A Little After Sunrise

Ever since being introduced to Nancy Drew and her blue roadster, I’ve been hooked by mystery novels, especially those with memorable characters such as Nancy, Bess and George, Miss Marple (Agatha Christie), Kinsey Milhone (Sue Grafton’s A is for Alibi series), and most recently, Armand Gamache of Three Pines, Quebec (Louise Penny). When Penny’s most recent book, “Glass Houses,” became available, I wasn’t waiting for my name to reach the top of the “hold” list at the library. Instead, I purchased a hardcover copy of my own, eager to read the next volume in the series Maureen Corrigan describes as “deep and grand and altogether extraordinary.”  

In “Glass Houses,” Penny introduces the concept of a cobrador del frac, a historic figure who follows debtors and shames them into paying their debts. Gamache sets the stage when he testifies of the cobrador: “I knew there was something wrong when the figure in the black robe appeared on the village green.” Indeed, as the story unfolds, we meet Penny’s invention, a black-garbed cobrador who becomes a conscience to those without one. The mystery revolves around the death of the cobrador, intertwined with a dark, compelling drama rooted in the opioid epidemic.

Writing for STAT, a national publication focused on finding and telling compelling stories about health, medicine, and scientific discovery, Max Blau notes: “Deaths from opioids have been rising sharply for years, and drug overdoses already kill more Americans under age fifty than anything else. There are now nearly one hundred deaths a day from opioids, a swath of destruction that runs from tony New England suburbs to the farm country of California, from the beach tons of Florida to the Appalachian foothills.” And, special or not, the deadly reach of opioid addiction has struck Ashland County, Ohio as well.

Mayoral candidate Sandra Tunnell hears about it on a regular basis: “As I am out and about talking to people, the number one issue I hear them being concerned about is our drug epidemic. What can we do to protect our friends and families and turn this around?” Her opponent on the November ballot, Matt Miller, shares her concern: “It’s easy to point fingers, but it’s time to start addressing the problems and saving lives. We all have a role.” 

Recently, the Cincinnati Enquirer sent reporters into the field for seven days, and the ensuing series was heartbreaking in its ordinariness and scope. Those caught in this epidemic’s suffocating web aren’t mobsters or hardened criminals, just ordinary people. Eighteen deaths, at least 180 overdoses, fifteen newborns with heroin-related medical problems – in one week. With fewer people here, our numbers are smaller, but are still too many.

So what do we do? Ohio’s Senator Sherrod Brown understands the approach is many-faceted as he discussed with NPR’s “On Point:” “It’s prevention; it’s education; it’s medication-assisted therapy; it’s trying to keep some of these drugs out of the country – although you can never arrest your way out of this . . . When you talk about addiction, somebody always has a story to tell. Tears come to eyes. People tell the story of an addicted sister they have, or a child . . . It breaks people’s hearts, and it’s the biggest public health crisis of our lives in this state and in this country.”

The fictional black-masked cobrador of Three Pines stood silent, accusing. Something is wrong. Yet finger-pointing and darkness, silence and shame do not bring healing from an epidemic. Instead, along with prevention, treatment, and law enforcement, the less measurable elements of light and voice play a role. When the opioid epidemic is only numbers, it is beyond us, not our problem. But when voices are lifted and faces unveiled, numbers become brothers, sisters, parents, children. This is us.

Paraphrasing the Enquirer’s opening line, “It’s a little after sunrise on the first day of another week, and Ashland is waking up again with a heroin problem.” The cobrador of death and overdose bears witness to that truth on our village green. There may be “no one story or one way out,” as Ruth Stender understands, but together, our shared stories and pain will help us find our way to the light.