Chapter 50
Now
quinn
‘Jesus fuck,’ Quinn says as she opens her hotel door and sees Iris Gray standing there.
‘I did knock,’ Iris says.
‘Well, not bloody loud enough. You nearly gave me a heart attack lurking in the corridor like that.’
‘You need to change,’ Iris says.
‘Change what? My moral compass?’
‘Your shoes.’
‘Why? Are we going dancing?’
Iris ignores her facetious tone. ‘The ground’s wet. Canvas sneakers aren’t going to cut it. You must have some boots. Put on whatever you wore when you went up the mountain with Rose.’
‘You know about that?’
‘She’s my daughter.’
Quinn doesn’t have children. But from what she remembers of her own miserable childhood, before her parents packed her off to boarding school at the age of seven, motherhood doesn’t confer mysterious telepathic powers.
‘I tracked Rose’s phone,’ Iris says impatiently. ‘Of course I know she’s talked to you. Why do you think I’m here? Now, are you coming, or not?’
Quinn quickly changes her shoes, and follows Iris down to the hotel lobby. Iris leads her around the parking lot to the steep, wooded mountain slope behind it.
Quinn sighs. Her quads still haven’t recovered from the outing with Rose.
‘We’re not going far,’ Iris says, correctly reading Quinn’s expression.
Quinn wishes Phil was here. It’s a perfect shot: Iris, tall and willowy in her olive combat pants and gold jacket, the background of flaming fall foliage behind her – she could be on the cover of a magazine.
Iris crosses a shallow brook, jumping lightly from stone to stone. Quinn resigns herself to wet feet, and follows.
‘Much as I’m enjoying your family’s wilderness training,’ she says, as she slips on a rock and ends up knee-deep in the stream, which is much fucking colder than it looks, ‘it’d be nice to know where we’re going.’
‘We’re not going anywhere,’ Iris says. ‘I just figured it was time you and I had a chat.’
‘I thought I was the enemy?’
‘I’ve always rather liked you,’ Iris says.
For a brief moment, Quinn is actually wrong-footed.
‘We couldn’t have had this conversation in my hotel room?’ she says finally.
‘I don’t think either of us want to be overheard.’
Quinn follows Iris up the trail in silence. After less than five minutes, they reach a small overlook. Iris sits on the mossy trunk of a fallen tree, gazing out across the flaming flanks of the mountain.
Quinn joins her, squeezing water from the bottom of her sodden jeans.
‘You want me to go first?’ Iris says.
‘There’s only so much I can give you,’ Quinn says. ‘I don’t know what you think this is, but I’m not going to reveal my sources, or share anything they’ve told me in confidence.’
‘You don’t have to tell me anything,’ Iris says.
‘I don’t give a shit what happens to anyone anymore, except Rose.
You keep my daughter out of it, OK? That’s the deal.
Whatever story you’re chasing up in the mountains with Rose, you shut it down.
She thinks she’s all grown up, but she’s still a child.
A very damaged, traumatised child. And right now, she finds the world a bitter, complicated place.
Which makes her very vulnerable to people like you. ’
Quinn finds the world a bitter, complicated place, too.
‘I can’t promise you where this story is going,’ she says. ‘But I’m not in the business of taking advantage of children, traumatised or not.’
A pair of monarch butterflies flutter in the air in front of them, on their way south for the winter. At first, their dance appears random, and then, suddenly synchronised; they circle and spin, as if tied together by invisible threads.
‘Fine,’ Iris says, after a long moment. ‘I’ll tell you what I know. After that, it’s up to you what you do with it.’
‘Are we on the record?’
‘Sure. But this is all hearsay. You’re going to have to find the proof yourself.’
Quinn puts her phone on the tree trunk between them, and hits record.
Iris takes a deep breath. ‘The night of the accident, Jesse and Colt were on a dredger in the lake,’ she says. ‘Colt coerced his son, Mac, into lending it to them off book.’
‘Why?’
‘Colt’s brewery had been discharging unauthorised waste into the lake,’ Iris says.
‘It caused a dangerous build-up of zebra mussels in the waste pipe, and an analysis of them could have proved the brewery had been illegally discharging pollutants. That would’ve opened them up to all sorts of lawsuits from people near the lake who’ve got sick. ’
Quinn has done her homework since she first learned about the topic of Luke Connelly’s research; in the last five years, a number of local news organisations like VTDigger have published stories exploring links between blue-green algae and clusters of higher-than-expected numbers of people living near the lake who suffer from the killer disease ALS.
But proving what caused the algae blooms has been difficult, especially given the number of farms and roads and businesses whose water run-off flows into the lake.
Zebra mussels in the brewery’s waste pipe could be a smoking gun.
‘Jesse got a tip-off the EPA were planning an unscheduled inspection the Monday after prom, and he gave Colt the heads-up,’ Iris adds.
‘Colt knew it’d all come out if he didn’t get out on the lake and fix the problem.
I think he figured doing it the night of prom would attract less attention, and anyway, he didn’t have a choice.
He had to get it before the EPA inspection on Monday. ’
‘Remind me, what’s the EPA?’
‘Environmental Protection Agency. Colt’s been flouting their rules for years, and getting away with it.
But they got a new director there last year who threatened to bring down the hammer on Colt if they caught him cheating again.
It’s not an idle threat, not in Vermont. Even Colt can’t buy the EPA.’
‘How d’you know all this?’
‘Jesse’s never been able to keep a secret,’ Iris says.
‘Who else knew?’
‘Jesse refuses to name names, but Chad Givens, the fire marshal, I think,’ Iris says. ‘He and Colt have always been hand in glove. I’ve often wondered if there was a whistleblower, too, someone who contacted the EPA and tipped them off about the brewery.’
Quinn joins the dots. Luke Connelly was almost certainly the mystery whistleblower. If he’d ever had the chance to present his evidence in full to the EPA, they’d have closed the brewery down. Even a short disruption to production could’ve been enough to bankrupt a man as leveraged as Colt.
It’s the story Quinn’s always known was there.
The reason Luke Connelly had to disappear.
‘The dredger hit the Lady,’ Iris says. ‘Its lights were off, so there was no way for Mac’s lookout to see it, not with the power out around the lake.’
‘Why didn’t Mac tell the inquiry Jesse and Colt were on his dredger that night?’ Quinn asks. ‘Why did he let Amy take the blame?’
‘You don’t get it, do you?’ Iris says, exasperated.
‘Colt Smith owns this town. The inquiry was a farce. Everyone involved with it was in Colt’s pocket.
And people needed someone to blame. Mac tried to protect Amy, but people were already baying for her blood.
Mac and Amy were natural scapegoats – holding prom on the Lady was their idea, after all.
It was their boat. Colt just leaned into what people were already feeling.
No one wanted to hear the truth. Colt threw his own son to the wolves. ’
‘You realise if this comes out, your husband could end up in jail right alongside Colt?’ Quinn says. ‘Jesse will certainly face a civil suit. You could lose everything, just like your sister did.’
‘I should never have kept quiet this long,’ Iris says bitterly.
‘I was just trying to protect Rose. She’d already lost her brother.
I didn’t want her to lose her father, too.
And Jesse’s not a bad man. He’s just weak.
He got in over his head with Colt, and didn’t know how to put things right.
But secrets have a way of coming to the surface, don’t they? ’
Quinn waits.
‘The collision with the dredger,’ Iris says, ‘that’s just the beginning.’