Later, she realized she was once more on the bunk, facing a porthole. Water was running somewhere. It was night. An orange glow flickered below the opening. She had lit another fire, but had no memory of it.
Brenda rolled off her bunk and hit the floor hard. She caught her breath, then crawled into the passageway. The door to the shower room was swinging. Ehrlich was inside, slumped under the spray, talking. The air stank of puss.
“Get out of there….” She didn’t recognize her voice. “Bad for you… Get out. You need oil on your body.”
He was facing away, shaking, talking to the wall. “Sorry, Mr. Minot. No problem. Make it right, you’ll see. Back on track, you’ll see.”
It took all she had to pull him out. The Japanese tape loop had been playing for days. Ehrlich pulled free and worked his way back up the steps. At some point, she followed on hands and knees.
She heard his voice, but not from the wheelhouse. The gate railing was open. Brenda crawled over and looked down. Somehow, Ehrlich had made it down the ladder and was in the outrigger. It had never broken loose and still bobbed next to the hull. He was kneeling in it, trying to untie the rope. He kept working at it, mumbling.
She had no strength to call down. He looked up, frowned, and went back to the rope.
Everything after that she learned from the doctor on the Pacific Vision.
Like other vessels near their possible location, the cruise ship had been contacted by the Navy on Guam, following a report from Pohnpei. “I don’t know why the message was delayed twelve days, but you’re very lucky,” he said. An inter-district prop plane on a night flight between Rabaul and Truk Lagoon had seen fire. The pilot made a low pass, spotted a ship dead in the water, and radioed the location. The Pacific Vision had just left Truk and reached them a day later.
“You can also thank volcanoes in the Philippines,” the doctor told her. “The ash in the atmosphere means the temperature’s a few degrees lower than normal. In your case, that probably made the difference.”
She could recall most of what had happened up to the seventh or eighth day. The rest was all bits and pieces—a sky and sea with no horizon, flat and gray. Waterspouts, blasts of music, Ehrlich and herself crying. They told her the Nauro Maru had been adrift for thirteen days.
She couldn’t eat real food because of kidney damage. For half a day Brenda heard but couldn’t see—her eyes had swollen shut. Still in the outrigger when they were found, Ehrlich had been nearer death. They hooked him up to a dialysis machine and put them both on dextrose/saline IVs, coupled with antibiotic drips for the infected burns.
Once she was conscious, shellacked, mahogany-tan passengers in sarongs and string bikinis came to the ship’s clinic, needing to satisfy their curiosity about the effects of starvation and exposure.
They described the scene of rescue, the ocean so smooth that a crewman had used a jet ski to reach the trawler. Eleven hundred sunbathers had crowded the decks, a marimba band playing. What was it like? they asked. Did you pray? What was your worst moment?
She heard and answered the thoughtless questions, but could hardly hear herself. There’s justice in this, Brenda thought. Tit for tat, quid pro quo. You’re on the receiving end of a Lightning Rod story.
“God, her skin—”
She heard them just after her eyes opened. Ehrlich was on the other side of the drawn curtain. She turned on her pillow and could make out a couple at the foot of her bed. The man was barrel-chested and hairy, wearing a sarong, the woman in a terry-cloth robe.
“Like I keep telling you, honey, sunscreen. You don’t reapply often enough.”
“Did she know what was happening to her?”
“Not beyond a certain point. But after the eyes shut, she could still hear.”
“Will she get better?”
“Depends. Recovery could take weeks. She may have serious retina damage, be very sensitive to light. She’s real fair, those are nasty burns. Plus I would guess permanent kidney damage. She must be a tough number, though. I heard the man’s iffy. If they make it, they’re looking at one beautiful payday in court. I’ll give her my card.”
A lawyer. Brenda tried to get his attention by moving her head. He noticed and came around the side of the bed. When he leaned over, she saw he took good care of his own eyes. Up close, he looked like a raccoon.
“Fuck you,” she whispered.
He unfolded his arms and straightened.
“What did she say?” the woman asked.
“They need rest, come on.”
◆◆◆◆◆
A day later, the Pacific Vision reached Pohnpei. The doctor explained that the island’s channel was too narrow for the cruise ship and a tender was lowered. She and Ehrlich were carried aboard on stretchers, taken ashore and quickly driven to the district hospital.
They were put in the same room. Shabby and low-ceilinged, the walls were stained from a leaky roof. Something as unimportant as water stains could cause Brenda to break down. Ehrlich was conscious at last, still on the kidney machine. Looking over, she saw that he, too, was crying in the dark, ugly room. All her feelings of hatred and contempt for him had been burned away.
“We’re alive,” she told him. “Come on, Bob, it’s okay.” He wouldn’t answer. “We both get another shot. Think of Laura. Veal like you never tasted. You get to see her again.” Crying, laughing, Brenda wanted him to see it.
He just looked at the ceiling.
The nurses started feeding her a kind of porridge, making sure she didn’t eat too fast. The curtains were drawn to shield her eyes and she was given sunglasses. On the second day, the doctors determined that Ehrlich was too sick for the facilities on Pohnpei, and that Brenda was well enough to travel. GENE 2 people came in on the next scheduled flight. They arranged for beds and attendants, flew them first to Honolulu, then to the mainland.
◆◆◆◆◆
The Mariposa Medical Center was located next to the Phoenix airport. All Brenda could do was sleep and eat, still hooked up to an IV. From her room, she called her mother, but got no answer. She tried her old roommate.
“Thank God,” Renee said. “When I got your message I called Ned. I phoned your hotel on Pohnpei, but you’d left. What happened?”
“Tell you later.”
“I’ll book a flight, I’ll be there tonight.”
“There’s no point. They say I can fly in a day or two. But call Gordon Poole. See if he can get me in a hospital outside Detroit. I don’t want reporters.”
“That won’t be easy, you’re news. The rescue was in The New York Times.”
The second morning, the nurses had her walking. She crept along the hall with the IV pole, sweating through her gown. That afternoon, they wheeled her down to the first-floor lobby, into a van with a hydraulic lift. Iris was inside, the attendant who had traveled with her from Pohnpei.
“Where are we going?” Brenda asked.
“I’m not allowed to talk.”
“Why?”
“That’s what they told me.”
◆◆◆◆◆
Twenty minutes later, the van reached Phoenix. It threaded through downtown traffic and came to a stop in front of the Neff Industries Tower. The chair was lowered, and Iris pushed her inside. They crossed the big lobby to a waiting elevator and rode to the twentieth floor. Moments later, Iris wheeled her into an outer office.
It was separated from an inner suite by glass panels. Inside, a woman was kneeling on the carpet, playing with a child. Come to me, snookums, oh such a big boy. Behind her, the tops of skyscrapers filled the windows.
Another woman stepped through a side entry. “Oh, Miss Contay, just a sec. I’ll take Mark to the nursery and be right back.”
Iris locked the wheelchair and went over to a couch, sat and began thumbing through Time. On the wall behind her, a poster showed a man on horseback doffing a cowboy hat. Russ Minot.
Brenda looked back to the inner office. The kneeling woman had blonde, well-cut hair and refined f
eatures. She wore little makeup, eyes sharp as she coaxed and clapped for the little boy. The secretary crossed and picked up the child. Only then did the woman look out. Brenda had no doubt it was rehearsed. Mark was a prop, and Quality Time was over. The secretary came back through the entry carrying the boy and went into the corridor, closing the door.
The blonde woman now stood in the entry. “Sorry, that wasn’t the best timing.”
Iris got up.
“That’s fine, I’ll take her.” The woman stepped in front of the wheelchair and offered her hand. “I’m Betsy McIntosh, GENE 2’s PR director.”
Brenda adjusted her sunglasses and settled her hand on the chair arm. We’re not going to network just yet, she thought. The woman pursed her lips, then stepped behind the wheelchair. Swiftly she steered it through the side passage, pushed Brenda into the office and closed the door. At the far end of the room rested living-room furniture. McIntosh went to it and carried back a chair. She set it before Brenda, got a legal pad from the desk, returned and sat.
Neither spoke. Through her sunglasses, Brenda stared into alert, intelligent eyes—and then Betsy McIntosh started to cry. She kept looking at Brenda as tears slid down her face, clasping the arms of her chair. Phones rang somewhere. An elevator chimed.
“What’s the matter?” Brenda asked. “Worried about the next quarterly statement?”
“I’m sorry—” McIntosh shook her head. “I knew the medical facts, but seeing you… I have stills from your station. How much weight did you lose?”
“Twenty-two pounds.”
“You couldn’t spare five.”
“I’m touched. Let’s get to it.”
The woman nodded and looked down at the legal pad on her knees, wiping her eyes. “In your position I’d probably feel the same,” she said. “Bitter. Determined to punish.”
“Not bitter. Just determined.”
“To make an example of GENE 2.”
“Now you’re talking.”
“It won’t work.”
“We’ll see.”
“Yes, that’s why we’re having this conversation. So you can think it through.”
“I had some free time for that lately.”
Somber-faced, Betsy McIntosh nodded. “Thirteen days. But I want to set out for you what’s likely to happen. You had this experience on an island. You learned things that seem wrong. Immoral. Circumstances led to your near death, a horrible ordeal. You plan to go back home and call a press conference, or develop the story for W-DIG. You want justice done, and people compensated—”
“Forget compensation,” Brenda said. “You can’t compensate dead people. Or crazy people. Or polluted children. That’s your legal department talking. I know you have contracts that show Pirim’s leadership ‘knew’ what they were doing.”
“Yes, we do. It’s a fallback position, if we need it.”
After a moment, McIntosh got up, stooping to collect pieces of a toy puzzle still on the floor. Everything she touched seemed like a prop, every gesture designed. She took the puzzle to her desk, put it in a drawer and got out a small recorder. She placed it on the desk and pushed a button.
For several seconds, the room was filled with a shrill mix of hoarse shouts and moans. Mostly unintelligible, a voice still rang through, talking about Very Cherry soda. The person sounded possessed, demonic, like someone speaking in tongues. It’s me, Brenda thought.
McIntosh clicked it off. “That was made on the Pacific Vision,” she said. “By what I guess you’d have to call a passenger with a perverse sense of curiosity. Someone who came to see you and Bob right after you were picked up. We learned of it and purchased it.”
“We’re getting right down to the hard-ball bottom line, aren’t we?” Brenda said.
McIntosh folded her hands on the desk. “What can I say? You can hurt us. We’re legally protected, but we don’t need the publicity this story can generate.”
“Lay it out for me, Betsy McIntosh.”
“Yes, I will. And I hope you’ll think about it very carefully. Call a press conference, and we’ll counter with the tape. Of course, we’ve edited it. The overall effect is of someone who’s insane. Or hallucinating. Making up wild fictions. We’ve investigated you and know a fair amount. We know about your college. We know you were promiscuous. That you partied with people expelled for drug use. That material establishes a certain background.”
Under her folded hands was a manila folder. McIntosh slid it forward, then re-folded her hands.
“Then there are your Lightning Rod features. They segue convincingly with your past, and what’s on the tape. I am reasonably sure any tell-it-like-it-is revelation would sound far-fetched. People would be sympathetic about what happened, but not believe you. At least that’s the spin we’d put on it. You’re popular in your market, but I think something like this would end your career. Sympathy or not, you’d be thought unstable. Too risky.”
It made sense. She was pretty, with a slight Scottish brogue to her American accent. As Brenda stared at her, a puff of air-conditioned breeze passed over the raw, new skin on her shrunken hands and face. She felt no match. Outclassed.
“How’s your man on Pirim?” she asked. “Going to ship him a few more gallons of phenobarbital?”
“Calvin’s fine. Recovered from his gunshot wound. He’s concerned about you. We let him know you were all right.”
“How are his wasps?”
McIntosh got up, came around the desk and sat again in front of Brenda. “He’ll continue his own research and make a real contribution.”
She leaned forward. “Look, you know him, I don’t,” she said quietly. “All I’ve got is his personnel file. What I see there is a story of hope and progress. What will be gained if you go into gear on this, Brenda? I know you don’t trust me, but you have to see we aren’t going to pursue the research that caused this to happen. Research Calvin Moser had nothing to do with. If we aren’t forced to counter a public charge, you go back to Michigan a hero. A gutsy survivor. We’ve learned our lesson. We’ve made serious mistakes, but we’re trainable. It’s over. We’ll treat everyone affected. You say forget compensation, but we won’t. It’s necessary. Legal or not, our work hurt people.”
“Killed people.”
“That can’t be proved, Brenda. The Volunteer on Pirim drowned. That’s what the Peace Corps report says. He ran into the ocean, the body wasn’t recovered.”
She appeared to have everything covered. But unless she was concealing it, Betsy McIntosh did not know what Moser had done with Vince Soublik’s severed head.
“So, that’s where this stands,” she said. “Compensation ought to apply to you, too, whether you want it or not. It was our boat, our operation. You traveled to Pirim because our liaison took you. Suffered more than anyone besides Bob Ehrlich can ever know. Give it to charity if you want, or the Pirimese. Although I doubt they’ll need it when this is through.”
“A projection TV in every little grass shack.”
“A trust fund is more likely.”
“How about Ehrlich?”
McIntosh curled her hands on the chair arms and shrugged. “He’s a company man,” she said. “Bob’s no whistleblower. He knows we had good intentions and they went bad, that’s all.”
Brenda unlocked the chair’s brake levers to signal she had heard enough. McIntosh stood and smiled down faintly. She ran a hand through her hair, then stepped to the glass wall and rapped for the attendant.
A projection TV in every little grass shack.
Lindbergh looked back down at the glossy photo of Brenda Contay and smiled. The photo was paper-clipped to her file, a publicity still from her press pack. It showed her outside a police precinct station, standing next to the Harley. She was holding her helmet as she talked to a cop.
He sat at the desk in the small office adjacent to McIntosh’s, listening to the conference phone’s speaker. A tough number—it was evident even in the stagy photo. Adrift for two weeks, starving, burned
, eyes and kidneys screwed up. But she wasn’t taking any shit from Betsy. Not your garden-variety TV bimbo.
He heard knocking coming from the speaker. A door opened. “Iris—”
Clipped to his suit coat’s lapel was a plastic photo ID that read Corporate Security. In the two weeks since starting, he had worked hard to establish himself in the department. Tactfully, he had pointed out flaws in Neff’s building surveillance, suggesting stairwell cameras be added to those on the first floor and elevators. Metal detectors were now in place above the lobby’s three sets of revolving doors. Jokes about his name were already tapering off. He was just Chuck Lindbergh now. Last week, he had gone to lunch with his department head. He told people what they wanted to hear. Made his own ideas seem like theirs, let them take the credit. Lindbergh had learned the corporate drill in Reno, playing golf with casino executives. He and his new supervisor had played that weekend.
“All right, she’s gone,” McIntosh said.
He snapped off the conference phone. Stepping to the door connecting the offices, Lindbergh buttoned his suit coat before entering. McIntosh was at her desk, writing. Hands in his pockets, he walked to the glass wall behind her and looked out.
“Well?” she asked.
He jingled the change in his pocket. “I don’t know, she’s still in there punching.”
Glass-curtained office towers gleamed in the late-afternoon desert haze. They looked to him like molten bars of steel and gold. For two weeks, Brenda Contay had fried under such a sun, and lived.
“What’s that mean?” McIntosh asked, still writing.
“She doesn’t like to lose.”
“That’s the point. If she makes waves, no more Lightning Rod. Brenda Contay’s failed at everything except that. But she’s not dumb. Don’t tell me she’s willing to throw away the one thing she ever did right, just because some guy she once knocked got himself drowned.”
Lindbergh smiled again. Knocked instead of fucked—a word from her Glasgow past. He had worked late every night since starting, and in the second week, he had used his clearance to enter Personnel and read Betsy McIntosh’s own file. She, too, was a tough number. Ambitious, driven.
The Anything Goes Girl (A Brenda Contay Novel Of Suspense Book 1) Page 16