“How’s she doing?”
“Fine,” he said. “Her vital signs are good. She’s starting to feel zapped and disoriented, which is the part that gets worse before it gets better. The IV drip is just about done, but I’d like to keep her overnight. I want to monitor everything that comes out, and she’s apt to be unable to do it herself. Are you okay with that?”
I was fine with it. I was actually great with it. If Phoebe stayed over at the clinic, I could work longer with Sabina, and the longer I worked with Sabina, the more evidence I might amass and the less I would think of James. “Totally. Has any mercury come out yet?”
“It takes a little while for that to start. Late tonight, early tomorrow—those are the critical times.”
“What’ll you do if the tests are positive?”
He looked me in the eye. “Face a moral crisis. There are lots of people here who are sick. Do I treat them for mercury poisoning, or do I not? I need evidence that they were exposed.”
“You didn’t have evidence that Phoebe was exposed.”
“I know. That’s the problem. Can you find it?”
Determined to do just that, I returned to the store, but the place was humming. Sabina was helping Joanne, and they needed me, too. It wasn’t until we had locked the door, closed the register, and tallied up cash, checks, and credit slips, that Sabina and I had time to think, and then we were hungry. Sabina had already left a message at home that she would be staying here at the store with me awhile. Needing air, she volunteered to pick up dinner at Omie’s.
While she was gone, I went up to the office and logged on to check my e-mail. There was nothing from Greg, though I pictured him sliding down Mount McKinley in the snow. Berri sent a note saying that she and John were still hot and heavy. There was a note from my editor saying that my revisions were fine and she was clearing out of the city until after Labor Day, so I wouldn’t hear from her again until then, which suited me fine. I was feeling distanced from work. Not so from my friends. I felt a warmth inside reading a note from my friend Jocelyn, who was nearing the end of Peyton Place and wondered how much was autobiographical. She was trying to picture me there, she said. I clicked on “reply.”
Grace wouldn’t say that Peyton Place was the most autobiographical of her novels. She would say No Adam in Eden was that. But there are similarities betweenGrace and Allison MacKenzie. Both grew up without fathers in the house. Allison was something of a social outcast, as Grace was. Allison was slow to reach puberty, as Grace was. Grace was actually called“slats” when she was a teenager, because she was flat as a board. By the time she was sixteen, she had made up for it, but being called names may have enlarged the chip on her shoulder.
As for trying to picture me in the town of PeytonPlace, don’t. Middle River was like Peyton Place when I was a child, but returning here now, I see how different it is. For one thing, there’s fifty years of modernization. Middle River hasn’t stood still. Everyone has cell phones, Omie’s plays popular music, businesses are computerized, FedEx comes twice a day. Even theSheep Pen has gone modern with beer from microbreweries.
Funny, but I don’t feel isolated here the way I thought I would. Isn’t e-mail a fabulous thing?
I clicked “send,” then pulled up TrueBlue’s last note—the impatient one—and reread it. Rather than impatience now, I sensed urgency. So I clicked “reply.”
The good news is that I’ve located two people who were at the Clubhouse and the Gazebo prior to those fires, and who have had chronic problems in the years since.The bad news is that neither of them is willing to talk. I put the bug in their ear and am hoping they’ll come around. In the meantime, I’m working on finding others.
You’ve probably heard that my sister is being treated at the clinic. If it proves that she did have mercury poisoning—and if the treatment works—her mind may clear up so that she’ll remember more of the when and how. But that could take a while.
What are you getting on your end?
I sent the note, and quickly got one in return.
Lots of flack. The Meades are feeling threatened. Aidan is using your sister’s defection as a sign of looming trouble. A board meeting’s been called. You need to work fast.
I was reading his note when Sabina returned, and I might have hidden it from her. I had enough time. But she was my ally now.
“He’s my source,” I explained. “He has given me information on the mill’s use of mercury. He was the one who told me that a toxic cleanup was done after the fires.”
She finished reading. “Who is he?”
“He won’t say. He works at the mill, has for years and hopes to for a lot longer, but his user identity is all I have. TrueBlue. Any ideas?”
Sabina looked at me. I could have sworn I saw a flicker of smugness. “Actually, yes. I’d guess it was James.”
“James.” My heart tripped. “James Meade? Why do you say that?”
There was more than a flicker of smugness now. She seemed downright lordly. “I’ve spent much of today reading e-mail that’s come into the system. James is currently going back and forth with a friend who lives in Des Moines, a lawyer, from the gist of the conversation. I gather they’re old college buddies. The guy calls him Blue. Sounds like a college nickname.”
Hadn’t TrueBlue said that his college roommate was a lawyer?
“That’s bizarre,” I argued. I did not want TrueBlue to be James. James and I had been too intimate for him not to have told me something as important as that. Besides, Sabina’s tone grated. I didn’t want her to be right. It was like we were kids again, and she was one-upping me. “Are you sure James’s friend was calling him Blue? Maybe he was referring to someone else.”
Sabina had an answer for that, too. “He did it multiple times—as in Hey, Blue, good to hear from you, and So, Blue, how’s Mia? and Good thought, Blue. Don’t e-mail. I’ll call. James had legal questions that he wanted to keep confidential. Is it a coincidence that he’s asking a pal legal questions at a time when Aidan and Sandy are getting nervous about mercury?”
No, it wasn’t a coincidence. So was James asking legal questions on behalf of Aidan and Sandy? Or was he asking on behalf of TrueBlue?
“And he has information on a board meeting,” Sabina said. “The rank and file wouldn’t know that.”
“Why would his college friends call him Blue?” I asked, resistant still.
Sabina put the bag of food on the desk. “Because, Annie, he wears blue all the time. Blue shirts, blue jerseys, blue sweatshirts and jackets. Ask me, and I say that’s boring as hell, but hey,” she opened the bag, “each to his own.” She removed take-out containers and handed me one. “Omie’s hash, in memory of Omie. She always told my kids that her hash was brain food. Maybe it’ll help us. If a board meeting is coming up soon, we need something more than we have.”
We sure did. Phoebe was our best bet, but she wasn’t thinking straight, and now I had to think about James, too. There were oh-so-many reasons why his being TrueBlue made sense, and the more I thought about it, the more sense it made. But it raised the major question about whose side he was on, and how could I possibly know? James didn’t trust me enough to share more than a very general I’m doing what I can.
Well, from what I could see, that wasn’t enough. Bottom line? I didn’t trust him either.
As soon as Sabina and I had eaten, we phoned Susannah Alban, Sammy Dahill, and Emily McCreedy in the hope that maybe if Sabina voiced the appeal, one of them would talk. No luck. We did get the full Rotary Club roster. It was in the town hall files, and since the Meades so generously allowed the town to use Northwood’s server, Sabina was able to pull it up. We matched three other names from that list to mine, but two were dead, and the third wouldn’t talk.
Moreover, the fourth event held prior to one of the fires was a photo shoot at the Gazebo for a clothing catalog. Since the Times hadn’t listed names (I asked Angus that on the phone), and since most of the participants were from out of state, Sab
ina was going to have to dig into the Northwood system for details.
For now, we scrutinized more of the mill’s e-mail. It seemed that this very day Aidan had initiated a dialogue with an agent of the state Department of Environmental Services suggesting that Northwood sponsor another of the public information days that the department periodically held. Northwood had done this before. The mill was a best friend of the DES, enough to make one wonder. And then, there was the timing. It was fishy. But the correspondence was clean.
Frustrated, we left the shop at ten. We stopped briefly at the clinic to find Phoebe in a private room now, sound asleep. It was past ten-thirty when I finally got back to the house. I had barely set my things on the kitchen table when the phone rang.
Caller ID told me it was James, and I was suddenly furious, hurt, and confused, all at the same time. I debated not answering. I simply didn’t know what to say to him.
But I couldn’t just let it ring. So I picked it up. “Yes, James.”
There was a pause, then a quiet, “How’s Phoebe?”
“She’s sleeping at the clinic.”
“How’s she feeling?”
“Lousy, I’m told.”
“I’m sorry.”
“That she’s sick? That half the town is sick? That you can’t trust me enough to confide in me?” I could feel Grace telling me to confront him about being TrueBlue, but I didn’t want to. I wasn’t ready.
“We need to talk,” he said in that same quiet voice.
I rolled my eyes. “Have I heard that before?”
“We need to talk about us.”
“Us?” I cried, realizing in that instant that I wouldn’t be asking about TrueBlue at all, because this phone call had nothing to do with TrueBlue. This was between James Meade and me. “What us? There is no us.”
“I think there is. That’s why this is so hard.”
“What’s so hard?” I shot back. “Lying?”
This time he was silent so long that I half expected he had hung up. I was surprised when he said, more quietly than ever, “I want to see you.”
Fingers closed around my heart. Eyes tearing, I said, “Well, you have a child, so you can’t leave your house, and I have obligations to my family and dozens of other people in this town, so I need to be up early tomorrow to work, and I’m not sure there’s any point in our seeing each other, because I’m going back to Washington in two weeks, so even if there was an us here, it’s done. It’s been fun, James, y’know?”
As I waited for him to reply, I cursed myself for sounding like a petulant twelve-year-old.
When he remained silent, I rubbed my chest. It hurt.
When still there was nothing one minute, two minutes, three minutes later, I realized that this time he truly had hung up.
Chapter 24
NATURALLY, I didn’t sleep well. I ran early to work out the kinks, but James spoiled that, too. I kept looking for him. Yes, I knew he couldn’t leave Mia until the nanny arrived, but I kept thinking that if it mattered enough to him to see me, he would have found a way. Hell, he knew Phoebe was at the clinic and that I was alone in the house. James was a resourceful guy. He could have found a way to come at two in the morning, if he chose.
He didn’t, which was probably just as good. My mission was never more narrowed than now. With no one else in town willing to talk, Phoebe was our only hope. Assuming the tests proved mercury in her body, I had to link her to an incident of actual exposure.
After showering, I dressed quickly and went to the clinic. Phoebe was groggy, dozing on and off throughout the Today show as it came from the monitor high on the wall. She was still catheterized, but she seemed comfortable. Comfortable? I half wondered if she was on morphine, she was that spacey.
“Hey, Phoebe,” I said.
She was slow to turn her eyes to mine, then a minute in recognizing me. “Hello,” she replied in a distant voice.
“Feeling okay?”
“What’s it doing out?”
“It’s warm and humid. They’re predicting thunderstorms for later.”
“Oh dear,” she murmured and closed her eyes. “No golf.”
“You don’t play golf.”
“Michael does.”
“Oh, sweetie.” Michael was her former husband. He lived three towns over, had remarried since their divorce, and now had two kids. “Do you ever see him?”
Phoebe didn’t open her eyes. “Who?”
I let it go. But I clutched her hand. “I have to ask you something. I know you’re feeling kind of out of it, but remember I asked if you were with Mom at the Clubhouse right before the fire?”
Phoebe opened her eyes wide. “Mom’s dead. What are you talking about?”
“The Clubhouse fire. A couple of days before it, Mom was there with the WIBs. Were you there?”
Phoebe closed her eyes again. “Tell them I can’t move,” she said, back to murmuring. “I’m sorry. If there’s a fire here, it’ll have to go on without me.”
“The Clubhouse fire.”
“What Clubhouse fire?”
I didn’t say anything else. As the minutes passed, I’m not sure Phoebe even realized I was still there. In time, I left and went on to the store.
Tom called shortly after noon to say that the tests were positive, that there definitely was mercury leaving Phoebe’s body. I found the news almost anticlimactic; I’d been that convinced even before all this. That said, I was definitely relieved. We would never know for sure whether Mom had mercury poisoning, too, because we weren’t about to exhume her body for an autopsy, but in my heart I knew. Though the satisfaction was bittersweet, it was satisfaction nonetheless. Wasn’t this why I had returned to Middle River? Granted, my mission had changed. But I did feel a certain vindication on Mom’s behalf.
I e-mailed Greg with the news. I knew he was somewhere in his descent and wasn’t sure whether he could send or receive, but I wanted the message waiting for him.
I did not e-mail TrueBlue. The idea that he was James still had me reeling. I kept remembering remarks in his earlier e-mails—had even reread a few that morning. The clues were there. He slept alone; he had to be up early; he liked the anonymity of being TrueBlue so that he could be free of who he was and what he did. Even the flirting felt familiar, though with James in the flesh, it had been—well—in the flesh.
Besides, James had hung up on me. And now TrueBlue wasn’t e-mailing. Did either of them have to know that the mercury theory was a go? Not from me, they didn’t. At least, not right now. After all, the theory would only be good if I could show that Phoebe—or someone—had been exposed to mercury at the mill.
We spent the day at it, Sabina and I, but it seemed that no matter how many Rotarians we called, no one was willing to talk. Likewise, no matter how many leads we followed trying to track down Sara Wright (now married and presumably using another name) in Arizona, on the chance that she might know whether Phoebe had been at the WIBs meeting that March day, we had no luck.
And through it all, we had to help in the store. It seemed that we were no sooner into something in the office, when Joanne gave a yell—and this, even with part-timers at work and Kaitlin and Jen in the back room. August was one of the busiest months of the year, Joanne kept saying by way of apology, and I’m sure that between back-to-school wear and general fall merchandise, it was true. What became apparent as the hours passed, though, was that, once again, many of the customers came by in a show of concern for Phoebe. They wanted to talk as much as to buy, and for that, they wanted Sabina and me.
I was surprised by the last part. Totally aside from Omie’s wake, where emotion, compassion, and grief snuffed out other realities, I would have thought that Middle Riverites had such a deeply ingrained image of me as a wretch of a writer that they would never have been able to warm to me as a person, much less trust me in the retail setting. Enter TRUTH #9: All people have the capacity to change their minds, even people who live in small, insular, parochial towns.
In
fact, with regard to that issue of trust, I swear they came to me more. It was as if they wanted my advice on what they should buy, whether one size or color or style was better than another, precisely because I was now from the big city.
Perhaps it was my own need to think that. But the end result was that I was every bit as busy on the floor as Sabina.
So she and I talked with the people who came in. We sold lots of clothes. We ran up to the office to catch a minute here or there at the computer, and, through thickening clouds, dashed over to see Phoebe. Tom wanted to keep her at the clinic one more night, more for his own education than anything else. He figured that if he might be treating others this way, the data the nursing staff collected with regard to vitals would be a help. And again, neither Sabina nor I minded.
She headed home at seven for dinner with the kids, but I stayed on. I had a bag of chocolate pennies that (surprise, surprise!) Marylou Walker had brought over herself, and I still had the second half of my lunch sandwich. I wasn’t in the mood to go out, because distant thunder was rumbling and the air was as thick as it could possibly be without rain.
The thunder neared, the rain began, and Sabina returned—at least, I thought it was her. Shortly before nine, I heard the downstairs doorknob jiggle, then the front door open.
“Up here!” I called. I was following yet another lead in trying to locate Sara Wright, and didn’t think anything of it when Sabina didn’t answer. At the sound of footsteps on the stairs, though, I was frightened. This wasn’t Sabina. These footsteps were heavier, definitely male.
I stood and looked around frantically for something—letter opener, scissors, anything—with which to protect myself, which was, of course, what my Washington self would have done. That this was Middle River, hence the open front door, was a minute in registering. By the time it had, James was on the office threshold, shrugging off a hooded rain parka. Underneath, he wore sneakers, shorts, and—yes—a dark blue T-shirt. His limbs were long, lean, bare, and hair-spattered, but the most notable aspect of his appearance was Mia. Wearing a thin pink sleeper, she was strapped to his chest, facing out, arms and legs dangling free. She was wide awake, looking straight at me, and I must have been starting to look familiar to her—she certainly was looking familiar to me—because she smiled. I saw two teeth on the bottom and two on the top, plus eyes that had narrowed with the smile but were beautiful, indeed. That smile plucked at my heart.
Looking for Peyton Place Page 32