Spilled Blood

by Brian Freeman

  When Chris did, George climbed out and marched into an abandoned field that was a sea of mud and rocks. The black man’s hands were shoved in his pockets, and his shoulders were hunched. Chris followed. They were near an old gravel driveway, but the driveway led nowhere. There were no buildings around them. Massive trees dwarfed the two men, making the lot feel secluded. With the barest moonlight, the constellations above them were easy to distinguish.

  ‘So where are we, George?’ Chris asked.

  The black man was almost invisible, even though he was barely six feet away. ‘This land belonged to a man named Vernon Clay.’

  ‘Who’s he?’

  ‘Until four years ago, he was a research scientist at Mondamin. He and I share the same specialty.’

  ‘Are you going to tell me what that is?’

  George hesitated. ‘Pesticides.’

  ‘You mean DDT, atrazine, Round-Up, nasty stuff like that?’

  ‘It’s not nasty stuff when used appropriately.’

  ‘And when used inappropriately, you grow a tail, right?’

  ‘That’s a gross exaggeration,’ George huffed. ‘Environmental extremists make wild claims about the risks of pesticides in the food chain, but it’s mostly junk science. Without pesticides to protect our crops, we don’t feed the world – particularly the developing world. My research is aimed at ways to get better crop results with less chemical exposure.’

  ‘Okay, so why are we here? And what does this have to do with Ashlynn Steele?’

  Chris heard George Valma’s growly breath in the darkness. The man ginned up his courage to talk. ‘Last fall, Ashlynn pulled me aside during a party at Florian’s house. She asked me what I knew about Vernon Clay’s work at Mondamin.’

  ‘Did she say why?’

  ‘She said she was doing a paper on agricultural research for her Biology class. I didn’t question it at the time. It seemed like a reasonable query coming from Florian’s daughter.’

  ‘What did you tell her?’

  ‘I told her what I knew about Vernon. The sanitized version, anyway. Vernon was young, but he was one of those scientists who develops a whole new paradigm for his field. It was a coup for Mondamin to land him. He was among the pioneers using nanometals in pesticides when the rest of us were still snipping up corn DNA.’

  ‘It all sounds like Frankenstein stuff to me.’

  ‘Just the opposite. Would you rather eat tomatoes from a field that had been treated with tons of chemical pesticides or from a field where the crop had developed its own structural resistance to insects?’

  ‘I’d rather eat tomatoes my neighbor grows in his window box.’ Before George could protest, Chris added, ‘What’s the unsanitized story about Vernon Clay?’

  ‘The rumor is he was sick. He left Mondamin four years ago and dropped off the radar screen. He hasn’t resurfaced.’

  ‘What do you mean, sick? Like cancer?’

  ‘More like mental illness.’

  ‘So what does his land have to do with anything?’

  ‘Probably nothing.’

  ‘You didn’t drag me out here for nothing, George.’

  The scientist squatted in the field. Chris could hear him squeezing mud through his fingers. ‘Ashlynn’s question made me curious. It’s not often that someone like Vernon walks away at the peak of his career. I started asking around about him at Mondamin, and I hit a stone wall. No one wanted to talk about him. They told me to drop it. That made me more curious. I looked him up in an old phone book, and this was his address. Right here where we’re standing. Only when I came out here, I found nothing left. Google Earth showed a house here five years ago.’

  ‘Okay, so where is it?’

  ‘Gone. Torn down. The fields were plowed over, too, and sterilized. Nothing grows here. It’s like a dead land. And guess who owns the property? It’s not Vernon Clay anymore.’

  ‘Florian Steele,’ Chris said.

  ‘That’s right.’

  ‘Did you talk to anyone about this?’

  ‘Hell, no. I didn’t tell anyone. I didn’t want to lose my job.’

  ‘So why tell me now?’

  George got to his feet, and Chris heard his knees pop. ‘Ashlynn called me two weeks ago. She was asking about Vernon again. She wanted to know where he was and where she could find him.’

  ‘What did you tell her?’

  ‘I told her I didn’t know.’

  ‘Did Ashlynn say why she wanted to locate him?’

  ‘She was trying to find out whether Vernon’s research could have been responsible for the cancer cluster in St. Croix. She also wondered if the pesticides he was developing could cause birth defects.’

  Anencephaly.

  ‘What did you tell her?’ Chris asked.

  ‘I told her no. No way. Even if you accept that environmental factors may play a role in some cancers, it would normally take years of exposure to have an impact. Mondamin has only been around for a decade, and the first cases of leukemia developed six years ago. It would have taken a catastrophic level of exposure for there to be any connection.’

  ‘Catastrophic?’

  ‘Yes. As in deliberate. Plus, the lawsuit prompted an investigation by one of the top university epidemiologists in the country. Her name is Lucia Causey. I’ve met her. She’s thorough. If there was even the slightest possibility that the cancer cluster involved Mondamin, she would have found it. So the answer is no. There’s no connection. That’s what I told Ashlynn.’

  Chris heard the conviction in the man’s voice. It was the conviction of someone who wanted to believe he was right. ‘Then why are we here?’

  ‘I’m a scientist, Chris. I only believe what I can prove. I don’t trust coincidences.’

  ‘You didn’t answer my question.’

  George Valma spoke softly. His words breathed out of the night. ‘Do you know where we are?’

  ‘I lost track of where we were going miles ago,’ Chris said. ‘Where are we?’

  George took Chris’s shoulder in an iron grip and turned him toward the dark trees bordering the field. ‘Beyond those trees, we’re not even half a mile from the town of St. Croix,’ he said. ‘The land shares the same aquifer. Whatever you put in the ground here makes its way to their water supply.’

  28

  Chris stared at the decrepit storefronts of the ghost town and tried to see the world through Ashlynn Steele’s eyes.

  It was midnight, just as it had been when the girl limped into this town with a flat tire. She must have felt like the last person on earth, awakening to find that some cataclysm had left the land in ruins. He wondered if she was keenly aware of the irony of her location. She’d been forced to give up the life inside her, and she’d been stranded in a place that had proved unable to support life.

  She must have asked herself why God had led her here.

  His Lexus was parked where Ashlynn’s Mustang had drifted to a stop. He wandered the street, like her, listening to the empty noise of his footsteps. He was alone, but he didn’t feel alone. The broken glass, the boarded-up doors, the rusted signs, made him feel as if eyes were watching him. It might have been animals, or it might have been ghosts, or it might simply have been his imagination. Ashlynn would have felt the same way, but she didn’t know then that she really was being watched. Olivia and Tanya were in the shadows.

  He wondered if someone else had been there, too.

  Chris tried to re-create what had been happening in Ashlynn’s life. Six months earlier, she had gone to George Valma with a seemingly innocent inquiry about a Mondamin research scientist named Vernon Clay. Days before her death, she’d called George Valma again with more questions about the same missing scientist. True or not, she had begun to link Vernon Clay to the cancer cluster in St. Croix and to the tragic situation with her own baby.

  Had she actually discovered something? Or did she simply need someone to blame? If you knew your child was going to die, you could believe almost anything to explain it. You wan
ted answers. You wanted justice, just like the people in St. Croix who had watched their own children die. By the time she arrived in the ghost town that night, Ashlynn had begun to blame Mondamin. She’d begun to blame her father.

  He saw the park where she died. The fraying police tape still clung to the trees. The swing where Ashlynn sat was a black silhouette. Behind the park, a minimum-maintenance road vanished into the desolate corn fields. He pricked up his ears, as if he could hear Ashlynn humming if he listened hard enough. As if he could hear the confrontation between Ashlynn and his own daughter. The gunshot, the screams, the crying. The horror of it made him close his eyes. Olivia had no way of knowing that she had arrived at the lowest pit of Ashlynn’s life, a well from which there must have seemed no escape. Instead, she had taunted and tortured her for crimes that weren’t hers. She had poured salt into an open wound. He wished he could have been there to stop it, to rescue them both.

  He reminded himself: Olivia didn’t know. She was young. She was drunk. She’d made a cruel mistake, and she’d already paid a horrible price for it. So had Ashlynn.

  Chris thought about Olivia leaving Ashlynn alone. Alive. What happened in that next tragic hour? Who did this to you? Who found you in the park, consumed with your grief, and put a bullet in your brain? He knew that Michael Altman would say he was creating a conspiracy out of something simple. The simple explanation was the one supported by the evidence. The easy, logical answer was what everyone believed. Olivia was there. She had a gun. She pulled the trigger.

  No.

  She’d walked away. Sometimes it happened that way. Chris had pointed a gun at Kirk Watson’s head, and he’d walked away, too.

  He saw headlights approaching the ghost town from the south. He knew it was Hannah’s car. He stood on the dirt shoulder until her high beams caught him in their glare, and he lifted a hand to shield his eyes. She pulled past him and parked, and when she got out, the light of her flashlight splashed across the ground between them.

  ‘Thanks for coming,’ he told her.

  ‘You said it was important.’

  ‘It could be.’

  He had no idea if Vernon Clay was important. The simple truth was that Chris felt a need to be with Hannah. Apparently she sensed it, too. In the glow of the light, he saw that she was holding a wine bottle by the neck.

  ‘I still have a bottle of that Cosentino Cab we bought in Napa,’ she said. ‘I thought you could use some.’

  ‘You’re right.’

  Hannah opened the rear door of her SUV. They sat next to each other on the bumper. The cork was halfway into the bottle, and she released it with a pop. When she passed it to him, he tilted the neck and drank. There was something about drinking expensive red wine straight from the bottle that made him feel free. He passed it back, and Hannah drank from it too.

  He wondered if she remembered the last time they had done this, on the Saturday night of their California vacation, while Olivia slept in the motel room in Calistoga. They’d sat just like this on the rear bumper in the motel parking lot, and they’d finished a bottle together, and they’d made love in the back seat like teenagers. From that moment to the divorce two years later seemed like a long way to fall.

  ‘I was late the next month,’ she said softly. ‘Do you remember?’

  ‘Of course.’

  Hannah hadn’t forgotten. She’d been thinking about that same warm night. Two weeks later, she had been a day and a half overdue for her period, and they’d spent those thirty-six hours convinced that their back-seat romance had given Olivia a sibling. It wasn’t to be. She was simply late. He’d been stupid enough to announce his feelings before he knew what was in her heart. ‘I guess I’m relieved,’ he’d said, fully expecting her to laugh and say, ‘Me, too.’

  She hadn’t said that at all. She’d cried a flood of tears, and he knew he had made the worst mistake of his life.

  Such a long way to fall.

  ‘Should you be drinking?’ he asked.

  ‘No,’ Hannah replied, and she tilted back the bottle and drank again.

  ‘Are you scared?’ he asked.

  ‘Terrified.’

  ‘How bad is it, Hannah, really?’

  ‘Pretty bad. I won’t kid you. It’s pretty bad.’

  ‘If I were cancer, I wouldn’t mess with you,’ he said.

  Hannah laughed, but it was a broken laugh. ‘Thank you.’

  ‘Does Olivia know?’

  ‘The odds? No, I haven’t told her. She doesn’t need that burden.’ His ex-wife turned toward him. The soft glow of the flashlight on the bed of the truck between them made her skin look young. ‘If something happens to me, Chris, you need to be there for her.’

  ‘Don’t talk like that.’

  ‘I don’t dwell on it, but I don’t pretend it’s not one of the possible outcomes.’

  ‘I’ll be there for her,’ he said. ‘You know I will.’

  She nodded. She was grateful to hear him say it.

  ‘You’ll beat this,’ he added.

  ‘That’s my plan.’

  He wanted to hold her, but he didn’t know if she wanted or needed his comfort. He wanted to let her cry in his arms, but he was worried that she would hate being vulnerable in front of him. It was messy and awkward, not like the early days, when they’d been able to divine the other’s thoughts simply by the look on their faces.

  ‘So why are we here?’ she asked.

  He drank more wine. ‘I don’t know. I’m sorry. I wanted to see where Ashlynn was killed, but I shouldn’t have called you. It’s late. This could have waited.’

  ‘No, I’m glad you did.’

  They sat in silence, with nothing but the soft voice of wind alive in the town. The wine in the bottle slowly disappeared, swallow by swallow, and went to their heads. He looked at Hannah at one point, and her face was bowed, as if she were praying. That was what you did on hallowed ground, where someone innocent had been lost.

  ‘I almost killed someone tonight,’ he said, filling the void with his confession.

  Hannah stared at him. ‘What?’

  He explained about the gun and Kirk Watson and his date with the devil outside Kirk’s window. It made him feel better to admit it to her. The guilt was too heavy to carry on his own.

  ‘You would never have done it,’ she told him.

  ‘I almost did.’

  ‘I know you, Christopher. You’re incapable of murder, no matter who it is, no matter what he did.’

  ‘I’m not so sure.’

  ‘I am.’ Hannah poked him in the side. ‘Now if it was me, I would have blown the fucker’s head off.’

  She grinned, and laughter bubbled out of both of them, defusing the tension. It felt easy and familiar. If things had been different, he would have pulled her into his shoulder. He would have kissed her and taken her hand and held it, sending the old silent message. I love you. He didn’t do any of those things, but he wished he could have preserved the moment for a while longer. He wanted to be a couple again.

  ‘Listen, I learned something else tonight,’ he said. ‘It’s why I called you.’

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘Have you ever heard of a man named Vernon Clay?’

  Hannah looked unhappy to hear the name. ‘He was a Mondamin scientist. We tried to find him during the litigation, but we couldn’t.’

  ‘Why did you want to find him?’

  ‘Because Florian Steele obviously wanted to keep him a secret.’ She paused and then said, ‘Glenn can tell you more about him. He disappeared before I moved here, but it sounds like he was a strange character. Disturbed. Who knows what he was doing on that land of his?’

  ‘So you know about his land near St. Croix?’ Chris asked.

  ‘The dead land? Sure. There’s nothing to find now, but we were always suspicious that it was at the root of the cancer cluster. How did you find out about it?’

  ‘George Valma,’ he said. ‘Ashlynn contacted him.’

  ‘Ashlynn did? Wh
y?’

  ‘She wanted to know the same thing – whether Vernon Clay’s research could have been connected to the cancer in St. Croix. And to her own baby.’

  ‘That poor girl.’ Hannah shook her head in dismay. ‘Bad enough to go through what she did, but to think that your own father’s company was responsible. It must have been unbearable.’

  ‘George told her there was no connection.’

  ‘Well, he would say that. He’s a Mondamin guy.’

  ‘He said a top epidemiologist looked into it during the litigation and found nothing.’

  ‘I don’t care. She missed something.’

  Chris wanted to believe her, but he wasn’t convinced. ‘If there was really something to find, Florian would never have agreed to a special master’s investigation. He’s a lawyer. He knows you can’t bury bad facts.’

  ‘I think Florian can bury whatever he wants,’ Hannah said. ‘If Ashlynn was talking to George, do you think she discovered something that got her killed?’

  ‘You mean something about Mondamin?’

  ‘That’s right. She lived in Florian’s house. She might have known what he was hiding. Or she found out enough to start asking questions.’

  ‘What are you suggesting, Hannah? That Florian murdered his own daughter? He may be a son of a bitch, but I simply don’t believe he’s that cold-blooded.’

  ‘I’m not saying it was Florian, but he’s not the only one with an interest in that company,’ Hannah said. ‘You said she was talking to George, right? She was already suspicious.’

  ‘Right.’

  ‘So maybe Ashlynn talked to someone else, too.’

  ‘Like who?’

  ‘I don’t know.’ Hannah studied the ghost town in the darkness, and she shivered. ‘Maybe she talked to the wrong person.’

  29

  He knew her.

  To him, she was the essence of youth, pretty and vivacious. You couldn’t see her and not smile; couldn’t be in her presence and not fall in love. Her expressions changed with the speed of coins dropping from a slot machine, always different, always inviting. She moved with confident grace, not like the other gangly teenagers who were catching up with their bodies. She was young, and yet she was already mature in ways that counted. You could hear it in her seriousness of emotion when she talked about love and loss. She wasn’t a melodramatic teenager weeping over a dead kitten on the highway. She understood better than most adults that life was fragile, quickly birthed, quickly spent.