by Karen Harper
She unlocked and lifted the window over the kitchen sink. “Hello. May I help you?”
The older man spoke. “Charlene Lockwood?”
“Yes.”
“Young lady, you are very hard to track down. I’m Royce Flemming, and I’d like to ask your advice about something that affects your work. This is my assistant, Orlando.”
Indeed it was the fracking king, Matt’s senior partner. She figured they had learned where she was living from him. Or maybe Gabe or Tess. She opened the door.
“May I step in?” Mr. Flemming asked with a smile and a nod. “Orlando’s content to admire the lovely view from here—of Lake Azure, my favorite place in these parts.”
When she gestured him inside, he stepped past her. He smelled of some sort of tart citrus aftershave or cologne. “Please sit down. May I get you some coffee?”
“No, I’m fine, thanks. I know Winston Richards, who owns this cabin,” he said, looking around. “Quite a hunter, but I see they’ve taken down the bear and stag heads for you.”
“I was sorry to hear about his heart attack, but his wife has been very kind to rent it to me.”
“He owns and runs trotting horses, which he takes excellent care of, but he forgot to take good care of himself,” Flemming said as he sat in the upholstered chair where she indicated. She sat on the couch, facing him.
“You have some questions about my work?” she asked.
“Needless to say, I am overwhelmingly grateful you were up on Pinecrest to help Matt when someone tried to either terrify or kill him.”
“I only did what anyone would have. Mr. Flemming, do you have any clue why someone would do that to Matt?”
“I don’t. He’s very popular, competent and an excellent PR man. And until the local sheriff comes up with something, I’m chalking it up to the rampant moron-factor around here.”
She sat up straighter. Granted, there were some eccentrics, some loose cannons around here, but he’d said that with such disdain. Especially for a man who must rub shoulders with his staff at Lake Azure and with the locals he dealt with for fracking.
“The moron-factor?” she said, her voice on edge.
“Drunks, rednecks, throwbacks to the pioneer days, et cetera. I don’t think the Hear Ye sect’s would-be messiah lets his people loose, but the woods are full of crazies. But I—like Matt—am a practical businessman, Charlene, if I may call you that. I have a proposal for you, which Matt does not have to know about.” He leaned forward, elbows on his knees, hands clasped. “What could I provide that would most help you with your work to reach the poorly schooled youth of Ohio Appalachia? I’d like to make a contribution, not only because you helped to save Matt, but for your helping to save the next generation of mountain folk. Name your project, damn the price.”
She just gaped at him for a moment. Had Matt explained what she did, or did he research that on his own? Raising money for projects—and because of local pride, one had to tread carefully—was something she hoped to spearhead in the future. But she’d been racking her brain to figure out how to best help kids like Penny Hanson and Jemmie McKitrick. Despite his generosity and his ties to Matt, she wasn’t sure she liked or trusted this man. Was there some sort of ulterior motive here, and could Matt be involved?
Well, a bird in hand, as they said. She cleared her throat and explained the situation that concerned her most. “There are at least six children up on Pinecrest Mountain—way up—who can’t get to school because the bus can’t go up that high to get them and find a spot to turn around. Their parents, for various reasons, can’t or won’t manage transportation. But a van could drive that far and turn around, maybe one with good snow tires even during the winter. And then deliver them back home again, of course.”
“I like a woman who knows what she wants and clearly asks for it,” he said with a nod. “In thanks to you, I’ll get Orlando on that. You’ll see I like quick results. And I greatly admire a woman who doesn’t ask for something for herself.”
“In that vein, let’s not tell the beneficiaries who set this up. If the families up on Pinecrest think it’s the school or even the state government that wishes them well despite their distrust of outsiders, all the better.”
“You’re too humble. I imagine it will come out that we’re working together on this. I’ll let Matt know. I’m sure he’s determined to thank you in his own way,” he said with a grin as he rose.
He reached out and took her hand. She thought he would shake it, but he held it in his firm grip. He was exactly her height; they looked eye to eye. His hands were small, but just think of the power they must wield.
“I’ll let you know,” he said, “when our bus is ready and you can liaise with the school district and the families.”
“And, it would be helpful,” she added as he released her hand and stepped to the door, “if the driver could be someone local who knows the area and needs a job. I hope I can send you a suggestion for a bus driver, someone who hasn’t seen the blessings of fracking fall from heaven.”
“Ah,” he said, tilting his head and narrowing his eyes at her.
Had she overstepped? She couldn’t keep the skeptical tone out of her voice about fracking, no matter how generous Royce Flemming was.
“Yes,” he said. “Another good suggestion. So, we are partners in this, Charlene. I, for one, am grateful for all you are doing to elevate the level of living here, and, I’m sure, you will come to see that I am doing the same with my fracking company. Good afternoon. I’ll be in touch,” he called back over his shoulder as he walked toward his car.
I’ll be in touch, indeed. He had held her hand so warmly, looked at her so intensely....
She closed the door behind him and glanced out the window. Orlando had been walking around outside. She’d seen him go by the window several times, as if he were circling the cabin. Now he hurried toward his employer and opened the sedan door for him. She watched as they drove away and the car disappeared from view.
Royce Flemming hadn’t said a thing about the hole in the door, maybe hadn’t seen it, but she felt he was the type to see every detail. He’d said, I’ll be in touch. Matt had touched her life and her heart, but this man, Matt’s friend and mentor, was both loved and hated around here. He surely had the Midas touch when it came to making money. Though he’d asked nothing of her, she wondered if she owed him now. For the best of reasons, had she just made a deal with the devil?
9
As Matt drove into the driveway of the Fencer farm, he noted in the weathered paint over the barn door, Heritage Farm, 1908. As if he’d been watching for him, Joe Fencer opened the front door of the old, but well-kept farmhouse.
“Thanks for the call,” Joe shouted over the noise from the huge fracking site across the road. When the work went on at night, how did these people even sleep? Matt wondered.
“I’m really interested in the possibility of the job,” Joe told Matt as they shook hands on the porch.
“We can do a formal interview when I show you around the grounds and have you meet some key people,” Matt told him as they went inside. “But I thought it might be good to talk to you on your own turf first. It looks like you had gardens, flowers and vegetables, besides your soybeans out back. And I can tell from how neat your bushes look that you’re a good hedge trimmer.”
“Glad you can tell since we’ve had so many early frosts, and the flowers and crops are gone,” he said with a shake of his head. “Sorry about this chaos inside here. We’re packing to move.”
“I heard about it from Royce Flemming.”
“It was nice of him to suggest me for the job. Brad Mason said he was a nice guy.”
“He is. I’ve known him for years. I’m sad the fracking has caused problems for him around here.”
Joe grimaced. Tall and lanky with sandy hair and brown eyes, prob
ably in his midforties, Joe led Matt into a back room that must have been a den or office. Like the front room, half-packed or sealed boxes were stacked in corners, but he’d obviously cleared off the desk and pulled up two chairs.
“I gotta level with you,” he told Matt. “Despite the windfall of fracking money, I swear, I almost turned it down. This place has been in my family for generations, and it’s hard to let it go. It’s what I chose to do after high school, farm with my dad, then when he was gone, go it alone and hope that one of my boys would carry on. The money—it doesn’t mean so much to me but it does to the wife. Better life for the kids, got four of them, two girls, two boys.”
“I was in the restaurant the other night when you came in. A good-looking bunch—a full house.”
“For sure, and we got my sister, Mandy Lee McKitrick, here for a spell.”
“I heard. I visited the McKitricks yesterday. Seems we have a lot of people in common.”
“So you know about her husband, Sam? The docs at the VA hospital said he was better, but once he got home—well, a short time later he suddenly regressed, so the medical men were wrong.”
“Can’t he be examined and readmitted?”
“His mother and Mandy Lee tried that, but he seemed to convince the docs he was stable, and they wouldn’t keep him.”
“Charlene Lockwood remembers you as an outdoorsman, said you were often down by the creek, even when you were young.”
“I still love it down there, despite the mess the fracking work is making on the ridge above it. At least when the Hear Ye people were there, it was a lot more quiet. Obviously,” he said, “it’s so damn noisy now. Forget quiet country living. And I’ll miss being able to walk down to Cold Creek to unwind. We’re moving to a new place on the other side of town out toward Chillicothe. Sara Ann’s real excited about it.”
“And the kids?”
“Yeah, it’s a lot bigger house. Going to have a playground and trampoline, lots of new stuff, new school. I just hope I can convince them that new stuff isn’t what makes someone happy.”
“A wise thought, especially in the midst of what some folks around here would kill for.”
“Speaking of that, I heard what happened to you up on Pinecrest. Facing death—it really makes you think. Matt, I told both Brad Mason and Royce Flemming that I could walk away from this bonanza. Not sure either of them believed me, but I think you do.”
Matt nodded, and they shared a moment of silence—as silent as it could be with the fracking noise, even here in the back room of the closed-up house. “So, can you come to the lodge for an interview, and we’ll talk turkey, as Woody McKitrick used to say?”
Joe nodded, then sighed. He’d been sitting erect, but now his shoulders slumped. “He was a courageous guy. I couldn’t believe he had the nerve to lead the antifrackers around here when he worked for Lake Azure since Royce Flemming financed that, too. I saw Woody once picketing with a big sign that read, KILL THE DRILL!” Joe shook his head. “Then he ends up dead. He was an original around here, especially when he wore that coonskin cap. My sister says they never found it.”
“No, but then he fell quite a ways.”
“It probably snagged in a tree or caught on a ledge. I’ll come to the lodge whenever you want. The womenfolk don’t understand why I’d want to work outside in all weather with my hands anymore, as if I’d be happy just sitting around toasty warm in the house, watching sports on TV. Your know, the sod on my new place is just rolled out over unworked soil, no trees on our lot, but I’ll plant them. It’ll be real hard to get a garden of any kind going there, so I promise I’ll help beautify your community if I get the chance.”
They chatted awhile longer and Joe walked him to the door. Matt heard the voices of women and young children upstairs. Maybe Joe had got them out of their way for this meeting. The light young voices made the high-ceilinged, bare rooms of the old farmhouse seem at once friendlier, and sadder to be deserted. Unless the rig workers wanted an office here, the house and barn would be torn down and the land would soon be under concrete and drilling rigs, water retention ponds and trucks.
“The noise is amazing this close.” Matt stated the obvious as Joe walked him to his car and they shook hands again.
“At least that hellish light is gone.”
“You mean night-work lights?”
“No, not those. When they first hit gas, they flared a fifty-foot-tall flame out the top of that big drilling framework, kind of like a beacon day and night screaming, ‘Look what we’ve done!’ It erased the night, crept into the house even with the curtains closed.”
He shook his head and stayed standing there as if watching the work site as Matt got in his car, honked and drove away. In his rearview mirror, he could see Joe standing in his front yard still glaring across the road.
Despite how pleased Matt was that Royce had put him onto Joe Fencer as an excellent replacement for Woody, he left feeling depressed.
* * *
“Oh, forgot to tell you something,” Tess told Char as she opened the mail during the day care nap time. They were drinking coffee while Tess’s friend and helper Lindell Kelton took charge of the sleeping kids for a half hour, a task Char had helped with when she first came back to Cold Creek. “Sara Ann Fencer phoned to say she’d like to put her two boys in day care here three times a week. At least that’s something good they’re doing with the fracking money. Some folks went crazy when they got it.”
“Money talks—and walks. I saw them in La Maison the other night, meeting with Brad Mason.”
“Hmm. He may be Grant’s brother, but I wouldn’t trust him. Anyhow, I told Sara Ann that will be fine. I don’t want to take on too many new ones right now, though, so that I wear myself down, especially now.” She looked at Char as if waiting for her to say something.
“Tess, you don’t think that large area of fracking down Valley View could work its way down to our old homestead, do you? Wouldn’t that be something, since we don’t own it anymore?”
“Yes, but I wanted to tell you something else,” Tess said, almost pouting. “I was going to wait until you, Kate and I were together, but I just can’t. Gabe and I are making up for lost time.”
“Wait—Tess, do you mean...”
“Yes. Yes! I’m even getting morning sickness. Isn’t that great?”
“Well, I wouldn’t put it that way but—yes!” she cried, before remembering it was nap time and they were making too much noise. “Yes, that’s wonderful!” They hugged and held tight, rocking each other.
Tess started to cry. “Mom would have been so happy, but having you and Kate here helps a lot. We’re going to call Dad this weekend. That will make him feel older, to be a grandfather.”
As least, Char thought, even with Tess’s childhood abduction, her little sister was obvious ready for this. She evidently considered Cold Creek a safe place now, but Char wasn’t so sure.
* * *
After leaving the Fencer farm, Matt drove around the big fracking site on the old Hear Ye cult grounds. The continual clash of sounds, human and mechanical, grew louder as he approached. He saw the tall iron framework in the shape of an obelisk Joe had mentioned. From it, thin guy lines spreading out like tentacles attached it to the earth. Near that, a maze of massive pipes three times as tall as the trucks snaked around each other. Since the crew worked day and night shifts, tall pole lights studded the area. More than once Royce had said that work did shut down for a while on Sundays—his “gesture” on the Sabbath in an area where most people still went to church.
Though he’d taken an early tour of the site before it was really up and running—and had to admit, he’d boycotted it since—now he noted new, huge, round silos for storage and numerous wellheads cluttering the ground near a series of metal trailers. Big, noisy tanker trucks, some with their diesel engines running, surr
ounded the site, and men in hard hats hurried here and there. And in the midst of it all was an artificial lake, nearly as big as a football field. The main fracking lagoon had been dug from the earth and lined with gray polyethylene.
As a tanker drove up behind him, he went past the site, turned around and drove back. If he remembered right, the massive lagoon held recycled water that had been treated and collected to be forcibly injected into the deep shale beneath the surface. From this angle, the water looked golden brown. Matt knew the polluted flowback from the drilling had to be stored in steel tanks before being taken away to be treated and returned. Remembering Woody’s claim that such sites could taint local wells and springwater, he decided to walk down to Cold Creek to take a look for any signs the water was being polluted. Joe had said there were paths near here. If the beavers were still building, maybe he’d bring Char down to see them.
He parked and found a path down to the river everyone called a creek. Had it been smaller when the pioneers in these parts had named it, or did Cold Creek just sound better than Cold River?
He saw a cluster of beaver dams but didn’t get too close as they were busily building. The noise from the fracking site didn’t seem to faze them, so there was one sign the environment wasn’t being seriously damaged. He jumped and hunkered down when he heard what sounded like a gunshot nearby. For sure, way down here, off the road, that wasn’t a truck backfiring. Considering his recent record for getting in harm’s way, he stayed put a moment, scanning the ground beneath the leafless trees. It reminded him of his search Thursday morning for a spot where someone could have shot that arrow into Char’s door.
As he moved out of his hiding place, he saw there was a dead beaver over on the creek bank. People trapped, not shot, beavers, and it wasn’t hunting season for them. He didn’t want to risk hanging around here, walking out in the open to check it. He knew vultures would make short work of it.
