Chapter 17
Chapter Seventeen
On Monday morning, Elena woke up to a text message from James: "Would you like to have dinner together tonight?" Elena’s heart jumped into her throat. Panicked, she threw her phone to the end of the bed and jogged in place, trying to calm herself down. Everything felt like it was happening at once. By the end of a five-minute jog, she realized that a dinner date with James was everything she wanted. What was she so afraid of? She texted back: Yes! Let’s do it!
And with that, she guessed, she was officially dating James.
She was the luckiest woman in the world.
Downstairs, Elena set out her mother’s medication and brewed a big pot of coffee.
It was seven in the morning, and she had a heavy schedule ahead: a Christmas festival at the Millbrook retirement facility, which she and Natalie had agreed to attend together for newspaper reasons, four articles to edit, plus, she hoped, additional time to research potential corruption at a government level.
Not since her days in the Middle East had she felt so energetic. Even Carmen noticed.
“You’re looking fiery today,” she said. “Is it new lipstick?”
Elena laughed. She wondered if Carmen remembered anything from their conversation last night and decided it didn’t matter. The love remained.
That afternoon at one, Elena met Natalie at the retirement facility.
Natalie carried one of the fancy cameras from the Gazette's back room and took a few exterior shots of the Christmas decorations before they entered and greeted the woman at the front desk.
Everywhere they looked, staff members were wearing Santa hats and holiday scrubs.
From the back room came the sound of “Jingle Bell Rock,” and the woman at the front desk told them to head down the hall. Everything was just getting started.
Of course, recording the events of a retirement facility Christmas party wasn’t high on Elena’s hard-hitting journalist list. (The truth was, the other journalists at the Gazette were either on vacation or busy with other Christmas-themed articles, or such slower writers that it was silly to assign them anything that needed to be written on the day of.) But as she and Natalie walked in, Elena was overwhelmed with the joy that bounced through the room.
The people living at the retirement facility were anywhere between sixty-five and one hundred and five—a broad age range if Elena had ever seen one.
It was funny to imagine that Brenda, the oldest, had been forty when Ron, the youngest, was born.
But here they were together, eating turkey and yams and listening to songs that everybody loved.
One of the nurses, a woman named Margorie with a very kind face, brought Elena and Natalie around the room, introducing them to some of their residents. “This is Mrs. Galloway,” she said. Mrs. Galloway is a retired middle school teacher. Isn’t that right?”
Mrs. Galloway looked incredibly proud of her forty-five years of teaching. Despite being in a wheelchair, she looked down at them from the other side of her nose.
“Forty-five years,” Elena said, genuinely at a loss. It was hard to fathom getting up every day for forty-five years and teaching thirteen-year-olds geography. Some would say that was a level of hell.
“What do you think is the secret to finding happiness in forty-five years of teaching?” Natalie asked. Elena smiled at her. It was a good question—the kind that would lead to a simpler article.
Mrs. Galloway thought for a moment, then smiled to herself. “I was married to the principal. We kept things fun.”
Natalie grinned. “You had love at school.”
“Not everyone did,” Mrs. Galloway said. “I watched teachers burn out left and right. I hear it’s even worse now. People no longer respect that profession. Especially the government.”
Elena’s ears rang at the mention of the government. Was it possible that everyone could smell Millbrook government corruption, even if they didn’t have the words to speak on it? Maybe it was an open secret.
“What do you think the government is up to?” Elena asked.
Mrs. Galloway tossed her white hair. “What aren’t they up to? They’re trying to manipulate how our children think! They’re on the internet! They’re on the airwaves!”
Her heart sinking, Elena realized she’d met a quasi-conspiracy theorist, which wasn’t necessarily a bad thing.
There was always some truth to what these people said.
“I get what you mean,” she said, nodding.
But soon, Elena and Natalie managed to slip away and head to another table, leaving Mrs. Galloway to complain about “mind control” to whoever else was at her table.
But Mrs. Galloway’s comments had reminded Elena of something.
The people in the retirement facility had been a part of the Millbrook fabric for many, many years.
Not all of them had memory problems, like Carmen did.
Their bodies were failing them, but their minds were as sharp as whips.
Could Elena learn more about what was going on at Cranberry Cove through the Christmas party at the retirement facility? Was that ridiculous to suggest?
When she finally mentioned her thoughts to Natalie, though, Natalie said they had to go for it. “I thought today would be a wash,” Natalie whispered, taking photographs of the residents from the corner. “But it might be instrumental to our investigation.”
Elena bit her tongue to keep from smiling too brightly. Natalie had begun to speak like a hard-hitting journalist. Elena wondered if Natalie was trying to imitate Elena, or if she’d picked up the verbiage from the internet or television shows. It didn’t matter. She was the perfect partner.
Next, they interviewed other retired folks: Ben Mason, who’d run the grocery store for thirty-five years and could tell you how much the cost of a loaf of bread had changed during that time, and Mary Conrad, who’d had seven children, four of whom had died tragically in a house fire back in 1983 and one of whom had gone on to be a best-selling author of children’s fantasy books.
“I don’t really understand what the big deal is about fantasy,” Mary said to Natalie and Elena.
“Who gives a crap about all those dragons?” Elena and Natalie had to stifle their laughter behind their hands.
But it was when they encountered Greg Treutner that things got especially interesting.
The nurse in charge of him introduced him as “the mayor of Millbrook,” and he grinned proudly, his face ancient and sagging and filled with moles.
But there was something regal about him, Elena thought, something that spoke to a previous handsomeness that had probably had all the women in Millbrook talking about him.
It was perhaps part of the reason he’d been voted in in the first place. People loved a good-looking politician.
“It’s a pleasure to meet you, Mayor,” Elena said, shaking his hand.
“You must be the newspaper woman’s daughter,” Greg said. His voice sounded like tires on gravel. “What’s her name? Carmen.”
Elena smiled, grateful that Greg’s memory was intact. “That’s right. She’s been in charge of things at the paper for years and years. I’m helping out these days.” Elena gestured toward Natalie’s camera and added, “We both are. Trying to take over where my mother left off.”
“I’m almost one hundred years old,” Greg announced, as though he hadn’t heard her. “They’re going to throw me a big birthday party in February to celebrate. I never liked having a birthday in winter. February is a cruel, cold, thankless month.”
Elena laughed good-naturedly and thought, How am I going to get him to talk about corruption in Millbrook? She’d have to placate him.
Admittedly, it took a little while to get there.
They talked about Greg’s grandchildren, his hobbies, and his obsession with birds.
He could name every bird that lived in Millbrook County when they migrated south, and when they came back.
Natalie wavered on her feet, as though she’d let her knees lock. But still, Elena pressed on.
At the retirement party, a few residents had gotten up to perform short Christmas sketches or sing songs.
It looked as though one of them—a woman named Rhonda—was the taskmaster, having installed herself as the theater troupe leader.
When an older woman forgot her lines for the mini-pageant, Rhonda lost her mind and told the other woman that she wouldn’t be cast in the play next Christmas.
Things got rowdy after that. A few nurses came in to calm the woman who’d forgotten her lines.
Rhonda was sent away and told to collect herself.
Greg shrugged. “What do you expect? We lived all our lives in our separate houses, only seeing one another when we wanted to. Suddenly, we all live together here. All our personalities come together, bubble up, and reach a breaking point. We’re old, but we’re still ourselves.”
Elena thought it was one of the more poetic things she’d ever heard. Greg’s sharp gaze gave her the confidence to ask the question heaviest on her mind.
“When you were mayor in the seventies,” she pressed, “did you ever experience any corruption? Or did you notice it going on?”
Greg took a breath and gave her a look that again showed her precisely what he’d looked like back then: domineering, intelligent, powerful. “Why do you ask?”
“I don’t want to get anyone from the past in trouble,” Elena said firmly. “I want to get a better picture of what life was like back then, if only to learn what it might be like now. I want to figure out how deep corruption goes and how it might ruin normal people’s lives.”
Greg slid a finger across his gray eyebrow.
“If you want to find corruption? Look all around you.” He gestured vaguely at the room where they sat and at the window that looked out onto the forest. “For a town to run, there’s corruption.
For something to be built, there might be corruption.
Everyone is out for their own capitalistic gain, and to get what you want, you might have to manipulate someone else, who also wants something else.
We’re all alone on this journey of life. We’re all selfish.”
Elena leaned back in her chair, surprised at how forthright he was. She also wasn’t entirely sure she agreed with him. She thought of James Murphy, of Natalie, of her mother; she thought about her career in the Middle East and how much she’d ached to do a smidge of good.
“I hear you,” Elena said finally. She felt she had to agree with him, at least on some level, to keep the conversation going. “Let me ask you this. What does Cranberry Cove mean to you?”
Greg erupted into ominous laughter. Elena glanced at Natalie, who was equally as buggy-eyed. It took a little while for Greg to calm down, and by then, a few of the residents had turned to look at what all the commotion was about.
“That was a thorn in my side all through the seventies,” Greg admitted. “I thought I’d never have to hear about it again.”
“What was so awful about it?” Elena asked.
“Well, you must know the town pushed back against it,” Greg said.
“There were all kinds of people trying to give me money to quiet certain people down. Big players were involved, and a lot of money changed hands. They wanted their own ecosystem up there. Their own town lines drawn. They thought I could do more for them than I could.”
“Did you take the money?” Elena asked.
Greg cackled. “Some of it. Yeah. Of course I did. Should I feel bad about it?”
Elena and Natalie exchanged glances, unsure of what to say.
“I see from your expressions that you think I’m a bad man,” Greg said. “But I’m just as bad as you or your mother or your grandmother before you. I’m bad, and I’m good, and I contain multitudes. Like all of us.”
Up on stage, a little girl (probably someone’s granddaughter) had begun to do a tap-dance routine for a jazz version of “Silent Night.” Elena’s heart pounded along with the little girl’s shoes.
She needed to get out of there, if only to take a breath.
She stood and thanked Greg for his honesty.
But before she could pull away, Greg grabbed her hand and said, “Follow the money. You’ll find more than you can handle.
” He let her go, and she slipped through the crowd, away from the song and the smells of cooling turkey.
Natalie chased her, her camera clutched in her hands.