“Good morning, Mr. Hall.”
“Morning, Miranda.”
Miranda Concepcion was Jim’s administrative aide. If her skills were modest, her disposition was certainly bright. And she brought with her the added bonus of a federal grant that reimbursed the county for 90 percent of her salary. As a qualifying “Hispanic,” Miranda single-handedly fulfilled the United States government’s incentive award program under Title XII, accounting as she did for a minority presence of one-fifth of the office’s full-time staff. All this she accomplished without being Puerto Rican or Mexican or Jamaican or Dominican - or Latin American at all, for that matter. Miranda’s father came from a wealthy family of olive oil exporters in southern Spain. But under the government’s liberal interpretation of the term Hispanic, that was good enough.
“Que pasa?” Jim asked her, pretty much exhausting his familiarity with the Spanish language. Miranda opened the office at 9:00; by the time Jim arrived, she’d already played the phone messages, checked the faxes (E-mail was still a thing of the future for the office), and made coffee.
“Not much,” she said. “Troopers picked up an underage driver over in Austerlitz. Had to keep him, ‘cause his folks were out of town.”
“That’s it?”
“That’s it.”
For this, he’d spent three years in law school and $2500 of his own money on party fund-raisers, just so he could win a token primary and an uncontested election.
“Coffee?” she asked him, though she knew he always said yes.
“Sure,” he said. “Why not?”
From South Chatham, Stephen Barrow drove home, stopping only to pick up his mail. He could have arranged to have it delivered; in fact, it would have saved him the $12 a year it cost him to rent a box at the post office. But he rather liked the idea of having a box number for an address: It gave him a feeling of insulation from the credit-card companies, the catalog purveyors, and the disseminators of bulk-rate advertising. Lori the postmistress, was a willing accomplice to those who shared this sentiment: she provided a large trash bin by the door, so folks could discard unwanted junk mail right on the spot. He enjoyed his daily visit with her much the same way he enjoyed buying his New York Times and quart of milk from Joe and Gail over at the general store in Queechy Lake, where there was always somebody willing to discuss the weather if he was so inclined, or just nod hello to if he wasn’t.
Today he lingered long enough to address his Valentine’s Day cards to his daughter and drop them in the slot to make sure they’d arrive on Monday. “To the love of my life,” he inscribed one of them, thinking how very true the words were. As an afterthought, he signed it, “Love, Stephen.” He smiled, knowing Penny would get a kick out of that.
Then he headed home to spend a couple of hours wrestling with his miracle diet drug - or shake, or herbal supplement, or whatever it was going to be, if ever it was going to be anything at all.
Just before noon that same Friday, as Stephen Barrow sat in front of his computer, as his daughter Penny and the rest of her first-grade class learned the names of different geometric shapes, as Theresa Mulholland snacked on pretzels and diet Sprite, and as Jim Hall stared out the window of his office and sipped his fourth cup of coffee, a woman named Emma Priestley turned on the switch of the ColorMaster 3000 in the back room of the South Chatham Drug Mart. The ColorMaster 3000 was a relatively new arrival at the store. For as long as anyone could remember, when a customer had dropped a roll of exposed film off at the counter, you’d toss it into a wire bin marked tillmans. Each day, around 2:00 or so, a driver from Tillman’s Photo Processing would show up to collect whatever was in the bin. At the same time, he’d deliver a big paper sack. In the sack were envelopes containing the prints ordered by customers from the day before.
Six months ago, Tillman’s had raised their rates, virtually doubling what they’d previously charged to process film. For a while, Drug Mart absorbed part of the increased cost and passed the remainder on to the customer. That made absolutely no one happy: The store saw the small profit margin it made by handling film dry up and disappear; the customers noticed the difference, and either grumbled about the new higher prices or took their film elsewhere.
Then one day in November, a salesman had shown up from an outfit called Rochester Enterprises. He told Ernie, the day manager, that Rochester was a division of Eastman Kodak. That had made sense to Ernie, who seemed to remember hearing that Kodak was to the city of Rochester what DuPont was to the state of Delaware. Within a week, the salesman had “placed” a ColorMaster 3000 in the back room of the Drug Mart, on something he described as a “no-lose six-month trial lease with an option to buy.” For Emma - who didn’t much care if customers dropped their film off for processing in the first place - the whole thing had been pretty unsettling. To begin with, the machine was as big as she was, and no doubt weighed considerably more. It came with all sorts of switches and lights, and even when it was supposed to be in something called rest mode, it made noises that were downright scary. But the worst news of all came several days later, when Ernie announced that all of the employees would have to learn how to use the thing.
The way Emma had understood it at the time, they were supposed to be sent to a special three-day school up in Schenectady, where they’d be put up at a nice hotel, fed free restaurant meals, and continue to get paid just the same as if they’d been working the whole time. But that hadn’t happened. Instead, this pimply-faced kid who couldn’t have been more than sixteen had shown up one afternoon with an instruction manual to, in his words, “walk you through this one time.”
Now, three months later, Emma hated the thing as much as she had the first time she’d set eyes on it. She could work it - though it had taken her a full two weeks just to be able to say that - but she’d developed no comfort level with it whatsoever. Instead, she sat in front of it this Friday afternoon as she always did, with her eyes squinted and her arms stretched out in front of her, as though the contraption might suddenly explode without warning at any given moment. She winced each time another colored bulb lit up unexpectedly, and jumped at every hiss and clank that came from inside the angry belly of the thing. It would be the death of her, she knew. If it didn’t blow up on her, it would surely cripple her with carpal tunnel syndrome, or give her bone cancer from its radiation. Already she’d begun to inquire about other job openings in town. But if the rest of the nation was riding the crest of an economic boom, things were pretty slow in South Chatham. And for a sixty-three-year-old store clerk who couldn’t drive and, therefore, had to find work within walking distance of her home, there simply weren’t a lot of opportunities.
The first set of exposures were of the Andersons’ vacation in Disney World. She recognized Darcy and little Katie. For Emma, the only good thing about working the ColorMaster 3000 was that you got to look at the snapshots customers had taken, as they came out of the machine. In a small town, you often knew the customers personally, which meant you got to see where they’d been and what they’d been doing. Emma liked to play a little game with herself: She’d look at the snapshots before reading the customer’s name on the envelope and see if she could figure out whose film it was. Sometimes it was easy: The Andersons at Disney World was a perfect example. Other times it was harder, like when somebody had taken pictures of things instead of people. But even in those cases, she’d gotten pretty good at picking up on clues. For instance, if you saw a lot of shots of antiques, that was likely to be the pretty woman over in East Chatham who called herself the Wood Witch of the East; houses meant it was Jean, the real estate broker from down in Red Rock; and dogs were usually Flaky Annie, who worked over at the pet shelter.
The day’s second set of photos puzzled her for a moment, but not for long: Halfway through the roll, she recognized Maude Shoemaker’s barn, a dead giveaway. Maude’s granddaughter Tracy fancied herself a photographer and was trying to get herself set up with a scholarship down to New York City. But Emma knew better. If Tracy
was ever going to get anywhere, she’d better stop taking all these pictures of dead trees and old barns and woodpiles and get busy with something pretty, something folks wanted to look at, like vases of flowers or smiling faces.
The third set stumped her. It was a man and his little daughter, that much you could see, but no one she knew. On a couple of the shots, the man must have set the timer on the camera and then run back around to get into the picture: the shots were slanted, and the man and the girl were laughing a lot, waiting for the shutter to click. There were a lot of just the girl, hiking through the snow, standing next to a snowman they’d built, throwing a snowball - stuff like that. She was pretty. Then one or two of a sunset, again slanted and slightly out of focus. The man had probably let the girl take those; men didn’t take pictures of sunsets all that much.
Then they were indoors, the girl bathing, with shampoo in her hair. Several showing her from the neck up. One of her completely naked, except for a few soapsuds, standing in the bathtub, facing the camera. Emma Priestley drew back from the developer. What kind of a man takes pictures of his daughter like this? She looked at the envelope, saw the name printed on it, S. Barrow, and felt relieved she didn’t know these people.
And it might have ended right there. Emma was a Godfearing woman who said her prayers each evening and went to church every Sunday morning, but she’d never thought of herself as a prude. If this man S. Barrow wanted to expose his little girl for the rest of the world to see, that was his business, Emma figured. She stared at the image of the little girl, standing there in the bathtub. You could see both her nipples, just like that; thank God she was too young to have breasts. Her . . . her area down there was partially hidden by bubbles, but only partially.
Whatever had this man been thinking?
Still, it might have ended there, but for the very last photo. Emma’s reaction upon seeing it was a physical one: The sight of it actually caused her to recoil, to literally slide her chair away from the machine, until a good six feet separated her from it. But even that wasn’t far enough, and she was forced to stand, to retreat to the far wall of the room, until she could feel the door pressed hard against her back.
It was a full minute, a very long time under the circumstances, before Emma Priestley could get herself to approach the machine, and without sitting back down - she never did get herself to sit back down - to look at the last photo. It was numbered twenty-five. The roll was only supposed to have twenty-four exposures, but with those old cameras you sometimes got an extra one or two, especially if you didn’t wind it too much when you first loaded the film. The little girl’s body was turned away this time, and she was bent over at the waist so that you could see her face, upside down, between her legs. Her rear end was fully visible, along with her private parts, in perfect detail. In fact, she’d placed her hands on either side of her rear end and spread herself wide open - no doubt at her father’s coaching - so that, like it or not, you were forced to see every minute detail of her anatomy.
As horrified as Emma was, she could not stop herself from staring at the photo. She continued to do so for the next three minutes, and if a minute is a long time in such a context, three minutes is an eternity. And the entire time she stared, her mind raced. She thought about bringing the photo to the clerk up front; but that was Max, an old-timer who had his hands full just making change, let alone decisions. She considered calling Ernie, the day manager, at home; but Ernie absolutely hated it when you bothered him on his day off. She toyed with the idea of trying to reach Mr. Gentry, the owner; but she didn’t have his number there in the back room, or any other way of reaching him. For a moment she even thought of phoning the twenty-four-hour emergency help-line number printed on a sticker on the Color-Master 3000; but she decided this probably wasn’t the kind of situation they were there to help with.
Yet she couldn’t very well do nothing about it; that much was certain. Anyone could see this was pornography. Worse, it was child pornography. A little girl was being exposed and abused in the worst way imaginable, and by her own father.
Or maybe it wasn’t her father at all. Maybe it was her uncle, or her stepfather, or someone else in whose care she’d been placed. But whoever it was, it made little difference. You had only to look at the photo to know there was no excusing it. It was what it was: a clear-cut case of abuse. And somebody had to do something about it, and quickly, before the little girl became a runaway, found herself driven into child prostitution, or worse. For Emma Priestley, it didn’t take much of an imagination to picture the poor child lying naked and horribly mutilated in a pool of blood, in some dark, garbage-strewn, rat-infested alleyway off Times Square, down in New York City.
In the end, Emma didn’t bring the photo up front to show Max, the register clerk; she didn’t phone Ernie, the day manager; she didn’t try reaching Mr. Gentry, the owner; and she didn’t call the 24-hour toll-free emergency help line, either.
What she did was pick up the phone and dial 911.
The writing was going surprisingly well. As long as he remembered not to get bogged down in too much scientific detail, Stephen Barrow found that he could keep the reader’s attention - at least the theoretical reader’s attention - in the early part of the story by providing a little more detail into his account of the experiment that somehow went awry and produced the miracle diet drug.
The director of the research lab was running the place on a shoestring, struggling to survive. He was trying to discover a way to keep the sun’s ultraviolet rays from burning the skin and causing cancer. Suntan lotions afforded a certain amount of protection, but recent studies showed they didn’t do a very good job of preventing malignant melanoma, the most deadly form of skin cancer. Worse yet, sunbathers who used the lotions tended to stay out in the sun longer, confident that those high SPF ratings on the labels would adequately protect them. The result, when combined with the well-documented thinning of the ozone layer, had been an unprecedented increase in melanoma.
The idea, it seemed, was to find some substance that would trigger the body’s own natural defenses to UV rays. Unable to afford the prohibitive costs associated with the research and development of a new drug, the lab’s director had instead turned to drugs that were already on the market, but were being used for other things. One such drug was already widely in use in emergency rooms for serious burn victims. Administered in a single massive dose, it seemed to arrest the tissue damage sustained in third-degree burns, cases where there was actual charring of the skin.
The drug was known generically as MU-26 and marketed by Pfizer under the brand name RetroChar. (Stephen got a kick out of that; he loved making up names for things.) The lab’s pretty young blond research assistant (if you ever wanted movie companies to read the book, you had to have a pretty young blonde somewhere in it) had been testing RetroChar on mice. The mice were genetically engineered - were all identical, virtual clones of one another. They were albinos - meaning they had no pigmentation in their skin - and on top of that, they were completely hairless. The combination of these two traits made them remarkably ugly, with their beady little red eyes and pink skins (pink because their blood showed through their skin). It also made them particularly vulnerable to sunburn.
The mice had been divided into two groups, a test group that was given small daily doses of RetroChar, and a control group given a placebo. Then both groups were bombarded with UV rays.
The research assistant had been following the two groups for several weeks now, and measuring their little sunburned skins with an instrument called the Chromometer 300. (The Chromometer 300 was, of course, another invention of Stephen Barrow’s fertile imagination; any similarity between it and the ColorMaster 3000, an actual machine, while perhaps ominously ironic, was nevertheless purely coincidental.) Now, the lab assistant reported sadly to the director, it appeared that the test mice were burning just as badly as the control mice. “Other than that,” she added, “there is one peculiar development I’ve noticed.”
“What’s that?” the director asked, peering over a stack of bills he couldn’t afford to pay.
“For some reason, the mice being given RetroChar are losing weight.”
Aha!
From there, they give up on the drug as a sunburn-protector and instead devise an experiment to test it as a diet drug. And, naturally, it works like magic. The good folks at the lab want to write up the results, let the public reap the benefits, and pocket a little change for their efforts. But the Evil Forces of Big Business get wind of the experiment. Records disappear in the middle of the night, the lab is mysteriously burned to the ground, and soon the drug finds its way into the marketplace - not only renamed, but now disguised as a tasty milkshake (Penny’s contribution) or an exotic herbal supplement.
All goes well for a while. The pounds melt away from the nation’s obese; the bucks roll into Big Business’s coffers - until the startling revelation comes that once you begin taking the drug you continue to lose weight forever, until you finally waste away and die. Then must we turn back to our noble lab director and his beautiful blond assistant to somehow come to the rescue.
Okay, so it was trash.
The fact was, there were a lot of people out there writing trash, and making millions in the process. And if Stephen Barrow happened to have the terrible fortune of seeing one of his books become commercially successful (he didn’t dare think in terms of a bestseller, lest lightning strike him dead on the spot), wouldn’t that, in turn, give him the luxury of getting back to the kind of writing he really wanted to do?
Was that such a terrible fantasy to have?
Best Intentions Page 3