by Jack Lacey
‘Damn it...’
Sizzler’s was nowhere to be seen. Maybe I’d entered the town on a different road? Or maybe the burger joint had been closed down and Nancy didn’t know about it?
I left the town behind and worked my way slowly up through a series of snaking bends, hemmed in by rocky escarpments, feeling frustrated suddenly. Then, as I searched for somewhere safe to turn around, a dark blue sedan swung around the next bend on the wrong side of the road, heading straight for me.
‘Fuck!’
I grabbed the steering wheel tightly trying to avoid its trajectory, then took the decision to go left and thundered across the scalpings, bouncing off the cutting wall as I went, shooting across the road again, narrowly missing another car travelling behind me, before finally coming to a bone-crushing halt between a large road sign and a lump of rock.
I sat there motionless for a moment temporarily stunned, not believing what had just happened, then grabbed the door handle and fell out onto the ground. I took a few deep breaths trying to regain my senses, then looked over to see the sedan angled on its side in a drainage ditch, its far-side wheels elevated a good metre in the air, still spinning.
I stood up feeling groggy then ran over to it and stared in through the windscreen. Inside was a young brunette with her eyes closed, wearing a red puffer jacket and black woollen hat, a trickle of blood running down her attractive face. I went to the driver’s side and tried to open the door. Such was the tilt of the car it wouldn’t budge. Then I smelt petrol.
‘Shit...’
I ran to the rear of the vehicle, picked up a rock and smashed the back windscreen with one firm hit.
‘We’ll have you out in one minute, darling,’ I shouted, without response.
I scrambled through the window and clocked the smoke in the foot-well.
‘Mother of god...’
Working frantically, I located the seat adjuster and worked it back as fast as I could, until the girl’s body was leaning sufficiently back for me to grab her under the arms and pull her out through the smashed window onto the small square trunk, then onto the ground. When I saw the flames, I picked her up in my arms and ran back to the stolen pick-up and took shelter.
As I lowered her down, the sedan went up in a deafening explosion. I ducked my head instinctively. The girl moaned and came around. I stared at her face, thinking how familiar it looked, before realizing it was the same as the photo I’d seen in Lexington. It was the biologist, Nancy Stringer.
‘Are you okay, Nancy? Are you hurt anywhere?’ I said concerned.
She looked confused for a second at hearing her name, then seemed to guess who I was from my accent.
‘Blake?’
I nodded.
She offered a hazy smile.
‘I think someone may have cut my brakes...’
Chapter Sixteen
‘the sanctuary’
Devil’s Fork. Cumberland Mountains.
I watched intrigued as Martha pulled a variety of green and brown bottles from the shelves, filled with an array of ointments and tinctures, then sat in obedient silence as she dabbed their gloopy contents onto our numerous cuts, the lump on Nancy’s forehead and the sizeable swelling over my eye where I’d hit the windscreen.
‘Well, I’m glad ya came back, Nancy. I just wasn’t expecting it to be so soon,’ the mid-wife said, breaking the numb silence.
‘Yeah, right,’ Nancy replied, patting her head gingerly with an ice pack.
‘I tell yer, it geeves a whole new meaning to running into someone, don’t it?’
I smiled painfully, eyeing Martha Reynolds with curiosity. She was wearing a pair of faded dungarees stretched over a short, dumpy frame and a flowery bleached cotton shirt underneath them, which complemented the ancient-looking sandals on her feet. She looked like the sort who enjoyed living by simple means, and appreciated the simple pleasures in life. Her solid, two-storey mountain lodge certainly seemed to radiate that. It had the same welcoming glow as she did...
‘It was lucky that the brakes didn’t go a few more miles down the road where the bends are fiercer,’ I said, feeling the strange lotion bite as she applied it.
‘Do you know who deed it?’ she quizzed, looking at us both.
‘I theenk we all know who did it,’ the biologist replied softly.
Martha headed back to the ramshackle kitchen and made some more noise.
‘I just can’t understand how they deedn’t snap right aways...’
‘They fit a small explosive device to the brake lines, which is then activated when you reach a certain speed to cause maximum damage,’ I explained, my face stinging from all the blows.
‘Are you serious?’ Martha said, returning with some steaming mugs of coffee.
‘I’m afraid it is, yes...’
‘And how do you know about things like that, Mr Blake, if you don’t mind me asking?’ she said eyeing me with suspicion suddenly.
‘Hey, Corrigan’s men roughed him up good and proper at my place, then tied him to a tree in the Daniel Boone. He doesn’t work for them, okay?’
‘God damn…is there no lengths these people won’t go to?’ Martha said, hands on hips, her face etched with defiance.
‘Nope,’ Nancy said, patting my thigh in solidarity.
I turned to face her and tweaked a smile. For a second our gazes locked onto each other and there was some sort of unconscious exchange.
‘Gunna make some stew tonight, that orta sort you two out,’ Martha said, severing the moment.
‘Thanks,’ we replied in tandem.
I laughed and felt a nerve twinge in my face. I’d taken a real thump in the crash, and just hadn’t realized such was my concern for Nancy. I was lucky I hadn’t busted anything serious, or gone through the bloody windscreen.
‘There are a couple clean beds up in the attic room for you guys later. I’ve got a some guests staying for B and B tonight, so you can’t have the main rooms, but it’ll be comfortable and warm enough,’ Martha announced, eyeing us like we were kids on a sleep over.
‘I’m really indebted to you...thanks,’ I said genuinely.
‘Sure thing,’ she replied, readjusting the clip in her thick auburn hair.
I shuffled forward to the edge of the sofa, keen to ask the question that had been on my lips since our arrival.
‘I know when we chatted on the phone before, Martha, you said that you hadn’t heard from Chrissie recently. Is that still the case?’
Martha pulled up a rocking chair next to the log burner and stoked it a little as if deep in thought.
‘Can’t remember the last time we did chat in truth, Blake. It’s been a while...’
I fumbled for a moment and pulled out my cell.
‘The number I’ve got for her is this one. She’s still not picking up.’
I held the phone up so she could see the illuminated number.
‘Yeah, that looks about right.’
‘It would just be great to talk to her, that’s all. She might be able to lead me directly to Ethan and Olivia and save me one hell of a lot of time and stress.’
‘As I’ve said before, she’s got a lot of changes happening in her life at the moment, son. I thought I’d let her come to me when she’s good and ready. You know how it is...’
‘Yes of course,’ I replied, disappointed.
The conversation petered out and for a good few minutes the job of finding Olivia Deacon was temporarily forgotten. The mountain lodge would be a good place to rest up for the night too I reflected. It seemed secluded enough to keep us out of trouble at the very least. And a night of uninterrupted sleep and a decent stew would certainly raise the energy levels, as well as give me some more time to quiz Nancy about what was really going on in the mountains…
A good half-hour had elapsed before Martha finally stood up, breaking my ruminations.
‘Well, I’m gunna head up the road to get some provisions before the guests come later. You’ll be okay, won’t you?’
she asked, staring solely at Nancy.
The biologist shot me a smile then nodded back to her friend.
‘Sure.’
‘I’ll leave you to it then...’
I heard the door slam a few minutes later. For a while Nancy and I just sat there in silence again, conversation alluding us. Then I heard her shuffle in her seat restlessly as if some question were welling up inside her, needing to be aired.
‘I think there’s more to you than meets the eye, Blake, you know...’
‘Yeah?’
‘Well first things first…what sort of name is Blake? Is that your first or second name? It kinda sounds pretty harsh as it stands.’
‘It’s a name.’
She looked at me bemused.
‘And you’ve only ever had one name?’
‘My father only ever used the first.’
‘He’s dead?’
‘Disappeared in Panama fifteen years ago. When I finally find him, I might start using it again...’
She looked down at my muddy boots then into my eyes as if wanting to connect with something deeper, but was afraid to do so.
‘I never knew my mother either before you ask. She died giving birth to me.’
‘I’m sorry...’
‘It’s in the past now.’
‘Yeah, and it’s easy to get stuck there, huh?’
I shrugged my shoulders, brushing off her words.
‘I was stuck in the past for a long time too, Blake. It was hard not to be. My husband died seven years ago of cancer. He was only twenty-eight. In fact, I’ve only just moved from the house we had up here back to Lexington, to try and escape the memories. I only come here to do my work now.’
I heard her voice audibly tighten.
‘Things are tough up here, you know...There are those of us who believe in keeping the mountains the way they are, and those who want to remove them one by one. It’s a constant battle.’
She leaned over hands entwined, and stared at the floor.
‘Was his death somehow connected to the mining operations?’ I asked gently.
‘Damn right it was,’ she replied sharply, her emotions pricked. ‘He was slowly poisoned by the water we were drinking from the well on our property, just like my little girl was. If only we knew at the time...’
‘Isn’t that the way,’ I said, thinking about Olivia for a second.
‘It was why I went and studied environmental biology after they both died. I wanted to try and help protect other folks, so they wouldn’t have to go through the same devastation.’
‘You lost your daughter too?’
‘She died of Blue Baby Syndrome, aged just six months...’
For a few painful seconds the conversation faltered. I couldn’t find any words to respond, that seemed in anyway good enough.
‘What in the hell is Blue…?’
‘Cyanosis. The polluted water she drank affected the make-up of her haemoglobin so that it couldn’t transport enough oxygen around her body. In the end, her skin went blue and she fell into a coma. She never came out of it…’
‘God, I’m sorry...’
‘Many more people here have suffered far worse though, Blake, and that’s the dark truth of it. Those who live near the strip mines and cleaning facilities have to breathe the coal dust in and the chemicals every-damned-day, have to face mud slides where they’ve cut all the trees down, have to drink the toxic water from their own taps and wells...’
She dabbed a tear from her eye and sighed.
‘You know, if you live near a surface mine here, your life expectancy is only fifty-five, Blake. Fifty-five...’
There was a longer silence this time. For a while we both just stared into the fire absorbing what had been shared before Nancy spoke again.
‘A few years back, around fifty people died when a damn in a slurry basin broke not far from here. Two hundred and fifty million tons of toxic sludge swept down into one of the valleys, Blake. Five times more than the Exxon Valdez oil spill. People were swept away in their beds for Christ’s sake. People.’
‘Jesus…’
‘And when they’re not being swept away by mud and black sludge, they’re dying slowly from silicosis, dying from the heavy metals in the water their drinking. Their hair and teeth are falling out, their lungs are collapsing. At least I had time to say goodbye to Tom. It took him slowly...’
‘How come no one knows about this, that there’s no one stopping it?’
‘Because Appalachia’s not the Sierra Nevada, nor the Rockies, nor the Cascades, Blake. We’re damaged goods and always will be. We’re the sweet mountain whore that big business just loves to keep on fucking.’
I sat back in my chair cowed by the anger powering her words. Here was a proud woman who’d spent most of her life fighting for something she believed in, who was nearly, but not quite broken and who was going to continue fighting until she was.
‘You’ve walked into one hell of a storm, Blake, and it consumes everything in its path if you choose to stand in its way. So you’re better off out of it, I’m telling ya. The girl will eventually turn up if she has any sense. Leave while you can. Go back to England and wait for her there. Just wait...’
‘Thing is, I made a promise to her father that I’d find her...’
Nancy looked at me as though I were mad.
‘Look, from what I can make out, she’s been attracting the wrong sort of attention since she arrived. Recently I told a private detective that she’d helped me take some water samples. A few days later I start getting tailed myself.’
‘By Corrigan’s men?’
‘Yes, I think so.’
‘This guy confronted me in a car park in Frankfort, after a talk I gave a few weeks back on water pollution.’
‘Go on…’
‘He asked me where the English girl was staying. I said that I didn’t know, that she only came to help me for a day, like some of the protesters do sometimes to learn more about the science behind it all…’
Nancy got up and headed to the kitchen.
‘I’m used to getting heckled at talks from the mining people wanting to dissuade me from building a case against a potential new mine site, or threatening letters in the Mountain Eagle, or crap through my letterbox, but this was on a whole different level.’
‘They’re not usually that direct with their intimidation?’
‘No. The guy said that if he found out I was lying, that he was going to send me to meet my husband and daughter. His hand was resting on a gun as he said it, Blake.’
‘Pleasant...’
‘So whatever this girl has stirred up, it’s not worth getting killed for I can tell ya. These guys mean business...’
I got up and walked over to the fire to poke a fallen log back into place, then looked over and saw the rage in her exquisite brown eyes. She was a mother and a wife who had lost everything. I’d only just lost a daughter...
‘I’ve been in worse situations,’ I said trying to lighten the mood, and anyway, I like the company.’
She offered a flicker of a smile.
‘And you don’t know where Olivia was staying?’ I said softly.
‘No, only that she came here to protest. I met her at the Street-Level Café in Lexington three or four weeks ago after a similar talk. We arranged it that she’d come out to help the following week. Over the course of the day together she spoke about her life in London, the gallery in Minneapolis, and Ethan of course.’
I got up and joined her in the kitchen.
‘And what did she say about him?’
‘That he was fun to be around, you know, all the usual girly talk.’
I eyed Nancy from head to toe and took the fresh coffee she’d poured for me, wishing for once that I wasn’t on a case.
‘Okay, and was there anything else?’
‘No. Well, she did ask me if I’d seen some other girl who was missing. A girl called, Mellissa Robertson. I said no, and that was that.’
‘Right...’ I said finding the coincidence interesting.
‘What is your first name, Blake?’ she asked suddenly, eyebrow raised.
‘Blake.’
‘And your second?’ she pushed.
‘Blake,’ I replied with a smile.
Chapter Seventeen
‘lights’
I woke up thinking I was dreaming; believing some alien craft had landed outside and was beaming its lights into the building so as to convey a message for all humanity.
I edged up onto my elbows and watched bleary-eyed as a multitude of bulbs flashed on and off, moved closer, then became more intense as they probed through the slats of the wooden blinds above me, scanning the attic in broken bands of light.
‘Blake...’ Nancy whispered from the other side of the room. ‘Are you awake?’
‘Sure.’
‘Can you see them?’
‘Yeah, there’s two trucks out there - a couple of guys in each cab and a few on the back, working the lights from the rails.’
‘Maybe they know I’m back? Or that you’re here?’
I listened to the heavy growl of the pick-ups revving menacingly.
‘Is there a gun in the house?’ I said.
‘Martha’s got one, but she doesn’t like to stoop to their level. They’re just scare tactics anyhow. We’ve had it before from the mining people over various protests.’
The trucks pulled back and faded into the darkness, their headlights switched off as they reversed. It reminded me of my ordeal in the forest, made me think it was Corrigan’s men who had returned.
‘They’re going,’ I said groggily, desperate for a full night’s sleep.
‘They’ll be back.’
As if on cue, an object smashed through the window. Instinctively I threw myself to the floor between the single beds. I shouted at Nancy to do the same. Another rock rapidly followed the last, clattering against the rear wall, sending a framed picture careering to the floor, showering us in pointed shards of glass. I pulled Nancy tightly into my chest, trying to protect her face, hoping the madness would quickly end.
Then there was gunfire, the sound of a shotgun to be exact; both barrels booming in quick succession. I crawled up onto the bed and peered tentatively through the busted slats, worried about Martha’s safety, worried about more projectiles heading our way, then looked down to see her standing defiantly outside, gun in hand, silhouetted in the moonlight like a cowgirl about to make her last stand.