Deadly by Julie Chibbaro

came calling for her again. That gave us both a lesson—don’t talk about ideas with boys. Maybe Anushka will have another chance—just yesterday, she wrote of being sweet on a feller named Randall. She met him on the Columbus Day hayride, but she didn’t say whether he knew of her feelings or if she’s still a secret admirer. She’s a girl of mystery when it comes to love. I wrote back, asking what exactly he looks like, and if she’s spoken to him in any meaningful manner. I asked her to write the whole love story out for me, dialogue and all. I told her to make it good, as I’d commit her lines to memory, and use them for my own next time a boy tries to speak to me.
    Mr. Soper and I took the results of our sample tests to his office to study them. As he rifled through the pages, I did wonder aloud what the world might look like through a microscope, but Mr. Soper did not take my hint. Instead he handed over a section of the laboratory results for me to type out, stained sheets of tables and charts with breakdowns of the samples, all poorly handwritten, with columns and diagrams that I found difficult to understand. Mr. Sopershowed me which rows to follow. “We are looking for a positive identification,” he said, “something that tells us that the typhoid disease might live in any of the foodstuffs or organic matter we collected.”
    I examined each page he gave me as I typed it. I had expected at least one source to show positive for the disease, yet they all, every single one, came out clean. When I told him, Mr. Soper double-checked, frustration wrinkling his brow. The information seemed to move him to work harder, to search deeper for an answer to the question before us. We must go back, he says, and ask more pointedly about the family’s agenda, what they did, who they saw, how the disease might have traveled into their home.
    I’m coming to dislike these drives to Long Island—not the trip, but the way the children run to the door, their mouths expectant and wide, the worried peak of Mrs. Thompson’s brow when we return once again having uncovered nothing. It’s another day they must remain in the house, away from their city home, and school, and friends.
    Strange where clues can come from. After shopping for Mrs. Zanberger one evening (she’s now home from the hospital, and acting the perfect invalid), I sat with her in her kitchen, peeling a five-pound sack of potatoes for her asher hands hurt too much for the work. In the course of the labor, she asked me about my job at the department, and I told her of the case. She said that her cousin got the typhoid once from a bushel of clams he fished out of Sheepshead Bay. Nearly the whole neighborhood had fallen ill with the disease from those clams, she said. I took this report to Mr. Soper, and the information illuminated his eyes, and he shuffled through our notes, saying that bottom-feeding shellfish
was
a common cause of the illness, and that next week we would thoroughly investigate that angle. Warmth gushed through me, pride, I guess, at finally having something to offer.

    Lately I seem to think about my father and brother more and more. Not actual thoughts, but pictures. I see them inthe boys and men at the office. What Benny might have become. What Papa might look like now. Around the time my father decided to go to Cuba to fight against Spain, I felt a darkness about him, as if a shadow had engulfed him and wouldn’t let him go. I think I was confused and so angry at him for signing up to leave us, I couldn’t speak, not enough to pierce his darkness. I remember thinking,
What about us?
Over the years, I’ve invented reasons for his leaving us: Grandfather fought in the Civil War, and maybe that’s why my father wanted to fight too. Maybe it was a way for him to feel he could win, after death won the fight with Benny.
    Or maybe I will never understand.
    Even as I think of my