He had adopted the Possum Island name for his splendid compound because the location overlooked the island proper and because of what the retreat recalled for him. It was his refuge and his touchstone to real life, life outside the Beltway, a place to think.
It seemed like the perfect place to spend a few days working out the details of his campaign’s first television commercials—commercials that would immediately thrust him into the position of front-runner. Unfortunately, there was an array of problems. Not surprisingly, Richey was in the middle of them.
Conceptually, things were perfect. The plant itself, everyone had agreed, was exactly the right backdrop, a strong visual connection to Dorn’s major campaign theme of economic liberty. That, after all, was where it had all started. As a young representative, Dorn had called in some of the few favors he was owed and arranged passage of a local bill that allowed Recovery Metals to shortcut several onerous and unnecessary environmental regulations and build a facility near Winston. Jobs had been created. The facility and the town of Winston had prospered. Along with recruiting a three hundred-job defense facility for another county in his district, the legislation was one of Dorn’s proudest achievements as a public servant.
Soon, lawyers discovered Dorn’s bill permitted a number of facilities in every state to take a self-policing approach to many regulations. Savings on environmental control equipment and improved profits soon followed. Right behind them were political contributions, access to corporate jets, and luxurious vacations for Representative and Mrs. Dorn. Encouraged, he had begun to give speeches on the topics of individual and economic liberty—ideas more powerful than any fanatical religious or totalitarian movements, he liked to remind his audiences.
His timing had been good. The public, fed up with an over-governed, politically correct economy, had responded to his demands for lower corporate taxes and a rollback in government. And too much government was a problem worldwide. Others had taken up the call. The Liberty Agenda, as the movement he championed had become known, was gaining international traction. The plant was the perfect symbol of all that.
Not only that, his aides had learned that by happy circumstance the next week represented the tenth anniversary of the plant’s groundbreaking. Given that he was responsible for its existence and that it was about to be the lynchpin of his effort to achieve higher office, Dorn did not find it at all surprising when his consultants reported that the good folks at the plant had been happy to integrate their celebration with the congressman’s effort—quickly agreeing to erect a stage in front of the facility’s least unattractive side and to shut the entire operation for an hour the following Monday so every worker on the day shift could leave to attend as happy, dedicated workers, the whole tableau a picture of progress.
The news media had already risen to the bait. CNN was dangling the possibility of live coverage in exchange for an exclusive interview with the congressman following the event.
But, as always, there was the unexpected. Folding chairs, flags, red, white and blue bunting—even long tables to display his campaign literature—all had been reserved for the upcoming River Days celebration. Replacements had to be trucked in from Charleston and Cincinnati.
While ultimately accommodating, management had been unusually greedy during discussions about how long and how prominently the company logo would be displayed during the campaign commercial. Vince Bludhorn, the plant attorney, had insisted on at least one-eighth of the screen for a minimum total of six seconds during the thirty-second spot. The campaign’s ad agency, which had scrambled a top-flight production crew on short notice, agreed in principle but insisted on final creative control. Dorn had been forced to end the discussion in a way that satisfied no one—telling the agency that he, not the agency, had creative control and telling the folks at the plant, as he had learned to do so artfully on the Hill, that he was personally committed to their point of view and that he would do his very best but could make no promises.
Now, the problem was that there weren’t enough blacks employed at the plant, at least on the day shift, to reflect the new ideal of a racially diverse America. Women were adequately represented and so were Hispanics. But not the blacks.
Most of his aides, he believed, were competent. Manipulative, backstabbing, self-promoting, certainly. But competent. He couldn’t say the same for Richey who had once mistakenly handed him a copy of a press release about his speech instead of a copy of the speech itself, leading Dorn to give a talk in which he ended a stirring sentence by saying, “Congressman Harry Dorn declared today,” in effect quoting himself. The fact that Richey’s chief interest was using his business card to impress the district’s women had never been an issue before. Now, all the aide’s shortcomings were becoming glaring liabilities.
The sound of Clendenin’s heels on the wooden front porch interrupted Dorn’s thoughts.
“The crowd problem’s handled,” he said. “The plant’s promoting a black guy and a black woman from the night shift to the day shift. When the camera shoots the crowd from over your shoulder, they’ll be front and center.”
“What about the big crowd shots?” Dorn asked.
“We’re busing in the whole congregation of the Tabernacle Church of the Cross in Charleston.”
What’s in it for them?”
“New church bus.”
“You’re amazing.”
“I’ll take that as a compliment.”
Dorn stared at a bend in the river. The wind had picked up, creating little wavelets that made the Ohio look like it was flowing upstream, against its natural current. “We need to dump Richey. He’s bad news.”
Chapter Thirteen
Allison opened the sliding glass door. The fog of the previous evening had thickened into a heavy mist that wet the patio bricks outside her condo. She could smell the river. She waited. Still no Hippocrates.
She had been unable to sleep for the second straight night. She was worried about Katie and disappointed not to have heard from Josh after the trip to Columbus. She had had no luck finding her x-ray patients. And there was still no sign of her missing cat. It was as if they had all been transported to some other world, a place maddeningly beyond her reach.
She arrived at the clinic just as Coretha was accepting a package from an overnight delivery service. “Good news,” she announced. “Replacement x-ray film. The supplier’s looking at the old stuff to see if it caused the problem. You’re early, even for you.”
“Any call-backs?”
“Only Wanda Faggart, the lady with the toe. She’s coming in later this morning. Pringle’s moved. No forwarding address. Cloninger listed a post office box for her address. She doesn’t have a land line, at least in her name. None of ’em are on Facebook.”
“Cloninger probably hangs with that abuser, Darryl, whoever he is.”
“Ricky Scruggs lives out in Blood Run. I left a message on his phone. I haven’t heard back but I also sent registered letters to everyone except Pringle. They should get them today.”
“If they’re around to receive them. Let me know as soon as you reach anyone else. Keep the afternoon clear.” Allison poured herself coffee. “Any word from Josh Gibbs?”
“Nothing from him either.”
Josh had arrived at the newspaper knowing he had to finish as much of the week’s edition as possible, given the uncertainties ahead. The chance to escape the torture of imagining every outcome for Katie had been a pleasant prospect, a much-needed distraction from worry.
But it was still work. He had ripped through the filings from the community stringers, each of whom earned ten dollars weekly for sending in reports from their hamlets—births, hospitalizations, even news of out-of-town visitors (weddings and deaths got separate treatment)—and hurriedly updated the Little League standings. He had dashed off an innocuous editorial urging readers to support the local farmer’s market and reluctantly select
ed a photo of the police department’s new rifle range for the front page. It wasn’t much of a news picture but Chief Holt was extremely proud of the facility and had been badgering Josh for coverage for days.
He had been about to finish page design when the phone interrupted. He was hoping for a call from Dr. Pepper with the results of Katie’s tests. But he had specified that the doctor call his cell phone, which he had kept at the ready 24/7 since leaving Columbus. This wasn’t that call and he didn’t need an interruption. But he could see on the caller ID that it was Allison.
“I was going to call you,” he said, before she could even ask the question. “No word yet. It’s frustrating.”
Allison could feel his tension through the phone. “How’s Katie?”
“Scared. But better than I am. How are you?”
“Frustrated,” Allison admitted. She was increasingly despondent about her cat but she decided against mentioning it. Hippocrates was the only family she had but he was trivial compared to what Josh was facing. Instead, she told him about the cases of unexplained tissue death and her difficulty reconnecting with any of her patients except Wanda Faggart who had come in that morning. And while it was still possible she might learn something from the lab work on Faggart’s blood and tissue samples, her second exam of the woman had so far only added to the puzzle. Faggart had recalled no cuts or other trauma to her toe that would have provided an entry for infection.
The one possible lead Faggart had provided was a stretch, at best, Allison told Josh. Newly employed at a commercial cleaning service, Faggart had previously worked at the Sternwheeler Hotel with a waitress named Candi or Candy who fit Allison’s description of Candi Cloninger. She hadn’t known the woman’s last name and she didn’t know if the woman wore a tongue stud since they were prohibited for on-duty Sternwheeler staffers, along with all facial piercings. But Allison told Josh it had gotten her thinking: perhaps her tissue death patients had been in contact with each other.
“What about interviewing the others?” Josh asked.
“Pringle’s a dead end. Left a voice mail for Ricky Scruggs.”
Josh thought back to his reporting techniques. “Why don’t you just drive out and see them? Nothing like just showing up.”
“Well, Scruggs’s address is the only one we have.”
“It’d be a start.”
Allison found the idea appealing. The tissue death mystery was gnawing at her—in the same obsessive way, she realized ruefully, that uncompleted tasks, even a puzzle, had gnawed at her father. More than once the man had declined to join his wife and daughter for Sunday dinner because he could not bring himself to abandon the crossword. Just like Horace Wright, Allison had to have answers before she could move on.
There was another upside to the trip. Josh needed a distraction. “Maybe you should come with me,” Allison suggested.
“I’ve got bigger things to worry about.”
“You’ve done all you can for Katie for now. Sometimes it’s good to get your mind off things.”
Josh considered the idea. With another hour of hard work, he’d be caught up. The prospect of gut-grinding waiting for Pepper’s call with nothing important to do was not attractive. “All bets are off if Pepper calls.”
“Fine. If he doesn’t, be at my place at 2:00.”
Chapter Fourteen
Josh let the Ohio Valley Medical Supply van pull away from the curb and took its parking spot in front of the clinic. He was disappointed to see three patients in the waiting room. Mom and a kid who’d been bit by a snake. Fifteen minutes, he estimated. Old man in a John Deere hat with a nasty gash on his arm, forty-five minutes, depending on the number of stitches. A young woman with crutches and an icepack on her ankle. That might mean X-rays. He figured at least ninety minutes for everyone.
Two hours and two Field & Streams later, Allison entered the room in jeans and a ponytail tied with a red ribbon—a particularly welcome sight, Josh concluded, after one had been looking at nothing but photos of deer and cutthroat trout.
He assumed they would take his Volvo but she had other ideas. “We’ll need four-wheel drive and good ground clearance,” she pointed out. “Besides, I want to drive.”
He climbed into her blue Jeep Wagoneer unable to remember the last time he had been a passenger.
“They checked the x-ray machine today,” Allison said. “I know it’s not what you want to hear but it’s working fine. We haven’t heard back about the film.”
“Those x-rays won’t matter once Pepper calls.” He thought of the phrase Sharon had ultimately found so comforting: It will be what it will be.
Heavy mist turned to rain as they headed east, away from the river. Winston’s old homes, quaint downtown and new subdivisions gave way to a dirt-streaked house trailer behind a huge satellite dish in a scraggly cornfield, an ancient half-painted farmhouse with plastic sheeting in the window and a blue couch on the porch, a collapsed chicken coop overgrown with weeds, a pile of rusting farm implements.
They were all reminders of something Josh had long observed: the further you moved away from the river, the harder life seemed to get.
Near the rivers were great stretches of flat land ideal for farming, a business, a housing development, a town. The state’s cities—Charleston, Huntington, Parkersburg, Fairmont—had developed there. But the mountains buckled quickly from the river plains and developable land elsewhere was scarce. A swatch along a big river tributary might support several dozen farms, some churches, a few stores—a community with a name frequently containing the words “Branch, Fork, Run, Lick.” Further upstream, along the rocky creeks and narrow streams, a parcel of five or ten acres might be found, enough for a hard-working man to support a family through farming, a few animals and the occasional odd job—enough if he and the family had no higher aspirations. But there was no question: when wide rivers turned to creeks and streams, the land got narrower, backyards got more vertical, the going got rougher.
And, it had to be acknowledged, the people and the customs often got stranger. Mountains meant isolation, with education and change sometimes less prevalent than marriage between blood relatives. Vestiges of Elizabethan English, snake handling, and people with abnormal chromosomes could be found in the deep hollows. Josh himself had encountered inbred, pinched-faced, hawk-nosed women and children with skin so translucent, locals unremarkably referred to them as “the blue people.” In covering the trial of two men accused of the murder of their mother, he had learned about the mountain cult that practiced crucifixion.
Josh shifted his attention to Allison. The rain was still light and she drove easily, left hand on the steering wheel, right hand toying with her hair ribbon. He happened to fix upon the position of her driver’s seat and was again struck by her long legs.
They slowed for a six-man state highway crew filling potholes from the previous winter’s freezes.
“Three guys to do the work, one to lean on the shovel, one to drink the coffee and one to watch,” Allison muttered as the smell of hot tar infused the Wagoneer. “All getting overtime.”
The rain began to fall harder. The Wagoneer’s windshield wipers worked to keep up.
Twelve miles later, they turned onto a narrow gravel road that ran parallel to a churning stream red with mud, swollen by the rain. Steep hills loomed around them, deepening the gloom. Allison switched on the Wagoneer’s lights. “We’re almost there,” she said.
Josh bounced hard in his seat as they lurched from one water-filled pothole to the next, the back end of the big vehicle clawing for traction in the mud. Playing the brake and the accelerator perfectly, Allison handled the challenge like a veteran off-road driver. Josh thanked his lucky stars they hadn’t taken his Volvo.
By the time they crossed a rickety metal bridge, water had risen to within a few inches of the top of the bank and only three or four feet below the grated surface of the bridg
e. A half-mile down the road, they came across a scattering of tired, frame houses on small plots of land. Allison slowed the Wagoneer near a sign that read “Blood Run. Unincorporated.”
“Which place is his?” Josh asked.
“Don’t know. But chances are they’re all Scruggs one way or another.”
Allison assessed which house was most likely to contain people who would help them. She had developed the skill during her medical school residency at Detroit City Hospital when one of her assignments had been tracking communicable diseases. That meant going into neighborhoods where cooperation with authorities was not always highly valued. She found she was more inclined to be welcomed, or at least tolerated, in homes with some external sign of hope—flowers in a window box, toys in a yard, a vegetable garden out back.
A single-story house, with a tin roof and walls clad in faded brown shingles caught her eye. A ringer washer sat on its sagging front porch, along with the one bright object in the whole rainy, dreary landscape—a child’s tricycle with multi-colored tassels hanging from the handlebars. She noticed a wisp of smoke curling from a large weathered shed that sat behind the house on the edge of the creek.
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