by Paula Boyd
Funny thing about me and showers, I get many of my great insights standing naked under running water. No, you don’t need a visual; it’s just the way it is. And, true to form, the message came to me as I gazed—with eyes closed, of course—upward toward the heavens. Jerry had made some pretty heady implications last night and the possibilities for interpretation were both scary and really scary. Oddly, I couldn’t decide what it was that I hoped he had meant. “For godsakes, Jolene,” I said out loud and to no one but myself. “You’re not seventeen. Stop it.”
I might not be a teenager, but sometimes it sure felt like it. Still, the reality of the situation was that Jerry hadn’t really said anything of substance, nothing had changed, and I needed to get my mind off of what might be and deal with what was. The short list I’d come up with included murder, mayhem and why my mother owned mineral rights on Bob Little’s property, if indeed she actually did.
It made no obvious sense, of course. But that meant nothing. Lucille was involved and therefore logic was not. And in order to cut down on the lies she could tell, I needed to gather as many facts as I could before I tried to corner her for answers. Mineral rights were generally recorded in property ownership records, and there should at least be a date on when she got the mineral rights and how much of a share she actually had. That meant I needed county records from the county courthouse.
I knew from unrelated experience that there were plenty of counties that had put their property ownership records online. I didn’t know about Texas, but, my typical disparaging comments aside, I doubted that the Lone Star state was any farther behind than its neighbors. That meant they’d probably started the process, but it was a county-by-county crapshoot.
If Bowman County ownership data was available online, knowing the section, township and range for Kickapoo might help me narrow the search. Then again, it occurred to me that Texas was, by its own admission a whole other country, and as such, was fairly guaranteed to have foreign ways. Indeed, now that I thought about it, I recalled some obscure something about Spanish land grants and hybrid mapping that was sure to turn a simple search into a typical Kickapoo SNAFU (look it up). Whatever the case, I was starting with what I knew and hoped that something would be relevant or at least lead me in that direction.
Longitude and latitude was a piece of cake, thanks to satellite imaging. Ha! That would be kind of cool. I could look up my mother’s house from space. And while I was at it, I could scope out the Little Ranch and see what made it so appealing for an RV park. Why hadn’t I thought of it before?
As I rinsed the hotel conditioner from my hair, my thoughts hopped to what Jerry had said about Tiger dying of an overdose. That didn’t automatically mean murder, but it didn’t automatically exclude it either. He could have accidentally killed himself, and suicide was an obvious option. But why come to Texas to die and not go out with some sort of theatrics? He’d blown up the feed store, sort of, and the exploding paint cans at the rally had been a pretty decent show, so why would a dedicated protester die alone without making some kind of major point out of it?
He wouldn’t. That meant it was either murder or it was unintentional. Or, he could have made a suicidal point, framing someone for his death and we just didn’t know about it yet.
I really wanted more information to narrow my field of choices. I doubted Perez would even take my call at this point or tell me anything even if he did. The only other source I could think of that would know more details was the medical examiner Yes, obvious, but I felt a little squeamish about it. I didn’t know of any law that said citizens couldn’t call and ask a few questions, but it sure seemed that Jerry would not be pleased to hear about my inquiring mind. Still, a dead man had been found in a motel room that was supposedly rented to my daughter. I had rights. No, actually I didn’t, and that approach was not going to get me anywhere with either Jerry or the medical examiner.
Let’s be clear. I am not good at deceit. The straightforward approach is the only one that works for me, only it wasn’t going to work this time. This time, I needed a good cover story, which is just a fancy way of saying a big fat lie. You’d think a good reporter would be good at such things, but as I may have mentioned a time or two, I am not a good reporter, investigative or otherwise. I write stories; I do not infiltrate and probe.
I snapped the big white towel from the rack on the wall, wrapped it around me and headed for the desk. The phone book was in the drawer, and after a little searching, I found the number I was looking for. After a couple of mental and oral dress rehearsals, I dialed.
After only one transfer, I hit pay dirt with a young man named Travis. “Hey, Travis, this is Barbie down at the Times and Record News,” I said, doing a pretty decent Kimberlee-esque airhead impression despite my unfortunate choice of a fake name. “Kimberlee asked me to call and get the final cause of death on that man who was found in the motel room yesterday. I’d really appreciate it if you could look that up real quick for me.”
“You’re the third person who’s called about that this morning.”
Third? Oh, crap. “Kimberlee called already? Because if she did I’m really going to be in trouble. I’m new and—”
“No one from the paper called.”
“Well, that’s a relief,” I said, although it really wasn’t since now I wanted to know who else was calling about this. “A lot of people are interested in this I guess.”
“I’ll tell you exactly what I told the others. We still don’t have all the labs back, and I can’t give you anything official until it’s official.”
I hadn’t counted on that. Actually, I guess I hadn’t counted on anything. I’d just gotten a wild idea and acted on it. That was one of my finest character traits, seeing what needed done and just doing it. It was also a fairly significant flaw in that I didn’t necessarily apply long range thinking to the process and wound up in situations just like this one where I had to then improvise. “How long do you figure he would have lived, with the cancer and all, if he hadn’t overdosed?”
“I never said he overdosed. Or that he didn’t. He could have died two months ago or lived another two, depending on what he needed to do. We leave when we’re ready.”
Huh? A philosopher? At the morgue? “Unless someone helps us along.”
“It can work either way. Read Richard Bach’s Illusions. Things aren’t always the way they seem.”
The non-Barbie Jolene was having a hard time keeping her mouth shut. I wanted to tell him that I’d read the damn book. Many times. And, I too recommended it to people who I thought needed to expand their closed little minds, so I knew what he was doing. One part of me wanted to let him know that I knew way more than he did about these topics, and the other part wanted to find out just how far down the rabbit hole the county medical examiner’s esoteric knowledge went. Neither was going to happen so I decided to put my little ego aside and do a little backhanded fishing. This is, of course, yet another skill I have not mastered. “I’ve known a lot of people who died of lung cancer. Tough to go through and tough to watch. It really sucks.”
“Death isn’t good or bad, it is simply a transition from one state of awareness to another. How it occurs can be affected by freewill and choice, ours as well as that of others. Either way, if you leave without getting the lessons you came here for, you repeat them.” He paused for a few long seconds then said, “Hepatocellular carcinoma, Barbara. Primary liver cancer. Look it up.” Click.
“It was Barbie,” I muttered, hanging up the phone.
That had been a bizarre conversation on all levels. I jotted down what he’d said on the hotel-provided notepad and I absently added “look it up.” Something about the way he’d said that had sort of stopped me in my tracks. He’d also hung up on me, which would typically really tick me off, but it didn’t. He told me what kind of cancer Tiger had, and to look it up. There was something there, I just knew it. Something he suspected but couldn’t say for sure. No doubt people around here thought him to be exc
eptionally weird.
I continued talking to myself all the way to the closet. I wasn’t looking forward to wearing yesterday’s clothes, but I didn’t have much choice. As I slid back the mirrored closet door, I realized I actually had no choices at all. The only things of mine in the closet were my sandals. Jerry had apparently taken everything else—and I do mean everything. My bra, semi-stained shorts, sink-washed shirt and even the borrowed white, big and tall were gone.
Now, I could jump to conclusions and assume that he took my clothes to purposely keep me trapped in the hotel room naked, which was a distinct possibility. Or, I could assume that he kindly and thoughtfully took my clothes to have them cleaned. Or both.
At the moment, the why of it didn’t much matter. The fact was that I had nothing to wear. And since I couldn’t walk down the hall naked or in a bath towel, I called the front desk to see about the possibilities of having a robe sent up. Amazingly, within minutes, a robe was on its way to my door. It would have to do for now, and if my laundry didn’t make a timely return, I’d have to figure out how to get something delivered from the mall somehow.
Within ten minutes, I was swaddled in a thick white terry cloth robe and my little toes were tucked into my sandals. I had a package of peanut butter crackers from the vending machine in one hand and a glass of water in the other. Yes, water. After last night’s gassing, just the thought of a sickly sweet Dr Pepper made my stomach roll. I wolfed down a few crackers on the elevator then washed them down as I searched for the hotel’s business center. The gold wall plates with the arrows helped considerably.
The room was fairly large—and thankfully unoccupied—with a worktable, a fax machine and a desk with a newer looking computer. A laminated sheet that said “Internet Use Instructions and Agreement” was taped to the desk, advising me that, basically, if I touched the keyboard I agreed to everything on it. Computer use was free, but printouts, copies and faxes required a credit card. I hadn’t brought one of those with me, so the hotel pen and note pad were just going to have to do. I did have a couple of dollars just in case. I also had a long list of topics to research and decided that starting with the simplest seemed wise.
From the beginning, the whole park thing had seemed ridiculous. It wasn’t public land, yet there was an implied link with the city of Redwater Falls as well as Kickapoo. I’d start with the official city websites then move on to AAC, Damon Saide, hepato-whatever cancer, then find Kickapoo on GoogleEarth and eventually check the online records at Bowman County. I also needed at least do a quick search on Gilbert Moore, Commissioner Fletcher and Barnett Shale. I wanted time to research everything thoroughly, but I didn’t have it. I’d spend two hours and stop, get some real food.
The City of Redwater website was easy to find but there was nothing at all about the park on it. Nothing. A search for Parks for Progress came up with something in New Jersey and it wasn’t even a good match. I did, however, get a hit on AAC immediately. Nice website, official-looking. Someone had done a decent job, in a template sort of way. It got less impressive when you started following up the “events” that AAC had supposedly engineered. Either they never happened at all or they were actually pulled off by a different group, and AAC had simply stolen the photos and stories from other websites. And, of course, there were no faces or names on the AAC site to incriminate anyone. And no, I didn’t get very far on the owner of the domain name either. Registered to a reseller.
For the kind of group it was, AAC could be considered legit even if the success stories were bogus or stolen. But it made me wonder if the people in town saying they were with AAC really were. And furthermore, there wasn’t even a blip in the national news archives about any of this. Contrary to what my mother and a deceitful sheriff would have liked me to believe, this was very much a local story. It was at least an eight on the Kickapoo absurdity scale, but it was not national news.
Damon Saide didn’t register on any of the people finders or search engines. An alternative spelling picked up a quote that said, “the bitch must die,” which was kind of creepy, but thankfully not relevant. I figured the name was bogus anyway. Just like Tiger and Bobcat and the flower girls that hung around with them. I ran out of tails to chase, and wound up with more questions than when I started.
I couldn’t spend a lot of time on any of it, so I hurriedly put in Gilbert Moore and drilling. I got a Yellow Pages listing, but nothing more. Then, I remembered Barnett Shale, which was easy to remember since it was such an odd name. I hit the search button.
“What the hell,” I muttered, looking at the top search listings. Barnett Shale wasn’t a who, it was a what, a very big what. It was a natural gas field in North Central Texas. I read quickly and made notes on location, depths and the whys and wherefores of it all. Like many activities in the petroleum industry, what had been previously unprofitable was now wildly lucrative. That didn’t automatically mean that oil and or gas was being harvested behind Mother’s house, but it didn’t mean they weren’t either. From what I could tell, Kickapoo would be on the far northwest edge of the known field, which made it iffy, but not impossible. I started to click another link to try to figure out how iffy, but realized that I could get lost in researching that and get nothing else done. For now, all I needed was an overview, and I definitely had that. So, I refocused back on the park with new eyes.
There were a few local news stories on the park, the protest, county truck vandalism and the feed store incident, but even the local media had lost interest and column inches without any meat behind the hype. There was nothing significant about the Barnett Shale play, as they called it, just a general mention. There were, however, letters to the editor from my mother. I only found two, which was two too many. She had made exaggerated accusations and vague threats with a lot of rambling and very little detail. Why the newspaper had published such nonsense was beyond me. Quite a few readers wrote in with the same concerns and—I’m only guessing here—that Kimberlee had to spend some time in the Bridal and Fashion department, or maybe the obits, as penance for letting the drivel get printed in not only the editorials, but for referencing it her “news” stories. You had to give her credit though, Mother did give entertaining quotes.
The computer’s clock told me I’d burned about forty minutes, which was great, considering what I’d found, but the hard stuff was still ahead.
I don’t like to visit medical sites—physically or in cyberspace—because I am suspicious of the medical community in general. There are a lot of reasons for it, which would take a couple of days to relate, but mostly it’s because they approach things from the wrong angle—an unnatural one. They’ll either drug it or cut it, and that’s if you survive their toxic tests. Seriously, it wasn’t the cancer that killed my favorite aunt. It was the biopsy they did “just to be sure” she had it. Apparently the fact that she’d been a smoker and lived with one for forty years, had a mass the size of a grapefruit in her chest and was coughing up lung tissue just wasn’t convincing enough. Nope, a biopsy was essential as was apparently the collapsed lung and other resulting complications that killed her. I really wish I were making that up, I really do.
Now, don’t get me wrong, I’m grateful to have good and important medical care available and a lot of lives are saved by some really dedicated people. But in every day doctoring, it seems that either people pick a pill off a TV ad that they think will magically fix their lives or some drug rep pitches the latest “approved” pill for the same reason. Big Pharma knows Americans want quick fixes and they’ve dreamed up a pill for just about everything, creating conditions and disorders as needed to help everybody feel better about the scam. There are exceptions to this, of course, but there are no exceptions to the fact that the unhindered power of the pharmaceutical companies in this country scares the living crap out of me.
Stopping myself from riding that train of thought any longer and wasting any more time on things I had no control over, I went directly to the American Cancer Society site. Hepatocel
lular carcinoma popped right up, and I found out in a hurry that primary adult liver cancer is rare, but that the hepatocellular variety accounted for 75% of the rarities. Smoking and drinking were big contributors, as was Hepatitis B and C. Tiger was a good contender in all three categories, although at a distance he hadn’t looked yellow that I could recall. Also on the list of risk factors were heredity, aflatoxins, arsenic in drinking water and chemical exposure, specifically vinyl chloride from plastics manufacturing and thorium dioxide from x-ray testing. The conditions and symptoms sounded horrible, and killing himself to stop the pain of it all was a highly credible option. However, none of it explained why he’d chosen to spend the last days of his life in Redwater Falls, Texas. I had money left from my vending machine purchases so I fed a dollar bill into the printer/copier and printed out the info.
My next stop on the web was GoogleEarth, which was thankfully already available on the hotel’s computer, and in no time I was zooming in on Kickapoo, Texas. As the satellite homed in on mother’s address, a wide expanse of mottled white with splotches of green around the perimeter flashed on the screen. When the image stopped on Lucille’s house, I immediately scrolled east to see what I’d just gotten a glimpse of.
“What the hell,” I muttered yet again as the area came into focus. Several huge areas of whitish dirt splayed across the screen. Red dirt that was pockmarked with small areas of sparse vegetation filled in around the bare white stuff. “Is that what drilling and oil wells do or are they mining something?” I muttered to myself.