“Going to try,” he answered, straightening the hat. It didn’t look right. Maybe it was the wrong size. He looked down at Danny and rubbed his head. “You should be settling down.”
The phone rang, sending a pang of fear and guilt through Sean. Maybe she couldn’t sit with them tonight. Damn. Or maybe it was…
“Brigitta, I was going to call you first thing tomorrow,” he lied, standing in the kitchen. He’d told her he would call her this week. But every time he’d thought of it, his gut had twisted.
He listened as she told him she was hoping they could go to the movies that weekend, but what he heard was this: I don’t know yet, Sean, so we have to keep going…
After some strained small talk, he told her he had to go. Where was Creed?
He hung up the phone, but his hand lingered on the receiver. A dozen times he’d felt the pull to call Julia, to ask how she was doing. Once he’d even dialed her number and was relieved when no one answered.
He heard a car door slam outside. That would be Mrs. Creed at last. He took a deep breath and strode toward the front of the house.
***
When the vaccine trials began, Julia was curled up in bed under the treatment of a doctor. Nervous exhaustion, he called it. To her it just felt like despair.
She read the papers every day and listened to the radio. The reports wouldn’t be written for a year, but she knew, deep down, that this was it. Her disease would be gone from generations to come.
And so, too, would any attention on people like her. Lost to the world, forgotten—she and the other polios.
The phone rang, and her heart leapt, her nerves on edge as she listened and waited…Mutti’s muffled tones carried through the floorboards, and Julia closed her eyes and wished. Wished. Prayed. Hoped.
Please let it be Sean. He said he’d take care of me. Don’t let him forget…
Coming Soon: Everlasting Love, a Sean Reilly mystery by Libby Sternberg
Giving up on the Baltimore police force, Sean Reilly opens his own private investigator’s office in June 1954, installing his fiancé, Brigitta Lorenzo, as secretary. As Sean struggles to make a go of things—and tries to dig up some love for Brigitta, who is three months pregnant with his child—polio victim Julia Dell again enters his life. She brings him his first big case—determining if her sister’s fiancé, thought missing in action, presumed dead during the war, is still alive. Her sister swears she spotted him at his father’s recent funeral. While he chases leads, Sean fights his growing affection for Julia and his growing suspicions about Brigitta, who seems to have renewed a friendship with her former boss.
Author’s note
The crime and those involved in it in Lost to the World are pure fiction, as are references to an “Irene Brodie.” Drs. Jansen, Lowenstein, Spencer, MacIntyre and Rollins are all fictional.
Information about the polio vaccine trials, however, is based on fact, including the references to previous trials and the impact these trials had on the researchers involved in them. Dr. Brodie, for example, did die at a young age, his death a suspected suicide. The reference to the Walter Winchell broadcast of 1954 in which he warned America of the “white coffins” ordered before the vaccine trials is true and quoted exactly. The most prominent researchers of the time, Drs. Jonas Salk and Albert Sabin, were Jewish, and researchers did receive some anti-Semitic hate mail complaining of a Jewish conspiracy. Dr. David Bodian of Hopkins, who is referred to in this novel, was involved in the research and did help solve a mystery related to why monkeys at a Park, Davis lab seemed to be afflicted with polio after being inoculated with the new vaccine. Drs. Salk and Sabin did have an intense rivalry and Dr. Sabin lobbied the research community to forgo trials on a killed vaccine and wait until a live vaccine was ready. Some members of the research community believed, as does Dr. Jansen in this novel, that the March of Dimes had reduced the search for a vaccine to a “circus” and resented the organization’s influence even as they took its money.
Sources for this book include:
A Splendid Solution: Jonas Salk and the Conquest of Polio by Jeffrey Kluger
A Summer Plague: Polio and its Survivors by Tony Gould
Polio: An American Story by David M. Oshinsky
A Nearly Normal Life by Charles L. Mee
Small Steps: The Year I Got Polio by Peg Kehret
“What Ever Happened to Polio?” Smithsonian Institute exhibit
Because I am a graduate of a music conservatory, I have a hard time resisting art song as a source for book titles. This book’s title is from the title of a poem by Friedrich Rückert, set sublimely to music by Gustav Mahler: Ich bin der Welt abhanden gekommen. The first lines, roughly translated, are: I have become lost to the world, with which I used to waste so much time…
About Libby Sternberg
Libby Sternberg is the author of several young adult mysteries, the first of which (Uncovering Sadie’s Secrets) was an Edgar finalist. Her first historical women’s fiction, Sloane Hall, is a Five Star/Gale release. Writing under the name Libby Malin, she is the author of several humorous women’s fiction books. Before becoming a novelist, she studied voice, earning both bachelor’s and master’s degrees from Peabody Conservatory of Music. Her website is at http://www.LibbySternberg.com
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