by Robin Lamont
“He said that he’d seen you and Tim together,” reported Lucas haltingly, “and that he knew what you looked like after sex.”
She let the coarseness of Gordon’s comment rip into her as she knew it had likely ripped into Lucas. Damn Gordon! What was his fucking problem?
“What are you going to do?” Lucas asked.
“I’m going to find Tim,” she replied. “And I’m going to finish what he was supposed to do.”
“Let it go, Jude.”
“I can’t. Not now.”
Suddenly, the whirring of the air conditioner stopped and there was a dead silence around her. She heard Lucas’s pained sigh before he said, “Gordon wants you back. And I think you should come back, too.”
“Are you aware that the Amaethon protocol is over in a few days and all the animals will be euthanized?” she asked angrily. “I am not going to let their deaths be for nothing. It’s bad enough animals get tested on, but I refuse to let yet another laboratory get away with abusing them in the process.”
“Don’t do this.”
“You know what? You can both go to hell.”
Immediately, she regretted lashing out at him. But it felt like even her most trusted colleagues were leaving her, giving up on her. And she couldn’t admit even to Lucas that her emotional life was falling apart, her body was falling apart. All she had left was what she did – being a fighter for animals, for the voiceless beings that were trod on, abused, and slaughtered every minute of every day. This was the life she bought into and the game in which she’d given so much skin. She was flayed to the core and there was no turning back now.
She took a breath to try to explain, but he’d already hung up and there was a new incoming call. She didn’t immediately recognize the number and answered with a curt, “What?”
“Jude?” came a woman’s voice, calm and low. “This is Ruth Harris. I’m sorry I couldn’t take your call before. I was with a patient. Do you have a moment now?”
* * *
Lonnie McGrath was having a shit day. It started before he’d even gotten out of bed when his mom stormed into his room and got on his case about not taking the garbage out the night before. Then it was the red D on his last history test and Mr. Bronstein’s holier-than-thou, “I think you can do better, Lonnie.” Fuck that, he never wanted to take AP History in the first place. And now he had the after-school job at the Buck farm when all his friends were going to mess around at the miniature golf place that just opened.
“You’re late,” said Kurt when Lonnie pulled up to the barn.
“Sorry Mr. Buck, I had to stay after school,” he replied. He went over to the back of the pickup and began helping the farmer load empty milk crates.
“Hop up and I’ll hand ’em to you,” said Kurt. “How come?”
“How come what?”
“You had to stay after. You in trouble?”
“No, I just didn’t do so well on a history test.”
Buck grunted as he hoisted a 10-gallon bucket filled with a dark, syrupy liquid. “You’re a smart guy. You can probably do better.”
“Yeah, probably, Mr. Buck.” Lonnie took the bucket and set it down at the front of the flatbed, mouthing under his breath, “And probably fuck you, too, Mr. Buck.”
When they’d finished loading the crates, the farmer drove to the apple orchard with Lonnie riding in the flatbed. After they’d parked, Buck handed the teen his tools and instructed him on replacing the homemade traps for the codling moth pest. On each apple tree hung a can holding a few inches of the molasses-based liquid. The moths flew into the bait and died before they could lay their eggs that would, in turn, become larvae that infected the apples. Lonnie’s job was to pour out the old goopy stuff into an empty pail and replace it with fresh slop from the 10-gallon container.
“Got it,” he told the farmer, demonstrating far more enthusiasm than he felt with a hearty thumbs-up.
When Buck left, Lonnie tied a bandana around his forehead and got to work. Even shoveling compost wasn’t as sickening as this job. Just the sight of the brown liquidy shit filled with dead bugs made him want to heave. The trick was not to get any on his hands or clothing.
He had gone about halfway down the first row when he heard the ca-ca-cah of crows over his head. There were two of them sitting atop the young apple tree he was working on. The branches were bent low with their weight.
“Scram!” Lonnie shouted. He didn’t know if crows ate apples, but they probably did or else why put scarecrows all over? The big black birds continued their squawking.
Lonnie turned back to his task, figuring that if he put a little extra bait in each trap, he could get through the big bucket a lot sooner. Just then something struck his head and there was a wild flutter of feathers against his face. He dropped the bait bucket and flailed his arms to fend off what he believed was an assault by one of the crows. The bird fell to the ground.
“What the fuck!” exclaimed Lonnie as he leapt back. He peered at the ground and saw the crow twitching in the grass. One wing trembled and then the bird lay still. As he waited to see if it moved, the second crow fell from the tree and landed with a thud about ten feet from the first. This one didn’t move a muscle. A fly insolently lit on the crow’s head, and another joined him.
Lonnie stood rooted, trying to process what had just happened. Since when did two birds fall out of a tree like that? The teenager scanned the sky above to see if there were any more friggin’ crows that might drop on his head. When he felt safe, he wiped a hand across his forehead, smearing the codling moth bait across his face. Then he looked down and saw that he’d spilled the bucket’s revolting contents all over his pants. He promptly lost the bologna and cheese sandwich he’d had for lunch.
CHAPTER 15
Trooper Willison stood on the side of the road overlooking a shallow ravine. He turned his head when he heard Haydon’s patrol car pull in behind his. “Hey, Sarge,” he called out affably. In his mid-twenties, Willison had been on the force for two years and was in love with his job. He’d grown up in Half Moon and knew everyone in town, most of whom still saw him as Janice and Bud Willison’s kid. Someday, they’d know him only as Senior Sergeant Willison – the officer that no one dared to mess with.
“Thanks for the heads up, Seth,” replied Haydon.
“Sure thing. I knew you initiated a BOLO on this as a possible missing person, so I told dispatch to get hold of you.” He pointed down to the fragments of silver and glass that glinted through the tall shrubbery. “That’s the car all right. The VIN traces back to Timothy Mains, with a New York address. No one inside, of course, but it looks like the driver was hurt.”
“Okay,” said Haydon grimly.
First, he scanned up and down Loop Turnpike, inexplicably named since it was just a forgotten country road. Its four-mile stretch was hemmed in by forest on either side, and hardly anyone used it after the Interstate was built. The cracked asphalt needed attention as did the single faded yellow stripe down the middle.
The two officers didn’t have to remind each other not to scramble down the embankment where the car had gone over, thereby disturbing evidence of the accident scene. They walked several yards ahead of the vehicle where Willison had initially tackled the slope. As Haydon descended, he took in more details. There was no guardrail despite the drop off; it wasn’t a state road and probably the town had no money to install one. Highway maintenance hadn’t been around for ages to clear the embankment where weeds and saplings now filled the space. A rough swath of the thicket was disturbed where the car went over, but not enough for passing motorists to have noticed.
“What tipped you?” asked Haydon, picking his way through the thorny brush.
“The power company was up this way working on a utility pole. Must have seen it from the bucket,” Willison answered over his shoulder. “I’ve been by here a half dozen ti
mes, never caught my eye.”
They stepped the last few feet down to a dry stream bed where a dirty silver sedan had come to rest, tilted on its side. The front end was partially crumpled against a sturdy maple growing out of the ditch. The windshield was cracked, but the roof didn’t appear damaged.
“Come look at this,” said the junior trooper. He led Haydon to the driver’s side window and shined his flashlight inside.
The now deflated airbags, including the steering wheel, side, and seat belt bags, had done what they were supposed to. Haydon concluded that the accident was most likely survivable. Yet, there was a significant amount of dried blood on the driver’s bag.
“Head injury, you think?” asked Willison.
Reflexively, Haydon removed a pair of latex gloves from his pocket and put them on before prying open the driver’s side door. He asked for the flashlight and shone it around the interior of the car, looking for a hard or sharp object that the driver might have struck to cause such an injury. Finally, he backed out.
“I don’t see anything,” he said. “If he was wearing the belt, the bags would’ve stopped him from hitting the windshield. If he wasn’t wearing it, he probably would have gone right through.” Haydon pointed to a section of bent frame around the windshield. “Pressure on the frame broke the glass, not anything hitting it from the inside.”
“Unless the steering wheel bag didn’t fully inflate,” suggested Willison.
Haydon remembered the cluster of bloodied tissues Jude had pointed out in Tim’s hotel room and offered, “Or maybe he was bleeding before the accident.”
“Could explain why he went off the road.”
“Could.”
“Whatever happened, it looks like he was able to walk away,” said Willison.
As he moved around the perimeter, Haydon noted, “Someone took the plates off.” He continued to scan for footprints or broken brush that would tell him how Tim had gotten out of the car and where he might have gone. Most likely he would have tried to get up to the road for help. But if he’d been injured in some manner, he could easily have been disoriented. He might have wandered into the woods, not knowing in what direction he was stumbling.
Reading the sergeant’s mind, Willison tailed after him. “He probably would have tried to climb back up.”
“And no one saw him?” questioned Haydon. “And if he was hurt, wouldn’t he try to flag someone down, get help?”
“Not many folks come this way. Maybe he’d been drinking and was afraid someone would call the cops.”
Haydon murmured an encouraging response but was thinking along different lines. “What kind of search did you do in the car?” he asked.
“Just a prelim to make sure no one was inside and no bodies in the trunk. With the plates gone, at first, I thought maybe it was stolen and got dumped here. But then I saw the blood. And when I ran the VIN, it came back to this guy Mains. I didn’t know why you flagged it, but just in case the car had been used in a crime, I thought ….”
“You did right, Seth,” Haydon assured him. “Let’s take a closer look. Use gloves and be careful of needles.” Given what Jude had told him about Tim using heroin, he didn’t want either of them getting stuck with a semi-hidden hypodermic.
Willison’s eyes widened. “Junkie?”
“I don’t know. Just in case.”
Haydon took the trunk, which was empty but for a plastic ice scraper. He lifted the loose carpeting and removed the spare tire. Nothing. Then he turned his attention to the exterior. Willison, meanwhile, examined the front and back seats. It didn’t add up. By all accounts, Mains had cleared out of his hotel room in a hurry. But he hadn’t left his things there. So where was his suitcase? A knapsack? Where was all the stuff like a change of shoes or an umbrella that guys leave in their cars? Haydon couldn’t easily visualize Mains, bleeding from a head wound, grabbing his suitcase before he took off.
“Glove compartment’s empty, Sarge,” Willison called out. “Somebody stripped this baby. You sure no one reported it stolen? No plates, no registration … sure looks like it was dumped.”
He found Haydon squatting by the front wheel on the driver’s side examining a gouge that tailed off into a scrape running lengthways to the door.
“Yeah, I saw that,” said Willison. “He’s got a couple of dings in the rear bumper, too. Guess he wasn’t winning any safe driver awards.”
“How long do you think the car has been here?” asked Haydon, running his finger along the wound.
“A few days, maybe a week. Not much longer or we’d see debris from the trees.”
“Un hunh,” Haydon concurred. “This damage hasn’t been here long, though. Not like the dings in the back.”
“He must’a hit something on his way down, a rock, maybe.”
Haydon examined his finger which had come away with tiny particles. “Not unless it was a rock painted blue.” He stood up and instructed, “Put something over this and tape it down. Then call a tow for impound.”
He squinted into the thick coppice of northern hardwoods and calculated that they bordered the Roxbury State Forest. No one would knowingly drift off in that direction, would they? Because if they did, they’d walk a long, long way over difficult terrain before finding help.
* * *
“They might have missed something,” said Jude.
“It’s certainly possible,” came Dr. Harris’s reassuring voice. “But I’ve known Dr. Amin from our Columbia-Presbyterian days in New York. He’s about the best there is, and my understanding is that his testing was pretty extensive.”
“Doctors make mistakes.”
“They do.”
Holding the phone to her ear, Jude rolled her shoulders to ease the tension that ran up her spine and into the back of her neck and jaw.
“Let me ask you something, Jude,” Dr. Harris continued. “Since you reached out to me, do you think that what you’re experiencing may not solely have a physical explanation?”
“How would I know?”
“What’s your sense of it?”
“If it’s not physical, what could it be?”
“First of all,” said Dr. Harris, ignoring Jude’s testy tone, “losing your sight for periods of time is certainly a physical symptom, and it must be very frightening. But just as our bodies respond to disease or injury, they can also respond in similar ways to intense stress or trauma.”
Jude cleared her throat, which she was surprised to find had closed up with emotion. “Like what?” she asked.
“Like events in your past that sensitized you to the suffering of others. Past events and relationships also can have an imprint on the coping strategies you’ve developed for what I imagine must be a stressful job.”
“I have that covered really,” said Jude, going for casual breeziness. “I go for runs with my dog which relieve a lot of tension.”
“How about friends and family?”
Jude flashed on her conversation with Lucas minutes earlier. Oh yeah, my coping strategy is to blow off my friends, sabotage relationships that might go anywhere … and family? I don’t need one, I don’t want one. But she asked instead, “You’ve seen this kind of thing before?”
“A few times. It can take various forms, unexplained pain or paralysis, and one patient I had whose vision failed completely. It’s called conversion disorder and it’s more common than you would imagine.”
Feeling slightly nauseous, Jude wandered over to the hotel window and cracked it wider for some fresh air. “Did, uh, your patient’s vision return?” she asked.
“It did.”
“And you think that’s what this is?”
“I don’t know. But given that your physical tests have come back negative, I think it’s worth exploring.”
“Maybe Dr. Amin told you, but I investigate animal abuse. And, sure, I see things done t
o animals that are incredibly disturbing. But it can’t be that, because I’ve been doing this job for years and the eyesight thing has only just been in the last few months. Besides,” she hastily continued, “everyone I work with comes face-to-face with animal suffering as much as I do, and they’re not going blind.”
“Dr. Amin did tell me a little. But there may be other factors that come into play that are unique to you. We can talk about it. Would you like to make an appointment?”
“I can’t right now, I’m in Vermont. And I have to stay until this whole business with my investigator is sorted out.”
“I think it would be helpful if we could meet as soon as possible.”
Pushed off balance by her sense of urgency, Jude shot back, “Sure, so I’ll call and make an appointment when I get back to D.C.”
There was a pause at the other end of the line, but then Dr. Harris said reassuringly, “Okay, Jude. In the meantime, you should give some thought to whether or not you should be driving or doing anything that might result in harm if you suddenly had an episode. Does that make sense?”
In the parking lot, a state police car rolled in, its tires crunching on the gravel. A fresh-faced, young trooper emerged from the car and looked up toward her room on the second floor. Jude’s limbs suddenly felt heavy and rigid. “I’ll … I’ll call you,” she said, breaking the connection.
Clutching the phone against her stomach, she started toward the door, bracing for another in-person visit by the cops. But with the first step, her knees buckled and not sure she could make it all the way, Jude collapsed on the bed. There she sat, listening to the trooper’s footsteps on the wooden staircase. Waiting for the bad news.
* * *
But it wasn’t that they’d found Tim’s body. The officer, a kid really, had come to tell her they’d found Tim’s car and towed it to the police pound. He introduced himself as Trooper Willison and said that Sergeant Haydon had asked if she would come down and make a visual identification.
Haydon met them at the state police impound lot which was surrounded by a chain link fence topped with scrolled barbed wire. He nodded but said little as he led her onto the dusty property where a few dozen cars were randomly parked. They ranged from junk heaps to brand new luxury models. At the end sat Tim’s silver-gray Toyota which had accumulated even more miles than Jude’s tired station wagon.