Into the Inferno Page 11

  “What’d you find?” I asked, trying on a smile I knew was a little tight.

  “Too soon for most of it. Your X rays and CT scan were fine. The blood workups haven’t told us a thing. You’re slightly anemic, but that may be normal for you. The dermatologist says the growth on your hands is the same as Holly has on her hands. I’ll be here most of the night. I want to hand-carry some of these samples through the lab, watch the tests myself. You take care of yourself. Stay hydrated. Get lots of rest. If anything changes tonight or tomorrow morning, call me. If I don’t hear from you, I’ll be in touch tomorrow morning.” She gave me a slip of paper with her cell phone number on it. “You have somebody who can watch out for you?”

  “My girls.”

  “I mean an adult.”

  “They’ll do.”

  “Okay.”

  I’d been feeling anxious in North Bend, but the dramatic change in Stephanie Riggs was bothersome to say the least. I’d driven down here thinking I might have some contagion, but now a knowledgeable doctor thought I was going to be a vegetable. She hadn’t said it outright, but you could see it in her face.

  She thought I was headed for the same fate as her sister.

  I’d been hopeful on the drive down, but that was before we found out my symptoms and those on Stan’s list correlated with what Holly had documented in her diary. Odds were if Stan hadn’t died on I-90, he would have ended up in the brain ward—just as he feared. Odds were I would be forced to make the same decision Stan had: turn into a vegetable or commit suicide. Trouble was, I didn’t know if I had the guts to kill myself. Would you? I mean, one day I’m walking around worried about weeds in the yard; the next I’m trying to figure out if I should kill myself. It was too weird.

  I was trying to figure out which option was better for my daughters. Which did I not want to put them through?

  “I’m sorry about your sister,” I said. “I wish things had turned out differently.”

  “Let’s not talk about it.”

  “I’m a firefighter. I signed up for a bad ending. I didn’t think anything was going to happen, but in the back of my mind I always knew it might. Holly didn’t sign up for anything more than sweetness and light. That’s what she deserved.”

  When tears began creeping down Stephanie’s face, I said good-bye and got out of Dodge.

  DAY THREE

  21. BAD HEADACHE, DIZZINESS, FALLING DOWN

  Disoriented and somewhat confused, I came fully awake on the floor next to the bed. I was clad in pajama bottoms and a T-shirt, my usual nighttime attire, but it was morning, the sky bright and blue outside my bedroom window.

  Wednesday.

  Day three.

  I knew I hadn’t stumbled or tripped but had simply lost my balance on the way to the pissoir, and not with a topsy-turvy feeling of light-headedness as in a faint, but as if I’d been caught by a trip wire.

  I’d gone down like a sack of shit falling off the back of a manure truck.

  The on-again off-again headache from yesterday had returned with a vengeance. Headache, dizziness, falling down—it occurred to me with a jolt that I had all of the symptoms for day three.

  When I spotted the cotton ball taped to the inside of my arm, the events of the previous day flooded my consciousness.

  Arriving back in North Bend the night before, I’d driven straight to the mayor’s house. Haston lived on the eastern edge of town, three hundred feet down the road from the ranger station, in a small yellow house with a modest yard. A neighbor’s dog barked at me from inside a chain-link fence. Two desolate wooden planters sat on the concrete stoop but contained only weeds. They must have been Gloria’s.

  Aside from a single phone call when we initially discovered the extent of our joint betrayal, Steve Haston and I never sat down and discussed what had happened between our former wives. Though neither of us had said it aloud, Steve thought I was responsible for the mess, while I thought he was.

  When Lorie and Gloria decided to leave town together, Gloria stripped Steve of his spare cash, emptied their bank account, cashed out their certificates of deposit, stole the Land Cruiser, and sold their schnauzer. The dog was the only thing he got back.

  On our side of town, Lorie swiped Britney’s piggy bank—Britney had been four at the time. I managed to replace it before she figured out what happened. When I accused her on the phone, Lorie claimed Gloria must have taken it. I hated the thought that Gloria Haston had been prowling my house and making love to my wife while I was a mile away at work.

  For some reason the two women had filled themselves with enough venom to justify anything. Maybe it was the rain. North Bend was a beautiful town, green as hell, but it rained more than a hundred inches a year, and the clouds and moisture drove people mad. Later, somebody from the FBI called my home trying to get a line on Lorie, told me she was kiting checks all over the Midwest.

  “Mind if I come in?” I asked Haston. It wasn’t that I was afraid people would overhear us on the stoop; it was more that my legs needed a rest.

  “The place is a mess. Sit down anywhere.” Despite his demurrals, Haston’s housekeeping was impeccable. He told a lot of little lies like that, falsehoods designed to make you doubt your own eyes. I confess I hate people who do that. I took the sofa, while he perched across from me in a leather armchair that looked as if he’d taken furniture polish to it. “Terrible about Stan. Just terrible.”

  “Especially in light of how easily it could have been avoided.”

  Haston ignored my sarcasm. “Everyone in town’s talking about it. They’re starting to call it the Bad Luck Fire Department.”

  “There’s more coming.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “You heard Joel McCain’s a vegetable?”

  “Karrie told me about him.”

  “Jackie Feldbaum’s a vegetable, too.”

  “Well, yes. We knew that. The accident.”

  “Stan thought they all had the same disease. He thought Newcastle died out in the woods as a vegetable. I’ve been with a doctor in Tacoma all day and she thinks they were part of an epidemic.”

  “Good God!”

  Without telling him about my own symptoms or about Holly, I filled him in on Stan Beebe’s theories, adding facts I’d gleaned on my own. By failing to mention Holly I’d left out a lot, including the truck accident in February. There hadn’t been much up there but snowballs, chickens, and Coca-Cola extract. I didn’t want to have to admit that to Haston.

  In presenting my case as a fire department issue, I’d left it in a neat little package, stressing my concern for the families of Stan, Joel, Jackie, and Chief Newcastle. I had another rationale for not talking about my own symptoms. Like a child hiding under the blankets, for some nonsensical reason I felt as if not talking about my involvement would somehow make the symptoms less real. But this wasn’t like a cold, where I could resign myself to riding out the symptoms and knew I would be better in a week.

  “You think all these people have arsenic poisoning or something?”

  “Nobody’s exhibiting the symptoms of arsenic poisoning. Or cyanide or anything else the doctors are familiar with. This is a whole lot more exotic.”

  “How can the accidents be an epidemic?”

  “These people had accidents because they were sick.”

  “As mayor I’ve never been faced with anything—”

  “None of us have.”

  “I only took over the job to help out after Gloria left town. The biggest problem I’ve had so far is that squabble with the Army Corps of Engineers over our dikes. I wouldn’t know where to start with something this complex.”

  Steve Haston had been timid in his day-to-day decision making, his leadership at the monthly council meetings alternately limp-wristed and carping.

  His sole contributions to handling the fire department’s problems were a single phone call to the station one day to ask if I was “okay” and then letting Stan out of his sight. Essentially, I was running
the fire department by myself.

  “We should have a meeting,” I said. “Start with Brashears. He treated Jackie and Stan both. Bring in McCain’s doctors. Get Eastside Fire and Rescue involved. It could just as easily be them next time. If it’s a chemical hazard passing through our district, it’s moving by truck, which means it’s going through their district, too. The State Department of Transportation should be involved. The State Patrol.”

  “You believe this was something you folks got on the job?”

  “I do.”

  “The city is self-insured. This is going to destroy our cash flow. Look, Jim, I’ll clear the docket and we’ll work on this full-time. I’ll call the King County Executive. One of us will have to speak with the governor. Maybe we can get disaster relief from the feds.”

  “Who’s there? Anybody home?” Karrie Haston walked into the room and stood awkwardly beside her father when she saw me.

  It was easy to see the family resemblance. They were both tall, Steve around six-seven, Karrie five-ten. They both had long arms and lantern jaws. Although most people would have said Karrie was attractive, her father’s face was just this side of ungainly, and the only thing you could say about his normal expression was that it resembled that of a man about to fall off a donkey.

  Even though Karrie and I had been on a businesslike basis since the Christmas party, she flushed when she saw me in her father’s living room.

  At this late date, it was easy to see how improvident it had been to fool around with the daughter of the mayor. To trifle with the feelings of a probationary firefighter. For all I knew, she’d been on the couch because she thought it would further her career. Get her past McCain’s critical reports. But more than that, attempting to seduce the daughter of the woman who’d seduced my wife had enough Freudian implications to keep a psych class writing papers for years. I didn’t even want to think about it.

  “Jim was just leaving,” Steve said, flashing his bird-shit gray eyes at me as a signal that he didn’t want Karrie to know what we’d been discussing.

  I knew what he was thinking. If Stan had been sick, if Joel and Jackie were sick, Karrie might have contracted it, too.

  As far as accepting this on a personal level, Steve was on the same page I was.

  When I got home that night, the girls and I lit candles, set out the Monopoly board, and fell into a freewheeling discussion about life and our lives in particular, talking about why their mother wasn’t with us anymore, a frequent conversation in our household and one I generally avoided. I answered Allyson’s and Britney’s questions more candidly than ever. None of us had laid eyes on Lorie since she left town three years earlier.

  I felt I owed it to the girls to be as honest as I could. It wasn’t as if they’d be able to ask later.

  There wasn’t going to be any later.

  22. DON’T YOU HANG UP ON ME, YOU BASTARD

  And now, this morning, I was on the floor.

  A spectacularly ignoble way to begin one of my last days as a human being.

  “Oh, Daddy. Quit horsing around. You have to get ready for work. Morgan’s already here.” Britney was standing behind me, her arms twined around my neck. I remained seated on the hardwood floor. I had no idea how long I’d been ruminating about last night, about Lorie. Or how long Britney had been in my bedroom.

  “Not going to work today, sweetie.”

  “You’re staying with us?”

  “I’m going to spend as much time with you as possible.” She hugged me closer, her tiny rib cage pressed against my back. Though I had a couple of days to work it out, I had no idea who was going to take care of her after I was gone. Their grandfather couldn’t take care of himself. My mother was in Japan—or was it Shanghai?—going through an extended second childhood and in no shape to take on two girls. Lorie’s parents were not the kind of people I wanted to leave them with.

  “Want me to tell Morgan to go home?” Britney asked.

  “Let’s keep Morgan. I might have to run some errands.”

  “Oh, goody. Me and Ally and Morgan and you. This was too much to hope for. It’s going to be like Morgan’s our mommy, isn’t it?”

  “Britney? Don’t—” But she was already out of the room.

  The razor I shaved with every morning had been my father’s. I hadn’t thought about that in a long while. Yesterday’s visit had shaken loose a lot of ancient feelings.

  He’d been a hard disciplinarian in my early years. Punishment had rained down on me willy-nilly, even though as a child I’d bought into the Sixth Element of the Saints of Christ hook, line, and sinker. For years I believed I was headed for heaven and that if I died prematurely, I would meet Jesus Christ at the pearly gates. For years I’d taken a whack on the bottom for every little infraction.

  The crack in my faith began the week my mother vanished, the week my father told me it was my fault.

  Later, one night on a drive home from a Saints sojourn in Oregon, my mother asleep, my father and me listening to show tunes on some funky Oregon Public Radio channel—I was twelve and my mother had returned by then—I asked about his pronouncement four years earlier that my mother’s departure had been my fault, since by this time she’d confirmed I’d had nothing to do with her leaving.

  He swore he’d never said any such thing.

  When I insisted he had, that he’d said it more than once, he dismissed my sputtering objections as absurd, yet I knew what he’d said. It hadn’t been out of my mind for a day.

  He said I’d been young and emotionally distraught after my mother’s departure and that my memory was a child’s and faulty. I didn’t buy it. I’d memorized thousands of Bible verses without being accused of having a faulty memory. Although we never spoke of it again, his denial haunted me, had in fact been the linchpin in my decision to run away from Six Points.

  “Morning, Mr. Swope.”

  “Morning, Morgan. I hope you don’t mind; I’m going to be home today, but I’ll be running errands and making phone calls. I would appreciate it if you could be with us while I’m doing that.”

  She blushed. “I’d love to.” Britney began bouncing up and down and squealing. Allyson took it a little more calmly, though I saw her exchange a meaningful glance with Morgan.

  We had breakfast together, the girls and I. Morgan, who was as skinny as six o’clock, claimed she’d already had breakfast at home, though I doubted she had. The girls babbled, while I pondered the end of my life and, for all intents and purposes, the end of theirs as they knew it.

  Before we were done, Mayor Haston phoned. “Jim. The King County Executive wants to have a meeting today at the mayor’s office. Twelve noon. Can you be there?”

  “Absolutely.” I was delighted things were moving so quickly. We were going to whip this rabid dog before he bit anyone else.

  “I talked to Brashears last night. He’ll be there. And one of McCain’s doctors is coming.”

  “You’ve been busy.”

  “I’m worried.”

  “Good. I am, too.”

  We drove to the fire station, the four of us shoulder-to-shoulder in my pickup. The engine was in, but the medics were out, which left three people on duty. Ben Arden was working in Ian’s spot, along with Karrie and a volunteer. In the event of a fire, more volunteers would pop out of the woodwork to help. At least that was the plan. They were all on pagers.

  I went into the office and looked up the fire report Chief Newcastle had written for the truck accident last February. The report said the chicken truck was owned by Alsace Poultry, based in Kent, Washington. I already knew Holly had driven for Continental Freightways Associated, a company out of Seattle.

  When I called Continental Freightways, I was connected to a harried-sounding man who answered, “Continental.” After I began to explain who I was and what I wanted, he interrupted. “Last winter? What does that have to do with the price of tea in China?”

  “We have someone here who’s sick, and we think it’s from that accident. We
’re just trying to figure out what the product is that’s making our people sick.”

  “Hey, look. I’m busy here. Hazardous materials are not our gig. Why don’t you go down the street to Consolidated? They might know something.”

  “It was your company’s truck. Holly Riggs was driving.”

  “Just goes to show they shouldn’t be letting girls behind the wheel.” He laughed. “Call Consolidated.”

  The line went dead.

  “Bastard.”

  “Daddy, you said a bad word.” Having led the charge through the fire station, Allyson was behind me now, trailed by Britney and Morgan, who was trying to keep her cool, although it was clear she was overpowered by both the hardware and the stark immediacy of my profession. You could still smell smoke in the station from a fire we’d had three days ago.

  We could look into the chickens if Stephanie found a cause for it, but until further notice, I was going to concentrate on whatever product or combination of products had been inside Holly’s truck. I found it much more credible that a chemical had caused our problem than chickens. Our reports hadn’t included a copy of the manifest for either truck. There had been no reason for it. I remembered a few things about the contents of Holly’s rig and had been wracking my brain all day yesterday and last night trying to recall a specific logo I’d seen on one of the boxes. I knew I’d read about the company in the Wall Street Journal just a day or two after the wreck, so it had stuck in my mind. The logo consisted of a winged lion inside a black circle. Today, without further thought, the name of the company popped into my head. Jane’s California Propulsion. I looked it up on the Internet and found my memory was dead-on—Jane’s California Propulsion, Inc. In San Jose.

  Dialing one of the phone numbers provided on their Web page, I found myself getting shuffled from office to office. After explaining my problem to several individuals and then waiting for almost ten minutes while the earpiece spewed out easy-listening rock, I finally managed to get connected to a Mr. Stuart in their safety division.