Spilled Blood

27

Chris didn’t go back to the motel right away, because he didn’t want to spend time with his conscience. He told himself that someone else had stood in the dark, holding a gun to a man’s head. Not him. He wasn’t ready to be alone with a lie. Instead, where the northbound highway split near Barron, he followed the steep bluff toward the hilltop. Maxine Valma lived within a few blocks of the high school.

The tall black principal answered the door herself. She was still dressed for work, and her needle-thin eyebrows arched in surprise when she saw him. ‘Mr. Hawk.’

‘Ms. Valma, I’m sorry to bother you. I hope I’m not interrupting.’

Her face had the awkward look of someone who was too polite to admit that his arrival was an unwanted intrusion. ‘George and I just got back from dinner in town. He’s putting the kids to bed.’

‘I have a couple questions for you. It won’t take long.’

She shrugged. ‘Come in.’

Valma led him inside her house. The living room was furnished with antique furniture that had been painstakingly refinished. He saw framed concert posters on the wall from the jazz era heyday in Harlem in the 1920s. The posters looked original. Saxophone music played loudly on the stereo, and Valma lowered the volume as he sat down in an armchair.

‘What can I do for you, Mr. Hawk?’

‘Well, you can call me Chris, for starters.’

‘All right. Chris. I stopped by to see Olivia at the hospital. I hope you don’t mind.’

‘Not at all. I’m glad you did.’

‘I don’t know if she was pleased to see me. She still associates me with Mondamin because of George’s work. However, I wanted to make sure she knew that all of us at the school were thinking of her.’

‘I appreciate that.’

‘You’re not seeing the true heart of this town,’ she told him. ‘The true heart is good. I really believe that.’

‘I hope you’re right.’

‘What is it you need, Chris?’ she asked.

‘Well, this is a strange question, but do you know if Ashlynn was sharing a class this term with Tanya Swenson? It’s a course on Religious Studies that meets Tuesdays and Thursdays.’

‘I’d like to tell you I’ve memorized the class schedule for every student in my school, but I’m afraid I haven’t,’ she said.

‘Is it something you can look up from here?’

She nodded reluctantly. ‘I suppose so. It will take me a moment. My office is upstairs.’

‘I really appreciate it.’

Maxine Valma left Chris alone. He heard the precise click of her heels on wooden steps, and then he heard unhappy voices above him. After a sharp silence, another, heavier set of footsteps thudded to the ground level. A large black man filled the doorway. Like his wife’s, George Valma’s face had a strained politeness, as if Chris were interrupting them from something important. He wondered if they were in the midst of an argument.

George shook hands like a football player with a crushing grip. He had a rumbling voice that was unusually soft for such a big man. He had wiry gray hair and wore a navy silk shirt with an open collar and gray dress slacks. He was a few years older than his wife, probably in his mid-fifties. Despite his size, he looked fit, not heavy.

‘Did Maxine offer you a glass of wine?’ George asked as he sat on the sofa.

‘Thanks, but I’m fine.’

‘It’s just awful what happened to your daughter.’

‘Yes, it is.’

‘I have two girls. They’re nine and twelve. If someone did anything like that to one of my babies, I think I’d tear their heads from their shoulders with my bare hands.’ George looked like he could make good on his threat.

‘We’re fathers,’ Chris said.

‘Exactly.’

‘Your wife told me that you work at Mondamin.’

George nodded. ‘That’s right. I joined the company when they were acquired. Before then, I worked with the parent company in Missouri.’

‘It’s a controversial place.’

George’s lips wriggled like a caterpillar as he phrased his reply. ‘I’m a scientist. I stay out of politics and PR.’

‘Was it hard to move here? Rural areas don’t always welcome strangers.’

‘Particularly African-American strangers?’ George said.

‘I mean any strangers, but Barron isn’t exactly St. Louis in terms of diversity.’

‘You hear a lot more Hank Williams than Charles Mingus in this neighborhood, no doubt about that. I feel like a zoo animal sometimes, but these are decent Christians living here. I can’t say they’ve ever made us feel unwelcome. They’ve taken us into their church. I’m much happier with my girls growing up in this town than in St. Louis. I go to work with a smile on my face.’

His voice rose oddly as he said this, as if he were trying to convince himself.

‘What kind of work do you do?’

‘I’m afraid I can’t say much about it. I’m sorry.’

Chris held up his hands. ‘I’m not trying to steal your trade secrets.’

‘No, but you’d be surprised at the lengths to which people will go. Some companies hire private investigators to ride elevators at trade conferences, in order to eavesdrop on conversations between researchers. Others train hookers to obtain information. It’s a cutthroat business.’

‘A lot of money must be at stake.’

‘Billions.’

Maxine Valma returned to the living room, but she didn’t sit next to her husband. Instead, she stood in the doorway with her arms folded across her chest. Chris thought she didn’t want him lingering in their house any longer than necessary. ‘Are you asking questions about Mondamin?’ she said. ‘I warned you that we’d have to kill you, didn’t I?’

The joke fell flat. None of them laughed. George shot his wife an uncomfortable glance.

‘Anyway, the answer is yes,’ she went on. ‘Ashlynn was in a Religious Studies class with Tanya Swenson this term.’

‘Thank you for checking.’

‘Was there anything else you wanted?’ she asked.

‘What do you know about the relationship between the two girls?’

‘I’d be surprised if there was much of a relationship at all, given the situation. Why?’

‘Ashlynn called Tanya the day before she was killed. She told her father it was about a school assignment in their religion class.’

‘That sounds reasonable.’

‘Yes, I suppose it does,’ Chris said. ‘Anyway, I’m sorry to bother you.’ He stood up from the armchair and then added, ‘Actually, I do have one more question. Ashlynn called you here at home a couple of weeks ago. Do you remember what that was about?’

The principal shook her head. ‘Students call here a lot, but I don’t remember a call from Ashlynn.’

‘Sure you do, Maxy,’ George reminded her. ‘She told you that one of the exit doors in the gym was sticking. She was concerned it was a safety hazard.’

Maxine blinked, and her face softened. ‘Of course. That’s right. I’d forgotten it was Ashlynn who told me about that.’

‘Did she talk about anything else?’ Chris asked.

‘Just the typical pleasantries.’

‘Nothing unusual about it?’

She smiled. ‘Sorry.’

Chris nodded. He was hitting dead ends in every direction. ‘Well, I appreciate your time.’

‘Not at all.’

He shook hands with both of them, and the principal led him to the front door. She shut it behind him as he left, and as he reached the sidewalk at the bottom of the steps, the porch light went off, leaving the front yard dark. He navigated his way blindly to his car, which was parked at the street, and climbed inside.

He started the engine and sat in the darkness, thinking. Before he could pull away, someone rapped on the passenger window.

George Valma was outside.

He switched off the car, and the bulky scientist got in next to him. George sat uncomfortably with his hands in his lap and his big lips pinched together. He was as large as a bear in the passenger seat. Chris waited. Finally, George swiveled his head and met Chris’s inquiring stare.

‘This conversation never happened,’ George said.

‘Okay.’

‘If you tell anyone, I’ll deny it.’

‘Understood.’

‘Maxine and I are careful what we say in the house. We’re never sure who’s listening.’

‘Are you saying you think your house is bugged?’

‘I don’t know, but it pays to be careful.’

‘Who would want to do that? Florian?’

‘Maybe. Or maybe others. There are always people who want to listen.’

‘So what is it you want to tell me?’ Chris asked.

George twisted his fire-hydrant neck in both directions to study the street, as if looking for strangers in the shadows or cars in the neighborhood that he didn’t recognize. When he was satisfied they were alone, he rumbled, ‘The phone call wasn’t what I said it was.’

‘Then what was it?’

‘Ashlynn didn’t call Maxine,’ George told him. ‘She called me.’

George Valma gave instructions as Chris drove. They stayed off the north–south highway and instead followed bumpy, unpaved roads through the empty rural lands. Chris quickly got lost in the maze of turns at unmarked intersections, but the scientist had a confident sense of direction. Chris peppered him with questions, but George said little during the fifteen-minute ride.

‘Stop here,’ the scientist said finally.

When Chris did, George climbed out and marched into an abandoned field that was a sea of mud and rocks. The black man’s hands were shoved in his pockets, and his shoulders were hunched. Chris followed. They were near an old gravel driveway, but the driveway led nowhere. There were no buildings around them. Massive trees dwarfed the two men, making the lot feel secluded. With the barest moonlight, the constellations above them were easy to distinguish.

‘So where are we, George?’ Chris asked.

The black man was almost invisible, even though he was barely six feet away. ‘This land belonged to a man named Vernon Clay.’

‘Who’s he?’

‘Until four years ago, he was a research scientist at Mondamin. He and I share the same specialty.’

‘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.’