He cautiously broached the topic of Chief Holt. Allison had explained that it would be therapeutic for Katie to talk—but only when she was ready. “Give her an opening and see,” she had suggested.
It turned out Katie was eager. Josh was glad to listen. “He told me he was picking me up because the people at the plant were going to kidnap me. He said the only way he could stop the kidnapping was to get to me first. He took me to his little shack. I called you from there on my phone but it ran out of battery.” She took another cookie. “He said they were going to bulldoze the pond and it would poison everyone. He said they’d already killed two people and dumped one of them in the river. He said he had to stop them. We watched from the woods until we saw the bulldozer. He told me to hide until it was safe.”
“Did he tell you why they wanted to kidnap you?”
“To stop you from reporting something bad they’d done. He said I should be proud of you because you’re a hero.”
Josh swallowed hard. There was no escaping the fact he had put his daughter’s life in danger.
After dinner, he started a load of laundry.
Wait,” Katie said. She unzipped her duffel and handed her father a blue and gold lanyard. “I made this for you in arts and crafts.” She reached back into the duffel, and pulled out a hand-thrown pottery mug. “We made these for our moms. I’m giving mine to Allie.”
Later, he packed her bag for the hospital. Katie made sure he included plenty of books, and pictures of her mother and the 13-0 Black Ravens.
At 1 a.m. he tucked Katie into bed, kissed her and turned out the light.
Furbee was waiting when he arrived back at his office. He had one question. “Where do we stand?”
Furbee answered. “With all the starts and stops, we have enough ink to print a four-page section. That’s it. And only a few thousand copies at that.”
Josh didn’t hesitate. “We’re going with an Extra on everything that’s happened. Three pages of news and one full-page ad on the back cover—from the Friends of Chief Cornstalk.”
He caught Furbee’s raised eyebrow. “They’re prepaid,” he pointed out. “Plus it fits the content.”
Furbee clapped her hands. “I’ll call in the crew. Press rolls at 6 a.m.”
Allison arrived looking drawn and tired from all the questions but eager to get out the news.
Josh switched on his computer. Three pages of content and it was all up to him. He rewrote the contamination to encompass the developments at the plant, changing it frequently based on reports from Allison.
The story quoted Allison about the hazards of exposure to radiation and listed places victims could turn for help.
The story devoted significant attention to the life and death of Chief Holt, a hero who died doing what he was sworn to do—protect the citizens of Winston.
Josh wrote a separate story about Congressman Harry Dorn. He made sure there was room for the photo Allison had taken at the Sternwheeler.
A third story spotlighted the Winston News’s own Jimmy Mayes. Josh cobbled it together from what he had seen in Betheltown, what he had learned from the dying Mayes and the content of the Friends of Chief Cornstalk ad.
The ad was headlined: The Third Betrayal of Chief Cornstalk. An italic precede said the purpose of the ad was to alert the community to the danger from the plant, which also meant correcting the version of history portrayed in the Old Fashioned River Days historical pageant.
The story began with a recounting of Betheltown, the community on land condemned and seized for the plant but never used. Most of the five hundred inhabitants relocated but a few—who referred to themselves as the ‘Remaining’—never left.
Some like Jimmy Mayes, Josh wrote, regarded the land as sacred, the resting place for the body of Chief Cornstalk. For Mayes, the plant and its actions defiled sacred ground and represented another betrayal of the great Shawnee chief.
The first betrayal, the Friends of Chief Cornstalk ad explained, was Cornstalk’s death. Josh quoted from the ad:
“Following his defeat near Winston on October 10, 1774, Cornstalk and the Shawnees relocated to Ohio and agreed to end attacks on settlers on the east side of the river. In 1777, at the height of the American Revolution, Cornstalk journeyed to Fort Randolph to warn the Colonials that the British were inciting his tribe to attack but that, instead, his tribe was prepared to join the Americans. Cornstalk was seized and imprisoned. A month later he was shot twelve times, murdered along with his son. As he lay dying, he spoke a curse.” Josh’s story quoted it in full.
“I was the border man’s friend. Many times I have saved him and his people from harm. I never warred with you, but only to protect our wigwams and lands. I refused to join your paleface enemies with the red coats. I came to the fort as your friend and you murdered me. You have murdered by my side, my young son . . . . For this, may the curse of the Great Spirit rest upon this land. May it be blighted by nature. May it even be blighted in its hopes. May the strength of its peoples be paralyzed by the stain of our blood.”
The ad listed the area disasters that followed—the worst coal mine disaster in American history in Monongah, West Virginia in 1907; one hundred fifty local people killed by a tornado in 1944; the Silver Bridge disaster which sent forty-six people hurtling to their death in the Ohio River in 1967; the 1970 crash of a chartered plane near Huntington which killed the entire Marshall University football team; the 1978 deaths of fifty-one men working on the Willow Island power station. The plant catastrophe was the most recent on the list.
Cornstalk’s second betrayal, the ad said, was the disrespect accorded his body in burial. He was originally interred near the fort where he was murdered. In 1840, some of his remains were moved to the courthouse grounds. When they were unearthed again and reburied in 1954, only three teeth and fifteen bone fragments were found.
The third betrayal was the conduct, indeed the very existence, of the plant.
The story concluded by noting that the ad had been signed by the News pressman who identified himself as president of the Friends of Chief Cornstalk group. In the ad, the pressman noted he was changing the spelling of his last name to his family name, the name of his ancestor, Wynepueschiska. The signature read ‘Jimmy Maize.’
At 6 a.m., Josh felt the Goss Community offset press rumble to life—a familiar and comforting feeling at a very unfamiliar time.
Allison dropped Josh off at his house and went home to change. She was still wearing the pizza delivery uniform.
Josh woke Katie. An hour later, they were crossing the Ohio River on their way to Columbus.
Chapter Sixty-One
The attendants paused short of the automatic doors reading Pediatric Surgery. Josh leaned over the gurney and kissed his groggy daughter—thirteen times, plus one for luck. He looked at the photograph she held of the famous Black Ravens girls’ soccer team, 13-0. He turned to a man wearing green scrubs, a Donald Duck surgical cap and blue clogs with yellow smiley faces on the front. “Throw everything you got at it,” he told the surgeon. “We need a win.” The surgeon nodded. The doors opened. Pepper, the gurney and Katie disappeared.
A nurse directed Josh to a waiting room. He was its only occupant. He leafed through two magazines. He identified each of the species in the soothing tropical fish tank. He figured more than an hour had passed and he was starting to worry. A short surgery, he reasoned, meant a good biopsy and no immediate amputation. A bad biopsy and immediate amputation was likely to take much longer. He looked at his watch. Only thirty minutes had elapsed. Journalists, he decided, were not meant for waiting rooms. They needed to be close to the action, the first to know. Josh bolted from the waiting room and established a sentry post in a plastic chair just outside the automatic doors.
At first, he sprang to his feet each time the doors opened. As the parade of orderlies, nurses, doctors and other surgical cases became endle
ss, he numbed to the sound. Only the clatter of gurney wheels got his attention. Was it Katie? Tubes, oxygen masks and surgical caps made it difficult to tell. He developed a quicker test. They came out feet first. One leg or two?
The doors opened with no sound of a gurney. Elbow resting on his thigh, hand supporting his chin—a pose like The Thinker—Josh was calculating the number of dots per tile in the floor. He didn’t look up until a pair of bright blue clog shoes with smiley faces on the front walked into his view. The surgeon, accompanied by Dr. Pepper. The verdict was in.
Josh sprang to his feet. Too fast. His knees felt wobbly. Pepper was still wearing his mask. Josh searched his eyes for a sign. Was he seeing defeat or relief? He thought he might faint.
Pepper removed his mask. “The Black Ravens,” he smiled, “are still undefeated.”
His joy did not prevent him from respecting the admonition of Walker Burns, his first city editor, to take nothing for granted. So only after he had seen for himself that Katie still had two legs and only after the doctors assured him that it would be hours before she awoke, he called Allison. She was ecstatic.
“I’m afraid the news isn’t so good here,” she reported after pumping Josh for the details about the operation. “Spike was airlifted to Charleston but it was too late. His grandmother appears to be okay, along with the rest of the Remaining, but we’ve already identified two dozen plant workers who received high levels of radiation exposure. Four of them won’t make it to the weekend. Of course, we won’t know the final number of fatalities for years.”
“At least eight,” Josh noted. “Jimmy Maize. Spike. Darryl. Chief Holt and the four from the plant.”
“Make it nine. A body washed up on Possum Island. They think it’s a guy who died in the original accident.”
“What about the cleanup?”
“Teams from Homeland Security are all over the place. They’ve already recovered Darryl’s cesium from the lake and the metal from the lagoon at Recovery Metals. The stuff’s going to be loaded into these huge casks that they use for spent nuclear fuel but there’s a whole other problem about where to put it after that—the same problem the healthcare business has getting rid of high-level radioactive material in the first place. They’ve put the plant and about ten square miles around it totally off limits until the cleanup is complete. They say it could take years.”
“It’s just as bad as you said it would be,” Josh observed.
But beyond that, he found himself unable to react. Each of the events of the preceding two weeks—Katie’s cancer, her disappearance, the murders of Jimmy Maize and the chief, the Dorn scandal, the radioactive threat, even his developing relationship with Allison—were consuming, life-changing experiences. Experiencing them all at once had left him emotionally drained, numb. He had nothing left—beyond a conviction that whatever the challenge was he would find a way to get through it.
“There is one positive development,” Allison continued. “Congressman Dorn resigned. His office says he’s entered a treatment center. Blames the stress of the campaign.”
So many story ideas flooded into Josh’s brain he couldn’t keep track. He had no doubt: he was right in the middle of the biggest story of his life. He called the newspaper after he hung up with Allison. “Furbee, how are we going to cover all this? There’s enough news for a year! How can we even publish this week? I’ve got Katie—”
Furbee interrupted him. “Some of your old Atlanta buddies showed up to cover the story. They learned about your situation. A couple are taking vacation time to stay and more are coming later to help the News until you’re back and things slow down.” Josh was flabbergasted. “I do have one question. Do these Atlanta guys know how to make deadlines?”
Josh had to laugh. “What about ink?”
“We’re floating in it. The trucking company called to apologize. Claims it was all a mix-up. And apparently they buy ink by the truckloads in Atlanta. Your guys didn’t think they’d miss a few barrels.”
Josh shook his head in amazement.
“I’m just getting to the good news. Somehow, your reporter friends found out about Katie. One of them started grilling the health insurance company. Kind of reminded them that they’d look pretty bad if they didn’t pay for everything, especially now that you’re a hero.”
Hero. Josh had never thought of himself that way. If there were any heroes they had to include people like Furbee who never quit trying. He had no doubt how the information about his insurance problems had made its way to the Atlanta reporters. He could never leave a profession that produced people like his colleagues in Atlanta and a newspaper that included people like Furbee. No matter how big the offer from the group in Pennsylvania and Bella Partners, there would be no sale of the Winston News for as long as he had anything to say about it.
“Another thing,” Furbee said, as if she were on his wavelength. “A fax came in from Bella Partners and the Paddlewheel project is off. I’d never heard of them but Charles said Bella Partners is affiliated with Recovery Metals. What’s the Paddlewheel project?”
Josh couldn’t believe his ears. He had come that close to selling the Winston News to the people behind the plant, owners who would then be free of any threat of independent oversight. “Nothing,” Josh replied. “Nothing at all.”
Chapter Sixty-Two
The sky darkened and the wind whipped small cyclones of dead leaves through the gravestones in Winston Memorial Gardens.
Under a green vinyl canopy, a minister concluded a final prayer over the casket of Darryl Dunn. Allison crossed herself. Her hunch had been wrong but she was glad that she had come. Even Darryl Dunn deserved at least one mourner.
She was returning to her car when she noticed a woman in black watching from a distance. So she had been right after all. She walked up to the woman and extended her hand.
“I’m sorry for your loss,” she told Candi Cloninger.
“He wasn’t all bad, you know,” Cloninger said. “He had his faults but they had no cause to kill him.”
“Why did they, Candi?”
“To keep him quiet. He figured out they’d paid him off in poison metal. They thought he was going to talk.”
“Let’s get out of the weather. Coffee’s on me. You can tell me how the whole thing worked.”
Cloninger stirred her Java Joynt latte. “The plant had a deal with the truckers. In addition to their base pay, Darryl got a nice commission on ‘undocumented’ metals.”
“Undocumented?”
“Stuff that’s not on the manifest. Maybe it’s stuff he didn’t pay for. Maybe it’s stuff that might not fit environmental regulations, so to speak. Darryl collected his commissions by retaining recycled platinum, gold and silver which he’d sell. Only he found out one batch was bad.”
“How’d he learn that?”
“When the newspaper called. The guy left a message saying he was going to do a story about Darryl and his supplier. Of course, that was the plant. His bosses freaked out when he told them.”
Allison felt terrible. In some ways that meant she had been responsible for Dunn’s murder. She had badgered Josh into leaving the message in an attempt to get Dunn to respond to her calls. Instead, he’d told his bosses. She swallowed hard. “So they killed him to keep him from talking to the paper.”
“It was more than that. Darryl was pretty upset when he found out he’d been paid off in bad metal. He threatened to blackmail the plant with some undocumented medical machine he’d kept as evidence to tie them into this. That was his mistake.”
Allison felt a little better. She remembered finding the metal with the Columbus hospital logo amid the wreckage at Dunn’s.
“Candi, you remember Darryl putting something from the machine in his safe?”
“Oh, sure. Some neat powder that glowed bright blue. But someone stole the safe. Probably when they trashed the house.”
>
She had one more question. “Did Darryl cook meth?”
“He did a lot of things but not that. I heard they found a cooker but the killers must have planted it to throw the cops off track.”
The women finished their coffee. Allison suggested they go to the clinic where she was pleased to see that Cloninger’s tongue had healed and that early intervention had prevented further problems.
Josh was delighted to find Allison waiting in the driveway when he arrived back home. He found a long-forgotten bottle of red wine and poured glasses while Allison boiled pasta to go with her homemade spaghetti sauce. “Katie’s going to need some live-in care when she gets out of the hospital—someone to help me cook and to get her in and out of the shower.”
Allison drained the pasta into the sink. Steam billowed from the strainer. “Maybe a part-time nurse?”
Josh put his hands on her waist from behind. “I had a little higher level of care in mind. Someone more like a doctor.”
Allison wondered where it would lead. Josh had mentioned help for Katie but she knew he was telling her that he was open to more. If the relationship developed that way, she’d like that. Unlike her ex, Josh was capable of love and commitment. And she had come to see that a relationship with him was not a betrayal but the ultimate fulfillment of her pledge to Sharon to take care of things.
She smiled and turned into his arms. They fit together as if they’d been made for each other. “I’d be good at that.”
He held her tight. “You would indeed.”
About the Author
Mark Ethridge is a third-generation reporter and writer who directed two Pulitzer Prize-winning investigations for the Charlotte Observer. Ethridge is the author of Grievances (NewSouth Books, 2006) and wrote the screenplay for the movie adaptation, Deadline, starring Eric Roberts. He lives in Charlotte, North Carolina, with his wife Kay.
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