Fallout

by Mark Ethridge

  “Interesting.” Josh looked again at the scan of the note. “Bradley Hand,” he said.

  “What?”

  “The fish note is typeset. A font called Bradley Hand. You don’t see it often except in newspapers.”

  Chapter Fifty

  Josh and Allison drove to the News, the baggage of the DVD riding uncomfortably in the front seat with them.

  Josh could not erase the images from his mind. He ached to know more. But he would not take away the only vestige of control Allison still had and bring it up. As much as his reportorial instincts and natural curiosity protested, that right would have to remain with her.

  Allison was despondent. In a stroke, the DVD had stripped her of her painstakingly constructed armor and violated her very essence. She felt broken, befouled. But more than that, she felt ashamed. How could Josh not think the worst of her after what he had seen?

  Why had she left the DVD running? Was it to punish herself? To prove that she was dirty and weak? Had she hoped Josh would see it and flee from her life forever and prove once again that she was unworthy of affection and esteem, undeserving of companionship and love?

  The awkwardness grew with each mile. The flip-flip of the windshield wipers fell into the same rhythm as her pounding heart. Finally, she could take it no longer. “Pull over,” she said. Josh did.

  She took a deep breath. Then, slowly, haltingly, almost beseechingly, she began. “What you saw—”

  “You don’t have to explain.”

  She took another deep, almost fluttering breath, and resumed. “What you saw is something I can’t defend. But it happened. It’s part of me.”

  “But how? I mean—”

  “Vince was a control freak. I couldn’t go anywhere without his permission. He’d check the odometer to make sure I hadn’t driven while he was at work. He set up spy cameras in every room to monitor me.”

  Josh was staggered. What he had seen on the DVD were the actions of a sex slave. Bludhorn was the leather-hooded master. Josh felt his rage building. Bludhorn—damn him!

  “So the things on the DVD . . . you were forced?”

  Allison sighed. “Some people would say so but it’s more complicated. I permitted it to happen. I didn’t have to.”

  “Why’d you marry him in the first place?”

  “There was a time when I was rebellious, to put it mildly. I hated my father. I hated myself and did all the things that reinforced my low self-esteem. Vince was the captain of the football team. I got pregnant. Abortion wasn’t an option. He gave up a scholarship and we got married at 18.”

  “But the child?” Josh couldn’t conceal his shock.

  “I miscarried at four months. Vince and I tried to make a go of it, but things went downhill fast. He resented me. He believed that I’d trapped him, that I’d cheated him out of his dreams. I suppose his way of responding was to try to control me completely, even if that meant beating me. Once, I ended up with his boot on my neck and his shotgun jammed to my temple.”

  “You should have left immediately,” Josh said firmly.

  “Again, it’s complicated. He was always sorry. And my self-respect was such that I believed I deserved it, that it wouldn’t have happened if I hadn’t done things to make him angry. But I could never do enough and I did anything, no mater how degrading. It got so bad I came to believe suicide was a way out.”

  Josh swallowed hard. “You tried?”

  “No, I called the suicide hotline.”

  “They talked you out of it.”

  “No, they put me on hold. But that was enough. I decided a world where the suicide hot line puts people on hold is a world more screwed up than I am.”

  “So the DVD—”

  “Is his way of still controlling me.”

  “Wouldn’t he leave a note?”

  “No need. I got the message.”

  “But why this? Why now?”

  “Just to show he can,” Allison said glumly.

  Josh wasn’t so sure. “Maybe you’re right that the DVD is only about you and Vince. But that doesn’t explain the posters. And the fish. And I’ve had cancelled ads. I think we’ve stirred up some kind of hornets’ nest. I’d say the DVD is about you backing off.”

  “No question we’ve upset a lot of people. But what links it all together? Who are the hornets?”

  Josh had no answer. He stared out of the window. Perhaps the right thing to do was to follow Dorn’s advice and let everyone do their jobs. “Do you have any doubt Vince would go public?” he asked.

  “None.”

  “Allison, you’ve done everything anyone could expect of you, trying to track down the victims, notifying the local police, the state agencies, the feds. I won’t let that bully ruin your life. I’m taking it from here.”

  An image of herself as a patient undergoing surgery came into Allison’s head. Naked, vulnerable, body and soul, past and present, stripped and laid open for the world to see. At the mercy of someone else.

  No, not just at the mercy of someone else. At the mercy of Vince Bludhorn, her psychopathic ex. That was the scariest notion—worse than public exposure and humiliation. She hadn’t fought all these years just so Vince could put his boot on her neck again. “No,” she swore. “I’m not quitting.”

  Allison and Josh went directly to the pressroom where the crew was readying for the River Days special section run. Josh waved the foreman over. He showed him the printout of the Cornstalk Curse note. “Who set this type?” he signed.

  The foreman motioned Josh and Allison to a terminal which controlled the newspaper’s high resolution typesetting machines. He scrolled backwards through the log of output jobs, stopping to open each file that contained too few kilobytes to be a full advertisement or a story. The first two were headlines that had been set separately from the stories they went with. The third file was the one they were looking for—the electronic original of the Cornstalk note. The log identified its creator as Jimmy Mayes.

  Josh and Allison followed the foreman to the lockers where the pressmen exchanged their street clothes for work coveralls. Inside Mayes’s, Josh found a copy of the catfish note, a dream catcher, books on Native American history, and a file labeled ‘Friends of Cornstalk.’ The file containing several pages of handwriting and a sketch of an advertising layout.

  “Where’s Jimmy?” he asked.

  “He didn’t show up today.”

  “Do you know where he lives?”

  “Betheltown,” the foreman signed. Josh translated.

  “But nobody lives there,” Allison said. “It’s been a ghost town for decades.”

  Chapter Fifty-One

  “We’ve been assuming the fish was an attack on me,” Josh said as they hurried to Allison’s car. “But it wasn’t. It was a warning from a friend. How did that curse go again?”

  Allison consulted a printout. “The curse of the Great Spirit will spread across this land, blighting it by nature.”

  “Jimmy was trying to tell the newspaper something bad was spreading, blighting nature, harming fish. Cornstalk’s Curse is being fulfilled again.” In that sense, Josh realized, the radioactive catfish was like the anthrax incidents. In both cases, the intention wasn’t an assault, it was an alert. The difference was, Jimmy Mayes wasn’t trying to hurt someone to make his point.

  Josh realized he’d been guilty of giving short shrift to the pressman, failing to get to know him, perhaps even stereotyping him. Mayes wasn’t simply a hearing-impaired Indian who kept to himself, Josh understood. He was a man who honored his home, his family and his traditions. Even though his job was running the press, Josh realized Jimmy Mayes was a journalist—a crusader, very much like Josh had once been himself.

  “How would he know the fish was radioactive?” Allison wondered.

  “Probably didn’t. But it sure as heck wasn’t healthy
, with all those lesions.”

  “Why throw it through the transom?”

  Josh smiled. “Inside newspaper joke. Big stories that come to a newspaper unsolicited are said to come in ‘over the transom.’”

  “Why not just tell the newspaper directly? Why write a note and identify yourself as ‘One of the Remaining’?”

  Josh shrugged. “We’ll ask him right after we find out where he got that fish.”

  The rain fell harder as Josh turned on to Betheltown Road, retracing the route they’d traveled several nights before. The Wagoneer bucked like a bronco as Josh swerved to avoid one water-filled pothole only to splash into the next. Yellow police tape snapped in the wind as they passed Darryl Dunn’s.

  A mile beyond Dunn’s, a muddy, two-rut driveway led to a rust-streaked mobile home wedged into a crevice by a creek. A steel barricade crossed Betheltown Road a quarter-mile later. Josh parked just short of the rusted sign that still pointed to the abandoned community. “We’ll walk in,” he said. “It can’t be more than a mile. Watch your step. The place is crawling with snakes.”

  Allison pulled on a parka to protect against the increasing drizzle and tightened the laces of her hiking boots. Josh was amazed at how nature had reclaimed the road beyond the barricade. Delicate wildflowers flourished among the pieces of crumbling asphalt. Years of leaves hid curves and dips. The roadbed vanished in places.

  They had walked for ten minutes when silver flashes of a lake gleamed through the woods and rain. “This looks familiar,” Allison said.

  The details of the day remained burned in her memory—her father’s pickup laboring into the hills; her jacket sliding across the battered truck bed as the faded green Dodge swayed through the switchbacks, fresh air spilling into the cab blended with the sounds of the straining engine and the low hum of cicadas.

  They had turned at a county road sign and had rumbled across a rickety steel single-lane bridge. After another mile, a flagman had waved them to the side of the road where they parked behind a line of cars.

  All Winston had showed up as if the event were a picnic, entertainment.

  But the solemn parade of Betheltown’s houses creaking down the mountain on flatbed trucks followed by station wagons sagging with suitcases, furniture and forlorn families was the saddest thing Allison had ever seen.

  The little black dog with the white belly who struggled to keep up with the caravan was the most heartbreaking of all.

  A rivulet of cold rain sliding down her neck snapped Allison back from her reverie. Josh was already tromping toward the lake. Allison picked her way behind.

  She caught glimpses through the trees of what remained of the place: row houses that had been too fragile to move, their porches collapsed, their rusted tin roofs peeled back to the sun-bleached framing; a bare plank wood building with a giant Coca-Cola bottle cap logo faded on the side; a rusted Esso sign; a pine tree shooting through the crumbled asphalt of a street.

  “An entire community,” she said when she caught up to Josh by the lake. “Houses. A little store. Even a church. On the map one day, gone the next.”

  “Betheltown was part of the land bought by the plant, right?”

  “Claimed under eminent domain by the government and given to the plant,” she corrected. “The people had no choice. They were uprooted and cast aside. Families who’d lived in this hollow for generations had six months to accept their settlement and move out.”

  Josh led Allison toward the bridge to the abandoned town. A sheet of rain swept across the lake signaling a new intensity to the storm. A hut emerged from the gloom. “We’ll wait it out here,” he said.

  The hut smelled of a forest in summer—the rich, heavy odor of moss and dark soil, the sweet scent of new growth and decaying leaves. The snare drum rapping of rain on the tin roof cut them off from the outside world.

  Allison peeled off her poncho, shook off the water, spread it on the floor and sat down, her legs stretched out before her, back propped against a wall.

  Josh looked at her long legs, tight jeans, blonde hair pulled into a pony tail, her simple white t-shirt stretched just to the side and up, revealing her navel. He sat beside her. Her left hand rested on her thigh. He rested his hand on top of hers. He was delighted when she made no effort to move it. He waited for a full minute before he slid his arm from her hand and slipped it around her waist. The touch of her skin sent a bolt of pleasure through him.

  Josh tightened his hold on her waist. Heart thudding in his chest, he abandoned all pretense, pulled Allison close and kissed her on the mouth.

  She pulled away. “I’m sorry. I’m just not ready to go there.” She put her hand on his. “If it were anyone, it would be someone like you.”

  Josh’s faced burned with heat. “I’m confused,” he said. “When you kissed me at rehearsal, I thought you were encouraging me. Heck, you were encouraging me.”

  Allison blushed. Josh was right and she knew it. She hadn’t intended to send mixed signals but she had. In fact, she realized she’d been a tease.

  Looking back, it was almost inevitable that she’d come across that way. Josh was attractive. He was kind. He was a great partner. She cherished his company. She’d learned a lot about Josh Gibbs over the last week and discovered some things about herself as well. She was better in his presence. She knew without a doubt that there was a connection between them. Despite her best efforts, her feelings had pierced the tough armor she’d developed and Josh had picked up on them. Still . . .

  She had no confidence in her ability to have a healthy relationship with any man. She’d idolized her father only to realize later that her hero worship had been grounded in her desperate attempts to win his affection. Her marriage to Vince was a combination of acting out against her father coupled with her continuing need to please. How could she be right about Josh when she’d been so wrong in the past?

  And larger questions, questions that lay down the road but that nevertheless demanded to be answered before she would permit herself to acknowledge her feelings. Was she ready to be a wife again? Was she ready to be a mom? Would she a better parent than her father?

  She had sent mixed signals because that’s what she felt—a growing love for Josh against fear of another failure, a fear that meant she had to reinforce her emotional armor and hold him at arm’s length.

  Josh’s phone rang. He answered in a tone transformed from frustrated to warm and loving. “Hi, sweetheart!”

  Allison could guess Katie’s end of the conversation from his questions—“How bad? When did it start?” She was moved by his determination to reassure her: “Don’t worry. Things will be fine. I’ll be there to meet you when you get off the bus.”

  When Josh told his daughter, “Of course. You’ll always be beautiful,” Allison wept. At that moment, she understood that Josh Gibbs was solid ground on which she could stand.

  Josh had been right about her and she knew it. Altruism, not love, defined her life. And love had a power that altruism did not. Josh’s love for his daughter was a fuel infinitely more powerful than her impersonal concern for public welfare. Even after the pain of his wife’s death, Josh hadn’t stopped loving. In the face of tragedy, he was willing to risk it, to be hurt again. That was, she realized, the difference between them. After Vince, she had so little love left to risk, least of all for herself, that in attempting to build bulwarks against the savagery of the world, she’d inadvertently sealed herself inside a prison of her own making. Love was such a big part of Josh that he was willing to give it to others without regard to the consequences. He had survived the past. That was his triumph and her failing. Fortunately, it could be rectified—at least this small part of it—easily enough.

  There was only one hurdle.

  She didn’t catch Josh’s last few words but as he hung up she turned to him. “What about Sharon?”

  Josh’s head had been far
away, with his daughter.

  “Josh, did you hear me? What about Sharon?”

  Josh’s focus returned to Allison. He used her own words. “Sharon’s not here anymore. We are.”

  “But do you think she’d understand?”

  “I wouldn’t have kissed you if I didn’t believe she understands. Sharon wants what’s best for Katie and for me.”

  Allison knew Josh meant her. She loved Josh. She loved his daughter. She was willing to devote herself to their happiness.

  In an instant, he had wiped away all her self-doubt. That the best man she had ever known could care so deeply for her gave her a confidence and belief in herself that she had never felt before. The past failings had been her father’s and Vince Bludhorn’s. They had not been about her. That Josh loved her meant the world.

  “Please, kiss me,” she said.

  “Are you sure it’s okay?”

  “Try it.”

  Josh kissed Allison lightly on the lips. He couldn’t believe their softness. He took her into his arms and kissed her again.

  How different, Allison thought, from Vince’s brutish, animal-like slobberings, clumsy preludes that inevitably left her feeling like an object. Josh’s kisses communicated tenderness, comfort, love. She felt like she was being kissed for the first time.

  When they parted, Josh asked, “Was that over the line?”

  “I don’t know. Later, we’ll have to try again.”

  The downpour eased. They left the hut and spotted a one-story frame house nearly hidden in the trees. Josh noticed a red cedar picnic table in the carport, along with a half-full bag of Kingsford charcoal, a can of lighter fluid and a grill. “Someone lives here,” he said.

  And then, a voice from behind him, “That would be Blanche Lee.”

  Josh whipped around. Not five paces away was a woman he judged to be at least eighty dressed in a camouflage raincoat and holding a rifle. She was barefoot. “And you are?” she asked.

  “Josh Gibbs.”

  The woman swung the gun from Josh to Allison who immediately raised her hands into the air.