“Do you know what’s been going on here?” Liz asked, addressing herself to Brenda Elliot. “Teachers saw him in class with body tremors and sweat pouring down his body and nobody even sent him to the infirmary. He went to the infirmary on his own power with a strep throat bad enough to take over Taiwan, and they didn’t even do a throat culture.”
“Excuse me,” Dr. Copeland said, “some of the symptoms are unlikely to be the result of caffeine poisoning alone. Oh, they could be if the caffeine poisoning were as acute as it was last night, or close to, but if it had been, he’d have been hospitalized long ago. I’m thinking of the memory losses, and the body tremors, and the blackouts. We did test for Parkinson’s disease.”
“Jesus,” Mark said.
“And the tests came back negative,” Dr. Copeland went on. “You really don’t have anything medically wrong with you. I’d be interested in knowing, though, when those symptoms started: the tremors, the blackouts, those.”
Mark thought about it. “After Christmas,” he said finally. “Before then I was nervous all the time, and I couldn’t pay attention to anything, but that was about it. And it was that way all through Christmas, too—”
“Were you drinking a lot of caffeine over the Christmas break?” Dr. Copeland asked.
Mark looked sheepish. “Yeah, well, but not intentionally. I mean, I was drinking Mountain Dew, and I didn’t know it had caffeine in it until the vacation was nearly over, and I’d been drinking nearly a case a day.”
“What?” Liz said.
“Well, it was in the pantry,” Mark said.
“Go back to the symptoms,” Dr. Copeland said. “You say they started after Christmas.”
“Yeah, right, after Christmas break. First I was just sick a lot. I’d get stomach cramps something awful. Then I lost my appetite. I didn’t want to eat anything. I’d have coffee and put a ton of sugar in it and that would be it most of the day. Then about a week or so later it got really weird. I mean, really, really weird.” He looked at Gregor. “Like it was yesterday when I saw you,” he said. “Only worse, sometimes.”
“All right,” Dr. Copeland said, “then we have to assume that this started soon after you got back to school after Christmas break. We’re going to want to take a few locks of your hair for analysis.”
“My hair, why?”
“Because it will give us a fair idea of how long this has been going on and to what extent,” Dr. Copeland said. “Mind you, this isn’t my area of expertise. If you’d asked me the day before yesterday if I expected ever to encounter a case of this kind throughout my entire career, I’d have said no. But here we are.”
“Where are we?” Mark said.
“I still think we should wait until we have these results analyzed by experts,” Brenda Elliot said. “It’s ridiculous to get the boy worked up over what may very well be a false alarm.”
Dr. Copeland stepped in. “When you were brought in last night, after the danger was passed, Mr. Demarkian suggested to the doctor on duty that we should screen you for arsenic poisoning.”
“Arsenic? Somebody has been giving me arsenic?”
“Yes, that much we know for sure,” Dr. Copeland said. “The issue now is, how much arsenic and how long have they been giving it to you. The human body can take quite a bit of arsenic if it’s delivered in small doses over time, and it will develop a tolerance for it. The symptoms you’ve been reporting, and the ones Mr. Demarkian also reported on seeing you yesterday, do seem to indicate a slow and steady delivery of—”
“Somebody’s been poisoning me with arsenic,” Mark marveled. Then he brightened. “Cool!”
Liz stared at the ceiling. “Dr. Elliot’s of the opinion that you’re a child. I’m of the opinion that you’re impossible.”
“We do have to check,” Dr. Copeland said. “Arsenic can cause long-term problems, especially in the liver and kidneys. And you’re not going anywhere for the next couple of days. For one thing it’s going to take a while for that stuff to work its way out of your system. I know you feel better. You probably feel a lot better. If you’ve been getting doses of arsenic at least daily for weeks, then going a day or so without one is going to make you feel better. You’re not going to be better, though, for weeks and maybe not months. So that’s the first reason I don’t want you to go back to school.”
“What’s the second reason?” Mark asked.
“Well,” Dr. Copeland said, “arsenic is not a child’s toy. I suppose it’s possible that somebody gave it to you as a prank, but it’s not very likely, is it? Most people do know that arsenic is a poison, and that it can kill you. I think we have to assume either that somebody wanted you dead, or that they wanted you very sick and didn’t care if they risked making you dead as a consequence. We’re having more tests run on what we pumped out of you last night. I think we’re going to find a really big dose of arsenic, enough to have killed you in the ordinary course of events. You were very lucky.”