“You know what fracking is, right?” she asked me. When I nodded, she went on: “Okay, so Shalesburg was like ground zero for fracking in this area. We got sold a bill of goods from a drilling company called EnergyCorp. They made it sound like the whole thing was a walk in the park. One of those ‘make millions at home without lifting a finger!’ kind of pitches. Most of the farms around here have been struggling for years, so signing up with the gas company seemed like just the ticket out of trouble. Jimmy Delaney was one of the first to lease his land.”
“Is Jimmy Mara’s dad?”
“Was. He died a couple of years ago—some cancer that got him in what seemed like a couple of weeks. That was before the accident, thank God, and all the craziness. At least he didn’t have to know about that. Probably would’ve killed him even faster.”
“The accident?”
“Yeah. It was really awful. I still hate to think about it. But it’s not like that was the only problem we were having. Things were going downhill for months before it happened. The water started turning brown and tasting funny. Trout were dying off. The big trucks they were using to haul the heavy machinery around were tearing up the roads. The countryside was starting to look like a war zone. Then there was some kind of explosion out at the Harney site, and a couple of workers got soaked with the chemical mix they pump into the wells. They rushed them to Community Medical over in Glendale, where Hannah Delaney had just started working as an ER nurse. She was the first one there when they came in, and she ended up getting exposed to a lot of bad stuff.”
The young woman shook her head, her eyes glistening.
“Hannah was a year ahead of me in school. She was just the sweetest person, you know? One of the really good ones. Always happens to them, for some reason, doesn’t it? She and Jack’d had Danny the year before, and she was already pregnant again. She had some kind of toxic reaction in the ER. Went into shock. They say the workers ended up okay, but Hannah lost the baby—and then a couple of days later she started convulsing. Lost consciousness. Some people say she was brain-dead even then, but Jack refused to give up. Moved right into the hospital room with her, leaving Mara to deal with the farm and Danny. The press poured into this town like locusts. Even that what’s-his-name from 60 Minutes stopping people on the street to ask us how we were ‘feeling.’ Jesus! I don’t blame Mara for wanting to get the hell out of Shalesburg after that. Jack was a mess—and the farm was falling apart. I think she did right to get Danny away from it all, too. So she was making a fresh start in Massachusetts?”
“Yes,” I told her. Which was true, of course, but not the whole truth by any means. “I really appreciate you telling me all this. So Hannah was in a coma for—how long?—over two years?”
“Something like that. It seemed pretty hopeless, but Jack never gave up. And he kept hounding EnergyCorp for information about the chemicals. Got a bunch of lawyers involved. He was convinced there was a way of bringing her back if the drilling company would just release details about the kinds and amounts of chemicals they used. At least then the doctors would know what they were up against. But apparently the gas companies are not legally bound to reveal that sort of information—like they’re guarding state secrets or something. Pretty pathetic, isn’t it? That they get to protect their precious formulas. And Hannah? Who thought about protecting her?”
When we got up, she gave me directions to the farm.
“Tell Mara that Julie Thorndike said hi,” she said, grabbing her daughter’s hand. “Tell her to call me if she needs anything.”
“I will,” I said as I headed to my car. “And thanks again.”
Though I’d left the store with the sandwich, I’d lost my appetite. I tossed the paper bag into the backseat, started the engine, and continued north, as Julie had instructed me, on the two-lane highway out of town.
A summery haze lay over the rolling hills and fields. I crossed a bridge that spanned a wide, shallow creek, and drove through a stretch of second-growth sugar maples, birches, and hemlocks. I passed a farm with a collapsing silo, a backyard busy with hens, and a handwritten wooden sign that said “F— FRACKING!” in front of the house. A pickup truck sat on its chassis in the middle of an adjoining field, surrounded by grazing cattle. It wasn’t until I reached the stop sign that Julie had told me to look for and turned left down the dirt road to the Delaney farm that I noticed how badly the road had deteriorated. Deep ruts and potholes forced me to slow to a crawl, but even then my muffler scraped against the uneven rubble. The shoulders had been filled with gravel at some point, but most of the stones had been dislodged and re-formed into gullies that cut steeply into either side of the road.
After several minutes, the overgrown brambles and shrubs gave way to more-open views of old, lichen-covered stone walls and overgrown fields. Ahead of me through a line of maples, I saw the ranch-style house that I recognized from Mara’s screen saver. There were the willows flanking the one-story structure. But the cornfields behind the house that I remembered from the photos were gone. In their place was a sea of mud occupied by a brightly colored army of trucks and pipes and holding tanks. A derrick, tall as a lighthouse, rose above the site. A dozen or so cars were parked along the driveway in front of the house. I pulled up behind the last one in line.
As I made my way across the front lawn, the door suddenly slammed open and a passel of kids in bathing suits spilled down the steps, a red-cheeked Danny in their midst.
“Last one in—!” a young girl in a two-piece screamed as the group raced around the side of the house. The front door stood wide open. I knocked on the frame and waited. I could hear subdued voices inside, and when no one came to the door after a few minutes, I stepped into the small, dark front hall. From there I could see most of the cramped downstairs. The living room was filled with adults holding drinks and plates of food. The dining room table was covered with casseroles, a baked ham, platters of cookies and brownies, and a party-size aluminum coffee urn.
Mara must have spotted me from the kitchen and come down the back hall, because she was suddenly at my side.
“Not here,” she whispered urgently, taking my arm.
“I’m sorry, I—” I started to say as she led me back outside.
“Yeah, right, I know,” she said, guiding me across the lawn toward the faded red barn. “I called Eleanor this morning to tell her where we’d gone, and she told me you might be coming.”
“I’m sorry about everything, Mara,” I told her. “I know what happened to your sister. To Hannah. Danny’s mom. I’m so very sorry. For you—for your whole family.”
“Not many of us left now,” she said when we reached a split rail fence that formed a paddock in front of the barn. She turned and looked back at the house. In the backyard, about fifty feet from the fracking site, the children were horsing around in an aboveground pool, jumping off a ladder into the water, pushing each other in. “My momma died when I was fifteen. Then Daddy a couple of years back. Of course I knew it was better for Hannah to go—and I was half praying she would—but still, I wasn’t ready. The world just feels so empty without her. The Delaneys used to be a pretty big deal in this town. But that’s all over. There’s nothing left for us here.”
“What about the farm?” I asked.
“What farm? It’s a disaster area. You see that water the kids are swimming in? It’s trucked in, just liked our drinking water is. They’ve polluted the groundwater, though they’re paying millions of dollars in PR to deny it. Jack had to actually get a restraining order to stop them from pumping after what happened. They claimed they had a legal right! It’s all tied up in court now. Lawsuits and countersuits. I’ve lost track of the whole mess, though Jack can give you chapter and verse. It’s what’s keeping him sane, I think. Or almost sane. He barely even said hi to Danny—and he’s drinking again. He went cold turkey before Danny was born. Nobody’s calling him on it, but it would break Hannah’s heart
if she knew.”
We stood there, watching the kids splashing around in the pool, their high, excited voices floating across the yard to us. After a moment or two, I said, “How did you find out that Mackenzie was building a house in Woodhaven?”
“We got to talk about that now?”
“I think you know that’s why I came.”
“It was a mistake, okay? Yes, I wanted him to suffer. I wanted to make him pay for what happened to Hannah. Eleanor told me about his heart problems, and I knew the digitalis would make things worse, but I didn’t mean to kill him. I really didn’t—I wouldn’t have been that stupid! I need to take care of Danny. He doesn’t have anybody else who can do that now.”
“But you came to Woodhaven to track Mackenzie down, right? That seems pretty premeditated.”
“Yeah, I know. But the truth is—” She hesitated, turning to face me. “Do you want to know the truth?”
“Yes. Very much.”
“Okay,” she said, looking out across the work site. “I didn’t know what I was doing. I didn’t have a plan. I just knew I had to do something. I had to get Danny away from this hellhole, and I had to somehow make that fucker pay for what he did to Hannah. I had him on Google Alerts. I saw a notice that he was building some huge place in the Berkshires. I figured it would be easier to get to him there than at his headquarters in Atlanta. By then Jack was already all wrapped up in his legal battles. He barely registered it when I told him we were leaving. I lucked out when I saw your ad in the PennySaver. The only two things I know anything about, really, are farming and computers.”
“You took the job so you could be nearer to Mackenzie?”
“Yeah.”
“It must have seemed like a miracle when Eleanor called that day.”
“Not really,” Mara said. “I’d gone up to the house a few times after I started working for you, just looking around. Curious about where the monster lived, you know? I didn’t think anyone’d moved in yet. But Eleanor caught me there one afternoon. And I had to think fast, so I told her that I worked for you and that I was just checking out the property, hoping maybe we could do the landscaping. She was so nice—and she didn’t suspect a thing. She befriended me and Danny after that. She put in a good word for us with Mackenzie, though I know he double-checked with Mr. Lombardi before letting her put you down on the call list. I feel really bad about how I betrayed her. But I couldn’t help myself. I’d do the same thing again if I had to.”
“What I don’t understand,” I told her, “is why you stayed after they started the investigation into Mackenzie’s death. You must have known that they’d discovered he’d been poisoned. You were right there when Detective Erlander asked me about the digitalis.”
“I was going to leave,” she said. “I was going to leave that night, actually. But then Erlander called me at home, remember? He asked me all those questions about you—you and your husband. And I got worried that they’d think you’d done it. Erlander seemed clueless enough to charge the wrong person for the right reason. And I also felt bad about how the whole thing had hurt the business. I wanted to make things right.”
She’d stayed out of loyalty. I felt awful about what I had to tell her.
“You need to come back to Woodhaven with me and explain what happened. I’ll help you find a good lawyer. I have a feeling that if you’re honest about what happened—and why—the authorities will be lenient.”
“I can’t right now,” she said. “I’ve got to stay for Hannah’s funeral tomorrow. But I’ll come back after that. I promise.”
I looked at her and said, “I’ll have to tell them if you don’t. I’ll have to go to Erlander myself, if you’re not back by the end of the day on Monday.”
“I’ll be there,” she said, meeting my gaze forthrightly, but I didn’t believe her.
I glanced in the rearview mirror as I drove away. She was still standing where I’d left her, watching me go. It was the last time I’d probably ever see her, I realized. She would take Danny and move on. Some out-of-the-way place where Erlander couldn’t find her. Change her name. Invent a new story. She’d done it before. That’s what she was going to do now. Start over again—again. Somewhere that wouldn’t remind her of the past and everything she’d lost.
That’s what I’d do, anyway.
32
The wreckage of the Delaney farm—and the family itself—haunted me as I got back on the highway. In my mind’s eye I kept seeing the fallow fields and potholed roadway . . . the ugly tangle of equipment and holding tanks behind the house . . . the children swimming and playing within shouting distance of all those pipes and pumps and toxic chemicals. It was early evening by the time I took the Woodhaven exit off the turnpike. In stark contrast to the countryside around Shalesburg, the Berkshires, burnished by the setting sun and the first red flares of autumn, had never looked more beautiful.
I loved this bittersweet time of the year in southern New England when the nights have turned chilly and the gardens, though already starting to die back, are still full of color and texture. The dense ranks of turtleheads with their gleaming purple helmets. The delicate, orchidlike sprays of the Japanese anemones. I drove past a garden where the wide hoop skirts of the hydrangea bushes—white and otherworldly in the fading light—looked like so many ball gowns gently adrift on the darkening lawn.
I parked the car by the barn and ducked into the office to check the messages. There was nothing that couldn’t wait until morning. I walked up the path to the house, cricket song throbbing in the cool night air as loud and piercing as bagpipes. But the place felt empty to me. The office already seemed so deserted without Mara. And she wasn’t the only person I was missing. Gwen still hadn’t called. And there was no word from Tom.
With a rising sense of shame, I thought back on the last time Tom and I were together. How selfish and self-involved I’d been! While he’d been so emotionally honest and frank with me. And right about so much. Since Richard’s disappearance, I’d prided myself on my independence and self-sufficiency. But I realized now that I couldn’t keep sitting on the sidelines of life. What I saw and learned at the Delaney farm that day had opened my eyes to many things. Not least of which being the importance of the fight that Tom had been waging for years. I was ready to join him—and that fight—if he’d still have me.
I decided to wait until the next day to call him. I needed to get some sleep and think through exactly what I was going to say. But I was still as nervous as a schoolgirl when I finally steeled myself to dial his number on Sunday afternoon.
“Alice,” he said when he heard my voice. And just the way he said it made me realize that everything was going to be okay.
“I hope you’re doing the right thing in terms of Mara,” Tom told me after I filled him in on my trip.
“I know I am,” I said. “God, Tom, if you could have seen that place! Mackenzie’s company ruined a farm that had been in the family for generations—and the whole area is being torn up and destroyed. Hannah Delaney would be alive today if she hadn’t been exposed to those chemicals! I can’t condone what Mara did, but I sure can sympathize.”
“Yes, I know,” Tom said. “I’m still worried about your role in all this, though. Letting Mara disappear without telling Erlander. It’s taking the law into your own hands. I can see how he might even consider you an accessory.”
“Well, no one but you knows that I went to Pennsylvania yesterday. I’m going to call Erlander and tell him what Mara did, but I don’t see why I need to tell him when I found out. I could just as easily have waited until tomorrow, say, to start wondering where she’d gone. It’ll be Labor Day, anyway; no one will be looking for me in the office. I can lie low, keep the answering machine on, and mentally move my trip to Shalesburg forward. Then I could call the police Tuesday morning, after Mara’s well on her way.”
Tom was quiet for a moment, thinking this over.
“Didn’t the family see you?”
“No, I don’t think so. Mara hustled me out of the house before anyone noticed I was there. I talked to someone at the store in town, but I can’t imagine Erlander’s going to track her down. I think this could work, Tom.”
“Maybe,” he said. “I hope so. You can count on me to back you up if it comes to that. I’m no big fan of Erlander and the way he’s conducted this investigation. At the same time, he’s obviously putting two and two together now.” He paused, then seemed to decide. “The best possible scenario would be for him to learn the truth about Mara’s involvement when it’s too late to grab her.”
“Thank you,” I told him. “For understanding and for supporting me on this—and Mara.”
“I’ve seen too many towns like Shalesburg,” Tom replied. “I’ve heard too many stories like Mara’s—people whose lives have been devastated by fracking. And it’s always the poor and helpless. It’s always some desperate farmer just trying to hold on to his land.”
“Yes. I see that now. I finally—”
“It’s a national disgrace!” Tom went on. “Letting these special interests run roughshod over the law. What you told me about EnergyCorp refusing to release its chemical formula? That’s just criminal! And the only people making any real money out of butchering the countryside and destroying innocent lives are the damned Mackenzies of this world!”
I smiled to myself as Tom continued his tirade, though I’d heard a lot of it before from him: “. . . blame an army of high-paid lobbyists . . . total lack of government oversight . . . desperate need to overhaul the whole campaign financing mess . . .” And I would probably be hearing much of it again. At least I hoped so. But I needed to get used to Tom’s fiercely held convictions. Not to mention his lack of restraint in voicing them. Richard had been low-key about most of his opinions, political and otherwise. He used to poke fun at people who “clambered up onto their little soapboxes” to espouse this or that cause. I used to agree with him. I used to believe in Richard’s “go along to get along” approach to things. Until I saw where that led.
Bleeding Heart Page 25