Bridget turned. “What do you mean?”
“I just mean,” Jane put her hands up, searching for the words. “He goes after me every chance he gets. He knows I can’t stand him. I roll my eyes or tell him to go chase wind or whatever. Makes no difference. He just laughs and says things like, ‘C’mon, Janie Jane. We can be friends.’ Says he’ll win me over someday. He can’t let it lie.”
Bridget smiled. It seemed like Nate, and frankly, made Jane look like a bitch. Maybe his intention, maybe not.
She took a step toward Bridget and cocked her head, her eyes narrowed to a slit. “But, don’t you think it’s a little pathological? That he needs to be liked that much?”
?????
There always seemed to be a cloud over the mill and its hundred feet of stacks poking holes in the sky, even on the brightest day. The faint smell of sulfur hung on the grass blades, the trees. She’d been told that while the mill was in operation, before 2005, the whole town smelled like rotten eggs, and eventually you could tell a shutdown by the odor. Clean air meant trouble at the mill.
Nate explained once that the smell wasn’t harmful. It was called TRS—total reduced sulfur—and was the same chemical that was added to natural gas to make it detectable. If you were an Oanoker for life, you learned to like the smell. Making paper, making money, they’d say. You could hear the hum and screech of the pulper as you drove up Mill Road. Bridget couldn’t imagine it. She sometimes wondered if it was a chemical cloud that hung over the plant, low and thick, like a fog.
She remembered what Dale said about the birds: arsenic poisoning from the mill.
Was arsenic a by-product of paper production?
Bridget pushed open the huge steel door, the inside unchanged from the week before. If pressed, she couldn’t have explained why she was back, just that she was. She felt like she had a flimsy, tenuous grip on the truth. That she had all the pieces, and still couldn’t assemble the puzzle.
Rows and rows of rolled brown paper sat in the room to her left, giving off a moldy smell. The air inside the mill always felt wetter, like somehow it rained on the inside. It was the pulp room, the one they’d been stuck in last week, where the lost, squawking goose waddled his way around.
The pulp room was littered with debris, steel machinery, cranes, and conveyors.
Bridget cleared her throat. “Hello?”
She didn’t know whom she was yelling for—it was just a hunch. She didn’t even tell Tripp she was coming. She felt stupid for it and certainly couldn’t have explained it. Except . . .
This mill was the place Lucia was drawn to the first time she’d run away. If Nate was right, it was the place that ruined her father and her future in one fell swoop the day it closed its doors. Did she know her father was back? Or worse yet, did he have anything to do with his daughter’s disappearance?
There was no sign of her, no gas heater. But it had been in the sixties at night and hot as Hades in the day, so that might not mean anything.
The pulper sat in the far corner, twenty feet around, a concrete bathtub sunk into the ground. It contained a tank that went down to basement, fifteen feet deep, with a steel rotor in the middle. Bridget had seen it before.
The mill was a destination in Mt. Oanoke.
Years ago, before they’d known that Holden was sick, Bridget and Holden would come here with Alecia and Nate. Like kids, they brought bottles of Two Buck Chuck and sat in the pulp room throwing rocks into the pulper. Two points for each metal ting of the stones bouncing off the rotor. Alecia and Nate snuck off somewhere between the rollers, and later Alecia had told her drunkenly they’d had sex back there, up against a metal spool, a screw digging into the small of her back, her feet braced on the cylinder in front of her.
“It’s the angle,” she’d giggled, lifting one foot to demonstrate, her hands pushing at her thighs.
Holden and Bridget stayed near the pulper, throwing stones at the rotor and intermittently talking, but mostly each thinking about the things they weren’t talking about—the conference, the fingernail, Watercress 6:30, and why Holden was being so different. Bridget remembered looking off toward the big rollers, to the sound of Alecia’s giggle, and feeling a pang. Wishing she’d had that love, wishing she had someone else. Wishing they’d come back. Nate made things between them all bearable.
Bridget pushed past the conveyor, the rubberized mat that she remembered walking on like a balance beam, drunk on the Chuck, her hands out to her sides, Holden holding one arm and Nate the other and Alecia in the back protesting, you guys, get down, someone is going to get hurt, we’re too adult for this bullshit, and they’d all laughed, their voices mimicking her. When she hopped off the end and stumbled, her ankle twisting, it was Nate she grabbed, not Holden.
Now, next to the pulper was a new thing. A stepladder. It wasn’t there years ago, and she didn’t remember it being there a week ago. Bridget pushed past the old control panel, under the pipes that had moved the pulp from the tank to the sheeter. She pressed her hand up against the flat expanse of steel, dusty and rough with rust.
The sun gleamed through the windows, dust sparking and dancing in the air. She’d never been in the mill in this kind of daylight; she’d always come at night.
She stood next to the tank, open on the top, the concrete coming to her chin. With one foot, she tested the stepladder and found it sturdy. She climbed to the top and looked down. It was empty, the rotor shining, leaves curled around the smooth edges, but the center, around the rotor, smooth and bare. Except for a small black backpack with a rainbow zipper.
Lucia’s.
CHAPTER 36
Bridget, Thursday, May 14, 2015
“Lucia!” Bridget’s voice echoed off the brick walls, the floor. The inside of the pulper, along the rear wall, contained a maintenance ladder, steel pipe and thin. Bridget wound her way around the concrete casing and tested the ladder. It was about a fifteen-foot drop to the floor, but the ladder felt solid. She dropped her foot down on the first rung, her moccasin slipping, and then caught herself. She climbed down, her throat closed and heart thudding with every creak.