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grandeur, the place looked drab in grimy, leafless March. It would look better in May when its lawns and trees turned green.
    An anxious face peered through a mullioned upper window and quickly disappeared. A wild-haired soul in a pale nightgown rapped her fist at another window and called inaudibly through the triple-pane glass.
    “Does your grandfather like living there?”
    Art felt like a grandfather, so Zol didn’t correct her. “He appreciates the company and the amenities, I think. A single room with his own bath and toilet. Says he’s glad the Lodge is a small operation that doesn’t feel like an institution.”
    Thirty active seniors lived in the original part of the building, known as the Belvedere Wing. It was a shame the renovators had removed the grand staircase, which Zol had seen in old photographs, to make space for an enlarged dining room and several more bedrooms.
    “The common sitting room is just the right size,” Natasha said. “Cozy but not cramped. And I love its chintz curtains.”
    Zol never noticed curtains and had yet to figure out exactly what chintz was. “Don’t think there’s any chintz in the Mountain Wing infirmary. According to Art and Earl, it’s the dark empire on the far side of the moon. I’ve never had occasion to go in there.”
    Natasha pointed to the second floor of the addition and made a face. “You haven’t missed much. Bare walls, ugly blinds on the windows. Eight patients, in four double rooms. All in various stages of dementia, poor things.”
    Zol thought of his parents, currently on a month-long golfing holiday in Florida. They lived thirty minutes west of Hamilton, off Highway 403. His dad was pushing seventy but still active on the farm and secretary of the Ginseng Growers Association of Brant County. He’d switched from growing tobacco to harvesting ginseng seven years ago, soon after Zol started his public-health training. Zol couldn’t imagine his mother, so fastidious about her appearance, as anything less than a commanding presence in her own home. She was a super cook and a whiz at crosswords and Sudoku.
    He had no warm and fuzzy illusions about nursing homes and retirement residences, no matter how many luxuries they purported to offer. He knew they were businesses, first and foremost. And visited by battalions who packed the parking lots: doctors, nurses, chaplains, chiropractors, chiropodists, physios, pharmacists, herbalists, hairdressers, and the delivery guys who lugged in everything from flowers to oxygen tanks. Today, only three vehicles sat in the lot: a blue Dodge van, a grey Chevy Malibu, and Phyllis Wedderspoon’s long, snow-white ’72 Lincoln.
    The place was owned by someone offshore, a Taiwanese, Zol had heard. The Oliveiras were resident managers with their own apartment on the ground floor. Gus, who used to be in construction, did the maintenance. Gloria, who had once been a bookkeeper and office manager, was clearly in charge.
    Zol read the closed-to-visitors notice on the front door as he held it open for Natasha. He’d ordered the Lodge quarantined the moment she’d told him about yesterday’s deaths. Of course, no one used the word
quarantine
these days — too frightening for the sensibilities of the modern public, too much like the nineteenth century and its epidemics of smallpox and typhus. The politically correct term was
closed to visitors
, with instructions to take enquiries to the front desk. The elusive pathogen had become a vicious adversary, its power escalating. The damn thing had killed five people in the past two weeks. Zol found it impossible not to think of the Q-word. He pictured the Prime Minister’s assistant at his desk beneath the Peace Tower, the name
Zol Szabo
scrawled on his to-do list.
    Inside the lobby, Zol and Natasha pumped hand sanitizer onto their palms. Zol usually made a show of rubbing a double shot of the pungent antiseptic over every centimetre of his hands. But there was no audience to