by Dave Daren
“Lucky indeed,” I murmured in agreement as I squeezed past the chairs at my desk to give the board a closer examination. I scanned the long list of names, some with dates, somes without, before I turned my focus to the timeline itself.
“Looks like the Harrisons’ were the first,” I said with a frown creasing my face. “Clara introduced me to them. Well, to Mrs. Harrison.”
I felt a pang of sympathy for the woman as I recalled her sallow face and the bruise-like dark circles under her wide eyes. Her and her husband were the first victims of Knox and his damn petrochemical plant and the thought enraged me.
“We’ve got a few more dates we can probably fill in, but I have a feeling if either of us touch Evelyn’s work, it might be the last thing we ever do,” he muttered.
I chuffed, and a smile flashed across Brody’s face.
“Oh, good, so I’m not the only one afraid of her,” I said.
He quickly buried the smile and harrumphed as he tried to look stern.
“I’m not afraid of some tiny old woman,” he clearly lied. “She should be back soon, or she decided to steal my car and leave us both high and dry.”
“You let Evelyn use your car?” I asked in obvious disbelief.
Brody grumbled something under his breath before he huffed again.
“You try telling her no when she gets on a damn roll,” he muttered. “The woman should have been a damn politician for all the shit she spews.”
I didn’t want to kick him while he was down, but I couldn’t help the laugh that burst out of me.
“Right, sure,” I conceded and very pointedly ignored the look of annoyance Brody shot at me.
He and I passed the time while we waited for Evelyn with more phone calls to the last of the residences on our list. I’m not sure if something in the tides had shifted, but we actually began to make real headway with the residents. It was on the fourth successful phone call that someone ended the mystery by citing the press conference this morning for her change of heart.
I jotted down the names of the newly converted on a sheet of legal paper, and Brody did the same with his share of the list. But after we’d finished our phone calls, we’d still only signed up twenty-six out of the fifty-four households in the neighborhood.
Evelyn arrived nearly an hour after Knox retreated back to whatever evil oil baron mansion he lived in with a greasy bag of take-out that she unceremoniously plopped on the desk for Brody and I.
The food had just started to go cold, which led me to believe she’d been taking Brody’s car for a little joyride. He didn’t seem to notice, however, as the older man pulled out a burger and started to eat. I shared a look with Evelyn, and she simply winked and raised one finger to her lips as she trotted over to the whiteboard to make sure we hadn’t fussed any with her work.
“You were gone long enough,” Brody groused.
“Long lines,” she replied as she wiped a smudge from the whiteboard. “Did you meet Dr. Torres?”
This last question was asked as she turned to look at me with a raised eyebrow.
“I did,” I replied. “He’ll call when he has results, but he was certain there’s some sort of poison in the water.”
She nodded and then frowned as she studied me. I looked down at my shirt in search of whatever I had dropped, but the fabric was still clean.
“You look like a vagabond,” she declared.
I wasn’t sure how to respond to that, so I shoved a few more fries in my mouth and nodded to Brody.
“Well, I don’t see any blood, so you didn’t kill Mr. Knox,” she muttered.
“No, ma’am,” Brody agreed. “Though it was tempting.”
“What did he say?” she asked.
“He wants us to drop the case,” I said. “That much was clear. He didn’t have much more to say than that.”
Evelyn’s face creased in a deep frown as she tapped the tip of her finger against her chin. I glanced at Brody again, but he shrugged and shoveled more hamburger into his mouth.
“Did he give any sort of specific threats?” she asked.
She didn’t seem bothered by the act of threatening us, but more his lack of specificity. It gave me pause as I watched her consider the possibilities, but Brody chuckled and shook his head.
“Well, I feel like telling us exactly what he intends to do would undermine the threat,” he drawled.
“No,” I agreed. “He didn’t give us any specifics, because I think he was hoping we’d back down. He seems like the sort of man used to being able to get what he wants just by making a threat. That whole big stick thing.”
A mangled choking-sound came from Brody, and both Evelyn and I whirled our heads to stare. He pounded his chest with a meaty fist and gave another cough.
“You don’t talk about another man’s stick, Landon, Lord,” Brody grunted as he still tried to catch his breath.
Evelyn reached over to smack him upside the head, and I bit back a laugh to avoid a smack of my own.
“He was quoting Roosevelt, Brody” she scolded as she shook her head. “Get your head out of the gutter. Well, at least we know we’re on his radar now, and we can watch our backs. He doesn’t strike me as the sort to play fair.”
I nodded my agreement before I balled up the now empty brown sack in my fist and shot it like a basketball toward the waste bin across the room. It caught the rim and then dropped in, which earned me an appreciative nod from Brody and a ‘tsk’ from Evelyn.
“If he’s playing checkers, we’ll just... have to play chess,” I declared. “Let’s just finish up the timeline now that you’re back, Evelyn.”
I grabbed the legal pads we’d used while we called the neighbors, and though Brody’s handwriting looked like chicken scratch, I managed to decipher it well enough to read off the names, dates, and illnesses aloud to Evelyn. She jotted down the information in her significantly neater scrawl onto the whiteboard with a crisp, red Expo marker.
It took another handful of hours before we were finished as the three of us rearranged the information as new information flowed in. A few people called us after talking to their neighbors, and we had to call some that we’d already spoken to clarify some of the dates we had. At the end, though, we finally had a cohesive timeline of Piney Crest’s decline.
I stood with my hands braced on my hips as I looked over the chilling list. It sent a shiver down my spine to see all of the names written out like this. Twenty-four homes, twenty-four families, eighty-six people in total, that suffered at the hands of Knox Chemicals.
Aside from the twenty-four affected residences, two unaffected residences had agreed to take up our cause which brought our suit against Knox to twenty-six plaintiffs. A lot of people seemed to have been waiting for someone, anyone, to help them, and it added to my queasiness that they’d been left to suffer for so long.
Miscarriages, leukemia, chronic kidney disease, skin conditions, ovarian cancer, lung disease, diarrhea, sinus cancer. The conditions that plagued Piney Crest ranged in type and severity, but none of them mattered any less. For two years, the small neighborhood had been left to suffer at the hands of Abraham Knox and his petrochemical plant, and it was clear he’d assumed that the problem, and the people, would just go away.
I clenched my jaw and breathed hard through my nose. It wouldn’t do me any good to be angry now, and it wouldn’t do me any good to just be angry. I needed to be focused and ready.
Evelyn, Brody, and I parted ways as the sun lingered just over the horizon. I wanted to stay longer, to push for more scientists to conduct tests and to reach out to local doctors, but after a stern bit of scolding from Evelyn, I’d agreed to go home.
I didn’t realize how exhausted I’d been until I stepped foot into my apartment. I dropped my keys into the small bowl by the door with a clatter and kicked my front door shut with my heel. I practically sagged with relief to be home.
The apartment hadn’t come furnished when I’d signed the papers less than a year ago, and I still
hadn’t filled the space completely. I knew if my mother ever saw the state of the place, she’d give me the same sort of treatment I could expect from Evelyn.
It was one reason I’d yet to make the drive back up to Mesa to fetch her. Well, that and the fact that a thirty hour round trip sounded miserable enough without fifteen hours of being trapped in my car with my mother. I loved my mother, but even I had my limits, and one of those was having to listen to NPR for eight hours at a time.
I’d offered to fly her out, once, before receiving a lecture on the dangers of airplanes, as though she was any less anxious in a car. After my father’s accident, nearly sixteen years before, my mother had sworn cars would kill us all one day.
What little furniture I did have had mostly come secondhand. Much like my office, I preferred function over form. I was a single man working long hours, so I didn’t need to live in a spread from Better Homes and Gardens. I had, however, made sure to match my navy blue curtains to the same shade as my bedspread. After all, I wasn’t an animal, nor was I a man that had given up hope.
I toed out of my shoes in the doorway before nudging them onto the lowest level of the mostly empty shoe rack beside the front door. I pushed my hand up through my hair with a discerning touch. I’d need to see my barber soon as I didn’t like how the ends were beginning to flop over my forehead like I was some sort of teenager.
Though my body ached for a shower, and I desperately needed to shave, I opted to put it off until after I could eat something a little more substantial. I’d had the fries a few hours before, but the lack of food and excess of caffeine coursing through my system was beginning to take its toll.
As I walked into my kitchen, I emptied my pockets out onto the granite island countertop. For someone that rarely cooked, the expansive kitchen was wasted on me. The selling point of the apartment had been the proximity to my office, only a handful of blocks away, but the kitchen was the real crown jewel. The landlord had been eager to inform me of all the various, now unused, amenities and had all but given me a spreadsheet with the list of renovations. The only real praise I could give it was that the microwave was top notch.
I still had an overflowing Ziploc bag of tamales from Mrs. Hernandez down the street that I’d purchased on a whim, and though I could all but hear her thick, accented voice scolding me for heating them in the microwave, that’s exactly what I did. I leaned with my elbows against the island as I watched the plate spin in the orange-yellow light of the microwave.
My trance watching the plate spin only broke when the shrill ring of my phone cut the silence of my apartment. I jolted in surprise before quickly regaining my composure and reaching across the island to slide my phone across the granite. The name scrolling across the screen read Clara Shepard below the clock showing 8 p.m. on the dot.
I furrowed my brow, but didn’t hesitate to answer.
“Is everything alright?” I asked instead of a more polite greeting.
Across the line, I heard Clara exhale a sharp breath.
“Yes, well, no,” she finally replied. “Turn on the news. Channel…”
She trailed off, and I heard the sounds of something plastic clattering onto a hard surface.
“Channel 6.” She sounded panicked in a way I couldn’t quite describe.
I ignored the microwave’s insistent beeps and quickly made my way from the open concept kitchen to my couch. I kept the phone pressed to my ear as I bent down to grab my remote and flip on the television.
“Clara, what’s wrong?” I asked for a second time while I skimmed the channels to find the Channel 6 News. Any response she might have had, however, fell on deaf ears.
I sank onto the couch and watched, my mouth agape, as Abraham Knox postured on a well-lit podium outside the front steps of Knox Chemical. He towered over the screen like a giant. His presence on my television was startling enough, but it was the banner scrawled across the bottom of the screen that knocked the breath out of me.
My phone slid from my hand before I could stop it and clattered to the hardwood floor.
KNOX CHEMICALS SUING PINEY CREST RESIDENTS FOR DEFAMATION.
Shit.
Chapter 6
I leaned forward to fumble for my phone and brought it back up to my ear with one hand as I turned the volume up with the other.
“--re you seeing it?” Clara choked out the words. I could hear the panic in her tone, and I wished I could be some sort of anchor, but I was filled with panic of my own.
On the screen, Knox continued to preach to the waiting masses.
“It has come to my attention that the residents of a neighborhood, Piney Crest, have decided to come together as a coalition to tarnish my family’s name and our livelihood. The Knox Chemical plant has been a staple of our community for longer than many of the residents have been alive,” Television Knox crowed.
“I’m watching,” I half-whispered to Clara as if this was all some sort of nightmare.
“But, this publicity stunt, because it truly is nothing more, seems to be coming directly from a local lawyer. Archer Landon, of the miniscule firm Landon Legal has been the neighborhood’s… champion throughout the opening stages of this circus,” he continued to drone. His sentences were punctuated by the flash of cameras in the crowd and the sound of my own heart beating its way into my throat.
Across the line on the phone, Clara hissed out a soft curse. I’d nearly forgotten she was still on the line.
This was the worst sort of nightmare, the kind where you could watch, but couldn’t wake up.
“This is clearly the ploy of a new lawyer spilling his own blood in the water to then cry that there are sharks. It’s unfounded, and it’s not something I, nor my company, will stand for,” Knox grandstanded.
I felt sick to my stomach as I remembered what Evelyn had said to me in the office about playing fair. I continued to watch in horror at the scene playing out on the screen.
“The so-called victims of my alleged offenses, as presented to you all this morning by Kenneth Richards, are untrustworthy at worst, and swindled into believing lies at best,” Knox said before he continued on his war path. “Richards himself has an arrest record with marks for solicitation and possession. Another resident that featured in their little broadcast, Amber Havish, is facing an impending foreclosure on her residence that a hefty check from a class action lawsuit could make go away.”
Over the line, Clara gave what sounded like a sob.
“I can’t keep watching this,” she gasped out. “I can’t keep watching him say all of this. We’re good people. We’re good, sick people. I just…”
Her words trailed off and a sudden hopelessness came over me. Had I done the wrong thing by taking this case? Would everyone in the neighborhood have been better off had I told Clara there wasn’t anything I could do?
“Just breath,” I told her. “You can turn it off, Clara. Don’t work yourself up over someone like Knox.”
But I knew it fell flat coming from my mouth. Why should she listen to me? I was the one that had just yesterday told her everything was going to be alright.
The microwave continued to beep in the background, but I could not move from where I’d sunk into the couch. The television broadcast continued to roll as Knox continued to slander the residents of Piney Crest with new claims lobbed against them.
Criminal records were dragged up, divorce filings, bankruptcies, custody battles, if any resident that might be on the lawsuit had so much as crossed the street without looking both ways, Knox somehow knew, and now, so did the rest of town.
I’m glad I hadn’t started to eat before getting Clara’s warning because I didn’t trust my roiling stomach to have kept anything down.
Across the line, I heard a faint click and a subsequent hiss. It took me a moment to realize that Clara had lit a cigarette. She didn’t strike me as the type to smoke, but then again, we weren’t exactly in a precedented situation. I listened as she took a shallow, breathless drag.
�
��What does this mean for the case?” she asked.
The clank of windchimes faintly punctuated her sentence, and I assumed she’d moved outside to keep the smoke away from Emma.
She’d asked me what this, the defamation suit, meant for the case, but I could hear the real question underneath. Does this mean you’re giving up?
I rubbed my hand across my jaw as the broadcast ended and cut back to the two matching blonde anchors sitting at their arced desk. I turned the television off with a click of the remote and counted it as a victory that I didn’t simply throw at the years-old flatscreen to put us both out of our misery.
“It means we have to work harder now,” I said and nearly shocked myself with the confidence in my own tone. “Knox is worried. He doesn’t like us poking around in his business, so we keep poking. This is a good sign.”
It didn’t feel like a good sign, I had to admit. It felt like a big, flashing warning. I wasn’t concerned about the fact he’d started to rake mud over my name, but the threat to some of our plaintiffs was another matter. I could handle the pressure he put on me, and I knew precisely what I’d been getting myself into, but I doubted any of the people being slapped with defamation suits had Knox personally visit them to scare them off.
Or, maybe he’d done just that. It did seem to be a move in his playbook.
The microwave continued to beep, and I wanted to break it along with the TV. I clamped my eyes shut and took a deep breath through my nose as I listened to the staticy silence on the other end of the line. It was just the soft inhale of Clara’s breaths and the tinkle of windchimes.
“Do you think we still have a chance here?” she asked, and a certain sort of rawness had crept into her tone.
