“I know.”
“Then clearly there is a leak from this source here to this intake here.”
“A leak or something.”
“Or something. Here’s what we’re going to do.”
“What?”
“If you can spare Vergil, he and I will go take a look.”
“And I. I’ll fix you some breakfast and—”
“Call in sick.”
“Call in sick. Let’s go back to bed. I’ll wake you at nine.”
I go back to bed dressed. I go back to ordinary sleep, as if I had dreamed the whole thing, panzers, nukes, bad water, Alice Pratt — but not Lucy.
5. BREAKFAST IN THE OLD dining room is a meal of quail, grits, beaten biscuits, fried apple rings, and the same bowl-size cups of chicoried coffee. I don’t know whether Lucy or the uncle or Carrie Bon cooked it. The uncle is proud of the quail— they’re his, he’s got a freezerful — half a dozen hot little heart-shaped morsels per plate, six tender-spicy, gamy-gladdening mouthfuls.
Lucy is half finished. She gives me a single quick look, head down, through her eyebrows. She and the uncle watch in silence while I eat. I am starved! Lucy smiles, smokes, and drinks her coffee. Satisfied, the uncle leaves.
We move to the other end of the table, where Lucy spreads out a geodetic survey map, weights the corners with cups and cellars. She summons Vergil.
When she stands, I see she’s wearing jeans too, worn and gray and soft as velvet. They fit her admirably. She sits at the head, Vergil and I flanking her; Vergil, arms folded on the table, eyes fixed on the map.
“I think we got trouble,” says Lucy, plucking tobacco from her tongue. “I think there’s been a Grade Two incident at Grand Mer. Either a spill or a leak. Vergil knows the plumbing — maybe he can help us. What I can’t understand is how in the hell it could get into the Ratliffe intake upriver. In any case, it’s my business. When people get sick, etiology unknown, it becomes my business. What do you think?”
Vergil and I look at each other, “One question, Lucy,” I say.
“What?”
“You know those queries you made of the data banks last night?” “Yes?”
“Do they know they’ve been queried by you?”
“Why?” She looks at me strangely.
“Just curious.”
“It’s routine epidemiology. I’m entitled. They wouldn’t red-flag it — as they might if the query were suspicious, some hacker fishing around. They know me. I did the same thing with the Jap encephalitis, though not on such a grand scale as last night.”
“I see. Lucy, are you going to notify the feds, EPA or NRC?”
“Of course. This is heavy-duty stuff — and you found it. We found it. We’ll both report it, okay? But before the stampede of bureaucrats, I’d like to have a look for myself. Want to come? I think you better come. You’re the guy that blew the whistle. I should think you’d be interested.”
“I’m interested.” She’s forgotten it is my idea.
“Vergil’s going to come. He knows the territory and the technology. He’s our resource person. Okay, Vergil?”
“Sure,” says Vergil without looking up.
“Okay, now look.” Lucy weights the map with more crystal goblets and salt cellars. “Here we are at Pantherburn. Here’s old Grand Mer, now a blind loop of the river, a lake. Up here is Angola, the state pen, a plantation with ten thousand inmates — which incidentally is supplied by the Ratliff number-one water district. Here’s Fedville—”
“Is that in the water district?” I ask.
“No, it’s not. They’ve got their own intake half a mile upriver.”
“I see.”
“You see what?”
“Nothing.”
“Here’s Tunica Island, not really an island, as you see, but part of the great Tunica Swamp. Here’s the Grand Mer facility, reactor and cooling tower. Here’s Raccourci Chute, the New River, and here upriver, less than a mile from the facility, is the Ratliff intake. And next to it, over the levee, is the pumping station which supplies the area of the occurrence of your syndrome. Here, not three hundred yards upriver, is Ratliff number-two intake, which supplies all of Fedville. Now here’s the question. You already know, don’t you?” She cocks an eye at me.
“Sure. The question is how what you call an incident can affect number-one intake, which is upriver, and not affect number two.”
“Right,” she says, eyeing me. “Why do you say ‘what you call an incident’?”
“That’s what you call it. I don’t know what it is.”
“Let’s go look.” She pushes back her chair.
“Do you just drive up to the gate and announce your business?”
“I sure as hell do. Because it is my business. And I’ve got both federal and state passes. I can go to the facility or the water district number-one station or the Fedville station. I can go anywhere. You, Tom, are coming along because it is also your business. You discovered it. What we don’t know and mean to find out is whether it is a one-shot spill and we’ve seen the worst or whether it’s an ongoing contamination. Vergil is coming because he knows pipes. What we’ve got here, both in the facility and in the water district, is essentially nothing more than a system of pipes. And Vergil is majoring in pipes, aren’t you, Vergil?”
Vergil smiles and nods.
“What we got here is a pipe problem,” Lucy tells us. “A busted pipe. Got to be. Let’s go.”
“Lucy,” I say, taking her arm, “before we go I’d like to check one more reading upstairs. Could Vergil meet us at the truck in, say, fifteen minutes?”
“No problem.” Vergil nods and is gone.
6. LUCY WAITS, SMILING, at her keyboard. “Who do you want to run?”
“Ellen.”
“Ellen.” One swift, hooded glance, but her voice doesn’t change. “Okay. How do we get a handle?”
“Easy. She’s a volunteer nurse at Belle Ame Academy. So she takes the same physical all schoolteachers and staff take. Try State Public Health.”
“Right. That’s — ah — Van Dorn’s outfit, isn’t it?” she asks carefully.
“Yes.”
“You got her SS number?”
“Yes.” It’s with mine in my wallet. I read it out to her.
She hits keys without comment.
The screen nixes. She looks at me neutrally.
“What name did you use?”
“Ellen More.”
“Try Ellen Oglethorpe. That’s her maiden name and tournament name.”
A nod, no comment, not an eye flicker. She hits keys. “There she is.”
NA-24—2.
We look in silence. “That’s not much, Tom.”
“No, not much. But too much. Let’s try Van Dorn. I don’t have his number.”
“No problem,” she says, as neutrally as I. “I can get it from Fedville file.”
She gets it, hits more keys. The screen answers laconically.
NA-24—O.
“How could that be?” I ask nobody in particular.
Lucy waits, like a stenographer, watching the keyboard. After a while she looks up at me. “What’s the matter?”
“Nothing. Let’s go,” I say. “Vergil will be waiting.”
We pile into Lucy’s big pickup, Vergil standing aside so I’ll sit in the middle next to Lucy. The uncle is nowhere in sight. Maggie, the pointer, thinking she’s going hunting, jumps clear over the tailgate into the truck bed.
“We’re not going to have any trouble,” Vergil tells us in a soft voice. “There’s only one fellow at the intake gate. I know him. He used to fish with my daddy. He’s from Baton Rouge.” The only sign that Vergil is black is the way he pronounces Baton Rouge, with a rough g, Roodge.
He’s right. There is no trouble. We swing off the Angola road to a chain link gate, Lucy not even showing her pass to the uniformed guard in his booth, who probably recognizes her truck, out and over the Tunica flats between the high-rises of Fedville on the right and the barbed-wire chain link fence of the Grand Mer facility on the left. The gravel road slants up and over the levee. There across the still waters of old Grand Mer, now Lake Mary, and not half a mile away looms the great lopped-off cone of the cooling tower, looking for all the world like a child’s drawing of Mt. St. Helens after it blew its top. The thin flag of vapor flies from its crater. From the pumping station below a brace of great pipes strapped together like the blood vessels in the thigh humps directly up and over the levee, making an arch high enough for a truck to pass under. Across the upper blind end of Lake Mary is the old revetment, great mattresses of concrete, old, moldering, lichened, laid down years ago in a vain attempt to thwart the river’s capricious decision to jump the neck of the loop and take a shortcut south — to no avail. Ol’ Man River done made up his mind.