Page 76 of A Princess, Stolen
“Quiet,” Pan growled. His huge body was tense to his core, looking as if he wanted to rip out the bars one by one if necessary. I glanced from him to Sparta and was suddenly no longer so certain if Pan was truly harmless.
“I see a coward,” I said now, braver because of Pan’s proximity. “You wanted…”
“I’m dying!” he suddenly screamed so loudly that I flinched. “I. Am. Doomed.” For a few seconds, he breathed in and out deeply as if his words had shocked him.
“You’re dying?” I was completely perplexed, but all the evidence that he was seriously ill was gathering in my mind. His feverish eyes, his emaciated face, his constant cough, and those strange pustules. The camphor ointment.
With his lips pressed together, Sparta shook his head, otherwise, he remained completely motionless, speaking in a soft but dangerous voice. “It’s your father’s fault. His damn oil sands factory and his greed. That cauldron has polluted all our rivers and lakes. He had studies falsified so that he could pumpmore and more poisons and chemicals into our waters. And only God knows where else.”
For a few seconds, I stood there transfixed. “Never,” I said when I recovered from the initial shock. “My father would never do something like that.”
“It’s true.” It was Nathan. I turned and spotted a handful of men in the hallway that had been drawn by Sparta’s shouts. Troy, Icarus, Ilias, one of the hobbits, and Taurus with his bull tattoo on his forehead and snakes and lizards on his shaved head.
“It’s true?” I repeated like a parrot and then involuntarily laughed. “Absolutely not.”
“Your father’s oil company is located near the Athabasca oil sands in Alberta. A third of the world’s oil reserves are stored there but hardly anyone knows.”
“I know,” I said, looking from Nathan to Sparta and back again.I’m dying!The words echoed in my mind, but it had to be a misunderstanding. “But my father is hardly ever there anymore,” I objected vehemently. “He used to be, yes.” For several heartbeats, I recalled that his young son, Nicholas, and his first wife, Florentine, had died in the fire. Back then, he had been in McMurray more often, however, since the fire at the Forb Hotel he had been avoiding the company up north. I blinked nervously. “He doesn’t know what’s going on there at all…”
“Believe me, he knows. And the fact that he's not there doesn’t absolve him of his guilt. Quite the opposite.” Nathan looked at me challengingly and folded his arms across his chest. Now he seemed angry again, but I knew it was only this outrageous lie that stood between us. Dad may have done many things. Maybe he loved Mom too much and tied her to him, but he would never intentionally poison entire areas so that people died from the environmental consequences.
“Medicine,” I heard Sparta say behind me and turned to him. “I wanted the money from your ring for Sam and Grace and medicine. Morphine. Tramadol. Good treatment in a hospital. Less pain when I’m going to die…” He was sitting on the floor again, bent forward and breathing heavily. For a moment, I felt sorry for him, but then I thought of the hooded figure with the compound eyes.
“Maybe you didn’t want the ring. Maybe you merely wanted to let me drown in the net because you’re dying too,” I said bitterly. “You wanted revenge. Because you believe my father is to blame for your condition. But my father doesn’t own the only oil industry there.”
“The Hampton Oil Company is the one closest to Coldville.” Nathan’s voice left no doubt that he agreed with Sparta. “Your father built on his father’s legacy when his company accidentally stumbled upon a gigantic amount of oil sands in a completely untouched area during permitted drilling. His oil empire flourished and became one of the largest in the world.”
“I know that, but that means nothing.”
Nathan stared at me in disbelief. “You’ve never heard that the oil sands industry is polluting our environment?”
“Yes, but my father makes sure to follow all the regulations.”
A few of the crew laughed mockingly and Nathan snorted. “I doubt that. Our rivers and lakes have been poisoned for twenty years and nothing has changed to this day. In fact, it’s getting worse.” Nathan looked at the men one by one and many nodded in agreement. “It was a gradual process. The people from our hometown didn’t even notice that the waters were becoming ever-growing poison dispensers. Arsenic, borate salts, mercury, hydrocarbons, isopropanol… When we were little, the death rate suddenly rose explosively, including children and young people. And Coldville wasn’t the only village that was affected. Many of us lost at least one parent, some both. Cancerin its most aggressive form. Gradual failure of the immune system for which the few doctors in the area had neither names nor explanations. And certainly no cure. Inexplicable fever that wouldn’t go down. Worn-out bodies. Should I carry on?”
I stared at him. Unconsciously, my hands clenched and my whole body shook. “That’s not true. If that was true, someone would have intervened. There are laws and there are government agencies.”
“Oh yes.” Nathan looked at me seriously. “People from various institutions actually came to Coldville every now and then. They put on protective suits before they went into the water to take samples. From the lake where we fished. They examined the groundwater. Supposedly, everything was always okay, elevated but not so worrying that it could have had this effect on health. In addition, the environment, nature itself, was blamed for this increase. The river flows through rock and oil sands, and it would be contaminated anyway. Scientists have supposedly been studying the effects of the oil sands industry on human and animal health for over fifteen years, but they still have no concrete results. Why do you think that is?”
“Because large-scale studies sometimes run for decades?” I phrased it as a question.
“Nonsense,” Nathan replied harshly. “They are bribed so that they never finish. Because no one will have to act until then. All they have to do is look at our fish. I have never, in any body of water, seen fish that were so deformed and crippled as when I returned to Coldville after a long time. Fish with huge skulls and bulging eyes. Fish with bent spines. Fish with deformed fins, barely able to survive.”
“But my father has nothing to do with it.” I shook my head again and again. “Never. Ever.” Environmental scandals were nothing new and I knew that there were protests against all the oil sands factories in Canada, but Dad always dismissed themas baseless and exaggerated. He had said that the oil sands in Canada were a gold mine for America. Almost two-thirds of it would flow into the American economy, making the USA less dependent on oil from the Middle East. The North American Free Trade Agreement even stipulated that the two-thirds export could never be reduced. But Dad would never falsify any reports or assessments just for profit.
Or would he?
Didn’t he once say that everything had its price?
For a moment, I felt dizzy, so I grasped one of the bars. No! He couldn’t be responsible for all these men’s misfortune. Dad was a good man who did everything for me, was everything to me. “You must be mistaken…I mean, maybe Hampton Oil Company is actually poisoning rivers and lakes, but if so, my father doesn’t know about it. My dad builds children’s homes and hospices all over Canada. He organizes charities…” I stopped myself and let go of the bar because my words suddenly sounded strange even to my ears. For a few seconds, I stood in the corridor and noticed nothing but the flickering neon bulb that cast strobe-like light onto the walls, floors, and men’s faces.
They stood there as a front. Most of them were dark-haired and tall, and their unspoken question burned into my mind. Why did my father build children’s homes and hospices in Canada of all places? Why not New York?
I felt my eyes fill with tears because I felt so powerless in the face of their truth. “It’s not true,” I whispered. “Never.”
Nathan approached me, but I backed away as if he were to blame for what they were accusing my father of doing. “Will, be reasonable! We’ve been following this for years.”
“It’s not true!” I screamed, wanting to punch something. For the first time in my life, I wanted to break something. I felt the huge gap of accusations hanging between me and the crew, even between me and Nathan. I didn’t want to believe any of it andyet I was partly convinced they were telling the truth. Why else would Dad do so much for orphans and the dying in the area if he didn’t feel at least guilty? Why would so many young men risk abducting the daughter of one of America’s richest oil magnates unless they were absolutely certain it was true? I glanced at Sparta and wondered why it never occurred to me before that he might be ill? Seriously ill. Suddenly, a terrible thought struck me, striking me to the core. It cut through everything, truth and lies, right and wrong.
