Neil reached to touch her, but she snatched her arm away. “I can’t— I can’t—” she cried.
He wasn’t sure what had proven impossible for her—telling her story or bearing his touch. Part of him wanted to tell her, “Forget it. Share it when you’re ready. I can’t stand to see you in this agony.”
The other part? He knew the agony was only beginning if Lige had some kind of hold on her. So he waited.
Charli stared out into the distance, her mouth pinched. In a low, clipped tone, she said, “She got a credit card. How she did it, I don’t know, but she did. She lied to me, told me it was just a thousand-dollar credit limit, said that Dad’s attorney had suggested it to...” She laughed harshly now. “To rebuild her credit. But this is exactly what she’d do—like clockwork—every single Christmas when I was little. She’d sneak around, open either a store account or get a credit card without Dad knowing about it, and then she’d run up the bills until the plastic smoked. I thought...I thought she was better. She hasn’t done it in years. But I guess, what with losing Dad...”
Neil frowned. “But...how does that figure in with Lige?”
“She asked Lige for money. To bail her out. I guess Jed—Jed Cannady, Dad’s attorney and executor—wouldn’t or couldn’t give her the cash.”
Neil whistled softly. “So he tells you to treat these guys or he won’t lend you the money. Man, that’s cold.”
“Tell me about it. I don’t have a choice, Neil. He threatened to fire me, send me packing without references, and I told him, do it. But...Mom—once she gets stressed, it’s like it unleashes this person you’d never, ever imagine. She’s not a bad person. It’s not as though she means to do it—or even that she needs the stuff she buys. She gives it away, mostly. It’s a compulsion.”
“If she has a problem, don’t you think you need to deal with it straight on? How long...has she been―”
“Years. I don’t want to talk about it, okay? I’m doing the best I can.” Bitterness shot through her words. “My dad took care of her, made sure she was okay, and he...did things to get her out of jams. Every cent got paid back. So no harm, no foul, right?” Charli attempted a smile.
Her reference to her dad doing “things to get her out of jams” caught Neil’s attention. Now that he really listened to what she was saying—rather than focusing on her teary eyes—he saw a gaping hole in her explanation. “What else have you done, Charli? To get your mom out of a jam? I mean, you’re a doctor. You could go to the bank, borrow the money yourself. It’s not like you’re a credit risk. You could even go to another bank, not this one.”
The pleading turned to anger. “I’ve done nothing illegal, if that’s what you’re insinuating.”
“No. I’m not insinuating. I’m telling you I’ve figured it out. You’re the Secret Santa. Aren’t you? It was you who gave that money to the clinic? So how come you had access to that money, but you don’t have enough money to tell Lige to take a hike?”
Charli blanched. “Okay. So I went on a little shopping spree myself—dropping all my dad’s spare cash on the clinic. It’s not a crime. And I don’t want this spread in the papers. Maybe I did it in an unorthodox way, but I wanted it to be private. I didn’t want anyone to know. I didn’t even tell my mom. The clinic is a good cause. You said it yourself that it needed to be saved. So I did good, right?”
Only, she sounded as if she was trying to convince herself as much as him.
“And yeah,” she went on. “I’m a doctor, but I’m loaded down with student loans. The only way I can pay them off, not to mention my mom’s newest debt, is if I can write some of them off by working in Brevis—or another underserved area. And Lige? He’s threatening to fire me. Without references. Do you know how hard it is to get a job as a doctor without references? How will I pay any of the mountains of debt I owe without a job? Not even counting what my mom has probably racked up.”
“Charli, you can’t live like this. You know it’s not going to end—blackmail never does. Go to immigration, turn his sorry carcass in—”
“I can’t. I just can’t!” The cry tore from her. “You don’t understand. Not right after Dad— She’s so fragile right now.” She laid her head on the roof of her car and wept. Neil reached out to touch her, remembered how she’d snatched away from him a few minutes before and held back...out of fear that she’d shut him out again.
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
CHARLI RAISED HER HEAD from the crook of her arm and scrubbed at her eyes. She sniffed and wished desperately for a tissue to blow her nose.
“It doesn’t matter. I know.” She cut short his protest with a wave of her hand. “I have to deal with it—with Lige, with all of it—sooner rather than later. I have to deal with my mom. But right now?” She turned and dared a look at Neil. “Right now, illegal or not, those poor guys need to be checked on.”
“Well, I’m not letting you go alone. You can use at least some moral support.”
Charli’s heart lifted. He still wanted to be near her, despite her having a crazy shopaholic for a mom and doing Lige’s bidding, not to mention being the Secret Santa.
Of course, she still hadn’t told him about her dad covering up outbreaks and deaths for Lige. Or that she hadn’t told the whole truth about where the money for the clinic had come from.
But for now, she wanted to feel Neil’s strength. “Okay. All right.”
“I speak Spanish. Would that help you out?” he asked.
Part of the weight she’d been carrying moved from her shoulders. It would be a relief not to rely on a game of charades to glean medical history. “Yeah. Yeah, it would. Last night I was relying on Lige to do the translating...and, well, I figure he’s not the most trustworthy translator. I decided I was better off without him.”
Neil rolled his eyes. “Tell me about it.” He turned and headed back for his car. “I’ll follow you.”
About a half mile farther on, the dirt road emptied out into a shantytown of trailers at the edge of the onion field. Charli parked the car and got out, taking in the scene before her.
The newest trailer had to be thirty years old, with cardboard blocking off a broken window. The oldest? It was a remnant of a trailer frame, with blue tarp covering the roof and a stovepipe stuck out the front window. Aluminum foil and towels seemed to be the insulation material of choice to stuff in windows.
An old school bus with its paint peeling and the school system’s name blacked out rested at an angle on two flat tires. Here and there clothes flapped on clotheslines, but for the most part, there was no sign of life.
At least not human. A skinny dog skulked away from Charli’s approach, darting behind the trailers. No grass grew here, only sprigs of frostbitten dog fennel that had sprung up in the narrow spaces between the trailers. The sturdiest, most carefully maintained structure was a hoop greenhouse. Charli could see lush green plants through the translucent plastic and marveled that these people would house their plants better than themselves—or was that Lige’s greenhouse?
The whole settlement resembled something Charli had seen on the disaster relief trip she’d taken to Haiti while she was in med school.
The sound of a car door slamming made her turn around. Neil strode up to where she stood, his mouth drawn in contempt. “Well, this explains why he wants illegals. If he had them on legit work visas, he’d have to provide better housing for them.”
“It’s awful, isn’t it? Do they even have running water?” Visions of typhoid came charging through Charli’s imagination. She’d known migrant workers lived in subpar conditions, but she wouldn’t even call this primitive. She shook her head. “Let’s find Hector and Luis.”
Neil trailed after her as she took off for the nearest trailer. “I take it that was the pair you treated last night?”
Charli just nodded. She didn’t have time to offer
color commentary. She was due at the office, and she’d already taken way too much time trying to explain her situation to Neil. She climbed a set of rickety steps and knocked on the trailer’s dented door.
It opened a crack. Suspicious brown eyes stared out at her. “Hola,” Charli greeted the person. “Soy la doctora Prescott.”
The eyes blinked, no less suspicious than they had been thirty seconds previous. But then, somewhere deep in the trailer, came a groan and the all-too-familiar retching sound from the night before.
“Hector?” Charli asked. “Luis?”
The door opened a sliver wider. “La médica?” The eyes turned out to belong to a short round woman in a tight pair of jeans and a faded sweatshirt, with worry and fatigue marring her features.
“Sí.” Charli held up her medical bag. “La doctora.”
The woman threw open the door and let loose a torrent of Spanish. Helplessly, Charli looked over her shoulder at Neil. “Did you get any of that?” she asked.
Neil said something in Spanish, and the woman spoke more slowly. He turned to Charli. “She says for you to come in, that her teenage daughter is very ill. She says Hector and Luis are a couple of trailers down.”
“Oh, no. Is it the same thing Hector and Luis have? If it’s the gastroenteritis, they all must have eaten some bad food.” Charli crossed the threshold and saw an interior more in keeping with a third-world country than any place in the U.S. Naked plywood had been nailed across what had presumably been a sliding glass door on the backside of the trailer. The linoleum under her feet was buckled and cracked, mended in some places with wide strips of duct tape.
Still, in the corner stood a ragged plastic Christmas tree decorated with tinsel and multicolored lights. A motley collection of irregularly shaped presents waited under the tree.
Charli quelled her dismay at the living conditions she saw and fumbled in her medical bag for latex gloves. She handed a pair to Neil. “Here. Put these on. They’re probably going to be tight because they’re mediums, and you have bigger hands than me, but it’s better than nothing.”
“You think it’s contagious?”
“I’m not sure, but safety first,” she said, snapping the latex gloves into place.
The woman directed them with a finger to a mound of covers on a couch with its stuffing spilling out of soiled upholstery. Again she rattled off a quick burst of Spanish.
“She says the place is cursed. That it’s bad luck. They haven’t been here long, but the girl’s gotten sicker the longer they’ve stayed.”
Charli negotiated her way through the narrow path between the Christmas tree and a chunky coffee table loaded with candles featuring religious scenes on them, lit and burning. She squatted down beside the teenager, who was as round and soft as her mother. The girl’s dark hair was matted, her skin pale and damp despite the chill air in the trailer.
It took a long time to manage an exam, what with Neil having to translate. But at least she could trust his translation. Again, the symptoms were intense stomach distress, nausea, vomiting, diarrhea—severe, bloody diarrhea.
“What is it?” Neil asked.
“I’m thinking E. coli. That’s three people who are sick. Ask her if they all ate the same things, maybe a cookout where hamburger was served?”
Neil asked, listened to the woman, then volleyed the mom’s answer back. “No. She doesn’t let her daughter hang out with those guys—the younger one has been making eyes at her girl, and so she keeps her away.”
The woman started again, hands on hips, anger lighting her eyes. Neil listened for a moment before telling Charli, “She says that lots of people are sick here, or have been, all with the same sort of thing. Ten, maybe fifteen. They’ve been here a few days, and they got sick when they first arrived. Some became sick, improved and then got sick again.”
Charli frowned. “It has to be some form of E. coli. Probably STEC.”
“STEC? What’s that? It sounds bad.”
“Shiga-toxin producing. Basically, you eat or drink something—or touch something and, say, lick your fingers—that’s contaminated and the bacteria produces toxins that inflame the lining of your intestines. So that’s where the bloody diarrhea comes from.”
“Hope you’ve brought along the economy-size packs of Imodium,” Neil joked.
“Tell them not to use that—some Pepto-Bismol is okay, but anything else can prolong the illness.”
“Prolong it! The girl’s been sick for nearly a week. She can’t go without something to—”
Charli shook her head. “It’s very important that they stick with something like Pepto and not Imodium—the body needs to be able to clear the infection. Usually this is self-limiting. There’s not a lot we can do besides push fluids and watch for complications.”
The mother interrupted again with what sounded like a question. Neil started in on Charli’s answer.
“She keeps saying the place is cursed,” he told Charli after he’d finished relaying her instructions to the mom.
“It must feel like it.” Charli straightened up. “Let’s go find Hector and Luis...and while I’m here, I might as well look in on some of the sicker ones. Maybe I can figure out the common denominator.”
From trailer to trailer, they worked in tandem. Charli saw the same thing over and over, in varying degrees of severity. Squalid living conditions, horrible stomach ailments. Lige had lied about the scope of the problem—no surprise there, but she was still shocked. By the fifth trailer, Neil had lost any urge to joke.
“This is awful,” he said when they were finished. “Something is making them sick.”
They stood outside, after having stripped off yet another pair of gloves, breathing in fresh clean air. Charli squirted a generous dollop of hand sanitizer into Neil’s cupped palms. “I wouldn’t touch your face,” she advised, “even with this stuff and the gloves.”
“I’ll probably burn these clothes,” he said, a small amount of his humor restored for a moment. “What’s causing this?”
Charli shook her head. She rubbed the alcohol-based cleanser into her skin. The winter air chilled her wet hands. “I don’t know. They were all pretty adamant that they’d not eaten any of the same food.”
“Could somebody have brought it in? The bacteria, I mean?”
“Sure. Sometimes you don’t even present with symptoms, but you can still be a carrier.” She moved her shoulders to relieve the ache between them and yawned. If she stood still, with the hovel behind her, all she could see was a peaceful countryside. Across a fence, cows drank from a placid watering hole and munched contentedly on winter ryegrass that was an improbable shade of green in a landscape of dun brown.
To be a cow, with nothing to do but stuff your face and loll around all day. No patients to see. No compulsive-shopper mother. No father who died and left you with a hundred thousand problems.
Beside her, Neil stood quietly at first. “Fifteen. That’s a lot. Especially with no common thread,” he said. “You have to call DPH.”
She jerked around to face him. “What?” Call the Department of Public Health? On illegal workers Lige wanted to keep under wraps? That would be just what Lige had in mind.
“Yeah. I mean, this could be serious,” Neil told her. “I covered an E. coli outbreak from a fast-food restaurant in Macon when I was a reporter for the Telegraph, and DPH was all over it.”
Charli’s palms went sweaty, despite the cold. “That’s a little different situation, Neil. That’s a threat to the entire population. This—this is self-contained. And besides, I don’t know yet that it is E. coli. It could be viral.”
“But aren’t you supposed to? Report it? An outbreak? And isn’t this an outbreak? With this many cases?”
She closed her eyes, worked her jaw. Yes. Any cluster of cases needed to be reported to health authoritie
s at once. She couldn’t believe she was rationalizing reasons not to do so in this case.
Unable to look him in the eye when she said it, she faced the cows again. One big guy, the color of the rust that was covering almost every piece of metal here, was almost shoulder deep in the water. Apparently, he didn’t mind an ice bath.
Yes. Yes. She should call DPH. It was the right thing to do. These people were sick, and it was complicated, and the easiest solution was to turn it all over to the state and let it be their problem.
Easy if she wanted to get fired and likely never work in medicine again. Easy if she wanted her mother to have a nervous breakdown.
Maybe she could manage this. After all, what could DPH actually do? She could take care of those who were sick—push the fluids, keep them quarantined. These folks didn’t tend to mix with the general population, so it was doable.
It’s not like it’s TB.
She exhaled a shaky breath. How to convince Neil? “Neil...it’s... It—it would just go down in some database of statistics. Fodder for boring PowerPoint presentations. It’s not like they’re going to actually come out here and be able to do anything I haven’t already done,” she replied at last.
“You’re afraid of Lige, aren’t you?” Neil stepped in between her and the pasture. “Charli, you can’t let him blackmail you. You could lose your license.”
“It’s a technicality,” she insisted. “Not everything gets reported right away. I’m doing the care. And if it gets worse...” She hefted her medical bag’s strap on her shoulder.
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