We exchanged phone numbers, and I pulled out my wallet and left money for the meal.

  “Forget the tip,” she said. “I’m not poor or anything.”

  “No, but you work for your money, and you earned it. I’ll call you when I get somebody to come out and film.” I stood to leave. “And Olivia—” I said, meaning to follow it up with something else. An apology maybe, or an explanation, or something that would bring back that spark we’d once had.

  “Thanks,” I said instead, and I left before I could make anything worse.

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  I took a particular delight in calling for Candy to bring me a root beer in my room, and once I explained what I was up to with Olivia he even cracked a smile. He was also kind enough to put in a discreet call to Ford Branff for me on Monday. Branff was a little suspicious at first, but he was a smart guy and got where I was going pretty quickly. He promised me we’d have a television crew over from one of his stations in Knoxville by the end of the week. Ford wasn’t about to pass up a chance to rake some muck over Elsinore Paper International, and besides, cute girls puking their guts out apparently makes good TV, as evidenced by Girls Gone Wild: Miami Beach and its seventeen sequels.

  Olivia sounded less than enthusiastic when I called her later that day, but said she’d be there. If she got cold feet we’d lose our money shot, but I figured I could do it if she chickened out.

  In the meantime, plans for Hamilton’s stay at the rehab clinic in Bristol moved quickly. Claude and Mrs. Prince pulled him in for another family meeting on Tuesday—this time without me—and told him D-day was Friday morning. That left just three days before we were both gone, because it was clear from my hosts that I would be shipping out at the same time. Apparently Claude’s answer to our snooping around was to get us both out of town as quickly as possible. They didn’t get any complaints from me, but I worried there was too little time to get the dirt on Hamilton’s uncle. Maybe the best I would be able to do would be to set the wheels in motion, but the thought didn’t do anything to make my last days here smell any rosier.

  The morning of Olivia’s televised spit-take we met down by the river where the runoff pipe pumps the sludge into the Copenhagen River. She was already there when I arrived. She looked bad, like she really was sick, and I told her so.

  “All part of the show,” she told me, and she looked like she might throw up already just from the effort. If she was really sick it would look better for the cameras, but I worried there was more to it. Before I could press her on it, we saw the news crew looking for us on the road above the river and I ran to flag them down. They had sent a little compact hatchback with the channel number and call-letters plastered all over the outside of it. I helped the cameraman haul out a couple of boxes while the reporter spruced herself in the mirror.

  “God, it stinks bad enough,” the repor ter said. “So the water is actually brown? If it’s not dark enough, this stunt’s probably not going to make the news, no matter who you know.”

  “Don’t worry,” I told her. “It’s a real story.”

  “Jack, you think you’ll have enough light?” she asked.

  The cameraman consulted a light gauge and nodded. “I’ll check it again by the river, but yeah.” I led them through the brush and trees down to the water, where Olivia sat on a rock. She stood to say hello, and I could see her sway a little. Had she been drinking? Was that why she looked so sick?

  “You think we should make her up a little first?” the woman whispered.

  Her cameraman shook his head. “Nah. This’ll sell it better anyway.”

  Then they got a good look at that river, and it was like they had discovered the lost Fountain of Youth and it was a sewer.

  “God, look at it, Jack! It’s disgusting! Do you think you can get a shot of that part there, where it’s all bubbling up? Is that where it comes from the factory?”

  “Plant,” Olivia corrected her. She swallowed like she was holding down a couple of meals and managed to give the reporter a brief history of the situation.

  “Great—wait,” the woman said. “Let Jack get the camera set up before you tell me everything, and we’ll go through it before you drink the water.”

  I pulled Olivia aside while we waited.

  “What’s up with you? Are you all right?” I asked.

  She nodded sluggishly.

  “Have you been drinking?” I whispered.

  “Kind of,” she said.

  “Okay, we’re ready,” the reporter said. “If you can just stand here.” She guided Olivia to a picturesque spot with the chunky brown water behind them. Olivia might have looked drunk, but she was sharp as ever. I knew a good sound bite when I heard one, and she gave them half a dozen. The reporter was clearly impressed too. She kept sharing knowing looks with the cameraman, who returned them with a thumbs-up.

  “Now, I understand you’re going to drink some river water today,” the reporter prompted her, “as a protest against what you perceive to be illegal pollution levels here in the Copenhagen River.”

  Olivia nodded. “That’s right. Elsinore Paper claims this water is safe, and the EPA agrees with them. I’m here to show everybody they’re both wrong.”

  Olivia pulled a Mason jar out of the pocket of her Wind-breaker and held it up in front of the camera. From where I stood, it didn’t look like soda. It looked like tea mixed with cleaning detergent and whipped into a frothy soup. In fact, it looked like river water.

  “Now, how can we be sure that’s really water from the river?” the reporter asked. “I mean, who’s to say you didn’t just go to a convenience store and mix together all the sodas?”

  Olivia glanced at me, and it felt like an apology. I couldn’t figure out the look, since we’d planned for this all along anyway. I started to step forward to explain everything, but she looked back into the eye of the camera and said, “It’s river water, all right, and I’ve been drinking it nonstop for three days.”

  I stopped in my tracks. She couldn’t be serious.

  “Here, I’ll prove it,” she said. She unscrewed the jar and poured it out, then dipped the jar into the river and pulled up an equally foamy broth.

  My feet were moving before my mouth. “No, Olivia! Don’t—”

  I was too far away. She took a big hit off the stuff, and it immediately came back up, along with half a gallon of whatever else she had to eat and drink in the last few hours. I caught her in my arms as she collapsed to the ground, letting her cough the rest of it out. I couldn’t believe I’d been so stupid.

  “You did it for real, didn’t you,” I said.

  “No point in—sending them home without a story.”

  Olivia lurched and her stomach erupted again. I held her up and pulled my phone out to dial 911, beginning to feel like I was doing this a little too often lately.

  Out of range. Again.

  The reporter had backed off from the puke zone, but the cameraman hadn’t left his place. “Hey kid,” he asked, “is she faking it?”

  “No, she’s not faking it!” I yelled. “Now turn that thing off and help me get her to the hospital!”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  I hate hospitals. The hushed whispers of sympathy, the sad, flickering televisions in dark rooms, the lingering scent of antiseptic and vomit. Zombies ambling around in those gowns where everyone can see their asses, clinging to wheeled coatracks with plasma or saline or something dripping into their veins. Sneakers squeak squeak squeaking down the hall as nurses deliver little cups of meds and trays with lumps that resemble mashed potatoes and Salisbury steak. But worse than all that was the feeling of weakness. Vulnerability.

  Helplessness.

  I had been here almost the entire day, waiting while doctors whisked Olivia away to an operating room where her stomach was pumped and she was rehydrated with water that wasn’t brown. When they were finished, they put her in a hospital room right next to her father. That made things pretty convenient for Larry Mendelsohn, I thought, although he didn’t seem to see it that way. I also thought that as a future ambulance-chaser he’d appreciate the opportunity to scare up some prospective clients, but for some reason Larry didn’t act like any of this was convenient. He acted like he was mad at the world, starting with me.

  “Five minutes,” he told me when I tried to get in to see Olivia.

  As the guy who dragged his sister to the hospital I thought I might get to spend a little more time with her, but Larry the lawyer had laid down the law. He went next door to give us some privacy, which I guess was as much of a nod to me saving her life as I was going to get.

  Olivia looked like she’d gone three rounds with a gorilla. A tube as thick as my middle finger snaked down her nose, and she had the makings of two black eyes worse than the one she’d given Hamilton. She played it tough and mustered a grin when she saw me.

  “Hey.”

  “Hey yourself,” I told her. “You know, if you wanted to lose weight, I can think of a few easier ways.”

  “Who says I need to lose weight?”

  She was weaker than she was letting on, and I figured the five minutes Larry gave me would probably be about two minutes longer than she could keep this up. I sat down in the chair next to the bed.

  “Now, let’s see . . . ” I said. “Who was it that said that only a complete dumb-ass would drink that water?”

  “You’re welcome,” she wheezed. “Finally did it, though, didn’t I?”

  Olivia nodded at the television hanging from the ceiling. She had just found a regional news feed from Knoxville, and they were leading off with the story of the high school environmental activist who got violently sick drinking “clean” river water. Local community leaders were shocked—shocked!—to discover their river was so polluted, and there were rumblings about an emergency session of the Denmark city council.

  Olivia closed her eyes. “Mission accomplished.”

  “You really scared me, you know that? I dreamed about taking you in my arms one day, but not to the hospital.”

  “Be careful, Horatio. Hamilton might be around to hear you.”

  “You could have died,” I told her.

  “Died?” said a doctor coming in the room. He consulted a boxy metal clipboard. “No, she wasn’t in danger of dying. Making herself very, very, sick, yes, but not dying. The pollution in the river is too diluted for that. You’d have to extract a large quantity of dioxin and drink a concentrated dose to do immediate harm.”

  He wasn’t the fellow I had handed Olivia off to in the emergency room, but the way he was checking her medical folder against the beeping machines along the wall meant he’d gotten involved somewhere along the way. I was more interested in that medical folder. It was giving me ideas.

  “Are you feeling any numbness?” he asked Olivia. “Any strange sensations in your extremities? Does anything hurt?”

  “I’m not sure, but I think there’s something wrong with my nose,” she said, pointing to the huge tube jammed down her throat. The doctor smiled sympathetically.

  “That has to stay there until you’re released.”

  “When will that be? Tonight?”

  “No—I’m sorry. We’re going to want to keep you overnight for observation.”

  “What was it in the water that made her so sick?” I asked.

  “A variety of things caused these symptoms, but the compound we’re most concerned about, of course, is dioxin. That’s the main reason for the stomach pump and the infusion of olestra.” He turned to Olivia. “The olestra bonds with the dioxin, which should help you pass most of it out.”

  Olivia got a mental picture of passing olestra and grimaced.

  “Dioxin is a poison?” I asked. I was developing an interest in poisons too.

  The doctor folded his arms across Olivia’s medical chart. “Dioxin may be the most toxic substance ever created by man.”

  I didn’t think it was possible, but Olivia got whiter.

  “What could it do?” she rasped.

  “Dioxin is a carcinogen. It causes cancer. The more that’s left in your system, the greater your chance of getting cancer one day.”

  “Can you get it all out?” I asked.

  “Well, even if we were able to remove all the dioxin she ingested over the last few days, she’d still have dioxin in her system. Just about every person in America tested for the stuff has five to ten parts per trillion of dioxin in their bodies, and we haven’t got the slightest idea where it comes from.”

  “That’s always a good thing to hear from a doctor.”

  He shrugged. “Dioxin is almost a complete unknown. There have been all kinds of tests on lab animals, of course, but each study comes out differently. One animal gets liver cancer. Another gets lung cancer. Another gets stomach cancer. But one thing remains the same in each case.”

  “They all get cancer,” I guessed.

  He nodded. “That’s why dioxin is thought to be the most toxic chemical in creation—it can cause cancer in just trace amounts.”

  “Does that mean—does that mean I’m going to get cancer?” Olivia asked.

  “Twenty to twenty-five percent of Americans develop some kind of cancer,” he told her. “Each of us carries more than trace amounts of dioxin, and we’re exposed to countless other carcinogens every day. They’re in the air we breathe, the food we eat, even the cups and napkins we use. Once we clean you up, I’d say your chances are about the same as anyone else’s.”

  The doctor checked a few more things on Olivia’s chart, then flipped it closed.

  “I hope I haven’t scared you,” he said.

  “No more than I already was,” Olivia croaked.

  He smiled. “You’re going to be fine. This is the worst of it right now. Just promise me no more stunts like the one you pulled this morning.”

  “Okay, twist my arm,” she joked.

  Larry caught the doctor at the door and got the whole spiel again. It bought me a few minutes more with Olivia, and I got up to stand by her side. I moved a strand of hair off her face and held her hand.

  “You really are a dumb-ass,” I told her.

  “Thanks,” she said. “I kind of like you too.”

  “Look, about that day, on the bluff,” I told her. “I wanted to. Really. It wasn’t you—”

  “I know. It wasn’t me, it was Hamilton.” She laughed, and it turned into a cough.

  Larry heard her coughing and came in looking as unhappy about me holding her hand as Olivia poisoning herself. He folded his arms across his chest.

  “Time’s up,” he told me.

  “I’ll be back tomorrow,” I promised Olivia. “And don’t worry,” I told Larry on the way out, “no rich little hotties have ever fawned over me at Wittenberg.”

  Larry shut the door behind me.

  I peeked in at Paul Mendelsohn. He was sleeping soundly. On the screen above him, Olivia was watching over him through the miracle of cable and sound bites as the story of her poisoning ran on a twenty-four-hour cable news station. Her pale face on the TV reminded me of Hamilton’s father, coming to us live as a ghost from the valley of death.

  Thinking of Hamilton’s father made medical charts come to mind again, and it didn’t take me long to find a nurse’s station. The only woman there was youngish—midtwenties, maybe—with mousy brown hair and a bit of an overbite.

  “Help you?” she asked.

  “Hi,” I said, putting on my sad face. “My name is Hamilton Prince. My dad was a patient here a while back, but I can’t remember the name of his doctor.”

  “He can’t tell you?” she asked.

  “He died of cancer,” I told her. “While I was away at school. I’m supposed to talk to his doctor. To, you know, get some kind of closure.”

  “I’m so sorry,” she said. “You don’t have any bills or medical records at home? Doesn’t your mother have his name?”

  “My mother died last year. Car wreck.” I sniffed and blinked my eyes, getting them wet. “I’m sorry. The school psychiatrist gave me the name before the summer break, but everything’s been so crazy . . .”

  I was laying it on pretty thick, but I could see her weak chin get weaker.

  “Prince, you said? What was his first name?” she asked, swiveling to her computer.

  “Hamilton. Just like—just like me.”

  She nodded, then scribbled the name on a pad advertising a blue pill with a funny name and passed it across the counter to me.

  “Dr. Henry Lapham,” she told me. “He won’t be back in until next week.”

  “Thanks,” I said. I sniffed again for effect. “I guess I was so messed up then, I just wasn’t thinking.”

  “See it all the time,” she told me. “You call his office and have your chat.”

  I thanked her again and kept up the sniffling until I was around the corner, then headed down the hall to a room I had passed on the way in. A little green plaque on the wall read: “Records Room.” I glanced around to see that no one was around, and I slipped inside.

  The last time there was a presidential election, there was a lot of hullabaloo about fixing health care. Part of that, apparently, was the idea that all the hospitals in the country would keep patient records on computers so they could be shared anytime, anywhere. Luckily for me, nothing ever got done about it. Everybody still keeps files the old-fashioned way—in easy-to-steal paper folders.

  I scanned the wall of floor-to-ceiling shelves and quickly found the P’s. I had always seen these rainbow-colored folders behind the reception desk at my dentist, but only when I was close up did I realize that the colors corresponded to different letters of the alphabet, I guess so the medical professionals could thumb through them quickly. It worked too—I found Rex Prince’s file in no time. It was pretty thick, and there were reports from a number of doctors over the years inside. I caught Dr. Henry Lapham’s signature at the bottom of one or two pages and knew I had what I was looking for. I debated just taking the ones I needed, but figuring that out would take time. Besides, Mr. Prince wasn’t going to be visiting his doctor anytime soon, so I just took the whole thing.

  The trick to stealing something is to just walk out with it like you’re supposed to be taking it. My sister Miranda, who’s a patrol cop in Knoxville, once told me about two thieves who went into a sporting goods store, picked up a canoe, and carried it right out the front door. Security cameras caught it and tons of people saw them, but they got away with it because nobody thought they were stealing it. One of the clerks actually held the door open for them. After all, who just walks out with a canoe without paying for it?

 

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