Saving Medesha Read online

  Saving Medesha

  DK Land

  Copyright © 2011 by DK Land

  All rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced

  or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission

  of the author except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

  Original cover artwork Copyright © 2011 by LM Land

  112211

  Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Free Bonus Short Story:

  Drain Cleaner

  Chapter 1

  “It hurts Mommy! It hurts so bad”

  The young mother ran her hand across the nine-year-old boys forehead as she ran alongside the gurney. “I know Sweetie. The doctor will make it feel better. I promise he will.”

  She saw Dr. Gerard Slocum standing near the swinging doors that led into the emergency room of Medesha Memorial Hospital. “Dr. Slocum?” she yelled. “Dr. Slocum, it's Jimmy! He's terribly sick! He’s been throwing up constantly and his fever’s over a hundred and three!” In an attempt to suppress her child’s fear, as well as her own, she lowered her voice to almost a whisper. “And Doctor! Just a few minutes ago, he threw up blood!”

  Gerard Slocum was not an extremely imposing figure. At just over six feet in height, his gaunt appearance, with narrow sloping shoulders and thin arms extending several inches beyond the long sleeves of his white medical smock, the hard-working, dedicated doctor seemed to be more ghostly than real as he glanced up from the clipboard he had been studying. He smiled weakly as the two EMTs that were pushing the gurney slid to a stop next to him.

  “Hi Julie,” he said to the mother. He looked down at the boy on the gurney. “Hi Jimmy! Have we been bitten by that ol’ flu bug?”

  Jimmy tried his best to smile. “Uh huh. I think so Doctor.”

  Gerard Slocum put on his best clinical smile and said, “Well, little buddy, it looks like you and most of your friends are coming down with the same crazy flu. I guess we’ll have to get you into the ER and take a good look at ya. What do you say, partner?”

  The boy moaned, “Okay, Doctor. Can my Mom come with, please?”

  The doctor put his hand on the boy’s shoulder as he said, “Well, of course your mom can come too! You don’t think that I’d make her sit out here in this old hallway by herself do you?” As he nodded to the EMTs to take the gurney into the ER, he said, “These nice men will take you into that room right over there and your mom and I will be in to see you in just a minute, okay Jimmy?”

  As the gurney was rolled away, the boy could only nod his head.

  Doctor Slocum turned to the worried mother. “Listen to me, Julie. I’m not going to sugarcoat this for you. Yesterday afternoon we started getting kids in here about every other hour and it hasn’t let up yet.”

  The mother put her hand over her mouth in astonishment. “What is it, Dr. Slocum? Is it serious?”

  “To be honest, Julie, we don’t know if it’s serious or not,” he replied with a grave tone to his voice. “We’ve received eleven kids… well… with Jimmy, we’ve received twelve kids and we haven’t been able to discover just what we’re dealing with. It has all the symptoms of influenza, but nothing we’ve done so far has helped. Children are still in pain. They’re still vomiting, and we haven’t been able to break their fevers.”

  Julie pleaded, “Won't this just run it’s course after a couple days, and that'll be the end of it?”

  Doctor Slocum apologized. “I really am sorry, Julie. At this point, we just don’t have any definitive answers. We’re packing them with ice to try to break the fevers, but they’re still pretty sick. I want to get Jimmy on a saline drip immediately to try to stem the dehydration. Why don’t you go in and hold your son’s hand while I get some meds ordered for him?”

  She turned frantically toward the swinging doors. “Okay, Doctor. You’ll be right in then?”

  He smiled wearily, “I’ll be there in just a couple minutes.” He flagged down a nurse that was rushing down the corridor. “Cindy! Could you have Doctor Roberts paged for me please. I think we’re gonna need all hands on deck. This looks like it could be the start of something big.”

  * * *

  With a population of only twenty-five hundred people, Medesha was not what one would consider a bustling metropolis. Unless it was summer, it wouldn’t be considered a bustling anything, but Medesha was doing pretty well. Most of the town’s residents gained their livelihoods from the local clothing manufacturer, Vander-Wear, or from the lake.

  Medesha was located on the western shore of one of Northern Minnesota’s premier walleye and northern pike fishing lakes, Lake Medesha. The lake itself was shaped like a huge teardrop. In fact, until about forty years ago, the lake was known as ‘Lake of Tears’, but the town’s elders felt that a change of name was necessary if the town was going to be able to attract the free-spending fishing and boating crowd. In the years since the lake became known as Lake Medesha, a marina had been built, two small resorts had sprouted up, and the city had added a campground with over a hundred spaces, complete with water, sewer, and electricity.

  Anything that was not within two blocks of the lake was considered to be on the ‘Backside’. After World War Two, the Vandervork family had immigrated to Medesha and founded Vander-Wear, a small clothing company that specialized in outerwear for the cold northern winters. ‘Backside Medesha’ was a pretty inexpensive place to set up shop and small town Minnesota was a good place to draw a work force from. The people were dedicated and they worked hard. Soon it became apparent that Vander-Wear was a good place to work and Medesha was a good place to raise children. Because of Vander-Wear, the nineteen fifties and sixties were to bring the only population explosion that the little town of Medesha would ever experience. The population grew from about fourteen hundred, to it’s present size of just over twenty-five hundred.

  With the help of federal grants, the town had been able to build a new school, and they had even managed to build a small twenty-bed hospital. With a small increase in local property taxes, coupled with matching funds provided by the state government, the town had gone on a beautification binge, which included a new Main Street and streetlights, and their pride and joy, the Medesha Marina at the end of Main Street. A large donation of land and money by one of the local ‘do-wells’, a man by the name of Jefferson Cordain, had provided the impetus by which the town had been able to add a one hundred and ten space campground. Yes, especially during the spring and summer months, Medesha, Minnesota was truly a wonderful place to live and work, and a great place to spend a summer vacation.

  It seemed as if things were just getting better all the time. Preston Vandervork, the owner of Vander-Wear, and the only surviving member of the Vandervork family, had recently secured a contract with a major snowmobile manufacturer to supply that company with all of their name brand snowmobile suits and gloves. Vander-Wear also supplied free of charge to the Marina, a full stock of life vests, which were included with every fishing boat rental.

  As a young man, Preston Vandervork had always loved the adulation bestowed upon the Vandervork family by the locals of Medesha. His family had been the town’s salvation and they would not forget. In the last four years, Preston had been chosen three times by the members of the Medesha Chamber of Commerce to be the Grand Marshall
of the great kickoff into the summer fishing and boating season, The Medesha Memorial Day Boat Parade.

  This year, he’d had to decline the honor. Preston Vandervork was ill. He had used the excuse of having prior commitments with the owners of the snowmobile company, and that he would be out of town during the festivities, but he was ill. He was deathly ill.

  For generations, the men of the Vandervork family had never lived past their fifties. They were the victims of an insidious genetic disease that completely robbed them of control of their own bodies. While their minds would remain intact, their bodies would slowly become paralyzed until the only way they could survive was to be placed on total life support. Doctors were able to detect brain function, so they knew that these people were alive and able to think, but they were unable to communicate in any manner whatsoever until, eventually, the one final spark of life within their brains dissipated and the victim was left in a totally vegetative state. It was usually at this point in the progression of the disease that the remaining members of the family would elect to have all life support discontinued.

  The disease would show it’s ugly head slowly. Usually by the age of forty, the victim would begin to experience minor difficulty with leg movement and slower speech patterns. As the disease progressed and began to envelope the victim, the age of fifty would bring about the need for complete wheelchair confinement. Five years later, the Vandervorks would usually experience another death in the family.

  Preston Vandervork was forty-eight years old and he was right on target with those that had gone before him. So far, he had been able to keep his disease veiled from the public, but he knew his clock was ticking and he was not sitting still. His family had immigrated from Germany after the war where his grandfather, Claude Vandervork, had been a doctor and a proud member of the Nazi party. Claude had done extensive experimental procedures on many of the wretched victims of the Nazi interment camps in an attempt to find a cure for his family’s unfortunate disease. He was actually beginning to make considerable progress when a regrettable situation occurred. The war came to an end, and he had been on the losing side.

  Claude Vandervork had decided to escape with his family into the arms of his former enemy. He entered the United States disguised as a tailor from Switzerland and eventually ended up as the proud owner of a successful clothing company. He had kept all of his notes and journals of his experiments in hopes of eventually finding a cure for his family’s disease, but inevitably, the disease itself ended his quest. His son, Erik, would have nothing to do with Claude’s experiments. However, his grandson, Preston, was deeply interested and continued his grandfather’s efforts in the privacy of his own laboratory on Vander Island, the only island on Lake Medesha.

  When Vander-Wear had shown the promise of becoming a huge success, Claude Vandervork had purchased the twenty-acre island and built his dream estate in the exact center of the wooded paradise. Sadly, before the mansion had been completed, the patriarch of the family had died of the disease he had spent his life trying to cure. The completion of the estate, and the management of the clothing company had been left in the hands of Claude’s only son, Erik.

  Twenty-six years later Erik was claimed by the same wicked disease and Preston Vandervork assumed the reins of Vander-Wear, the estate, and the family fortune. Among Preston’s first managerial decisions was to hire a former mayor of Medesha to be manager of his clothing company. From that point on, he became continuously more secluded on his island to devote his time to finding a cure for the disease that he knew would eventually find him. For Preston Vandervork, life was a torturous existence. For the fishermen and the boaters, and even the townspeople that worked at Vander-Wear, life was good. Life went on.

  One block away from the lake, on the corner of Main and Front, stood the oldest service station in Medesha. It was situated diagonally to the street so a vehicle could pull up to the gas pumps from Main, and leave the station by pulling out onto Front Street. The square cinder block building was painted white with a large white oval sign at the corner that proclaimed in large red letters, ‘Ollie’s Service and Bait Shop’. There were only two other stations in town, one across from Vander-Wear, six blocks further to the west, and one out on the two-lane highway that led into Medesha from the south. Ollie’s was, by far, the busiest station in town.

  Ollie Torgerson was a tall muscular teddy bear of a man with a short red headed crewcut and a smile wide enough to engulf the front bumper of a fifty-eight Buick. Everybody in town knew Ollie for his smile and his love of fishing. If he wasn’t at the station pumping gas or fixing somebody’s flat tire, you could always find Ollie sitting in a booth next door to his station at Mabel’s Coffee Shop or out in his boat trying to catch ‘Wilbur’, the mythical monster walleye of Lake Medesha. The scuttlebutt at the marina was that Wilbur weighed eighteen pounds if he weighed an ounce. Others felt sure that he was merely a fabrication of Mayor Paul Sorenson to help boost interest in fishing Lake Medesha. However, the town’s Chamber of Commerce had placed a two thousand dollar bounty on old Wilbur’s head and Ollie Torgerson was determined to be the hero of the lake. It wasn’t the money he was after. Like all fanatical fishermen, he wanted only one thing. He wanted the bragging rights that came with being the only one to catch the lunker of the lake.

  Next door to Ollie’s, at Mabel’s Coffee Shop, Mabel Martin was standing behind the counter with a stern look on her face. At only five feet four inches tall, with short deep brown hair, and a bust line that could be considered a serious handicap while working over a hot grill for hours at a time, she was scolding Ollie Torgerson and Wallace Crenshaw, a foreman at Vander-Wear. Shaking a finger at the two of them she said “Shame on both of you! I know those folks from Iowa, and they are not goofballs. They’re good, fun-loving people, and they spend a lot of money in Medesha. You shouldn’t be talking about them that way!”

  Wallace Crenshaw laughed, “Wow, Mabel! Haven’t you had your morning coffee yet? You seem a little cranky this morning.”

  “Don’t you worry about my morning coffee, Wallace,” she smiled. “I should start charging you by the gallon for your morning coffee.”

  “Ooh!” laughed Ollie. “You just got zinged, Wally!” He got up from the booth that he and Wallace were sitting in and walked over to the counter and laid a dollar bill down. “Here, Mabel. I’ll buy you a cup of coffee myself this morning.”

  She smiled and put the dollar in her cash register. “Thanks, Ollie, but I think I’ll wait and have my coffee with somebody that doesn’t talk so nasty about other people.”

  “Now, Mabel!” said Ollie. “We weren’t talking nasty. We just said they were goofballs. You know how those folks from Iowa come up here and stock up on them crappy ol’ bullheads and completely ignore the walleyes and northerns. Now, if you ask me, that’s just plain goofy.”

  “Yeah!” added Wallace. “They pull into the campground with those six huge motorhomes, and before they leave, they must have at least a dozen of those big coolers filled with nuthin’ but bullheads. Now, you gotta admit Mabel, that definitely falls into the category of goofy.”

  “Well,” she replied. “I don’t care if they leave with a bunch of coolers full of rocks, they’re nice people.”

  “We didn’t say anything about them not being nice. We just said they were goofy,” said Ollie.

  Just then, the front door to Mabel’s opened with the clanging of a cowbell over the top of the door.

  Mabel smiled. “Mornin’ Tandy! How are you this fine day?”

  “Humph!” replied Tandy, Mabel’s one and only full-time waitress.

  Tandy Williams was twenty-five, but looked like she was eighteen. She was only about five feet tall, and had the kind of wispy, curly blond hair that you’d normally find on the head of those little toy dolls that cried when they were tipped over onto their backs. Under most circumstances, she had a joyful disposition that was completely infectious.

  “Oh oh!” giggled Mabel. Raising her voice a f
ew decibels, she continued, “Something tells me that somebody did just a little too much partying last night!”

  Leaning over the counter with her face in her hands, Tandy pleaded, “Mabel! Please don’t yell? My head is like a train derailment.”

  Mabel lowered her voice and said, “We have company, Missy.”

  Tandy turned around and noticed the two men sitting in the booth nearest the window. “Oh! Hi Wally.” Then she managed to muster a weak smile. “Hi Ollie. How are you this morning?”

  Mabel chuckled, “Ollie and Wally! Sounds like we’re serving coffee to a couple cartoon characters this morning.” Then, unable to hold back a deep belly laugh, Mabel yelled, “It’s the ‘Ollie and Wally Show!”

  With one hand still massaging her temple, Tandy looked over at Mabel as if she’d just escaped from the state mental facility in Fergus Falls. “Mabel, sometimes you’re a whole lot more happy than the situation really calls for.”

  Ollie interrupted with a smile, “Good morning, Tandy. Did you go out partying last night?”

  She turned and faced Ollie, misery written deep in her eyes. “Oh, God! Did I ever! A bunch of us girls were down at the ‘Minnow Bucket’ ‘til one o’clock celebrating Shauni Wheaton’s engagement to Jefferson Cordain.” As soon as she’d said it, she wished she hadn’t. She knew how Ollie felt about Shauni Wheaton, and the one thing in life that Tandy didn’t want to do was hurt Ollie Torgerson.

  At the mention of Shauni and Jefferson’s engagement, Ollie’s smile weakened noticeably. Trying hard to pretend that Tandy’s announcement didn’t bother him, he said, “Oh, really? I hadn’t heard the good news. I bet you gals really tore up the ‘Bucket’, huh?”

  Oblivious to Ollie’s feelings for Shauni Wheaton, Wally interrupted. “Well, holy cow! I wish somebody woulda told me about the party. I would have come down to offer my own congratulations.”