Critical Judgment (1996) (34 page)

First the red pickup, now this.
Get out! Get out now
. Lyle Quinn was delivering his message with all the subtlety of a wrecking ball.

Well, I’ve got news for you, Lyle
, Abby thought.
I’m off the fence now—but not on the side you expected
.

She went to the basement, retrieved her notebook, and began plodding through the data once more. Unlike her previous efforts, though, this time she knew what question to ask: which came first, the illness or the test?

Abby wasn’t surprised when the repairman took much longer to arrive than he had promised. Although there was no way the man could have any idea what she was doing, she was just paranoid enough to close her notebook and conceal it in a kitchen cabinet until he was finished. Her preliminary survey of the data was confirming what she suspected. Somehow the MRIs were
preceding
certain symptoms, not just diagnosing them.

It was after three. Almost thirty sleepless hours now. The handyman talked incessantly as he worked, sharing town gossip with no regard for whether Abby knew the person or not. She brushed off several questions about the nature of the damage to the front of the house, then finally explained it away as blandly as she could—some vandals on a spree.

Still, bullet holes were bullet holes, and she could only imagine what a juicy yarn he would be spinning for his next customer about the crazy lady from the big city. She was smiling at the notion that no story the man could conjure up would come close to matching the truth, when the phone began ringing.

Reflexively, Abby hurried to the bedroom nightstand. But then she could only stand there, staring down at the phone through one ring, two, three. One more ring and the answering machine would kick in. Thinking about
the hang-up she was certain had been Josh, she forced herself to pick up the receiver.

“Hello?”

“Abby, this is Kelly Franklin.” The woman spoke in a near whisper. “Are you alone?”

Abby felt her temperature rise a degree at the mention of the woman’s name.

“I’m not,” she said coolly. “There’s a repairman fixing a shattered window in my living room. What do you want?”

“Please get rid of him, Abby. I have to know you’re alone before we can talk. I need to change phones and call you back. Is ten minutes long enough?”

“What’s this all about?”

“Please. It’s very, very important.”

“Where are you?”

“Right now I’m at the library. Please—trust me.”

Abby sank onto the bed.
Why should I, lady?

“Okay, Kelly,” she said. “Ten minutes.”

I
t took some fast talking and a twenty-dollar tip, but at last the handyman got the message that Abby wanted him to take a break—now. He was halfway down the front walk when Kelly Franklin called again. This time Abby snatched up the phone.

“Your friend Quinn had someone deliver an ultimatum to me with a high-powered rifle, Kelly,” she said. “You led me to believe you wouldn’t tell him about our conversation for twenty-four hours. It was more like twenty-four minutes.”

“I never said a word to him. I swear I didn’t.”

“Spare me. You said you thought he was all bark and no bite. Well, those bullets were the real thing. They wrecked the front of my house, and they scared the hell out of me. Our staunch protector, Captain Gould, pooh-poohed the whole deal. He thinks that whoever pulled the trigger was an expert marksman who was just trying to frighten me out of town. I didn’t bother pointing out to the man that one hiccup, one little gnat in his expert marksman’s eye, and any further attempts to frighten me out of town would have been unnecessary.”

“Abby, please believe me. I never even saw Lyle after we spoke. Of course, he may have a tap on my phone—that
doesn’t seem beyond him. But I never said a word to him or anyone else. I was far too busy following up on some of the things you told me.”

She was clearly upset at Abby’s accusation, but Abby reminded herself of Lew’s warning that the woman was a consummate actor. Still, according to Captain Gould, Lyle Quinn was at church all afternoon. If Kelly hadn’t called him, she had to be right about the tap on her office phone. Abby felt some of the hard edge of her anger toward Kelly begin to soften.

“Where are you calling from now?” she asked.

“My car. I don’t trust the office phone. And there are always people hanging around pay phones, waiting to make a call.”

“All of a sudden you’re starting to sound as paranoid as the rest of us.”

“I’m beginning to feel that way. Abby, I was bothered by some things you said the first night we were together. Especially a question you asked about openings on the northeast face of the cliff. You didn’t explain the question, but it seemed clear to me you wouldn’t have brought the subject up unless you knew something.”

“I saw an old slide of the cliff, and it looked as if there were openings then. So a friend of mine and I scanned the face with high-powered binoculars. There almost certainly
were
openings there at one time—three of them. But they’ve been sealed off or camouflaged somehow.”

“I know.”

“What?”

“I know there were three windows. One of
my
good friends works at the library. I told her I wanted a book on the Patience mine. She found one locked away in the archive room. It’s waiting on reserve for you.”

“I’ll stop by there tomorrow.”

“If it’s possible, it might be better if you could go now. The library’s closed tomorrow until one.”

“I haven’t been to sleep since yesterday morning,” Abby said, rubbing at her eyes.

“Abby, I believe you now. Something has to be going on at Colstar. Something that I don’t know anything about. And I’m frightened. I left a note for you in the book explaining some things I’ve found. I … I probably shouldn’t have done that.”

Resigned as much as curious, Abby stuffed her nightshirt under the pillow and dragged a brush through her hair.

“I’ll be at the library in fifteen minutes,” she said.

“Thank you. You’ll understand more when you read my note to you. But, first, stop by the registry of deeds in the basement of town hall. Ask for volume fifty-eight, and look on page one-seventeen.”

“Page one-seventeen, volume fifty-eight.”

“The registry’s open until four. The library closes at five.”

“Anything else?”

“Yes. Forgive me for doubting you. Whatever it takes, I’m going to find out why people in this company have been keeping secrets from me.”

“Just be careful.”

“I will. Read the note I left for you and do what it says. I’ll contact you through your pager later today or this evening. And, please,
don’t
call me at the office.”

She sounded agitated now, her words spilling out one on top of the last.

“Easy does it, Kelly. We’ll get to the bottom of things.”

“No!” she snapped. “They lied to me. I hate being lied to. I don’t detest anything else as much.”

Without waiting for a reply, she slammed the receiver down.

Abby gazed longingly at the bed. As a resident, she had once done four straight months of alternating thirty-six hours on, twelve hours off, and had held up reasonably well. In fact, during training there was a certain
cachet that surrounded “doing a thirty-six.” But now she knew there was nothing heroic about long stretches without sleep, and a lot that was not only stupid, but for a physician, downright dangerous.

The Patience town hall, located on the small village green not far from the police station, was the only granite building in town. Like most everything else in the valley, it was postcard perfect, with a manicured lawn and a tree-lined duck pond in back. The cornerstone put the construction of the building at 1922.

On the way into town Abby stopped at the convenience store for a sixteen-ounce cup of hi-test coffee and a sugar fix in the guise of a jelly doughnut. In fifteen or twenty minutes she would feel as if another thirty or forty sleepless hours were quite within her capabilities. The chemically induced bravado would last for an hour or two, but the crash that followed would be the biologic equivalent of Black Monday.

No one took any particular notice of her as she crossed the marble-floored foyer and followed the signs down to the registry of deeds. The wizened man dozing behind the counter could well have been there since the cornerstone was laid.

Abby cleared her throat, startling him to his feet.

“Excuse me, I need to review some records,” Abby said. “Volume fifty-eight.”

“Can’t take the volumes out of that room.”

“I know.”

“We close in an hour.”

“I know.”

“You real estate?”

“Medicine.”

“Oh.”

The man had resumed his nap before Abby passed by him into the dimly lit registry. The space smelled of mold, dust, and old paper. The volumes, hundreds of
them bound in khaki, canvaslike fabric and embossed in gold, filled five or six long rows of shelves, as well as shelves lining the stone walls. She found volume fifty-eight with ease, but wondered how she would have found anything if she had had to depend on the man at the desk. What, she wondered, had brought Kelly Franklin here in the first place?

Page 117 was the first of a series of documents dealing with the Patience mine. It recorded the seizure of the property known as the Patience Gold Mine in 1919, by the village of Patience. The reason given was failure to pay taxes and other bills. The next document registered the purchase of the property from the village by the California Battery Company. The date was October 18, 1925.

The several succeeding pages described and depicted plans to build an alkaline-battery manufacturing plant on the site of the old mine. Abby scanned the architectural drawings and knew immediately why Kelly had started her there. Fifty feet in from the cliff was the main shaft of the Patience mine, descending over a hundred feet from the surface, and terminating beneath ground level at the bottom of the cliff. There was an artist’s arrow pointing at the shaft with the notation “To be sealed off.” Nothing else.

Wedged into the binding was a small slip of paper.
A
, it read,
I had no idea this shaft even existed. I don’t believe it was ever sealed
. Signed,
K
.

Abby traced the main aspects of the drawing on typing paper and tiptoed past the now-sleeping clerk. The existence of the shaft was not that surprising. But keeping it secret from the environmental health and safety officer of the plant certainly was. The caffeine-and-sugar mix, which had kicked in some time ago, was now augmented by a jet of her own adrenaline. Her initial take on Kelly Franklin, dating back to the ball field in Colstar Park, had been on the mark, after all.

Lyle Quinn had pushed Abby over the edge with bullets
and a battered red pickup. Abby had done the same to Kelly Franklin with a barrage of facts. And the Colstar house of cards was beginning to quiver.

The library was directly on the opposite side of the green from town hall, but Abby walked casually around the green rather than across, careful to stay as far away from the police station as possible. There was a pay phone on a pole by the front lawn—undoubtedly the one Kelly had used to call her. Abby fished out the number of Seradyne in Fremont and called Steve Bricker.

“Steve, it’s Abby Dolan,” she said. “Anything?”

He laughed.

“Peaceful as a manger,” he said. “Abby, don’t you think you’re blowing this whole business out of proportion?”

“Actually, I don’t. A woman here is dead. She was run down by a man who—”

“I know. I know. Who was poisoned with cadmium, just like Josh. You told me that.”

“Objects of hatred seem to become magnified in these people’s minds.”

“And Josh hates the four of us because we cost him his job. Abby, it just isn’t going to happen. We’ve got an extra security man inside the factory, the Fremont police are circling the block every fifteen or twenty minutes, and Pete Gentry and I are carrying guns just in case. Now, if I were you, I’d be calling hospitals. If Josh is as sick as you say he is, maybe he’ll show up at one of them.”

“That’s a good idea. Maybe I’ll do that.”

“Say, listen, Abby. You said you were coming down here.”

“As soon as I arrange for coverage at work.”

“I always thought you were a real interesting woman. How about we meet someplace for a drink?”

“Good-bye, Steve.”

Ass
.

The book Kelly had left on reserve,
A Brief History of
the Patience Mine
, was narrow and threadbare. It was held closed with a rubber band that kept Kelly’s envelope in place, and possibly kept the binding from falling apart as well. “Property of the Patience Historical Society” was stamped on the inside of the cover.

Abby took the book to a carrel in the stacks and opened Kelly’s note.

The Patience Gold Mine, first opened in 1850, produced a steady yield of ore for almost fifty years before going dry. Abby flipped through the pages of the small volume, which was written by one of the last owners of the mine, William H. Gardner. In addition to creating incredible profits for some, the mine seemed to have spawned intrigue, financial ruin, suicide, and even murder.

What goes around comes around
, Abby thought as she flipped through the pages. Colstar International, through the California Battery Company, seemed to have inherited some of the Patience Gold Mine genes.

There was a small piece of paper—Kelly’s paper—protruding from between pages thirty-eight and thirty-nine. Those pages and the ones following showed sketches of the mine. Extending some ninety or a hundred feet from the main shaft through the outer wall of
the cliff face were three ventilation shafts that correlated perfectly with the three windows on Lew’s slide. The highest of the openings was twenty-five feet below the mesa surface, the next, twenty-five feet below that, and the lowest, another twenty-five feet down, which placed it twenty-five feet above the ground. On the other side of the main shaft were two enormous man-made caverns, which expanded each year as miners chipped away at the rock. One of them appeared to be at about forty feet down and the other just below ground level. The drawings were fairly crude, but there was one, captioned “Piercing an Imposing Wall of Rock,” that showed the ventilation openings clearly.