Authors: David Vinjamuri
The folder also had news clippings from the morning papers. I’d already heard the story on the radio as I drove to Arlington. A group of protestors got beaten up in West Virginia and one of them had died.
“Who’s the girl, sir?” I asked the obvious question.
“Her name is Heather Hernandez. She’s the daughter of a friend. The picture is several years old, but I understand her appearance was the same when her parents last saw her. She left home at the beginning of the summer with a group called ‘Reclaim’ to protest the activities of the Transnational Coal Company in West Virginia. The parents’ only contact with her after she left was by e-mail. Her mother also saw some of her Facebook posts through a family friend. After the incident last night, Heather’s parents were unable to reach her and neither the police nor any West Virginia hospital has a record of Miss Hernandez being transported or admitted.”
“Can we confirm she was on the bus last night?”
“We cannot.”
“Do you have any background on the other protestors?” I asked, thumbing through the documents in the folder.
“There are some profiles at the end of your file,” Alpha answered, pulling on a pair of reading glasses and flipping open his copy. “Reclaim has a fairly typical composition for a radical environmental group: somewhere between thirty and fifty members, mostly young, almost all white or Asian and largely from the Northeast, California and the Pacific Northwest. A number of them took part in the Occupy Wall Street protests. Some have criminal records, but nothing unusual—one shoplifting conviction, some minor drug charges—but primarily a large number of arrests for disorderly conduct, vandalism and similar crimes. Three of Reclaim’s older protestors have the majority of the disorderly conduct citations and other misdemeanors consistent with protesting, but no criminal backgrounds.”
“Do you have a complete profile of the leaders?” The folder only had photos, basic information and the police records.
“No, but we can run that,” Alpha replied, making a note on a blank white pad sitting inside a leather portfolio on his desk.
“Sir, I’m not a licensed investigator. That could create some problems, particularly with all the media attention on this story,” I pointed out.
With a curt nod, Alpha pulled a sheet of paper from his file and handed it to me. “This letter from the governor of West Virginia welcomes you to the state to investigate Miss Hernandez’s whereabouts as a private citizen on behalf of the family. It may not carry any force of law, but it should suffice for your purposes. The governor has already called the Sheriff for Lincoln County and the Mayor of Hamlin, West Virginia to ensure you receive their cooperation. If you need any other help, please let me know.”
“Could you get me a meeting with the head of the mining company? I’d like to get a look at the mine site where these kids were protesting without getting knocked on the head myself.”
“I’m sure that can be arranged. There
is
one more thing,” he said. I looked up from the file, knowing he was about to share the case’s most important detail. Nothing he’d told me so far justified the urgency of his request. He pulled a sheet of paper from his folder and handed it to me. It was the printout of an e-mail.
Mommy I miss you. I’m going to run out of insulin and gas for my car on Monday and I wont be able to get more. Can you please help me? Sorry about things. Tell Dad I miss him. Love you. H
“Heather’s mother received this yesterday morning?” I asked, looking at the date.
“Yes.”
“That’s an odd note.”
“It is.”
“Heather’s diabetic?”
“Type 1, the kind that requires insulin.”
“How often does she dose?”
“She has an insulin pump she needs to use once a week with a medicine called Novalog. I’ll send some along with you in a cooler.”
“And if she doesn’t get the medicine by Monday?”
“Difficult to say, but hyperglycemia is the most likely consequence. For a Type 1 diabetic, that can lead to diabetic ketoacidosis, which can be life-threatening.”
“Immediately?”
“No, but she could become ill quickly.”
“Isn’t that kind of diabetes pretty common? Shouldn’t it be easy for her to get insulin?”
“Yes.”
“Then this is an even stranger note.”
“Exactly.”
“Does Heather have health insurance?”
“Yes, through her parents.”
“So we’re talking about a gallon of gas and a ten dollar co-pay? That’s what’s preventing her from saving her own life? Is this just a plea for money?”
“According to Miss Hernandez’s parents, that would be very unusual. She’s hard working, self-sufficient and very independent. She paid most of her own college expenses with jobs and a scholarship. Her mother suggested that if Heather needed to ask for money, she would have done it in another way.”
“Does Heather have a cell phone?”
“Yes, but it hasn’t connected to a cell network since yesterday afternoon. Her phone contract is with AT&T, though, so it would be roaming through most of that area. That mode causes heavy battery drain, so phones are often powered down when they are not being used. So we can’t draw conclusions from that alone.”
“A car?”
“A 1998 Toyota Tercel. Details are in the folder.”
“And what do her parents think she’s really asking for in the note? Assuming it’s not about money?”
“Some kind of help. They suggested that writing this note would have been extremely difficult for Miss Hernandez.”
“Why? Pride?”
“Possibly. I don’t know.”
I hesitated for a moment, wary of territory I’d never trodden. I didn’t learn anything about Alpha’s personal life in the years I served under him.
“Sir, you’re obviously willing to use government resources on this project, in addition to my time. Why is this particular family so important to you?”
That’s when Alpha pulled out the glossy photo of the three of them. It was another graduation photo—this one with the girl’s parents. Her father was a Colonel, with the medals that proved he was the real deal and not just some paper tiger. The girl’s mother was a beauty: raven-haired with almost translucent skin. When I saw the uniform, things slipped into place. Colonel Hernandez looked to be of an age with Alpha.
“I owe a great debt,” he said, “one that I cannot hope to repay. But if I can help them find Heather, I will.” He spoke slowly and evenly, but his voice was brittle. I understood the kind of obligation a battlefield creates. I noticed Colonel Hernandez’s POW ribbon then and knew Alpha didn’t wear one on his dress uniform. I wondered if that was part of the story.
“Sir, I can’t promise you what I’ll find, or how quickly.”
Alpha regarded me for a minute and I couldn’t tell if the ice in his cold blue eyes was hardening or thawing until he spoke. “Michael, I can’t think of a more qualified person for this task.”
Alpha had never used my given name before, and I found myself dazed as he offered his hand, another unexpected acknowledgement from him that I was no longer his to command.
4
“My name’s Roxanne. Grab that pail and you can walk with me,” a sturdy, handsome woman about two decades my senior said to me, then carried on as if I’d already agreed. She’d intercepted me as I entered the meadow that housed the protestor’s camp in Stone Holler on foot. The tents were pitched in orderly rows behind a cluster of screened rooms allotted to the tasks of food preparation and consumption. A row of four portable potties sat twenty yards behind the camp. If I hadn’t known better I might have thought I’d stumbled onto a Boy Scout jamboree site. Roxanne Chalmers was solidly built and of middle height with salt and pepper hair that was cut short for practicality. She was in shirtsleeves, as the warm morning dictated. I knew in an instant that she was responsible for the order in the campsite. I picked up a pail and trailed behind her, struggling to keep up with her brisk pace without breaking into a jog, though my legs were longer than hers.
“You look like a reporter but walk like a cop,” she observed. “Which is it?” I couldn’t imagine that she saw either thing in me. I’m an even six feet with black hair, an average face and a Mediterranean complexion. I’m the kind of guy you forget ten seconds after you meet him. My walk had been painstakingly scrubbed of telltales years before.
“Neither,” I replied as we threaded our way between blooming clumps of yellow foxglove and box huckleberry shrubs toward a stream that I’d seen from the road. Finding the holler proved to be more difficult than I’d anticipated. My phone-based GPS took me off Route 3, through a series of increasingly narrow, winding roads thrust between rolling mountains. The mountains in West Virginia look much like the Catskills, but wilder and closer together. “Hollers” were the local name for the valleys formed between the ridges of the Appalachian Plateau, but they were tricky to navigate. My GPS signal got weaker and weaker as the hills closed in and eventually gave up the ghost. I ended up navigating with a U.S. Geological Survey map of the county that I’d found in the package propped up against the wall just inside my motel room door when I returned from breakfast that morning. Eventually I found the camp. It consisted of a simple clearing of perhaps five or six acres pressed up between a mountain and a stream at the side of a dirt trail. Two police cruisers blocked the entrance. The cops let me pass after they decided I wasn’t a reporter.
I followed Roxanne’s example and put one foot onto a sturdy boulder in the stream before downing my bucket in the flowing water to fill it. She filled two buckets before unfolding a padded aluminum frame and positioning it astride her shoulders. The buckets clipped onto either end of the yoke. It looked like a tricky job to balance them but she was able to shoulder twice the water I carried with less effort.
“I’m from Maine,” she said as we walked slowly away from the stream, “and when I’m there I live in a camp without electricity or running water. In Maine a camp is a house you build with your own hands—I guess you’d call it a cabin. The thing about living from the land is how it connects you to your needs. You develop a real sensitivity to day and night, where your water and food comes from, how hard it is to heat a house if you’re relying on cutting your own wood with a crosscut saw and an axe. You get very conservative. Once you’ve hauled a five-gallon bucket of water for a quarter mile a few times, you don’t just slop it around. You wash your vegetables and yourself and then the floor with it. You have to think about things that way, or else you’ll find yourself spending so much time hauling water that you’ll want to get the heck out of there.”
“How well does this kind of work go over with them?” I asked, nodding toward the gaggle of activity around the breakfast tent. Environmental activism and upper-middle-class entitlement seemed like a lethal combination in a working camp.
“Some of them take to it, others don’t. Those that don’t...well, they don’t last long. But that’s the way of it. We’re trying to change something important here and it’s not easy work.”
“Fighting mining in West Virginia seems a little like tilting at windmills,” I observed. The comment did not faze Roxanne.
“We’re not fighting mining, just mountaintop removal. It’s a horrible practice for the environment. They’re relocating entire communities, poisoning the water and changing the face of the earth forever. But it doesn’t look like I’d be able to convince you of that.” She smiled and I returned it reflexively.
“I’m not political. I grew up near mountains like these and wouldn’t want to see them changed. But I’d worry about the people first—how they were going to survive without work. And I’m not sure how I’d feel about of bunch of strangers telling me what to do.” I was pushing a little to see how she would react.
She smiled again and it was genuine. “That’s exactly what they say here, but it’s a myth. An economy based on mineral wealth never prospers. The only people who make money are the investors. You might not want to put a miner out of work, but they have some of the most dangerous and debilitating jobs on the planet. And unlike underground mining, most of the men working on surface mining projects aren’t unionized. They have the worst deal imaginable. Every change involves pain, but this one has to happen.”
“It’s easy to say if the job that disappears isn’t yours.”
“Fair enough,” she said, ending the discussion. “So I gather you’re not here to join Reclaim?”
“No, I’m here on behalf of the Hernandez family. Their daughter came down here to protest but they weren’t able to reach her after Wednesday night.” Roxanne’s expression shifted slightly when I mentioned the family name, but she was hard to read.
“There are a lot of worried families right now. We’re going to head back to the hospital after breakfast. But Heather hasn’t been with us for...well, more than a month now.”
“She left a month ago?” I was caught off-guard.
“Maybe six weeks, even.”
“Do you know where she went?”
“I don’t know where she ended up, but some of the younger members here were closer to her. They might be able to tell you something more. I’ll introduce you as soon as I drop my burden,” she said as she dumped her pails of water into a cistern. After I poured my water in, she covered it tightly with a tarp.
* * *
“Heather left in September, right after...” The girl named Chloe hesitated and looked at Adam, having swiftly stumbled onto a taboo topic. The two of them formed the kind of couple that mirrors each other rather than contrasts. Chloe was tall and freckled, her long red hair flowing from under a bandanna. Adam had a trimmed beard and glasses and looked like he might have stepped directly from a Patagonia catalogue.
“There was a shakeup here around that time,” Adam explained, taking up the story. “Reclaim was founded on communalist principles, but that didn’t work for too long when we actually had to survive. The meadow got to be a mess and we attracted raccoons and lost a bunch of food. The county threatened to evict us if we didn’t deal with our waste better. Funny for environmentalists, right?” I didn’t smile. Adam shrugged and continued. “Anyway, it ended up that Roxanne, Josh and Amy took charge and things improved by the middle of the summer. The camp was cleaner, we ate better and we didn’t have any more trouble with the locals. We were even able to shut the Hobart site down for a day in July.”