“But what is it? Are all frogs magnetic and yours are just backward?”
“Nope, I’ve never heard of it in frogs.” They were getting close, the tiny creek making burbling noises even at this late hour, and the local frogs raising their voices in a hellish chorus.
“So why would these frogs be magnetic?”
“Other animals are.” She raised the compass in her palm, angling it to catch the light, and read it. Still in the right direction. No worries there. Yet. She kept up her chatter with Aaron, they were getting close and she was nervous about what she might find out. “Bees are, and so are homing pigeons.”
“Not enough to stick to the refrigerator.”
“You’re sooo funny - Aaron, look!” She held up the compass. The needle had flopped to the opposite direction. She stepped backwards retracing her steps out of the area where she had first found the freaky little frogs. The needle swung back to the correct orientation.
“Sweet Jesus.” As she walked back and forth, it changed. To exactly the opposite direction. Sure she wasn’t seeing it right, she lifted her head to ask her brother to shine the light over her way and was met with a blinding glare. For a moment she had visions that the sheriff had found them and was going to haul them in, cuffs and cruiser and all. Although they were on their own property and all they could be cited for was leaving the car by the side of the road.
In a second Aaron was at her side and the blinding glare was gone, directed down at the face of the compass, leaving her completely unable to distinguish anything beyond the borders of the light. Back and forth they walked for a minute or two, mesmerized by the swing of the needle. Then Becky pulled him forward to the edge of the stream and the spot where she and Brandon had caught all the frogs.
The needle stayed re-oriented. North was south and south was north. “This is where we caught them.” She shoved up her sleeve and slowly bent over, sinking her hand into the cold water. The forest around them was now quiet, except for the wild trickle of the creek. It had no instincts and didn’t know that something was amiss with all this bright light in the middle of the dark. But the frogs knew, and Becky could spot their shapes under the edges of the bumps and eddies. Their little noses and eyes stuck up above the surface, trying to catch a breath, and yet be still enough to thwart the predator.
But Becky got lucky, and in a moment she had reached down and slowly wrapped her hand around one of the little guys thinking he had it made by being motionless. She held up her catch, even as the nearby frogs scattered away from the site of the latest loss of their brethren. “Look Aaron, four back legs.”
When she finished pulling up several six-legged frogs, she wandered the area using the compass as a guide, certain that some large object was buried here. Sighing, she was grateful again that Aaron was a lawyer. “What if whatever’s here is government? Can they keep me from publishing my findings?”
“Huh?”
“If this is a dump site, you know, for some magnetic ore, or there’s a secret lab under the ground,” Okay, now she was getting really far-fetched, “well, would they be able to stop me from writing this up and letting the world know?”
He thought for a moment. “No, we’re on our own land. I don’t think they have any legal recourse. But if you have skeletons in your closet that they might blackmail you with, who knows?”
She laughed with him. “I don’t have a boyfriend. I don’t even steal paperclips from the school, and I’ve never made one of those freaky sex tapes.”
“Don’t let Mom and Dad even know that you know what those are.”
“No joke.” She crossed the stream on large stones that she had put there years ago and wandered through the woods, crashing through underbrush and sounding much like the Jolly Green Giant. She was half trying to convince herself that it was just the unearthly silence that made it sound that way. If Satan himself rose up before her, she couldn’t say that she would be too shocked. But just then the compass needle jumped.
Becky startled, then walked back and forth a few times, using the sway of the thin red magnet to get a feel for the edge of the spot. “Aaron.”
“Hm?” He looked up from his musings. “What?”
“We need to go get stakes and a . . . that yellow police tape stuff. There’s a clear boundary here. We can mark it.”
“But not now.” He refused, and once he shined the light back the way they had come, she had no choice but to follow or be abandoned to the noise and the blackness.
“Oh we weren’t expecting you.” It was Maddie, according to her nametag.
Jillian just smiled. She wasn’t half bad at this lying. “Really? I’m sorry. Our secretary was supposed to let you know that we’re following up the interviews done by Drs. Smith and Webber.” Maddie was Maddie Levinson. She and her husband owned and ran the Levinson Home for the Aged.
The round-faced woman just smiled and stepped back, holding the door open for them. “Well, you’re here now.” She seemed perfectly content to let them come in and reassess the place. Which clicked in Jillian’s mind as a good thing. If they were trying to cover up elder-abuse or something, the case for a new disease would never hold.
Jordan trailed her in and she introduced both herself and him to the woman’s husband, who was just as round and polyestered as she was. They had the same pie-faced smiles that ultimately seemed kind and gentle. A visual sweep of the area made it clear that this was a home that had been converted to a care facility. She’d read beforehand that these two lived here, twenty-four seven. “We would love to comb through your patient records, if we could. Maybe we could just stay out of your way.”
But she had barely gotten the last word out when Jordan started speaking over her. “We just think that there might be something new here, and we want to be certain that it gets identified and stopped. I know the last CDC team suggested a staph infection-”
And for the first time the sweet moon face looked disgruntled. “I just don’t know how that could have happened. We’re so. . . . it sure hasn’t happened again, if that’s what you’re afraid of.”
Jordan stepped close and put his arm on the woman’s shoulder, leading her to sit at her own breakfast table where he pulled a seat a little closer. “When Dr. Brookwood and I reviewed the file, we didn’t feel it was a staph infection at all. There wasn’t any evidence of it; they just couldn’t find anything else.” His hand covered the older woman’s, calming her immeasurably by that simple, unforward touch. Jillian watched the changes in her with awe. “Jillian is right.”
She couldn’t believe he had used her first name. Not that she was angry, but she didn’t understand. It was all about being professional, right? And having no clue where he was going, she decided to step back and let Jordan ride the wave he had created.
“We’ll want to go through all the old records like the other team. But beyond that, we’ll need some time to talk to you. Maybe you can tell us something that isn’t in the records.”
Maddie balked a little, “We keep very thorough records.”
Jordan didn’t even try to argue that one. “I’ve seen them, they’re some of the best in the business, but there are other things that you’d never think were medical, things that only a close caretaker, like yourselves, might notice. Any information you can give us would only help.”
Arthur Levinson, ‘Art’ by his nametag, finally spoke up, but only to talk to his wife. “Honey, why don’t you help them get the files and I’ll serve breakfast.”
And with that Maddie led them down the hall and unlocked a large, very neat office with mauve frills above the windows and ducks walking around the border at the top of the room. Walls of cheap, black file cabinets surrounded them, each carefully labeled and clearly locked. Mrs. Levinson let them know they were welcome to anything they wanted to peruse and, smiling at Jordan, handed over the small key ring labeled ‘office’ and asked what she could bring them to drink, or if they wanted a danish?
God, that was Jordan for you. Five
minutes and any woman would be eating out of his hand. Look at the way he had worked over Anne at the front desk. Jillian was glad she wasn’t that kind of girl. But here they were - in the office, with all the files at their disposal. And coffee on the way. Sweet deal.
She took a deep breath. “Let’s get to work.”
“Roommates?” Jordan asked, not looking up from the labels on the file drawers.
It was Maddie’s voice that answered. “The roommates of our members who got sick? Well, there’s Mildred Hartford. She’s still here in the green room.” She paused while Jillian started scribbling furiously on her notepad, “third down the hall on the right. She was Joseph Finklestein’s roommate.”
Maddie continued - the second roommate was in the hospital in Sarasota with a broken hip. And the third roommate had moved to another home after developing a more severe case of emphysema. But Mrs. Levinson said she had numbers to reach all the current caretakers. Then she named names and rattled the numbers off from memory, impressing the hell out of Jillian.
Three hours later Jillian had about thirty folders pulled and open in various states of disarray around her. Jordan had about twenty more. They were getting somewhere. But God, if she had to look at these cream-colored walls for five more minutes she was going to spontaneously combust. “Jordan?”
“Hmm?”
He didn’t look up from where he hunched over the files on the floor. He had graciously insisted that she take the only desk space. But in the hours in between he had sprawled, his jacket getting hung up over the inside doorknob, his tie loosening then disappearing. Now his sleeves were rolled up and he was in some unnatural position, chewing on the end of his red pen.
“I don’t know about you, but I need lunch.” She stood and stretched, ignoring the fact that her suit was wrinkled. That was okay, it wasn’t designed for stretching either.
When they finally pulled out of the driveway, they both began talking at once. “I think it’s a-”
“I’m positive it wasn’t staph.”
“Me, too.” She sighed, running her hand over her hair, smartly pulled back into a ponytail that looked as professional as a ponytail could.
“There’s no positive culture and nothing to link the three patients. No chain of infection.” Jordan looked out the window at the passing communities of cookie-cutter bungalows, all labeled as “Sunset” this or “Retirement” that. “And I don’t know if you’ve watched these guys . . .” he trailed off and waited for her to shake her head. Of course Jordan had observed them in action. She wasn’t sure why the thought hadn’t even occurred to her. “They are fastidious. Every injection clean. Every surface wiped down. Hugs and touching all the time, but I have never seen two people wash their hands so much.” He sighed, slumping a little lower into his seat.
“Do you think it was all just for show?”
“No way.” He turned to look at her, not doing his part to help find food anymore. “We walked in here, unannounced, just as we planned. There were already hand sanitizer bottles everywhere, sharps containers in every room, and if you noticed, both the Levinsons have very chapped hands, indicating this handwashing was going on long before we got there.”
Of course she hadn’t noticed.
What she did notice was a small sub stand with a name she didn’t recognize, and she pulled into the lot and climbed out. “None of the roommates has anything even resembling this. I called the nursing home and the hospital for the two that are gone. The hospital is ready to send the broken hip back to the Levinsons for the remainder of care.” She didn’t stop talking while she read the menu up and down. “So there’s nothing there to indicate it being airborne.”
Jordan sighed and pushed both his hands through his hair, adding his order right on the tail end of hers. Only his was twice as big. “They have all the same symptoms that Eddie did. I don’t get it.”
Jillian waited until they were seated and Jordan had his head turned sideways, taking a huge sharklike bite from the sub. “They were the three most immuno-compromised patients in the home at the time.”
That made Jordan look up. But she still didn’t pick up her sandwich. “And get this: Bertha Martin was a leukemia survivor.”
Becky thought they probably looked odd, marching across the field, dressed for camping, snapping photos while they went. Melanie had suggested the disposable camera from the checkout at Home Depot this morning. And Becky had gotten two. You just never knew.
The real work was in getting all the equipment out there. Aaron had taken that upon himself; he looked like a hiker gone mad - or a serial killer - with the lumpy bags, the pack and the shovel. She, Brandon and Melanie followed like ducks, holding clear lexans of frogs that were finally returning to their home. But just to visit.
Once they arrived at the site, the frogs were set down and they all went to work with the compasses they had picked up. Melanie swung her little hammer, pounding a stake meant to hold garden edging into the soft ground near the stream. With the small mallet she hit at it until it was low, or until she mistakenly whacked some part of her body and swore a word that Becky wasn’t aware her sister knew.
Brandon was a more efficient force; he and Aaron both having seen the need for method early on. Baggy army pants oozing garden stakes, both guys walked a line designated by the compass in their left hand, periodically pulling a stake from some previously unused spot on their person and pounding it into the ground with one swift stroke. Of course, Brandon pulling stakes out of his pockets resembled a gunslinger, with a swagger and a little preening where Aaron was all efficiency of movement.
Aaron looked up at her right then. “Hey, Doctor Smartypants, get in here and help.”
“Aye, aye!” She crossed the creek on the old stones and set about mapping the other side. Within half an hour, all the loose ends had met up and they had an oddly shaped circle. Becky set Melanie to winding the tape from spike to spike clearly delineating the magnetic boundary, while the rest of them wandered the site, eyes glued to compass needles, looking for any smaller spots of greater activity.
That was an exercise in futility. There was nothing. Well, it was all or nothing. No one spot that gave a greater reading, or even caused the compass needles to jump or shimmy. No such luck.
“Okay, guys.” They lifted their heads from whatever they were meddling around with at the sound of her voice. “It’s hokey pokey time. Put all the frogs in the circle.”
Even Aaron got into it. Each of the four eagerly grabbed a lexan and walked inside the orange boundary. They each set down the tupper with a flourish and waited for . . . nothing.
“Anyone?” Becky whispered.
“Nothing.” Aaron told her. His voice strong with certainty.
“Nothing.” Brandon repeated, bell clear.
Becky felt her heart sink. She had thought surely bringing the frogs back here would accomplish something. Melanie’s voice called out next. “Nothing! Nothing!”
That was a little too chipper. Wasn’t it true that the really smart ones always cracked?
“They aren’t doing anything Becky!”
“Duh, Dorko.” Brandon sneered, standing guard over his frog, legs spread, fists on his hips, sneer worthy of the schoolyard. “They’re just acting like normal frogs.”
“And they aren’t normal frogs!” Melanie was at a near fever pitch.
“Holy shit.” Becky whispered. “She’s right.” The frogs were no longer orienting. Reaching down, she turned the container. Aside from the usual the-world-is-rotating-under-me shuffle that all frogs did, this one didn’t do anything. It didn’t re-orient northwest. “Turn your frogs!”
This time even Aaron and Brandon caught on. “Okay, this is just too freaky.” Aaron looked up at her. “I like things neat and understandable. This is beyond my boundaries. Can I have these little green guys arrested for disorderly conduct?”
Becky laughed to herself. The disorderly conduct was what they were supposed to do. It was the lining-up-in-one-dire
ction that was creepy.
She took a moment to write notes. Then had everyone take their frog out of the circle.
Alignment.
That got noted too.
Into the circle, in new spots, this time.
Disorder.
Out of the circle.
Alignment.
But this time there was more.
“Everyone, back in the circle.” At least they didn’t look at her like she was crazy. Something was drastically wrong in the spot where they were standing. Her breathing hitched.
“Okay, we’re going to take our frogs and walk out a bit.” Three nods. “Every one has compasses?” Three nods. “Good, now start walking, carefully, away from the site.”
She had lined each of them up in a different direction, so they backed out like four corners on a compass until Becky couldn’t see any of her siblings anymore. But, loud bunch that they were, vocal contact wasn’t an issue. She yelled out, “My frog is facing southwest. Aaron?”
“North-north-east.”
“Brandon?”
“South-east.”
“Melanie?”
“West!”
She hollered out to her sister, whose little voice was coming through the thick trees from somewhere on the left. “Melanie! Have you figured it out?”
“Yes! They’re all facing the site!”
5
Jordan scribbled furiously on the pages of loose leaf paper spread out on the floor of the office with the awful mauve accents. He and Jillian had been here for two days, and he was never happier to not have a laptop. He had survived med school, ridiculed for his handwritten notes, but remembered everything far better than if he had typed it. And now this spreadsheet was taking over its eighth page, and he never would have accomplished this with the best notebook program.
Jillian watched while he organized and wrote and drew arrows in multiple colors. He started thinking out loud, “Okay, recap: Joseph Finklestein had lupus, Bertha Martin was a leukemia survivor, and Beatrice Weitzman had a kidney transplant and was on immunosuppressive drugs.”
Resonance Page 8
