The Cure (28 page)

Riley did as he was told, sitting down next to Dylan. Across from him sat the judge, a man with consistently disheveled bright red hair who seemed to always have a razor nick on his pallid chin. The judge cleared his throat as the others settled into their seats. “Mr. Keep, I believe you know everyone here except for Mr. Keller.”

The young man in the suit nodded at Riley.

Riley said, “Hello.”

“Mr. Keller approached the prosecuting attorney yesterday afternoon with new evidence in your case,” said the judge. “The prosecuting attorney made me aware of it at my home, and I decided it was important enough to call us all together first thing this morning. I apologize for interfering with everyone’s weekend plans, but given the nature of this evidence, it seemed best not to wait.

“Mr. Keller is an attorney. The new evidence comes to us in the form of a videotaped deposition he took in connection with another matter that concerns you, Mr. Keep. We have all seen the video, and rather than explain the details I think we should just let you watch it yourself.”

Turning to one of the guards who had remained by the door, the judge said, “Deputy Harris, would you please turn off the lights?”

With the room dark, the judge said, “Mr. Keller, if you would,” and the freshly scrubbed young man leaned forward and pressed a button on the television. There was a brief pause, then the screen filled with a close-up image of an old woman’s face. It was Willa Newdale.

C
HAPTER
T
HIRTY
-F
OUR

A
BRIGHT LIGHT CAST SHADOWS DEEP
into the furrows on her brow. Beside her nose and around her eyes and lips were wrinkles like the hairline fractures earthquakes cause in granite. As she stared away from the camera, Riley heard a man’s voice say, “My name is Robert Keller, plaintiff’s attorney in the matter of Willams versus Hanks Pharmaceutical Corporation, BHR Incorporated, Mr. Lee Wallace Hanks Jr., Mr. Riley Preston Keep, and Mrs. Hope Leigh Keep. It is 3:00 p.m. on the fifth of May. Our location is my offices at 1979 Westwood Drive in Wichita, Kansas. Umm . . . Would you please state your name and address?”

Riley saw her blink in the light. She let a couple of seconds go by without responding, her hesitation reminding him of the way he felt the day he led his wife into a dugout canoe to ride beyond all roads and wires and help. No turning back from here. No help left where we are going.

She licked her lips. “I really have to say where I’m living?”

The man off-screen said, “If you’re having second thoughts . . .”

“No.” She blinked again into the bright light. “But you’ll keep this in a safe-deposit box at your bank, like we said?”

“Absolutely. You have my word. On camera, even.”

Willa Newdale smiled a little. She drew a deep breath slowly in and let it out all in a rush. “All right, then. I live at 131 Pine Street, number three, Trask, Kansas, and my name is Dr. Dale Williams.”

Riley tried to process this information. Willa Newdale was Dale Williams? The one suing him? A doctor, not a social worker? As the voices on the television continued talking, he considered what it meant. The lawsuit was not coming from some stranger with a name he had never heard before, but from the old lady who had taken him and Brice into her shelter on that cold November night. So Willa Newdale knew he was the one behind the cure, and she must have known he stole the cure even when he was passing it out around her shelter. And if she knew that way back then, it meant . . . what? Riley tried to think, but the wrinkled woman with the strong jaw on the television kept on talking, distracting him.

“I was—I
am
a research chemist. My job involved finding ways to synthesize naturally occurring compounds that showed medicinal promise.”

The off-camera voice said, “Could you describe your work in layman’s terms?”

“Well, I specialize in creating methodologies for the replication of chemicals normally found in plants, developing laboratory protocols for synthesis in lieu of extraction to facilitate economical mass production.”

Mr. Keller’s voice chuckled. “Okay, Doctor, to put it into words even I can understand, is it accurate to say you looked for ways to make chemicals artificially that would normally be found in nature?”

“Well, it’s more complicated than that, but okay. Essentially that’s right. Yes.”

“Great. Now, could you explain why you’ve filed this lawsuit?”

“Okay. It started more than seven years ago, when I was assigned to a field research effort in Brazil. I, uh, I flew into a remote camp in the upper Amazonian river basin run by a pair of missionaries.”

Keller said, “What were their names?”

“Riley Keep, uh, Reverend Keep, and Hope Keep.”

Riley blinked at the screen. Who
was
this woman? What was going on here? He felt exposed, vulnerable, like he was being stalked. He thought of his soft footfalls on the snowy road to Teal Pond, when he had been so certain of his solitude only to find a fox had been watching him with golden eyes all along from the shadows of the evergreens. He had to forget his preconceptions. He had to pay attention now. He must not miss a thing. He had to focus on this woman’s words.

“. . . because Mr. Hanks, my boss, sat on a lot of missions boards. Back then I thought it was for religious reasons, but now I think he did it to keep his ear close to the ground on native remedies. And to have a cover story. He needed the missionary agency so he could send his own people in to find new product opportunities without tipping off competitors or local governments. A huge percentage of the medicines we produce began as native remedies, you know. So it shouldn’t have surprised me that—”

The voice off-camera interrupted. “Could you stick with what happened, Doctor?”

“Oh, I’m sorry. Uh, so one of the boards Mr. Hanks sat on was getting reports from the Reverend and Mrs. Keep that their tribe—the indigenous people they were sent to work with—were being miraculously healed of alcoholism. Mr. Hanks arranged for a team to visit the tribe to find the source of their recovery.”

“He believed it was caused by a plant?”

“Yes.”

“How do you know he believed this?”

“He told me so, in a meeting at Hanks Pharmaceuticals’ home office on . . .” She looked down and there was a rustling of papers, then she provided a date.

“You said the missionaries reported that the Indians were being miraculously healed. Did you mean that literally? Did the Keeps think it was a, uh, a miracle?”

“I guess so.”

“But Mr. Hanks suspected these Indians had a plant that cured alcoholism? That must have caused some tension when you showed up with all your testing equipment and whatnot.”

“It probably would have, but Mr. Hanks knew what he was doing. He only sent a small advance team at first. Three medical doctors. He told them to present themselves as part of the missions effort. And he got the missions board to tell the Keeps to help with the team’s insertion into the indigenous population.”

“So the Keeps introduced these doctors to the Indians as fellow missionaries?”

“That’s right. The search for the cure would have been impossible otherwise. The Keeps had been there about four years, and had the Indians’ complete trust. They told the Indians the doctors were Christian missionaries and . . .”

Riley put his head in his hands and covered his eyes.

“Please pause the video, Mr. Keller,” said the judge, leaning forward.

Riley did not trust himself to speak. He sat in the darkened room, seeing horrible things, gruesome things.

The judge said, “Mr. Keep? Are you all right?”

He looked up. On the television, the old woman’s face was frozen, her eyes aimed someplace back behind the camera, her forehead, cheeks and chin a complex web of creases folded in on themselves. He looked at her and saw these things, and other things besides. Himself, telling those three doctors they could trust The People. He saw Sam, Melinda, and Rory. Those were their names. They were not “three doctors,” but the sons and daughter of grieving parents, the friends of people who probably still missed them, three human beings who had trusted him with their lives. Riley saw their faces as clearly as he saw this woman’s on the television screen, saw them overflowing with excitement as he left them for his sabbatical, and saw them as they had been on his return, mostly eaten by the living jungle.

The judge said, “Would you like a glass of water?”

Riley cleared his throat and forced the horrific images back into the deep place where they lived. “I’m okay.”

“You’re sure?”

“Ayuh.”

“All right. Mr. Keller, press Play again, if you would.”

“. . . got the team accepted pretty quickly,” spoke the woman on the screen. “The doctors examined The People—that’s what they called themselves—and provided some medical care. But while they were doing that, they also went about their real mission, looking for anything that might explain the Indians’ sudden sobriety.”

“Just to be clear, did these doctors find a plant that cured alcoholism? The plant Mr. Hanks believed was there?”

“No. It took them about a month to decide through blood tests and so forth that there was probably some substance being used, but they couldn’t identify it, and The People wouldn’t talk about it.”

“How did Mr. Hanks react to this news?”

“Well, this is where I came in. He sent a second team, which included me, another research chemist, three medical technicians, and eight men who were supposed to help us with logistical support and translation.”

“Translation? These men spoke the Indians’ language?”

“As it turned out, no.”

“No? Okay, we’ll come back to that, but first would you tell us what the defendants, Reverend and Mrs. Keep, were doing during this time?”

“Oh, they weren’t there by the time we arrived. Mr. Hanks had the missions board recall them to the States for a vacation and debriefing. I was told . . .”

She continued speaking as Riley remembered his mixed emotions at hearing they would have a chance to get away for a few weeks, their first trip back in four years, in the whole time since they had made contact with The People. He remembered wondering if it might be a mistake to leave the three newcomers there to minister to The People without their help. But he had been so deeply weary. He had suppressed the whispered warnings, convinced himself all would be well, placed his own desires above the leading of the Spirit. He had been tired, just tired. And because he wasn’t strong enough to stay the course, all that blood was on his hands. So much blood . . .

“. . . was worried we might have trouble without them, but the first team had established some relationships among the tribal leadership by then, so we were able to conduct our research pretty well.”

“Dr. Williams, in the interest of time, let’s move on to the central question. Did the team ever discover a cure for alcoholism among those Indians?”

“No, but I did.”

“Please explain how that happened.”

The woman on the screen looked down again. Riley could see the gray at the roots of her auburn hair. When she looked back up, her steady eyes were moist. “We ate every meal with The People in order to track the full range of their diet. We ran a full analysis on everything. We tested their water sources. We even analyzed the logs and branches they used to build fires in case the substance was ingested as an inhalant.”

“Why didn’t you just ask them?”

“Well, of course we tried. But only a few Indians knew any Portuguese, and their vocabulary was limited. None of us spoke their language. And the main reason, you have to remember the Keeps and the Indians all thought we were missionaries, so it was really hard to move the interviews from talking about ‘miracles’ to talking about plants or medicines without coming across like we were skeptical about their faith.”

“You worried they would guess you weren’t really missionaries if you pressed too hard for other reasons they were sober?”

“Sure. I mean, we couldn’t go in there and say, ‘Hi, we’re Christians and praise God and all that, but why do you
really
think you’re not a bunch of drunks anymore?’ So we just weren’t making any headway. I started to worry that Mr.

Hanks might pull us out of there. I couldn’t stand the thought of it.”

“Why did it matter so much to you?”

“My father died of cirrhosis of the liver and I had a younger brother who hadn’t been sober for thirty years. I felt like if I could find whatever had made The People sober all of a sudden, it would do so much good for so many people. I knew my brother . . . couldn’t last much longer, and I thought a little deception wouldn’t matter. I . . . I . . . uh, could you shut it off a minute?”

“Is something wrong?”

The old woman wiped her eyes. “Just shut it off, will you?”

The television screen went black for about two seconds. Then her face returned. Robert Keller’s voice off screen said, “All right, Doctor, your last words were `I thought a little deception wouldn’t matter.’”

Riley saw the old woman’s face on the screen, nodding. “Okay. I . . . I started spending time with two men who were habitual drunks. The others, the ones who had been cured, they called them ‘ghosts.’ Some strip miners had shown The People how to make their own alcohol from a kind of guava. Terrible stuff. Tasted like a cross between sour milk and bile, but these two men still loved it, and like all the other Indians, they were always willing to share everything they had. So I started drinking with the ‘ghosts’ every day. I did my best to limit my intake and exaggerate the effects. Soon The People started calling me Falls Down Woman, or something like that. I let my personal hygiene deteriorate. I picked fights. I was a mess, and generally made a spectacle of myself every way I could.

“One day, an old Indian asked if I was happy. At least I think that’s what he asked. My Portuguese was bad and so was his. But I was lying on a sandbank by a stream near their village—it was a place we went to drink—and this old man, his name was Waytee, he came out of the jungle and asked if I was happy. I told him . . .”

Riley closed his eyes as she continued on. To hear the woman speak of Waytee, to hear that he had asked if she was happy . . . it was all he could do to keep from leaping up and running from the room. Riley sensed something dreadful stalking him within the story she was weaving. He thought of swallowing the same foul brew of river water and rotting guava the old woman had described, of lying drunk for days on soil that had been sanctified by the blood of those he had thought were saints, of joining the lost missionaries’ suffering as best he could this side of suicide, embarking on a life of ceaseless penance, surrendering his essence to become a drunken shell like the brutal savages who had martyred them.

If there had been any comfort in his life since then, it was only in the fact that all his suffering was just as it should be, justice rolling down on him like a mighty river; he had seen to that at least. He had always been so certain of his failure, so sure he was the cause of everything. But if those people were not really missionaries at all—if it had been as this old woman said—then who were the savages, and who the saints? And which of those was he?

“. . . so Waytee asked if I wanted to stop drinking. I said sure, but it was impossible. The Indian said he could help, if I was willing to go for a walk with him.

“That night I told the others on the team. It was our first hint of success. The team leader got so excited he called Mr. Hanks with the good news on a mobile satellite phone. The next morning, Waytee came for me. I thought we’d be gone just a few hours, but we walked for three days, sleeping wherever we were when the sunlight faded. Waytee gathered fruit and berries along the path and started hunting an hour or two before the sunset every evening. He built fires at night and roasted whatever he had killed. It rained hard almost every afternoon. He taught me how to use the largest leaves to form a funnel and send the rainwater into my mouth. He taught me a lot of things about surviving.