Something Rotten, page 5
I poked my way through the bramble and the stunted trees until I caught sight of the water, or what passed for it. It looked like a river of Pepsi. A dark brown liquid churned up white froth as it broke against the rocks, and pallid clumps of foam roamed the surface like slugs. How anything could live in the murky depths below seemed impossible.
My eyes burned. “Ye gods and little fishes,” I muttered.
Olivia was sensible enough to have brought a handkerchief to cover her mouth and her nose, but she was letting me experience the Copenhagen River full on. And why not? She had taken me to the river to be baptized into her religion, and now I was a total convert.
“Elsinore Paper is doing this?” I said, coughing.
She pointed to a roiling, bubbling part of the river, like a fountain of sewage erupting from the surface. From there, it was easy to trace the big industrial pipe that wound up into the woods toward the plant.
Olivia took my hand and led me back to the Jeep, where I slumped into my seat. All the thrill of driving down back roads with the top down was suddenly gone, replaced by an overpowering urge to spew chunks. She took it easy on the road as we left, and I avoided projectile vomiting as my nausea subsided.
“That was the most disgusting thing I’ve ever seen,” I said when I could. “Or tasted.” I smacked my lips and tongue, trying desperately to rid them of the aftertaste from the air. It was worse than when I was five and accidentally drank from a soda bottle filled with used motor oil.
“There’s no way a company like Elsinore Paper would ever build on a river as small as the Copenhagen these days,” Olivia told me. “A hundred years ago, it was a little paper plant on a little river. But Elsinore Paper grew, and the Copenhagen didn’t. Today they’d build a plant this size on the Mississippi and dump the same crap they’re dumping here, only the Mississippi is so big, it would blend in. Same crap, just harder to see. Here there’s no way to hide it.”
“How can they get away with it?”
“Who’s going to stop them? Hamilton’s dad said it would cost so much to run clean, he’d have to close down for good. That paper plant employs almost two thousand people, not to mention all the shops and restaurants that rely on those people having money to spend. There’s only four thousand or so people in all of Denmark, Tennessee. How many of them do you think are gonna vote to make Elsinore clean up its act when that might mean losing their jobs?”
“You believe him? Mr. Prince? That he’d have to close the plant?”
“I think its BS. He could have cleaned up without closing. He just didn’t want to spend the money when he didn’t have to.”
Olivia pulled into a combination gas station/convenience store/post office and angled the car so I could see where we were.
“What’s this?” I asked.
“Its real name is Jackson Hollow, but everybody around here calls it Widowville.”
Widowville was a tiny little row of broken-down houses and abandoned buildings. It dead-ended in an overgrown lot filled with rusted-out train cars. The four-way intersection at the heart of town didn’t even warrant a stoplight, and the entire time we were there not one car came down the road.
“Somebody actually lives here?” I asked.
“About fifty people, maybe. A few more up in the hills. This town used to be where the woodcutters lived, back when the mill was small enough to still use wood from the surrounding area. Now they slice up parts of national parks out west and ship the lumber in by rail.” Olivia leaned forward on the steering wheel. “There are families in this town that have worked for Elsinore Paper for three generations. Now they’re paying for it. Almost all the men who worked for decades at Elsinore are dead.”
“All of them? From what?”
“Cancer.”
It was the second time that day someone had answered one of my questions with “cancer,” and I was a bit spooked.
“There was a study done, a few years back,” she told me. “Researchers came over from Duke, did a population study. They said the death rate from cancer was no different here than anywhere else in the country. But how many men got cancer after the doctors left? How many had already died not knowing what killed them? Seriously—where are all the men? There’s just a handful left here. The new generations live over the mountain, away from the river. But these men worked their whole lives for that plant, spent their nights sleeping beside that river, and now they’re gone. You can’t tell me the river didn’t make them sick.”
“Surely they weren’t drinking the water, though, were they?”
“God, no. That probably would have killed them right off. But where do you think these people get their water from? They pump it from the ground, from wells. Tell me that nasty river isn’t feeding into the water table. Just ask the folks whose tap water comes out looking brown and smelling like rotten eggs. How long do you think they drank that stuff before it got discolored enough to see it?”
The door to the gas station/convenience store/post office jangled open behind us, and an old woman walked out with a loaf of bread and a plastic jug of water.
“Seen enough?” Olivia asked me, and I nodded.
Back in Denmark, Olivia swung into the parking lot of a greasy spoon. “Can you eat? It’s my treat.”
“I think I can keep it down,” I told her.
The door squawked on the way inside, grinding against torn linoleum on the floor. The place had that dirty look old diners get from years of crumbs and grease, even though the tables looked clean enough to eat off of. The red vinyl seat cushions along the counter were dried out and cracked, and a few of the fluorescents on the ceiling flickered in prolonged death throes. A tired-looking old waitress—the same one who works in every diner in every town in every state across the country—was taking her smoke break underneath the No Smoking sign in the corner near the coffee machine. This hour of the afternoon, we were the only customers.
“Ya’ll sit wherever you like,” the ancient waitress croaked. “I’ll be right there.”
Olivia looked at me expectantly.
“What?” I said.
“Hamilton hates this place. He’d already be out the door, heading up to that chain restaurant on the interstate.”
I shrugged. “You want the counter or a booth?”
Olivia slid into a booth, and for a moment I envied the taped-up seat cushion as she got comfortable. I crawled into my side and leaned back against the grimy window. The E in the word “EATS” cast a slanting backward shadow across our table.
The waitress appeared next to us, depositing glasses of water like they do now only in dives and five-star restaurants. “Hey honey,” she said, looking right at me but clearly addressing Olivia. “What’ll ya have?”
“Hamburger, onion rings, and a Diet Coke,” Olivia said without looking at a menu.
“Same here, only make mine fries and a root beer instead, if you’ve got it.”
“Cheese or curly?”
“Curly.”
That seemed to be all the information the waitress required, and she slid away from the table with a lingering look at Olivia.
“You a regular?” I asked.
“Regular enough,” she said. “Pie’s good.”
Drinks appeared in front of us, and the waitress gave us our space as she smoked another cigarette and waited on our order to come up.
“So everybody lets Elsinore poison that river because they need the money?”
“Basically,” Olivia said. She sipped her water. “I tried for two years to get Hamilton’s father to do something about it. He said there were fish still living in that water, that he fished it all the time. He was as full of crap as that river.”
“What about the government? The Environmental Protection Agency? Wouldn’t they be all over this?”
“Are you kidding? The EPA is in the state’s pocket. Tennessee doesn’t want to see that plant shut down any more than the people of Denmark. They need the tax revenue. Besides, Elsinore has passed every one of its water quality tests.”
“You’re kidding.”
Our elderly attendant slid our plates in front of us. My hamburger was huge, piled high with lettuce and tomato, and surrounded by a mountain of curly fries. The taste of the river was quickly replaced by a gloriously greasy aroma.
Olivia shook her head, taking a huge bite of hamburger and chasing it with Diet Coke. “Uh-uh. But I know how they did it. They just took samples from the river where unpolluted streams fed in from the mountains. That way there’s still pollution, so the EPA knows it’s from the river, but the fresh water dilutes the junk and makes it look better than it really is.”
“They can’t tell it’s polluted by just looking at it?”
“They’re never gonna come all the way out here,” Olivia said through a mouthful. “Would you?”
“You must have been pretty pissed. At Hamilton’s father, I mean.”
Olivia shrugged. “Well, yeah. He was poisoning Denmark. He knew it, and he didn’t care. And you can bet the only water he ever drank came from a bottle. He should have had to drink poison like the rest of us. Then he’d have changed his tune.”
I chewed in silence. By his own account, Rex Prince had been poisoned. The question was, did a devastatingly attractive teenaged Denmark girl with access to his house see that poetic justice was served with his dinner?
“You know, I heard it was cancer that killed him after all,” Olivia confided.
“No kidding.”
“Yeah. I’d think it really was the water if he ever drank it. Water, I mean. The only thing I ever saw him drink was whisky, and lots of it.”
“Are you saying he was an alcoholic?”
“Calling Mr. Prince an alcoholic would be like saying the Copenhagen is dirty. It doesn’t begin to cover it.” She raised her glass. “Like father, like son.”
It was nice to know I wasn’t the only person who had apparently given Hamilton a hard time about his drinking problem. I wondered if that was part of what had come between them, and why I didn’t ride him harder about it. Maybe that was the difference between like and love.
As she drove me home, I remembered Olivia standing there in the rain protesting Elsinore Paper where no one but Hamilton could see her. At first I had thought that Elsinore’s pollution was just a convenient knife to stick in her ex-boyfriend for spite, but it was clear her passion for the cause went well beyond the fury of a woman scorned. But just how far did it go?
We pulled up in front of the Prince estate just before dusk. I climbed out of the Jeep and Olivia kept the motor running.
“Was there some message you want me to take to Hamilton?” I asked her.
“Yeah,” she said. “Tell him I hope a tree falls on him.”
“You really came all this way out here just to rag on him?”
“Who says I came all this way to talk to Hamilton?”
Olivia threw the Jeep into gear and sped off, and I prayed to the Norse gods of Denmark I wasn’t falling in love with a murderer.
CHAPTER EIGHT
I half hoped Olivia Mendelsohn would drive up the next morning and whisk me away to someplace exotic like Mexico or Canada or Albuquerque. Instead the only invitation I got was to play a racing game with Roscoe and Gilbert, who had apparently been given guest rooms. I took a pass. In the shower, I wondered just who exactly had invited Bo and Luke Duke to the house, and why. Mrs. Prince had seemed just as surprised to see them drive up as I was, and Hamilton had been giving them a wide berth. That left Claude as the cruise director, but I didn’t see the angle yet. After a quick powder at the boudoir in my room I felt like a new man and went looking for Hamilton.
I knocked softly on his door expecting him to still be asleep, and I was right. Hamilton was crashed out on his bed wearing the clothes he had on last night. An empty glass sat overturned on his bedside table. I didn’t need him right now anyway; it was his computer I was after.
Ford Branff was due to visit today, and I wanted to know more about him. Money is always a good motive in murder mysteries, and if Branff was proposing a takeover of Elsinore Paper, we were talking a lot of money indeed. It seemed like a long shot that he could have orchestrated the death of Hamilton’s father from wherever it was he lived, but I didn’t want to count anyone out just yet.
Ford N. Branff, I learned, was the nation’s most eligible media mogul. While the business pages were busy speculating on which companies he might acquire, the society pages were guessing which woman he might acquire. So far there were no women on the radar, but plenty of businesses. From his humble beginnings owning a lonely little community television station and a daily paper in Charlotte, North Carolina, he now owned seven papers, twelve television channels, and eight radio station groups throughout the southeast. And he wasn’t done. There were reports of pending acquisitions in Virginia and Georgia too. Branff was branffing out.
There was no connection between Branff and Elsinore—at least none that I could find. After that I checked in on my dad’s fantasy baseball team and skimmed boingboing.net. Fifteen minutes later I was lost in a gallery of Japanese robot pictures and had to close the browser before I spent all day surfing.
My stomach told me it was time for a little something and I set out on an expedition to discover the stairs. I heard the doorbell ring and I homed in on it like sonar. As I came down the stairs, one of the hired help was opening the door for the very man I had just Googled. Branff was a sharp-looking fellow, but his photo on the “Fifty Young Lions of Business 2006” list didn’t do him justice. He swooped into the Prince castle modeling the latest in business-casual perfect. His fitted dress shirt was the color a tag would have called “espresso” instead of brown, and had a satiny smooth sheen. The pants looked easy to travel in, and sported a chalk-stripe design that gave them a sophisticated flair and an element of whimsy. Or at least that’s what I imagined the Banana Republic catalog said. If we hadn’t been a hundred million miles from the nearest city, he could have passed for metrosexual.
Mrs. Prince was just coming to the door, but I beat her there. Branff spied me coming down the stairs.
“Is that Hamilton?” He pulled off his burnished-gold sunglasses and stepped inside. “You don’t look a thing like your mother!”
“I’m the black sheep of the family,” I told him.
Mrs. Prince walked into Branff’s open arms and kissed him on the cheek as they embraced. “It’s so good to see you again, Ford.” They held the pose just long enough for me to feel the weirdness, and then separated. Mrs. Prince smiled at me.
“Ford, this is Horatio Wilkes, a friend of Hamilton’s from school. He’s staying with us for part of the summer.”
Branff laughed. It was much more subtle and practiced than Claude’s, but still fake. He held out his hand.
“No wonder you don’t look like Trudy. Horatio, huh? That’s a funny name.”
I shook his hand. “Don’t worry. It’s not giving yours any competition.”
He held my hand a second longer than he should have, trying to figure out how I thought we were such good buds I could say mean things about him already. When he couldn’t figure it out, he smiled awkwardly and let go.
“I hope I’ll get to meet the real Hamilton Prince Jr.,” he joked with Mrs. Prince. “I like to think he could have been my son instead.”
“You should say that to Hamilton,” I told him. Then the Branff would really hit the fan.
Mrs. Prince put a delicate finger to a button on an intercom and said, “Hamilton?” into it.
There was a brief pause, then a crackle, a hum, and a “What.”
“We have a visitor. Ford Branff. I’d like you to meet him.”
Mrs. Prince released the button with a click, and waited. When there was no response, she turned to her old college flame. “Come on in, Ford. We have a lot of catching up to do.”
She led Branff in the general direction of the kitchen, and I followed. Mrs. Prince showed him into one of the hundred or so sitting rooms in the place, and Candy the Cowboy appeared in the doorway wearing a cow-print shirt with tassels and tight blue jeans. He waited for Mrs. Prince’s orders with an impossible smile.
“Candy, could you bring us some refreshments, please? Claude and Hamilton will be joining us as well.”
“Of course, señora.”
Mrs. Prince went into the parlor with Branff, and Candy and I met each other’s eyes at five paces. I usually go out of my way to be nice to anybody paid to wait on me, but Candy was different. For one thing, he didn’t act like any servant I had ever met. For another, he had pushed my buttons without provocation yesterday, and I couldn’t let that go.
“No bandana today?” I asked. “I’m disappointed. Did they go out of fashion so quickly?”
He kept the cow-patty-eating smile, but his eyes narrowed. Today he decided he’d win by not rising to my bait, and he turned on his heel and strutted away toward the kitchen. I tagged along.
“You know what would really make that ensemble sing?” I said. “Chaps.”
Still nothing. But I thought he was maybe working the strut a little more for my benefit. As we entered the kitchen he put a hand to his behind, silently telling me I could kiss it. I laughed and went to the refrigerator, waving off multiple offers of assistance from the other servants working in the kitchen. I found a bag of fresh bagels and was just trying to sneak one into a toaster before someone could offer to butter it for me when Hamilton walked in. He’d made a remarkable recovery from the corpse I’d seen in the bed earlier, and he’d even deigned to put on a new shirt.
“He’s here?” Hamilton asked. “Banff?”
“Branff,” I corrected him.
Hamilton grabbed a donut from the ever-present tray of sweets.
“What’s he doing here? Or doesn’t he care she’s already married again?”
