Up in Smoke (5 page)

She replaced the lid and the gingham wrapping, then handed him the box, the tears rolling down her cheeks. “Hide it in your pocket. Quickly.”

She watched as he stuffed the box into his jacket. When she was satisfied, she wiped her cheeks on her coat sleeve and said, “Okay. Now we go.”

“But —”

She pressed the green button on the elevator panel. “Take me home. I tell you story in car.”

CHAPTER
6

An hour later, his hands shaking, Zol removed the gingham cloth from the Birks box and placed it, unopened, on his kitchen counter. All the way back to Hamilton from his parents' place, he'd been obsessed with keeping to the speed limit, terrified the police would pull him over and search his pockets.

Colleen padded into the kitchen and pecked him on the lips.

“Any news from Hamish?” he asked.

She shook her head. Her eyes narrowed. “Oh my God, you look awful.” She squeezed his arm. “How's your mum?” She searched his eyes. “What's happened?”

He cocked his ear toward the computer room. “Where's Max?”

“Still with Travis. Swimming, then a movie. He was really keen on it, and I didn't think you'd mind. They promised to have him back before dinner.”

“Perfect.” He didn't want Max knowing about any of this. He pointed to the Birks box on the table. “I need you to open that.”

Colleen raised her eyebrows, then scrutinized the box from several angles. She looked and listened, but didn't touch. “Birks,” she said, finally. “The jewellers. What is it? Something of your mum's?”

“Please, just open it.”

She grasped the lid and it eased off, then jumped back when she saw what was inside. She leaned in for a closer look. “How extraordinary. Zol, it's stunning.” Her face tightened. “But it's hot. The police . . . The Native councils . . . However did she get it?”

“It's not what you think.”

“It doesn't matter what I think. The police are going to —”

“It's never been in the
ROM
.”

“You've lost me.”

“It's not the loon in the newspaper. See? Her eyes are black, not red. It's the —”

“The mate? No. Don't tell me the second loon actually exists?”

He wiped his hands on his jeans and lifted the beautiful little loon from her cotton nest. He cupped her in his palms, stroked her smooth grey back, felt the sharpness of her beak, her heft, the fine balance of her tail. He held her to his face with the smoke hole opposite his lips, and stared into the creature's eyes. He could see that if you were stoned on its hallucinogenic tobacco, those piercing, black eyes would be mesmerizing.

“Your mother gave you this?”

“She didn't want anyone to find it accidentally when . . . you know . . . the time came to go through her things.”

Colleen's eyes began to glisten. “Oh, Zol, I'm so sorry. But how touching.” Her mouth twitched as she gazed at the loon cupped in his palms.

“Here,” he said, “you hold her.”

She held out both hands, then cradled the creature like an injured duckling. She seemed reluctant to hold her for long. “Let me put it away before either of us drops her.”

She placed the loon in the box, then took Zol by the hands and kissed him on the lips. “You'd better sit down. And then tell me what this is about.”

He poured himself a glass of water, took a few gulps, and sank into a chair at the kitchen table. “Turns out they've had that black-eyed loon for at least five years.”

“Your mum and dad?”

“Dad found her, then gave her to Mum for safekeeping. She's the organized one.”

“Why didn't they give it to the
ROM
?”

“Because of all the hassles and indignities they endured after finding the first one.”

He told her the story of the Native land claim made against their farm as soon as word got out that the Szabos had unearthed a priceless First Nations artifact. The Natives were convinced the family was sitting on a sacred Iroquois burial site. For three weeks, a gang from Grand Basin Reserve — and a few imported rabble-rousers brandishing unregistered firearms — barricaded his family's driveway, built bonfires on their front lawn, and blocked access to their home. For Hungarian immigrants who'd fled the excesses of Soviet totalitarianism, the experience was terrifying. The land claim fizzled when his dad produced the English strongbox in which Zol had found the pipe and persuaded a group of moderate Native elders that the pipe came from a White man's cache and not a First Nations burial site.

“Do your parents know about the legend?”

“That's another reason why they hid the second loon. To keep the two of them apart.”

She nodded, her expression solemn. “Had your mum and dad heard about the bombing at the
ROM
?”

“Oh yeah.” He gestured at the little blue box. “I think that's what reminded Mum about our friend here.”

“Where did your dad find it?”

“In the opposite corner of our property from where he found the first one.”

“In another strong box?”

Zol sipped his water. His tongue was still thick. “Also made in Sheffield.”

“So at one point, the same guy had possession of both loons.”

“Looks like it.”

“And chose to separate them. What does your mum want you to do with this second one?”

“Told me not to tell Dad I had her. He's terrified of another land claim and doesn't want anyone to know we've got it.” He shrugged, then cracked his knuckles. “But otherwise, she told me to use my judgment.”

“That's a bit heavy. Especially with the coppers looking for its mate as part of a potential terrorist attack and homicide investigation.”

He was stuck in it deep. Up to his neck in the crap. If he presented the loon to the curator of the First Peoples Gallery at the
ROM
, the Assembly of First Nations would go crazy. They'd rail against yet another instance of a White guy, and a government agency, misappropriating their aboriginal heritage. Any goodwill between his office at Simcoe's health unit and his flock on Grand Basin Reserve would fly out the window barely two weeks into his new job as their medical officer of health. “If I hand the loon over the
ROM
, no one on Grand Basin will ever speak to me again. And if I hand it over to the cops, they'll accuse me of theft and being an accessory to murder. I can't see them believing I came by it honestly.”

She answered without hesitation. “You do have a point. Police detectives are not in the business of crediting the innocence of coincidence. Your possession of this loon, at this moment, no matter what its eye colour, will be seen as highly suspicious.”

“So, what do I do?”

“Give
me
the loon and keep quiet. I have a safety deposit box in the name of a numbered company. Absolutely no link to you. Even with a search warrant the police will never find it. And nobody else will, either, for that matter.”

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.”