Whitewash

by Alex Kava

  He plunged into the sludge. Consciousness slipped away. He could hear the vibration of the soup slosh around him, more like ocean waves crashing into him. Through a swirling blur of rust-colored water and blue sky he saw the wide-eyed chicken heads bobbing alongside him.

  Dwight Lansik knew all too well that it would take only minutes before the liquid sucked him down, swallowing him whole, and that he would simply become a part of the very formula he had created. So he was grateful when everything finally went black.

  Colin Jernigan marched through the crowded lobby of the Marriott Hotel, trying to find someplace quiet while his cell phone continued to vibrate. He shouldered his way past two lethargic businessmen, almost tripping on the oversized cases they dragged behind them.

  “Yeah,” he finally barked into the phone. Nothing. He pushed his way out the revolving door, trading chatter for car engines and still straining to hear. “Go ahead.”

  “Meeting just got canceled,” he finally heard a male voice say.

  Though he didn’t recognize the caller it didn’t matter. If the man had this phone number he had been approved to make this call. Colin didn’t answer. He didn’t need to because immediately there was a click then the buzz of a dial tone.

  He slipped the phone into the pocket of his jacket. He was neither surprised nor disappointed, both worthless emotions he had long ago discarded. Still, his fingers found the gold tie bar and he rubbed his thumb over it as if for good luck while he straightened his tie using the reflection of the empty valet booth’s glass.

  He rubbed his eyes and took a good look at his reflection. He looked like hell. Soon all his hair would be prematurely gray. The broad shoulders were slumped enough to remind him to straighten them. An ache in the back of his neck announced that maybe the gray wasn’t all that premature.

  It had been a wasted trip. A whole day blown. He wasn’t looking forward to telling his boss. She’d be pissed; that, he already knew for certain. Briefly he wondered what it was that made Dr. Lansik back out at the last minute.

  Colin Jernigan shrugged and checked his watch. Then he started looking for the airport shuttle. He’d catch some sleep on the trip back. Maybe he’d even make it to Washington before the eleven o’clock news.

  2

  Friday, June 9

  Tallahassee, Florida

  The phone had wakened Sabrina Galloway almost an hour before her alarm clock was set to go off. Now she snapped it off and replaced it on her nightstand. Even as she sank back into the pillows she found herself waiting for her heart to stop galloping and her breathing to return to normal.

  What did she expect? This was exactly why she had uprooted her quiet, predictable life in Chicago and moved to Tallahassee. And she had given the hospital permission to call at any time of day. Still, it startled her each time the phone rang before sunrise.

  “Did I wake you?”

  The tone was always the same—abrupt, authoritarian and unapologetic. Even though it was a different nurse every time, each one said similar things. In the beginning Sabrina had tried to remember their names. Now that the calls became more frequent she had gotten lax in her manners, which would have made her father angry or at least it would have in another time. Not so much anymore.

  “I know it’s early,” the nurse had continued, “but I’m getting ready to end my shift.” This, too, was a frequent reason, whether the call came past midnight or before 6:00 a.m.

  “Of course I understand,” Sabrina said and bit down on her lower lip. Truth was, she didn’t understand why someone on the next shift couldn’t call her at a more reasonable time, at a time that wouldn’t automatically jump-start her heart and put her into emergency mode, that is, if there wasn’t an emergency. At this rate would she be able to tell when the real emergency came?

  “He tried to leave the premises again,” the woman said without alarm or urgency. More than anything, she sounded annoyed, like she was talking about an errant teenager breaking curfew. And almost as an afterthought she added, “He’s demanding to see you. Dr. Fullerton seems to think it might settle him down a bit if he does see you.”

  Sabrina promised to be there as soon as possible, only to have the nurse tell her that sometime in the afternoon would be just fine. It wasn’t that they didn’t have the situation under control. So why did they need to wake her during that time frame reserved for alarm and emergency, triggering a panic that stuck with her for the rest of the morning? She knew better than to ask. She already had, once, only to be lectured that they were following her instructions, honoring her request that she be notified each time it was required to use restraints and sedate him.

  “We aren’t required to contact you,” the charge nurse reminded Sabrina at the end of that lecture. It was strictly a “courtesy call.”

  Sabrina sat up on the edge of the bed, waiting for the tightness in her chest to ease. Each time she expected the worst or at least something similar to that phone call two years ago. The one that started all this. She rubbed her hands over her face. Was it only two years ago? The tightness in her chest gave way to an ache, not much better but familiar. She still missed her mom.

  She reached for her running shoes exactly where she had left them next to the nightstand, ready for her so she wouldn’t have to fumble around in the faint blur of morning. Despite the phone call Sabrina always woke up before sunrise. Her daily routine had been her saving grace, giving order to the sudden chaos that had taken over her structured, predictable life. She slept in her sports bra and jogging shorts instead of pajamas, so she couldn’t talk herself out of her morning run. It was a habit she had developed when she moved to Florida. In those first weeks it took all her effort to push out from under the covers. She kept telling herself she needed to be strong for her dad. She couldn’t afford to lose him, too.

  She began making the bed as soon as she was out of it, pulling the corners taut. Before she finished she found herself sitting on the edge. She hated that they had to restrain him again. The first time she visited him with the leather straps binding his arms to the bed rails like some criminal she demanded they let him go home with her, never even considering that she wouldn’t be able to take care of him and work at the same time. The charge nurse—the same one who reminded her it was a courtesy for them to even call—quickly squelched Sabrina’s heroic gesture, explaining that since her father signed the commitment papers himself only he and Dr. Fullerton could release him. And of course, Dr. Fullerton would not.

  She snatched the folded gray T-shirt waiting on the corner chair and wrestled into it. Her mind raced through her work schedule, already adjusting and reorganizing her day to accommodate the unexpected road trip. She would ask her boss if she could leave early. It was Friday. Shouldn’t be a problem. With any luck she could be driving back home just as it started to get dark. It was silly and she felt as though she were ten whenever she admitted it—because the rumors and stories certainly sounded like old superstitions told over a campfire—but she hated the idea of being stuck in Chattahoochee after dark.

  In the kitchen she heard the first timer click on and within a minute the room began to fill with the aroma of freshly brewed coffee. Seconds later the refrigerator’s ice machine clattered into its dispenser the requisite amount of ice needed for her breakfast smoothie.

  While she waited for the coffee, Sabrina retrieved the rolled-up newspaper from her doorstep and set right the flowerpot the carrier continuously aimed for. A glance at the local headlines made her long for the Chicago Tribune. Who’d ever guess she’d miss tales of murder and embezzlement in exchange for county-festival schedules and new city zoning rules. It was almost a year since her move and Tallahassee, Florida, still didn’t feel like home. She couldn’t imagine that it ever would. But it wasn’t Florida’s fault.

  She had lived in Chicago all her life. In thirty-five years her biggest move was from downtown to the suburbs. She never felt alone in the city of 2.8 million, not even when the winters dragged on and on. Of cou
rse, restlessness would set in. How could it not with the mountains of black, smudged snow and ice piled up along the streets? In the bleak midwinter, bundled strangers passed each other with no eye contact, all of them focused on one single thing—warmth and getting back into it. But that was just a part of winter living in the Midwest.

  Her schedule and routine kept her busy. Her students kept her entertained. And until two years ago she had a family who was her lifeline: a slightly neurotic but loving mother, a brilliant, doting father and a reckless but charming brother who had also been her best friend. She never imagined they’d all be swept away in less than a day.

  No, Florida wasn’t the problem. It didn’t take a Ph.D. for Sabrina to figure out what she was feeling came from deep inside her, not around her. If nothing else, warm and sunny Florida could and should be a catalyst. At least the residents of Tallahassee made eye contact when they met you on the street. Though Sabrina suspected it was to look her over and quickly determine—although they didn’t say it, their eyes did—“you’re not from around here, are you?”

  She wondered how they could tell. What exactly was it that gave her away?

  She glanced through the newspaper, taking time to read only the headlines as she poured a quarter cup of skim milk into a mug and filled the rest of it with coffee. Below the fold on page three a headline caught her attention: Jackson Springs Bottled Water Recall.

  She drove by the family-owned bottling company every day on her way to EchoEnergy. She shook her head, not really surprised. As a scientist she believed the federal government did a poor job of regulating municipal water supplies, allowing much too high levels of arsenic and other dangerous contaminants in regular tap water. That they thought they could regulate bottled water any better was a joke. She sipped the lukewarm coffee and worried more about the caffeine in it than the water. She hadn’t gotten a decent night’s sleep since she moved to Tallahassee and yet she knew caffeine was probably the least of her worries. She only wished it could be that easy.

  Her friend Olivia liked to remind her that within less than a year Sabrina had picked up and moved to a part of the country she had never even visited before. Throw in a new job in an industry she had never been a part of and add to it the role of caregiver. “Of course it’s the caffeine that’s stressing you out and keeping you awake at night,” Olivia would conclude, her tongue firmly planted in her cheek.

  Sabrina gulped down the coffee and set aside the mug. Her fingertips absently rubbed where the diamond ring used to be on her ring finger. She’d never had it resized and it was loose. She constantly worried about losing it as she pulled on and off latex gloves on a regular basis. The ring sat safely in its box in her dresser drawer, tucked away so she wouldn’t lose it down a drain.

  Who was she fooling? She had really taken it off because all of its meaning and promises had already gone down the drain. This move had cost her much more than she’d ever anticipated.

  Actually, the new job was a lifesaver. She was a scientist, after all. She thrived on new puzzles, concocting solutions to unsolvable problems, finding alternatives to old, worn-out remedies. It came naturally, instinctive, an insatiable curiosity. It was about time she was out in the real world confronting the challenges instead of sitting back, debating and theorizing them. For ten years she had focused so much of her attention on making tenure that maybe she had forgotten the thrill of discovery.

  When she was a kid this job at EchoEnergy would have been exactly the kind of stuff she had dreamed about doing. Growing up, her older brother, Eric, played football and put together model cars while Sabrina begged for her father’s hand-me-down microscopes so she could get a better look at what particles made up a regular clump of dirt. She’d spend hours figuring out how to separate those particles and several more hours experimenting what happened when you added water to each. While Eric discovered girls, Sabrina was breaking down the elements in sulfuric acid and chromium phosphates. The summer of her fifteenth birthday her mother was ecstatic to hear that Sabrina had been spending every afternoon with Billy Snyder, until she learned the two of them had been creating a flashlight that glowed in the dark without the use of batteries.

  Her mother’s harshest recrimination was, “You’re turning out to be just like your father.”

  Her mother had never been able to say it without a smile, and Sabrina knew it was more a compliment than an accusation. That was her mother, melodrama and sarcasm as much creative tools as her paintbrushes and clay. Sabrina knew it was obvious her parents loved each other, though they gently teased and goaded one another. Her mother called Arthur Galloway’s inventions “worthless contraptions” even as she clapped and fought back tears of joy during his demonstrations. However, her father’s contraptions were usually the root of all family arguments and, according to her mother, the cause of all their hardships and heartache. But her father never seemed to mind, only grinning at her mother’s outbursts and placating her with a kiss on the cheek while telling her he “was indeed crazy, crazy in love” with her.

  Sabrina had to admit that she didn’t remember any hardships. She couldn’t remember the family ever—not once—going without. Her father’s teaching job at the university always provided more than enough. It wasn’t until after her mother was gone that Sabrina realized all those arguments, all those hurled accusations were simply her mother’s way of saying that she knew Arthur Galloway could have been a famous inventor if only he hadn’t been saddled with a family and monthly responsibilities. That she understood he had sacrificed something larger than the sum of all of them, and she wanted to make sure he knew, over and over again, that she hadn’t asked for any of it. Almost as if she was also giving him a reason, or perhaps a second chance, to change his mind, the ravings of a woman who could never believe she was worthy of her good fortune. The fact was that Meredith and Arthur Galloway were crazy in love with each other. In the end it wasn’t her mother’s petulance that drove Arthur Galloway crazy or drove a wedge between her children. Instead, it was the absence of that petulance, the absence of her mother that had ripped them all to shreds.

  Something slid and crashed outside, startling Sabrina. She jumped even as she recognized the sound, then winced at a second crash. She raced across her living room to the sliding glass door.

  “Hey, cut it out,” she yelled, shoving open the door.

  Too late. The huge white cat batted a paw, sending a third terra-cotta flowerpot off the deck railing.

  “Come on, Lizzie, give me a break.”

  Sabrina grabbed the broom that had become a common fixture in the corner of her small patio. She waved it in front of the cat before Lizzie could swipe at the next pot in the row. It took Sabrina weeks of yelling to realize the feline terror was stone deaf, so even raising the broom did no good unless it was in the cat’s line of vision.

  On a morning like this the last thing Sabrina needed was to have to deal with Lizzie Borden.

  3

  Tallahassee, Florida

  Jason Brill left the concierge’s desk shaking his head. It was ridiculous what this hotel considered a king-sized suite. The so-called manager didn’t even know enough to be embarrassed by it, his bush-garden eyebrows raised in surprise at every one of Jason’s questions like he couldn’t quite imagine why a noisy and empty minifridge wasn’t quite the same as a well-stocked minibar. Jason straightened his tie and gave his shirt cuffs a tug as if the altercation had included more than a tongue-lashing. He wanted to hit the guy. In the past he would have. He knew his boss would be okay with the room, but Jason wasn’t okay with it.

  He balled up his fist around the key card to the pathetic suite and jammed it into his back trouser pocket. His job was to ensure that the senator got only the best and that he would be well taken care of. A particularly difficult task this morning since none of the goddamn hotel staff—not a single one with English as a first language—even knew who Senator John Quincy Allen was. Okay, so it was one more good reason to support his boss�
��s stand on immigration, which pretty much supported sending the whole goddamn lot back and building a wall.

  Earlier Jason had considered pulling up stakes and going to a different hotel, but it probably wouldn’t make much difference. There wasn’t a decent four-star hotel in the entire city. Now he wished the senator hadn’t been hell-bent on staying overnight. Maybe he could convince him to take a flight back after the tour. If nothing else, he could at least save the senator from the head chef’s runny omelet. Jason could still taste the damn thing. The grits had been runny, too, not that Jason understood why every breakfast in the South had to include that stuff, anyway. Again, the omelet wouldn’t matter to the senator. The grits would, though the man wouldn’t complain. There’d be only that drop of the eyes and a slight nod as if to say, “So this is the best you could do.”

  God, he hated that look of disappointment, a look that said, “So this is how you repay me.” Sometimes he’d rather the man chew him out instead. Jason’s uncle Louie used to say, “It ain’t healthy for a man not to say what’s on his mind. You keep it all bottled up, eventually you blow up.” Uncle Louie wasn’t much of a scholar, but he knew a thing or two about common sense, which was certainly one thing Jason discovered to be lacking in D.C. big-time.

  But Jason also knew the difference between people who inherited good manners and discipline and those who had to learn it from scratch, the difference between Senator John Quincy Allen and Uncle Louie. It was the difference between Jason walking away from that stupid-ass manager instead of slamming the bastard’s smug face into the wall.

  He rolled his shoulders and stretched his neck, but knew the tight ball of tension was there for the day. He flipped open his cell phone as he reached the bank of elevators and punched the Up arrow. While he waited he scrolled down his phone’s call list. The elevator doors opened to two chattering maids and Jason held the door open, standing back. When they noticed him their conversation stopped immediately in midsentence—pretty obvious even if he didn’t understand the language. The older one bowed her head as she passed by while the younger woman smiled at him, a wonderfully coy smile as though she had no clue she had a nice ass. But then she glanced back over her shoulder as if to make sure he noticed the tight ass. It only reminded him that this discipline thing pretty much sucked and it certainly couldn’t be healthy for a twenty-six-year-old male.