Dire Straits

by Melissa Pearl

  “Is your mom friends with Dorothy Klein?” Charlie had asked.

  “Name doesn’t ring a bell.”

  “She lives out by County Road 12, right? Those older homes.”

  Jarrett nodded.

  “Dorothy lives out that way, too. Near Nelson’s Greenhouse.”

  Jarrett knew the place. The business was a sort of jack-of-all-trades, selling plants and trees during the spring and summer months, produce when it was in season, and Christmas trees during the holidays. They also did dog boarding, which Jarrett assumed was because they had the space to do it and because it probably helped bring in a little extra money.

  But he didn’t know what this Dorothy person had to do with his mother.

  “She worked at AFCC,” Charlie told him. “Retired a few months ago.”

  Jarrett picked up his beer and took a sip.

  “She didn’t want to.” Charlie peeled at the label on his bottle. “Had a couple of years left before Social Security kicked in.”

  Jarrett still wasn’t sure why Charlie was telling him about this coworker, but his curiosity was slightly piqued. “Why’d she quit, then?”

  “She was sick.” Charlie looked up at him. “Lung cancer.”

  Jarrett raised an eyebrow.

  “Never smoked a day in her life.”

  Jarrett took another sip. “Why are you telling me this?”

  Charlie looked at him. “You of all people should know.”

  Jarrett stared at him blankly.

  “Don’t you think it’s a little weird?” he asked. “All of these sick people?”

  “No,” Jarrett said with a shake of his head. “You’re talking about an older segment of the population. They get sick. And they die.”

  He grimaced at the bluntness of his words, but it was the truth. He saw the obituaries the paper published, knew just how frequent of a visitor death was to Aspen Falls. The population of the town was aging, but he was well aware that there were young families and college kids moving to town trying to reverse the trend, trying to set Aspen Falls on course so it wouldn’t end up like so many other small towns across America. They’d made good progress, and Jarrett was hopeful. The community college continued to increase in enrollments and offer new courses, and the town was certain to benefit from its expansion. Michael Richmond was building a new apartment complex to serve the growing needs of the community college population, and a new elementary school was going to be built nearby, too. The City Council had just approved funding for upgrades to the parks and trail systems, which would serve to strengthen Aspen Falls’ appeal, as well. And some of the shuttered storefronts in the town’s small downtown were reopening once again, with fresh new concepts that appealed to young families and millennials.

  No, Jarrett was pretty sure Aspen Falls wasn’t going to turn into a ghost town any time soon. But none of these things changed the fact that the town’s core population, an older generation that was tied to farms or local businesses that had prevented them from moving to the cities when times had been tough, was aging. And dying.

  “You should talk to her,” Charlie told him. “Just see if there’s something there.”

  “To this Dorothy person?”

  He nodded.

  “There isn’t.”

  Charlie rolled his eyes. “You just know this automatically? I thought you were a reporter, not a clairvoyant.”

  “Why are you so bent on me going?” Jarrett asked.

  Charlie scraped his thumbnail across the beer label, watching as it peeled away from the glass. “Because I’m worried about her,” he said finally.

  “About Dorothy?”

  “She’s alone,” he said. “Divorced. No kids. I’m not sure who’s going to look after her, you know?”

  “And you think talking to me—a reporter—is gonna help?” Jarrett stared at his friend. He had enough problems of his own, especially with his mom in poor health, and he failed to see what he could do to help with Dorothy Klein’s situation.

  “I don’t know,” Charlie admitted. “But couldn’t you just go talk to her? See if anything she says grabs you? Maybe there’s something contributing to all of these health issues.”

  “Like what?”

  “I don’t know.” Charlie rubbed the neck of the bottle, dislodging more of the label. “Something in the environment? Something in the food? Similar medical treatments? It just seems…weird to me.”

  And that was why Jarrett was sitting in Dorothy Klein’s kitchen, inside a modest rambler parked on two acres that were pretty much in the middle of nowhere, trying to work his way through the most unappetizing meal he’d had in recent memory.

  He sawed at the baked potato, trying to get his knife through the thickened skin. Dorothy was sitting across from him at the round wood table, using her fork to scrape the inside of her own potato.

  He thought about Charlie’s comments, how it was weird that there were so many sick people.

  Jarrett was pretty sure the only weird thing was that Charlie had insisted he talk with Dorothy. He almost grinned. He knew why. Because Charlie knew that Jarrett would go. Even if he groused and voiced his belief that it would be useless, he would make the trip.

  Because Jarrett never knew where he might find a story.

  His thoughts returned to his conversation with Charlie at Shorty’s, and how he’d inadvertently blown off Jessica Claret. He flinched at the memory. He hadn’t meant to be so abrupt with her. Charlie had bombarded him with information and Jarrett had gone into full-on reporter mode, trying to jot down every last word. That was his job, what he was good at. And he’d completely dismissed her.

  He bit back a sigh. That had definitely been a bad decision, and one he would need to remedy. Immediately.

  “Thanks for having me over on such short notice.” He smiled at Dorothy.

  She smiled back. She was a striking woman, with her almost metallic gray hair and steely gray eyes. Everything about her appearance was sharp: her hawk-like nose, her thin lips and arched eyebrows, the cheekbones that sliced two diagonal lines down her face.

  “Any friend of Charlie’s is a friend of mine,” she said.

  He managed to cut off a hunk of potato and popped it in his mouth. He’d slathered enough butter and dumped enough salt on it to at least make it palatable. Chewing it was another story, and it took him several seconds to work it enough so that he could swallow it down. He reached for his glass of water and took a huge sip.

  He abandoned the potato and shifted his attention to the peas. “Charlie mentioned you retired early,” Jarrett said.

  They’d already gotten some small talk out of the way, and she knew he was there from the paper. He’d initially told her he was doing a feature piece on the aging population of Aspen Falls. That was far easier to swallow—and far more truthful, as far as he was concerned—than the idea that he was there to investigate illnesses in their small town.

  “Earlier than I wanted to.” She made a face. “I had a couple years to go, but my health decided otherwise.”

  Jarrett nodded sympathetically. “Cancer?”

  “Lung cancer.” The words came out of her mouth easily enough, and if she was upset by the diagnosis, she certainly didn’t let on.

  “I’m sorry to hear that.”

  She waved a hand in the air. “It’s life, I suppose.” Her smile was thin. “We all have to go sometime, right?”

  Jarrett glanced down at his plate, thoughts of his own father succumbing to his illness flitting through his mind.

  If his dining partner noticed, she didn’t let on. “Doctors seem to think they can treat it, so I guess that’s good. And if not, well…” She shrugged. “I’ve had a good, full life. I’d much rather it be me than someone younger.”

  She was so matter of fact about it, and it took Jarrett a little by surprise. Most people, when faced with their own mortality, often lingered on regrets, on the things they still wanted to accomplish, on the unfairness of it all. Dorothy didn’t seem
overly fixated on any of those things.

  Dorothy cut into her chicken. “It’s the kids that bother me,” she said, her voice growing softer. “They shouldn’t get sick. Not at such a young age.”

  Jarrett looked up. “Kids?” He distinctly remembered Charlie saying that she didn’t have children.

  “All the sick kids in the world,” she said, and Jarrett nodded. So she was talking in generalities.

  Jarrett agreed with her statement. It did seem unfair when kids were struck with cancer or other life-threatening illnesses.

  But life wasn’t fair.

  He’d seen that time and time again, not just in his job as a reporter, but in his own life, too.

  “Kyle’s four,” Dorothy said. “His family had to move because he was sick. To get him access to treatment.”

  Jarrett looked up at her. “Kyle? Is he a nephew or something?” Maybe there were kids in her extended family.

  Dorothy shook her head. “A neighbor. Well, former neighbor now. They moved earlier this year. He needed specialized care, so Holly and Jake sold their house and moved to the cities.”

  “Holly and Jake were his parents? And they moved, you said?”

  She wiped at her mouth with her napkin. “Brain cancer,” she said, her brow furrowing. “It has some big fancy name, but I can’t remember it.”

  Jarrett stared at her, his mind working over what she’d just said. Charlie’s words mingled in, as did Jarrett’s own thoughts about his mom, his dad, their neighbors.

  He wasn’t sure there was a connection. The illnesses were too varied. He went over the mental list in his head. There were cancers, autoimmune disorders. He thought about Patty and her thyroid, Glen and his kidneys.

  There was no way they could all be related.

  Could they?

  His workbag was sitting next to him, on one of the empty chairs at the dining room table. He glanced at it.

  And then he reached for it and unzipped the bag. Took out his pad of paper and fished around for a pen.

  Might as well take some notes.

  Just in case.

  “You said brain cancer?” His hand flew across the blank sheet of paper, scribbling notes. “Where did they live? When was he diagnosed?”

  He listened as Dorothy talked. She didn’t have much information in the way of the boy’s condition, but he could get that elsewhere. She told him that their house was about half a mile away, closer to County Road 12 than Dorothy’s house. Kyle’s parents had priced their home well below market value in order to facilitate a quick move. Jarrett asked Dorothy if she knew if it had been sold yet.

  “Yes, it sold almost right away,” she said. “A young girl. I think she resells them?”

  Alaina Dans, he thought.

  Jarrett wrote this down.

  Satisfied with the information he’d gotten about the boy, he turned his attention back to Dorothy’s own health. Asked her about her symptoms, when she first noticed them, if the doctors had any clue as to how she’d come down with lung cancer.

  “They suspected radon at first,” she told him. She’d finished her dinner and, after wiping her mouth one last time, set her napkin down on her plate. “Since that is one of the leading causes of lung cancer in nonsmokers. But I’ve tested the house on and off over the years and have never had high levels.”

  Jarrett noted this.

  “Dr. Ellis said sometimes these things just happen.” Dorothy’s smile was grim. “Sometimes our bodies just…go haywire.”

  Jarrett gave her a sympathetic nod, but his mind was elsewhere.

  He still wasn’t sure there was any kind of connection between any of the illnesses of the people in his own life and this woman sitting here in front of him. But there was one thing that had made him sit up and take notice, one thing that had occurred to him when she first started telling him Kyle’s story.

  They all lived in the same area of Aspen Falls. The north side of town. He didn’t know if that meant anything, but he wasn’t about to dismiss it, either. Not when there was this seemingly high cluster of different kinds of illnesses.

  He brought up a mental map of the town, trying to picture everything that surrounded this particular area of Aspen Falls. There were no factories nearby, no toxic waste dumps. Hell, the town’s landfill wasn’t even in Aspen Falls proper, and actually bordered the east side of town, miles away from where he was sitting.

  No, he didn’t think it was anything like that.

  He thought about what else the land was used for out here. There were farms surrounding this residential area, farms growing mostly corn, soybeans, and potatoes. Maybe they were using fertilizers and pesticides that were hazardous to people?

  Jarrett frowned. But there were farms ringing the entire town, not just this particular section. So if people really were getting sick from ag runoff or airborne chemicals, wouldn’t it be a citywide issue? Granted, he didn’t know if there were people suffering from these same kinds of ailments in other parts of Aspen Falls, but part of him thought this would have been newsworthy in and of itself, if citizens of the town were coming down with cancer and other illnesses at unusual rates.

  Maybe he needed to look into it.

  He tapped his pen on the pad of paper in front of him, thinking. Nothing looked glaringly obvious to him.

  Actually, one thing did.

  The fact that there just might not be a connection at all.

  In truth, that was probably the likeliest explanation.

  But still.

  There was something about the story that poked at him. Needled him. Maybe it was the fact that his own mom was sick. That his dad had died just last year.

  Was there a reason for their illnesses, other than simply fate dealing them a lousy hand? He hated to think that their destiny was tied to something as stupid as the luck of the draw. What if something else was responsible?

  He shook his head. He was pragmatic about a lot of things. He had to be, considering his job. He needed results, needed to follow solid leads and get the info necessary to write his articles.

  But he was also a dreamer.

  Because he had to be that, too. To consider all possibilities, to look at every angle. To look for stories and hunt them down, even if he wasn’t sure one was there.

  That was where he was now.

  He just wasn’t sure where to go from here.

  7

  Tuesday June 27

  8:00 am

  Jessica dragged herself back to the station. The night shift was killing her, and she couldn’t wait for the week to be over. She had a weeklong vacation coming up, which she was more than ready for, and then she’d be back on day shifts. The sooner, the better, as far as she was concerned.

  She shifted her sunglasses to the top of her head as she worked her way into the building, pausing momentarily to stop and say hello to the people manning the front desk. She was halfway to her desk when she heard her name.

  Kellan motioned her toward his office.

  “Cam followed up with the recycling place,” he said.

  Jessica raised her eyebrows. “Yeah?” She waited for her boss to elaborate.

  “She’s in, if you want to ask her about it.” He smiled. “But I just wanted you to know, you made a good call telling us about it.”

  It was meant to be a compliment, but it rang hollow for Jess. She didn’t want to be the one reporting things. She wanted to be the one doing the investigating, solving the crimes.

  She forced a smile back and then walked past her own desk to the detectives’ office, stopping in front of Cam’s cluttered desk.

  Camila Perez was on the phone. She glanced at Jess, held her finger up to tell her to wait, and then kept talking. She was speaking Spanish, and Jess immediately wondered if it was a personal call or if she was following up on leads to a case of hers with someone in the Hispanic community. Not that Aspen Falls was terribly diverse, but there were pockets of families here and there, mostly of Hispanic, Somali or Hmong descent, which
was a mirror of some of the ethnicities found in the cities.

  Finally, she hung up. “Just who I wanted to see,” she said to Jess. She was a striking woman, with long dark hair and dark, penetrating eyes.

  “Kellan told me the recycling center panned out,” Jess said.

  Cam smiled. “Sure did, on a couple of different fronts. I wrote up the center for multiple violations in connection with the seller you told us about: no ID number on file for him, and they didn’t have him sign the affidavit that the metal belonged to him.”

  Jess felt a small surge of satisfaction despite the frustration over her lack of involvement. At least her tip had resulted in something.

  “So Superior Metals got a citation, and will probably have to pay a hefty fine.” Camila smiled again. “Let’s hope they do a better job tracking their sellers from here on out.”

  Jess nodded. The database for metal sellers was a relatively new thing, created as part of sweeping legislation to cut down on the amount of metal parts stolen and then sold for cash. Farmers had been particularly vulnerable prior to the passage of the bill, but so had regular citizens. Before the creation of the APS database, thieves would steal cars and have them in the crushing lots an hour later; they’d break into homes and businesses and rip out valuable copper piping, creating thousands of dollars’ worth of headaches for their victims.

  The APS database made it illegal for anyone to sell metal without registering their information and declaring that they were the individuals that owned the items being sold. And companies that didn’t follow the rules could be held accountable, too.