Saving Medesha Page 3

  “Now, don’t misunderstand me,” cautioned Gerard. “At this point, this is all hypothetical.” He leaned back in his chair, as he began to explain the possibilities. “In a medical research laboratory, the scientists will induce a disease into an animal, such as a rat. They may use an injection of a virus or bacteria, and inject the same amount into several test subjects. Once the rats have begun to show the symptoms of the disease that is being studied, then the researchers will try different antibiotics to try to stem the advancement of the disease.” He paused and looked over at the Sheriff.

  Harold smiled nervously. “Go ahead, Gerard. I’ll stop you if I start getting confused.”

  Dr. Slocum smiled as he continued. “Now, all diseases are not viral or bacterial in nature. Some are chemical, and some are genetic. For those that are chemical, the researcher injects that particular chemical. If the disease is genetic, such as Parkinson’s Disease, or Alzheimer’s, this is where the real difficult issues come into play. The scientist needs to get down to the very genetic makeup of the subject being studied. By that, I mean that, if the researcher is trying to find a cure for a disease, which only occurs in rats, then he must study the genetic makeup of rats. If he or she is studying a disease, which only occurs in humans, then he must study humans on the genetic level. If the researcher can isolate the gene that is causing that particular disease, then he is half the way there. Then he must study ways in which to re-engineer that gene so it doesn’t cause the disease. In theory, it would be possible to reverse engineer a gene in such a manner that, where it was originally normal, it would actually start to cause a new, or existing disease. That disease, Sheriff, would be a ‘Tin Lizzie’. It could theoretically lead to ‘gene warfare’.”

  “But, Gerard,” said Harold, rather shaken. “Isn’t all of this just theory? I mean, nobody has actually done anything like that yet, have they? From all that I’ve heard, hardly anything has gone past the laboratory stage yet.”

  “Well, yes and no,” replied Gerard. “For many years now, we’ve had re-engineered corn and other agricultural products. They’ve been messing around with livestock for quite some time also.”

  “But, Doc,” pleaded Harold. “These are humans! I mean, for God sake! They’re just young kids! Nobody would do that to young kids, would they?”

  Doctor Slocum just looked at Harold with his eyebrows raised.

  “Well, okay. In today’s world, maybe anything can happen. But, Jeez! This is Medesha, Minnesota, Gerard! If it doesn’t have something to do with fleece lined gloves and snowmobile suits or how to catch and clean an eight pound walleye, there isn’t much chance of finding anybody around here that would have a clue what you were talking about.”

  “Please remember, Harold. These are just speculations on the part of Dr. Roberts and myself. At this point, it’s nothing more than that. However, until we can find just what is causing these kids to be sick, I think we need to keep our minds open to any and all possibilities.”

  Dr. Slocum turned in his chair and pushed himself over to his computer, which was sitting on another desk. He clicked the mouse and watched the monitor. “Just before you arrived, I sent a blanket e-mail to several hospitals around the country, requesting them to send me any information about any possible diseases of this nature that they might have experienced lately.” He perused his latest e-mails. “So far, I haven’t received any positive answers back.”

  Just then, they heard a quick knock on Gerard’s office door, and his nurse Cindy peeked in. “I’m terribly sorry to interrupt, Dr. Slocum, but we’ve just had two emergency situations occur. We just received patients number thirteen and fourteen in the ER, and the Filmore boy just lapsed into a coma.”

  Gerard jumped to his feet. “Oh God! Where is Dr. Roberts?”

  “He’s handling the patients in the ER. He requested that you check on Sammy Filmore,” replied Cindy.

  “Right! I’m on my way! Thanks, Cindy.”

  Gerard turned to Harold. “I’m sorry, Sheriff. I’ve really got to go handle this right now. The Filmore boy was the first patient we received yesterday.” He looked down at his watch. “If I’m not mistaken, we’ll probably have several more children lapsing into coma within the next few hours, unless we can come up with some way to stem the tide of this thing.”

  Harold stood there as if he were shell-shocked. “Sure, Gerard. Go do what ya gotta do.”

  Before he ran down the corridor, Gerard Slocum said, “Say, Sheriff, one more thing. We’re trying to cover all bases here in trying to find the cause of this thing. Would it be possible for you to get us a couple samples of water from the lake, down by the Marina, and also from the north end where Quail Creek empties into the lake?”

  “Sure, Gerard. I’ll get on that right away,” he replied.

  “Oh, one more thing, Harold. Quail Creek is up on Jefferson Cordain’s property. He’s a good friend of mine, and he’s also a very highly trained pathologist. Could you possibly track him down and ask him if he would be willing to come in to the hospital to give us a hand.” He hesitated slightly and continued, “Uh, I know she just celebrated her engagement last night, and it’s her day off, but we could sure use your daughter, Shauni also. She’s a helluva nurse! Thanks, Harold!”

  Suddenly, the corridor was empty. Harold stood there with chills running down his back. “I forgot to ask him if this thing was contagious. God! I sure don’t want Shauni coming down with this damn thing. I sent her to nursing school because she wanted to help people, not so she could catch some unknown ‘Tin Lizzie’.”

  As he walked through the main entrance of the hospital and out toward the parking lot, he grabbed the mike of his PCD. “Irene, this is Sheriff Wheaton.”

  “This is Irene. Go ahead, Sheriff.”

  “Irene, would you please give Jefferson Cordain a call… I’m sorry, would you please get in telephonic communication with Jefferson Cordain and inform him that I am on my way out to his place to talk to him.”

  “Will do, Sheriff. Shall I tell him what this is in reference to?”

  “No, Irene,” he replied. “Just ask him to be available for me to talk to him in about twenty minutes, please?”

  “Roger, Sheriff.”

  “Oh, another thing, Irene. If my daughter is there with him, please tell him that I need to speak to her as well.”

  “I’m dialing as we speak, Sheriff.”

  When he arrived at his squad car parked in the hospital parking lot, Harold opened the trunk and pulled out a large black suitcase marked ‘Evidence Kit’. He opened the case and removed four small three-ounce containers. Placing white adhesive tape on the side of each bottle, he marked two of the bottles, ‘Water Sample – Marina Area, Lake Medesha’. On the other two bottles, he wrote ‘Water Sample – Quail Creek’. Then he hopped into the squad and drove directly to the Marina.

  As he stopped his car in the parking area, he noticed that the Marina was completely deserted, except for Ollie Torgerson. He walked out onto the docks where several boats were moored and waved at Ollie, as he was climbing into his aluminum fishing boat. “Morning, Ollie,” he called out.

  “Hi, Harold,” grinned Ollie, as he began to untie the bow of his boat. “What’s bringing you down here so early in the morning?”

  “Well, I wouldn’t exactly call it early anymore. It’s headin’ towards eight o’clock,” replied Harold.

  “Huh! So it is! Lester showed up a little late to open the station, so I guess I’m getting a later start than usual. Say, Sheriff, what’s going on at the hospital?”

  Somewhat startled by the question, Harold stammered, “Wha… What do you mean?”

  “Well,” answered Ollie. “George Barnes stopped by the station to get some gas just a while ago, and he said his son, George Jr., was admitted yesterday with some kind of unusual flu.”

  Harold managed a thin smile. “I just came from the hospital. I talked with Dr. Slocum, and he said that they think they’re getting a handle on the situation. It�
��s kind of a weird bug though, and he asked me to get a couple samples of lake water to make sure there’s not something in the water that’s causing it.”

  Showing a bit of concern, Ollie asked, “Is there something I can do to help?”

  “As a matter of fact, Ollie, there is something you can do. Could you take these two little bottles out about fifty feet from the docks, and fill them for me, please?”

  Smiling, Ollie replied, “Hey! Not a problem.” Then, he couldn’t resist asking, “Would you like to hop in, and get the samples yourself?” Ollie knew what the answer would be. He knew that the town’s sheriff would never accept an offer to get into a boat. It was widely known that Sheriff Harold Wheaton was deathly afraid of the water.

  Harold frowned. “No!” he said emphatically. “I’ll just wait right here.”

  He handed the bottles to Ollie, and in less than four minutes, he was heading back to his car with the samples safely ensconced in a brown paper bag.

  As he sat in the driver’s seat of his cruiser, he watched as Ollie was speeding across the lake, heading toward the north end of Vander Island. He knew that Ollie was only teasing him good-naturedly, but just the mention of going out onto the lake, brought back the same old memories that had haunted him since he was ten years old.

  When Harold Wheaton was a young boy, his parents always knew where they could find him and his younger brother, Tim. Both boys, being less than a year apart in age, were inseparable. Wherever one was, the other was sure to be there also. The lake was all that young Harry and Timmy could think about. Everything in their lives revolved around the lake. In the winter, they would be out ice-skating, or fishing through a hole in the ice.

  They loved the winter months on the lake, but when summer came; that was when they were in their true element. Their father had a fiberglass fishing boat that had Styrofoam inserts under all of the seats. This meant that the boat was virtually unsinkable. The two boys would take the boat out onto the lake and capsize it. The inverted boat would make a perfect diving platform and when the boat was upside down there were perfect breathing spaces underneath, between the seats. The Wheaton boys would spend their summer months pretending to be pirates or Navy Seals, attempting to blow up passing enemy ships.

  Life for Harry and Timmy was wonderful, until that horrible day, in the summer of Harry’s tenth year. The boys had taken the boat out and capsized it, as they always did, but this time there was a problem. When the boat flipped over, Timmy disappeared. At first, Harold thought his brother was just playing an underwater game of hide and seek, but it soon became apparent that it was not a game. Tim had not come up for air, and Harry couldn’t find him anywhere. He began to yell for help, but the folks within earshot were so accustomed to the Wheaton boys playing in the lake and making all kinds of noises, that nobody paid any attention. Two days later, poor Timmy’s bloated body surfaced at the south end of the lake, and young Harry vowed never to enter the lake again.

  As he turned away from the lake, and drove up Main Street, he thought about Mabel Martin. She had been the one true friend in the months after he had lost his brother. She would come over to his house and the two of them would sit beside each other, and say absolutely nothing. She knew, even at such a young age, that little Harry Wheaton needed somebody there, just to keep him company. Mabel had helped him through the hardest part of his young life, and she had been there again so many years later, when he had lost his wife, Maureen. She had never made any demands of him, and never tried to scold him for his grieving. She had always encouraged him to cry, as much as she had encouraged him to laugh.

  As he continued up Main, he drove past Mabel’s Coffee Shop, and there she was again, waving and smiling at him from her front window. He smiled and waved back. Yes, he thought to himself, in many ways, Mabel had been a truer, more committed friend than even his beloved wife Maureen had been. Feeling somewhat like a dull oaf, he had only begun to realize just recently that Mabel had loved him deeply all their lives, and he had resolved to make up for lost time.

  He continued driving up Main until he came to the other end of town, where State Highway 53 came up from the south, and made a sudden jog to the northwest, away from Medesha. He had always wondered why the state of Minnesota had decided to place that sharp turn in the highway. To him, there was really no logical reason. The highway could just as well have continued straight north, past Medesha Lake, before it turned northwest. He felt that the state engineers in St. Paul had deprived the people that traveled Highway 53 of some of the most beautiful scenery in the state, by making that stupid jog where they did.

  Where the state had left off, the county had taken over. Many years ago, the county had voted to construct an asphalt road, which continued north from where Highway 53 made its dangerous left turn. The smooth black top road slowly snaked its way through the remaining bit of virgin forest that had not fallen victim to the lumber companies that had so indiscriminately cleared such a large portion of Minnesota over a hundred years ago. Along this beautiful county road were stands of huge white pines, birch, and poplar, interspersed with a few gnarled old oak and walnut trees. To a lumber mill executive, this area looked like a gold mine. To a nature lover, it looked like the end of the rainbow. To the local residents, however, it looked like what it was, The Cordain Nature Preserve.

  A few years before the Vandervorks had come to Medesha, the Cordain family had arrived in the area from somewhere back east and purchased all the available land on the west side of the lake. They had continued, over the years, buying up land as it became available, until everything north of Medesha, and west of the lake had come under their ownership. When the county had decided to construct the road north, they not only received welcoming permission from the Cordain family to construct the highway on their land, the Cordains even offered to pay half of the construction bill. Their one stipulation was that signs reading ‘The Cordain Nature Preserve’ were to be placed at half-mile intervals along each side of the road.

  Everyone in Medesha felt sure that the Vandervork family, of which only one remained, was the richest family in the county, but Sheriff Harold Wheaton knew different. He had been Sheriff for well over twenty years, and he’d learned about many of the skeletons in the community closet.

  The biggest secret that Harold felt was nobody else’s business, was just how rich the Cordains really were. He knew that the huge amount of property, with the large house up near Quail Creek, was just a small portion of the Cordain holdings. He knew they had large properties in Maine, Delaware, Tennessee, Louisiana and Wyoming, as well as a large coffee plantation in Costa Rica. He had no idea how they had acquired their money, but from all that he had been able to discover, the Cordains had created nature preserves in many places across the country, and around the world. They appeared to be good people, but they were way too rich for a good ol’ boy like Sheriff Harold Wheaton.

  As he drove north up the county road, past the lake, the relationship that his daughter had with Jefferson Cordain was what was troubling him. At times, he felt that it was just the fact that Jefferson was so embarrassingly rich, but he was also very uneasy about the man’s interests in death, and the spirit world. Shauni had tried to explain Jefferson’s theories about what happens to a person’s ‘lifeforce’ when that person dies, but he was never able to understand any of it. All he could picture in his mind was some crazy scientist, robbing graves, and bringing zombies to life. None of it made any sense to him.

  Another thing that bothered him about his future son-in-law, was the fact that he had decided to become a pathologist. Of all the things for a rich kid to do with his life, why would he choose pathology? Wasn’t that the study of diseases and the causes of death? This young man just seemed too weird.

  * * *

  “Jeffer! This is absolutely amazing!” Shauni Wheaton giggled, as she peered through the glass of the two-foot square container. “I can’t believe that it actually worked!”

  Shauni was a beautiful young
woman of twenty-seven. She was slender and tall, with glossy, almost black shoulder length hair, and the fine olive skin features of her Mediterranean ancestors. It was obvious that Shauni resembled her mother’s side of the family, rather than her father, Sheriff Harold Wheaton. Her fiancé, Jefferson Cordain, had similar features. He was also fairly tall, but where Shauni’s hair was flowing with a natural gentle wave, Jefferson’s hair was dark and curly to the point of being almost kinky. A few shakes of his head after showering was about all that he was able to do in the way of creating any kind of hair style. He merely let the medium length curls go where they may.

  Jefferson, at age thirty-two was a highly educated and driven man. Early in his childhood he had become fascinated with the mechanisms that seemed to come together so wonderfully to create life. His studies had taken him into the world of pathology because of his growing curiosity about the different outside forces that can interrupt and stop the flow of life. He wanted to be on the leading edge of science’s search for a control over disease and aging.

  Being born into a wealthy family had afforded Jefferson the opportunity to devote his time to his passions. A seemingly unending supply of money had allowed him to create the kind of laboratory in his home that any scientist would have been proud of. He had all of the latest equipment and computers, and he had also contributed a great deal of equipment to the pathology lab of the local hospital, Medesha Memorial.

  A great deal of Jefferson’s research required the use of laboratory animals. By sheer coincidence, he had received a shipment of white rats more than two years ago that contained one rat with a genetic flaw. The animal had extremely short legs. Even with a controlled diet to make sure the rat was not overweight, the poor animal could not walk without dragging it’s belly. The isolation and manipulation of that one rat's genes had brought Jefferson Cordain, with the help of his assistant, Shauni, to the point they were at this wonderful spring day.