Looking for Peyton Place

by Barbara Delinsky

  When I finally righted my head and opened my eyes, he was watching me.

  Actually, he was watching my breasts.

  I cleared my throat. His eyes met mine. Was he embarrassed? No. But that was the power thing. The Meades oozed entitlement. They were shameless when it came to using people—and that was what this was. There was no way that James Meade really wanted Annie Barnes, unless it was tied to thwarting my mission here. But I wasn’t falling for it. Like the saying goes—fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me.

  I wasn’t being fooled. If anyone was a user, this time it would be me. That decided, I continued to look at him as I stretched. Oh yes, he was male. If I was drawn, what harm would it be to play awhile? If James could do it, so could I. Running was my Washington thing; as long as my contact with him related to that, I was strong.

  Did I feel duplicitous? Not on your life. If anything, I took satisfaction in the knowledge that while I was running with James Meade, I was plotting to screw him.

  Uh-oh. That was a poor choice of words. Clearly just a figure of speech.

  But you get my point. I might have no longer been out for revenge. But if, as TrueBlue implied, it proved to be the case that toxic waste had been recklessly disposed of, James Meade and his family had some answering to do.

  We never did say much of anything that morning, James and I. He didn’t look at my breasts again. He looked at my mouth, my eyes, my legs—and he seemed puzzled, like he hadn’t expected that I had any of those things or that they would function like the same body parts on other women functioned. He looked confused, like he had never dreamed I could run, much less keep up with him.

  Of course, with a Meade you never knew what a look meant.

  But I wasn’t virginal and naive, I wasn’t employed by the mill, and I wasn’t afraid of James. I thanked him for the water. That was all I said before I headed for my car.

  Grace was the one who felt the need to talk. I was barely out of the parking lot when she lit into me.

  What are you doing? she asked. She was clearly annoyed. You don’t just…toy…with a man like that. You go after him with all you have. You could have charmed him. You could have said something sweet. You could have told him he’s a great runner. You could have batted your eyelashes, for God’s sake.

  Batted my eyelashes? People don’t do that nowadays.

  If you want to play, play. Milk it, sweetie. This could be a central part of your book.

  Book? What book? I’m not writing a book.

  I think you should. But you need sex in it. Sex sells. Real sex. Down-home-and-dirty sex.

  I’m selling just fine without that.

  You’d sell better with it. Remember what happened when I finally soldPeyton Place?My publisher made me add a sex scene between Constance and Tomas. I wrote it in her office in an hour, and I was not happy. But my readers loved it.Peyton Placesold twelve million copies. Have any of your books done that?

  No, I reasoned, accelerating as I turned left from School onto Oak, because times have changed. Virtually no book today sells twelve million copies. There’s too much competition, too many other books, too many other diversions, like movies, DVDs, and cable TV. Besides, in its day, Peyton Place was unique with its sex. Sex in books today is commonplace.

  So what’s your problem? Seduce James Meade, and you have a great plot.

  I stopped where Cedar crossed Oak, let a car pass, then accelerated again. Grace was starting to annoy me. I am not seducing James Meade, I insisted. I’d only be burned. And I’m not writing a book.

  You’re a disappointment.

  You’re a pain in the butt.

  I’m leaving.

  Good. Go. I’m stopping in a second anyway. I want The New York Times. And chocolate pennies.

  Okay, she tried. Forget the book. Seduce James Meade, and you’ll be able to get the dirt you need on the mill.

  That’s disgusting, I mused

  It’s the best way to get information. Done all the time in my day. You all are even more promiscuous, so what’s the problem?

  Leave.

  I will. But when your search goes nowhere, remember what I’ve said.

  Go!

  I heard a siren and at first thought it was a warning—to me, to Grace, to us both. Then I realized it came from the car behind me. Car? Make that police cruiser, from the looks of the top bar with its lights popping and flashing.

  Sirens and lights were rare in our town. Thinking something big must have happened, I pulled over by the barbershop to let him pass. To my dismay, he pulled over right behind me and killed the siren. The lights remained on.

  I was trying to decide why that was so, when Marshall Greenwood approached. Leading by his middle with his back ramrod straight, he took his sweet time.

  I looked up at him. “Hi.”

  “License and registration, please,” he said in a voice that had grown more gravelly in the years I’d been gone.

  I blinked. “Did I do something wrong?”

  “You were speeding. License and registration, please.” He hooked his hands on his belt, waiting.

  “Speeding?” I echoed. “Here? I just stopped. How could I be speeding?”

  “The limit’s twenty. Sign’s right up the block. You were going more than twenty.”

  I looked around. There had been a car ahead of me, and there were others coming along now that were going at the same rate I had been going.

  No. That’s not right. They weren’t going at the same rate. They had all slowed down to stare at me.

  I cleared my throat. “May-be I was going twenty-five, but even that’s pushing it.”

  “Twenty-five is above the limit.”

  “Are you using radar?”

  “Don’t need to. I know when someone’s speeding. License and registration, please.”

  I had never gotten a speeding ticket in my life. Nor had I ever seen—ever known of anyone else to get one on this particular strip. “Is this a new crackdown or something?” I glanced around. There were men on the barbershop bench, men on the rockers outside Harriman’s Grocery, men and women in the chairs on the lawn of the town hall. All were watching the goings-on—garish blinking lights were definite attention-getters—but not a one of them was crossing the street. “Was I endangering anyone?”

  Marshall sighed. “That’s not the point, Miss Barnes. The folks who live here, well, they know the ropes. It’s you folks from away, come here and try to do things the way you want with no regard for the greater good. When you’re in this town, you have to abide by our laws.” He put out a hand, waiting.

  Short of causing a scene, I took my license and registration from the glove box.

  He was ten minutes in writing up my ticket. I’m sure most of the town knew I was getting it before I actually had the paper in my hand. Cars and trucks rolled past, drivers’ heads turned my way. People went in and out of buildings, craning their necks to see. And those blinking lights remained on.

  I sat, and I sweated—I was parked in direct sun. I weathered the heat of dozens of pairs of eyes.

  Oh yes, he was doing this on purpose. Marshall Greenwood was Sandy Meade’s puppet. But if Sandy thought to intimidate me, his scare tactics were laughable. Sitting there waiting for my speeding ticket under the eyes of every Middle Riverite who passed, I was suddenly inspired.

  I did stop for the Times and some chocolate pennies, but if Marylou Walker was more chilly than she had been on previous days ringing me up, I didn’t care. I was out of there in a flash, tossed the goodies in the car, and drove on home.

  Fortuitously, Phoebe had already gone to the store. That meant I didn’t have to talk low when I picked up the kitchen phone to call the New Hampshire Department of Environmental Services.

  Yes, I know. I argued earlier that I didn’t dare call the agency lest someone with Meade connections get wind of it. But that had been Friday; this was Wednesday. That was before TrueBlue appeared as an ally, before my epiphany at the graveyard
gave me renewed incentive, before I had held my own side-by-side with none other than the powerful James Meade. It had been before Marshall Greenwood gave me a speeding ticket with Get out of town written all over it in invisible ink.

  And it had been before my devious little brainstorm.

  Chapter 14

  I DIDN’T CALL direct. Rather, I called Greg’s assistant in Washington, who knew all the little ins and outs of these things and who just happened to be a friend of mine, too. She patched me through on one of the lines that the network used when discretion was in order.

  Didn’t think that happened? Think again. Media people have all sorts of tricks up their sleeves. Making untraceable calls is the least of them.

  I would far rather have taken the high road, of course, but the circumstances called for caution. How would you feel if you had been stopped in the middle of town for doing what everyone else always did, and then were made to sit there while everyone watched? Was Marshall Greenwood really checking my registration that whole time? Was he really checking to see if there were any outstanding warrants against me? No, he was not. He was making me wait for the humiliation of it.

  For the record, I was not speeding. This was intimidation, pure and simple. Was that taking the high road? Marshall was the law, yet he made me feel helpless and harassed. Moreover, of all the people watching, not one came forward in my defense. They were turning against me, and no, this wasn’t more paranoia on my part. Heretofore, their stares had been largely benign. Now they were censorious. Marylou Walker’s coldness was a case in point.

  What had I ever done to them? The injustice of it infuriated me.

  If you’ve ever felt that, then you’ll understand my resorting to subterfuge in making this call—and, as it happened, I didn’t even have to lie about who I was. I introduced myself as a novelist who was exploring the issue of mercury pollution for a possible book, and in theory it was true. Though I wasn’t planning a book on Middle River, who knew whether the book after the one I was now plotting wouldn’t include a twist of this type?

  The woman at NHDES never even asked me my name. Trusting and pure, she simply asked what I wanted to know.

  “I’m interested in plants in this state that produce mercury waste,” I began in a most general way.

  “We do have those,” she replied.

  “Mostly paper plants?”

  “That produce mercury? Not exclusively. But mostly.”

  “Do you monitor them?”

  “Yes. Any plant that discharges waste of any sort into our waters is required to take out a permit. Then there’s testing, monthly or quarterly. Water samples are taken from the point of disposal and are sent to the lab for analysis. We test the air, too, by taking samples of emissions from stacks.”

  “Who does the testing?”

  “Water tests are done by the plant itself. When it comes to air tests, there’s usually an observer from our department.”

  “You don’t observe the water sampling?”

  “Not usually.”

  This struck me as a case of the fox guarding the chicken coop. “What’s to prevent someone from taking bottled water and claiming it’s from the river?”

  “The lab would see the difference. We know the chemical makeup of the river.”

  “What’s to prevent someone from taking river water and simply filtering out the bad stuff?”

  “If someone went to that extreme, it would suggest there was major pollution, and if that’s the case, the air sample would show it. We also do annual inspections to see that plants are properly disposing of their hazardous waste. Disposal is key. Not only does on-site disposal need to be done to code, but everything exceeding the legal limit must be loaded into drums and sent to an authorized site. The mills pay for the disposal of this extra waste. They keeps records of how much goes where. They also pay the state up front for every pound of waste produced.”

  “What kinds of numbers are we talking about?”

  “That depends on the plant.”

  “Say, Baxter Mills. Or Wentworth Paper. Or Northwood.”

  “Any of those could produce upward of six or seven hundred pounds in a given period. At three cents per pound to the state, there would be an assessed fee of two thousand dollars.”

  Two thousand dollars didn’t strike me as being prohibitive. Northwood could certainly handle that without folding. “Do you check the accuracy of what they report?”

  “Only when there’s a discrepancy from the norm.”

  “How do you know the norm?”

  “We have records. There’s a Web site, if you’d like to look.” She gave me the URL and explained how it worked.

  “And test results?” I asked. “Does the Web site show those, too?”

  “No. Mills keep the results. So do we, for a while. Then they’re archived.”

  Northwood wasn’t about to show me its files. “Can someone like me access your archives?”

  “Yes. But there’s a process.”

  I knew how that went. Processes required applications. They also required time. Between the information I would have to give on the former, and the ability that the latter gave for someone from NHDES to notify Northwood, I would be cooked.

  “Okay,” I said, “in a slightly different vein, exposure to mercury is known to create health problems. Does your department deal with those?”

  “We know what the health problems are. Do we monitor them in specific cases? That would be difficult. Mercury poisoning is hard to diagnose. We hear about the occasional acute case, but that’s it. A local health commissioner might know more. You could try contacting one of those.”

  “That’s a thought,” I said appreciatively. And it was a thought, albeit a moot one. Middle River didn’t have a health commissioner. “You’re very kind to be helping me this way.”

  “It’s part of my job,” she replied pleasantly.

  “Then you don’t mind another question or two?”

  “Of course not.”

  I spoke hypothetically now. “If, say, a paper plant wanted to cover up the extent ot its production of mercury waste, what would it do?”

  “It might bury waste improperly. Or falsify records.”

  “Could it cover up an actual spill?”

  “Technically, yes. If the spill was a major one, though, there would be obvious repercussions, people suddenly very ill. In that case, a plant might try to cover up the extent of the spill, but they wouldn’t be able to hide the fact of its occurrence.”

  “What about bribery?” I suggested.

  She chuckled. “That would be hard, given the numbers of people who work at these plants.”

  Clearly, she didn’t know the power of the Meades. “How could a person—my protagonist, for instance—uncover an attempted cover-up of a spill?”

  “That’s a little outside my jurisdiction.”

  “Take a guess. Pure speculation.”

  She was a minute thinking about it. “There would likely be memos, but they would be internal. He would need someone on the inside to provide him with those. Same thing if you want to show that records had been falsified.”

  TrueBlue. He was my man. He could give me this.

  Knowing what I had to do next, I gave in to genuine curiosity. “How does one clean up a mercury spill?”

  “Not easily,” the woman replied. “A cleanup involves decontaminating everything that came into contact with the mercury—clothes, skin, flooring, machinery. Since mercury is heavy, it sinks into the ground, so in the case of a ground spill, a cleanup could entail digging up dirt and extracting whatever of the metal that seeped in. It’s very costly, and it’s time-consuming.”

  “Do you believe that there have been spills in New Hampshire?”

  “I know there have been.”

  “Any plants I know?” I teased and added a quick, “I could interview people there for a touch of authenticity.”

  “Fortunately for us—unfortunately for you—they’ve closed. That’
s the thing. A mercury spill can devastate a company. You understand why they’d try to keep it under wraps.”

  I checked out the URL she had given me. Much of the information provided was technical, such as identification numbers and codes, but when it came to waste description, total quantity, and weight in pounds, the data were clear. Up until eight years ago, Northwood had produced mercury waste. When I compared the amount with that of other paper mills, it was similar. Not that I cared about other mills. My sister wasn’t sick in those towns. Only in Middle River.

  To: TrueBlue

  From: Annie Barnes

  Subject: Possibilities

  It appears that Northwood is not on a DES watch list, which is consistent with the claim that it no longer produces mercury waste. So I’m guessing that one or more of the following is true:

  (1) Northwood falsified past reports to hide the amount of waste produced.

  (2) Northwood falsified past tests to hide the strength of toxicity in that waste.

  (3) Northwood improperly disposed of waste.

  (4) Northwood covered up the incidence of spills.

  Do you have—or can you get—information on any of this? Ideally, I’d like copies of internal memos.

  I sent it off with a sense of satisfaction. Moving ahead on the mercury front was key.

  Right behind it was Phoebe. She wasn’t getting any better. I had made reservations to fly to New York with her, but she was still worried about Sabina.

  I wanted Sabina in my corner. I really did. I figured she would continue to fight me on the mercury thing, but I was hoping to reach some kind of agreement on Phoebe.

  And then there was Tom. I owed him an update on what I was doing. I also wanted him to give me the name of a doctor I might take Phoebe to see in New York.

  Killing two birds with one stone, I phoned my friend Berri, the one in Washington who had helped me plan the dinner I made at Sabina’s last Friday.

  “Hey,” I said, delighted to hear her voice at the other end of the line. “I’m so glad you’re home.” I meant that, and it had less to do with menu plans than with warmth. I had been in Middle River for a full week now. My reception was getting cooler by the minute.