat Native accent he’d used in front of his parents, probably in deference to his dad. His mother seemed a lady of considerable refinement.

  “Tammy was infecting live tobacco plants,” he continued, “with a genetically modified virus that induced the plants to produce some new wonder drug.”

  Hamish pictured the sandy loam fields of Norfolk County covered with tobacco plants stirring in the breeze as far as the horizon. It was ingenious. Tobacco grew with little encouragement, didn’t belong to a union, and could be programmed to fill its stalks and leaves with wonder drugs by the tonne. The technology to grow drugs in plants had first been devised to produce a vaccine against Norovirus, the diarrhea demon that spread like wildfire among cruise-ship passengers. The vaccine was a promising innovation and rumoured to be close to a marketable product.

  “What was the drug?” Hamish asked, unable to suppress the excitement in his voice.

  “A derivative of nicotine. And if you can believe it, it wasn’t addictive.”

  “Who’d want that? Certainly not the tobacco companies.”

  “We’re not talking smoking. Or chewing.”

  “Oh?” Hamish said.

  “Appetite suppression.” Matt looked around to be sure they were still alone. “You know what our rezes are like.” He mimed a big belly. “Most of us are way too fat. Diabetes is killing us. This could have been a breakthrough. Take a pill a day and you get a nice slim body without any work.”

  “What went wrong?” Hamish asked.

  “I don’t know. I tried to talk to her research assistant, but he went underground after they found Tammy’s body.”

  “Do you have any idea why she was killed?”

  “My parents think it was personal. Motivated by hatred. You know, because of the . . . the brutality of the rape. There’s a lot of domestic violence on the reserve and . . . and hell, you almost come to expect it. As a rez magistrate, my mother has to deal with it almost every day.” Matt’s face flashed with shame and guilt, then quickly became neutral. “Except Tammy didn’t have a boyfriend. She lived quietly with Mum and Dad. Her work was her life.”

  “You think her murder was related to her research?”

  Matt nodded.

  Something had gone terribly wrong in Tammy’s experimental tobacco fields, and there’d been a major cover-up, no doubt about that. Why else would anonymous heavies be allowed to strip everything from her laboratory in a single afternoon?

  Matt was living in two worlds — that was clear by the way he’d switched dialects so readily. Tammy had led two lives too: Dr. Holt at the university, plain Tammy on the rez. What about Donna? What double life had she been living? And had that secret life destroyed her liver? Had she got hold of Tammy’s problematic wonder drug? And had she, or someone close to her, been supplying it to the students at that Christian high school? Unlikely. It didn’t make sense that Donna and the others got sick more than a year after the door was slammed on Tammy’s project.

  Hamish massaged the back of his neck and took a couple more yogic breaths. In through the nose, out through the nose. If they were going to solve this liver thing and stop further deaths, they had to discover exactly how Tammy’s failed research with tobacco mosaic virus intersected with her sister Donna, the other first responders, and the kids at Erie Christian Collegiate.

  It seemed everything focussed on cheap tobacco from Grand Basin Reserve.

  CHAPTER 17

  Hamish took Matt’s business card and headed back to the Saab. He circled the car twice to be sure no one had taken a key to the new paint job, then got in and punched Zol’s home number into his phone.

  He counted the rings.

  Zol picked up on the sixth.

  “Zol. Glad I got you. We’ve got to go shopping.”

  “Okay?” Zol sounded suspicious. “For anything special?”

  “Rollies and Hat-Tricks. And whatever other tobacco products they sell on the reserve.”

  “And you need me to carry your shopping bag?”

  “Give me a break. You grew up next to Grand Basin and went to high school with Native kids. You know the protocol. I’ve never been on a reserve.”

  “It’s just a rez, Hamish. There’s no protocol.”

  “You mean, you’re allowed to drive in unannounced, any time you like? Without an invitation?”

  “Yep.”

  “What about a permit?”

  “For God’s sake, Hamish, there are no border guards. It’s not a foreign country.”

  “All the same, I’m not driving in alone. Not in the dark. I’ve heard stories.”

  “Never mind the stories. They’re normal people, same as us. But
it’s almost nine, kind of late for a shopping trip, don’t you think? Why do you want to go now?”

  “We’ve got to keep moving on this. Matt Holt says the smoke shops on Grand Basin stay open until eleven or midnight.”

  “Matt Holt?”

  “Tammy Holt’s brother. And Donna’s — the female paramedic they medevac’d to Toronto General’s transplant unit. Matt says Tammy was working with tobacco mosaic virus. Right before . . . you know . . .”

  He told Zol about Tammy’s secret diet-drug project that went haywire. And he shared his theory that the experimental drug, or the engineered virus, must be somehow tied to the liver cases. And the blisters. Winnipeg had said the lip and finger lesions he sent them contained what appeared to be a plant virus hybrid. It was no stretch at all to implicate Tammy’s strain of tobacco mosaic virus as having a role in the lesions. They could prove it if they knew exactly what to look for. For that, they’d need specific details about Tammy’s research and a comprehensive analysis of rez tobacco.

  Zol scratched at his five-o’clock stubble and said nothing. For an awful moment, Hamish pictured his late father pawing at his cheeks and making that same sandpapery sound before flying into one of his rages.

  Finally, Zol stopped scratching and said, “Exactly what are you looking for tonight?”

  “I won’t sleep until I’ve got a good idea of what rez tobacco actually is. What it looks like. How it’s packaged and labelled.” The closest he’d ever been to a Native smoke shop was two summers ago when he was driving along the highway near Grand Basin Reserve. He’d been on the way to Lake Erie for a picnic and spotted a cluster of three roadside smoke shacks flying Mohawk flags. He’d wondered briefly what went on in those places, then forgot about them. Until this week.

  Zol was muffling the receiver with his palm. And talking to someone. Colleen? Oh no, they must be in bed. With their clothes off? He could feel himself blushing.

  “Tell you what,” Zol said, after several moments. “I’ve got to stay home with Max, but Colleen knows the reserve. Sometimes her work takes her there.”

  “You’re kidding.”