No, it simply disappeared, leaving nothing but a faint electrical smell, like soldering or an overheated motor.
From Thunder Rise down into the valley and beyond, Morgantown shook with a fresh round of the noises.
In the cafeteria the McDonalds were too preoccupied to notice. Bostwick heard something but dismissed it as a furnace starting up. By their wood stoves the old-timers took notice.
The next day, as a cold front pushed the last traces of the nor’easter over the hills toward Boston and the Atlantic, they would venture as to how they were the loudest yet. One particularly old old-timer would remark that they sounded less like thunder than some kind of underground laughter, but his colleagues would dismiss that as the effect of one too many holiday tipples.
CHAPTER FORTY-THREE
Friday, November 28
Dexter had insisted Brad take the day after Thanksgiving off. “You could use a little vacation,” he’d said. “I don’t want my editor burning himself out.”
Abbie and Brad got the show on the road early. Yesterday’s storm had blown over, leaving a morning so brilliantly clear it could almost seduce Brad into believing a Berkshire winter might not be so bad after all—even if, by all accounts, it was kicking off a month early. Brad had shoveled the front walk, and an enterprising young man recommended by Mrs. Fitzpatrick had come by with his plow to take care of the drive.
Abbie and Brad were building a snow fort when Rod Dougherty telephoned with the news about Maureen McDonald.
Maria, tethered by a chain, had been watching warily from inside the garage. The Golden didn’t like this snow, not a bit. Didn’t like the cold, too sharp on its nose. Didn’t like the happy noises the child and the grown-up were making, either, or the fact that the grown-up continued to chain her up. Maria was almost always tethered now. Brad hadn’t decided what he was going to do once real winter set in, but temporarily, at least, the garage was Casa Doggy.
That hadn’t been the original intent. This was going to be one of those sleeping-by-the-hearth creatures, Man’s Best Friend. The early progress was encouraging. The dog had been house-trained in two weeks. Brad and Abbie had fashioned a cozy little corner for her in the kitchen—complete with muddy quilt and food and water bowls initialed with the letter M— and she was perfectly content to sleep there. Like all Goldens, this one was terminally stupid, but she had enough functioning neurons to begin learning the commands Brad considered bottom line: Sit, lie down, come, go to hell.
About a month ago the dog had started acting queerly. It was as if she had been lobotomized, leaving those few functioning neurons disconnected from the organism. She stopped coming and lying down on command. She forgot house training; the living-room rug, Brad’s shoes, under the kitchen table were as good a place as any nowadays for a crap. She had taken to growling, seemingly without provocation. Brad had the unsettling feeling the dog was constantly watching them, watching and—and what?
Waiting?
Waiting for what, exactly? It was a silly notion, but once it entered his mind, it was wedged tightly there. Brad no longer trusted the animal, especially around his daughter. If there’d been a way to get rid of it . . .
The ringing of the phone was insistent.
“You stay here, sweetie,” he said to Abbie, who was working on the snow fort’s north wall.
“OK,” she said cheerfully.
“Just be careful,” he said. “Don’t pile it too high.”
“OK.”
He dashed into the house. “Hello?” he said, winded, when he picked up the phone.
It was Rod Dougherty. In the background Brad could hear standard newsroom sounds: phones, loud voices, the clickety-clack of a nearby terminal. Almost noon. They were coming up on their final deadline.
“The McDonald girl died,” Rod said simply. “Late last night. We’re scrambling to get something for today’s paper.”
“Jesus,” Brad said, sounding surprised.
But he wasn’t really. The mystery disease had been their number one running story since early fall, and as it had developed, it had become increasingly clear where it would end. Someone would die.
Maybe many were going to die. Brad had no doubt that eventually (sooner rather than later, he believed) the cause would be found, and treatment and cure would be available. As cruel as it sounded, Brad could see good in Maureen’s death. If nothing else, it would jolt the public health bureaucrats. Because by now it wasn’t only the Transcript interested in the disease. Just Tuesday Brad had fielded a call from AP in Albany. A friend at the Times had expressed interest. Word was leaking out. A death could only hasten that process. Brad gave Rod a few pointers on writing the story, and they discussed a tentative plan for covering the funeral, which would be Monday. Then he talked to his city editor about where the story should be played: on page one, bannered across the top. Did they have a file shot of her? No? He thought of Abbie’s kindergarten group photo—Maureen was standing directly behind his daughter; he could see them in his mind’s eye—but he couldn’t bring himself to offer it. Try the school, he advised. He hung up and went back outside.
Abbie was not at the snow fort.
Abbie was gone.
For a millisecond a string of nightmares flashed through his mind (all on Every Good Parent’s List of Standard Nightmares).
Abbie was kidnapped. Run off to the river, where she’d drowned. Lying dead in the road, where she’d been hit by a passing truck. Fallen into the old farmer’s well out back that he’d vowed a thousand times to seal before calamity struck.
His imagination had gone no farther when he saw her. She was standing just outside the garage, her face a foot from Maria’s. The dog was straining against her chain. Her teeth were bared.
From one nightmare to the next: Crazed pet mauls helpless kid. “Abbie!” Brad screamed.
She didn’t respond. He couldn’t tell if she’d heard him.
It had started quite innocently. Abbie had tired of snow forts. “Maria?” she called, looking for diversion. “I’m your best friend! Here, puppy!”
As Abbie had approached, the dog had growled, then lunged. Only the chain had prevented contact. Abbie froze. Daddy was right: Maria had been acting a little funny lately. If things continued, he’d said, they probably should take her to a vet to get her all checked out. But she’d never done anything like this, growling and snapping her teeth.
Abbie stood, her legs wobbly. She could feel the tears, very close to the surface. She didn’t know what she would have done if the dog hadn’t been on the chain . . . or if the chain suddenly snapped. Ever since they’d gotten the dog, she had been growing (“like a weed,” Daddy’d said). But until now Abbie didn’t realize just how big she had gotten. If Maria stood on her hind legs, she would be taller than Abbie. And now, growling, her teeth glistening, she didn’t seem like Maria at all, but more like a wild jungle animal.
Brad reacted instantly, tearing into the dog, screaming bloody murder, driving her back with the snow shovel. “Lie down, you bastard!” he swore. “You ever go at her again like that and I’ll—I’ll . . .” For Abbie’s sake, he didn’t finish.
The dog knew when she was bested. She slunk off into a corner and lay down. She would not lift her head, but neither did she take her eyes off either human.
Brad wrapped his arms around Abbie. She seemed frightened but otherwise unharmed. The tears that had been so near the surface were quickly retreating.
“What happened?”
“I don’t know, Dad. I was just going to pat her when she started growling. Maybe she . . .” But Abbie couldn’t think of any possible explanation for the dog’s behavior.
“Maybe she isn’t feeling good,” Brad finished. He stifled the urge for an “I-told-you-so”—of his often repeated warnings to stay away from the dog until they checked her out with the vet.
“Yeah, maybe that’s it.”
“Dogs can be like people.”
“Yeah. They can.”
Th
ey walked back toward the fort. Neither was eager to resume the job. So they stood, vaguely admiring their work, daydreaming.
“Who called?” Abbie finally asked.
Brad swallowed. He could not look at his daughter. He gazed out over the fields, so quintessentially New England under their blanket of white. Half a century ago this had been a working farm, and the stone walls remained virtually intact, crisscrossing and dissecting the landscape as far as the eye could see. On the horizon, radiant in the brilliant light, was Thunder Rise. The only clouds in the entire sky hovered over it, halolike, casting gray shadows on the pine trees that stood out starkly against the snow.
Such beauty. It seemed sacrilegious to introduce death. “Who, Dad?” Abbie repeated.
How do you tell a not-yet-six-year-old one of her friends is dead? He didn’t have an answer. He supposed you muddled through as best you could.
“I have some very sad news,” he said, embracing his daughter.
“Is it about Mom?” she asked immediately.
Her response surprised him. “No, it’s not,” he said.
“Mrs. Fitzpatrick?”
“It’s Maureen.”
“What about her?” she said, faintly alarmed.
“She died, honey.” He swallowed again, this time with greater difficulty. “Last night. In her sleep.”
Abbie didn’t answer. Not initially. A scowl took shape on her face, then deepened, as if she were pondering some great mystery. In his arms Brad could feel her muscles stiffen. He’d felt that before—many times, during the separation and custody battle. It was her body’s response to stress or pain or severe rejection.
“Why did she die, Dad?” she asked softly. She felt the tears resurfacing.
“She was very sick, hon.”
“Have I ever been that sick?”
“Oh, no. Not you, pumpkin.”
“What did she have?” Brad had discussed the disease before, but only fleetingly.
“A bad sickness.”
“But why did she die?” Abbie repeated.
“God called her,” he blurted out. “She’s in heaven now. Very happy.” A stock reply—a ghost of childhood Catholicism sprung to life. Considering the circumstance, he thought it was a good answer.
Abbie looked skyward, looked for the moon. It was not out. She pointed up. “God?” she repeated.
“God.”
“But why would God do something like that? Maureen was happy here. I know because she was my friend.” Abbie’s scowl softened and dissolved, and the tears finally surfaced. Brad was out of answers. He tightened his hug and said nothing. Abbie’s sobs shook her body, but there was an oddly reassuring feeling to them. They were the sobs of a strong, healthy little girl.
Healthy.
For how long? It was an ugly thought, unplanned. But there it was. There was no getting around it. He knew at that moment how much Maureen’s death had changed the stakes. For the first time, he wondered if coming to Morgantown hadn’t been a colossal mistake.
CHAPTER FORTY-FOUR
Tuesday, December 2
Dr. Raymond Gosselin arrived the day after Maureen’s funeral.
Bostwick met him at the Albany airport, and for the first part of the drive they talked old times. It really was good to see him, Bostwick thought. He’d aged (hadn’t they all?), and he was still homely as sin (floppy ears stay floppy); but he looked healthy and happy in a knocking-on-middle-age kind of way—as if he ate well, had a challenging career, made a lot of money, lived with a wonderful woman in an equally wonderful house, and worked out every other day at the local racquetball club. All of which, Gosselin informed his old roommate, he did.
“That sweet southuuurn clime,” Gosselin bantered, using the fake Georgia accent he always sprang on his northern friends. “Heck, you just can’t beat it.”
“No snow, I bet.” The sun had eaten away at it, but there was still plenty left from last week’s surprise storm.
“No snow. Heck, it was seventy-two at Hartsfield when I left.”
“Can’t beat that.”
“No, sirree.”
The talk soon enough turned to the disease. It wasn’t only friendship that had brought Gosselin to Morgantown: The state Health Department had finally requested the official involvement of the CDC. Gosselin, high up on the centers’ Public Health Services’ seniority list, wore enough medals to get the assignment when he volunteered. Yesterday he’d read the summary staff had prepared for him, and he’d talked an hour on the phone to Boston. By the time he’d gone to bed last night, he had his theories.
Diseases turned Gosselin on. Especially offbeat diseases, the ones found only in some godforsaken tribal village once every hundred years. And the mystery killers—those were the crème de la crème. Before the Legionella bacterium had been identified, Legionnaires’ disease had been like that. A total mystery, and deadly as hell. Gosselin’s first big CDC assignment had been a support position on the Legionnaires’ task force, and it was there, as he liked to pun, “that I got the bug for good.” His hero was Dr. Daniel Gajdusek, the American virologist whose work solving the Polynesian killer virus kuru won him the 1976 Nobel Prize in medicine. Such an honor for Gosselin, Bostwick would have agreed, probably was in the cards. Although they had not corresponded since their residency days, Bostwick for years had come across his name in the literature— either as author or subject. Gosselin was the doc who had cracked the famous Virgin Islands fever, the disease that had killed four tourists and sent a boatload of millionaires to the hospital. Turned out it was a parasitic worm causing that one; Gosselin had isolated it within three days of coming to St. Thomas. He’d gotten his smiling face in People magazine.
“I think you missed your calling,” Gosselin said as he removed a bundle of folders from his briefcase and thumbed through them.
“What should my calling have been?”
“Epidemiology. You do excellent backgrounding,” he said, ruffling the papers. “The tests you ordered, the sequence—good detective work, every bit. I wouldn’t have done any differently myself.” A decade ago Bostwick would have been insulted, but now he felt something akin to pride, considering Gosselin’s reputation.
“I had no choice, really,” Bostwick said. “My kids were getting worse. The state was doing doodly-squat.”
“Typical,” Gosselin said, sounding personally peeved. “Massachusetts or Montana, my experience has been the same: Health departments sit on their asses until it’s so hot they have no choice but to jump.”
“The paper here’s given them a few good jolts. I know the editor personally. He’s got a kid of his own.”
“Good. I’m sure they needed a little roughing up in the press. I don’t think it’s deliberate neglect in these cases, by the way. I think it’s inexperience. The local yokel syndrome, we call it, and we see it in health departments in even the biggest jurisdictions. There’s a real tendency to believe that if you cross your fingers and hold your breath, it’ll go away.
“The funny thing is, in nine out of ten cases, it does. If we blitzed every time we heard the word ‘epidemic,’ we’d need the Pentagon’s budget, for heck’s sake. Not that I wouldn’t take that kind of dough.” He smiled. “Combat pay for some of the crap we have to take working with the locals.”
“You’ll be working with them?” Bostwick asked.
“No choice. That’s how we operate, in concert with the local authorities—in most instances, state health departments. In fact, that’s about the only way we can get involved, by official request. Most people don’t know that.”
“I must confess I didn’t.”
“Did you know your state Health Department called Atlanta? Late last week?”
“No.”
“Not that there wouldn’t have been ways of finagling an invitation if they hadn’t. But in this case, the request was generated—quite unilaterally and before my input—in Boston. Maybe they knew what you were up to.” Gosselin smiled.
“It wouldn�
�t surprise me. I’ve made enough noise.”
“Before I left, I spoke extensively to Smith.”
“He’s the director.”
“Right. Seems slick, in a positive sort of way. He put me in touch with this doc, Hough, who’s been handling the nuts and bolts of the thing. Tell me. Is he as stupid as he sounds?”
“Worse.” Bostwick laughed.
“If it’s any comfort, we’ll be in the driver’s seat all the way on this one.”
“It is a comfort.”
They were over the line now, heading through downtown Pittsfield. Berkshire Medical was only a couple of blocks away. Tomorrow Bostwick would take him there to see the four children who were still hospitalized.
“Any preliminary ideas?” Bostwick asked.
“Of course,” Gosselin said. “Three, to be precise.”
“Legionella? I tried to get them to test for that. They just about laughed.”
“Ah, Legionella pneumophila,” Gosselin said, as if merely pronouncing the name gave him a secret thrill. “I doubt it, although I’ll be screening for it as a matter of course. There’s a lot of stuff I’ll be screening for, even though I am virtually certain it isn’t any of them. Parrot fever, toxoplasmosis, Q fever, Weil’s disease, even smallpox, which, of course, has been extinct since 1977 but which all of us remain instinctively fearful of. No, I have other, more likely candidates.”
He went on to describe them. Heading his list was babesiosis, caused by a protozoan parasite. The disease was unusually difficult to diagnose and even harder to treat, Gosselin said; antibiotics did not touch it. Transmitted by tick. Incubation period of one to twelve months, which would explain the appearance of new cases once tick season had passed. Worldwide occurrence, with cases reported in U.S. in Nantucket, Massachusetts, Long Island, and Wisconsin. Extremely rare. Frequently fatal.
A Haunting of Horrors: A Twenty-Novel eBook Bundle of Horror and the Occult Page 570