by Ross Pennie
Tasha shifted her notebook on her lap as if uncertain how to phrase what she wanted to say next. She touched Zol’s knee and said, “We may even have a sixth case of Zika acquired among those tulips.”
“One of the polio cases or someone else?” Hamish asked.
“A polio case,” Tasha said.
Hamish made no effort to mask his impatience. “Who is it? Why haven’t you told us about this before?”
“Steady there, Hamish,” Zol said, glancing at his watch. “Tasha’s got an entire day’s worth of interviews to tell us about. Let’s give her some —”
“Actually,” Tasha said, her eyes flashing at Hamish. “I shouldn’t have to be telling you.” She paused to let that sink in.
“What?” Hamish said.
Smiling at his momentary befuddlement, she said, “You’ve had the kid under your nose for the past four days.”
Chapter 31
When the adults were somewhere in the middle of their noisy discussion in the sunroom, Travis rapped on Max’s bedroom door. It was open as usual, but Travis knocked anyway and waited to be invited in. His mom, an army colonel, had a strict code of politeness she expected him to live by. And as far as Max could see, he mostly did.
“I need a break from algebra,” Travis said.
Max tossed his pencil onto his desk and covered a yawn with his hand. “Me too. Do you wanna go downstairs for some OJ?”
Travis closed the door and spoke in a low voice. “I don’t know, KB. Your dad sounds kind of upset down there.”
There was a network of ducts in the house that circulated the cool air back to the furnace. The ducts carried every bit of sound from the sunroom downstairs to the landing outside the boys’ bedrooms. Upstairs, they could hear what was going on downstairs, and vice versa. When Travis first came to stay, he showed Max how to cover the vent in the downstairs computer room with a piece of cardboard. After that, they could game and razz each other as much as they liked and no one could hear what they were saying.
“Your dad and Hamish have been arguing,” Travis continued, “and I don’t want to snag any spillover. We’d better stay up here out of the way.”
“Nah, it’s okay,” Max told him. “Dad was reminding Uncle Hamish to be more respectful towards Tasha. That’s all.”
“Does Hamish have a problem with women? My mom says the army’s full of guys that hate taking orders from women.”
“Dad says Uncle Hamish’s mom is an extreme narcissist — a female version of Donald Trump who’s always treated her son like shit.”
“And he takes it out on Natasha?”
“I dunno. Dad never said it in so many words.”
Travis pointed to the sunroom below them. “This polio thing is getting pretty heavy, eh?”
“Yeah, it’s on Dad’s mind every minute. And Tasha’s. And you know what Uncle Hamish is like. It’s getting to him big time. Everything does.”
“It’s got Omar freaked too. He was on one of those bus trips they’re talking about down there.”
“I know. And he sat beside that girl who got sick. I’d be scared too.”
“Do you think we need to worry?”
“About getting polio?” Max shook his head. “It won’t help. Worrying doesn’t make anything better. That’s what the Dalai Lama says.”
“What?”
“My dad quotes him a lot. Dad says a wise person knows that worrying steals the strength you need to deal with the present.”
“Then we better check in with Omar. He’s one worried dude.”
Max glanced at his math text. He was only about halfway done the day’s assignment. “Now?”
“Yeah. We weren’t exactly helpful to him yesterday after school.”
“I know.”
But what, Max wondered, were they supposed to tell Omar?
Travis was looking serious. “We need to tell him something he can hold on to. Like his dad has, um, a perfectly good reason for keeping those meds on hand.”
“And what would that be, Trav?”
“Maybe he needs them to put a sick animal out of its misery?”
“We gotta get real, here,” Max said. “Omar’s dad, our barber, is mixed up with some bad characters. So we gotta stay out of Omar’s life as much as we can.”
“We are out of it. Omar doesn’t know anything about us except we’re a couple of kids he plays Fortnite with. He doesn’t even know our real names, just our IGNs.”
“You’re forgetting something.”
“What?”
“He knows my dad’s the doctor leading the polio investigation. Don’t you remember? I told Omar that yesterday.”
“Oh yeah.” Travis rubbed at his neck with both hands. “And your dad’s picture is all over the news. Ten times a day. Omar must know exactly who he is. ”
Max rammed his pencil against the metal lid of his math set. “And sooner or later, Omar and his dad are going to put their facts together and figure out exactly who we are and how much we know.”
“We gotta message Omar,” Travis said. “Tell him to shut up about those notes from the warlord. And to shut up about the meds. His father needs to think no one knows he grabbed those drugs and stashed them in with his socks.”
“Yeah. Least of all, the two of us.”
“But what if Hosam uses them?” Travis said.
“You mean, what if he kills someone with them?”
Trav’s birthmark was on fire. “Would we keep quiet about it forever?”
Max rammed his pencil against the desk until it broke in two. “I dunno. Maybe it would depend on who he kills.”
Trav’s eyes were bugging out of his skull. “Like, it’s okay if he executes a warlord?”
“Shit, Trav, I dunno.”
“Holy crap. Racking up a few bombs on Fortnite was just supposed to be something to do for kicks after school.”
Chapter 32
“It took some prodding,” Natasha told them, “but I think I got the truth out of Bhavjeet Singh Malik and his auntie this afternoon.”
She took a tissue from her briefcase and wiped the sweat from her palms. Twice, her tall glass of Perrier had nearly slipped through her fingers and crashed onto the new coffee table she’d chosen when rejuvenating the sunroom.
Hamish’s eyes narrowed. “What do you mean you think you got to the truth,” he said, his cheeks still scarlet. “Either you did or you didn’t. Which is it?”
She’d never seen Hamish in such a lather. For some reason, this polio thing had him spooked. Did he know one of the cases? If so, he hadn’t said anything. She couldn’t see how. The guy was status-conscious. She couldn’t see him having ties to the collection of low-paid workers that this epidemic was preying upon.
“They were cagey with me, Hamish. That’s what I mean.”
“Hell’s bells. The boy’s a step away from the ICU and a ventilator, and they’re being evasive?”
“Not everyone is comfortable with authority, Hamish,” Zol said then gave her a smile. “No matter how benign a form it takes.” Sitting beside her on the couch, he pressed his arm gently into hers. As always, the warmth of him boosted her confidence.
Hamish gulped back the last of his wine. He opened his mouth as if to speak, but when he glanced at the two of them, a united front, he held his tongue.
“Anyway,” Zol said, “what did you get out of the Singhs?”
She described visiting Bhavjeet on the medical ward at Caledonian Medical Centre after she’d interviewed Jamila’s parents in the ICU with the help of the barber-surgeon from Syria. Bhavjeet’s cousin and uncle were at work at their gas bar, so only the auntie was with the lad in his isolation room. She was a small woman with a sharp face, a missing front tooth, and suspicious eyes. Her pea-green shalwar kameez, though threadbare in places, had been expertly ironed. Her loose polyester s
carf — its shade of maroon was particularly muddy — kept slipping off her head onto the back of her neck. It was irritating to watch her fidgeting with the silly thing. As Natasha’s mother told anyone who would listen, there was nothing elegant about a garment that had to be constantly adjusted.
Natasha had started by asking if Bhavjeet had ever visited the Niagara Region. Before the teenager could get a word in, the auntie said that yes, she and her son had taken him to see the Falls about a month ago.
When she then asked if they’d visited anywhere else nearby — Niagara-on-the-Lake for shopping or a tour of a winery — Bhavjeet seemed either too shy or too intimidated by his auntie to respond. The answer from the auntie was a grim-faced no. The woman then looked Natasha up and down and made it obvious she didn’t like what she saw: a South Asian woman, most probably Hindu, with a pixie haircut, bare legs, and a bare head. Auntie told Natasha that they had no time for shopping and, being a Muslim family, they did not drink alcohol in any form.
“But I kept digging,” Natasha told Zol and Hamish.
“I should hope so,” Hamish said. “That kid’s Zika did not appear out of thin air. We have to know where he got it.”
“Exactly,” Natasha said. “And he’s been in Canada too long to have acquired it anywhere else but in this country.”
“What about that tulip greenhouse?” Zol said. “I don’t suppose he ever set foot in there?”
“That’s where they got cagey on me.”
“How so?” said Zol.
“I asked them specifically about Vander Zalm Nurseries and the acres of tulips they have under plastic. I could tell Bhavjeet knew exactly what I was talking about, but before he said anything, his auntie cut in and said they hadn’t visited any indoor gardens.”
“Did you believe her?” Zol asked.
“The two of them carried on an animated discussion in Punjabi.”
Zol chuckled. “Which they figured you couldn’t understand?”
“Bhavjeet told his auntie they should be truthful with me because I was trying to make him better. Auntie said it wasn’t anyone’s business why they were buying second-quality tulips for resale, and the greenhouse had nothing to do with Bhavjeet’s illness.”
Zol put his head back and laughed. “And then you broke it to them?”
“I told them, in Punjabi, of course, that Bhavjeet’s life depended on them answering my questions with the absolute truth. A bit of an exaggeration on my part, but . . .”
“How did they react?” Zol said.
“Bhavjeet didn’t look surprised. He’s a smart kid. He knew Sharma was a common Punjabi name and there was a good chance I would understand their language. The auntie looked at me as though I were some come kind of heathen Hindu ghost.”
Zol was beaming. Even Hamish looked a little impressed.
“Well done,” Zol said. “Did they have anything else to say?”
“Nothing other than verifying that it was Vander Zalm Nurseries, not some other tulip farm, that they’d visited.”
“So,” Hamish said, “that makes how many polio cases visiting that greenhouse?”
“Let’s count the ones we know about,” Natasha said. “Two pupils and one teacher’s aide from Cathcart School. Jamila and the bus driver from the high school. And Bhavjeet.”
“Hmm,” Zol said. “Six.”
“Out of ten,” Hamish said. “That’s more than half of them.”
“So,” said Zol, throwing Hamish a no-nonsense look. “Vander Zalm’s is definitely our Zika hotspot. But what about the Parvo-W?”
“I asked your Syrian barber friend to track Jamila’s movements with her parents,” Natasha told him. “We’ll have to do that with the others and see if they intersect somewhere.”
“That’s going to be a huge task,” Zol said.
“And,” said Hamish, lifting his professorial index finger, “between poor memories and cagey personalities, how reliable is the tracking data going to be?”
“There’s more work to be done than the three of us can handle,” Zol said. “We’ll need to expand our team.”
Hamish looked puzzled. “How are you going to do that?”
“Hamish is right,” Natasha said. “We all remember what happened that time they forced so-called help on us from Toronto.”
Zol laughed. “Poor Wyatt Burr. He barely survived us.”
“Or we him.” She couldn’t suppress a tsk. “But he brought it on himself.” The guy was an arrogant so-and-so who rode in on his high horse from Toronto’s ivory towers. In the middle of what looked like Canada’s first human outbreak of mad cow disease, Dr. Wyatt Burr discounted Zol and Natasha’s groundwork and local knowledge, then jumped to erroneous conclusions. He quickly made a complete mess of their investigation and exposed them to the wrong sort of international attention. In the end, they sorted the situation themselves.
“Don’t worry,” Zol said. “I wouldn’t dream of asking Toronto for assistance.” He paused and scrubbed at his five-o’clock stubble. “I think we should ask Jesse to join us.”
“Jesse?” Natasha said, making no attempt to hide the surprise in her voice. “Zol, you must be kidding.”
“Who’s Jesse?” Hamish asked.
“Our receptionist,” Natasha told him.
“That’s not fair, Tasha,” Zol said. “He’s a lot more than a receptionist.”
“Okay, so he fetches your coffee and helps us with our IT problems.”
“Hey,” Zol said. “Jesse completely revitalized our communication system with his nifty out-of-the-box approach to computer networking. Remember?”
“Okay, but that’s a far cry from the footwork involved in field epidemiology.”
“He’s got the gift of the gab and a charming manner,” Zol said. “You have to admit he’s disarming. It would be impossible for him to come across as an intimidating government official.”
“Which of our polio cases are you going to assign him to?” Natasha said.
Zol thought for a moment. “Let’s give him one of the deceased. The young janitor who worked at Limeridge Mall. What was his name?”
“Darryl Oxman,” she told him. “I guess Jesse can’t do too much damage if we give him Darryl. The poor guy lived alone, and there were no next of kin listed in his hospital record.”
“Okay, then,” Zol said. “We’ll send him to Limeridge tomorrow where he can speak to Darryl’s employer. It’s a long shot, but maybe Jesse can dig up something on the guy’s movements over the past few weeks.”
An ear-piercing siren filled the house, and footsteps thundered down the stairs. In a flash of plaid shirts and sneakers, Max and Travis raced into the sunroom
“Dad,” shouted Max. “The fire alarm. What’s going on?”
And then they saw it: a cloud of black smoke billowing from the kitchen.
“Oh my God,” Zol said, looking at his watch in disbelief. “I forgot about the Wellington. The puff pastry must be in flames. Shit.”
They raced into the kitchen, coughing and fanning the dense haze in front of them with their arms. Travis grabbed the fire extinguisher beside the stove. Zol opened the oven door. Flames leapt toward him.
Zol jumped back. “Go ahead, Son,” he told Travis, shouting to make himself heard above the wail of the alarm. “The salmon is ruined at this point. But stand well back.”
Beaming as if this was the best fun ever, Travis pulled the extinguisher’s trigger and sprayed the oven with gusto. In seconds, the flames disappeared, but the boy was enjoying himself too much to stop. By the time he’d emptied the canister, he’d covered the entire oven with three layers of foam.
Max and Natasha opened the doors and were working on the windows when Zol climbed on a chair, reached toward the ceiling, and pressed the silence button on the shrieking smoke detector.
“Damn,” Zol said
, “I can’t get this thing to shut up.”
“There’s too much smoke,” Hamish said bluntly. “It’s the same model we installed in our new kitchen. When there’s this much smoke, you can’t turn the thing off. No matter what you do, the fire department gets called.” Looking much too proud of his insider knowledge, he added, “And there’s no calling them off. They’ll be here any minute . . . sirens, trucks, hoses. The whole shebang.”
Chapter 33
Natasha couldn’t believe the hullabaloo caused by Zol’s flaming Salmon Wellington. The poor thing was not only flambéed but reduced to a solid brick of charcoal. Never before had she experienced the frenzied and cacophonous yet thoroughly professional onslaught of a fire brigade responding to a call. Before Zol could stop them, the firefighters had unspooled their hoses and were storming the front door with axes in hand. Despite Zol’s protestations that the kitchen fire was now out and had been limited to the interior of his oven, the firefighters insisted that everyone vacate the premises immediately.
While Natasha shivered with the others on the front lawn, five men and one woman in helmets and heavy gear spent several minutes searching the house from top to bottom. Presumably, they were looking for an ongoing source of smoke and flames. Much to Zol’s obvious relief, they left their hoses outside. Hamish, flapping his arms and shifting his feet in a vain effort to keep warm, gave a wary eye to the coils looped across the grass. He pronounced, most unhelpfully, that if the firefighters turned those hoses on, Zol’s kitchen would be destroyed as quickly as Hamish’s own had been on Friday night when his brand new pipes burst.
After a while, four of the firefighters exited the house through the front door. They told Zol they were satisfied that the danger had passed and nothing further needed to be done. The female firefighter repaired directly to one of the firetrucks. She told her colleagues she was getting started on the paperwork, an essential component of the proceedings the men seemed pleased to leave to her.