After their mother’s death, and with money tight, it was “big brother” who insisted that Jake continue his education at Marshall University upstate, though it would be the first time in their lives the two brothers would be apart. To Jake, moving to the tristate area, with its three hundred and fifty thousand residents, meant he was truly going off to the big city.
Blake had promised to visit him, but something always seemed to come up.
Jake navigated the car around a corner, and his destination was in front of him. He drove through the wrought-iron gate and parked. At fifty acres, the Oakley Cemetery wasn’t overly large, but it might very well have been the most scenic spot in town, especially with its profusion of black oaks, live oaks, basswood, beeches, and its many varieties of maple trees. The cemetery grounds had been selected as a historic area by West Virginia’s State Historic Preservation Office.
The dead, however, were not immune from the slings and arrows of the living. The upkeep of the cemetery was no longer a community priority, and vandalism seemed to be ever more of a problem—addicts, everyone assumed, looking to rob the dead of whatever jewelry and keepsakes they’d been buried with. It didn’t help that the cemetery was also a popular spot for the young to party.
As Jake headed in the direction he’d walked in only a few weeks before, he whispered to the universe, “I got your back, brother.”
vvv Walking down the row toward Blake’s grave, his thoughts on the past, Jake saw a figure working in front of a headstone. He paused, not wanting to intrude, and as he did so, she got to her feet and began to move away.
“Anna?” he said, shocked by the familiar face.
She turned. “Jake?” she said, her voice unsure.
Anna Fowler looked much the same as she had in high school.
Her blue eyes sparkled, and her long chestnut-brown hair swayed against her shoulders. The two of them walked toward each other and then embraced in a big hug. As they disengaged, Anna’s gardening basket hooked on Jake’s shirt.
“Don’t move,” she said. “I don’t want to tear your shirt.” With careful fingers—did Jake imagine it or were her fingers trembling?—she disentangled the shirt from her basket. “Sorry about that,” she said.
“You could always hook ’em without even trying,” said Jake. He hoped his smile said he was kidding—sort of.
“Listen to you,” said Anna. “It’s so good to see you. How is it that we both live in the same town and we never run into one another?”
She seemed to be struggling to speak and smile at the same time; he could see the sweat trickling down from her forehead, though the day wasn’t very hot.
“I’ve been gone,” he said. “For a while, actually. And now that I’m back, all I plan to do is work.”
“Then nothing has changed,” Anna said. “I knew I never had a chance to be valedictorian with you in the mix.”
“That’s not how I remember it,” Jake said, grinning. “I recall you were always matching me grade for grade.”
“Blake thought we were both crazy to study like we did.” A cloud passed over her face; then she said, “My kryptonite was Algebra II. You deserved to be valedictorian.”
“I didn’t have your social demands,” Jake said with a wink. “I was more the nerd while you were doing cheerleading and student council. You even played volleyball, if I remember correctly. Not to mention how you were always working at Fowler’s.”
She laughed. “Don’t remind me about my misspent youth. See where it got me? Still right here. On the other hand, I hear you’re a lawyer.”
Jake nodded. “Hard to believe, right?”
Anna shook her head. “It’s not hard to believe at all. I’m really proud of you, Jake. And even though Blake and I didn’t keep in touch much after high school, I know he would be, too.”
Jake tried to deflect her praise. He didn’t want to feel like a fraud. “It’s not as glamorous as it sounds,” he said. “I’d probably be making more flipping burgers.”
“I don’t believe that.”
“Sadly,” he said, “it’s true. But that’s partly because of my own stubbornness. I’m about to start working on this long-shot case. I hate to think I’m tilting at windmills, but I probably am. You can call me Don Quixote.”
“It sounds like you’re doing something courageous, Don,” she said.
That got a smile out of him, along with more head shaking. “I wish I was that noble,” he said, “but the reason I’m pursuing this case is because of Blake’s death.”
Anna’s voice was unsteady. “I am so sorry about that,” she said.
Jake nodded. “His death really threw me for a loop. I never saw it coming, so it was a real shock.”
She didn’t speak for a moment, and he could see that she was blinking away tears. He hadn’t meant to make her sad.
“What about you?” he asked. “I heard you went off to college but then came back.”
“A dream deferred,” said Anna, nodding. “My mom got cancer, and I came home to help her fight it. Unfortunately, it was a fight we lost. And right after her death, Daddy had his stroke. I’ve sort of been a recluse myself since Momma died. And for a while there, Daddy needed round-the-clock care. Luckily, he’s better now. That’s allowed me to go out and work a part-time job.”
“Doing what?” asked Jake.
“I’ve been modeling.”
“That doesn’t surprise me,” he said, “as pretty as you are. What kind of modeling?”
“I’ve been an art model for Clint Smith for a while now,” she said. “Oakley’s native son made good.”
Jake nodded. In high school he’d had a crush on Anna, but then again, just about every male in his class had. Back then, he’d thought Anna was out of his league. She was classy, always doing and saying the right thing. Whenever he found himself in her presence, he had the hardest time uttering a complete sentence. In his daydreams he wasn’t tongue-tied; in them, he dared to ask her out. But that never happened. Besides, she’d always been arm candy for Blake. The two of them had looked great together. In fact, the school had voted them homecoming king and queen. They had dated a few times before mutually agreeing they were better off as friends. Jake wondered if Blake had sensed how he felt about Anna, and backed off to give him a chance. He guessed he would never know.
“This morning I made some floral bouquets to put on gravesites,” Anna said, gesturing to her basket. “I made one for Blake’s stone, assuming that’s okay with you?”
“Okay? At this very moment, Blake is strutting around the clouds, saying, ‘The prettiest woman in all of West Virginia is leaving me flowers.’ And loud enough for me to hear, he’s saying, ‘What do you think of that, little brother?’”
“You were the younger twin?” She laughed. “I don’t think I ever knew that.”
“By only twenty minutes,” said Jake. “But he loved lording that over me.”
Anna’s hands rose to her face, and a frown creased her expression.
“Are you all right?” he asked.
“I’m afraid I’m not feeling well,” she said. “If you don’t mind, I’ll give you Blake’s bouquet.”
As Anna passed him the flowers, Jake couldn’t help but notice her shaking hands. Pale red blotches had formed on her fair skin.
“I better walk you to your car,” he said.
“That’s not necessary,” Anna said, her voice sharp. Then she softened it. “I’ll feel better after a warm bath and a little rest.”
She smiled for him and began walking away.
“It was great seeing you,” Jake called after her.
Anna paused in her escape, waved to him, and said, “It really was. Don’t give up on your dreams, Jake. Or should I say . . . Don? Keep dreaming those impossible dreams. I hope you’ll call me.”
Her words, and her invitation, made Jake smile. “I will,” he said.
Anna waved again and kept walking. Jake watched her go. Her illness would give him a reason to call to see how she was doing.<
br />
Maybe he wouldn’t even wait until tomorrow to call her.
2
REMEMBER WHY THE GOOD LORD
MADE YOUR EYES
It turned out that tomorrow never gave him a chance. There were plenty of impediments to Jake’s trying to make a livelihood as a lawyer. In addition to not having a client, he also lacked an office, secretarial support, and financing. Most of his classmates at WVU had spent a good deal of their final year canvasing potential employers. Unlike his peers, Jake hadn’t interned with a law firm during that time. Between his UPS warehousing job, law school, and working on the Law Review, there just hadn’t been enough hours in the week. He had gone to a few job fairs, where it had quickly become apparent that lawyers with no experience and no connections weren’t exactly in high demand.
With limited options at hand, Jake set up his law practice out of the Rutledge family house in Oakley. His laptop and his cell phone comprised the totality of his legal research sources as well as his legal support team. He made the dining room table his desk, setting it up with photos, knickknacks, and mementos. His immediate family might be gone, but he put up a display of family photos, keeping their pictures and memories close.
9 Then, through word of mouth, he announced to the world that he was ready and willing to give advice to clients. The world didn’t exactly beat a path to his door, but Jake used the quiet time to learn more about the opioids that had killed Blake, and their impact on communities like his. He didn’t need to remind himself that he was on a mission. Blake’s absence was a continual reminder to him.
Jake blamed his own self-absorption for not noticing his brother’s addiction on the few occasions he came home. His time away at school had blinded him to everything except his own situation. Anyone with eyes and ears should have seen that Blake was in a death spiral. It seemed as if everyone but Jake knew that for more than a year, Blake had taken oxycodone—a drug some called Hillbilly Heroin—for pain relief. Blake had started taking opioids after an old brick chimney fell on his leg. Someone had given him some oxy for the pain. That had been the beginning of the end for Blake.
Jake talked to everyone in Oakley who had known his brother, including neighbors, old family friends, former teachers and classmates, and law enforcement. Blake’s story, he learned, was anything but unique. A plague had descended upon Oakley, and its swath of destruction was nowhere near done. Many were afraid it was even getting worse, if that was possible.
Walter Hughes, their longtime neighbor, talked about how it broke his heart when the local Elks Club had to close down. “All the break-ins at our building,” he said, shaking his head. “It got so that it became too scary to hold meetings at night. Our wives didn’t want us to be away because they were afraid to be alone. What happened to our hometown? Most days it feels like I’m now living in some kind of scary third-world country.”
Some residents whispered the word zombie, as if afraid to say it aloud, as if voicing it might turn their harsh reality into even more of a horror film. It was a reality where residents saw hundreds of addicts walking the streets in a daze. Former family members and friends . . . now transformed into barely recognizable beings.
Unlike zombies in films, though, Jake knew these zombies hadn’t sprung up as a result of a scientific experiment gone wrong. That’s what he needed to get to the bottom of—why did it seem as though his community, and his brother, had been targeted? How had the government become overwhelmed by the catastrophic problems caused by this plague?
During his three years in law school, Jake had used a voice-activated digital recorder to make notes. It wasn’t only a study technique—he often spoke into the recorder as if he were preparing for a case. The technique allowed him to better analyze a problem. By stating the problem multiple times, along with its potential solutions, he found that it improved his ability to arrive at a correct resolution.
Jake spoke into the recorder, pretending to talk to a fellow law student. “When Blake died, they blamed the neighborhood dealer who sold him heroin. There are a thousand neighborhood dealers, though. That’s the low-lying fruit for law enforcement. I need to show who was behind the oxycodone that originally got him addicted. They say the road to hell is paved with good intentions. I’ll need to show a court every SOB profiting from the opioid epidemic—from the corporate greed that permeates manufacturers and distributors, making them turn a blind eye to human carnage, to the personal greed of doctors and pharmacists preying on their own patients. I’m going to have to build a case showing all the opioid interconnections, and all the lies.”
Jake reached for another memento, an old picture of him and Blake wearing Halloween costumes. They’d been ten that year, and Jake had called dibs on Harry Potter, which hadn’t sat very well with Blake. At the time, the twins were both obsessed with the books and movies, but only one of them could be Harry.
Looking at the picture now, it almost seemed as if Blake’s choice had been prophetic. Mom had fixed him up with a white shirt covered in goo that made it look as if he’d just eaten a plate of bloody brains. It was Blake, Jake recalled, who’d gotten most of the compliments that night. Jake had thought he’d be the cool one, with the scar on his forehead and his wizard’s wand and his robe, but as it turned out, he couldn’t compete with an old-fashioned zombie.
He spoke into the recorder: “In court I’ll need to make the point that the new breed of opioid zombies don’t eat brains. It’s their brains that get eaten away. You’d think that would make them sympathetic, but that’s a problem I’ll have to face up to. Most jurors will think they brought on their problems themselves. But I’ll need to demonstrate how opioids didn’t magically appear. I’ll have to show how thousands of rust-belt communities—communities like Oakley that experienced loss of jobs and industry—were specifically marketed to and targeted. Corporate predators looked for communities with a high despair index, and the distributors then told the people in those communities, ‘We’ve got just the thing to help.’
“Suddenly, doctors began prescribing their new wonder pills like candy. Every year the Big Pharma manufacturers produced more and more opioids, and every year their distributors found creative ways to sell more and more of the product. Sales doubled, and tripled, and then went up tenfold. It’s all there in their corporate accounting and annual shareholders’ reports. Corporate profits depended on increasing demand, so they did all they could to create that demand.”
Jake stopped talking. There were a lot of moving pieces in the opioid epidemic, and stating them aloud helped him understand those pieces.
“The corporations hired scientists and doctors and field reps who were willing to be their mouthpieces and claim that studies showed these new, breakthrough opioids were nonaddictive. They took that one right out of the Adolf Hitler playbook: Tell a big enough lie, and tell it frequently enough, and it will be believed. Those studies have since been debunked.”
Jake clicked off the recorder. It was one thing building his imaginary case, but it was another to do it for real. First, he had to get the right client, and then he would need to file actual pleadings. Only then would he have a crack at making his case in front of a jury instead of his tape recorder.
He took one last look at the Halloween photo of him and Blake, then reluctantly put it away. For old time’s sake, he wanted to say, “Trick or treat.” But now he knew better. What Blake had fallen for— what had murdered him—wasn’t a treat.
“Trick,” Jake said.
vvv Very few lawyers practiced in Seneca County. The nearest firm that Jake was aware of was in the town of Melton, twenty miles northwest of Oakley. He didn’t know anything about Fitzhugh, Hodges, and Wolfe other than that the firm had been around for a long time. He hoped he would find a lawyer receptive to his questions, someone willing to mentor him. In his mind’s eye, Jake imagined an avuncular sort addressing his concerns and revealing a few tricks of the trade. There had to be some brotherhood among lawyers, right?
Melton
had always been a more affluent community than Oakley. The opioid crisis had made that even more apparent—anyone with any money had fled the towns most affected by the blight. But during his drive, Jake could see that the blight was spreading, and he didn’t doubt that Melton was also feeling the pain of illicit drugs. A plague doesn’t respect borders.
The law firm of Fitzhugh, Hodges, and Wolfe was housed in a converted Queen Anne Victorian just off the main road. Old sugar maples and red maples lined the street. Jake passed through a wrought-iron gate and started up the path. He hesitated at the front door, unsure whether to ring the doorbell or walk in. There were lights on inside, so he tried the doorknob. It was unlocked, and he pushed the door open.
A reception desk dominated the space, but judging from the pile of old papers and junk mail piled on it, the desk had long been in disuse. Although the building didn’t appear to be deserted, it was quiet. The office nearest to where Jake was standing looked dark and vacant. In fact, only one of the offices appeared to be occupied. Colorful light filtered into the hallway through a stained-glass window. On the door was a sign that read alton
Hodges, esquire. “Hello,” Jake called.
There was no answer.
He walked up to the door and knocked gently on the wood
frame, taking care to not shake the stained glass.
“What?” a voice called out.
Jake decided that was an invitation to come in. He opened the
door and found himself being stared down from behind a desk by a glowering man who reminded him of an older and meaner-looking version of Mr. Potter in It’s a Wonderful Life.
“Mr. Hodges?” asked Jake.
“What do you want?” the man said.
“I came by to introduce myself. My name is Jake Rutledge, and
I’m a lawyer who lives in Oakley.”
“Oakley?” said Hodges. “That town has become a den of thieves.
Are you a thief?”
“No, sir,” said Jake. “Like I said, I’m a lawyer.”
Hodges laughed, but it sounded more like a dismissive snarl. “As
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