Death in the Pines

by Thom Hartmann

  “‘Great fleas have little fleas upon their backs to bite ’em,’” I quoted. “‘And little fleas have lesser fleas, and so ad infinitum.’”

  “Heard it,” said Jerry, unimpressed, pushing away his empty plate. “Anyway, the parasites, the viruses, are called bacteriophages. They can carry the genes from one bacterium to all the others.” He spread his fingers. “Imagine that Superman was real. He comes along, shakes your hand, and instead of catching the common cold from him, you discover you can fly and bullets bounce off you. That’s how dramatic the change is. It happens all the time in nature, especially with bacteria and fungi.”

  “So there’re more and more nasty diseases loose in the world.”

  “More and more that are resistant to antibiotics.”

  “All right. What in the world does this have to do with Caleb Benson?”

  “I have no earthly idea. If Grandpa was talking about that, he was off on some wild goose chase of his own. Benson has nothing to do with cattle.”

  “He has a lot to do with timber. Do genes jump in forests?”

  “Unlikely to be significant. Trees grow so slowly, not like a bacterium.”

  “Other plants?”

  “Look, go to the newspaper office and ask them to dig up the story I did on this three years ago. But in a nutshell, back in the ’70s scientists figured out how to recode DNA without hybridization, without crossbreeding. We could simply extract it, recode it, and then insert it in a plant or animal. Even take genes from one life form and put them into a totally different one. Use a virus, or just inject it with something called a gene gun.”

  “Genetic engineering.”

  “Right. Say there’s a gene that controls the fertility of a seed. If a scientist can turn that gene off, the plant is sterile. If he could go a step further and figure out how to set that gene so its normal state is off but it can turn on if you feed the plant a certain chemical, one your company manufactured and patented, then you could control the fertility of a crop plant.”

  “I’ve read of something called Terminator Seeds.”

  “Yeah, it’s more complex than that, but in the same arena. It’s a way of making sure farmers can’t use seeds unless they buy from you, because only you have the chemical to make the seeds fertile.”

  “Didn’t the government stop that?”

  “Put it on hold. Too much publicity, and scientists were concerned about the gene jumping into the wild by crosspollination. One company put a gene into soybeans and corn to make the plants resistant to their herbicide, so farmers could spray and kill the weeds without killing the crops. But the gene jumped from the food crops into weeds that were closely enough related to react to soybean and corn pollen. The result was superweeds, created accidentally, the same way we created a virulent kind of E. coli accidentally.”

  “But if a plant can fight off a chemical, that just makes it stronger,” I said. “I don’t see how that can endanger a forest. Could a forest be taken over by superweeds?”

  “No,” he said flatly. “I can’t imagine any kind of genetic engineering that would endanger a forest.” His enthusiasm had ebbed. He turned and beckoned the waitress. She came over with an empty coffee cup and a small metal pot of steaming water. Jerry took a plastic bag from his shirt pocket and dumped some brown dust into his cup. It had a strange, musty smell. He poured the hot water on it. “My tonic,” he said. “Helps the digestion, good for the blood.”

  “Herbs?”

  “And Chinese mushrooms.” He stirred and sipped the tea, rolling it in his mouth as though it were a fine wine before swallowing. “Want to try some?”

  “I’ll pass, thanks.”

  “Most people are afraid to try something new.” He took another appreciative drink. “OK, back to genetic engineering. Here’s something I’m researching, getting ready to write about. Last year a company found the gene that controls how fast grasses grow. They found a way to flip its switch so grass will slow down to grow at approximately one-tenth its normal rate. Now they can sell you grass seed that will grow so slowly that you only need to mow twice a season.”

  “Sounds ideal for golf courses.”

  “But if it jumps, then the weed grasses that control erosion, that provide food for rabbits and deer, grow one-tenth as fast as they should, and a whole ecosystem is thrown out of balance. Worse, wheat, rice, rye, barley, oats, all these are related to the grass on your lawn. Most food grains are overbred, overweight grass seeds. If their growth slowed, the seeds wouldn’t mature and the world would starve. Half the food in the world comes directly from grass seeds—we call them grains—or indirectly, from animals fed on those seeds.”

  “And what’s being done about that?”

  “It’s being debated, but the whole system is so interbred that nothing much can be done politically. Here in Vermont, everyone’s flipped out because so many dairy farms use rBGH, a synthetic growth hormone that contributes to milk production. Now, the r in rBGH stands for ‘recombinant,’ meaning it’s genetically engineered. BGH is ‘bovine growth hormone.’ It makes cows grow faster. The human equivalent determines whether a fetus becomes a dwarf or a seven-foot-tall NBA star.”

  “Does the bovine version affect humans?”

  “Government says no, but some researchers and scientists, especially in Europe, disagree. They have real concerns it may be linked to breast cancer or other types of hormone-mediated cancers.”

  “Has that been proven?”

  “No. Human studies are difficult. You can’t just give a group of women rBGH and see if they get cancer. That’s illegal and unethical—unless you arrange to drop it into their food or water supply and follow it for thirty years to see what happens. We did that with DDT, and effectively we’re doing it now with rBGH.”

  He moved his cup around on the table as if he were playing with a model car. “Vermont now has the second highest breast cancer rate in the United States.” He laughed, a bitter sound that reminded me Jeremiah’s daughter had died of cancer. “Could be coincidence, they say.”

  “And Vermonters know that?”

  “Sure, it’s been in the papers. That’s why organic farmers want to label their milk as rBGH-free, why Ben and Jerry wanted to label their products the same way. But close to twenty-five years ago now the FDA rode into town and wrote up a policy. Now if you mention rBGH at all on your label, you have to say something nice about it, like it’s the same as natural hormones. And you can’t say anything negative about it, or even question the whole idea of hormone-spiked cows.”

  “Speak no ill of big business.”

  “And this is among the biggest. Over half the food crops in the US are now genetically modified. Practically all the domestic beef and chicken are laced with hormones, pesticides, antibiotics. It’s an unholy mess, and the government won’t do a damn thing about it because they don’t represent the people but the corporations that pay for their junkets and finance their campaigns. That’s all in my article in the paper.”

  “So. Do you think your grandfather’s death was engineered by a big company?”

  Jerry shook his head. “I don’t see a connection. As far as I’m concerned, this is just stuff I like to write about. And Grandpa seemed interested in it.”

  “And not long ago Jeremiah was upset about Caleb Benson and talking about gene-jumping.”

  “I really don’t think there’s anything there,” Jerry said, again in that depressed, listless voice. “Grandpa just had a burr under his saddle, that’s all. I can’t see how any of this could’ve had anything to do with the car that hit him.” He sighed. “I might as well tell you, this morning I called Benson’s business to ask if they knew anything about Grandpa contacting Benson. I got passed around to a PR man who said he didn’t know what I was talking about, and that was that.” He flicked a finger at the very small remnant of his sandwich he hadn’t finished. “Odds are the soy that this tofu is made from is genetically modified. Almost all American soy is.”

  “But
no forests.”

  He shook his head. “No forests. Trees take too long to grow. Companies are interested in this year’s profits, not some potential gain in thirty years.”

  “So what did the two guys who tied you to the tree want to discuss?”

  “Thanks for lunch.” He reached for his jacket.

  “You still want to pretend it never happened.”

  “Nothing happened. Don’t bring it up again. If you think you’re working for me or my grandfather because some of this stuff happened around you, you’re not. I hereby officially fire you, as the representative of the estate. Stay out of my life, OK?”

  “Calm down, cowboy.”

  “Don’t patronize me. I don’t need you to save me from anybody. There’s nothing I can’t handle. You’re off this case, got it?”

  I pulled one of Jeremiah’s twenties from my pocket and dropped it on the table. “Jerry, it’s crystal clear. But just one thing: even if I was willing to work for you—you couldn’t afford it.”

  He turned and walked away. I picked up the envelope and pulled out Jerry’s article to learn more about gene-jumping and Superman. At the moment, I felt low on invulnerability.

  15

  Jerry told it better than he wrote it, I thought as I considered my next move. I didn’t know enough about Caleb Benson. He said old Jeremiah hadn’t feared him, but feared change. Personally I wasn’t too happy with the kind of change that turned a benign, useful bug into a killer bacterium, and wondered if Benson had wandered from lumber into cattle or something that might involve bugs that Benson’s associate Frank would make sure were killed off. I wanted to find out if Benson’s enterprises might have anything to do with gene-jumping.

  It did not take the skills of a licensed PI to find Benson’s house. I asked a random person on the street and got precise directions. It wasn’t the kind of place you’d expect a man of Benson’s attainments to occupy, but it was substantial, an older house that at second glance had undergone more face-lifts than the average TV talk show host. As I walked up and rang the bell, two wall-mounted video cameras eyed me.

  A blonde woman, probably the third wife that Jerry had mentioned, answered the door. She wore a gray wool sweater and tan slacks and let me into a foyer that somehow reminded me of a small display room in a museum. I introduced myself and asked if I could see Mr. Benson. She gave me a mildly shocked look. “Oh, he’s not home. He’s at his office in Newport.”

  “It’s hard to catch him there without an appointment,” I said. “What time will he be back?”

  The question seemed to offend her. She reopened the front door, crafted of antique walnut and cut-glass. It was probably worth more than my whole cabin. “I’m not his secretary.”

  “Are you his wife?”

  The sun slanted in through the open door. She replied oddly: “He’s my husband.” She had good coloring, a baby-doll sort of face, but I could see that in ten years she might run to flesh.

  I said, “Then you’re Eva.” The name had appeared in the newspaper story of the confrontation Benson had been involved in, though the photo showed only him, not his wife.

  “I’m Eva. And you’re Mr. Tyler, and whatever you want with my husband, he isn’t here.”

  “What I want is to talk to him for a minute about Jeremiah Smith.”

  She closed the door, and we stood in the foyer facing each other. Behind her a grandfather clock taller than she was clacked off the seconds. “Jeremiah Smith?” she asked, her blue eyes showing surprise. “The old man who—that accident?”

  “That’s him.”

  “But he’s dead.” Her lips, which she had colored with some kind of cantaloupe-colored gloss, compressed. “He was walking beside the highway and a car hit him. Sad.” She blinked twice, rapidly. “Why do you want to talk to my husband about Mr. Smith? I hardly think they knew each other, and if you’re thinking my husband was the one who hit him—”

  I shook my head. “I’d prefer to ask him the questions, Eva.”

  “Then it’s not a business matter.”

  I shrugged and took a wild shot. “I do have an interest in forestry and genetics. So did Jeremiah. Someone thought our interests might have something in common with Mr. Benson’s companies.”

  “Who?”

  “Jeremiah’s grandson, Jerry.”

  Eva Benson blushed and half turned, blurting, “But Caleb—” and then she recovered and took a deep breath, as calm as a professional actor. “I know Jerry. We were in high school together.”

  “Oh, you were friends?”

  “No, he was two grades ahead of me.” She seemed on the verge of saying something else, but then gave me a patronizing smile. “I’ll tell my husband you called, Mr. Tyler. Do you have a card?”

  “No. If I can’t find Mr. Benson in Newport, I’ll just stop by again later.”

  She gave me a level look. “I don’t know that you’ll have much luck. He’s rarely home.” Her eyebrows raised as if she were asking a question. But she didn’t put it in words, and when she opened the door again, I left her in the big house. She closed the door slowly, so that all the way down the front walk I felt her gaze on my back. The door clicked as I reached the sidewalk.

  I walked the three blocks from the Benson house back to Main Street. Montpelier hadn’t had snow in two or three days, and the sidewalks were dry, though patches of dirty snow lay in strips along the shady sides of curbs. The town strings up tinsel and a giant fairy-light snowflake for First Night, and the decorations were still up, quivering in the breeze. I supposed they would be in place until spring.

  In an investigation it’s always good to look for loose ends, and now I had a small one. When Jerry Smith had told me about his grandfather’s driving him out to the Benson place, he’d made it sound as if he didn’t know Eva at all. That fact, and the way she’d reacted when I’d mentioned Jerry’s name, made me wonder exactly how well they had known each other. Jerry had insisted that Benson had nothing to do with a couple of guys tying him to a tree and zapping him with several thousand volts of electricity. Eva Benson had impulsively mentioned her husband’s name when I brought up Jerry. It was enough to make me wonder.

  I got into my Jeep, parked at a curb midway between the diner and the newspaper building, and pondered. There is such a thing as pareidolia, the human tendency to see coherent figures in random shapes: New Hampshire’s Old Man of the Mountain, a profile in granite, the Madonna in the scorch patterns of a toasted sandwich, a cloud that is very like a whale. I had to consider the possibility that everything that had happened was random, that there was no real pattern. Somebody putting a wick in Jeremiah’s gas tank and shooting at us might be unrelated to anything else, a crackpot, a warped redneck prankster. Jerry’s abduction might have been done by two guys who had no connection to the truck burning. Jeremiah could have been hit by a tourist bleary after too many hours behind the wheel. Genes might have nothing to do with anything.

  But Sylvia had told me the car had deliberately swerved to hit Jeremiah. And her lesson in the forest, if that’s what it was, seemed to tell me to look for unity in apparent chaos, for the pattern in randomness, and for something that was a danger to all life on earth, a pretty damn grandiose notion. What common factors did I have? The strongest was Jerry himself. And then Bill Grinder, who popped up in odd places at odd times.

  I weighed the probable success of a trip to Newport. I had no leverage to force open Benson’s office door. On the other hand, the newspaper office was half a block away. I left the envelope of articles in the car and went to see if Gina or anybody else there had any new ideas.

  It was still early afternoon, but two of the three staff members I’d met had left the office. Only Gina Berkof was there, sitting at her desk and rattling her keyboard again. I walked across the echoing, open room and sat in the old wooden chair beside her desk.

  She hit the Enter key and said, “That’s the big problem with not having a private office. I can’t close the door.”


  “Sorry to bother you again. Thanks for the copies of the stories.”

  “No problem. Now what can I tell you?” She swiveled toward me and picked up her blue pencil, as though she felt more at ease that way.

  “Little more information. Eva Benson?”

  “Oh, boy,” she said. “Look, this is a newspaper. We have no interest in rumors.”

  “What rumors?”

  “Ask the woman. She’ll probably talk to you. If the rumors are true.” Gina lifted an eyebrow and smiled.

  “At least tell me if she has any involvement with her husband’s business interests.”

  “I don’t know.”

  “And are either of them involved with the Abenaki?”

  She dropped the pencil. “What? Listen, did Jerry tell you about—” Then she said, “No, he wouldn’t have. He doesn’t know. OK, have you been checking up on me or was that a lucky shot?”

  “I haven’t been checking on you.”

  She said, “Because the Abenaki cause is kind of a hot button with me. I’m working on an article. The Abenaki got a royal screwing from the state, and from the federal government for that matter. All they want is recognition that they’re an actual tribe, but the state claims they don’t exist, that all the Abenaki were exterminated. That ignores the Abenaki who show up living and breathing, with birth lineages and family history and all that. The state seems to claim that the Abenaki can’t still be around because Vermont was just so damned good at genocide.”

  “What’s at stake?”

  “What’s always at stake?” Gina asked. “Money, of course. There’s a core of state politicians who are afraid that if they grant the Abenaki claims, then the tribe will demand some of their land back to create a reservation. That will cut into the tax base, complicate land claims, stir things up. Better to keep them dead Indians.”