Part 26 (1/2)
”I'm not ill.” Having to repeat myself made me grumpy.
”Sarah Booth, if anything happened to you, I'd have to blame myself.”
He was certainly intense. I looked down the hallway. ”I'm fine, Peyton, but thank you. I want to get this resolved. Can I pick you and the suits up in about fifteen minutes? I need to speak with Tinkie first.”
”I'll be waiting.”
Taking a deep breath, I went to see my partner and best friend. I had good news for her. I could only hope it hadn't come too late for the man she loved.
24.
Tinkie stood, straight-backed and stoic, looking through the hospital window at Oscar. I told her about the mold, about the potential for treating it, and I promised I'd find the person responsible for bringing this plague to Sunflower County.
She said nothing.
”Tinkie, you can't give up now. Doc can fix this. He will fix it.”
Eyes riveted on her husband, she finally spoke. ”Regina is drinking fluids on her own. Luann is sitting up and even talking on a cell phone. Their families are celebrating, and I'm happy for them. But look at Oscar and Gordon.”
In contrast to the women, Oscar appeared worse. His pallor matched the sheets, except for the oozing pustules on his skin, which were red and angry. Beside him, Gordon seemed equally bad. How had this mold thing taken down two strong, healthy men yet pa.s.sed over two women with lesser devastation?
”I'm helping Peyton with something, but I'll be back.” I resisted checking at my watch. ”We're going . . . to look for the source of these weevils.” Tinkie was so depressed, she didn't bother to question where I was conducting this great research.
”It's too late.” She spoke so simply.
While I wanted to argue with her, I couldn't. If I had to guess a time schedule, I didn't think Oscar would last through the night. ”He's fought hard,” I said.
”He's tired.”
She was killing me. I could actually feel the tissue that held my heart in place begin to rip. When was it right to offer false hope and when to help a friend accept what appeared to be the inevitable? ”Tinkie, what can I do?”
”Will you help me with all the . . . necessary arrangements?”
”We can talk about this later.”
”I have to let him go, Sarah Booth. I've held him here, selfishly, because I can't imagine my life without him. Now, though, I accept he has to leave me. He won't be far.”
Tinkie, unknowingly, had just stomped all over my own private wounds. Despite the fact that my parents had been dead for two decades, I hadn't let them go. I couldn't.
”How do you know Oscar is ready to go?” My voice quavered. There were times that Tinkie seemed to brush against another reality. She had a strong faith and a true belief that the veil between this world and the next was penetrable. When I was in Tinkie's company, I could believe it, too.
”I sense it,” she said. ”He's fought so hard. Trapped inside his body that's shutting down around him, he still fought. I felt the struggle. Now, he's still. It's almost as if a part of him has already left.”
h.e.l.l, why not scoop out my heart with a soup ladle? ”He's still because he's tired. I'll tell Doc to hit him with some speed. Now isn't the time to throw in the towel. Let me have the rest of the day.”
At last she looked at me. ”I can't ask him to suffer longer, Sarah Booth.”
I would not have this. ”You d.a.m.n sure can. Think of the things he put you through. Think of the ba--” Oscar's pa.s.sion for a planned life had cost Tinkie greatly in the past.
She put her hand over my lips. ”You fight dirty.” She looked a little sh.e.l.l-shocked at my tactics.
”You're d.a.m.n right. I'll fight dirty and underhanded. Make him hang on. Just until midnight. Give me that, okay? Doc is going to start the antifungals now, even before the cultures and tests come back. And I'm going to find out who did this. Oscar would want to live to see justice, I can guarantee that. Sure he's tired of suffering. He's been through it. But he isn't the kind of man who folds his tent and slips away into the night. And you're not the kind of woman who would let him. Buck up and put the pressure on him to stay.”
I took her chin in my hand and pointed her at the window. ”Do that thing with your lip. Let it pop out of your mouth.”
She frowned as if I'd spoken Celtic.
”Don't play innocent with me. I'll bet Doc will move Oscar to a private room. He isn't contagious. He doesn't have to be isolated. When he moves, you get in there and do what ever you have to do to remind Oscar of the pleasures of the flesh. He's a man--wherever he is, he'll return for that.”
”That's unethical, Sarah Booth. He's helpless.”
”Ethics be d.a.m.ned. You tell Oscar from me that he can't leave until I figure this out.”
Tinkie pressed her fingers into the gla.s.s. ”He hears you. See, his hands are twitching.”
She sounded less defeated, but I didn't have time to push her any harder. And I didn't want to. There is a limit to how much bossing a friends.h.i.+p can take. ”Move him to a room and do your worst,” I whispered.
I rushed down the hall before she could respond--either negatively or positively--to my unusual tactics.
The CDC office was locked up, but Peyton had left a note on the door for me.
”Exciting development in the mold. May be able to offer more help to Doc. Have gone to Jackson to a bigger lab. Bonnie Louise still unaccounted for. Will call. Peyton. P.S. The hazmat suit is in your car.”
While everyone else thought I was nuts to go to the Carlisle place, Peyton had faith in me. The suit was in the pa.s.senger seat of the roadster. I climbed behind the wheel and pointed the car for the one place where evidence against the instigator of this plot might be found.
I parked at the front gate and donned the suit. From the road, nothing looked too bad, but once I made it past the house and into the fields, the devastation was like a biblical plague. The cotton, which I'd been told was two feet high and lush, was a scraggly vista of dead stems and curled, brown leaves. Weevils were everywhere. They crawled along the brown stalks. I'd never seen anything like it, but I could easily grasp the direness of the situation if this moved on to the next plantation. I didn't need Jitty at my side to tell me that this looked like a scene from the War Between the States. Or a glimpse of the future on a globally warmed planet. This was devastation of a man-made order.
With the c.u.mbersome suit impeding my movements and vision, I entered the field. Behind me, the gracious structure of the old plantation rose like a specter of the past, a lone sentinel of a way of life that no longer existed.
A curtain fluttered briefly in a window, and I was reminded of the ghost I'd encountered in Costa Rica. Spirits lingered in old houses, but it wasn't a supernatural presence that I sought now.
Working from what I knew of Oscar's and Gordon's actions, I began my careful examination at the edge of the fields nearest the house. Before I left the property, I intended to search the old plantation, but I had to find out if Oscar and Gordon had seen something in those fields that drew them both into danger.
Moving through the rows, I ignored the insects. With the leaves mostly gone from the cotton plants, the activity of the weevils was like a maddened army on the march for food. They moved relentlessly. When I peered closer, I realized that some of them were dead.
Others were dying.
I watched in fascination as fire ants pursued the weevils. Huge mounds of the poisonous ants had sprung up in the cotton rows. Stories of elderly people falling into ant beds were Southern lore. Injured and unable to get away, the infirm died from the venomous bites.
The ants were on the attack, pursuing the weevils. Right in front of my eyes, the balance of nature was rea.s.serting itself.
The suit protected me from the ants, so I knelt down to study the action more closely. Some chemical or spore or pheromone or something in the weevils compelled the fire ants to attack. Hordes of the burnished red insects raced in pursuit of the weevils.
The battle was fascinating, even for someone who didn't have a scientific bone in her body. Inching forward on my knees, I examined the dying weevils. The ants appeared to be stinging them to death--and then carrying them away. As I leaned over to watch a dozen yeomen ants hauling a weevil twenty times their size, I saw a key ring. Half-covered in dirt, it caught the glint of the sun. As I brushed the dirt away from it, I recognized the fake, pink diamonds that formed the initials BLM.
Bonnie Louise McRae.