“I figured you’d want the details so I had him come in. He’s waiting in your office. I promised we’d protect him. He’s afraid for his job.” Josh nodded. Granting confidentiality to sources was normally the price for obtaining inside information.
They joined Angerson around the coffee table.
“You gotta protect me,” he said. “Talk about a conflict! I’ve been in knots. The plant is talking about suing you guys.”
Angerson took a sheet of paper from his briefcase. He handed it to Josh. It was from the office of the legal department at Recovery Metals.
Josh read it and said, “A memo from Bludhorn to all plant supervisors. It reminds them that unauthorized contact with the media is a firing offense. It says the reminder is being issued because erroneous information about the plant is being circulated by ‘muckrakers.’ Now, that’s a term you don’t see much anymore. It says the plant will sue any media that publishes information about it that has not been authorized. Interesting interpretation of the First Amendment. It doesn’t specifically mention me or the News.”
Angerson interrupted. “But they told us in a special meeting they meant the News. Bludhorn made a big speech about how important the plant is to the local economy, that our jobs are at stake, how we need to circle the wagons and keep plant business at the plant. He said anybody doing business with the News needed to stop.”
Josh was floored. That explained customers backing out of their ad contracts. And the cancelled ink delivery. And probably the posters. They’d obviously stumbled upon something bigger than they had ever imagined and the forces arrayed against them were bigger and more powerful, too.
“We’ve found the hornets nest,” Allison said.
“And the hornets have lawyers,” Josh added.
Furbee leaned forward. “Charles, do you know what they’re so concerned about?”
Angerson looked stricken. “Promise this is confidential, for background only. You have to confirm it yourselves.”
“Promise,” Josh said.
“One of our truckers brought in some stuff that contained high-level radioactivity. It got through the radiation detectors because it was encased in lead. But as soon as the lead melted in the furnace, the stuff went everywhere. Eight tons of metal got contaminated. One of the buildings is still hot in places. It was a mess.”
“Whoa!” Furbee exclaimed. “Anyone hurt?”
Angerson sighed. “I hear they’re seeing some problems. Burns. Hair loss. Maybe a dozen cases so far. There’s a rumor one guy died. I understand it’s going to get worse. But they’ve set up a clinic on site so they can deal with the problem there.”
Josh scribbled notes. “If it was an accident, why are they so uptight about it?” he asked. “Why not just say what happened?”
“Too great a chance they’d have to stop operating for a couple of weeks. They had me do some calculations. It’d cost millions. They deactivated the detectors to keep them from alerting, so we’re still up and running.”
Josh was shocked. Not only was the plant behind the radioactive contamination, it had undertaken a massive and continuing cover-up.
Allison started a new mental tally of the victims: Darryl and the manufacturers like Spike who bought his metal; her patients and anyone else who’d bought contaminated jewelry, all the Remaining in Betheltown; the whole work force at the plant. “Where’s the contaminated metal?” she asked, fearful that she already knew.
“They’re holding it in a lagoon. But I hear they’ve found a buyer—in Asia, I think—because they’re draining it.”
“Why would they pollute their own property?” Josh wondered.
“Well, the lagoon overflowed when they first dumped the metal in there. The radioactive water just dissipated into the woods. The engineers think the same thing will happen when they empty the whole thing. They say what isn’t absorbed will flow into a lake and be contained. No one lives down there anyway.”
Allison and Josh exchanged a glance. A clap of thunder shook the building. “Of course, I don’t think they figured on all this rain,” Angerson added.
Allison felt sick. In addition to not considering the rain, the engineers’ thinking was flawed because of two things they didn’t know. First, somebody—the Remaining—did live there. Second, the Betheltown lake was already dangerously radioactive because of the cesium Spike stole from Dunn.
If the flood of contaminated lagoon water overwhelmed the lake, cesium would race down the steep hills toward the Ohio River and the intakes for Winston’s water supply. The town was facing an environmental catastrophe, a nuclear nightmare, a true public health disaster. Winston would become another Chernobyl or Fukushima, uninhabitable for years. The last scene of the pageant would finally be written.
Images of her patients paraded before her. How strange that the town could die—Winston nothing but a fading memory like Chief Cornstalk or Betheltown.
Perhaps the forlorn trail of refugees she had seen at Betheltown had been a preview. Perhaps—as a girl—she had been allowed to see her future.
Angerson left. Furbee paced. Josh wrote, taking care only to use information from Angerson that he had confirmed independently.
Allison seated herself at Furbee’s computer and went to the website for the Environmental Protection Agency to determine if there was precedent for Angerson’s story. She quickly came across an unsettling report.
There have been at least twenty-six recorded accidental meltings of radioactive material in the United States . . . One such case happened in Texas in 1996 when a Cobalt-60 source was stolen from a storage facility and sold as scrap metal. Workers and customers of the scrap yard and law enforcement officers who conducted investigations at the scrap yard were exposed to the source and may have received dangerous levels of radiation.
Why was this just now coming to light? She typed “Texas” and “Cobalt-60” into the search engine and scrolled through three pages of listings of stories about University of Texas Longhorn running back Marquis Cobalt before finding another promising item. The summary read:
In 1983, a Picker 3000 radiotherapy machine once owned by a Texas hospital ended up in a Juarez junkyard where its Cobalt-60 was recycled into six hundred tons of contaminated steel. Radioactive table legs and rebar made their way to twenty-three states, Canada and Mexico where one hundred nine houses built with radioactive steel had to be demolished.
She clicked on the next item and scrolled down the item from the website of WKYC-TV in Cleveland reporting a 2004 incident where cesium-137 ended up in a Canton, Ohio steel plant, apparently delivered as part of a shipment of scrap metal.
Allison relayed the information to Josh.
“Make sure I have room for a big headline,” he told Furbee. “Seventy-two points at least. How’s the ink supply?”
“We blew some on that false start this morning but there’s enough for half the run.”
“Print as many as you can.”
“Any response from the plant to the questions I emailed Jerry Baker?”
“Not even a ‘No comment.’”
He finished writing. The story simply reported the provable facts: the victims of radioactive jewelry who had come to the attention of Dr. Wright, at least one of whom was not expected to survive; the murder of Darryl Dunn the metal dealer; Geiger counter readings that showed the much higher than normal radiation levels at the plant and deadly radiation levels off-site, including in the lake at Betheltown; the radiation injuries at the plant; the draining of the lagoon.
A companion piece warned readers not to buy jewelry from unknown sources and to avoid the local water. Another sidebar incorporated the information Allison had uncovered about past incidents of contamination at metal recycling plants.
The stories would, Josh fully understood, be the death knell of River Days even before it began, and would mark the end of the Winston Ne
ws because there would be no advertisers and there likely would be no sale—certainly not at the new wildly inflated price Bella Partners was now offering.
That would mean the end of his life in Winston. Even if the town managed to avoid disaster, the Winston years would be bundled up and buried. He and Katie would start over somewhere else. He would lose Sharon again. And Allison.
He took a long, bracing breath and told Furbee. “Okay. Let ‘er rip.”
He wanted to make the night special for his daughter.
Before he moved Katie’s bed into the living room so she wouldn’t have to climb stairs. Before she started six months of chemo. While she still had both legs.
Normal for one last night. Or at least as normal as it ever gets for a thirty-something father raising a teenage daughter by himself.
He had not felt such focus since the days immediately before Sharon died when his priorities were obvious and uncomplicated and he knew without a doubt what was required of him.
In an hour or so Katie would step off the bus with the rest of the ten-day campers and he would take her in his arms and he would hear all about camp—and, God forbid, maybe this boy—and they would have a nice, cozy dinner.
And then he would drive her to the hospital and entrust her to Dr. Pepper. He could stop worrying whether sending her to camp had been the right thing to do and they could finally get on with it, stop waiting and worrying and start fighting.
At home, Josh set the plate of cookies—the ones Allison had helped wth, not his own, coin-thin hockey pucks—and the straw basket with the ribbon on the dining room table where Katie would be sure to see them first and began preparing Katie’s homecoming meal: lasagna, a family specialty and Katie’s favorite.
Sharon was waiting for him in the kitchen. In the pantry, where he kept the pasta, he spotted two cans of beets which he knew neither he nor Katie would ever have bought. Sharon held these once, he thought. As he followed the recipe Sharon had written on the now-stained three-by-five note card, he saw her sitting at her small kitchen desk, glasses pushed to the top of her head, holding the hair back from her face. The glasses were still in his dresser drawer.
He stirred the tomato sauce with a spoon from a Sears set they had bought as newlyweds and placed it in a spoon rest decorated with an illustration of a couple kissing that they had received as a wedding present. He saw the picture of Sharon in her wedding gown and his heart swelled, just as it had then.
He looked to the refrigerator where her picture still hung—Sharon toward the end, bald head hidden under a pink bandana, face thin but smile as wide and radiant as ever. And then he heard her voice. “Katie needs a mom.”
Josh stared at the picture. Sharon smiled back.
The timer dinged. Josh returned to the stove, grabbed two hot pads and withdrew the glass pan from the oven. Minutes later he was on his way to the bus station.
On impulse, he detoured to a section of River Street where vendors were displaying their wares. He bought a huge bouquet of daisies for ten dollars and walked to the bus depot.
He passed several costumed acquaintances and was sure they were shunning him even though, he conceded to himself, it was possible they were merely hunkered down against the steady rain. He hurried past a drug store before he realized there had been a mason jar with Katie’s photo—Furbee’s doing—on the counter. He backtracked and peeked in the window. The jar was empty. Someone had defaced Katie’s picture with a mustache. Anger rose in him like bile.
The sound of grinding gears and the roar of a diesel engine pulled him from darkness to light and sent his heart soaring. Screw them and their pettiness, he thought. Katie was home.
By the time the bus from Camp Kanawha pulled into view, Josh was smiling from ear to ear despite the fact his daughter was suffering from bone cancer, his business was going down in flames and his town was facing the threat of nuclear disaster.
Knots of chatting mothers surrounded him beneath an overhang as the bus eased to a stop. Fathers, loners for the most part, ended cell phone conversations, set aside their newspapers and drifted in from a parking lot filled by a fleet of minivans adorned with expressions of devotion to the game. Tiny soccer balls topping radio antennas. Magnetic soccer balls clinging to the fuel filler door. Bumper stickers declaring that Soccer Players Kick Grass.
A blast of compressed air escaped with a whoosh as the bus’s hydraulic doors swung open. The driver emerged, opened the cargo area underneath, and began dragging out suitcases, sleeping bags, duffel bags and footlockers and piling them beside the bus. Parents began sorting through the pile for their camper’s belongings. A minute later, the first of the girls tumbled off dragging a net holding three soccer balls. Then another girl. And another. And another. A whole line of girls. A few paused to pose for final photos with new friends before drifting away with their parents.
Josh eyed each girl who came down the stairs. No Katie. As the flow of girls slowed to a trickle, Josh began to fret. He stood on his tiptoes. There were a few more girls inside and he watched with growing anxiety as they stepped off one by one. Katie was not among them.
Josh stepped around the luggage and the knot of campers and bounded on to the bus. He paced down the aisle heart pounding hoping to find his daughter still asleep in her seat. The seats were empty. Bathroom, he told himself as fear metastasized into panic. He rapped on the lavatory door, shouted, “Katie!” He pulled the latch and threw the door open. Empty.
“Forget something, mister?” Josh turned to see the bus driver standing in the aisle.
“My daughter,” he said. “She was supposed to be on this bus.”
“I loaded forty-seven and I dropped off forty-seven,” the driver said defensively.
“Stay here,” Josh commanded. He squeezed by the driver and sprinted to the parking lot where the last of the minivans was pulling away. Still clutching the daisies, Josh ran up and pounded on the driver’s side door. A mother lowered the window. Josh recognized one of his daughter’s teammates in the backseat.
“Where’s Katie?” he shouted.
“She wasn’t on the bus,” the girl answered.
“Why not?” he almost shouted.
The girl recoiled. In his dripping coonskin cap, Josh realized he looked like a madman.
The minivan pulled away, leaving Josh bewildered and alone in the street.
Chapter Fifty-Five
Josh sprinted back to the bus and pounded desperately on the door until it eased open. He bulled past the startled driver and, as if he could have overlooked a five-foot, ten-inch, thirteen-year-old the first time around, re-searched the bus. No Katie.
He whipped out his phone and dialed Katie. Voice mail. “Gimme the camp’s phone number!” he demanded of the driver.
The man handed him the passenger manifest with a number at the top. Josh dialed with speed-blurred fingers.
“This is Josh Gibbs in Winston,” he told the camp director. “I’m on the camp bus. My daughter Katie was supposed to be on it. She wasn’t.”
“You’re sure she’s not part of the long session? Sometimes there a mix-up, both parents aren’t on the same page.”
“She was supposed to be on the bus,” Josh said sternly.
The director cleared his throat. “One thought does occur. Is it possible that your daughter may have needed a little space, given what she’s facing?”
In years of reporting, Josh had learned to rule out nothing, to assume even the most bizarre scenarios might be possible. The thought had even crossed his mind that Katie had simply disobeyed instructions and stayed at camp. But he had dismissed it. Teens could be unpredictable but Katie generally wasn’t.
And Katie running away didn’t add up. She may have needed time to herself when he’d broken the news to her about the cancer, but Katie wasn’t the type to flee—she faced challenges head-on. “There has to be another explanation,
” he insisted. “You search every inch of that camp.” The camp director promised to call with any new information. Josh stumbled off the bus.
“Good luck, mister,” the driver said. The bus shifted into gear and pulled away, leaving Josh on the sidewalk. His head was swirling. The drumbeat of the rain made it impossible for him to think.
He dialed Allison and got a fast busy. He dialed again with the same result. The third time he pounded the numbers even harder, as if sheer force could bring about a connection. Fast busy again.
An icon on his cell phone screen alerted Josh to a voice mail left by an Ohio area code number. He got through the third time and retrieved the message—from Pepper reminding him to observe Katie’s pre-admission procedure, including nothing to eat after midnight. It ended with “It’s important that there be no more delay.”
Josh was beside himself. He dialed Allison again and got another fast busy. “Damn phones!” he swore. Like a reliever picking a runner off second base, he wound up and whirled to deliver a fastball into the brick wall of the bus station.
He balked at the last second. He took a deep breath. He turned the phone off, waited with waning patience for what seemed like an eternity as it rebooted, then redialed. Fast busy. Temples pounding, he tried again. This time, the call went through. But instead of the emergency dispatcher, Josh heard a confusing babble of competing conversations, one of which seemed to be about which Winston restaurant was most likely to have an open table for dinner that evening. He wanted to cry.
The problem, Josh realized, was not with his phone. The cellular transmission towers had simply been overwhelmed by the volume of traffic from the thousands in town for River Days. Everyone had phones, even Katie. He recalled the cell phone argument with his thirteen-year-old daughter. Not until you’re driving, he’d ruled initially. It’s for safety, she contended. Thank goodness he had relented. If only he could reach her now! He dialed three times before he got voice mail again. He followed up with a text. No response. Perhaps her battery had finally died.
Fallout Page 25