Deadly by Julie Chibbaro Read Free Book Online Page A

described how she’d begun feeling sick on a Friday night at eleven p.m. in mid-September (the twelfth, same day as her daughter Amy), after her dinner guests—the McDonnell, Graff, and Chadwell couples (no children)—had departed. (Menu: Broiled sole with asparagus tips. Caviar, chocolate mousse. French bread, butter froma neighboring farm.) Mr. Soper asked her about the visitors, if any of them had fallen ill, or could have brought the disease into the house. She shook her head; her doctors had spoken to their acquaintances (the three couples, plus the Lyons family, Mr. Cerasano, and the neighbors, the Heightons, and their five boys). As far as they knew, her friends had neither brought nor contracted the typhoid.
    As she spoke, Mr. Soper made sure I wrote names, foods, times, dates. We will follow these like breadcrumbs through the forest, he says.
    Mrs. Thompson then showed us the dining room where most of the family’s meals took place, and after, she walked us through the house. I followed her and Mr. Soper through the bedrooms and bathrooms, feeling odd about being in this wealthy family’s home, their life so different from mine, their privacy completely revealed to us. I had to keep reminding myself that they had been struck by a terrible disease, and I was there to help find out why.
    In the afternoon, we talked briefly to the eldest son, Jimmy, a boy my age, blond like his mother, long-limbed, easy with himself. He had fully healed from the sickness, though I noted the prominence of his collarbones and the greenish tinge under his cheerful blue eyes. He had gone clammingin the bay with his brothers Ronnie and Billy all summer. They had played polo at their neighbor’s to the right, the Heightons. The three boys had come down with the illness on the same day (September 4). Mr. Soper asked him to remember when exactly it struck them, and the boy said that it was in the early morning (sometime before the mailman arrived at nine). Not a Friday like Mrs. Thompson; in fact, their illness came more than a week before Mrs. Thompson’s.
    We left the house after our interview with the boy. Mr. Thompson and Mr. Soper didn’t speak on the ride back. At the office, at the end of the day, Mr. Soper nodded to me and said, “There is a depth to this case we’re not yet reaching. We will return to Oyster Bay tomorrow. We have a good deal of work ahead of us.”
    All day, I felt as if things were going on somewhere above me, while I tried to climb high enough to see, to understand. Follow the food, Mr. Soper says, follow the movements of the family—but I feel like I don’t know what we’re looking for. I don’t even know how we’ll know when we’ve found it!

October 23, 1906
    T he typhoid that spread through the household ended its course by the beginning of this month. I understand now the nature of epidemiology, and Mr. Soper’s work: If we don’t find out how this fever started, it could resurface, and pass like a plague through water or food or some other means, into the neighborhood. That would be disastrous.
    We’ve gone back to the house each day this week, collecting evidence, building the information we have about this large household. With each visit, I learned more about their lives—Mr. Soper says we must especially focus on the foods they eat, an amount that seems enough to feed everyone on my street.
    We interviewed the two maids, the laundress, the gardener, and the butler, all of whom became ill on a Saturday(September 6), the same week as the boys. Mr. Soper asked each of them to recall what they ate in the last month, and I jotted everything in the folio. It’s a most difficult task trying to get eleven people to remember thirty days of eggs and bacon and grits, baked breads and muffins, cheese sandwiches and tomatoes and apples and plums, steaks and potatoes and salads and chops and spaghettis and sauces, desserts and snacks,