by Diane Capri
“Thank you,” Mike added with an encouraging smile.
Antoine rushed off, and Mike turned his attention back to Lydia. He’d planned a thousand ways to say the words, but the right moment was now. He took a gulp from his water glass and leaned in to take her hand.
“You don’t want me to go? I don’t go. Because this?” he gave her hand a squeeze. “Us? Matters to me more than anything else. We’re both driven, and we both want to succeed. I wouldn’t change that. But I will choose you every time, Lydia. You have to know that.”
Antoine approached and hovered in the background. Mike waved him in. He set a gorgeous antique Herend plate in front of Lydia with a chocolate orb in the center, surrounded by raspberries and topped with a nest of golden, spun sugar. Nestled inside the chocolate was the engagement ring, kissed by the candlelight, a sparkling light show.
Mike stood and rounded the table to kneel before Lydia. Her face was white with shock and tears swam in her eyes.
“You are everything to me, Lydia, and I want to spend the rest of my life with you.” He plucked the diamond from its nest and held it out, heart hammering. “Will you marry me?”
When her face crumpled and she began to sob, his hands went ice cold. What if she said no?
“We’ve been together five years, Mike.” She sniffled on a half-hysterical laugh, sticking out a trembling left hand. “I thought you’d never ask.”
He slid the ring on her finger, rocked with relief and joy.
“Oh my,” she said, staring down at her hand. “It’s beautiful.”
The room had gone silent around them, and Mike shot a glance over his shoulder to see Willa and George looking on from afar. He gave them a thumb’s up and grinned.
“She said yes,” he called.
The restaurant exploded with applause as Lydia held up her hand for all to see.
Mike rose to his feet and pressed a kiss to her lips. He’d landed the best girl in Tampa, and she’d already forgiven him. Over Lydia’s shoulder, he caught a glimpse of Willa’s troubled frown and his euphoria evaporated just as quickly as it had arrived.
Now, if only his luck would hold and he could get this story right. He’d need photographs, interviews. Fletcher Textiles was hurting the people of Peru, and he would prove it. He’d get the Eyes on Eight gig and everything would be perfect.
CHAPTER TWO
“You have arrived at your destination,” the cool, female voice announced from his phone as he glanced down to see the blinking house icon beside the address he’d entered into the GPS.
Mike looked out his window to find a tall but narrow brick building to his right. Once a private home, it was now a bed and breakfast. On the patchy lawn, nestled between tiny bushels of pink blossoms, sat a sign that read “The Fantz House.” He turned off his engine.
Inside, Annalisa Fantz would be waiting for him, ready to tell her story. He squared his shoulders, more than prepared to listen.
He’d spent most of his tenure at the television station in the background, behind the lens, but he knew this first interview could go a lot of ways. Some people were frank, matter-of-fact. Others were weepy. Some were spitting with rage.
But there was only one way to find out which type of person Annalisa Franz would be.
Plucking his video camera and microphone from the trunk, he marched up the flagstones across the wide, wrap-around porch, glancing only momentarily at the cheery little “Welcome” sign on the door before ringing the bell.
In less than an instant, the door swung open.
“How can I help you?” The woman was frail and thin, so pale that she was nearly translucent except for the angry purple bags beneath dark, sunken eyes. Gray hair peeked out in wisps from beneath the floral scarf wrapped around her head. She wiped bony hands on a stained white apron.
“Mike Caldwell. From EBC—”
She nodded before he could finish. “Yes, yes, of course. I start cooking, and the whole world just flies out of my head. Come in, come in.”
She led him through the narrow halls toward the very back of the house and into a small, tidy kitchen. The appliances were old—cheap white models from decades before, chipped but clean. Just in front of the windows sat a tiny white table and chairs. After a moment, Mike noticed that they were not alone.
Perched in front of the table was a child. He was sitting in a wheelchair that was nearly as old as everything else in the kitchen and, without a doubt, much older than the boy.
“Hello, nice to meet you. I’m Mike Caldwell.” Mike extended his hand.
The boy took it, offering a weak smile.
“Dale, introduce yourself,” Annalisa murmured and stood behind the cutting board full of half-chopped root vegetables. He glanced at her for a moment before turning his attention back to Mike.
“I’m sorry, Mr. Caldwell. I’m Dale Fantz.” His voice was wheezy. “It’s a pleasure to meet you.”
“My son.” Annalisa nodded, picked up her knife, and resumed chopping.
But Mike had figured that much out for himself. Dale was the reason for this interview.
From the files his boss had forwarded, he knew only a few details. Dale was thirteen, but he seemed much smaller than a boy his age should be. About four years ago, he had developed an illness that had ravaged his body and still couldn’t be explained. Mrs. Fantz blamed the textile plant’s new carpet mill. A few months after production started, she claimed more kids were absent from school and flocking to doctors than the town had ever seen before.
Like his mother, Dale was pale and thin, but the vitality that exuded from Annalisa, hard-boned as she was, was absent from her son. He sat hunched over, his clothes much too big for him, a husk of a person. If Mike allowed the silence to continue, he would be able to count the boy’s breaths from his rattling inhales and whistling exhales.
Mike’s chest ached in sympathy, and it was an effort not to chatter just to fill the room with another, less heart-wrenching sound.
The doorbell rang. Annalisa looked at her son. “Dale, would you mind answering the door and then going to your room and finish your homework?”
The boy wheeled himself from the room without a word of protest, and Annalisa let out a little sigh.
“He’s never going to do that homework unless I stand over him and watch him do it, you know. That’ll be Cathy Bartow at the door. It’s her husband, Chuck, who’s missing.” She offered Mike a small smile, then something clicked behind her eyes, and she said. “Oh, goodness, how rude I’ve been. You must be thirsty after your long trip. What can I get for you?”
“Water is fine,” Mike said.
Annalisa pursed her lips for a moment and then nodded. From the fridge, she pulled a two-gallon water tub and filled three glasses before setting one in front of Mike.
“Oh, you didn’t have to do that. Tap water is—” He heard Dale’s quiet murmur and a woman’s louder voice in the foyer. The boy’s wheelchair rolled down the hallway, and soft footsteps came toward the kitchen.
“It’d be better not to drink the water while you’re here.” Annalisa nodded at the glass as she shoved her hands into her apron pockets.
“Something wrong with your water?”
A young woman walked into the room just as Mike asked the question. “Docs say no way of knowing what caused Dale’s condition. Could be the soil. The food. The milk. Better safe than sorry, though. That’s for sure.”
Annalisa shrugged. “Mr. Caldwell, this is Cathy Bartow.”
The younger woman was dressed in jeans and a sweatshirt, sneakers on her feet. Her hair was gathered into a messy knot at the base of her neck. She shook his hand briefly and turned to her friend. “I can’t stay, Annalisa. I’ve got to pick up Charlie at my mom’s. I would have called to let you know, but something has happened to my damn cell phone…”
“Maybe I can come by and talk to you tomorrow, Mrs. Bartow?” Mike asked.
She nodded absently.
He gave her his business card.
Annalisa clucked her tongue as Cathy dashed from the room. “She’s beside herself. Chuck isn’t the kind of guy to just go on a lark without telling his family.”
“Anybody call the police? Make a report?” In Tampa, calling the police would have been the very first thing a wife would have done.
Annalisa shrugged again and sipped from one of the water glasses. “You’ll need to ask Cathy. I’m not sure what she’s done. I just know something’s not right at that factory. We’ve all begged Chuck to stop sticking his nose into places where it doesn’t belong…”
He wasn’t going to get any more answers on that score, so he tried a new approach. “Mrs. Fantz, how long have you lived here?”
“In this house, a little better than a year.” She returned to her chopping.
“Where’d you live before? When Dale first got sick?”
“Over in Peru. About seven years ago, right after my husband passed, I moved from Texas into my mother’s boarding house over there. Made sense. I was alone with Dale. We could help each other out.” She’d returned to her chopping, punctuating her words with the knife blade against the board. “Back then, of course, mother’s place was mostly for migrant farm workers. Short-term. So that families had a cozy place to stay before they moved on to the next crop in season somewhere else, you know?”
“We have migrant workers like that in the Tampa area, too.” Mike nodded again.
“Before the factory expanded, the town was pretty much split in two groups, farmers and textile workers. Since the expansion, not many farms anymore.” She chopped the veggies in a mesmerizing rhythm as the big knife blade whacked the cutting board. “Not a whole lot of towns around like Peru, but we felt lucky to have the factory. It brought jobs and a bit of security to all of us back then.”
Mike had driven through lots of farmland on the way up here “So what happened to the farmland over in Peru? The factory bought up the acreage for the expansion?”
Annalisa paused in her chopping and leaned back on her worn laminated counter. She shrugged again. “About a year after the factory began producing the new carpet, the crops were gone. No more farm workers.”
“What do you mean?” Mike felt a twinge in his gut and pushed the water glass aside.
“Nothing grew.” She frowned and shook her head. “I remember going to the town council, right back when Dale started with his cough, and city council would say the craziest things just to get people to stop suggesting that the factory had anything to do with what was happening with the crops, with Dale and the others. Well, of course, I knew better.” She clicked her tongue.
His mouth dried up. He sipped the water, but it didn’t help. “And what exactly was happening with Dale?”
“Well, at first the docs thought he had meningitis. But by the third trip to the hospital, they said no.” Annalisa shook her head. “Never figured it out, really. His organs were just shutting down. And he wasn’t the only one. A few kids were worse off, but their parents… Let’s just say we all learned real quick not to go poking around.”
Mike felt the small hairs rise on his neck and gooseflesh on his arms. Good grief, man. Get a grip. “What happened when you questioned the situation at the town counsel?”
“I went back to one of those council meetings. Spoke my piece. Even tried to get a reporter from Jacksonville involved.” She shook her head and looked at the floor. “Then it was months of odd little problems with my electric, my water, anything you can name. And the bank called in my mortgage on the boarding house out of the blue. I couldn’t pay it.”
Mike frowned. “So that’s when you moved here?”
“We didn’t want to leave our friends. Peru’s only five miles away and this is about twice the mortgage of the old place, but…” She met his gaze. “When your child’s life is on the line, there’s nothing you can do, you know?”
“And has Dale’s health improved? Since the move, I mean?” He heard the hope in his voice.
Annalisa’s face somehow managed to blanch from pale to ghostly. “Docs say the decline has slowed.”
She meant the damage was already done. “Honestly, Mrs. Fantz, I’m not sure we’ve got much to go on here. I’ll do what I can. Ask around—”
Annalisa held up her hand. “I don’t mean to be rude, Mr. Caldwell, but you might want to consider keeping your reasons for visiting Peru to yourself.”
Mike opened his mouth to speak, but she shushed him with a wave.
“You don’t know what it’s like. What they can do. Just be safe. Think about Chuck Bartow gone missing and don’t tell a soul why you’re here.”
He frowned at the warning in her voice and wondered how she expected him to dig up anything incriminating without asking the right people the right questions. “I’ll keep that in mind.”
They talked a little more, and she fed him a surprisingly good home-cooked meal, and he left for his hotel.
He wrote up his notes from the interview and emailed them to his boss. He said it seemed like further investigation of her claims was warranted. There was something going on here, and the coincidental timing didn’t pass the smell test.
He hadn’t learned anything about the missing man, so his email emphasized the dying crops and the sick kids. The environmental story could be newsworthy, assuming he could find any real evidence. Either the regulations were inadequate to protect the people of Peru, or the regulations existed and were violated. Similar environmental tragedies had been surfacing around the country in recent years. Peru could be another one, he told Madsen.
Mrs. Fantz said there had been no reports about any of these troubles on local or national media, which should make the story more enticing to his boss. He promised to send video and still shots tomorrow.
Mike was feeling pretty good, though, because he hadn’t spoiled Lydia’s plans unnecessarily. Something was going on here in Peru. But what?
CHAPTER THREE
Before the sun peeked over the horizon the next morning, Mike was already climbing into his car, ready to document whatever he found when he drove into the town of Peru. He needed enough of something, anything, to make further investigation worthwhile. Madsen had made that much perfectly clear.
Peru was the kind of town where strangers would be noticed. But today was Sunday, and the Fletcher Textiles factory was closed. It was a good time to check out the area. He’d shoot his raw video without interruptions or interfering with operations. The factory was on private property, so he’d need permission to go inside, anyway. Which meant he’d come back tomorrow to finish up.
The drive into Peru wound through what had been farmland for generations. The fields lay fallow, just as Annalisa Fantz said. Even a mile away, as he passed the “Welcome to Peru, where everyone is family” sign, a faint smell permeated the air and grew stronger as he approached Fletcher Textiles. A stringent, chemical smell, and something caustic and sour that stuck in the back of his throat. He opened his mouth to breathe. Better to taste the noxious fumes than to feel them burn inside his nostrils.
Grass and weeds along the shoulders of the road and in the ditches were dead brown and disappeared altogether as the factory came into view. Bare trees made the scene foreboding.
He wasn’t a gardener. Most of the houseplants he’d tried to grow over the years died away. Dead plants alone didn’t necessarily mean illegal polluting was the cause. Could be a bunch of lousy farmers, like him.
“Objectivity is key,” he mumbled Madsen’s mantra under his breath, pushing away the nagging memory of Annalisa Fantz’s voice and Dale Fantz in his old wheelchair. Mike turned onto the cross street in front of the factory.
As he’d expected, the area was vacant at this hour, every window of the brick building darkened. He parked, stepped out of the car, and made his way over. He looked around before ducking under the mechanical armed security gate to traipse up the win
ding driveway to the factory itself. He was trespassing, but he didn’t intend to harm anything. He just wanted to see the place. Get a feel for it.
He pulled his phone from his pocket. As he moved, he used his camera phone, careful of his angles and settings to get the clearest shots. None of these photos could be published without permission, but if Fletcher Textiles had nothing to hide, their permission should be easy enough to get later. Besides, he worked in TV. Still photos would be of limited use on the air. When he got permission, he’d come back for video.
He moved into the rising sun, juxtaposing a rolling green hill behind the factory against the barren land in front of it for context.
From the outside, Fletcher Textiles was a factory like any other, complete with smoke stacks and an employee-only patio. But there was no way of photographing the eerie calm that enclosed the place like a bubble. The total, unnerving silence. Sure, it was Sunday and the place was closed and lacked whooshing cars and chattering people, but the silence was unnerving for a different reason, one he couldn’t quite pinpoint.
He followed the walking trail on the grounds until he reached a small pond and the wood beyond on the edge of the property. Leaves rustled at his feet, and he stopped short, struck suddenly by what was missing.
No chirping. The first rays of sun were blazing paths of light through the trees, but there were no birds to greet the new day. No gentle hum of crickets or buzz of insects. No mosquitos, even.
He glanced at the line of trees, then picked up a rock and threw it into the mass of leaves.
Nothing moved.
Nothing skittered or croaked or rustled.
Just a crunch of leaves and then the dense, complete silence resumed. As if there were no living creatures anywhere.
Bending low and contorting his body, Mike photographed it all. The pond, which was covered by a weird shimmering film, the strange pockets of mud on the ground, everything he could shoot. The sun was already higher in the sky than he’d planned by the time he finished.
