Brian Freeman - Spilled Blood

‘Are you going to tell me what that is?’

George hesitated. ‘Pesticides.’

‘You mean DDT, atrazine, Round-Up, nasty stuff like that?’

‘It’s not nasty stuff when used appropriately.’

‘And when used inappropriately, you grow a tail, right?’

‘That’s a gross exaggeration,’ George huffed. ‘Environmental extremists make wild claims about the risks of pesticides in the food chain, but it’s mostly junk science. Without pesticides to protect our crops, we don’t feed the world – particularly the developing world. My research is aimed at ways to get better crop results with less chemical exposure.’

‘Okay, so why are we here? And what does this have to do with Ashlynn Steele?’

Chris heard George Valma’s growly breath in the darkness. The man ginned up his courage to talk. ‘Last fall, Ashlynn pulled me aside during a party at Florian’s house. She asked me what I knew about Vernon Clay’s work at Mondamin.’

‘Did she say why?’

‘She said she was doing a paper on agricultural research for her Biology class. I didn’t question it at the time. It seemed like a reasonable query coming from Florian’s daughter.’

‘What did you tell her?’

‘I told her what I knew about Vernon. The sanitized version, anyway. Vernon was young, but he was one of those scientists who develops a whole new paradigm for his field. It was a coup for Mondamin to land him. He was among the pioneers using nanometals in pesticides when the rest of us were still snipping up corn DNA.’

‘It all sounds like Frankenstein stuff to me.’

‘Just the opposite. Would you rather eat tomatoes from a field that had been treated with tons of chemical pesticides or from a field where the crop had developed its own structural resistance to insects?’

‘I’d rather eat tomatoes my neighbor grows in his window box.’ Before George could protest, Chris added, ‘What’s the unsanitized story about Vernon Clay?’

‘The rumor is he was sick. He left Mondamin four years ago and dropped off the radar screen. He hasn’t resurfaced.’

‘What do you mean, sick? Like cancer?’

‘More like mental illness.’

‘So what does his land have to do with anything?’

‘Probably nothing.’

‘You didn’t drag me out here for nothing, George.’

The scientist squatted in the field. Chris could hear him squeezing mud through his fingers. ‘Ashlynn’s question made me curious. It’s not often that someone like Vernon walks away at the peak of his career. I started asking around about him at Mondamin, and I hit a stone wall. No one wanted to talk about him. They told me to drop it. That made me more curious. I looked him up in an old phone book, and this was his address. Right here where we’re standing. Only when I came out here, I found nothing left. Google Earth showed a house here five years ago.’

‘Okay, so where is it?’

‘Gone. Torn down. The fields were plowed over, too, and sterilized. Nothing grows here. It’s like a dead land. And guess who owns the property? It’s not Vernon Clay anymore.’

‘Florian Steele,’ Chris said.

‘That’s right.’

‘Did you talk to anyone about this?’

‘Hell, no. I didn’t tell anyone. I didn’t want to lose my job.’

‘So why tell me now?’

George got to his feet, and Chris heard his knees pop. ‘Ashlynn called me two weeks ago. She was asking about Vernon again. She wanted to know where he was and where she could find him.’

‘What did you tell her?’

‘I told her I didn’t know.’

‘Did Ashlynn say why she wanted to locate him?’

‘She was trying to find out whether Vernon’s research could have been responsible for the cancer cluster in St. Croix. She also wondered if the pesticides he was developing could cause birth defects.’

Anencephaly.

‘What did you tell her?’ Chris asked.

‘I told her no. No way. Even if you accept that environmental factors may play a role in some cancers, it would normally take years of exposure to have an impact. Mondamin has only been around for a decade, and the first cases of leukemia developed six years ago. It would have taken a catastrophic level of exposure for there to be any connection.’

‘Catastrophic?’

‘Yes. As in deliberate . Plus, the lawsuit prompted an investigation by one of the top university epidemiologists in the country. Her name is Lucia Causey. I’ve met her. She’s thorough. If there was even the slightest possibility that the cancer cluster involved Mondamin, she would have found it. So the answer is no. There’s no connection. That’s what I told Ashlynn.’

Chris heard the conviction in the man’s voice. It was the conviction of someone who wanted to believe he was right. ‘Then why are we here?’

‘I’m a scientist, Chris. I only believe what I can prove. I don’t trust coincidences.’

‘You didn’t answer my question.’

George Valma spoke softly. His words breathed out of the night. ‘Do you know where we are?’

‘I lost track of where we were going miles ago,’ Chris said. ‘Where are we?’

George took Chris’s shoulder in an iron grip and turned him toward the dark trees bordering the field. ‘Beyond those trees, we’re not even half a mile from the town of St. Croix,’ he said. ‘The land shares the same aquifer. Whatever you put in the ground here makes its way to their water supply.’

28

Chris stared at the decrepit storefronts of the ghost town and tried to see the world through Ashlynn Steele’s eyes.

It was midnight, just as it had been when the girl limped into this town with a flat tire. She must have felt like the last person on earth, awakening to find that some cataclysm had left the land in ruins. He wondered if she was keenly aware of the irony of her location. She’d been forced to give up the life inside her, and she’d been stranded in a place that had proved unable to support life.

She must have asked herself why God had led her here.

His Lexus was parked where Ashlynn’s Mustang had drifted to a stop. He wandered the street, like her, listening to the empty noise of his footsteps. He was alone, but he didn’t feel alone. The broken glass, the boarded-up doors, the rusted signs, made him feel as if eyes were watching him. It might have been animals, or it might have been ghosts, or it might simply have been his imagination. Ashlynn would have felt the same way, but she didn’t know then that she really was being watched. Olivia and Tanya were in the shadows.

He wondered if someone else had been there, too.

Chris tried to re-create what had been happening in Ashlynn’s life. Six months earlier, she had gone to George Valma with a seemingly innocent inquiry about a Mondamin research scientist named Vernon Clay. Days before her death, she’d called George Valma again with more questions about the same missing scientist. True or not, she had begun to link Vernon Clay to the cancer cluster in St. Croix and to the tragic situation with her own baby.

Had she actually discovered something? Or did she simply need someone to blame? If you knew your child was going to die, you could believe almost anything to explain it. You wanted answers. You wanted justice, just like the people in St. Croix who had watched their own children die. By the time she arrived in the ghost town that night, Ashlynn had begun to blame Mondamin. She’d begun to blame her father.

He saw the park where she died. The fraying police tape still clung to the trees. The swing where Ashlynn sat was a black silhouette. Behind the park, a minimum-maintenance road vanished into the desolate corn fields. He pricked up his ears, as if he could hear Ashlynn humming if he listened hard enough. As if he could hear the confrontation between Ashlynn and his own daughter. The gunshot, the screams, the crying. The horror of it made him close his eyes. Olivia had no way of knowing that she had arrived at the lowest pit of Ashlynn’s life, a well from which there must have seemed no escape. Instead, she had taunted and tortured her for crimes that weren’t hers. She had poured salt into an open wound. He wished he could have been there to stop it, to rescue them both.