Tampered , livre ebook

Ecw Press - Ross Pennie

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303 pages

English

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A Dr.Zol Szabo Medical Mystery ROSS PENNIE by the author ofTainted A Dr.Zol Szabo Medical Mystery RO S SP E N N I E ECW Press Copyright © Ross Pennie,2011 Published by ECW Press,2120Queen Street East, Suite200, Toronto, Ontario, Canadam4e 1e2 416.694.3348/ info@ecwpress.com All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form by any process — electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise — without the prior written permission of the copyright owners and ECW Press. The scanning, uploading, and distribution of this book via the Internet or via any other means without the permission of the publisher is illegal and punishable by law. Please purchase only authorized electronic editions, and do not participate in or encourage electronic piracy of copyrighted materials.Your support of the author’s rights is appreciated. library and archives canada cataloguing in publication Pennie, Ross A Tampered : a Dr. Zol Szabo medical mystery / Ross Pennie. isbn also issued as: 9 (pBK); 978-1-55490-959-9 (epub) i.Title. ps8631.e565t35 2011c813’.6 c2010-906697-9 Cover images: piano © Ryan Lane; background © Roberto A. Sanchez (iStockPhoto.com) Cover and text design:Tania Craan Typesetting: Mary Bowness This book is a work of fiction.

Informations

Publié par	Ecw Press
Date de parution	01 mai 2011
Nombre de lectures	0
EAN13	9781554909360
Langue	English
Poids de l'ouvrage	1 Mo

Informations légales : prix de location à la page 0,0600€. Cette information est donnée uniquement à titre indicatif conformément à la législation en vigueur.

Extrait

A Dr. Zol Szabo Medical Mystery ROSS PENNIE by the author ofTainted

A Dr. Zol Szabo Medical Mystery

RO S S P E N N I E

ECW Press

Published by ECW Press,2120Queen Street East, Suite200, Toronto, Ontario, Canadam4e 1e2 416.694.3348/ info@ecwpress.com

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form by any process — electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise— without the prior written permission of the copyrightowners and ECW Press. The scanning, uploading, and distribution of this book via the Internet or via any other means without the permission of the publisher is illegal and punishable by law. Please purchase only authorized electronic editions, and do not participate in or encourage electronic piracy of copyrighted materials.Your support of the author’s rights is appreciated.

library and archives canada cataloguing in publication

Pennie, Ross A Tampered : a Dr. Zol Szabo medical mystery / Ross Pennie.

isbn978-1-55490-936-0 also issued as: 978-1-55022-936-3(pbk); 978-1-55490-959-9 (epub)

i.Title.

ps8631.e565t35 2011 c813’.6 c2010-906697-9

Cover images: piano © Ryan Lane; background © Roberto A. Sanchez (iStockPhoto.com) Cover and text design: Tania Craan Typesetting: Mary Bowness

This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

This book is set in Bembo and Akzidenz

The publication ofTamperedhas been generously supported by the Canada Council for the Arts, which last year invested$20.1million in writing and publishing throughout Canada, by the Ontario Arts Council, by the Government of Ontario through Ontario Book Publishing Tax Credit, by the OMDC Book Fund, an initiative of the Ontario Media Development Corporation, and by the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund.

This story arose from my affection for two people now well past eighty: Luise Denman, my godmother, and Reg Blundell, a longtime friend. Full of sparkle, Luise quotes Homer and Virgil, is still taking university courses, and is a whiz on the World Wide Web. Reg Blundell is a gentle-man of the highest order. He is an accomplished artist who fought in the Second World War, helped build the telephone industry, and plays the piano with unabashed joy. I dedicate this book to all those who see the wonder in long lives well lived. Although I wrote most of this book alone in the pre-dawn darkness when everyone else was still asleep, I had lots of help from the people I love and respect. Jack David at ECW Press continued his trust and mentorship. Peter Harcourt, Larry Kramer, Bob Nosal, Ken Stead, and Mark Walma critiqued my early drafts. Bev Haun came up with the title. Edna Barker guided me to the finish line with her unerring edito-rial insights. And every day Lorna was at my side, sharing the journey and making life worth living.

C H A P T E R

Zol Szabo peered across the sea of silvery heads bobbing in the buffet line at Camelot Lodge. Usually, he looked forward to these monthly Sunday brunches with Art Greenwood, his ex-wife’s granddad.Art, the only member of Francine’s family who hadn’t smoked himself into an early grave, sparkled with wisdom and wit in defiance of his age and physical restrictions. Best of all,Art and his tablemates never let political correctness get in the way of a candid opinion or a good story. But today, Zol saw only clinical diagnoses smouldering through the retirement residence: the wobbly knees of rheumatoid arthritis, the stooped backs of osteoporosis, the trembling hands of Parkinson’s, the vacant eyes of macular degeneration. Zol forced another smile at Art, who was taking his place at the piano in the sitting room on the other side of the archway. Zol hoped Art was well enough to play. He’d looked pale and drawn when he’d greeted Zol a few minutes ago and confessed he’d been hit by another bout of fever and the runs earlier in the week.That made it his third bout in the past couple of months. And he wasn’t the only one. Dozens of others had been hit with the same bug. Art denied any headache, thank goodness. When headache compounded the fever and diarrhea, the result was lethal. In the past month alone, two

R O S S P E N N I E

of the converted mansion’s thirty-eight residents had died within hours of a blinding headache compounding their explosive stools. Art warmed up with a few bars of “Bicycle Built For Two.” His chording was tentative, not as sharp as usual. He switched to an improvised version of Beethoven’s “Moonlight Sonata.” Art played everything by ear. He couldn’t read a note, but if he heard some-thing once, he could play it forever. Despite the advancing muscle disease that had forced him into an electric scooter, he still glim-mered with the genius that had made him an engineering whiz-kid in the telephone industry fifty years ago. The understated elegance of the dining room’s caramel walls and burgundy accents reminded Zol of a café in one of Hamilton’s nicer hotels, except the bucolic vista through Camelot’s windows was con-siderably more handsome than any view of the city’s down-at-the-heels central core. Here on an elegant cul-de-sac a few blocks from downtown, stately homes abutted the woodlands at the foot of the Niagara Escarpment. Known locally as the Mountain, the imposing ribbon of limestone and old-growth forest snaked through the city like a giant’s doorstep, its flora and fauna protected by the United Nations as a World Biosphere Reserve. Zol thought of his own ren-ovated house a couple of kilometres above as the seagulls flew, perched on a generous treed lot on the Escarpment’s edge. He was thankful once again for the two million in lottery winnings that had sent him to medical school and bought him such a gorgeous piece of real estate with its jetliner view. He could cope with Hamilton’s overgenerous share of shysters and gangsters if, at the end of the day, he could tuck Max safely in bed, then sip a Glenfarclas while watch-ing Lake Ontario shimmer in the ever-changing light. Camelot’s dining tables boasted smooth white linens, shiny cut-lery, and imitation crystal that sparkled as brightly as the stuff his mother reserved for special occasions. Today’s spread of poached salmon, eggs, bacon, French toast, salads, and gooey desserts looked a treat.As a former professional chef himself, Zol respected the care and effort that went into every dish. But as a public-health doctor, the table seemed to him less a chef ’s delight than a minefield.

T A M P E R E D

Something nasty and undetectable — a microbe or a toxin — was poisoning the food. But intermittently. Not every dish and not every meal. As the Associate Medical Officer of Health for Hamilton-Lakeshore, second-in-command at the region’s health unit, Zol’s job was to quash epidemics, not wallow in them during Sunday brunch.Twice he’d sent his inspectors into Camelot.They’d examined every centimetre of the place with a magnifying glass. They’d collected scores of samples from the kitchen and dozens of specimens from afflicted residents. But they’d come up empty.The kitchen met all the health codes, and the laboratory detected no disease-causing pathogens. Zol’s friend and medical-school classmate, Dr. Hamish Wakefield, a savant in the field of infectious diseases, had raised the possibility of epidemic Norovirus. But even Hamish, an assistant professor at the city’s Caledonian University Medical Centre, was stumped; he conceded there was no indication that anything as simple as the cruise-ship virus was the culprit here. Zol helped the wait staff — invariably hesitant, awkward, and struggling with their English — park the walkers in a double row against the far wall of the dining room. He escorted the frailest of the gauzy-white residents to their seats, then joined the slow-moving buffet queue. He knew he’d soon be hunting down unsalted butter for one person and cholesterol-free scrambled eggs for another. He shrugged off the risk to his intestines and half-filled his plate with breakfast fare he hoped would be sterile: a rubbery fried egg, three crispy rashers of bacon, and a piece of charred toast. Bypassing the devilled eggs, sliced tomatoes, and potato salad, he took his place at Art’s table where Phyllis and Betty were already seated. Despite being past eighty-five, slow to move, and somewhat hard of hearing, Betty McKenzie and Phyllis Wedderspoon stayed fully abreast of the news.These days they’d be bursting with opinions on the latest Parliament Hill shenanigans and lamenting the deceptions that had triggered the stock-market crash now threatening their pensions. Betty beamed at Zol, then peered over his shoulder. “Where’s that handsome little man of yours, Zol?”