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  The x-rays showed just a touch of arthritis in Coretha’s fingers—and a very unexpected dark black ring about the diameter of a nickel that cut into Coretha’s wrist in two of the films. The area inside and immediately around the ring was almost as dark. The ring wasn’t visible on the third.

  “That’s weird.” Coretha rubbed her wrist. “What the heck is going on?”

  “Something’s wrong somewhere, that’s for sure,” Allison agreed. She reviewed the variables—machine, film, Coretha—and concluded she could rule out Coretha because the black ring wasn’t always there.

  In terms of the machine, she couldn’t think of a problem that would produce two unexpected and very different anomalies—a tennis ball-sized void in Cloninger’s mouth and the ring-like void in Coretha’s wrist.

  Coretha anticipated her next thought. “I’ll call our film supplier. Maybe someone else has reported problems.”

  “Good idea. And let’s hope no one comes in with a broken leg.”

  Coretha laughed. “At least until Wednesday.”

  Still brooding at the end of the day over the unexplained occurrences of tissue death, Allison packed the stack of medical journals she had set aside for the evening—even though she knew they likely would go no further than the pile on her bedside table—and went home.

  She knew something was amiss as soon as she cracked the front door. Invariably, Hippocrates sauntered up the greet her. Not today. She checked his usual napping places—under the bed, in the towel bin, on top of her winter boots in the closet—and found no sign of her beloved cat.

  “Hippocrates!” she called. She waited for the sharp cry of acknowledgement that always came. Silence.

  She tried to reconstruct the morning. Was it possible she mistakenly left the cat outside when she’d gone to work? She slid open her patio door and called into the evening. Quiet, except for the muted engines of a passenger jet throttling back overhead and the whoosh of tires on a nearby road.

  Panic swelled within her as she imagined the worst. Hippocrates was her truest companion—unquestioningly loyal, unconditionally loving, consistently comforting. Plenty of research showed that pets could enhance their owners’ mental health and sense of well-being but she believed Hippocrates actually had the power to heal. Strange, she knew full well, that a doctor would believe such a thing about her cat. But she had evidence. Just as she had rescued the malnourished black and white shelter kitten during the meltdown stage of her marriage, Hippocrates had rescued her.

  Now, the only friend she could count on was missing. Worse, it was her fault.

  Her search of nearby roads turned up no sign of the cat. She felt sick. An innocent life had been entrusted to her and she had fallen short. She returned to her condo and cried. When she was done, she took a deep breath, curled up on the couch with a throw and resolved to wait up for him. She couldn’t think of anything else to do.

  To pass the time, she tried to think about the other mystery of the day—the cases of unexplained tissue death among her patients. At least that mystery offered her leads to pursue. She dialed the clinic. Coretha wouldn’t be there until the morning but Allison wanted her to get the message first thing. “Find Audrey Pringle, Ricky Scruggs, Candi Cloninger and Wanda Faggart. Get them to come to the clinic. I need to give them another look.”

  She sank bank into the cushions, readjusted the throw and resumed torturing herself.

  Chapter Eleven

  The night brought Josh no peace.

  He thrashed in bed, his mind caroming crazily and unproductively between trying to recall details of the day’s meeting with Dr. Pepper and reviewing things Katie needed for camp. At 1 a.m., he gave up on sleep and opened Sharon’s closet, still full of her clothes.

  Her scent enveloped him, as if Sharon herself had breezed into the room. He hugged her robe, burying his face in its soft folds. For a moment, she was with him, not just the aromas of her shampoos, lotions and perfumes.

  He found a pain pill in the pocket. How like her! Wanting to be present for every possible moment with their daughter, Sharon had resisted taking them because they knocked her out. But in the end, the agony had been overwhelming. With Josh and Katie at her bedside, she’d slid imperceptibly from sleep to eternity aided by a powerful morphine drip.

  Josh rummaged around the closet until he found Sharon’s sewing basket. He settled at the kitchen table, threaded a needle with considerable difficulty and set out attaching name tags to every stitch of clothing, towel and sheet Katie had laid out to pack.

  When he was done with the nametags, he double-checked her non-clothing items against a list Camp Kanawha had provided: Bug spray. Tennis racquet. Flashlight. Water bottle. Sunscreen.

  He had added a few items of his own. Disposable camera. Journal. Stamps. Things so that I can know what it’s like for you even though we’re apart, he thought.

  He fell into a fitful sleep but was beset by a recurring nightmare in which it was past deadline and the Winston News printing press would not start.

  He was grateful for Tuesday, a day closer to answers about Katie.

  He looked in on his daughter at 7a.m., still asleep amidst a zoo-full of stuffed animals, each at one time indispensable, all now observers from her bookcase except for the favored koala that sat on her pillow; glittering soccer trophies, each one taller and more elaborate than the next, crowding for space on a section of her dresser with tubes of lip gloss and mascara (had he been right to allow it?); a wall of soccer team pictures and posters of boy bands. John Steinbeck’s Travels With Charley lay open by her bed. On her bedside table sat the team picture of the fifth-grade Black Ravens with the “13-0” sign held by Katie. The team had insisted she hold it. Even the other parents knew she was the best player. And the best kid, too, at least by his thinking. Katie could score all the goals in a 5-0 shutout and she’d credit her team. But if the opponent scored, Katie usually took the blame for allowing the goal. A gorgeous woman stood in the back row of the photo. Sharon. The team mom. Gibbs bent over and woke his daughter with a kiss and a whisper.

  She sat up and rubbed the sleep from her eyes. “Only four more days, Dad! I’m soooo excited about camp!”

  After microwaving a packet of oatmeal and toasting a bagel for her, he sent her off to school.

  A familiar feeling washed over him—a hollow, empty, pit-of-the-stomach feeling, a true heartache—and after a moment he identified it. He felt homesick. No parents. No wife. No soul mate. One child and she would soon be gone. Maybe just to camp, but it was the beginning. In recent years the focus of his life had been fulfilling his promise to Sharon that he would take care of their daughter. Now she was going away and he was the one who was homesick. Or perhaps, it was more than that, he acknowledged to himself. Perhaps the feeling was fear, fear that he would be left alone once again.

  He did his best to pull himself out his funk. The Winston News needed to print its next edition whatever his mental state. The masthead boasted that the paper had been publishing since 1896 and it would not do to break the string. And he needed to get busy selling for the Old Fashioned River Days special edition which would be distributed at the festival’s opening ceremonies and which carried so many ads it often determined whether the newspaper made or lost money for the entire year. The News literally couldn’t afford to fall short there, not with the prospective new buyers in the midst of due diligence checking every dollar of revenue and dime of expense. If it was usually the difference between profit and loss, this year the section was the difference between selling for a reasonable amount and being forced to unload the News at a fire-sale price.

  It hit him that Katie’s diagnosis could change everything. If she did face a year of treatment and rehabilitation, then not being a one-armed paperhanger at the weekly newspaper was a very good thing. On the other hand, a move would mean changing Katie’s doctors mid-treatment. And what about health insurance? H
is head spun.

  Josh found his voice mail light blinking and a note from a carrier and a misprinted copy of the News pinned to his desk chair when he arrived at the office.

  Mr. Gibbs, this is what they give me to deliver to my customers. Can you talk with someone about it? This is just terrible to have to deliver this type of paper to my customers. I been with the News for the last ten years off and on and this is the worst I seen.

  Josh sighed. Checking voice mail could wait. Too soon to hear from Pepper and any other calls were almost guaranteed to mean another distraction. He assumed the misprint problem wasn’t widespread and he had until Thursday to smooth the feathers of the carrier before the next edition. Sales for the River Days special section, on the other hand, could not wait.

  He started with his most likely prospects—the businesses that had advertised in the section the previous year. The bank which held the mortgage on the newspaper building renewed for page three. The Recovery Metals plant reserved its usual full-page ad. A metal recycling facility and foundry, the plant bought plenty of classified employment advertising in the Winston News but since it sold nothing directly to the public, this was the only display ad it ran all year, its purpose simply to generate goodwill by showing support for a very popular local event. The car dealerships quickly fell into place, as did the furniture store. The Cotter Funeral Home, a regular, tried to pull out on the grounds that a funeral wasn’t an impulse buy but Gibbs reminded owner Mark Cotter that the River Days issue was a keepsake in many households, sure to be close at hand year-round.

  He ran into unexpected resistance from Woody Conroy, this year’s Chamber of Commerce head whose River City Appliance store had taken the back cover—the most expensive piece of real estate in the section because of its high visibility—for as long as anyone could remember. “Okay,” Conroy said when he finally relented. “But this ad really needs to pay off for us.”

  “It worked last time. I bought a refrigerator from you.”

  At the end of the day Tuesday, Josh dealt with the nagging voice mail light. It was Allison, asking for an update on Katie. He’d call her tomorrow when, hopefully, there would be news to pass on.

  Chapter Twelve

  “The Chair recognizes the member from Illinois.”

  One of the country’s best-known congressmen rose on the half-empty floor of the U.S. House of Representatives. Nearby, a representative from California scrolled through the Sporting News on an iPad concealed within a copy of Congressional Quarterly. A knot of members huddled near the Speaker’s chair erupted in guffaws at the conclusion of a colleague’s joke. The Illinois representative propped a poster of a half-dozen mug shots on an easel and launched into speech lauding outstanding federal employees, undeterred that no one was listening.

  Congressman Harry Dorn yawned. His Illinois colleague really wasn’t that bad a guy. Too bad his political career was about to be cut short, and by scandal at that.

  Dorn pushed away from his desk—a real conversation piece since it contained a bullet hole from 1954 when Puerto Rican nationalists opened fire from the balcony and injured five members—and made his way to his party’s cloakroom, the hallway-like area just off the floor housing easy chairs, a row of dark wood phone booths, portraits of partisan heroes, political cartoons lampooning the opposition and a snack bar, recently outfitted with two flat screen televisions. The two House cloakrooms were the political parties’ clubhouses, havens during official sessions where members like Dorn could suck down a cigarette, take a phone call or engineer a deal away from public view.

  Dorn grabbed one of the cloakroom’s official yellow phone message pads. He filled in the Illinois representative’s name. He checked the boxes labeled ‘Returned Your Call’ and ‘Please Call Back’ and wrote down a phone number he had seen in one of DC’s alternative newspapers.

  A recess followed the Illinois congressman’s speech. Dorn crowded on to an elevator with his colleagues who were were set upon by a gaggle of reporters as soon as they stepped off at the basement floor. Dorn let the yellow phone message fall from his hand, confident that when the crowd moved on, some enterprising reporter would find it. The number would be called and the Illinois congressman would be linked to the phone number of a gay escort service.

  It didn’t matter whether the congressman had ever patronized the service. In fact, Dorn assumed he hadn’t. But the note would raise the question. Actual indiscretions might surface and if not, gossip would take over. It would not play well in the congressman’s conservative downstate district.

  Personally, Dorn was not specifically opposed to gays. He understood there were a number of them closeted among his colleagues, even on his side of the aisle. But the representative had crossed him one too many times, most recently voting against Dorn’s energy bill which he had previously promised to support. Outing was the price. Of course, his well-honed leak technique ensured that no one would have any way of connecting the assassination to Harry Dorn.

  Four hours later Dorn was boarding a Cessna Citation V for a trip back to the district. His phone rang just as he reached the top of the gangway. He couldn’t believe his ears.

  “No black people?” he exploded into the phone. “What the hell do you mean there won’t be any black people?” He put his hand over the mouthpiece and handed the phone to Clendenin. “Fix it.”

  Dorn selected one of the plush leather seats and stretched out. He could afford to. Of the eight seats on this particular plane, only three were occupied this Tuesday night—by himself, by Clendenin, now across the aisle, and further to the rear, by another aide. The curtain between the cabin and the cockpit slid open and the co-pilot emerged. “Drink, sir?”

  “Scotch.” Dorn nodded to Clendenin who was still on the phone. “One for him, too.” Dorn looked at Joel Richey, the aide in the back. “Nothing for him.”

  His cabin mates couldn’t be more different, Dorn thought. Peering at maps and screens of polling data through horned-rimmed glasses while working his calculator and Blackberry, Dan Clendenin looked like the reigning genius of American political strategists. Snoring, with his hair uncombed, his tie askew and his mouth open, Joel Richey looked like what he was—a deadweight slacker who owed his position to his father’s campaign contributions, an irritating daily reminder that money came with strings and could lead to problems—like a TV commercial with no blacks in the crowd shots.

  Strategists. Gurus. Aides. Advisers. He could barely keep track of them all. He’d always had a fair-size office staff, dozens of different people if he thought back over the years, bright-eyed young people who came to Washington looking for glamour and believing that they could make a difference. A few stayed—those like Richey who couldn’t get better jobs anywhere else—but most left much wiser a few years later, turning over so quickly he remembered a few of them only as “the blonde” or “the black guy” or “the sissy” or whatever fit. Add a senatorial campaign, with new hires like Clendenin, a high-powered itinerant political guru who only joined campaigns he thought could win, and other consultants for every conceivable thing from wardrobe to political issues, and the personnel lineup became a parade of faces.

  The co-pilot delivered the drinks and disappeared into the cockpit. The plane tore down the runway and lifted into the sky moments later.

  Through wispy clouds Dorn picked out the bright spike of the Washington Monument, the pale lunar glow of the Capitol, the Rayburn office building, the White House.

  He got a clear view of Dulles and, beyond that, snaking red arteries of tail lights—the cars like corpuscles being pumped out from the city’s heart each evening before being sucked back to its chambers beginning before dawn. A half moon hovered over the right wing, illuminating the folds of the Blue Ridge.

  He identified Interstate 66 and Interstate 270. West Virginians could thank two of his colleagues for them—United States senators who understood that the highways would serve
as neural pathways connecting their mountainous, nearly impassable state to the outside world. One had grown northwest toward Fairmont, Morgantown and Wheeling (where one of the senators lived) and the other had branched west and south toward Beckley and Charleston and Huntington (where the other senator lived), not coincidentally passing White Sulphur Springs and the Greenbrier resort, home of the government’s Cold War emergency capital. Those highways, Dorn devoutly believed, represented true public service, the kind of service he would deliver when he succeeded one of the senators, who was retiring.

  The roads, he had to acknowledge, had come at a price. They had slashed through the mountains and bled the state of people—whole communities which seeped from the hollows and flowed out the hillbilly highways to the factories and cubicles in far-away cities. Over the past few decades, the population of the state had actually declined. But the highways also nourished new development—vacation homes, wood chip mills and ski resorts crucial to further growth. And, it could be argued, the roads brought an infusion of federal spending that spawned many new government jobs for the state. And incumbent congressmen could now drive home from Washington in hours instead of days, facilitating their repeated reelection and, therefore, their seniority on important committees. He was an example.

  Dorn was grateful he no longer had to make the drive very often. He was well into in his eighth term in the U.S. House and he had done it plenty of times in the early years. But as easy as the interstates made things, why drive when courtesy of some corporation or lobbying group, he could be at Chuck Yeager Airport in Charleston two hours after leaving his House office building and at his retreat on the river an hour after that?

  Or, if traffic was particularly light, Dorn reflected as he sat on his front porch watching the river the next morning, in forty-five minutes.

  He called his retreat Possum Island.

  The actual Possum Island was a spit of land that broke the surface of the Ohio River about fifty miles south of Winston. Dorn had spent his favorite times there as a boy, poling a log and plywood raft across a shallow channel that separated the island from the West Virginia side, catching crawfish that hid in the detritus that collected on the downstream shore, climbing the tall beech trees that grew in the island’s center, watching the endless procession of river traffic—barges mostly, heaped with symmetrical hills of coal. Much of what he knew about the river came from observing the island—how it could be a mile long and a quarter mile wide with flat muddy banks extending even further into the riverbed in the fall after a dry summer; how it could shrink to the size of a football field in the late spring when the melting snow in the mountains and the ice in the Monongahela and Alleghany tributaries flooded the river basin; how, inevitably, the island grew longer every year—no matter what the season—as the grains of rich topsoil eroded from upstream farms caught and collected on the island’s north end.