Missing Chldren

by Gerald Lynch

  “Since there’s never any time to lose in my profession either, and as I was the consulting physician of record, I cancelled Foster’s prescription and ordered an immediate course of chelation therapy, with injections of EDTA. I made a brief report to the chief resident and told him the patient was now officially his, or Foster’s, I didn’t care which, and that I was heading back to oncology.

  “For the fun of it, though, I detoured back to the privacy room. Foster was sitting on the small couch, crammed between the parents with an arm around each, quite snug and smug. Per usual, Art was dressed to kill in a dark-blue three-piece suit. His lab coats are custom tailored, with big collars and bone buttons. His comb-over was perfect, probably held in place with spray or even pins. Art has handsome, chiselled features, chiselled from a bartering bargain he’d struck with a cosmetic surgeon. Parents immediately ‘related’ to Foster, warmed to him, liked him. To me, not so much, as you might suspect, Detective.”

  “I see.”

  It was obvious what obviously ironic Beldon meant: get on with it. But I’d tell the story my way or not at all.

  “Savouring the moment, I looked over their heads at the mural of Jesus, who was sitting on a rock beside a tree, his arm loosely around a boy’s waist, and smiling broadly at a little girl holding out a lily to him. Jesus’s day off, I thought, taking a break from the halt and the lame. Jesus, fellow healer, hardly ever smiled. Dr. Lorne Thorpe needed a day off too, a smile, a flower from a child.”

  “Lorne!” That was Veronica again. She’d probably detected something different in me. “Have you been drinking?”

  “I lowered my gaze at Foster. ‘It’s arsenic poisoning.’ His eyes widened. ‘What!’ He pulled back his head and looked down his nose as if he’d just apprehended a pair Munchhausen’s-by-proxy parents. I had to smirk. ‘Not intentional, Dr. Foster, accidental poisoning.’

  “There was the proverbial stunned silence. Then the father leapt to his feet and was pumping my hand: ‘Since this, I am many thanks, Doctor! Oh very very manys merci, merci, merci!’

  “‘Well,’ I said, leaning away, ‘it’s not exactly good news, arsenic poisoning, but better, I agree, than a misdiagnosis of leukemia.’

  “Foster winced, shut his eyes. There was a more thoughtful silence. The father extended his face towards me. ‘Mis…leuk…?’ He puzzled for a spell, looking like a man trying to identify a bad smell. Then recognition: ‘Ah! Mis-take! Mistake!’

  “Both parents were all but dancing round me then. I looked at Foster’s blank puss. He just managed, ‘But how explain…?’

  “How had I solved the medical mystery? As would any good detective. The model for Sherlock Holmes was a doctor, you know —”

  “Jesus Christ, Thorpe,” Beldon interrupted. “Your daughter is missing, you know.”

  “Okay, okay, I’m almost done. While sitting alone with the father, I’d coaxed him to retrace events of the previous forty-eight hours, again and again, stopping him frequently to make sure I’d understood his broken English and that he wasn’t leaving anything out. Like a methodical dick, I was alert for variations in his repetitions. Finally, in telling again about his daughter’s previous afternoon in the backyard kiddie pool, he said something he’d not mentioned before, something about smoke, fumée. I sensed fire. Warily, he confessed that he’d had an illegal backyard fire to dispose of the rotting materials of his deck.

  “It was instantly all there for me, rotting deck made of pressure-treated cedar, fire, the girl’s blistered palms. I’d read about the toxins problem in the back pages of a Health Canada report. Foster had slid the brochure under my nose in the cafeteria because its cover featured him and his government-funded placebo research project.

  “I held up a traffic cop’s hand to the talkative father. ‘The pool water soothed your daughter’s burnt palms, d’accord?’

  “He’d not tried to speak at first, just sat with bugging eyes and hanging jaw. Then, ‘Mais, comment…?’

  “I immediately called Health Canada on my cell. Within a minute of their hearing who I was, I was talking to the chief investigator. She itemized the chemicals they’d found in pressure-treated cedar. Arsenic headed the list, both for quantity and toxicity.

  “While helping Papa with his illegal fire, the short child would have inhaled the arsenic at more concentrated levels, the very worst means of intoxication, or the best, as in marijuana bonging, as I expect you know, Detective?… Okay, at one point she’d tripped and toppled into the embers on the fringe — the blisters on the palms, no facial burns or singed hair — which would have made her wail, whereby she’d sucked in who knows what concentration of the smouldering residue.

  “Conclusion: the five-year-old patient was suffering from acute arsenic poisoning. Arsenic poisoning accounted for the low blood-cell count, the preliminary test result that had led Foster to suspect leukemia. That misdiagnosis was further confirmed, for Foster, by the low BP, the headaches and vomiting, the blood in the urine, the skin discolouration. I was confident in the course of treatment I’d ordered, the only method really, chelation to flush the system of toxic metals.

  “But the episode had been a near-fatal blow to Marie LeBlanc’s young system. The next day she remained in poor condition and I began to wonder if she would ever recover sufficiently to help Papa again. We ran the urine tests, sampling the hair follicles and fingernails for toxin levels, and were relieved to see the parts count return to normal range. Still, she malingered.

  “CHEO’s malpractice team and the instantaneous legal team of the poisoned girl’s parents —”

  “Thank you, Lorne. That’s enough for now. You two need a rest and I need to look into some things now. Later this afternoon for the sequel, if that’s all right with you two?”

  With both hands pushing on his knees, Beldon stood, his small ginger head going way up in that room whose ceiling had always seemed high enough.

  Veronica whispered to the patio doors, “Shawn. No one’s even said her name.”

  Beldon pinched his mouth. “Rest assured, Veronica, this is all and only about Shawn. I will find her and the criminal who did this.”

  I took Veronica’s elbow, but she jerked it away from me, stood, and we accompanied Beldon to the front door. It was like she’d dug that elbow into my liver.

  Beldon turned on the stoop and adjusted his shoulders in the flimsy jacket. He looked only at my wife:

  “I don’t give false hope, Veronica, but I’d already known about Dr. Otto Fyshe’s experience with the missing boy from last night. The boy is not talking, which is puzzling, but he was unharmed and that gives us real hope. I strongly suspect we are dealing with the same kidnapper. And there was also an eleven-year-old girl on Saturday.”

  Veronica gasped and returned the hand to her chest.

  “Taken from Troutstream Arena, using the sick-kitty-in-the-car trick. She’s also returned unharmed and not talking, or not much. She did tell us that none of her clothes were removed. Strange to say, she was asked to put on costumes over her clothes — a cape, wear a crown, hold a wand of some sort. Some harmless fetish. I mean, compared to other possible outcomes.”

  “What can it mean?” Veronica gasped, still posed as if restraining herself, or her heart. “Shawn …”

  “What solid leads do you have?” I demanded.

  He flicked me a frown. “I don’t believe anything ugly happened between those kids and their abductor. Something sure happened, and is happening, and I’m going to find out what. Steady now, but all the kids are from Troutstream. And I suspect that others from here have been contacted or even taken by our man, but for one reason or another — shorter time missing, parents absent all day — the incidents were never reported. And I don’t think we’ve seen the end of it.”

  “How can you be so sure of all that?” Veronica asked.

  “It figures, and I have very strong gut feeli
ngs about these matters.”

  “So.” I sneered, still smarting from Veronica’s sharp refusal of my hand, “now we’re relying on your hunches?”

  He ignored me. “As is most often the case, Shawn may have known her abductor, who’s most likely from Troutstream too. Anyone come to mind? Anybody at all?”

  Neither of us had anything to offer.

  “What about this Bob …” Beldon consulted his notepad. “This Bob Browne who unofficially treated your poisoned girl, Lorne?”

  I was startled again. “Bob Browne? How do you come to know about him? Bob Browne couldn’t have had anything to do with this. For one thing, the man with the dog was tall and slim. Bob’s very short. I was going to tell you his part in the rest of my story.”

  “Okay, then. Before supper, I’ll call.”

  “Supper… She must be getting very hungry.” Turning back into the house Veronica knocked her knee hard on the aluminum door. She didn’t react.

  Detective Beldon strode to the maroon Crown Victoria at the curb, which I recognized from the museum. He drove off slowly.

  Jack Kilborn’s dishevelled self was standing at the end of his short front walk where it meets the driveway. He ran a hand through his hair and shook his head at me. I had no idea why. We’d have to explain events to the neighbours, what with Veronica having borrowed their car and all. I hoped the commotion hadn’t excited their son, Jake, a powerfully energetic Down’s Syndrome kid chronologically in his late teens, or Jack and Trixie would need Veronica to help out yet again. Nuisance neighbours, hopeless incompetents. But suspects? No.

  I turned away. I was surprised again to find myself starving.

  I didn’t return to work after lunch (which I made for myself and ate alone, two cheese-and-onion sandwiches). I don’t know why I didn’t go back to CHEO after all the crowing about keeping to normal routines. Monday afternoon Veronica and I mostly avoided each other, trying not to look like we were doing so, hovering near the phones and monitoring texts and emails. We were waiting for contact, a call from Detective Beldon or the kidnapper himself, or a delivery of the hoped-for innocent photos — electronically or by courier — waiting and waiting for news. As I often say to distraught parents: We’re waiting for the pictures. But nothing came, so the prognosis grew more desperate by the minute.

  Except for no work, we made the day appear as normal as we could. Owen kept to his room. Veronica busied herself with laundry (the never-ending chore; she seemed to be forever running up and down stairs with the rose-coloured plastic basket). She used the outdoor line for drying, which entailed much conversation through the cedar hedge with next-door-neighbour Jack Kilborn. Jack wasn’t snooping, she reported with a garish smile. Jack was upset about something of his own, per usual. I stopped listening to her once I’d heard what I wanted to know: she’d told him nothing.

  I went and lay on the brown leather couch in my study, monitoring local radio too now, jumping when the email chimed. Nothing. Spam: “Dating services,” sex enhancements, free money, a modicum of legit medical information, and a number of the usual conferences where I was invited to be keynote speaker for a sizeable fee too, me paying it to them. The World Wide Web had so quickly become the globe’s exploding subconscious. Even on every useful screen the irrational mass pressed hard behind. We invited this thing into our homes, this demon that hated us and our…children…

  Veronica cut the grass — I don’t know how she did it — and the pleasant odour of chlorophyll inundated my brown study. I glided off on its green drafts. Other children had been abducted, and only for a brief period, and nothing horrible had been done to them, Kevin said so. I dozed. At times the gentler electric lawnmower was a distant plane somewhere over a northern lake. I snapped awake…dozed again…a small plane buzzing a pristine northern lake green as jade…far below, but coming closer as the plane spiralled downward, someone the size of an ant was circling the oblong dark lake’s perimeter, someone was struggling in its black centre, drowning — snapped awake.

  Chapter 4

  This is the story, somewhat improved here, that I told Detective Beldon later that afternoon (sans his interruptions, especially as regards Bob Browne). Veronica had heard it all before, so she visited with the Kilborns next door.

  The hospital’s malpractice division and the instantaneous legal team of the poisoned girl’s family were unable to reach a speedy out-of-court settlement. We had done nothing wrong; regardless, we, meaning Art Foster, had confused the parents with a misdiagnosis, and the silent girl continued to show malingering effects, mainly psychological, from the arsenic poisoning. The ambulance chasers determined to fight it out, first in the local media.

  Our lawyers stressed that we continue not just to treat the girl but also to be seen to be treating her with the utmost compassion. But treating her for what? They’d also insisted on my continued involvement because I was the first consulting physician of record, and I was Dr. Lorne Thorpe (their emphasis). They said it didn’t matter, legally speaking, that I’d been right in my speedy diagnosis of arsenic poisoning. The truth didn’t matter. It was all public relations and minimizing what they’d already conceded would be the settlement against us. We were doing damage control, massaging the message, merely mitigating the cost.

  The CHEO board made Foster and me take all the press conferences, assigning us a media coach who advised that we always wear freshly laundered lab coats and stethoscopes. Foster agreed to sniffle whenever the word child was spoken and to dab his eyes at little girl.

  The situation deteriorated further. An enterprising reporter established that Ottawa’s playgrounds were filled with equipment made of the same pressure-treated cedar. Soil samples were tested from a selection of playgrounds and it emerged that the sand and dirt surrounding the playground structures were also contaminated with arsenic. Manufacturers of the treated cedar were named in the suit, which was threatening to become class action and looked ready to go national. At the height of attention — CHEO TORTURING OUR KIDS IN WEIRD EXPERIMENTS, PARENTS CLAIM — we had crowded press conferences for five days running. Our media coach met with us privately beforehand each day for a wasteful half-hour, trying to force a clipboard on me, and with extra stethoscopes bunched in his fist like the guts of some machine.

  Foster and I were thrown together too much, regularly having debriefing coffee after our press conferences. On the third day, he suggested that some friend of his be allowed to visit with the girl, Marie LeBlanc, who still had not spoken a word, though her vitals remained well within range. It was actually the friend of a friend of a friend, with the immediate friend being the mother of a patient and with the second friend being known only to that mother. Sometimes I wanted a lawyer present just to talk with Foster. This friend at the third remove wasn’t a psychologist and not a conventional therapist. Foster called him a “holistic pediatric grief counsellor.” I’m pretty sure he made that up on the spot for my sake. He claimed that his swami without accreditation had been known to work miracles with children.

  “Known to whom, Pediatrician Foster?” I asked.

  “Known to me, Lorne, personally.”

  “And the mother of your patient, the first unlicensed referrer, would I know her too?”

  “Yes, in fact, I believe you do. But I’m sworn to keep her confidence. Why this attitude, Lorne?”

  “Attitude?”

  “Teamwork, Lorne, remember? Teamwork.”

  Apart from the perfect non sequitur, he couldn’t simply have said work together on this. No, at CHEO we had become a team, from parking lot attendant to CEO, with every team member contributing to our winning… Well, I don’t know how it plays out. Regardless, before becoming a team, we’d been the CHEO family. That designation had been dropped, perhaps because the CHEO family had begun to sound in some marketer’s brain like a group of snacks or a sitcom about Italian immigrants. Whatever the reason, the CHEO family had donned
the nattier uniform of a corporate team of “healthcare providers.” That’s what we’d remain till contract negotiations started up again. Then we’d become something of a family again, the Corleones, that differently organized collective of Italians, with their distinctive manner of making and refusing offers.

  I was weary of it all by then. “And your holistic quack, he gets results?”

  “Didn’t I just say that I’ve seen the results with my own two eyes?” He pointed them out, his own two credulous orbs, just in case I’d forgotten the number he had or thought they were up his ass.

  I sighed melodramatically and said, “I’ll tell you frankly, Art, it sounds to me like more mystic mumbo-jumbo. But what the hell, she’s your patient, it’s your call, and your funeral.”

  He bristled: “You can be such a pri — so wastefully adversarial, Lorne.”

  “Hey,” I raised two John L. Sullivan fists, “wanna fight just for the fun of it?”

  He slid back in his chair. “You think my placebo research project is a joke too. Don’t try to deny it.”

  “I wouldn’t dare.”

  He fought to a smile, but he was actually coming to his old pre-anger-management-course Foster boil (the board had imposed the “re-education” as punishment for his behaviour in the operating theatre and with resistant nurses). “Such a prick!”

  I held up and shook both hands like an old-time Negro singing a spiritual: “Bring on da voodoo!… Do as you like, Doctor Foster, all the way from here to Gloucester, for all I care. I’m confident your juju man will be less wasteful, at least, than the tens of thousands of dollars Health Canada is throwing away on your placebo, so-called research, project.”