The Extinction Event

by David Black

  Jack got up and walked toward the stained glass window, hands behind him on his lower back as he stretched and searched the face of the seminaked woman in the shimmering glass grape arbor. His eyes burned.

  * * *

  “I’m not a doctor,” Jack told Caroline on Tuesday. “I flunked high school science. What the hell do I think I’m trying to do?”

  “Solve three murders,” Caroline said.

  “One certain murder,” Jack said. “Two maybes.”

  “Probables?”

  “Most of the books I’m checking are ten, fifteen years out of date.”

  Jack gave himself to the end of the week. Then—

  “What?” Caroline asked. “You give up?”

  “I write off Gaynor’s symptoms the same way the doctor at the hospital did,” Jack said.

  “Why do we even assume whatever’s wrong with her can give us a lead?” Jack asked on Thursday night.

  “Because otherwise we’ve got nothing,” Caroline said.

  “You haven’t found anything in Frank’s papers?” Jack asked.

  “Not yet,” she said.

  “Diary?” Jack asked. “Date book? Phone book?”

  “The police must have all that,” Caroline said. “Along with his hard drive, his BlackBerry…”

  “Safe-deposit boxes?” Jack asked.

  “He apparently emptied everything out,” she said.

  “He must have known—”

  “That someone was going to kill him? Why would that make him empty out his safe-deposit boxes—where things would be safe?”

  “Maybe he hid things in a safer place.”

  “Or there’s nothing there,” she said.

  “Or someone else got there first,” Jack said.

  “Where?” Caroline said.

  “His office?” Jack said. “His files? Wherever he hid things?”

  “I’m as tired as you are, Jack,” Caroline said.

  Across the table Caroline’s face was lit by the flickering candle.

  Leaning across the table, Jack kissed her.

  “You’re going to set your tie on fire,” Caroline said.

  Jack sat back in his chair.

  “Tonight,” Caroline said, “I think, we should—”

  “Go right home,” Jack said, studying her. “Me to mine, you to yours. That is what you were going to say, wasn’t it?”

  Caroline smiled and said, “You’ll never know.”

  The next day, Jack found the article about the dead cows.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  1

  The cow, brown and white, a Jersey—Jack thought—lay on its side, legs stretched out, udder flopped on the dirt like a semi-deflated balloon, cow shit round as croquet balls on the ground by its haunches. In the photograph Jack couldn’t see its head.

  The headline: SAVE ANIMALS FROM ELECTRICITY.

  Sub-head: A SUPPORT GROUP FOR FARMERS WITH POWER QUALITY PROBLEMS.

  The posting from a group called SAFE, Save Animals from Electricity, on http://www.safe.goeke.net by Nancy Bellville, dated March 14, 2001, said:

  My name is Nancy Bellville; I am from Prescott, Mi. For the last 35 years, my husband Brian and I have been dairy farmers. In Dec. of 1998 we looked at our DHIA records and found that we had freshened 39 animals and had removed 45 animals. We no longer were able to maintain our herd size. We had 10 cows not milking waiting to gain enough weight to sell and 6 pens full of sick cows. We knew we had a problem and set about trying to discover what was causing such devastating losses. We discovered another farm in our area that was also experiencing the same symptoms that we were and he believed he had a ‘stray voltage’ problem … When the utility company uses the earth as the pathway to transmit the unused electricity back to their substations, they cannot control where it might go and as a result it follows the path of least resistance which in our case is in our barns.

  Jack looked back at the photograph of the dead cow, two other cows standing to the left of the picture turned away like bystanders who didn’t want to know. On the right, in the background, was a live cow looking at the dead cow from a distance. Four other live cows stand by the dead cow, their heads lowered like gossipy neighbors discussing the strange death of a friend.

  The stray voltage shocked the cows, which caused them to stop eating and drinking and to produce less milk. In some cases, the shocks shut down their immune systems, causing them to die.

  A later posting on the same site said:

  Along with sick animals there is also a human health epidemic.… No one wants to investigate why so many farm families and people in and around these farms are experiencing health problems.

  The health problems included headaches, muscle aches, fatigue, dizziness, ringing in the ears, irregular menstruation, irregular heartbeat, hallucinations, difficulty in concentration.…

  Jean Gaynor’s symptoms.

  2

  Grotesque masks covered one wall: A Jew with a hooked nose, a drunken Irishman, a pinched German, an Italian, an African-American, a Swede.… The paint was faded and flaking. The mouths stretched up in ghastly grins or down in terrifying scowls.

  “From vaudeville,” the professor of biology at Highland Community College explained. “Turn of the century. The last century. Performers wore them when they did ethnic humor.”

  The professor—Dr. Matthew Shapiro—took down the mask of the Jew and held it in front of his face.

  “A Jew comes home and finds his best friend screwing his wife. Leo, he says, I have to, but you…!”

  Shapiro held the mask in his lap like a cat. “Nineteen-oh-one,” he said, “that used to kill them.”

  “Electrical pollution,” Jack said.

  “My grandfather was the Goldman half of Goldman and Webber,” Shapiro said. “Changed it from Gordon. Which was a Jewish name in Lithuania. Gordon. Don’t ask. There were two famous Gordons in Vilna in the eighteen-eighties, sometime around then, both writers. A journalist and a poet.”

  “I found some of your articles on electrical pollution online,” Jack said.

  “Tell me, Mr. Slidell,” Shapiro asked, “why would a guy change his name from Gordon to Goldman? In America? In the late eighteen hundreds?”

  “You were an expert witness in a lawsuit against Mohawk Electric,” Jack said.

  “I helped bring the suit,” Shapiro said. Fondly, he looked at the mask in his lap. “Goldman and Webber were one of the biggest comic teams in vaudeville until Webber got shot. A guy came home and found him schtupping his wife. Killed him while he was on top of her.”

  “I’m investigating a murder,” Jack said. “Maybe more than one murder.”

  Shapiro swiveled in his desk chair away from Jack to face a window that opened onto the campus. The sky was low. A breeze that smelled of mud wafted in. In the window was Shapiro’s face reflected, masklike. He leaned forward and pulled the window shut.

  “My father started collecting the masks when his father, my grandfather, died,” Shapiro said. “My wife won’t let me keep them at home. She finds them offensive.”

  “I can see that,” Jack said.

  “They’re history,” Shapiro said. “People hear my grandfather was in vaudeville, they think, How cool, begin romanticizing the past.” Shapiro nodded at the masks. “Nothing romantic about them.” He swiveled his chair back to face Jack. “I’m sorry these people died, but I’m not a cop.”

  “One of the victims was complaining of symptoms that sounded like electrical pollution,” Jack said. “Like what you reported in your research.” He flipped open his notebook and read, “Headaches, muscle aches, fatigue, dizziness, ringing in the ears, irregular menstruation, irregular heartbeat, hallucinations, difficulty in concentration…”

  “A lot of things could cause those symptoms,” Shapiro said.

  “I wish you could be more help,” Jack said.

  “The last time I tried to help somebody prove electrical pollution,” Shapiro said, “I lost my federal grant.”
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  “This is life and death,” Jack said.

  “And my job,” Shapiro said. “At Cornell. I’m lucky to have landed here. Since then, I mind my own business. And teach freshman courses. Twenty-six, twenty-seven in a class. Do you know how boring it is to teach freshman bio?”

  “The girl with the symptoms was living under high-tension wires,” Jack said.

  “When I was six years old,” Shapiro said, “I discovered the pond at the bottom of the backyard. In the dingle. I’d lie in the ferns at the edge of the scummy water and watch water skimmers, dragonflies hovering over the surface. Underneath the water were shiners, some gold, some silver with blood-red fins, their scales flashing in the sunlight, darters disappearing like fishy magicians under lily pads. Frogs and peepers, the hum of insects, the small sounds of the pond lapping the mud under my chin … Everything smelled full of life, a dark, rich, bitter, sweet stink I loved. Deep in the weeds, all around me, the sun looked green. I could feel my shirt and shorts wet against my skin, the heat on the back of my neck. On my lids when I turned over and closed my eyes. Everyone must have some heaven in their childhood. That was mine. I began studying pond life: the beetles that looked black until you saw the black was green and purple and red and gold. For my eighth birthday, I got a microscope. Not a fancy one. Through it I could see transparent creatures. I decided all I wanted to do with my life was study biology. Which I did. Until three years ago when I got involved in that lawsuit against Mohawk Electric.” Shapiro covered his face with the mask, which grinned horribly at Jack. “Suddenly, no more research. All my work shit-canned. And I’m teaching students who make fun of the subject. They make fun of me.”

  Jack looked at the mask, which still hid Shapiro’s face.

  “I’m sorry,” Jack said to the grinning mouth, the hooked nose, the eyes blinking deep in the blank sockets.

  He lifted his jacket, which he’d slung over the back of his chair.

  At the door, Jack stopped at a sepia photograph of a burlesque dancer.

  A beautiful woman naked to the waist, her left arm, in a black lace glove that reached her bicep, holding her tousled golden hair in a pile on her head, her gloved right arm bent, her fingers spread just below her breast, her thumb dimpling her side below the shaved hollow of her armpit. She was sitting in white feathers. A lavaliere of sparkling white stones hung between her breasts. Matching pendants sparkled from her long earlobes. Her lips were parted, revealing even, damp, gleaming teeth. Her nose was narrow, slightly snubbed, elegant. Her eyebrows were plucked and arched.

  “My grandmother,” Shapiro said. “A big star at the Old Howard in Boston. Where my grandfather met her. Right after World War One. He was fifty-something. She was a teenager.”

  Shapiro picked up a wooden-framed color photograph of an older woman in a peach sweater, cream-colored slacks, and pearls who looked shrunken underneath her big straw hat.

  “My grandmother last year at Tanglewood,” Shapiro said. “Celebrating her one-hundred-and-third birthday.”

  He held the recent picture up next to the burlesque picture.

  “No stopping time,” he said.

  3

  The pylons supporting the electrical power lines straddled the hill behind the motel where Stickman’s family lived, where Jean Gaynor had lived with Stickman. Before she moved to Rostyn Avenue. The two uprights, with the cross beams reflected in the pale moonlight, looked like the spinal column of some giant, turned to metal by a spell. An Atlas holding up the electrical world. Or a crucifix for an alien martyr with six arms in a lurid Frank Frazetta sci-fi book cover.

  “Sorry about your nephew,” Jack said to Kipp, who shrugged.

  “You surprised?” Kipp asked.

  Jack shook his head no.

  “This ain’t a sympathy call, right,” Kipp said.

  “Tell me more about the ghost,” Jack said.

  Kipp sat in a rusty pool chair. The green webbing was frayed. Jack sat in another rusty chair, next to him. Kipp stared into the empty, cracked pool.

  “What’s to tell?” Kipp said. “She skates through. Singing. They say you found Hussein?”

  Jack nodded.

  “I helped you out,” Kipp said. “Told you where.”

  Jack leaned to the left side and fished in his right pocket for some folded twenties.

  “Don’t insult me, man,” Kipp said.

  “Like you said, you told me where.”

  “Not the favor I want.” Kipp leaned down and pulled up a sock. “You tell the cops how you knew?”

  “No.”

  Kipp sat up, gave Jack a smile.

  “That’s the favor.”

  “Who needs the trouble is what I figured,” Jack said.

  “We got enough trouble,” Kipp said. “Kids drive by. Shout things. Throw things. Someday they shoot things, huh?”

  “You ever see the ghost?” Jack asked.

  “I look like someone sees ghosts?” Kipp asked. “I see the ghost I kick the little pest in the ass, tell her to sing something else for a change.”

  “How many people have seen the ghost?” he asked.

  “People talk,” Kipp said. “Say they know somebody who knows somebody who saw something.”

  Jack looked past Kipp at the pylons.

  “You ever get headaches?” Jack asked.

  “Everyone gets headaches,” Kipp said. “What’s your interest in the ghost?”

  “Muscle aches?” Jack asked. “Dizziness, ringing in the ears, irregular heartbeat…?”

  “What’s your point?” Kipp asked.

  “You moved in last June?” Jack asked.

  “Ringing in the ears,” Kipp said, “I guess everyone gets that one time or another.”

  “Did you have that, ringing in the ears, before you moved in?” Jack asked.

  “Who can remember?” Kipp said.

  “The electric wires up there,” Jack nodded toward the pylons. “Were they here when you moved in?”

  Kipp nodded.

  “Did Jean complain of headaches, ringing in her ears, muscle aches, dizziness?”

  “Like I said, who remembers?”

  “It’s important,” Jack repeated.

  “I didn’t see her much, you know.”

  Jack waited.

  “What you saying? I get ringing in my ears, headaches, because of the wires?”

  “Maybe.”

  “Maybe means what? Yes?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “But you’re asking, which means—”

  “I don’t know.”

  Slowly, Kipp smiled.

  “You think we maybe got a lawsuit?” he asked.

  “Jean Gaynor.”

  “I become a lawyer, maybe that’s my first case, huh?”

  “Jean—”

  “Okay. Okay. You help me, I help you.”

  “If I find something, I’ll let you know.”

  “Who do we sue?”

  “If I find that out, I tell you, too.”

  “The Great American Dream, huh?”

  Jack grinned.

  “A scholarship to Harvard, winning the lottery, getting hit by a big corporation’s truck, yeah.”

  Kipp called to some girls on the balcony, “You know Hussein’s girl? Who was here? She ever complain about being sick?”

  The girls looked at each other. Two giggled.

  “Hey,” Kipp shouted, “this man wants to know.”

  “She was always complaining,” one of the girls called.

  “About what?”

  “Everything.”

  “Smart-ass, I’m asking you.”

  “She’s right,” another girl said. “She was always complaining.”

  “She couldn’t sleep,” a third girl said.

  “You do that much coke,” the second girl said, “who sleeps?”

  “Kept telling us,” the first girl said, “turn down the music.”

  “What music?” the third girl said. “We don’t play any music.”


  “Maybe she meant the ghost?” the first girl said.

  The girls laughed.

  “Hey,” Kipp called. “You think this is some joke? She’s dead. Hussein’s dead.”

  The first girl glanced at the others.

  “I don’t know,” she said. “She was worried about her, you know, monthlies.”

  “Her period?” Jack asked.

  “Always asking if someone has Tampax,” the second girl said. “But what’s the point? Between her legs, nothing.”

  “Like the pool,” the third girl said. “Dry.”

  “And cracked,” the second girl said.

  “And growing moss,” the first girl said.

  Again, they laughed.

  “Headaches,” Jack said, “muscle aches, fatigue, dizziness, ringing in the ears, irregular heartbeat, hallucinations—”

  “You talking about the ghost?” Kipp said.

  “—difficulty in concentration,” Jack continued, “and irregular menstruation…”

  “We get that from the wires?” Kipp said.

  “You do, you get your lawsuit,” Jack said.

  “How do we prove it?” Kipp asked.

  “Like I said,” Jack got up. “I’ll let you know.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  1

  “Jury Awards Damages For Wisconsin Family,” Caroline read the printout from Agri-view, a Wisconsin publication, which billed itself as Your premier agricultural newspaper to provide up-to-date Capitol news, compelling livestock topics, current dairy coverage, timely crop reports and …

  “Eight hundred fifty thousand dollars,” Jack said. “They sued the local power company for electrical pollution, stray voltage.”

  “Two brain cells from a rat exposed to a low-level electromagnetic field show significant amounts of damaged DNA,” Caroline read from the next printout.

  “And that’s just from blow-dryers and electric blankets,” Jack said.

  Caroline flipped to the next printout and read, “Nighttime exposure to electromagnetic fields and childhood leukemia…”

  And the next: “The Urban Decline of the House Sparrow (Passer domesticus): A Possible Link with Electromagnetic Radiation.”

  And the next: “A Possible Association Between Fetal/Neonatal Exposure to Radiofrequency Electromagnetic Radiation and the Increased Incidence of Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASD).”