Off The Grid (15 page)

Chapter 30

Elvin Walker wasn’t always a garbage man, but he liked to tell people that he was. They seemed to open up around him when they thought he was beneath them. They let their guard down when they think you’ve been hauling trash your whole life. So he continued to do it, 40 years after he stopped being a garbage man and 15 years since he officially retired from the United States Air Force.

Military service had taken the better part of his life, but he loved the service. An operations analyst, Elvin saw things that others missed. How the price of wheat in Europe impacts computer sales in India. How the money spent to entertain a troop of soldiers impacted the war effort the next morning. Seemingly random occurrences found a connection with Elvin.

But now his biggest challenge was a daily crossword puzzle. So, the excitement of a new project occurring in his recreation room, was too much to keep him away. Even if  Loretta hadn’t asked him to keep an eye on Luke and Kathryn while they reviewed the boxes. He was more than up for the task and had trouble sleeping after a full day’s work – a rare occasion since he retired. So he was up bright and early the next day to join the project again before anyone else arrived.

He started sorting through the table of old photographs. The pictures had one clear similarity, Loretta and a tall man with white hair, who he assumed was her ex-husband. Elvin never married. He’d dated a few women, but just never felt the vibe. He was more comfortable alone anyway. Yet, he’d grown fond of Loretta. She was obviously fond of him too.

He looked at her smiling face in the pictures. The same smiling face he’d seen from her everyday. At least glimpses of one. She was a tough nut to crack, but he liked the conversations they had. Who knew that a cowgirl and a kid from the inner city of Atlanta could have so much to talk about? Of course there were times that they didn’t talk at all. During those times they just listened to country music tracks from the heart of the Deep South. Nothing sounded better.

He was flipping through another set of photographs, when he heard the whine of Loretta’s motorized wheelchair.

“It’s not nice to stare,” Loretta said. 

“Sorry, come again?”

“The pictures. It’s not nice to stare,” she said, parking her chair at the edge of the table. Glenda had followed her into the recreation room. She plopped herself down at a table nearby and started quietly rummaging through Blaine’s personal items.

Loretta moved the joystick on the chair and lowered her head slightly to see what Elvin was looking at.

“These were all inside the boxes. We pulled out the pictures for you. Thought you might like to see them.”

“Thank you, that was very kind. I would like to take a look.”

Elvin carefully spread out a dozen pictures on the table so Loretta could look at them as long as she wanted. He could see the flood of memories coming back to her in the expression on her face. The eyes. The eyes always told the story.

“Tell me what you see,” Elvin said after a few minutes.

“I see a part of my life that I’ve tried to forget. When I could walk – hell, when I could run. When I saw the world on my own terms. Old age or strapped to this chair, it really doesn’t matter, it’s a lifetime ago. There’s not much difference between me and everyone else here now. My memories are in those pictures and fading in my head.” 

She took a hard look at a picture of her and Blaine in a pineapple field. The sharp green sprouts of the plants were dark green and filled the background of the fading image. The large stem of the pineapples poked out the top of each still-ripening fruit.

“This was taken on our honeymoon in the Caribbean on the Island of Nevis. We’d rented a motorcycle and rode it everywhere we could on the island. We were riding to a beach on the south side of the island when we saw this tiny little trailer parked on the side of the highway. It was really just a wide spot in the road, but they managed to get the trailer wedged in there against a mountainside. They cut a big window out on one side to sell cane juice with flavors and shaved ice.

“A teenage girl and her little brother invited us into the trailer to watch them push the cane stalks into a press that extracted the cane juice. It was probably my favorite memory of our honeymoon, simple and quiet.
Sugary sweet too. There was a small pineapple plantation just behind the trailer. We spent an hour walking through the rows of pineapples, enjoying the sun and the smells of the tropics.”

“Did you ever make it to the beach?”

“Not that day. And not the next few days either, actually.”

“I get it. It being your honeymoon and all.”

“No, that wasn’t it. When we rode back to the hotel, I wasn’t paying attention when I got off the back and accidentally touched my leg to the tailpipe. I spent the next four days at a medical school hospital on the other side of the island being treated for second and third-degree burns and a little sunstroke.”

“I can see why that wasn’t your favorite memory of the honeymoon.”

“Blaine only left my side once the whole time I was in that hospital bed. He walked into town and bought me a necklace. I still wear it.”

Elvin gently pulled back her shirt collar and moved the necklace to the outside of the shirt. A shiny dark gray stone heart was attached to a washed out red leather cord.

“It’s a polished rock from the island. Only Blaine, the mineral specialist, would think that giving his new bride a black heart was romantic.”

“It felt warm when I touched it,” Elvin said.

“Of course, I can’t feel it now, but it always had - what’s the best way to describe it? A strong presence when I wore it. I stopped wearing it completely after a few days because it wasn’t comfortable. I just kept it in a jewelry box. I put it back on after my horse riding accident.”

“You don’t seem to have any resentment toward Blaine. I mean, you still wear the necklace he gave you on your honeymoon.”

“I don’t know why, but he asked me to wear it. It seemed important to him, so I did. To tell you the truth, I don’t really think about it much, since I can’t see it or feel it.”

“I can’t imagine that. You’re a strong woman and I don’t want to feel sorry for you, but I am sorry you’re in this position.”

“It’s my own fault. You need to know your limits. Riding that horse in Montana was over the limit. In my forties I broke my elbow skiing too. Hit a rock on a black diamond. Guess I’m damned.”

“I hate to say this to a lady in a wheelchair, but you seem pretty accident prone. Tailpipes, horses and black diamonds.”

“You’re right, Elvin. You shouldn’t say that to the wheelchair lady,” she said. “Now show me the rest of the pictures.”

Chapter 31

Loretta, Elvin and Glenda left the community room when breakfast was served in the dining room. Luke and Kathryn arrived during breakfast and went right to work. The files were still where they left them and they dug in for the long hall. Luke had been going over the files in his mind all night.
Kirkhorn had a laboratory in his basement where he was conducting research. Even with a second mortgage, there were limitations to the type of equipment he could afford to purchase. The costly work had to have been completed at another location – which is probably why he did some work at the Stanford lab. He could get in and out, but wasn’t required to keep his work accessible to anyone else.

By dividing up the type of experiments he could do by location, maybe he could make a connection. The records indicated that he had a sample size of 45 items – which were described only as units. He tracked and described the conditions of the units in daily increments. One entry read, “Unit 3 shows slight reaction on exposure, but falls short on second application.” Other entries, “Case 23FF3 mirrors previous batches,” and “Case 6AD9J6 a total disaster.” The records didn’t describe the units or what they were being exposed to.

Maybe the missing boxes had the clear answers he wanted. He wasn’t sure. Luke felt powerless. Kirkhorn was obviously creating something and testing it in batches or cases. He’d yet to bring this theory up to Kathryn. She was so keen on giving the project to another team. Her only reason for caring about his professor’s work was for her professional gain at MassEnergy. She had already booked them on a flight home the next day. She was ready to give up the search and focus her efforts elsewhere. Luke was more interested in figuring out what Kirkhorn had been involved with during his college days. He wasn’t ready to let it go to a pod team. Not yet.

Luke thought that maybe with a little probing, Loretta could offer some insight into the search. He found her resting in her shared room with her roommate Glenda who was visibly annoyed that yet another visitor was there to see Loretta and not her. She wasn’t about to excuse herself from the room, so she flipped on the television mounted on the wall and began watching a news program. She turned the volume down low, so she could still get the gist of her roommate’s conversation.

Luke explained his theory about the different locations for research work and experiments.

“He had always done some work at home, but he kept it out of sight. It wasn’t something I really even wanted in my house, all those rocks and things that he got from the mines.
Pure filth spilling out all over my rugs. The man had no sense of tidiness.”

“So it was rocks and minerals that he worked on at home?”

“Yes, at least some of it was. He kept it locked up in the basement. But like I said, I didn’t ever see any of it for very long, he knew I didn’t want that stuff all over my house.”

“That’s OK. Did he ever refer to the rocks or minerals by name?”

“He wasn’t a crazy person, Luke.”

“No, I mean did he refer to their scientific names?”

“I’m sorry, if he did, then I can’t recall it.”

Glenda began stirring on the other side of the room, and she turned the TV up noticeably higher.

“Maybe you should tell him your honeymoon story, dear,” Glenda bellowed. “That’ll bring down the house again.”

Loretta rolled her eyes, sharing a room to save a buck was beginning to seem like a really bad idea.

“Honeymoon story?”

Partially to annoy Glenda, she told him the same story she’d recalled to Elvin earlier that morning, including the burns on her leg.

“What was the name of the hospital you stayed in on Nevis?”

“I have no idea, it was in Charlestown tough, I remember that. It’s the big city on the island.”

“Was it the Medical College of the Caribbean?”

“It might have been, yes, that was probably it,” she said. “The students were mostly from the U.S. Why does it matter?”

“It might not, but I think I saw the name of that school on some return address labels.”

“I don’t know why he’d be receiving mail from the school. We only went to the island together once. How old were these shipments, our honeymoon was decades ago.”

“These weren’t decades old,” he said. “I’d have to go back and look, but I’m pretty sure there were several shipping labels and receipts in the files.”

“Does that mean something?”

“Only because he kept them.”  

***

Luke found six cardboard boxes that Elvin and the other residents had sorted into a trash pile. Each piece of cardboard was torn out of a larger box, but the rest of the boxes were nowhere to be found. The labels were clearly from the Medical College of the Caribbean, care of by Dr. Estevan Rigau. Two of the shipments were made before the accident. The other four were sent in the months after.

The inside of the boxes had a thin layer of tough rubber lining.

“I’ve seen these before. Hospitals and drug companies use these to ship medical waste or other human biohazards so they don’t leak out,” Kathryn said. “It’s not a common practice. The rate they have to pay to ship biohazard materials is outrageous, for even the most benign items. So, they sometimes put it in these lined boxes and seal them up so the carrier doesn’t know what they are transporting.”

“Just to save money?”

“Yeah, like I said, its not a common practice, but everybody has a budget.”

Luke couldn’t imagine what sort of biological material
Kirkhorn would be getting from a hospital in the Caribbean. He pulled up the university website on his phone. The school offered a medical degree program to United States citizens. Go to school in paradise, was the big selling point. He dialed the main switchboard of the school.

“Yes, I’m hoping to reach the office of
Estevan Rigau,” he said.

“His office? Well, I believe he’s around here somewhere, I will track him down,” said the receptionist who answered the phone. “Please hold.”

It was more than 10 minutes before someone came back on the line.

“This is
Estevan.”

“Hello, my name is Luke Kincaid and I’m researching the work of Blaine
Kirkhorn.”

There was a slight pause before the man continued, “Oh, yes. Brother Blaine,”
Estevan said in a thick West Indies accent. “In need of more samples, I can only assume? It’s been some time and I’ve got them all ready.”

“Yes, that’s why I’m calling, I’d like to procure his standard samples.”

“I was hoping for this call, but dreading it all the same,” he said, in a hushed voice. “I cannot ship the samples anymore. Our government’s port security has been strengthened and I cannot get them out through the mail.”

“We’re really in need of the samples, is there any other way I can get them?”

“Of course, but it will take quite an effort. Are you sure you’re up for it.”

“It’s very important.”

“In that case, is your passport up to date?”

“Yes it is.”

“Then write down this address on the island and let me know when to expect you. And give Blaine my regards.”

Regards?

He doesn’t know
Kirkhorn died.