Secret Santa (21 page)

“She’s going to make it, though, right? You got it in time?”

Charli stretched her neck and considered the question. Her heart wanted to say, “Absolutely! Yes!” But she’d seen how sick Bethie was...and HUS was serious.

“I...I honestly don’t know, Neil. I’ll feel a lot better if we can get her to CHOA.”

Neil’s face visibly paled. His brows drew together and he swallowed hard.

“She wouldn’t be here, Charli. If...”

At his words, echoes of her own thoughts, a tear trickled down her cheek. She dashed it away. “I’ve called DPH. They’re bringing in a team. You were right, Neil.”

“Yeah. Well.” He stared into the concrete wall hard enough to bore holes in it.

“I know you’re angry. So say it. Go ahead. Tell me you told me so. Tell me it’s all my fault.” She reached out a hand to his arm.

Neil stepped back and stared at her with flat eyes. “Just so you know. The migrants are going to be on page one this week. Do you want to give me a quote?”

As she had the night she’d stood listening to the doctors run the code on her father, Charli knew the bitter taste of regret. Her heart physically ached at the finality in Neil’s tone, the disappointment in his eyes.

Whatever she and Neil might have had was gone, and gone before she’d even realized the prize she’d held.

With as much dignity as she could muster, she lifted her chin. “Only that I am aware how my decisions—or rather the lack of my decision to act—endangered the lives of many people. And...I am...” Her throat closed up. “So sorry.”

Neil didn’t bother to hide the contempt that twisted his mouth. There would be no more dimples for her, she knew, no more admiring glances, no more laudatory articles about her prowess as a doctor. He gave her a stiff half nod of his head. “I appreciate the quote.” With that, he spun on his heel and walked to his car.

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

“T
HE
S
TATE
M
EDICAL
B
OARD
has confirmed it’s investigating a south Georgia physician who covered up an outbreak of
E. coli
that has led to at least eleven people sickened from a migrant-run farmer’s stand―”

Neil punched the radio knob off with a stab of his finger. He didn’t need to hear another state news bulletin about Charli. He’d written it. It was his article that had blown the whole cover-up. The only things he’d left out of the story were her mother and the part about the Secret Santa—that was the least he could do for her.

He parked the car in about the same place he had when Charli and he had come to the farm only a few days before.

Only a few days? Today was just Thursday, and he’d broken the story early, putting it on the news wire so the dailies could pick it up.

It felt like it had been forever. It felt like Charli—the woman he’d hoped had been Charli, anyway—had been ripped from his heart. Neil stiffened his resolve. He didn’t need the woman she’d turned out to be. The Charli who had turned a blind eye and allowed an outbreak to explode unchecked was not the Charli he’d fallen for.

The migrant settlement looked even more ramshackle and deserted than it had before. Mainly because it
was
deserted.

Every single family here had disappeared into the mist, vanished. It was of huge concern to the state officials because they still hadn’t pinpointed the cause of the outbreak.

Sure, they’d figured out the common denominator had been the migrants, who had grown the vegetables sold at the farmer’s stand, and the vegetables had sickened Bethie Brantley and at least ten other people in addition to the workers. But had someone brought the bacteria in? And if so, was a public health risk compounded because the migrants had taken the source with them?

So now, Neil waited for the rest of the team sent in from the state to leave their vehicles. They’d asked him, since he’d been the one translating for Charli, to walk them through and give them some context.

Stretching and joking, taking last swigs out of their coffee travel mugs, the doctors piled out of an SUV with state license plates.

Didn’t they know that lives were at stake?

Maybe they were as cavalier about this as Charli had been. She had made her choice to hide from the truth, and she apparently was still making it. Charli, for all practical purposes, had vanished, too. After she’d gotten Bethie a bed and had her airlifted to Scottish Rite in Atlanta, Charli had locked up the office and disappeared.

Neil opened the car door and trailed behind the state health people, his camera in hand. They began an exhaustive tour of the run-down trailers.

“So this was where they said the Patient Zero was?” asked one of the doctors, a tall thin lady whose pants were a quarter-inch too short for her, even in the flats she wore. Neil had learned she was an epidemiologist who had a string of letters after her name.

“Yeah. We started at the first trailer, and the families kept pointing us to other people who had been sick. Best I could understand, one of the guys who lived here in this trailer was the first to come down with it,” Neil told her. He looked around at the space originally designed to be an open kitchen/dining area/living room. It was still crowded with stained folding cots—eight, if he’d counted right.

The tiny bedrooms had been outfitted with rough bunk beds that slept another half dozen in all the spaciousness of a prison cell, but a whole lot less weatherproof. “Though, I guess calling this place a trailer is a bit generous.”

“Too right,” the woman said. “Appalling. They didn’t even have a roof over their heads—I count three buckets in here alone to catch leaks.”

When they went back outside, Neil listened as the doctors bounced ideas back and forth on the origin of the outbreak. He scribbled madly to get everything down for the next edition of the paper. The poor migrants weren’t the problem—Charli had been the problem. If she’d done what he’d advised her, the sick could have been treated without spreading the infection to the produce stand they ran.

His coverage of the whole incident had unleashed a firestorm of xenophobic rage. What he’d written with the intent to arouse sympathy for the poor suckers who’d called this place home had generated the opposite effect.

Readers wrote fiery letters, demanding that the community clinic be closed and that zoning ordinances be passed to prohibit settlements such as Whitaker’s. Neil could have cheered that last one, but those who pushed for the ordinance really wanted to run every Hispanic person out of town on a rail.

The AP and state and national news organizations had picked up the story. Even CNN had been down to get some video. Already, major newspapers and internet blogs had called to offer him jobs. Other weekly editors had given him congrats for his bravery about taking on the system in the interest of public health.

Still, Neil couldn’t help but feel guilty. He’d made all this splash on the poor unlucky fate of Bethie Brantley. Maybe he should have called DPH himself when he realized Charli wasn’t going to.

“Hey, is that—that’s a herd of cows!” One doctor in the team shadowed his eyes and peered across the fence at the watering hole.

“Why, yeah,” Neil couldn’t help saying. “We have cows around here. Lots of ’em.”

Now the whole team became extremely fixated on the cows. Even as they crossed the field to the fence, one of them was counting the number of cows around the watering hole. Another was snapping pictures like mad on a small digital camera he’d tugged out of his pocket. A third was walking a straight line from the fence to the greenhouse.

Neil couldn’t figure out what all the excitement was about. He lagged behind them in order to compose a photo of the doctors as a group. As he was about to hustle over to join them, the slam of metal caught him up short.

Neil turned to see Lige Whitaker rounding the hood of his truck and striding over to him.

Talk about someone coming out fighting. First thing Lige had done was very publicly suspend Charli’s privileges at the hospital. Next, he’d issued a typewritten statement asserting he’d had no knowledge of Charli’s failure to report the outbreak to the DPH.

Who knows? Maybe Charli had overreacted. Maybe Lige hadn’t come right out and threatened her.

Funny, though, how Lige dodged every one of Neil’s phone calls and visits.

“You and your camera. Off my property,” Lige told him. “You’re trespassing.”

“I don’t think so. You allowed the DPH access, didn’t you?”

“Last I heard, you weren’t employed by the DPH. Unless you’re folding up that slanderous thing you call a paper—”

“Libel. It would be libel. And it’s only libel if a) you can prove it’s not true, b) I knew it wasn’t true and c) I was malicious in intent,” Neil corrected him. “And the DPH asked me to come along.”

“Go to—” Lige sent a fist toward Neil’s jaw, but Neil swept up his arm—the one with the cast—and stopped the punch with a block to Lige’s forearm. The older man stepped back, his mouth slack, and rubbed his arm.

“It’s nice to be nice,” Neil told him. “But I don’t have to if you insist.”

“You, smearing my name, practically accusing me of ordering Charli Prescott to cover up this mess.”

“You didn’t? You want to go on the record with that?”

“I most certainly did not. Charli made her own decisions. All I did was take two sick guys to her house one night for treatment. She’s the one who covered it all up. I guess it’s because she’s partial to those illegals. And now look! All my help, sick and well alike, has run off and I can’t get my crop planted. I’m on the hook for a million plus!”

“Right.” Neil wanted to deck the man. This was the guy who had stolen Charli from him, and part of him still believed that, without Lige, she would have never contemplated such a cover-up. “You didn’t have a thing to do with it. She decided, on her own, that it would be better to keep this under the radar. Because she has a soft spot for migrant workers.” Neil didn’t bother to keep the sarcasm from his words.

“It’s just like I explained it to that CNN fellow. She donated all that money to ’em, now, didn’t she? Could have helped tax-paying legal citizens here by donating it to the hospital, but no, she had to go give it to freeloaders. And you—you son of a—”

Lige’s focus suddenly moved from cussing Neil out to the group by the fence. “What are they doing? That’s my wellhead they’re messing with. And my greenhouse!”

Lige stomped off toward the fence. Neil followed, frustrated that Lige hadn’t finished what he’d been saying. Had Lige known all along that Charli was the Secret Santa? Maybe Lige had indeed given Charli the money, a payoff to keep her quiet.

Neil came up to the team in time to hear sharp words being exchanged. He was amazed to see that Lige was so angry he’d dispensed with his usual “aw shucks” charm that Neil now realized had been a mask.

“Heck, yeah, I put this wellhead here! I drilled this deep well my very own self, like my daddy taught me. How else do you think I could irrigate this field? And that one over there, too.” Lige snapped at the epidemiologist with the alphabet soup after her name.

“And these irrigation lines...they go to what?” the epidemiologist asked.

“To these onion fields! Weren’t you listening? And to my greenhouse there. And I gave them ungrateful illegals free water out of it!” He shook his head and reached into his shirt pocket for a pack of cigarettes. It took him two tries to tap a cigarette out of the pack, his hands were shaking so badly.

Neil quietly raised his camera and captured the scene, really liking the way the confrontation gave the photo’s composition energy.

The epidemiologist nodded at Lige and scribbled some notes down on her clipboard. She delivered the next question in the blandest of tones. “Uh-huh. And was this greenhouse the source of the produce at the farmer’s stand?”

“Is that a crime? Can I help it if those sorry good-for-nothings brought some dread disease here from wherever they came from and got snot and spit all over my vegetables when they were running my stand?” Lige’s fingers still trembled with agitation as he thumbed a lighter to the cigarette he’d stuck in his mouth. But a deep draw of the cigarette seemed to calm him.

The epidemiologist pressed on. “Did you get clearance from the health department, Mr. Whitaker? For the well? And were you in compliance with state regulations concerning the sale of fruits and vegetables?”

“Missy, I
am
the health department in this county!” Lige ground the words out around his cigarette and jabbed a finger into his breastbone. “You’re talking to the chairman of the Broad County Hospital Authority.”

The woman didn’t look a bit browbeaten by Lige’s tone. She raised an eyebrow at her fellow team members. They nodded at her unspoken message.

“What?” Lige’s confidence seemed shaken. “What are y’all saying?”

“Mr. Whitaker, by order of the state, we’re closing this well and anything watered from it, pending testing.”

“No, by God, you’re not.” He jerked the cigarette out of his mouth and leaned within inches of the woman’s face. “I need that water! It’s my right! And those fields are my livelihood! You can’t do that, not in the United States of America!”

She stepped smartly back, careful not to touch him. “See those cows over there, Mr. Whitaker?” the epidemiologist asked, sweeping a hand in the direction of the herd across the fence. “See their watering hole?”

“Yeah? They gotta have something to drink.” Lige folded his arms across his chest, his cigarette dangling from his fingertips. “What, you gonna kill my cows now, too?”

“No. But we will need to check to see if you’ve sold any of those cows for beef without proper inspection. That watering hole backs up to your wellhead.”

“So? So?” Lige spat out the word. “You think you’re so smart with your college education and your state car and your—”

“Sir.” The epidemiologist broke in, implacable, totally unscathed by his abuse. “That wellhead is a straight shot down, a sure path for any contaminants. And I’d bet dollars to doughnuts those cows have contaminated that watering hole, which contaminated the well, which...well, you can follow the logic.”

Neil’s breath caught as he began to understand the epidemiologist’s train of thought. His mouth went dry. Nausea roiled in his stomach.

“No! Nah, no way, no how!” Lige’s voice went reedy-thin with rage. “It was that Prescott woman! She covered up those migrant workers! She didn’t let me know how sick they were! If I’d known she was hiding the truth, well, I’d have turned her in myself!” Whitaker shouted.

The epidemiologist’s mouth curled in disgust. She shook her head. “Mr. Whitaker, you have it wrong. It wasn’t the migrant workers or Dr. Prescott’s failure to report the outbreak that caused all of this misery. If I were you, I’d get a very good lawyer, because an army of personal injury attorneys are going to be gunning for you.”

“Me? They should be suing
her!
She’s the quack in all of this! She’s the doctor!”

“Sir.” The epidemiologist’s tone was careful, measured and completely contemptuous. “From our review of the records, that little girl became ill before you took the migrant workers to Dr. Prescott for care. She became ill at about the same time they did. So, no. It wasn’t Dr. Prescott’s failure to promptly report the outbreak. Your total lack of compliance with and utter disregard for state regulations?
That’s
what caused that little girl to almost die.”

Lige Whitaker turned a sickly shade of green. He looked as though any second he might retch.

And Neil? Neil felt the same way.

Sure, he’d reported the facts as he’d known them. But in his anger with Charli, he’d made sure to choose words that would vilify her. He had crucified Charli. He had hung her out to dry, spread her face across the nation’s newspapers and television sets as the woman who had caused all this sickness.

When, actually, she’d been as much a victim as Bethie Brantley and all those poor miserable migrants.