Ross Pennie - Tampered: A Dr. Zol Szabo Medical Mystery

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-wifes granddad. Art, the only member of Francines family who hadnt 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 Parkinsons, 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. Hed looked pale and drawn when hed greeted Zol a few minutes ago and confessed hed 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 wasnt 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 of the converted mansions 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 Beethovens Moonlight Sonata. Art played everything by ear. He couldnt read a note, but if he heard something once, he could play it forever. Despite the advancing muscle disease that had forced him into an electric scooter, he still glimmered with the genius that had made him an engineering whiz-kid in the telephone industry fifty years ago.

The understated elegance of the dining rooms caramel walls and burgundy accents reminded Zol of a caf in one of Hamiltons nicer hotels, except the bucolic vista through Camelots windows was considerably more handsome than any view of the citys 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 giants doorstep, its flora and fauna protected by the United Nations as a World Biosphere Reserve. Zol thought of his own renovated house a couple of kilometres above as the seagulls flew, perched on a generous treed lot on the Escarpments 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 Hamiltons 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 watching Lake Ontario shimmer in the ever-changing light.

Camelots dining tables boasted smooth white linens, shiny cutlery, and imitation crystal that sparkled as brightly as the stuff his mother reserved for special occasions. Todays 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 chefs delight than a minefield.

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 regions health unit, Zols job was to quash epidemics, not wallow in them during Sunday brunch. Twice hed sent his inspectors into Camelot. Theyd examined every centimetre of the place with a magnifying glass. Theyd collected scores of samples from the kitchen and dozens of specimens from afflicted residents. But theyd come up empty. The kitchen met all the health codes, and the laboratory detected no disease-causing pathogens.

Zols 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 citys 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.