Up in Smoke

by Ross Pennie

  What was so brilliant? Hamish felt stupid and left out. “Come on, guys.”

  Al threw him a reassuring smile. “It’s okay. Let me do it again. You’ll get it this time.”

  Al repeated the routine, but in slow motion.

  Suddenly, Hamish could see them. The scabby lesions that had walked into his clinic. The worried teens and adults with sores on their lips and fingertips, exactly where a cigarette would touch them.

  “Oh — my — God,” Hamish said. “So why aren’t we seeing hundreds of cases? A quarter of the population smokes.”

  “Maybe we are,” Zol said, “but we haven’t noticed. The two first responders I saw today thought they had cold sores. Herpes simplex virus lesions above the belt aren’t reportable. No jurisdiction keeps track of them.”

  “The two cases you saw this morning, are they smokers?”

  “Yes. Pack-a-day, at least.”

  “What brand?”

  “I didn’t need to ask. I could smell them. Rollies and Hat-Tricks. You know, from the rez. Of course, they may smoke other brands as well.”

  Hamish’s mouth filled with sand. If cheap cigarettes from the rez were the cause of the outbreaks of skin blisters and epidemic liver failure, the consequences would be catastrophic. “You’ve got to do something, Zol. Immediately.”

  “What? Get on TV and scare every smoker off the habit with threats of ugly scabs and liver disease?”

  “If that’s what it takes.”

  Al was pouring himself a generous whiskey, his cigarette nowhere in sight. “Have you ever looked at a cigarette pack, Hamish? The government’s been trying to scare smokers to death with threats of impotence and lung cancer for decades. Doesn’t work.”

  “So what do we do?” Hamish said.

  “The liver thing’s the bigger problem,” Zol said. “Our top priority.”

  “Gentlemen,” Hamish said, “the kids at Erie Collegiate have to be forced to tell the truth. Spill everything that could possibly have a bearing on the liver outbreak.”

  “How’re we going to do that?” Zol said. “Torture is against the law.”

  He didn’t dignify Zol’s sarcasm with a reply.

  Al swirled his bourbon. “How about a non-authoritative approach? Empathetic interviews with someone close to their own age. One on one.”

  “Natasha’s young. And empathetic,” Zol said. “Those kids didn’t respond to her.”

  A sly smile crossed Al’s lips as he dipped his nose into his glass. “You need someone who’s both hip and professional.”

  “Well, there’s no question that Natasha is professional.” Zol looked around as if to be sure no one else was listening, then lowered his voice, “And she’s sort of hip. Well, hot is more like it.”

  Al chuckled at Zol’s candid admission. “Hot or not, she’s attached to your office. No offence, Zol, but no matter how hip or sweet she comes across, she’s an agent of the Ministry of Health and all its baggage.” He took a long swallow of whiskey, then ran his tongue along his lips.

  “Come on, do I have to spell it out? Letter by letter?”

  “You mean . . . ?” Zol said.

  “You read the Spectator, don’t you?”

  “Of course.”

  “Catch the story of that Ponzi scheme operating out of a back room at City Hall?”

  “Shameful business, but —”

  “Who do you think coaxed that story out of the mortified victims?”

  “Shit,” Zol said. “Pour me another whiskey. Hamish can drive me home.”

  CHAPTER 14

  “We still haven’t settled on a game plan,” Natasha said, struggling to keep her tone professional. Al Mesic was impossible to read. And driving her crazy.

  “Holy crap,” Al said, pointing out the window. He turned, and again she felt the power of his eyes aiming at her from the passenger seat. “Have you ever seen so many pumpkins?”

  For the umpteenth time in the past hour, she thought her heart was going to jump out of her chest and she’d crash the Honda into the trees. Forget the potential for dogs and deer and God-knows-what leaping onto the road from the Norfolk County woods to her left, Al Mesic’s intoxicating amber orbs were ten times more dangerous. And those shoulders . . . a pair of tigers barely restrained by his skin-tight shirt and light-blue linen jacket. She gripped the steering wheel until her nails bit into her palms. She couldn’t believe Al was gay. He had to be at least bisexual.

  “I mean, really,” he continued, pointing to the right and filling Natasha’s tongue-tied silence, “who could possibly eat all those?”

  Dr. Zol was wrong about this fact-finding interview he’d arranged for this morning with the Vanderhoef twins. Al Mesic wasn’t going to get any more reliable information out of those girls than her failed questionnaire had recorded from their peers at Erie Christian Collegiate. Al might be a reporter, but he was anything but focussed. And incredibly distracting.

  “Those are for Halloween,” she told him. “You know, jack-o-lanterns. Scary faces lit with candles.”

  She forced herself to focus on her personal cure for nervousness in anxiety-provoking situations: concentrate on the practical details of the environment around her.

  And here, the practical details were pumpkins. Fields and fields of them. Half of Waterford’s annual crop would’ve been shipped by now to supermarkets across the country and served at thousands of Thanksgiving dinners. She pictured the elaborate pumpkin pie she and her mother had baked two weeks ago for the holiday. As usual, Natasha rolled and crimped the pastry because her mother insisted “English” pastry was impossible to work with and not worth the effort. Mummyji did the filling, and of course her mother couldn’t make a regular Canadian pie. She had to Indian it up with saffron and cardamom, and serve it with kulfi instead of whipped cream or Häagen-Dazs. Delicious, but why did Mummyji always have to flout the family’s Indianness, even at Canadian Thanksgiving?

  Before Natasha knew it, the highway was leading them into the village of Waterford, past an enormous sign that said HOME OF THE PUMPKIN FESTIVAL. Her body felt as tense as ever.

  “Must be some good money around here,” Al said, pointing to the yellow-brick Baptist church. “Takes a lot of coin to reno a building like that.”

  They’d done a beautiful job of restoring the church’s Gothic revival detailing. The slate on the steeply pitched roof looked new, and the bargeboard scrollwork on the gables had been renewed to achieve the cheery gingerbread effect she loved so much. She’d seen this church four years ago, when the renovations had been half finished. Professor Lindley had taken their art history class on a Gothic revival field trip here to Waterford and several other nearby towns.

  Her dashboard GPS told them it was ten-fifty-five, five minutes short of their eleven a.m. appointment, that they were driving along Main Street in Waterford, and the address they wanted was one hundred and fifty metres ahead on the right. She drove one hundred metres, signalled, and parked at the curb. She wasn’t going any farther until they settled on a game plan.

  She never operated unprepared and wasn’t going to start now. She had no idea whether she was dropping Al off alone at the door or accompanying him inside. If they went in together, would he take the lead? Who was doing the introductions and explaining what they needed? She wished Dr. Zol had been more explicit about how this interview was going to work.

  Al looked perplexed. “This can’t be it,” he said, pointing to a boxy red-brick bungalow that hadn’t seen new paint on its shutters for decades.

  “It’s up ahead about a block, but I’m not going any farther until I know how we’re going to approach this.”

  Al shrugged and for some strange reason looked relieved that the Vanderhoefs didn’t live in the red bungalow. Perhaps he had something against peeling paint. “There’ll be a story,” he said, “and we’ll get to the bottom
of it. No problem.”

  But if they weren’t prepared, there would be a problem. “You’ve got your questions ready?”

  “How am I going to know what to ask until I get a feel for the place, the people, and what’s happening between them?”

  “So, I’m going to watch and you’re going to wing it.”

  “Not quite. I’m going to charm them so thoroughly that they’ll drop clues left, right, and centre and lead us to the heart of the story.”

  “Can I take notes?”

  “If you do, they’ll clam up.” He turned and gave her a killer smile and dazzled her again with those eyes. “Use that brilliant memory of yours. Hamish doesn’t like to admit it, but I know he thinks your grey cells are almost as highly developed as his.”

  She felt herself melting, foolishly. “Hamish said that?”

  “Between you and me, he’s a bit threatened by your intellect.” He pulled a pen and notebook from his jacket pocket. “Now relax, and together we’ll get the story behind the story. How old are these girls?”

  “Twins. Sixteen.”

  “Grade eleven?”

  “With good marks.”

  “And they missed your show on Tuesday?”

  “They were in the hospital. A mild form of probably the same liver problem as the other ten cases. Amelia was discharged home yesterday, Annabel the day before.”

  “So we’re starting fresh with them. That’s good.”

  Clearly, Al considered her failed questionnaire to be incompatible with his charm-the-story-out-of-them technique. She was just as glad not to mention it in front of the Vanderhoefs.

  She put the car in drive and drove the final fifty metres while Al fussed with his hair in the vanity mirror, smoothed on some lip balm, and fluffed up his jacket collar. Suddenly, she couldn’t wait to see him in action.

  “I really like what you’ve done with this Gothic revival,” Al was soon telling the four Vanderhoefs in their living room, where the family had lined themselves on their chintz-covered chesterfield.

  Natasha watched him scan the room, as though fascinated by the decor. He turned to Mr. Vanderhoef, a ruddy man in his early forties, and asked him, “Did you do all that scrollwork on the bargeboarding?”

  “You like it, eh? That was last summer’s family project.”

  “Never seen finer. But you didn’t turn those king posts and finials yourself.”

  “Sure did.”

  “Impressive,” Al said, telegraphing his enthusiasm for Mr. Vanderhoef’s carpentry skills. “Especially in this day and age. Most people buy mass-produced pieces from Home Depot. Of course, only hand-turned finials have that look of authenticity.”

  Mrs. Vanderhoef leaned forward, eager not to be deprived of her share of the enormous pile of charm Al was heaping on her husband. “I found the bargeboard and finial patterns in the library. Like you said, they’re authentic.”

  The couple beamed their proud smiles at each other, and then at Al. “Hans cut out the scalloping under the eves as well,” said Mrs. Vanderhoef. “From a vintage pattern I found on the Internet. The girls painted it.”

  “I love the colour,” Al said, his teeth gleaming, his eyes darting from one twin to the other. “Is it Williamsburg blue?”

  “You’ve got a good eye,” said Mr. Vanderhoef, his chest puffed out like a tom turkey’s. “That was my choice.”

  “Alkyd paint makes such a nice job of exteriors,” Al said, “but the clean-up is a terrible nuisance.”

  “You can say that again, eh, girls?” Mrs. Vanderhoef said. “My laundry room was a mess for weeks.”

  Al didn’t take his eyes off the twins sitting there side by side on the sofa, flanked by their parents. They were an attractive pair, obviously sisters but not identical. One was white blond, the other more sandy; they were wearing narrow-legged blue jeans that highlighted their ultra-slim hips. “You girls did the cutting-in?” Al said. “Looks like a professional job.”

  The twins nodded, either too shy or too mesmerized to talk. If Al wasn’t careful, they’d be too much in awe of him to say a word and he’d never get the story.

  “What’s your secret, Amelia?” Al said to the sandy twin. “An angle-sash brush? Natural fibre, I bet.”

  The girl looked to her dad for the answer.

  “You did the work,” said Mr. Vanderhoef. “You tell him.”

  Amelia’s gaze dropped to her lap, where her fingers picked at an ugly crust on her right thumb. “We cheated,” she mumbled.

  “Yeah,” Annabel said, “we used FrogTape. A ton of it.”

  “That’s not cheating,” Al said, “that’s smart. Learned it from your dad, eh?”

  “No way,” Annabel said. “Figured it out for ourselves. From the Internet.”

  “YouTube,” said Amelia. “You can learn anything there.”

  Mrs. Vanderhoef’s face tightened. She didn’t like the sound of what uncensored YouTube sessions might be teaching her daughters.

  “The paint fumes bother you?” Al asked. “Me, I hate them.”

  The girls looked at each other, shrugged, and shook their heads. They seemed surprised to hear that paint could have a strong, unpleasant odour.

  Mr. Vanderhoef straightened his back and clapped Amelia on the shoulder. “Good Dutch stock. They don’t complain. Except about homework.”

  The girls rolled their eyes at their dad, then returned their gaze to Al. Clearly, he was a package they might like to unwrap. They were probably into urban fantasy and its vampire heartthrobs.

  “I do a bit of painting myself,” Al said. He reached into his jacket pockets and pulled out two small boxes. “Here,” he said, tossing a box to each girl, “have a look at my hobby. I use acrylic paints.” He smiled at Mrs. Vanderhoef. “No smell and much easier clean-up.”

  The girls caught the boxes and glanced at them with a guilty familiarity they couldn’t disguise. They turned to each other in what could only be described as horror, and tossed the boxes onto the floor as if they were hot potatoes. Their faces shone beet red in their pastel hoodies.

  “Goodness, girls,” said Mrs. Vanderhoef, “what are doing?” She stared long enough at the boxes scattered on her ivory broadloom to get a good look at them, then turned to Al. “Sorry about that. Girls, that’s no way to treat our guest. Those boxes are beautifully decorated.”

  “It’s okay, Mrs. V.,” Al said, picking up the boxes. He turned and winked at Natasha. She had no idea what he was up to. He aimed his reassuring gaze once again at Mrs. Vanderhoef. “No offence taken, ma’am. Not between us smokers.”

  “Smokers?” said Mrs. Vanderhoef. “There are no smokers in this house. And no drinkers, either. This is a Christian home, Mr. Mesic.”

  “Of course it is, Mrs. V.,” Al said. With a solemn glance, he acknowledged the leather-bound Bible open on a lectern beside the front window. He held up the boxes and raised his eyebrows at the twins. “What do you say we tell your mum what these are for? Eh, girls? Bring her into the twenty-first century?”

  Natasha watched Hans Vanderhoef’s reaction — certain the burly man was going to throw her impudent colleague out of the house. But Vanderhoef sat calmly on the chesterfield beside Annabel, his hands clasped across his belly, a knowing look glowing on his face. He knew what was going down and seemed to be relieved to finally have it in the open.

  “Annabel,” Al said, “why don’t you start. Tell your mum what Rollies are. I’m sure your dad knows already.”

  Half an hour later, they said their goodbyes at the front door, and Natasha followed Al to the street. Her head was spinning with the details he’d extracted from the Vanderhoef twins. Facts had poured out of them as easily as milk from the pair of Delft porcelain jugs displayed on their mantel.

  “I’ll drive, if you like,” he said with a look of either warm concern or brash patronization for her ob
vious giddiness. She couldn’t tell which, but figured it was probably the latter.

  She didn’t let anyone drive her car, not even Kostos. “No thanks, I —”

  “What? You don’t trust me?”

  She was tired and had no energy for arguing. And there were dozens of details to be scribbled into her notebook. “I suppose.” She dug her keys from her purse and tossed them to him. “But please, no speeding.”

  Al started the car and headed back the way they’d come. He looked pleased with himself. “I’d say that counts as a pretty good scoop.”

  She hated to admit it, but once Al got the girls started, they hadn’t shut up. Those few days in hospital with bright yellow skin had put quite a scare into them.

  Al tugged at the collar of his linen jacket. “That dad was a straight shooter. A good guy. Made his girls feel safe about fessing up about the Rollies. And everything else.”

  “I couldn’t believe how you schmoozed over his Gothic revival handiwork.”

  He shrugged and made no attempt to hide the smirk on his face.

  “Honestly,” Natasha told him. “King posts and finials? You actually know that much about nineteenth-century Ontario architecture?”

  “I’m a reporter. I know about a lot of things.”

  “But those terms rolled off your tongue as if you used them every day. Don’t tell me you’re a closet designer.”

  “Closets aren’t my thing. Never have been. Now, Hamish, he’s another matter. Locked inside for so long it stunted his growth. But I’m working on him.”

  “You’re changing the subject.”

  Al was smirking again. “You don’t want me to spoil the magic, do you?”

  “I can take it.”

  For a half a minute, Al’s face was pensive as he drummed on her steering wheel. “If you must know,” he said finally, “a little background research never hurts.”

  So much for his impromptu we’ll take the story as it comes approach.

  He made a sheepish face.

  “And somehow, you discovered the Vanderhoefs lived in a newly restored vintage house painted Williamsburg blue?”