scotch began to have the desired effect. He slipped off his shoes and loosened his seatbelt. In moments he had fallen into that world between sleep and consciousness—still aware of the hum of the tires on the concrete, the press of his head against the window. He saw himself standing at a lectern before a vast sea of howling supporters, their faces ecstatic with adulation, eyes glowing with orgiastic fervor, with strength, pride and solidarity of purpose.
The Lincoln hit a bump. Dorn felt as if he were falling and jerked to full consciousness. “The TV ad,” he said. “I know just where to shoot it.”
When Dr. Horace Wright ran The Winston Medical Clinic, he’d close at 1 p.m., walk three blocks to his house, enjoy a solitary lunch, catnap for twenty minutes and return to work refreshed.
His daughter’s pattern was different. Occasionally, Allison would schedule a hair appointment, stop by the bank or—heaven forbid—eat a lunch she hadn’t made. More often, she simply hung the “Closed” sign on the door and immersed herself in a cheap romance novel for the full hour and a half while sipping Diet Coke and nibbling on a sandwich she’d brought from home. Sometimes Coretha ordered from the deli and they read together in silence. For both father and daughter, the pleasure was a buffer against the chaos of the day. Allison guarded the time jealously.
Today, Coretha was using the lunch hour to be fitted for the costume she would wear in the town’s Old Fashioned River Days historical pageant. Allison was eating a tuna sandwich and at a point in Passions of the Prairie where she was disinclined to be interrupted. She became aware of knocking on the clinic door. Its tentativeness was unusual enough that it piqued her curiosity.
With her black eyes and a shiny purple bruise that ran from her left cheek to her temple, the young woman reminded Allison of a raccoon.
She shifted the beam of her flashlight to the woman’s mouth. “Open.” Candi Cloninger’s teeth were intact but her spittle was tinged with blood. Allison quickly located the source—the piercing for Cloninger’s tongue stud. The blow must have reopened the wound.
“Tell me again what happened.”
“I tripped and hit my face on the kitchen counter.”
“A counter with knuckles?” She didn’t try to hide her skepticism.
A long pause. “Darryl. He’s a trucker.”
“I suppose the tongue stud was his idea.”
Cloninger looked hurt. Allison hated herself for sounding judgmental. The woman needed support, not another reason to feel bad. She lifted Cloninger’s chin. “Nothing you might have done is worth being hit for. If he hit you, you need to leave before it happens again.”
The woman rolled her eyes. “And go where?”
Allison knew there was no good answer. Winston didn’t even have a domestic abuse hotline, much less a shelter. She x-rayed Cloninger’s skull, gave her some anti-diarrheal samples when Cloninger mentioned her boyfriend Darryl was suffering intestinal problems—even abusers were entitled to medical treatment—and asked her to wait while the x-rays developed.
She remembered that she’d intended to pull the file of the woman with the earlobe infection but before she could, the clinic’s day spun out of control. Sally McCollum’s kidney stones acted up, Charlie Sizemore lacerated his arm when he tripped over a scythe and, at age one hundred and one, Lester Mullinax suffered cardiac arrest and died at home in bed. Allison made arrangements for Sally to get Vicodin, for Charlie to get stitched up in her examining room, and for Lester to get to the funeral home. She was still cleaning up when Coretha reminded her she’d asked Cloninger to wait.
Allison picked up a stack of x-rays. “These hers?” Coretha nodded.
Allison slipped one into the wall-mounted light tray and frowned. She quickly unclipped the film and substituted another. The film showed the outline of Cloninger’s skull. Good news: no evidence of fracture. But the second film registered the same anomaly she had seen in the first—a blurry black void roughly the size of a tennis ball in Cloninger’s mouth, obscuring her teeth and part of her jaw. It was as if there was a large hole in Cloninger’s head, allowing x-rays to pass right through and expose the film.
Allison snapped all Cloninger’s films onto the light tray. All showed the same void. “Something’s off with the film. Get her back in here.”
Coretha returned a few moments later. “She’s gone.”
Allison scolded herself for probing too deeply into Cloninger’s personal life. She’d obviously made the woman uncomfortable. “I hope the whole box isn’t bad. Check other films we took today.”
Coretha returned a few moments later with x-rays of Wade Pedroza’s broken arm. “No problem,” she pronounced.
“What about yesterday?”
Coretha pulled the only films taken that day—of Katie Gibbs, who had complained about pain in her left leg. She slid the three views into the light box. “Looks fine to me.”
The films also looked defect-free to Allison but something caught her attention that hadn’t a day earlier. She held a magnifying glass over a section of the film showing Katie’s left tibia, right below the patella. She moved the film to a different position and studied more. She pored over the two other films inch by inch with the glass.
“What do you see?” Coretha asked.
“Maybe something, maybe nothing. Right now, I need you to call Josh Gibbs. See if he’s free for a cup of coffee after work.”
Chief J. P Holt navigated his aging cruiser through Winston with growing dismay. American flags hung from the front porches of at least half the homes. Red, white and blue bunting decorated many of the rest. On one corner, the Sternwheeler Inn was festooned with both.
How could it be festival time again already?
Claiming a heritage that dated to George Washington, Winston had once been a bustling Ohio River community—a host to paddle wheelers and coal barges and home to boat captains and a riverfront hotel where guests legendarily fished from the mezzanine during the Great Flood of 1937.
These days, Holt patrolled a town of eight thousand people consisting of a twelve-block Main Street of three-story buildings, several leafy in-town neighborhoods, a shopping center, a small industrial park of corrugated steel buildings north of town by the Interstate, and a large new subdivision of split-level homes perched on the low hills just to the east.
Instead of river traffic, the economy depended on farmers who worked the bottomlands outside of town, Social Security checks, one large employer, and Old Fashioned River Days, a start-of-summer festival originally conceived as a weekend sales promotion which had evolved into a ten-day celebration of Winston’s past, attracting tourists from several states who stayed in quaint waterfront Victorian guest houses, took river rides on replica paddle wheel steamers, attended a nightly historical drama in Winston’s riverfront park and oohed and ahhhed at the fireworks after. There was even a carnival.
Everyone
