Tamarack River Ghost (25 page)

He walked over to the administrative assistant’s desk. “Do you know where Emily Jordan has filed the returned questionnaires from our research project?”

“Sorry, I don’t,” she said as she reached to answer the phone. It seemed the phone never stopped ringing at the main desk of the Department of Agribusiness Studies. So much for cell phones and text-messaging replacing all land lines.

He waited until she had hung up. “Do you know if Emily is expected in this morning?”

“I’ll check her schedule—don’t you have a copy in your office?”

“Probably, but you know my office.” He smiled when he said it, because everyone knew that his office was not the most tidy and organized in the department.

“She should be in by nine this morning,” the administrative assistant said, reaching to answer the phone again. “This one’s for you,” she said as she covered her hand over the mouthpiece.

Randy returned to his office and picked up the phone.

“This is Ben Wesley, county agent in Ames County. I was at the meeting in Willow River, and I’ve been getting lots of calls about the research report you and your graduate assistant shared last night. I have a question for you.”

“Yes?” Randy tried to make his voice sound professional.

“About the numbers your assistant was sharing last night.”

“Yes,” Randy said again, but he could feel the color draining from his face.

“Do you stand by these numbers? I remember you saying they were preliminary.”

“Yes, yes, we do.” Randy knew his answer and tone of voice did not sound convincing. How could they be, when he, too, had some serious questions about the numbers’ accuracy?

“Will you be providing a more complete report of the study in the near future?”

“Yes, we will.”

“Do you have an idea of when that might be?”

“As soon as we’ve had a chance to analyze all the data. Final report should be ready in a couple months.” Randy tried to remain calm.

“Could you make sure to send a copy to my office?”

“We certainly will.” Randy was sweating. He wondered how many calls like this he would get. He wished he hadn’t agreed to have Emily share anything about the research project until they had analyzed all of it, carefully thought about it, and had others check the report for accuracy.

The return rate for the questionnaire seemed a bit high for the Tamarack River Valley, but he knew these people were the most divided about a new
hog facility coming into their community, so they would be more likely to respond.

But where were the returned questionnaires? He checked the area around Emily’s desk; the forms would fill several file boxes, so they should be easy to spot. He looked in the machine room, where the department kept the copy machine, fax machine, and other such equipment. No boxes there. No boxes anywhere. Randy had been extremely busy with his courses and committee work the last couple of weeks. He had seen the pile of mail—the returned questionnaires coming in—and he had asked Emily to take care of logging each one in and filing it. But where? He was becoming frustrated. Just then Emily, her usual bubbly self, entered the main office.

“Good morning, Professor Oakfield,” she said, a big smile on her face. She was the picture of radiance and positive attitude. Department Chair Evans had recently commented at a department meeting: “I wish all our graduate students had a personality like Emily. Always upbeat. Always optimistic. Some of our graduate students mope around like the end of the world is just around the corner.”

“Emily, could you come into my office,” Randy said.

“Sure, what’s up?”

“Please close the door.”

“This sounds serious.”

“I’ve already gotten a call about the preliminary numbers from the research project that you reported last night in Willow River.”

“A call about what?”

“The caller, he was polite about it, wanted a bit more information. He . . . he was questioning the accuracy of the numbers.”

“The accuracy of the numbers? I checked everything twice. The numbers are accurate.” She looked right at Randy when she spoke, her green eyes flashing.

“Where are the returned questionnaires? Do you have a spreadsheet on your computer? I’d like to spend some time with the results myself. We’ve got to be completely sure of our work before we make any more of it public.”

“The questionnaires are at my apartment; that’s where I’ve been doing the work the last several days. I’ll bring them in tomorrow.”

“Could you bring the questionnaires in this afternoon? I’ll help you, or we can ask another graduate student to help.”

“I believe I am capable of carrying four boxes of papers,” Emily said curtly. “Is there anything else?”

“No, nothing else.”

Emily got up, opened the door, and left. Randy, never one with much finesse in personal relationships, felt bad that he had so clumsily handled the simple request of bringing the survey materials to the office. He sensed that Emily believed that he was questioning her research and especially her data analysis skills.

When he returned from lunch, Randy found a big box of returned questionnaires on his desk with a little note: “Here’s some of them. I’ll bring in the rest tomorrow—I’m having a little trouble finding them.”

Randy read the note. How could Emily have misplaced the rest of them? He shouldn’t have allowed the returned questionnaires to leave the office. He remembered he’d said nothing about where they should be filed when they arrived. All that he remembered saying to Emily was that she should carefully log in each returned questionnaire, recording its number and date. He trusted her to take good care of the materials. Now he realized that “taking good care of the materials” should have included the stipulation that they not leave the office.

After two days and several more phone calls requesting more detailed information about the results of the research, he had all the returned questionnaires—at least, he hoped so. He divided them into three piles: Whistler County, Iowa; Ames County, Wisconsin; and the Tamarack River Valley. Randy knew they had mailed twelve hundred questionnaires: five hundred to the sample in Whistler County, another five hundred to rural landowners in Ames County, and a final two hundred to property owners living in the Tamarack River Valley. He remembered Emily sharing the return percentages with him—50 percent from Whistler County, 55 percent from Ames County, and 62 percent from the Tamarack River Valley.

He counted the questionnaires in each pile and noted the percentages: Whistler County = 250 (50 percent); Ames County = 275 (55 percent); Tamarack River Valley = 124 (62 percent). So far, Emily’s numbers were accurate.

He started with the questionnaires for Ames County and on a tally sheet he’d developed began recording the answers to one question: “Do you approve of a large, confined hog operation coming to the Tamarack River Valley?” Although Emily reported just three categories—“yes,” “no,” and “no opinion,” actually people responded in five categories: “strong yes,” “yes,” “no opinion,” “no,” and “strong no.” For reporting purposes, especially for preliminary reports, the two positive categories and the two negative categories were often combined.

In a couple of hours he had the results:

He added the two positive categories together as well as the two negative categories and compared his numbers to those Emily had reported at the Willow River meeting:

Ames County:

Randy went over his figures one more time, trying to see where his graduate assistant had come up with her numbers. He simply couldn’t do it, at least not for the Ames County figures. He began examining the
returned questionnaires for the Tamarack River Valley and came up with the following, which he compared to Emily’s numbers:

Tamarack River Valley (124 respondents):

Finally, Randy turned to the returned questionnaires from Whistler County, Iowa, once more only tabulating the responses to the question about approval of confined hog operations in their county.

Whistler County (250 returns):

Once more, Randy double-checked his figures for accuracy, then he thought,
Emily’s got to have made a major error, or I have totally missed how she did her calculations.
He began to perspire. He was well aware that the numbers Emily shared at the zoning committee hearing had a considerable effect on the final decision to allow Nathan West to build in the Tamarack River Valley.

Randy hadn’t even taken time to break for dinner; he worked until 9:00 p.m., figuring and refiguring and trying to determine how his assistant had come up with numbers so different from his. He didn’t want to believe the unbelievable, that she had manipulated the numbers. If she had, she surely must have known that she would be found out, and she also must surely know the consequences of such action. Not only would she lose her research assistantship and the opportunity to work toward her doctorate degree at the University of Wisconsin, but, with this serious blemish on her record, she would likely never be accepted at another research institution.

But if, indeed, Emily had made an honest error—he must talk to her about all this before jumping to any more conclusions—his own career would be in serious jeopardy. If she had consciously manipulated the numbers and then reported them, not only was she responsible, but he, too, as the research project supervisor, the principle investigator, would be in serious trouble. Ultimately, he was responsible for every research report, small and large, that came out of his office. It was his duty to make sure that those under his watch were acting honestly, ethically, and with complete accuracy. He had trouble sleeping as these thoughts swirled in his mind.

Randy was in his office at 6:30 the following morning, once more checking over his calculations to make sure they were absolutely correct. He was not looking forward to the meeting he knew he must have with his graduate assistant. In the back of his mind, he had a glimmer of hope that her numbers were correct and that she had used a different strategy than he had for coming up with them. But he couldn’t imagine what that would be.

Emily arrived at the office promptly at eight, greeting the office staff and saying hello to any of the professors who were already at work.

“Good morning, Professor Oakfield,” she said when she saw him. “My, you have a glum look on your face this morning.”

“Could you stop in my office as soon as you have a minute?” Randy said.

“Sure can,” she said. “How about as soon as I get a cup of coffee?”

She appeared at Randy’s office door with cup in hand. “Do I need a notepad?” she asked, smiling.

“No, just close the door and have a chair.”

“Why the serious look?” Emily was the picture of innocence.

“We’ve got problems,” Randy said. “Serious problems.”

“How so?”

“I’ve spent the last two days going over our questionnaire returns, and something doesn’t make sense to me.”

“And what would that be?” Now Emily had a serious look on her face.

“Can you explain to me how you arrived at the numbers you presented at the Willow River meeting?”

“Sure, but what seems to be the problem?”

“First, tell me how you did the calculations.”

“Well, let’s see,” Emily began. “As the questionnaires arrived in the office, I logged them in. Once we passed the deadline to receive them, I did a simple count and figured the return-rate percentages for each of our three samples.”

“Here we agree completely. We came up with the same percentages,” said Randy. “But then what did you do? At the moment I’m only interested in the question about positive or negative responses to confined hog operations in the three communities we surveyed. Let’s start with Ames County, Wisconsin.”

“Nothing fancy at all. I didn’t do anything fancy. I simply recorded the responses from each person on a computer spreadsheet.”

“Yes, I did the same thing, except I did it by hand. Then what did you do?”

Emily hesitated a moment before answering because she knew full well where the conversation was headed. “I added the ‘strong yes’ and ‘yes’ responses together for the entire group, and I did the same for the ‘strong no’ and ‘no.’”

“I did the same thing,” said Randy. “In fact, I added these numbers three times to make sure I was correct. Do you know what I found?”

“What?” asked Emily curtly. All appearances of pleasantness had drained from her face.

“I’ll put it bluntly,” Randy said. He tried to catch Emily’s eyes but she was staring at her hands, which she held in her lap. “Your numbers are very different from mine. Let’s take the Tamarack River Valley results, for instance. Your figures say that 75 percent of the respondents are in favor of confined hog operations. My figures show only 40 percent. How do you explain that?”

For a long moment, Emily continued looking at her hands and said nothing.

“I can’t,” she finally said quietly.

“You can’t,” said Randy, with an incredulous tone to his voice.

“That’s right, I can’t. And I don’t want to.” She raised her voice.

“You what?”

“You heard me. I can’t explain my figures, and I don’t want to.” Her voice had changed from quiet research assistant to confrontational.