Roger jutted his chin out. “I see where you’re going with this preposterous tale, but you’re dead wrong. We tested that water, and it was absolutely fine. Pure! There were no contaminants. I can show you the lab reports.”
“No doubt you did, when you first sunk the well. But how often did you do it after that? How regularly did you check?” I asked. “Because the FDA only required an initial testing. Of course, responsible companies would’ve tested more regularly than that, but it wasn’t actually a legal requirement.”
“I don’t understand. Are you saying that Beaumont Brothers’ water is contaminated with cadmium?” Bridget asked, her eyes round with shock.
“It was in those two seasons of heavy rainfall, but not anymore. Not for the last ten years, I think. And definitely not for the last four. Do you want to know how I can be sure about that?”
Roger pinched his lips together mutinously. Philip stared down at his untouched dessert. Jessica and her mother gaped at me.
“Well, I sure do,” Ryan said.
“Doctor Armstrong told me. Just this afternoon.”
“What?” Jessica said.
“This– this female is clearly out of her senses,” Roger said.
“Not in person, of course,” I said. “Not like he told Roger and Philip, here, many years ago. He sent me a stack of laboratory reports. Turns out he’s been testing Beaumont Brothers bottled water every three months for the last four years, and every time it’s come up clear.”
“Well, there you are then,” he retorted.
“Just what is going on here?” Michelle demanded. “And what did my husband have to do with anything?”
“Don’t you want to know why he started testing the water?” Without waiting for a response, I hurried on. “I think he’d been puzzled by one of his cases, maybe several. And he’d requested special tests be conducted on a tissue sample from an organ removed from that patient. The findings confirmed the presence of renal cancer, which he’d expected, due to long-term, low-level cadmium poisoning — which he hadn’t.”
“Kidney disease,” Vanessa said solemnly. “Cassie?”
“Cassie,” I confirmed.
“Oh my God!” Bridget’s face went white as chalk. She raised a trembling hand to her throat. “Cassie’s cancer was a result of cadmium poisoning?”
I nodded. “I’m so sorry.”
She turned on her husband and demanded, “From your water?” When he didn’t reply, she thumped her hand on the table, sending a spoon leaping into the air, and cried, “Philip! What is this? Did you know? Is this true?”
Philip stared ahead blindly, saying nothing.
His brother said, “Of course not. It’s utter drivel.”
“Doc Armstrong needed to break the news to his patient’s parents. You, Mrs. Beaumont, told me that you left all the medical details to your husband, so you” — I pointed at Philip — “went alone and listened to what he had to say, understood what it meant. And then you went home and didn’t tell your wife a word of it, am I right?” I turned to Bridget. “You never knew about the cause of the cancer?”
She swung her head from side to side in shocked misery.
“But you did tell your brother,” I said to her husband. “Your partner in life had to be kept from the truth, but your partner in business needed to know immediately.”
“Philip,” Bridget said, her voice a rough plea.
“Dad? Why aren’t you saying anything?” Vanessa asked.
“And Cassie couldn’t have been the only case of illness due to the contaminated water,” I continued. “Alarm bells must have been going off in the doctor’s head as he did his research on the sorts of health problems that could appear years down the line from chronic low levels of cadmium consumption. Perhaps he thought it might be implicated in many other disorders he’d been seeing more frequently in the town’s folk — anemia, osteoporosis, prostate and ovarian cancer. So, I’m guessing he called you back in?”
“Both of us,” Philip said to his lap in a voice so low, it was almost inaudible.
“Shut up!” Roger told his brother. “Not another word.”
“He confronted you two with what he’d discovered. Said the only way so many people could be affected was if they’d consumed it regularly. Cadmium doesn’t bind to plants, so that wasn’t the source. Pitchford’s main water supply came from the public system, which was regularly tested. So that left the bottled water.”
“It was Cassie’s favorite. She drank it all the time. Said soda was bad for you,” Vanessa said softly.
“Did you know about this?” Jessica asked her mother, her tone more accusation than question. “Did you hush it for the sake of the town?”
“No! No, I most certainly did not,” Michelle said hotly. “Good God, what sort of a person do you think I am?”
“Doc Armstrong would have insisted that the truth come out, but that would have been the end of the Beaumont Brothers company, and the two of you individually. The plant would have been shut down, there would’ve been civil claims, perhaps even class action suits. I’m no lawyer, but I think there would even have been criminal charges.”
Rick Torres nodded fervently.
“You both stood to lose everything if Armstrong talked. But somehow,” I said, “you two persuaded him to keep the secret.”
“Dad, tell me this isn’t true!” Vanessa begged.
“We needed the money for Cassie’s treatment. How could we possibly afford the best medical treatment if we were penniless? How could I take care of her — of this whole family — if I was in prison?” Philip said.
“Philip, shut up!” Roger bellowed.
“Besides, there was no point in telling,” his brother added.
“No point?” I asked, unsure I’d heard him right.
“There was nothing to be done. Many years previously, we’d built the new factory on the other side of Kent Hill and shifted water uptake to the source of the spring right at the top. So it was uncontaminated. And we’d tested it religiously ever since. What possible good could have come from Armstrong going public when the damage had already been done years before, and the problem had already been fixed?”
“You moron!” his brother snarled at him.
I said, “He would probably still have believed he was duty-bound to tell. It was a public health issue — people needed to be made aware of their exposure and seek treatment, if necessary. And he was a doctor, after all.”
“He was a drunken sot,” Roger said.
Michelle glared at him. “I beg your pardon!”
“Oh, spare me the indignation. You’ve called him that — and worse — every time you’ve spoken of him to me these last twenty years.”
Jessica stared at her mother in disgust.
“Then why didn’t Armstrong come clean? Why didn’t he report what he knew to the police?” Ryan asked.
“Blunt,” I said. “They used his son to blackmail him into staying silent. They must have had some kind of evidence of Blunt’s drug-dealing and threatened to report him. Blunt had two previous convictions, so another conviction would see him imprisoned—”
“Baseless speculation!” Roger blustered.
“—possibly for the rest of his life. And to sweeten the deal, they allowed him to live in a trailer in the woods behind this estate, where they knew he was farming weed and cooking meth or crack.”
“You have evidence of drug manufacture, and you haven’t brought it to me?” Ryan challenged Philip.
“Roger visited Doc Armstrong on the day he died,” I told Ryan, “and warned him against making a deathbed confession. He said he had hard evidence about Blunt’s activities — I’m guessing that was drone footage of precisely whatever it is Blunt’s doing in the woods.”
“He told you that?” Ryan asked.
“In a way.”
“I don’t believe you!” Roger snapped. “Now, please leave this house. You are no longer welcome to trespass on our hospitality while you tell thes
e baseless, slanderous lies.”
“This isn’t your house!” Vanessa yelled at him. “You have no say here.”
“Doc Armstrong knew he was living on borrowed time,” I continued. “He didn’t want to be around when all of this came out, and I think he still felt guilty. So he ended his life, but not before ensuring I got all the evidence I needed. He knew Roger might follow through on his threat, but maybe he figured the cops would be too busy with this case to worry about Blunt’s activities, or maybe he was past caring.”
“If what Garnet says is correct,” Ryan said, “then you’ve concealed several very serious crimes and engaged in a conspiracy to obstruct justice. And when Ca– And if anyone’s death can be ruled due to the effects of cadmium poisoning, then that’s manslaughter.”
“At the very least,” Rick said.
“They’ve done worse than that,” I said. “They’ve done cold-blooded, intentional, first-degree murder.”
50
NOW
Sunday December 24, 2017
Philip’s head snapped up at that. Roger’s face mottled red with rage.
“Murder?” Ryan asked.
Everyone at the table stared at me. I shifted my gaze between two faces, studying them minutely, because I wasn’t yet one hundred percent certain which one of them had actually done it, and whether the other had known, or whether they’d acted together.
A wave of deep sadness filled me. Colby hadn’t known who’d done it either, until now. And he knew I was right.
“Murder. Because Doc Armstrong wasn’t the first to test the water. He wasn’t the first to put two and two together and draw a conclusion that pointed at cadmium contamination, was he?” I asked the Beaumont brothers. “That was Colby.”
“Colby?” Bridget said faintly.
“Ten years ago, for his AP chemistry project, Colby chose to do an analysis of Beaumont Brothers’ bottled water. He tested for a bunch of trace elements — chemical, mineral, even metal. I think he wanted to prove how pure it was; he may not have wanted to join the family business, but that didn’t mean he wasn’t proud of it. But instead he found something impossible.”
“Cadmium,” Vanessa said.
“Yeah, cadmium. He couldn’t believe his results. He thought maybe Cassie had been fiddling with his chemistry set, so he repeated the test, got the same findings. He researched the FDA standards on bottled water to check permissible limits. He tried to get hold of a professor who’s an expert in groundwater pollution at MIT, hoping to find out more about the heavy metal. He studied online sites explaining the connection between zinc and groundwater contaminated by cadmium. He researched the health consequences of cadmium consumption and read about Itai-Itai — a mass cadmium poisoning that affected thousands in Japan last century. He realized he’d tumbled onto something catastrophic. Something that needed to be stopped and rectified immediately. He debated who he should tell — the cops, the FDA, or the FBI.” I glared at Colby’s father. “Did he come to you first? Maybe that Saturday, the day before he died?”
He nodded, his face white as old bones, his lips bloodless.
My anger was growing, solidifying into something cold and sharp behind my eyes. “He’d been distracted about something those last days, but he never got a chance to tell me what about. When I discovered the other day that he’d been sexually harassed at his job and then fired that day by this piece of work” — I cocked a thumb at Michelle — “I wondered why he’d never told me. It was because he was worried sick about what he’d discovered and needed to talk to his father. Did you know about the water?” I asked Philip.
“No! You have to believe me,” he said desperately, directing pleading looks at his wife and daughter.
“You would have called your brother immediately to tell him the shocking thing Colby had discovered. Roger was no doubt horrified, too. He called Colby the next morning, the Sunday he disappeared, and talked to him for over twenty minutes, trying to persuade him he was wrong, eventually agreeing to meet that night at the Tavern to talk things over, telling Colby to bring his laptop so you two could check his findings and calculations.”
Bridget’s horrified gaze was riveted on me.
“The three of you — Colby, his beloved father, and his dear uncle — met at the Tuppenny Tavern that night,” I said bitterly, my rage intensifying as I visualized that evening’s events, imagined how it had been for Colby. “Why there? Why not at the factory?”
“He said he refused to set foot on those premises,” Philip said.
“So you settled for one of the private booths in a quiet corner. Colby would have urged you to come clean. The contaminated water was on shelves across the country — you needed to do a product recall, urgently. He would’ve insisted you make a public announcement telling people who’d drunk it to seek immediate medical help. Perhaps they could get treatment to prevent further damage. Maybe even stop conditions from developing in the first place. And you two tried to persuade him to keep it quiet.”
Beside me, Ryan tensed. His eyes were locked on the Beaumont brothers at the end of the table. Jessica was watching me, wide-eyed, her wine forgotten. Vanessa’s hands, clenched in white-knuckled fists, rested on either side of her dessert dish, as though ready to be deployed.
“What did you say to him? That you’d stop collecting water until it could be done safely, that you’d test the water thoroughly and regularly from then on? Perhaps you even promised to recall stock. You,” I said to Roger, “would’ve come up with some spurious reason for the recall that wouldn’t alarm the market or hit the press. But Colby would’ve refused. Maybe he stormed out, taking his laptop with him, and the two of you were left with your fortunes and your futures crumbling down around you.”
“I offered him a ride home, but he said he had to meet someone at the pond,” Philip said.
“Pete Dillon,” I said. “Though he thought he was meeting Judy.”
“Pete?” Jessica said.
I explained about Pete’s jealousy, his ruse to get Colby to meet him that night by the pond.
“He and his sidekick Brandon Nugent beat Colby nearly senseless, warned him to stay away from Judy.” I turned to Jessica, possessed by a sudden suspicion. “Did you know? Did Pete ever tell you?”
“No! Never! And I’m finding it hard to believe he’d ever do something like that.”
“You don’t know him, Jess,” I said. “Not at all.”
“Why on earth would Peter Dillon confide in my daughter about his sordid romances and thuggish behavior?” Michelle demanded.
“Not now, Mom.”
“So, Pete Dillon did it. Pete killed Colby?” Bridget asked. Her eyes were dark with pain, and tears ran unchecked down her face.
“No. Pete and Bran left him unconscious, but alive.”
“How can you possibly know all this?” Ryan asked.
“I have it on good authority.” On the word of the deceased victim himself. “Ask Judy Dillon. She’ll confirm everything. So, either Philip or Roger — maybe both, but my money’s on Roger — followed Colby to his meeting at the pond, no doubt hoping for another chance to dissuade him from the course of action he seemed set on.”
“No,” Philip gasped.
“And watched as Colby was beaten and left behind in the falling snow,” I said loudly, my voice tight with fury. “And saw his opportunity to shut Colby up for good by dragging him into the water and holding him under until he stopped moving, stopped breathing.” My voice rose higher, until I was almost yelling. “Then dragged him deeper still and wedged him under the thickening ice.”
“You!” Philip lunged across the table, grabbed his brother around the throat, and throttled him with both hands, screaming, “You killed my boy! You murdered him!”
Michelle shrieked. My father waved his hands ineffectually. But in an instant, Ryan had hauled Philip off his brother.
“You murdered him!” Philip shouted over and over until his voice grew hoarse, and he collapsed onto his knees
on the floor, sobbing. Ryan stood beside him, a restraining hand on the man’s shoulder.
“You knew!” Roger spat. “You knew. You were just too cowardly to admit it. You knew something had to be done, but you were too spineless to do it yourself. You were glad to have the problem solved so neatly without you having to get your hands dirty. Admit it, you were relieved that the truth would never come out.”
“Glad? Relieved? I was broken! I was dead inside. You killed me, too, that night. You killed this whole family!”
Roger’s face contorted in a rictus of contempt. “This is all mere speculation. There is not the slightest shred of proof.”
Vanessa grabbed her dessert dish, leaned across the table and whacked her uncle on the side of the head, yelling, “You’ve already half-confessed, you bastard!”
Her husband tugged her back into her seat and wrapped her in his arms, held her while she wept.
“There’s an eyewitness who saw Roger leaving the scene, who can identify his car,” I said.
“Who?” Ryan demanded.
“Plus, I have proof of the water contamination.”
“What proof could you possibly have?” Roger challenged.
“You’re thinking about the missing test tubes from Colby’s chemistry set, and his laptop which never turned up.” The items that, along with his phone, hadn’t been around to be saved in his box of possessions. “You or your brother dumped that evidence someplace it would never be found. But” — I pinned Roger with a savage smile — “you never thought to check his school notebooks. I have those, and the chemistry one is filled with notes, measurements and calculations for his project. I’m guessing there’s more than enough proof there for any jury.”
Roger stared at me for a split second and then bolted. Quicker than I would have believed possible, my mother stuck out her leg. Roger tripped over the cast and went sprawling. He scrambled to his feet, ran two steps, and then I sailed into him, tackling his legs at the knees, bringing him down and winding myself in the process. He kicked back, hard. Connected with my jaw, sending a shaft of pain shuddering through my body. He clambered upright and dashed out of the room.
The First Time I Died Page 31
