End Of The Road: (A Clean Romance Novella) (Women's Adventure in Alaska Romance Book 3)

by Renee Hart

  She greeted a few of her neighbors on her way to her part of the patch. It was a nice, sunny day outside, so there were several people out tending their gardens. She said hello to an older woman who grew flowers in her plot, and a young gay couple who had a little coy pond in the corner of their plot. Everyone grew something different, and the only rule was that everything had to be all-natural. There were no chemical fertilizers, no artificial products. Just a patchwork field covered in little plots of nature.

  Tessa pulled on her gloves and got to work digging up the soil and mixing in organic fertilizer she bought from a local supplier. It was early in the season yet, and her plot was mostly an empty patch of dirt for now. She needed to fertilize the soil after the long, dry winter, and loosen the dirt to give the roots plenty of room to grow and thrive. She planted several tall trellises in the ground around the patch, to give the tomato plants somewhere to grow. They would help keep the tomatoes off the ground, keeping them cleaner and easier to inspect and harvest.

  She was working up a pretty good sweat when the ringing of a bicycle bell announced the arrival of her neighbor, Samson. He pedaled his bike around the back of the apartment building and stopped not far from her. He pulled a wooden case of herb seedlings from the basket hanging from the handlebars, then brought it over to his plot, right next to Tessa's. His garden was a busy, crowded patch, with vegetables growing in the dirt, and benches lining the area, each covered in collections of little clay plots for his herbs.

  “Good afternoon, Tessa,” he said, flashing her a smile. He had long blond hair pulled back in a ponytail, and he had a style that could only be described as “hipster hippie.” He wore skinny jeans and a loose flannel shirt over a tight tie-dyed t-shirt. Sometimes Tessa thought he belonged back in the sixties, but the iPod in his pocket marked him as a millennial through and through.

  “Hey, Samson.” She waved at him, scattering specks of dirt from her gloves.

  “How's life treating you?” He set the box of herb seedlings on one of his benches and started sorting through them. He dumped some of the old, dry dirt from the clay pots on the bench and refilled them with fresh soil to help the new herbs thrive.

  “I'm not even sure how to answer that question anymore.” She lowered her head, trying to focus on her work. She hacked through a patch of dirt with a little hand rake, wishing she could slice through her worries the way she did these troublesome roots.

  “That sounds ominous,” he said. “Anything you care to talk about?”

  Tessa thought about the file folder sitting in her desk drawer. She knew she couldn't talk about that to anyone. Not unless she was ready to be a whistle blower. And she couldn't do something like that when she wasn't even sure if Dunham was doing anything wrong. Like Mr. Morgan had said, there was nothing illegal about using GMOs. She couldn't even be sure if they were dangerous.

  “Ever have a moral dilemma?” she asked.

  “Once,” he said, nodding sagely.

  “What about?”

  “Well, it was back when I was much more religious.”

  “You?” Tessa looked him up and down, from his ponytail to his leather sandals. “Religious?”

  He laughed while he settled one of his seedlings into a pot. “Believe it or not, Tessa, I was raised to be Very Catholic.”

  “'Very' Catholic?” Tessa mulled that over. “As opposed to only 'Slightly' Catholic?”

  “Indeed.” He winked at her. “The difference is, someone who is only Slightly Catholic only goes to church on holidays, and they celebrate Christmas and Easter more for the presents and candy than for the religious aspects. But my parents wanted me to be Very Catholic, which meant church every Sunday, and always wearing our Sunday best.”

  “I'm trying to picture you in a suit and tie,” Tessa said, smirking. “Nah. Ain't happening.”

  He chuckled. “Oh, I'll show you some old family photographs sometime. I even had a sensible haircut.” He brushed a stray strand of hair back over his shoulder.

  “So what happened?”

  “Well,” he said, pausing in his work and looking off into the distance, “I got into a debate with one of my Very Catholic friends about something that I couldn't resolve. It came down to a question of morals, and where morals come from.”

  “Where they come from?” Tessa frowned as she thought that over, while she continued digging through roots in the dirt. “I don't understand.”

  “Well, here's the way to look at it. Say I gave you a gun.”

  “You hate guns.”

  “I know.” He laughed. “But hypothetically, say I gave you a gun, walked you into a room, and asked you to shoot a total stranger. Would you do it?”

  “Of course not.” She frowned at him, not having any idea where this was going.

  “Few people would. And that's the key. We could ask anyone here,” he gestured with his little shovel to the other gardeners in their plots, “and they'd all say the same thing. They wouldn't shoot the person. No one would, not even Topher.”

  Tessa glanced across the field at Topher. He was busy digging up dirt with a hoe, talking rather animatedly to himself as he did so. He had to be the most energetic and animated person Tessa knew. Sometimes he gave her the willies.

  “Because none of us are psychopaths,” Tessa said. Not even Topher.

  “But then, how do you know you have free will?”

  Tessa paused in her work with her rake still dug into the dirt. “I...wow. Okay. Well, I guess I know I have free will because I could decide to shoot the person, even though I never would.”

  “So then what's stopping you?”

  Tessa struggled with that for a long moment, but she had no answer.

  “My friend,” Samson said, “claimed the only thing stopping you is God.”

  “Hmm.” Tessa stood up and stretched out her back. “I mean, I guess in a way that makes sense. But I don't think I'm Very Religious enough to quite buy that.”

  “Neither was I.” Samson shrugged, then resumed setting his new seedlings into the clay pots. “It seemed to clash so much with my idea of what God was, what free will is meant to be. I couldn't accept the idea that God was like a giant hand, holding me back from doing something bad. And I started thinking about the difference between right and wrong, and how I knew what was right and what wasn't.”

  He paused with his little shovel stuck in the dirt, a distant look in his eyes. “I realized that the only way I knew how to tell what was right was to look at the bible for answers. And then I realized that so many people over the course of time have looked at those words, and found completely different answers. And many more who claim to follow God don't even follow His word.”

  He shrugged and went back to his work. “That's when I lost my faith in religion. Not in God, but in organized religion. In the institution of it. And I started looking within myself to find my morals. Analyzing situations to search for the right and wrong within my own heart.”

  “So what you're telling me is,” Tessa said, sighing, “I've got to settle my moral dilemma on my own?”

  “Well, I can offer my viewpoint, if you want to talk about it. But you,” he pointed the shovel at her, “have to determine your own moral compass. One person's right can easily be another person's wrong.”

  Tessa pulled off her gloves and grabbed her water bottle. She thought over Samson's words while she took a drink. What was her personal right or wrong? On the one hand, she thought it would be wrong to hide potentially dangerous secrets from the public, if it meant people could get sick. On the other hand, she also knew it would be wrong to risk damaging the company and risking a lot of people's jobs, based on nothing more than a hunch. If word got out that Dunham was using GMOs, it could crush the company's sales, and lead to thousands of layoffs. She didn't want that on her conscience. But she also didn't want the burden of knowing she let people get sick.

  “No offense, Samson,” she said, “but I think you just made this more complicated for me.”

>   “This is what I do,” he said, smirking.

  Tessa sighed and pulled her gloves back on. She knelt back down and got back to work, determined not to think about anything complicated for the rest of the day.

  Chapter 3

  Over the weekend, Tessa did some online research. Most of what she learned wasn't too disheartening. A lot of the studies she read indicated that GMOs weren't necessarily harmful to people. A lot of the benefits even sounded good on the surface: they were easier to grow, resistant to rot and decay, and could provide better vitamins. It almost sounded to Tessa like they were healthier and more beneficial, and for a time she thought that maybe all of the hype around them was nothing more than politics.

  But she came across a few studies that were more disturbing. Studies that indicated some types of GMOs could harm the heart, kidney, and liver. And there was another issue that bothered her more.

  Tessa was a strong supporter of fully organic foods. She never used chemical fertilizers or weed killers. But she learned that there were some types of genetically modified corn that were resistant to chemical weed killers.

  With normal corn, farmers would need to spray the weed killers only on the weeds, since the chemicals could harm the growth of the corn as well. But these genetically modified “super corns” could take a dose of chemical spray and keep growing just fine. It made things easier on farmers, since they could just douse entire fields with pesticides without worry. Which meant some people were eating corn that had been doused in chemicals. And while the corn might be resistant to it, that didn't mean that people were.

  She sat at her computer late Saturday night, her head resting in her hand, a glass of wine sitting by her side. It was a lot more information than she could process. She simply wasn't a scientist. She'd gone to college for a degree in philosophy, and since there were very few job opportunities for philosophers nowadays, she'd taken the best office job she could find. She was starting to wonder whether she'd chosen the right career path.

  She refilled her wine glass and walked over to the window, looking out over the darkened garden plots.

  She tried to imagine what it would be like, growing foods there that had been affected the same way some of the Dunham crops had. She knew that deep down a lot of the fear surrounding GMOs was nothing more than propaganda and politics, which had caused a lot of misunderstanding by the populace. But then she thought about her garden being doused in heavy sprays of toxic chemicals, chemicals that were used more heavily on some GMO crops than on natural crops. She thought about eating fruits and vegetables that had been covered in those chemical sprays, having all of that inside of her, affecting her in she knew not what way.

  She shuddered and took a sip from her wine glass. Maybe it was just her personal superstitions, but she couldn't embrace the idea of eating such things. And as far as she was concerned, a company like Dunham at the very least had a responsibility for transparency. If there was even the smallest danger from their products, then their customers deserved to know the truth. That way, the consumers could make up their own minds.

  People who supported and endorsed GMOs could be free to eat them, while people like Tessa and her neighbors could stick with their homegrown, fully organic foods.

  While she was thinking about all of this, Tessa caught sight of a shadow moving among the fields. She leaned closer to the window, peering outside. It was probably just one of her neighbors, checking their plot. When she focused on the movement, she realized which garden plot the person was working on. It was the one she and Samson had dubbed “The Mystery Plot.”

  Tessa was on a first name basis with most of her neighbors. They all shared what they grew, and they all helped each other out. But there was one plot, just one, that no one in the community ever worked on. Yet it always thrived. There were magnificent squash, zucchini, and tomatoes there throughout the season, and in the fall there were plump pumpkins growing just in time for Halloween. The rows of crops were always perfectly tilled, the weeds were always pulled, and the produce was harvested at its peak freshness. But no one seemed to know who was doing it.

  For awhile, Tessa had assumed that whoever worked on the Mystery Plot tended their crops during the weekdays, when a lot of the gardeners were at their day jobs. But Samson, who worked nights and weekends at a little music store downtown, said he'd never seen anyone there during the day. A few of the neighbors claimed it must have been a ghost, though Tessa didn't believe in such things.

  She set down her wine glass and grabbed a flashlight, then headed out into the garden patch. She walked along the lines of crops without turning the flashlight on until she was at the edge of the Mystery Plot. When she flicked on the light and cast it about the area, she saw nothing but carefully tilled rows of soil. This early in the season, nothing much had grown yet, but someone had started prepping the soil, just as Tessa had in her own plot earlier that day.

  She flicked off the flashlight and headed back to her apartment. She had enough worries in her life right now without chasing gardening ghosts. She finished off her wine, turned off the lights, and headed to bed, hoping that a fresh perspective after a good night's sleep would help her get past her moral dilemmas.

  Chapter 4

  At work on Monday, Tessa started doing a little digging. In between meeting her quota for entering files into the computer, she ran some searches through the database of older files. She had a few pages from the file she'd stolen, and she picked out a few keywords from it to search for. She ran searches on the terms “GMO,” “pesticides,” “safety,” “inspection,” and a few others. What she found started making her realize there was more to this problem than she'd ever imagined.

  She found dozens of files similar to the one she'd first discovered. Hundreds. Many of them dated back years and years, since before she started working at Dunham. After going over a good number of them, she started noticing a pattern. Each report started off with some small, seemingly innocuous problem that one of the inspectors had found. Trace amounts of an unauthorized chemical. Improper labeling of shipments. The discover of substances that, while not necessarily illegal or dangerous, were certainly not anything that Dunham admitted were being used. And at the bottom of almost every one of these reports, there was a note from the inspector suggesting further investigation. But as far as she could tell, there had never been any further investigation. At least, not in any of the reports that her department processed.

  She sat at her computer, drumming her fingers on her desk, wondering what she should do. There was still nothing in these reports to prove that illegal or dangerous chemicals were being used. But there was the possibility. A possibility that seemed pretty likely, given the large number of reports that had gone unchecked. Someone at Dunham Enterprises was either keeping themselves willfully ignorant of the possible risk, or else actively covering it up.

  “Whatcha doing?”

  Tessa jumped, her hand going to her chest. She looked up to see Mindy's spiky red head sticking up over the wall between their cubicles.

  “Geez, jumpy much?” Mindy asked.

  “You just startled me.” Tessa took a few deep breaths to calm herself. She clicked the button to minimize the report on her screen. “What's up?”

  “I was asking you that, Tessy girl.” Mindy leaned her arms on the wall and propped her chin on her hands. “You're slacking off today.” She nodded to Tessa's outbox, which barely had any files in it. “You never slack off. What's up?”

  “It's nothing.” Tessa grabbed another file from her inbox and opened it. “I just had a long weekend. I'll catch up.”

  “There's no rush,” Mindy said, snorting. She nodded to the several year's worth of backlogged files stacked up against the far wall. “It's not like those are going anywhere.”

  Tessa glanced over at the stacks of unprocessed files. The most recent files she had entered into the system were from inspections that had taken place over three years ago. Most of the ones she'd found in the database were
even older. If there had been any followup, she realized, then the files would still be in the boxes of backlogged reports. That was where she had to look.

  After Mindy went back to work, Tessa headed over to the stacks of boxes. She didn't know where to begin. All of the boxes were dated, marking when they'd received the reports. But they received reports from hundreds of branches across the country.

  She checked the file number on the first report she'd taken. Some of the reports they processed, such as the inventory reports, were compiled monthly. But a lot of the safety inspections were only conducted twice a year. She headed down the line of boxes until she found some from six months ago, then dug through them until she found a file with a matching number to the one she already had. She searched again until she found another report from a year ago, a year and a half ago, two years ago, and so on, until she had a stack of consecutive reports from the same facility.

  She brought the reports back to her desk and started looking through them, starting with the oldest one. It was written by the same inspector who'd filled out the first report, and it contained more notes at the bottom urging for a more detailed inspection of the facility. But the next report was written by someone else entirely. There was no way for her to know if the first inspector had quit, gotten fired, or simply been transferred to a different location. But the next inspector, for whatever the reason, reported that nothing was out of the ordinary at all.

  There was a similar pattern throughout the reports. Here and there, she found reports that indicated a possible problem, only to find that the inspector who had reported it was no longer working at the same facility by the following year. And the new inspector never found any problems at first. It could have been because they were intentionally covering things up. Or because they simply didn't know what to look for without having seen the previous inspector's reports. But whatever the reason, there were three years of reports, six files in all, but no inspector had remained at the same location for more than a year.