by Jerry Apps
Now Josh laughed. “Just pulling your chain a little, Natalie. But I really do wonder who M.D. is. I also think I better give the folks over at Nathan West a call, just in case the threat is real and someone is planning to do something stupid.”
“Sounds like a good idea. How about coming to my cabin for dinner on Saturday? I’ll bake a chocolate cake.”
“I’ll be there with bells on,” Josh said.
“You can leave the bells home—I don’t think you’ll need them.” Natalie chuckled as she hung up the phone.
Immediately, Josh called Ed Clark at Nathan West’s building site.
“Ed, it’s Josh Wittmore at Farm Country News.”
“How you doing?” answered Clark, who, unlike his superiors at Nathan Clark headquarters in Dubuque, had come to like Josh and his interest in and writings about their new hog operation.
“Say, I want to give you a heads-up. There may be nothing to it, but after the last piece I wrote about the progress you guys are making with your buildings, I got a rather nasty letter in the mail. I’ll read it to you.” Josh read him the letter.
“Who is this M.D.?” asked Clark.
“Probably stands for Mortimer Dunn, the Tamarack River Ghost.”
“Him again?”
“Yup, lots of ghost believers around. This may be simply a prank. I wanted to let you know, though, just in case there is something to it.”
“We’ve gotten this kind of stuff more times than I can count. We don’t put much stock in these tirades. They come at us from all directions. But thanks for letting me know,” said Clark.
For weeks on end, Josh and his boss scarcely talked. They had obviously reached some kind of truce. Josh came to work each morning, put in his eight hours, and returned to his apartment. His heart was just not in his work anymore. He felt like a phony; he wanted to be a journalist, dig out important stories, interview people, find different points of view on a controversial topic, but now his hands were tied. He believed a high school dropout could do the work he was doing; his position certainly didn’t require a trained journalist.
The electronic Farm Country News was making a profit. It should, thought Josh. The paper’s fixed costs were minimal. It had a tiny full-time staff and almost no newsprint and press charges, as it printed only a thin broadsheet once a month. Posting material on the paper’s website cost the paper little.
Josh had hoped people would begin to see that the printed articles, especially those that were supposed to be news, were not news at all but advertising pieces for the companies submitting them. A few people figured it out and let the paper know in no uncertain terms that they were opposed to what it was doing. A recent e-mail Josh received made the point:
Dear Editor:
What do you think your readers are? A bunch of idiots? I subscribed to Farm Country News for more than twenty years. In its print format, I found it interesting, informative and well edited. Now, with your new online format, you’ve completely lost your direction, and, I might add, you’ve lost my support. I’d like to say that I am canceling my subscription, but alas, all I can do is no longer go to your website. (I am telling my friends to avoid your website as well.) You claim that people want their news free and unencumbered by ads and other moneymaking schemes. Well, remember the old adage: there is no such thing as a free lunch. A free newspaper without advertising falls into the “free lunch” category. And perhaps, even worse, it is a major deception, coming right close to being a scam. Some people actually believe they are reading news when they are reading yet another advertisement presented to look like news. You are doing a great disservice to the public, whether you are aware of it or not. If I could think of a way of shutting you down, I would do it.
John Frederick
Ames, Iowa
Josh forwarded the e-mail to his boss, hoping that one day soon Lexington might see his idea was failing and that if the paper was to continue it must develop a new strategy. But he heard not a whisper from his boss. Not one word.
44. Disaster
Some things never change, thought Natalie as she sat in her Ford F-150, parked on a little knoll that overlooked a considerable portion of the Tamarack River Valley. It was late September, and she was on poacher duty. As surely as the first frost arrives in the fall, the calls come in complaining about game poaching and wondering why she wasn’t stopping all the illegal hunting. She wanted to tell these callers that rounding up game poachers wasn’t nearly as easy as it sounded, especially those who poached deer at night—which was when most of them operated.
She remembered so well the previous fall when she had been certain that she had the goods on Dan Burman but then had been embarrassed when she and the sheriff trekked out to his farm only to find a pair of dressed goats hanging in his barn. Natalie was convinced at the time that Burman was guilty and that he had cleverly replaced the deer carcasses with goat carcasses. If he chose to do some poaching this year, she would nail his skin to the wall.
With the driver’s-side window of her pickup open, she was listening to the early evening sounds and smelling the pungent aroma of fall. Even though she lost a lot of sleep on these watches, she also enjoyed the quiet. From time to time, she flicked on her Mag-Lite and scratched a few things in her ever-present journal. Writing helped to pass the time as she waited for the sound of a gunshot or the sight of a bright light sweeping across one of the open fields in the distance.
She allowed her mind to wander. Thoughts of Josh Wittmore and the good times they’d had together this past year quickly crowded out anything else. Was he the one? Should she say “yes” if he proposed marriage? A year ago marriage was the farthest thing from her mind as she worked hard to establish herself as a female warden in a county that believed only men should hold such positions. She believed, with substantial evidence, that she had garnered considerable respect in the county, especially from other law-enforcement people, environmental groups, and fish and wild-life organizations interested in sensible management of the county’s fish and game resources. Even those she arrested begrudgingly admitted that she was tough but fair—she treated everyone the same. She chuckled when she recalled the time she cited the mayor of Link Lake for having in his boat a largemouth bass one inch short of the lawful length. At the time, she didn’t know who he was, but it wouldn’t have mattered. She would have cited anyone—the law was the law. The incident was a considerable embarrassment to the mayor when his name appeared in the Ames County Argus’s citation list. Most of the people in Link Lake found the incident hilarious and never ceased kidding their mayor. Several even mailed him rulers with instructions on how to use them.
Would a marriage work? A law enforcement officer married to a journalist? She knew Josh was a good journalist, but he had a job that he hated. She had lately become his sounding board. When they got together, whether over a cup of coffee or for a night at her cabin, he always got around to sharing his unhappiness over what had become of Farm Country News. “It’s just not right what our paper is doing,” he often said.
A near full moon, orange and bright, hung low in the night sky as Natalie continued to look and listen. She inhaled deeply. The cool night air was refreshing, and it helped keep her alert, but soon she smelled something different. Just a hint of wood smoke. She wondered if the evening breeze had pushed the smoke from a neighbor’s chimney her way. She knew that many people in the valley continued to warm their homes, at least some of the time, with woodstoves. Heating a home this way was considerably less expensive than using propane, especially when most folks had their own woodlots.
She sat back and relaxed, pushing the new smell aside. She watched and listened, scanning the fields to the south, listening for a pickup, for the report of a rifle, for voices that carried some distance on quiet nights. Her eyes fixed on a faint red glow in the sky she hadn’t noticed before. She picked up her binoculars. It was brighter, but she still couldn’t make out what it was. Then she caught an even stronger whiff of wood smoke. S
he decided to check it out—could this be a forest fire? She fired up her pickup, drove out on the road, and headed toward the red glow.
As she got closer, the smoke smell became even stronger. Soon she saw what it was; the big new hog house at Nathan West was on fire, flames shooting into the air. She immediately got on her radio and called in the fire, alerting the local volunteer fire departments and letting the sheriff ’s office know.
She parked a safe distance away, grabbed her bag, which contained her cell phone, and ran around to the back of the building. Through the single window, she thought she saw movement inside, but she couldn’t be sure. She was clearly the first person to arrive at the scene. Could someone be trapped inside? One entire end of the building was on fire, smoke and flames everywhere. She forced open a door and entered the burning building, which was filled with thick, acrid smoke.
“Anybody in here?” she yelled. “Anybody in here?”
No response. She yelled again, “Anybody in here?” Then she heard what sounded like the tinkling of a bell, coming from deep within the building. The smoke was so thick that even with her flashlight she could see only a few feet in front of her. She was finding it increasingly difficult to breathe. She decided to return to the outside, but in the thick smoke she couldn’t find the door, couldn’t see anything, couldn’t breathe. She was on her knees, gasping for breath, the dense smoke curling around her. Then everything went black.
Oscar Anderson smelled smoke and saw flames lighting the night sky of the Tamarack River Valley. He hopped into his pickup and drove to the former golf course. He arrived the same time as Fred Russo. By this point, a half dozen fire trucks were spraying water on the fire, which still blazed out of control. On the way, Oscar met an ambulance, its red lights flashing and siren wailing.
“Geez,” said Fred when Oscar told him about seeing the ambulance. “Wonder what that’s all about?”
“Somebody must have gotten hurt in the fire,” said Oscar. “Wonder who?”
The sheriff ’s deputies strung up yellow tape to keep a growing number of spectators a safe distance from the fire.
“What happened?” Oscar asked one of them.
“I don’t know; when I got here, the whole thing was on fire. Terrible fire,” said the deputy.
“I just met the ambulance; did somebody get hurt?” asked Oscar.
“The game warden, Natalie Karlsen. Dan Burman found her just inside the door of the burning building. He must have gotten to the fire right after the warden and seen her go inside. He went in and dragged her out. I heard she was alive, but just barely. Smoke inhalation can be a killer. Burman’s a hero,” said the deputy.
“Imagine that, Dan Burman a hero,” said Oscar. Oscar had known Burman since he was a kid but never thought much of him. Burman had a reputation for hating the DNR. “Imagine him saving the game warden. Hard to believe.”
“Wonder how the fire got started?” asked Fred. By now the building had nearly burned to the ground.
“I bet it was the Tamarack River Ghost,” answered Oscar.
“You’re kidding, aren’t you?” said Fred.
“Nope, I’m not. The ghost didn’t want all these buildings and thousands of smelly pigs messing up his valley. The ghost takes care of this valley. Protects it.”
“Oscar, you are losing it. The old-timer’s disease has got you by the collar.”
“Scoff away, Fred. Make fun of me. Snicker away. But mark my word; the Tamarack River Ghost has got to be reckoned with.”
“Well I’ve got some other suspects in mind.”
“Like who?”
“Like some animal rights organization. They could’ve done it. Remember how that woman shot off her mouth at the meeting last winter?”
“They could have. But they didn’t. The Tamarack River Ghost started this fire.”
Josh was asleep when the ringing phone awakened him. He glanced at his watch; it was 10:30 p.m. He picked up the phone and mumbled, “Hello.”
“Is this Josh Wittmore?”
“Yes,” answered Josh. He didn’t recognize the voice.
“This is Sheriff Bliss, and I’m afraid I’ve got bad news for you.”
“Yes?” was all Josh could think to say. He was now fully awake.
“You are good friends with Warden Natalie Karlsen?”
“Yes, yes I am. Has something happened to Natalie?”
“She’s in the Willow River Hospital. She got caught in a big fire out here at the Nathan West hog operation.”
“A big fire at Nathan West? What burned? Will Natalie be okay?”
“The new hog house burned to the ground, and I don’t know how Natalie Karlsen is doing. But I wanted you to know.”
“Thank you,” Josh said.
For the past several weeks, Josh had turned off his scanner when he came home from work, something he had previously never done. When he learned that his new boss at Farm Country News really didn’t want him covering stories, he decided not to bother listening to his scanner. Still, had it been on, he would have known about the fire and would have hurried out to the golf course to get the story. But now he quickly pulled on his clothes and drove to the hospital, only a short distance from his apartment. After parking, he sprinted to the hospital door, a revolving affair that seemed to take forever to go around. He hurried to the information desk.
“Could you tell me Natalie Karlsen’s room number, please?”
The person on duty scanned a computer screen in front of her. “Room 325,” she said.
Josh ran to the elevator, punched the up button several times, and waited and waited for the elevator door to open. When it did arrive, he pushed “3” and soon was on the third floor, standing in front of the nurse’s station.
“Can I help you?” the nurse on duty asked.
“I’m here to see Natalie Karlsen,” Josh blurted out. “I believe she’s in room 325.”
“Yes, she is. But she may be sleeping. She had a close call today.”
Josh knocked gently on the door before entering. Natalie’s eyes were closed, and her nose and mouth were covered with a plastic mask. Tubes were stuck in her arms.
Josh touched her on the arm and said quietly, “It’s Josh, Natalie.”
Her eyes flickered open, and she smiled. Josh took her hand in his. She gently squeezed it.
“I love you,” Josh said. He had tears in his eyes. Natalie squeezed his hand again.
“You’d better get some sleep,” said Josh. “I’ll wait around for a while before I go home.”
Josh saw Natalie’s bag on the chair next to him. It looked as if some of the loose sheets of paper stuffed in it might fall out if someone moved it so Josh decided to fold the papers and push them further into the bag.
He glanced at the first sheet—it appeared to be a poem, and the byline was “M.D.” How did Natalie get one of M.D.’s poems? he wondered. He held the sheet of smudged paper in his hand for a moment. And then it hit him. Natalie was M.D. The mysterious writer of poetry—this possibility had never occurred to him. As well as he had come to know her, she had never once let on that she wrote poetry or had ever submitted anything to his or any other publication. He was both surprised and angry. Why had she not shared with him what she’d been writing? After all, he was the one who decided to publish it.
But then a darker thought crossed his mind. Did Natalie write the possibly threatening letter about Nathan West? And did she have something to do with starting the fire? His reporter’s instincts kicked in. He would have to find the answers to these troubling questions. He glanced over at Natalie, sleeping peacefully. The answers would have to wait.
45. Blame
Josh slept fitfully. His mind was on Natalie, the identity of M.D., and the huge fire that had completely destroyed one of Nathan West’s main buildings. Was it possible that Natalie, the woman he loved, was an arsonist? Was she someone with such an overzealous concern for the environment that she would burn a building to make a point?
; He had a vivid dream of a wild-eyed blonde woman, splashing gasoline on the new hog house and then touching a match to the liquid, and watching, laughing wildly, as the flames quickly spread up its side. Through an enormous cloud of black smoke, he heard the woman yelling in a high-pitched, eerie voice, “The Tamarack River Ghost doesn’t want you here. The valley doesn’t want you here. Leave, and don’t ever come back.” Then she walked into the burning building and disappeared as the flames shot ever higher into the air and the smoke became blacker and denser. As he watched the building burn, a strange apparition appeared above it—a white ghostlike creature emerging from the fire without seeming to be harmed by it. A faceless blonde joined the apparition, which embraced her. Then the two merged into one ghostly figure that floated off toward the river, away from the fire. He heard singing as the apparition slowly moved away:
Ho Ho, Ho Hay, keep the logs a-going
Keep ’em rolling and twisting.
He sat up in bed, wide awake. Had he really heard the song? Was it in his room, or was it just a dream, a bad dream? He glanced at his bedside clock—4:00 a.m. He walked into the kitchen and started a pot of coffee. He knew there would be no more sleep this night. The memory of the dream played over and over again, as he sat at his little kitchen table, drank coffee, and tried to sort out his feelings toward Natalie.
At 8:00 a.m., he drove to the hospital. He went directly to Natalie’s room, where he found her sitting up, looking mostly like her old self. The oxygen mask had been removed from her face, as had the tubes from her arms. She was eating breakfast.
“Good morning, Josh,” she said, smiling. “Do you want a cup of coffee? I can order one for you.”
“No thanks.”
“You are looking terribly glum on this fine morning, and rather tired, too, I might add.”
“I didn’t sleep well.”