Into the Inferno (16 page)

“Not really.”

“So why did you feel you had to make sure she knew you and I weren’t romantically involved.”

“I didn’t say that.”

“You did everything but pull out a grease pen and print
strictly business
across my forehead. You ashamed to be seen with me?”

“Absolutely not.”

“You practically apologized to her for being with me.”

“She’s a little touchy, is all.”

“Because of the way you broke up?”

“I suppose.”

“It
is
over, isn’t it?”

“It is, but she was having a hard time believing it.”

“You didn’t make it plain?”

“It’s more complicated than that.”

“How could it be any simpler? You don’t want to see her anymore. You move on. She moves on.”

“It’s hard to explain.”

“Selfishness always is. Were you seeing her before Holly or after?”

I picked up a piece of bread and broke it. “Before.”

“You took a long time to answer. It was during, wasn’t it?”

“I’m tired.”

“
You
dumped
her
.”

“We decided to make some space.”

“
You
decided to make some space.”

“She wasn’t fighting it. She—”

“You’re not the kind to tell somebody it’s over, are you? No. You’re too passive-aggressive for that. You like women hanging around. Clinging. Making you feel wanted. Important.”

“You drove up here today to attack me?”

“I’m not attacking you.”

“Funny. It feels like you are.”

I’d harbored some slim hope that Stephanie Riggs would remain my ally throughout this ordeal, that she would be there to the end, but it was a pathetic hope. Too bad there was no one else to hold my hand when I turned into a vegetable, not unless I wanted to resurrect my relationship with one of the Suzannes or Mary Kay or one of the others.

“She’s still carrying the torch and you love it.”

“Basically, we’re just friends.”

“If there’s one thing you’re
not
, it’s friends. So what woman hurt you so badly you can’t trust
any
woman? That you want to torture them all like this?”

“What’s trust got to do with it? Is that what Holly wrote in her diary? That I’d been betrayed?”

“I’m guessing it was your mother.”

The meal had been in front of us for some time. I sprinkled grated cheese on my tortellini and picked up my fork. “I’ll be dead by the end of the week. What does it matter?”

“Dead?”

“As good as.”

“You won’t be dead.”

“You think I’m a sonofabitch, don’t you?”

“I think you’re just like anyone else, a complex human being who doesn’t quite understand all of his motivations. There’s nothing wrong with that. Most of us don’t understand what makes us tick. Look. I really am sorry I opened my big mouth.”

“No. You’re right. I’ve known a lot of women, and I’m not sure I treated any of them the way I’d want my daughters treated. I’ve never been good with relationships. Every woman I’ve dated in the last couple of years . . . I start off thinking this is the one, and by the time I have her convinced of it, I’ve lost interest.” I broke off a hunk of bread and dipped it in olive oil.

“Did you cheat on your wife?”

“Why are you asking that?”

“You cheated on Holly and this other person, Mary Kay.”

“I didn’t say I cheated on Mary Kay.”

“But you did, didn’t you?”

“We were friends. It wasn’t—”

“Did you cheat on your wife? Indulge me. I’m trying to get to know you. We don’t have that long, and I want to know you.”

“You know plenty.”

“I don’t, though. Not enough.”

I didn’t know what kind of game she was playing, but as uncomfortable as it made me, it also pleased me in a manner that was hard to describe. I’d never been with a woman as brutally honest as her. Nor one who could put a knife in my heart as quickly.

“Did you?”

“What?”

“Cheat on your wife?”

“Never even crossed my mind. Well, toward the end it crossed my mind. But it never happened. And it never would have. Marriage vows are sacred.”

“Your baby-sitter was staring daggers at me.”

I broke off another hunk of bread. “Was she?”

“She’s got the hots for you.”

“I suppose you think I engineered that, too?”

“I don’t know how it happened, but it’s easy enough to see what it does for your ego.”

Oh, brother.

31. JANE’S CALIFORNIA PROPULSION, INC.

Digging into my lunch while she perused the list of company names I’d scribbled on the paper place mat, I thought about the script that had already been played out in Chattanooga. Had the problem there been addressed properly, firefighters in North Bend wouldn’t be dropping like empty shell casings under a drunken hunter.

Stephanie said, “Canyon View Systems. Is that what this says?”

“Yeah. Now that you mention it, Canyon View was on the manifest I got for Holly’s truck, too. But they were only shipping books, as I recall. And according to Charlie Drago, they were the only ones who helped out in Tennessee. Everyone else stonewalled or fought them tooth and nail. Canyon View sent two specialists down to answer questions and assist with the investigation.”

“My Aunt DiMaggio? You saw her the other night at the hospital. Her husband founded Canyon View Systems. She runs it.”

“That would make sense. Your aunt said Holly shipped stuff for them from time to time.”

“It also makes sense that they sent people down to help when nobody else would. Aunt Marge has always had a fairly well developed social conscience. She did a lot to help Holly get on her feet when she first arrived here in Washington.”

“Was she running the company three years ago?”

“Phil was still alive then, so he was.”

It was at about that point that I got a brainstorm and asked to borrow Stephanie’s cell phone. Mine had blown up with the engine back at Caputo’s trailer. On the first call I reached Mr. Stuart from Jane’s California Propulsion, the same man who’d told me they didn’t ship in February. I told him who I was and he said, “Lieutenant Swope? I guess you spoke to my colleague Ben Gray? It turns out we
were
shipping last February. I’m sorry about that. We very rarely send anything out during that time of year, and I could have sworn we didn’t last February. My mistake. Now what can I do for you?”

“I wanted to know what you were shipping and if there might be any adverse health effects attached to it.”

“We have a lot of materials we send by truck. Unfortunately, they’re all classified. I’m not really at liberty to talk about them. You say somebody’s been sick?”

“Quite a few somebodies.”

“I’m sorry to hear that. Do the symptoms include dizziness?”

“Yes.”

“Headaches? Ringing in the ears?”

“Yes. How did you—”

“You’re sure?”

“Yes. What does it mean?”

“Nothing. Nothing at all.”

“How could it mean nothing? Why ask if it means nothing?”

“Just please bear with me. This is a standard list of questions we’re required to go over. What other symptoms are there?”

I listed them, and he seemed to be writing it all down. Afterward, he said, “Not us. It wasn’t anything we have. We don’t work with any product that would cause anyone to go brain-dead.”

“What about the rest of the symptoms?”

“We don’t work with anything that could cause brain death.”

“What
do
you work with?”

“As I said before. Our work is classified. Lieutenant Swope, what if we were to send a couple of representatives up there?”

“Listen, if you have anything that might be causing our problems, tell me. There are people going through this right now.”

“We’ll have a couple of representatives up there in three hours.”

“What? You have a company jet?”

“No. They’ll be flying commercial. Good-bye, Lieutenant Swope.”

“Wait a minute. Did your company have any products in a shipping facility fire at a place called Southeast Travelers in Chattanooga three years ago?”

“I really couldn’t tell you. As I said, our representatives will be seeing you shortly.”

We hung up and I related the conversation to Stephanie, who said, “They’ve probably been sued before and have instructions not to say anything. No doubt that’s why they’re sending people up here, too.”

“It sounded to me like he knew what we had before I told him. I think these guys know what’s going on.”

“I want to talk to my aunt. If her company helped out with the investigation in Chattanooga, maybe she knows something.”

“Apparently she doesn’t know what the symptoms in Tennessee were, or she would have recognized them in Holly.”

“Canyon View is a big company. She might not know anything at all, but somebody there will.”

Stephanie picked up her cell phone and punched in a number, asked for Marge DiMaggio, and then listened for a moment and hung up. “Went to Portland this afternoon for a meeting. Staying overnight. She’s got a meeting up here at eight-thirty tomorrow morning. She’ll call beforehand.”

DAY FOUR

32. THE CURVE OF HER THIGH

With all that was happening, you’d think insomnia would have robbed me of my ability to sleep, but you’d be wrong. Once again I slept like the dead. No tossing or turning. No tottering trips to the loo in the wee hours. No memory even of having gone to bed. Just a blissful sleep that seemed to last forever. Maybe my nights were a foretaste of brain death. Maybe I was going to be happier than I’d ever been.

Thursday. By Sunday it would be over.

It occurred to me as I contemplated these things that going to sleep at night couldn’t be too different from death. Suddenly a great calm descended upon me.

I began to wonder why any of us feared death.

Last night had been a stretch in heaven.

I yawned lazily and glanced over at the clock. It was eight. I hadn’t slept this late in years.

Although it would be an hour before we got any direct sunlight, the rooms in our small house were slowly filling with the early morning June dawn. The house was quiet, motes of dust drifting in the dead air. I was filled with the sheer wonder of being alive.

Because we were almost directly underneath the west face of Mount Si, the morning sun didn’t reach us until ten-thirty or eleven in winter and not until nine-ish on the longest day of the year, which would be next week. In our stronghold under the mountain it was always a little cooler than the rest of the township, a little dewier, and in winter a little frostier.

I had slept in a pair of rumpled sleeping drawers and an oversize North Bend Fire and Rescue T-shirt, was now padding around the hardwood floors of our house barefoot wondering where everybody was. It was a small house with a living room, two bedrooms, and a dayroom that served as our family room just off the open kitchen.

They were on the futon in the family room, Britney, Allyson, and Stephanie Riggs, who’d spent the remainder of the day with us. We’d taken turns calling the companies that had been involved in the Chattanooga incident from the list Charlie Drago had provided and then on the manifest from Holly’s truck last February, calling until anybody who could answer a phone had gone home for the day. If Charlie Drago was to be trusted, and I wasn’t sure that he could be, there were dozens of suspects in the Tennessee incident, many more than on the list he was able to give me. Judging from what they might have been carrying, there were only three logical choices in our accident: DuPont Chemical, Pacific Northwest Paint Contractors, and Jane’s California Propulsion, Inc. None of the three were on Charlie’s incomplete list, but that didn’t mean much.

DuPont was being as intractable as any large corporation could be. So far I had yet to talk to a single person in authority there. At lunchtime Jane’s had promised to send a couple of people up in three hours, but as of that night they still hadn’t arrived. I’d called Jane’s five or six times since then, but neither of the two parties I’d spoken to earlier were in and nobody else seemed to have heard of me or a junket to North Bend. Pacific Northwest Paint Contractors had been shipping, among other items, toluene, which Stephanie looked up yesterday. The pathophysiology included effects to the CNS, euphoria, dizziness, confusion, CNS depression, headache, vertigo, hallucinations, seizures, ataxia, tinnitus, stupor, and coma. It was very close to the list of symptoms from exposure to organophosphates.

The list wasn’t exactly in line with what I was going through, but it was close enough. It occurred to me that the reason Joel had fallen off the roof and Jackie had crashed her car might have had to do with some of those symptoms in combination with one another. Hallucinations and dizziness. Euphoria and stupor. It was scary thinking about it. Pacific Northwest Paint had promised to check to see whether their shipment had been damaged and whether any of their containers had been opened.

In addition, Stephanie made a half-dozen discreet calls to physicians and personnel at Tacoma General. We discussed and analyzed Charlie Drago and the situation in Chattanooga, agreeing it would be good to get a second perspective from Tennessee.

Allyson and I had prepared dinner together while Stephanie and Britney played Candy Land, and then, at Allyson’s insistence, we set up candles on the table for dinner. The girls continued to treat Stephanie like visiting royalty. After dinner Stephanie and I were dragooned into a game of Monopoly, which we abandoned before it officially ended, when Allyson got so far ahead of the rest of us that Britney started to cry.

It was almost eleven when we unfolded the futon in the family room, insisting, all of us, that Stephanie forgo the motel and stay here. When the girls begged to watch a late-night movie with her,
The Whole Town’s Talking,
with Edward G. Robinson and Jean Arthur, I objected, knowing Stephanie had been up late the night before, but Stephanie said a girl party would be fun, that I should go to bed and get my beauty sleep. Britney cackled, never having heard the phrase
beauty sleep
before.

As I stood in the doorway between the kitchen and the family room watching them, I felt so much love for my girls it almost hurt. Characteristically separated by half a body width, Britney slept by herself, while the other two were snuggled up together. It was ironic because during the day Britney was the clingy one and Allyson the slightly more standoffish of my daughters. When sick or asleep, they reversed roles, Allyson clutching, Britney off to one side. Britney had a whisper of perspiration on her brow, both feet sticking out from the blankets.

Mixed with Allyson’s darker, heavier-looking mop, Stephanie Riggs’s hair was so silky and lustrous, it seemed from another world.

Too bad Stephanie hated me. Had circumstances been different, I would have been thinking about the curve of her thigh under the sheet, the gentle jut of her jawline, her hair splayed across the futon. But Stephanie had pegged me like a lepidopterist pinning down a butterfly: conquer and abandon. A small-time prick working big-time hustles on unsuspecting females all over the valley. The supreme cad. A self-involved jerk.

That had been my unspoken, underhanded, and unacknowledged modus operandi for the past three years. Funny how knowing it was your last week on earth could open your eyes to things that should have been obvious all along.

Before the syndrome, I’d had little time for real life. I’d been chasing the perfect woman, the one who would look good on my arm, the one other men would envy me for, the woman who wouldn’t leave me or get sick or go crazy or be anything but beautiful, the woman you could always count on with absolute certainty, the woman who existed nowhere on earth but in the deepest recesses of my brain.

After seducing each candidate with a sincerity that was believable primarily because I believed it myself, after earnestly convincing her of my fitness as a father, as a potential husband, as a lifelong friend, partner, and confidant, I would begin to discover minor aspects of her character that didn’t suit me. Eventually these token flaws would pile up and grow in importance until, after some days or weeks of torturing myself with indecision, I would make the inevitable announcement that we were getting too close; I would tell her I needed space. In other words, as several women had told me, I’d had my fun and it was time to move on.

Convincing them we were still friends was my own sick little mischief, which in my own mind managed to lessen the injury delivered but in fact only prolonged their pain.

Sincerity was the key, I’d found, when dealing with women. If you could fake sincerity, you didn’t have to fake anything else. My only defense was that I faked it so well that even I believed it was genuine. I was and always had been a genuine dope! As only a former Christian and a true idiot could, I believed my own patter.

Everybody has the capacity for self-deception, but I was the king.

Yesterday Stephanie made my jaw drop when she asked what woman had injured me so badly I felt the need to hurt all women. When you’re playing the kind of games I’d been playing and found yourself in the presence of a woman with that sort of quick insight, you ran like a scalded cat. I would have, too, if I hadn’t needed her help so desperately.

My mother had abandoned me at age eight. When she returned four years later, a meager two postcards and one belated birthday present in between, she became so self-conscious about relating once again to the religious rigmarole of the Sixth Element of the Saints of Christ, about fitting back into the hierarchy at Six Points, about being taken back by her husband, James, Sr., that she all but forgot me. I was twelve by then and not nearly the cute little button-nosed imp she’d left. In fact, I’d turned into something of a sullen brat. But then, even when her plate was almost empty, Mother had too much on it for me. By the time she returned, I was old enough to be bitter but proud enough to hide it, resentful enough not to forget but alienated enough to make sure it never happened again. I would die before I would put my trust in her.

Despite her cutting insights into my flawed psyche, I was surprised at how comfortable I’d been spending time yesterday with Stephanie. Not that I wasn’t still scared of her, mind you.

Not wanting to disturb their slumber, I stepped into a pair of sandals and went out back to the pasture. The morning air was clear and crisp. Intent on making each moment last as long as possible, I stood in the field under Mount Si, which rose to forty-one hundred feet over our house in a steep wall on the far side of the Middle Fork, firs clinging to the south end of the mountain, ragged rock screes and crags spanning the north end. Nobody ever visited our place without expressing wonder at how close the mountain was, at how majestic and awe-inspiring and downright frightening it was. Like Yosemite, people said.

On summer evenings hang gliders launched off the top, taking advantage of the warm air currents that raced up the steep face, and each year thousands of hikers and tourists labored up the four-mile trail on the side of the mountain, scrambling to a lookout just out of view of our property. From the top you could see Seattle thirty miles away, the snowcapped Olympic Mountains across Puget Sound, and, directly below, the entire town of North Bend.

I could hear the river a hundred yards in front of me as well as the breeze in the trees.

After some minutes, I heard footsteps in the tall grass behind me. I’d been out long enough to be thoroughly chilled in my T-shirt and sleeping shorts, long enough to start feeling sorry for myself.

“We slept in,” Stephanie said, coming alongside me and staring up at the mountain. “You have a good night?”

“Slept like the dead.”

“I wish you wouldn’t use expressions like that.” She touched my hand.

“Realistically, what do you think the odds are of stopping this before I end up like your sister?”

“Realistically?”

“You’re stalling.”

“I don’t know. I don’t—”

“You don’t think it’s going to happen, do you?”

“I do and I don’t. We basically know what’s going on, which is an advantage Holly and the others didn’t have. Except for your friend Stan, none of them suspected what this was. I’m speaking to consultants and specialists all over the country. You’ve got those people from California coming up. They might know what this is. And since Canyon View was helpful in the investigation in Tennessee, my aunt or someone working for her might know something.”

“In other words, the odds of stopping this before I end up like your sister are slim to none.”

“I didn’t say that.”

“I know. I said it for you.”