Up in Smoke

by Ross Pennie

  The corners of her mouth were twitching. “Something else has you worried,” he told her. “What is it?”

  She took a deep breath and paused as if debating what, or how much, to tell him.

  “Colleen?”

  Her eyes swept the room, she glanced at the loon, and then she said, “I spoke with my contact in the Toronto Police Service.”

  He wasn’t sure whether it was creepy or reassuring that she had nameless contacts inside various police forces.

  “Those three bodies they found under the rubble at the ROM? It wasn’t the explosion that killed them.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “They were already dead. Each shot in the head, execution-style.”

  “Before the explosion?”

  She pursed her lips and nodded slightly. “Probably a matter of minutes.”

  “Who were they? Mafia?”

  “I believe the current politically correct term is First Nations. The bodies have yet to be formally identified, or completely examined, but they exhibit certain features that lead the police to be quite certain they are Natives.”

  “Do the cops have any idea who did it?”

  “Only speculating at this juncture.”

  He pictured a cigar-toting multimillionaire in a brocade smoking jacket, feeding a psychotic passion for two-thousand-year-old Native artifacts.

  No, that was only in James Bond films.

  “The police are concerned,” she said, “that a rival Native gang got wind of the intended heist and intercepted it.”

  Zol looked at the black-eyed loon, nestled not so innocently in the Birks box. The creature had suddenly become tainted with a danger he couldn’t quite get his head around. “A shootout between gangs at a museum? That’s too freaky.”

  “Not a shootout, Zol. Something more calculated. There’s no denying three bodies with neat holes in their skulls.” She gave him a look that told him that in her line of work she’d seen stuff he didn’t want to know about. “It’s the apparent premeditation that has me worried. And I think you should be too.”

  He put up his hands. “Okay, I’m with you. Believe me.” He nodded toward the loon, now almost afraid to look at it. “Please, bury it as deep as you can.”

  She set the lid on the Birks box and pressed it in place. “It won’t be forever. When things cool off, you can decide what to do.” She rubbed the back of his neck exactly where he liked it. “And I know you’ll do the right thing.”

  At this point, the right thing was anybody’s guess.

  CHAPTER 7

  Natasha Sharma hit the NEXT DISK button on the Honda’s CD player. Given the potential pandemonium that awaited her down the road, five minutes of Bollywood on a Monday morning was as much as she could take. Her cousin Anjum had slipped the CD into the machine on Saturday during their drive to the wedding in Toronto. Anjum said the soundtrack from Slumdog Millionaire would get them into the mood. It hadn’t worked. Without an escort, Natasha had a miserable time at the wedding; the older women kept eyeing her up and down, as if she were an ageing cow with bad teeth. Her mother had threatened to have one of her meltdowns in front of every person they knew in the Indian community from Niagara Falls to Toronto if Natasha arrived at the wedding with that Greek boy Kostos on her arm. She’d considered bailing, but the bride was a sweet girl and there was no way she could snub a friend. Besides, if she’d stayed away, her mother would have whined about it forever.

  Michael Bublé came on crooning “Cry Me a River” as the fields of Norfolk County whizzed past. Most of the crops had been harvested, and the shaded ground below the ginseng netting was either bare or covered with mulch. Her GPS had offered her the scenic route when she’d typed in Erie Christian Collegiate, Simcoe, Ontario before starting her journey. The device was directing her along a series of respectable but minor roads.

  As she drove deeper into farm country, she couldn’t help noticing the identical, dilapidated wooden buildings clustered beside many of the houses. The caved-in roofs, weathered walls, and doors askew on rusted hinges gave the utilitarian shacks an artistic flare. She was reminded of the black and white photograph Dr. Zol used to have hanging in his office. The evocative image showed a pair of lonely buildings like these casting shadows in the afternoon sun. Dr. Zol had said they were tobacco kilns, as iconic to the Brant and Norfolk County landscapes as the grain elevators of Saskatchewan. He’d slogged summers and autumns as a teenager hanging tobacco leaves inside his family’s stifling kilns, where the crop dried to precise levels of humidity under his father’s exacting eye. In the winter, the tobacco was then sorted, baled, and sold to the cigarette companies. No one used the wooden kilns any longer, and many had fallen down, replaced by low, techno-efficient, unromantic constructions of boxy metal.

  Now, an hour after leaving her office in Hamilton, and with Michael Bublé still belting out the tunes, the GPS directed her onto Highway 3 a few kilometres east of Simcoe. It soon warned that her destination, Erie Christian Collegiate, was coming up four hundred metres on the right. Her stomach did a flip as she pulled into the parking lot next to the spot reserved for the principal. She’d been to a principal’s office only once in her life, a humiliating experience she hoped never to repeat. Yet here she was again, and though this time she had an appointment and not a summons, the cockroaches were nibbling the lining of her stomach.

  She sat down in the chair indicated by the tearful secretary who greeted her at the front office and rushed into a back room, where cries and sobs punctuated desperate voices. Natasha was fifteen minutes early and glad of some time alone to review her notes and plan her strategy. She shuddered at the fear infiltrating this school like a poisonous cloud.

  And no wonder. In the past few days, six students at this private Christian high school had come down with liver failure. Totally unexplained. Two sisters were only mildly affected and two kids had died on Friday. And that wasn’t the end of it. Earlier this morning, a cheerleader for the basketball team — her eyes and palms said to be fluorescent with jaundice — had shown up in Simcoe General’s emergency department.

  While Natasha had been enduring the Bollywood wedding in Toronto, Hamish Wakefield had got to do something far more thrilling. He’d spent the weekend tracing the liver cases and discovered that all of them attended the same high school, Erie Christian Collegiate. Their blood, when tested for an alphabet soup of hepatitis viruses, came up negative, which ruled out the garden varieties of liver infections the health unit dealt with every week. Some of the hundred and fifty students at this school were into something dangerous, she was sure of that. But did their parents and teachers have the faintest clue what their kids were up to?

  The principal’s office door opened and out limped a tall man with a large paunch straining his shirt buttons. He looked like he’d forgotten to shave and had pulled his suit from the dirty laundry basket. His eyes were so close together he’d never be handsome, even with a properly pressed suit and a nice haircut. His mouth twitched as he greeted her with a sweaty palm and introduced himself as Walter Vorst, ECC’s principal.

  “I suppose you’ve come to close us down,” he said as soon as he’d ushered her into his office and shut the door.

  “Not at all, sir.” She flashed the professional smile she’d perfected in the mirror for such encounters. “I’ve come to help.”

  He slipped off his loafers with a grimace that suggested they were too tight, then sank into the chair behind his imposing desk. He grabbed a pack of gum from a drawer and popped a stick into his mouth. He closed his eyes and chewed hard for a long moment. Soon the scent of spearmint mixed with the reek of tobacco and sweaty socks that had greeted her on the way in.

  “To help?” he said.

  “Discover why your students are getting sick, so we can prevent further cases.”

  “Seriously? Further cases?” He ran his hand through his hair
. “You don’t know what it’s been like . . .”

  “Mr. Vorst, Dr. Szabo and I need to go through your school and its students with a fine-tooth comb, and find out what the five students had in common. Something that looks quite innocent on the surface, but is actually . . . you know . . .”

  The word hung in the leaden air between them, unspoken but understood. Deadly.

  She looked down at her notebook until Mr. Vorst broke the silence.

  “But this is a superior school, Miss uh . . .”

  “Sharma.”

  “Sorry. I’m usually good with names. But today I’m . . . never mind.” He tossed his gum wrapper into the waste basket next to his desk. “Miss . . . Sharma. Most of our graduating students go to university. They come from good Christian families. Dutch Reform and Baptist.” He scratched the stubble on his chin and shifted in his chair. “And in case you’re wondering, our kids don’t smoke, their families are mostly teetotallers, and we don’t have a drug problem.”

  She let go of her professional smile. Was there even one school in the western world that didn’t have an issue with drugs? Kids everywhere used tobacco and alcohol, no matter what their parents said. Vorst was deluding himself. And in her line of work, delusions were dangerous.

  She looked around the office. There was a photo of four smiling children on Vorst’s desk and another, taken maybe a couple of years later, on the bookcase behind him. A formal family portrait of the kind produced by Sears or Walmart included Walter Vorst, but none of the photographs included a woman. He must be divorced, she decided. If the man were widowed, there would be at least one photo of his wife with her children. And clearly, this man was not living with a female partner. No one in possession of two X chromosomes would have let him out of the house in that suit. How did his marital status affect his role as head of a private Christian school? Families paid heavily out of their pockets to send their kids to this fortress, thinking it was a haven from drugs, premarital sex, and teachers with flexible morality. When it came to personal shortcomings, it had always seemed to her that fundamentalists of any religion were less than forgiving.

  She’d promised Hamish she would include his cases of lip and finger lesions in her investigation of the liver failure cases. Small sores on the lips and fingers constituted a less emotional issue than deaths from liver failure and a good place to start with Mr. Vorst. She would try settling the principal’s obvious anxiety and gain his confidence by first focussing on his students’ skin. Hamish had told her that two Erie Collegiate students had presented to his clinic with lip and finger lesions that wouldn’t go away.

  “Here at ECC,” she began, “has anyone noticed a number of students or staff with blisters on their lips? They might look like large cold sores. And perhaps something similar on their fingers?”

  Vorst tugged at his tie. “What’s that got to do with a hepatitis problem?”

  “We’re not sure. Maybe nothing. But there’s been a cluster of something in Brant and Norfolk counties we’re calling lip and finger eruption.” Well, that was Hamish’s name for it. Dr. Zol was reluctant to call it anything and insisted she stay focussed on the liver cases.

  Vorst glanced at the Band-Aids partially concealing the yellowed tips of the index and third fingers of his right hand. “No,” he said quickly, without giving his answer any thought. “No, no. Nothing like that.”

  “Are you sure, Mr. Vorst? Many of the cases come from the postal codes that surround your school.” She shot him her We’re working on the same side smile and added, “It’s probably a harmless skin condition, but I’ve been told to check it out all the same.”

  Beads of sweats glistened above his eyebrows as he took his time formulating an answer. “Well . . .” He paused to loosen his tie, keeping the two bandaged digits hidden in his palm. “I don’t know anything about finger blisters, but three girls missed a track meet because they were too embarrassed to show up with sores on their lips.”

  “When was that?” Natasha asked.

  “A couple of weeks ago.”

  “Any others?”

  “Maybe. I can’t say for sure.” He popped another stick of gum into his mouth and leaned back in his chair, the wrinkles less tight around his eyes. Something in that gum was having a calming effect on him. Nicotine? “Some students have been staying home, emailing their assignments.” He sat forward, and his wrinkles tightened. “Midterms are coming up, and I’m not sure how we’re going to manage the exam schedule if kids refuse to turn up for reasons of personal . . . vanity.”

  A bell sounded outside the office. Vorst looked at his watch and reached for his shoes. “If that’s all, Miss Sharma, I’ve —”

  “Actually, Mr. Vorst, this is just the beginning.” She held up her checklist. “I’ve got a long list of questions for every student, every teacher, every employee at this school.”

  “But —”

  “In outbreaks like this, especially when emotions are running high, I find it best to invite everyone concerned to a fact-sharing session.”

  “You mean —”

  “Our team would like you to gather all your students, parents, and employees in one place.”

  “I can’t think when we could do that. It would have to be at a convenient time and not interfere with the upcoming midterms.”

  She glanced at her watch. It was too late to get the parties assembled today. “We need to do this as soon as possible. No later than tomorrow. And as early in the day as possible.”

  “Tomorrow? Imposs —”

  “Dr. Szabo says we should start at ten a.m. In your auditorium.” It usually helped to drop her boss’s name at the right moment.

  There was a knock at the door and the tearful secretary who’d greeted her earlier padded in. A sheet of paper trembled in the woman’s hand. At the same time, Natasha’s mobile phone chimed the arrival of a text message from Dr. Zol: Simcoe General was reporting another ECC student admitted through emergency with jaundice, dark urine, bleeding gums, and confusion. They were sending the girl to Toronto General by helicopter.

  Vorst glanced at the paper. He pulled a wadded Kleenex from his pocket and wiped his forehead. “Noreen,” he said. “Activate the telephone tree. Emergency meeting in the auditorium. Tomorrow morning. Nine o’clock. Sharp.”

  CHAPTER 8

  Hamish Wakefield strode into his academic office at the rear of his lab at Caledonian Medical Centre. He locked the door behind him and dropped his briefcase onto the desk. He fumbled with the key as he struggled to unlock the tall, custom-made wardrobe. He got the door open and lifted out the ironing board. He extended its legs, then removed the iron and filled it with distilled water. He set the iron on the board and plugged it in, then slipped off his lab coat and wiped his sweaty hands with a towel. As the iron heated up, his anxiety began to subside.

  He opened his briefcase and removed the folded shirt he’d placed there this morning before breakfast. As usual, this was an exact match to the shirt he’d been wearing all day. He always bought dress shirts in pairs. One for the mornings, its identical twin for the afternoons. He washed and ironed on Sundays, preparing for the week ahead. He loved the feeling of a clean, freshly pressed shirt. The only way to sustain that crispness, especially in a line of work that confronted him with a steady stream of germs, was to change his shirt twice a day. But a folded shirt lost its freshness when tucked into a briefcase. Creases slashed its front and wrinkled its sleeves. He fixed that with the hot iron. Today, his morning clinic had run late and delayed his ritual, had made him feel edgy. No one at the medical centre knew about his two-shirt habit, or the ironing apparatus locked in the wardrobe. People wouldn’t understand. They would think he was overly fastidious. Or plain weird. And he had no interest in defending himself over something as calming as a warm, perfectly pressed shirt.

  Al knew. And understood. Over the past six and a half months, he and Ham
ish had grown closer. Not in spite of each other’s quirks, but because of a mutual delight in them. They’d first met during karaoke night at the Reluctant Lion pub. Hamish, a choir boy until his voice cracked at age fourteen, had hidden behind the beer glasses piling up on the table. But Al Mesic, a Hamilton Spectator reporter with a toned body and a Frank Sinatra voice, raised the audience to its feet with his first three bars of “The Music of the Night.” Since then, they’d been making music together. And not just in the living room with Al’s karaoke machine.

  Love of singing was not their only bond. Hamish reckoned they were both refugees. Hamish from the unrelenting attacks of the schoolyard bullies who never let him forget he was a . . . yes, a fairy. Al from the snipers, mortars, and hunger of the siege of Sarajevo in the nineties. They were both in the process of coming to terms with their pasts.

  Hamish’s pulse quickened as he buttoned the warm shirt. Al seemed keen that they move in together in the house Hamish’s aunt had left him in her will. The old place had become vacant two months ago, after the tenant broke her hip and moved into a nursing home. It was a detached, two-storey fixer-upper in the wilds of North Hamilton, two blocks from Lake Ontario. Not an area he would have thought he’d ever live in. He and Al had toured the empty house together, then traded ideas with an architect who’d promised to deliver a set of preliminary sketches this week. With Al in his life, perhaps anything was possible. A renovated house, a renovated life, a part of town showing signs of rebirth?

  He locked the wardrobe and opened the office door, then he sat at his desk and gave himself a few minutes to answer urgent emails waiting in his inbox.

  Half an hour later, he was racking his brain again, thinking of those young people with galloping liver failure. Yesterday there’d been five of them. Today it was six. Until Friday, fifteen cases of strange-looking lip and fingers blisters had been an interesting medical puzzle. Now, with two teens lying in the Simcoe morgue with their livers kaput and those same undiagnosed sores on their mouths, the pressure to find the cause was excruciating. Natasha was convinced that the liver-failure cases, all students at Erie Christian Collegiate, had nothing in common with the lip and finger outbreak. She said that while the liver disease was highly focussed, involving a single school, the blister cases came from all over the region. But two puzzling outbreaks presenting simultaneously in the same part of Ontario? They had to be linked. There was no way around it.