Scarlet Thunder (7 page)

It might have been funny. But I couldn't focus on anything except my stomach. It began to flip again.

“Uncle Mike,” I said, hardly above a whisper. My heart was racing hard. “I think I'm going to...”

I had thought my stomach was totally empty. I was wrong. Very wrong. I knew because of how much covered Uncle Mike's legs before he moved out of my way.

When I finished, I fell over.

I lay there with my heart pounding, gasping until an emergency crew finally arrived. Strong hands lifted me onto a stretcher and put me into an ambulance, with Uncle Mike beside me.

As my vision got darker and blurrier, the ambulance took us away into the night.

“Dizziness, headache, vomiting.” The white-coated doctor in front of us made notes on his clipboard as he spoke. His name tag said
Dr. Ellroy
. “Stomach cramps, breathing difficulties.”

“Yes,” Uncle Mike groaned. “I wish I didn't have to agree, but yes.”

The two of us shared a hospital room. Down the hall, Brian Nelson, Ken Takarura and Al Simonsen shared another room, waiting for their turn to see the same doctor.
Al was the reason the other two had been throwing up outside. Al had been in the motor home's bathroom.

“Gastroenteritis and tachycardia,” Dr. Ellroy said, more to himself than to us.

“Huh?” I groaned.

The doctor looked up from his clipboard. Although he was young, his square face sagged from exhaustion. I didn't blame him. The clock on the hospital wall behind him showed almost three o'clock. He was an internal specialist and had been paged from his home.

“Gastroenteritis is an inflammation of the stomach and bowels. It causes stomach cramping and diarrhea. Have either of you had diarrhea yet?”

“Yet?” I said.

Uncle Mike's white face got even whiter. “Doc,” he said, “why did you have to put that into my mind?”

“I'm not trying to put anything into your mind. It's just that—”

“The bathroom, Doc,” Uncle Mike groaned. “Where's the bathroom?”

Dr. Ellroy pointed at the door. “Down the hallway to your left.”

Uncle Mike got off the edge of the bed where he'd been sitting. He hobbled out the door.

I swallowed. It hurt. My throat was raw.

“That other word,” I said. “Tacky... tacky...”

“Tachycardia. A faster than normal heartbeat.”

The doctor looked down at his clipboard again. “Dizziness. Headache. Vomiting. Stomach cramps. Breathing difficulties. Gastroenteritis. Tachycardia.”

Dr. Ellroy's eyes came back up at me again. “Anything else?”

“I was shaking. Bad.”

He made another note on his clipboard.

He tapped his front teeth with his pencil. “I'm guessing the three in the other room had the same symptoms.”

“Probably,” I said. I had been too busy throwing up to take notes on anyone else.

“Then it's definitely some type of poisoning,” he said.

“Poisoning?!”

Dr. Ellroy smiled. “Not like in a movie kind of poisoning where a bad guy was trying to kill you. More like food poisoning. Still, this is pretty serious. We need to track it down. So let me ask you the obvious question. Were all of you in a place where you ate the same food?”

I nodded as I thought about the barbecue. What was weird was that no one from the pit crew had joined us. Almost as if only Uncle Mike's crew had been poisoned.

“We were at a barbecue,” I said. “We—”

I stopped as a scary thought hit me.

“Yes?” The doctor prompted.

“Margaret Lynn!” I said. “She was with us too! She's staying at a motel! What if she's real sick and no one knows it?”

Without any hesitation, Dr. Ellroy pulled a small cell phone from his coat pocket. He snapped it open.

“What motel?” he asked.

“The...the...” I struggled to remember. We had dropped her off after the barbecue because she wanted some privacy. She didn't
want to share the motor home the rest of the film crew used. I tried to picture the neon sign against the night sky:
Riverside Motel
.

He punched a few numbers and waited. “Yes,” he said. “I need the number for the Riverside Motel.”

After a few more seconds of waiting, he punched in more numbers. And waited briefly again.

“Yes,” he said. “I would like to speak to a guest registered at the motel.”

He gave me a questioning look.

“Margaret Lynn,” I said.

“Margaret Lynn,” he repeated into the cell phone.

For the next few seconds, I again felt stuck in mud with an alligator swimming closer. What if she had passed out? This was some kind of poisoning. What if she had...

“Hello,” Doctor Ellroy said into the phone. “This is Doctor John Ellroy. I'm an internal specialist and I—”

He closed his eyes. Even I could hear how loud Margaret Lynn was yelling into the telephone.

“No,” Dr. Ellroy said. “This is not Al or Brian. This is not a practical joke. I am calling because we were afraid that you might be ill. However, you sound very healthy and strong. I am sorry to have bothered you.”

He snapped the phone shut. He smiled. “It didn't seem the time for a long conversation.”

He began tapping his teeth again with his pencil. “This could help,” he said. “It could help a lot. Was there anything you all ate that she did not?”

“She's a vegetarian,” I said. “Does that help?”

“Perhaps.”

I snapped my fingers. “No,” I said. “Dessert. We all had a fruit dessert with whipped cream. She didn't. But Tim Becker, another guy who sat with us, did.”

Doctor Ellroy made a couple more phone calls and finally reached Tim Becker. Doctor Ellroy spoke seriously with him for a few minutes, then hung up.

“As you could tell from our conversation,” Dr. Ellroy said, “he's sick too, though he

doesn't sound as bad off as you are. I'd say it's a safe bet you're all reacting to the dessert.”

Doctor Ellroy frowned. “The strange thing here is that the symptoms sound like something that commonly happens to children who pick and eat raw elderberries.”

“Elderberries?” I echoed.

“Yes,” he said. “Cooked elderberries are fine. But uncooked, they'll cause exactly what you've experienced. The symptoms won't kill you, but they will slow you down. Raw elderberries contain a poison called cyanogenic glycoside.”

I didn't care much about the name of the poison. I cared much more about a bigger question. One that Dr. Ellroy asked out loud for both of us. Especially after I explained that only Uncle Mike's crew had been poisoned.

“But why,” he said, “would someone put raw elderberries in selective desserts?”

Before either of us could try to answer, a new kind of rumbling hit my insides. Not the throwing-up kind of rumbling. But the
kind of rumbling that had sent Uncle Mike out the door in a big hurry.

“Um, Doctor Ellroy?” I said.

“Yes?”

I was already running out the door as I answered.

“Got to go,” I said.

And I meant it in the truest way. I sprinted down the hall, looking for a bathroom.

Stupid elderberries.

Those stupid elderberries cost us nearly a full day of production, setting us even further behind Uncle Mike's million-dollar deadline.

Since it was the day between Friday's qualifying and Sunday's race, the original plan had been to interview Sandy in the morning and film the pit crew in the afternoon.

We'd canceled the pit crew film segments because we needed several cameras for those. Brian Nelson was still too sick
to work. Margaret Lynn, though, was fine. So even though we couldn't shoot using the two-angle method, Uncle Mike decided to go ahead with Ken Takarura's interview with Sandy Peterson.

He chose to interview Sandy in one of the motor homes. The backdrop was a simple black sheet. Sandy wore jeans and a light blue polo shirt. Uncle Mike wanted her to look pretty, but not too feminine, and together they had decided the light blue would do the trick.

I intended to keep my camera running the whole time.

Sandy sat on a cane-backed chair with Ken Takarura beside her. He wasn't in the best shape. We hid the sick whiteness of his face with good lighting and lots of stage makeup. I had a bottle of fizzy water for him to drink off-camera between his questions.

I didn't feel so great either. But I knew the deadline was too important to miss, and if Uncle Mike could force himself to work, so could I.

Not that this was something I would call work.

I was having fun.

Ken began the interview by paying Sandy some compliments. He wanted her to be relaxed so that he could catch her off guard with a tough question. Hopefully, she would be surprised and it would show on camera. Later, we would cut out the first part, so that at the beginning, viewers saw only the question and her answer.

“Yes,” Ken was saying in his deep voice. “At those speeds, the slightest mistake will put you out of the race. You need total concentration on the track, don't you?”

“More than total,” Sandy answered. She smiled. I was watching the television monitor hooked up to the camera. With her blond hair and soft features, she was interesting to watch. Especially with what she did for a living. “Ken, you can't let your lap times be more than a tenth of a second off your pace. Think of it. A typical race is four hundred laps. If you lose a tenth of a second every third or fourth lap, that's...”

She bit her front lip as she paused to do her math. I was doing it at the same time. Say every fourth lap equals one hundred laps. Then one hundred times a tenth of a second would be...

“Ten seconds,” she said. “That may not sound like much, but in ten seconds at the speeds we travel, that might put you back by a half lap by the end of the race. I can't tell you how many races are lost by the length of a car.”

She smiled into the camera again. “And Ken, it's not just the time you have to worry about. You need to keep your concentration focused, because if you daydream for a heartbeat, or blink at the wrong time, you can hit the wall or another car. It's not like driving through town to pick up groceries.”

Ken nodded. I knew he was about to spring the question that Uncle Mike had planned. And this was probably the best time.

“That brings me to something else,” Ken said. “Aren't you afraid of dying?”

The question hung there. How many people, after all, like to talk about their own death?

“Funny you should ask,” she said. The camera caught every twitch of every muscle on her face. We had expected to surprise her, but her face looked calm. “I think about dying every time I get behind the wheel.”

“Do other drivers?” Ken asked.

“I can't speak for other drivers,” she said.

Great answer, I thought. She was a pro at interviews.

“But for yourself...” Ken was a pro too.

“For myself,” she answered, “I'm ready to die. Don't get me wrong. I don't want to. At least not before I have to.”

Another smile. “There's this saying: ‘Don't do the crime, if you can't do the time.' In other words, be sure you're ready for the price you'll have to pay if you get caught.”

“Interesting...,” Ken said.

“When I get into a racecar,” she continued, “I would be foolish if I wasn't ready to pay the price for making a mistake.
And, in this sport, a mistake can kill you. It doesn't happen too often, because the cars and tracks are set up to reduce that risk, but it does happen.”

“So tell me,” Ken said, “what makes you so ready to accept death?”

She smiled again. This was going to be a great interview segment. Tough questions and unafraid answers.

“The long view.”

“The long view?” Ken asked. She had him hooked. And if she had him hooked, people watching the documentary would be hooked too.

“Sure,” she said. “Do you believe in God?”

She had caught Ken off guard. And he was supposed to be the interviewer.

“Do you believe in God?” she repeated. “Surveys show that up to seventy percent of people believe in God.”

“Well...,” he said.

“What I find amazing,” she said, showing us the tough Sandy Peterson who stood up for what she believed in, “is what people will
discuss on television in front of millions of people—weird things, private things, stupid things. All stuff that should embarrass them. But it doesn't. Then ask someone about God like I did just now...”

Ken squirmed. Uncle Mike, though, was too good a director to stop the camera now. He'd cut out the stuff that made Ken look bad and use bits and pieces of what Sandy was saying. I'd vote for keeping most of what she said. She was right, after all, about television. I'd seen some of those talk shows.

“Anyway,” Sandy said, “if you don't believe in God, death is pretty scary. Because then that's all there is. But if you believe that He is waiting, it is a lot easier to feel confident about getting into a racecar...”

She stopped for a moment, thinking about her audience. “And this isn't just about racecar drivers. Think about all the car accidents that happen away from the racetrack. Anybody anywhere who gets behind a steering wheel, especially teenagers, because they don't have as much driving experience, should think about what I'm saying...”

Ken coughed quietly. I quickly handed him a drink off-camera, then stepped back.

The liquid helped him recover his voice quickly. He was about to ask another question when George Lot burst into the motor home.

“Sandy,” he said. The big crew chief held a folded newspaper in his right hand. He waved it at her.

“George,” she said, without getting up. “We're in the middle of something.”

“I know,” he said, “but you're going to want to see this. Tim Becker just called me about it. He said he's starting to feel better and would come to the track later. But he's crazy mad. He asked me to show this to you. He wants to scrap the whole film shoot. The rest of the crew just want to quit.”