by John Moore
I knew this meant that dark days were coming to the Times and to the entire city of New Orleans.
Chapter Twenty-Four:
Disease
I was in shock. What the hell was going on? Once again, Bart Rogan came to mind. I drove home with my mind whirling, trying to figure out why I was no longer welcome at the Times and who the woman was who threatened to call the cops on me. Tom and the gang were back from LaPlace when I parked in the garage.
The whole group was on the balcony relaxing and talking about their day. They were all exceptionally animated, laughing and imaginingthe possibilities they saw transforming the farm into a money-making enterprise. I joined them and tried to clear my mind so as not to dampen their enthusiasm, a task not so easily accomplished.
Piper had a little gray tiger-striped kitten sitting on her lap, petting it as if she’d had it since its birth. “What’s this?” I asked.
Everyone averted his or her eyes from mine except Piper, who looked up at me and said, “This is Digi, short for Digital. I found him at the farm. He didn’t have a mama, so I brought him home.”
Oh shit, now we have a cat. I guess every little girl needs a pet, so what could I say? Tom must have agreed if Digi made it this far.
Tom spoke first after Piper showed me the kitten. “Alexandra, you should have been with us today. The farm is fantastic. Maddy has so many ideas for the house on the property. Do you remember meeting Daniel at the crawfish boil? He was one of the young guys from the lab where we get our water samples tested. Well, he met us at the farm to take soil samples to be prepared to talk to Jason when he arrives. We had a great day, and the future is going to be so fantastic. How was your day?”
I didn’t have the heart to tell him about the bad news I’d gotten today. It was good to see the group so into our project. Of all of the things we needed to accomplish in our lives, providing health-sustaining food to everyone was at the top of the list. I shouldn’t let a setback like a contaminated shipment of product paralyze me. I certainly didn’t need to squelch the momentum of these people who had their futures tied to the project. Charlotte and I would find a way to work it out, at least that’s what I told myself. As far as the Times was concerned, I only needed to discover why there was such a drastic change, and who was in charge. I could still use my website and my secret weapon, Piper, to communicate with people directly on the web. She could help spread the word for both the stevia company and the Nursery Rhyme Killer articles. Any relationship repair we needed to do with the stevia company could be enhanced by the web. We could produce some video demonstrating our strict adherence to quality control methods and add footage of the organic farming of the stevia plants, and if the Timeswasn’t going to let me keep my promise to Jess and print my article about the serial killings, then I’d do it myself. My following on my site was getting stronger every day. With Piper’s help, I could reach as many people as the newspaper.
“My day was fine,” I said, trying to show as much enthusiasm as I could muster. “Charlotte and I have some work to do, but we can talk about that later.”
Piper had her computer on the table in front of her. She butted into the conversation as if she was delivering a newsflash. “Did you know that tropical storm Miguela has been upgraded to a hurricane? The projections are that it may enter the Gulf of Mexico too.”
Maddy walked over to Piper’s computer and said, “Let me see that. This hurricane has so many different projected paths. Who knows where it will end up? We should watch it carefully because it looks like it could get huge.”
Zach said, “Hurricane be damned, we are starting work on the house in the morning. With a few repairs, we could be in the house in a couple of days. Maddy, you should go to the flea market tomorrow and look for some used appliances.”
“I know a guy who wants to get rid of a refrigerator,” Tom said. “His wife wants one that’s connected to the Internet. Why? I don’t know, but that’s what she wants. Zach, you and I can haul it off tomorrow and take it to LaPlace.”
We sat on the balcony and talked about the farm and all of our plans to bring food to the farmers’ markets around New Orleans. We had to come up with a way to get the produce to the less fortunate. Maddy suggested we sell to the local Council on Aging sites as a part of the meals programs they ran. That might work for the older residents, but what about the younger ones? We had to find a way to get the food to everyone and make it affordable at the same time. Piper was falling asleep in her chair, bobbing her head up and down, completely out of gas. Fatigue was setting in on all of us, so we decided to call it a night and head to bed.
I woke up the next morning before anyone. I’d decided to wait till this morning to tell Tom about Sweet Treat stevia and what happened at the Times. I drank my coffee on the balcony, enjoying the cool morning air and the stirring of the Quarter, knowing I would never get tired of watching the city come alive. I couldn’t help but think about poor Charlotte and her longing for her deceased soul mate. It made me realize, once again, how lucky Tom and I were to have each other.
Tom joined me with his coffee and a huge smile. “Good morning, pretty girl,” he said. “OK, what’s on your mind? You tossed and turned all night long. Besides, I know that look. Tell me what’s going on.”
I explained the situation with the stevia company and the Times, and he agreed that Rogan was somehow involved in both situations.
Piper walked onto the balcony and sat by me. She looked at me through sleepy eyes and yawned. She extended her right arm and scratched it wildly. I saw tiny red bumps from the middle of her forearm to her armpit.
“What are those red bumps on your arm?” I asked.
Tom had a guilty look on his face.“I took her in the woods with me while we were at the farm. I think she got into some redbugs.”
“Redbugs?” I queried. “You didn’t shower last night before you went to bed, did you?”
“No, I was too tired,” Piper said. “I just plopped down on the bed with my clothes on.”
“You need to go back upstairs now and take a hot shower. Use a washcloth and soap and scrub yourself everywhere. A good shower will get rid of any of the bugs that are still on your skin. Make sure you get in every crack and crevice. I’ll get your clothes and throw them in the washer.”
“All of these bumps itch,” she said.
“After your shower, I’ll put some calamine lotion on you,” I said. “It’ll help with the itching, but I’m afraid it’s going to itch for a few days.”
“We are all supposed to go back to the farm today to work,” Piper said. “I want to go. Can I?”
Tom laughed. “Of course you can. I can’t even count the times I had redbugs all over me, and ticks too. All of that just goes with the outdoor life. You’ll learn how to watch out for those kinds of things. OK with you, Alexandra, if she goes with us?”
“I guess so, but stay out of the woods. I know it’s almost fall, but snakes are everywhere this time of year. Stay by the house, or better still you can ride with Maddy to look for appliances.”
Later that day they left to meet Maddy and Zach at the farm. I worked around the condo for the next couple of days refining my article about the serial killer and trying to get to the bottom of the contamination of the stevia. Michael was on the road calling on the accounts that had product on the shelves, so neither Charlotte nor I heard from him.
I called Charlotte and asked her to come to the condo. Piper stayed home while Tom was at the farm because she was coming down with a touch of the flu. I suggestedshe take the day to rest, and he didn’t fight me since she felt so bad. She’d been in bed most of the morning.
It had been more than two days since we’d heard from Michael. I’d only tried to call one time, assuming that Charlotte was speaking to him. When she told me she hadn’t spoken to him either, I thought we needed to track him down together.
Charlotte sa
t at the table in my condo and dialed Michael’s number on speakerphone. The call went straight to voicemail. It was odd that he didn’t answer or call right back. “What do you think is going on with him?” I asked.
“I don’t know, but when I showed you the photo of us the other day, I decided to put some distance between us and make sure our relationship stayed on a professional level,” she said.
Suddenly we were startled by a knock on the door. I looked on the security system screen and saw Sophia at my door. She was alone. I let her in and she joined Charlotte and me at the dining room table.
“I wanted to come here by myself to warn you about something,” Sophia said. “We’ve picked up some chatter from Victor’s people that they are going to do something to hurt you. We tried to get more information but weren’t able to discover what they were planning.”
“What the hell?” Charlotte said. “We think they’ve sabotaged our business already.”
We told Sophia about the contamination to the Sweet Treat. “That’s sounds more like Bart Rogan than Victor,” she said. “The word we heard was that they were going to cripple you. We weren’t sure what that meant. I guess it could mean financially, but that’s not how we took it. You need to be on your guard even more than you have been.”
Charlotte got a concerned expression on her face and said, “Our manager, Michael, hasn’t been in touch with us for a couple of days. You don’t think they did anything to him, do you?”
“These devils are capable of anything. No evil is too much for them. If they thought it would hurt Alexandra, they’d do it,” Sophia said. “I can check it out for you if you’d like. Give me his name and a description and I’ll see what I can find out.”
“We can do better than that,” I said. “Charlotte, show Sophia the picture of you and Michael at the restaurant.”
When Charlotte produced the photo, Sophia flung her head back, her eyes wide. “You said his name is Michael?”
“Yes,” Charlotte answered. “Michael Keeson.”
Sophia looked at me as the color left her face. “That’s not his name,” she said. “I know who that guy is. He’s a Russian named ArkadyBurak. He’s one of Victor’s key men. He was born in Russia and worked for the KGB before coming to the United States. He’s a killer, like Victor, but we haven’t able to pin anything on him that will stick.”
“Oh my God,” I screamed. “But we checked him out. He was a Yale graduate.”
“I’m sure his credentials were perfect,” Sophia said. “They were all fake, too. No doubt created by Victor’s hacking farm in Russia.”
“I believed in him,” Charlotte said. “I almost fell for him. He was setting us up all that time.”
“We both believed in him,” I said. “We were duped.”
“We’ve got to go into damage control mode. Charlotte, you contact the factory and the packaging plant to shut down all production. As soon as I go check on Piper I’ll contact the locations where we’ve delivered product, to get them to take it off of their shelves.”
“Do you mind if I go with you?” Sophia asked. “I’d love to see Piper. She’s such a doll.”
“Even though she’s got the flu, I know she’d love to see you too, Sophia. Come with me,” I said.
We climbed the stairs to Piper’s room. She was under her covers shivering, with sweat beads collecting on her forehead. He pale skin seemed lifeless. I touched her head with the back of my hand.She was burning up with fever.The thermometer confirmed she had a 102-degree temperature.
“Hi, Sophia,” she said, shivering as she spoke. “I’m sorry I’m sick and can’t get up.”
“It’s OK, child,” Sophia said as she sat on the edge of Piper’s bed. She lifted the covers to get a closer look at the red bumps on Piper’s arms. When she did she saw something move on the white sheets. She reached down with her finger and stabbed one of the moving black specks.
“What is it, Sophia?” I said. “What do you see?”
“Fleas,” Sophia answered. “There are fleas in her bed. The red bumps on her arms are fleabites. We need to get her out of this room.”
“Her fever is getting worse,” I said. “I’m taking her to the emergency room. These fleas may be causing some type of reaction. Where the hell did the fleas come from anyway? We don’t have any dogs or cats.” Oh crap, I just remembered the kitten she’d brought home.
“Has she been anywhere else other than this condo?” Sophia asked.
“Yes, she brought a kitten home from our farm in LaPlace,” I said.
“Fleas live on many animals in the woods,” Sophia said. “Maybe that’s where they came from.”
Piper was so pitiful lying there. She was helpless to do anything but shiver. I picked her up and carried her down the stairs. She weighed hardly anything. She’d always been tiny, but it felt to me like she’d lost weight. A pain stabbed my chest worrying about her, and I wondered if this was what mothers went through. I realized that I had a lot more to be thankful to my mom for than I’d realized.
Sophia rode with us to Tulane Medical Center. We checked into the emergency room. A nurse recognized me and asked to look at Piper.
“This child is very sick,” she said. “She’s a little dehydrated also. Let’s get her checked in and put her in a room. We need to take blood samples to confirm what’s going on with her.”
“Confirm?” I said. “What do you think it is?”
The nurse didn’t bother to answer. She just wheeled Piper back behind two large automatic swinging doors to a holding area. She asked Sophia and me to remain in the waiting room till they had more information to give us. I protested that I wanted to go with Piper, but the nurse shut me down immediately. I had to wait, and I wasn’t good at waiting, but that was my only option.
Sophia sat next to me the entire time. She was truly a dear friend. She told me that NSA was monitoring Victor’s men’s communications, but they were sophisticated enough to evade most of the eavesdropping equipment. She’d only gotten bits and pieces of information. She knew he was planning something big that involved moving into gambling and prostitution in New Orleans.
She told me that Victor’s organization had gotten stronger since my last run-in with them. Victor had acquired a certain amount of legitimacy in Washington by contributing to a number of politicians’ campaigns, but mainly from forming a PAC that didn’t have to disclose where its funds came from. That allowed him to place political ads for friendly senators and representatives without being tied to them. He’d also purchased a few legitimate companies that he used as fronts to launder drug money. His favorite method for cleaning his ill-gotten gains was through a Vegas casino he owned the controlling interest in.
No wonder he was so bold in his moves in the Big Easy. With Clint out of his way and his newly acquired friends, he wasn’t vulnerable to the local cops. He was becoming a powerful force in the country. His association with Rogan gave him more politicians to put in his pocket to help him skirt the law.
The doctor with a concerned look on his face walked through the two swinging doors trailed by a nurse. “Are you the child’s mother?” he asked.
I looked at him, fearful of what I might hear next. “No, Doctor, I am her legal guardian. What’s wrong with her?”
“She’s very sick,” she said. “The lab will have to confirm the diagnosis, but I’m quite certain she has bubonic plague.”
Chapter Twenty-Five:
Worried
“Bubonic plague?” I said. “No, she can’t have something like that. Tell me it isn’t true. She’s just a little girl. I didn’t know bubonic plague still existed. She’s going to be OK, isn’t she? You have a cure for it, don’t you?”
The doctor interrupted my onslaught of questions with a calm but firm statement. “We’ve had to isolate her. We have some of the best infectious disease doctors in the world here at Tulane. W
e are doing everything possible for her. But she is at least two days into her symptoms, so she is in grave danger. You need to prepare yourself for a grueling ordeal, because she’s not going to get better overnight.”
With that, she whirled around and disappeared behind the double doors. I stood there next to Sophia still reeling from the words, bubonic plague. Images of medieval Europe—one-third of the population dead, corpses piled high outside city walls—commandeered my mind. A single tear formed in each eye before turning into a torrent that flooded my face.
Sophia put her arm around me. “I’m sure Piper will be fine,” she said. “She’ll receive the best medical care possible here at Tulane. We have cases of bubonic plague in South America where the medical care isn’t very good and neither are the outcomes. I had a distant relative in Bolivia who contracted it, and we flew her to Bogota for medical treatment. She eventually recovered. I learned a great deal about the disease. The doctors say that it has mutated since the Middle Ages and found ways to take genetic material from other bacteria and viruses to survive over time.”
“I should have brought her here when I first saw the bites on her arm,” I said. “Maybe she wouldn’t be sick now.”
I didn’t get to finish my thoughts because a young man interrupted me. “Would you two please come with me?” he asked. “I’m an intern and I need to take a blood sample from each of you to make sure you aren’t infected with the disease.”
“Neither of us has any bites on us,” I said, looking at Sophia for confirmation.
“There are other ways the plague spreads,” he said. “You are probably not infected, but we have to make certain, andI’ll need a list of all other persons who were exposed to the location of the contraction and to the young lady you brought in.”
Holy shit, I thought. That meant Tom, Maddy, Charlotte, Zach, and that asshole Michael or whatever his name was. I called Tom to tell him what had transpired. He said he’d round up Zach and Maddy and bring them to Tulane Medical if I’d call Charlotte. I was able to reach Charlotte, and she immediately drove to meet us at the hospital. This whole thing was a nightmare. How could things be any worse?