Point taken. I clear my throat. “So, you found yourself butting heads…”
“Somehow he got theBugle’sowner to forbid me from covering him, which irked me to all hell. Goes against every journalistic principle. But the owner was a businessman, not a journalist—owned a chain of papers all over the state—and he didn’t want the trouble. So for a while I was muzzled.”
“What changed?”
Mr. Abraham sighs. “Look, Miss Cornier. I’ve been waiting a long time to talk about what transpired down in Bottom Springs, but no one was ever interested in asking. Most people wanted me to shut up and not rock the boat. So I’m certainly willing to play your source, but before I spill, I have a question for you.”
“Okay.”
“Why?”
I blinked. “What?”
“Why am I talking to you? What’s got you dredging up the past, peering down the dark rabbit holes in your own father’s life?”
I weigh my options for a moment before deciding that a man like John Abraham, who prizes the truth, requires honesty. “I’ll tell you plain, Mr. Abraham. I recently learned my father, Augustus, and a small group of other leaders in town were involved in some despicable behavior years ago, and I’m trying to get to the bottom of it. I want to know the truth about what they’ve done and who they are. I think Bottom Springs deserves it. And now, with Augustus dead and Blanchard Hospital passing to my father—”
Mr. Abraham nearly gasps. “Augustus is dead?”
“It happened just a few days ago. He died in his sleep and left everything to my dad.”
“Sweet Jesus,” Mr. Abraham whispers. “Those sons of bitches got away with it.”
“Please, tell me what you mean. I saw the photos you took from the bicentennial. The ones you published right before theBuglegot shut down.”
“How? All the old issues were destroyed.”
“No they weren’t. We kept them on microfilm at the library.”
At this, Mr. Abraham chuckles. “Good old Mrs. Dupre! I knew she had some fire in her, the old bat.”
“The picture,” I repeat. “Of my dad and the others at the beach, where you can see their tattoos.”
“Your daddy hated those pictures. Especially the ones I didn’t print that showed his own little witch-mark.”
I press my shoulders hard against the wall. “Wait a second. Are you saying my father has a tattoo? I only saw them on three of the men.”
Mr. Abraham’s voice goes flat. “They all have them. The whole cabal.”
In all my life, I’ve rarely witnessed my father without a pressed, buttoned dress shirt on. I’d always assumed his formality, the care with which he covered himself, was evidence of his godliness, or even an insecurity, some shame over his large, broad body. The humanness of it had actually endeared him to me. But now I know the real reason he’s kept his skin out of sight: the great Reverend James Cornier, the man whose fame and power has been built in opposition to the occult, wears an occult symbol on his chest.
With my back to the wall, I slide all the way down to the floor. “Is that why theBuglegot shut down?” My voice is low. “Because you published that picture? I know it was your last issue. Did my father have something to do with it?”
“It wasn’t the pictures,” says Mr. Abraham. “The pictures were only a nuisance. I’m guessing what drove Augustus Blanchard to acquire theBuglefor well over market price and then promptly dismantle it wassomething he deemed much more dangerous.” He waited a moment. “My investigation into Blanchard Hospital.”
Beneath my surprise, a white-hot spark of interest flares. “On what grounds?”
“This is your scoop,” Mr. Abraham promises, lowering his voice like we’re meeting in a dark alley with enemies in the shadows. “After I was told not to go after the promising young reverend, I had a bit of an ax to grind. So I started poking around—in his dealings, his friends’ dealings, you name it. Whatever they touched, I studied. I was hungry and itching for a story no one could suppress, to show those bastards even they didn’t have power over the truth. As part of that, I FOIA-ed—sorry, requested—all the publicly available files I could get on Blanchard Hospital. It turned into a little hobbyhorse, me digging around in those files every day after work. Eventually I noticed something in Blanchard’s purchase orders that struck me.”
“What was it?”
“They were ordering massive amounts of painkillers. Mostly Schedule II opioids like oxycodone and hydrocodone. Back then those things were still considered miracle drugs, but there were some cracks beginning to show, some stories swirling around about how addictive they were, over and beyond anything else. And Blanchard was ordering—we’re talking hundreds of thousands of these pills a year, and their orders increased every year, all the way up to half a million the last year I had records for. When I checked the number of patients they typically saw in a year, the numbers didn’t match up. Even if they prescribed those opioids to every person who came in for a runny nose, the amount would still be excessive.”
Painkillers—the goods the Sons of Liberty stole from the hospital and trafficked around the state. Maybe Blanchard was ordering massive amounts because the Sons were stealing them…but if so, if the theftswere affecting the hospital’s bottom line, why hadn’t anyone ever alerted the sheriff?
“I started researching pill mills.” A new enthusiasm brightened Mr. Abraham’s voice, and in it, I caught a glimpse of the tenacious reporter he’d been all those years ago. “You ever heard of those? It happens when the good guys turn dirty—the doctors and hospitals themselves. I found out about them from some old colleagues who started working for the AP—they said the FBI had started quietly investigating a few pharmacies and pain clinics in other states after they discovered they were selling opioids to drug traffickers to hawk on the black market.”
“My God,” I whisper, because I know where this is going.
