Into the Inferno Read online

  “We’re talking right now.”

  “I’d come back up there, but I’m stuck at work. There are some issues I need to go over with you. In person. Please?”

  “I don’t even know you, lady.”

  “You knew my sister.”

  “That’s over with.”

  “Just please come?”

  “She going to be there?”

  “My sister won’t even know you were in town.”

  “Okay. Sure. Maybe we’ll videotape it for when I have friends at the house. Some of my pals missed your remarks this afternoon.”

  “This morning when I saw you, it surprised me. Holly said you were a nice guy.”

  “I thought she said I was a bastard.”

  “I’m so not like today. I couldn’t even believe I said those things.”

  “Neither could I.”

  Despite everything I was feeling, her conversation had the hint of promise to it. I couldn’t tell whether she was flirting or I was only imagining that she was flirting. In the past I’d thought women were coming on to me when they weren’t. As outlandish as it may sound to you, I found myself entertaining lascivious visions of a summertime fling with my ex-girlfriend’s sister. Was this an invitation, as in invitation, or was this a setup so her favorite rugby team could knock me down and put the boots to me?

  “You really took it well, I thought, considering. You were a darling.” The word oozed out of her mouth like maple syrup. Darling. Next to cute or sweet it was one of the major tip-off words that a woman liked you. I didn’t know much, but I knew that.

  “I suppose I can drive down,” I said, mentally kicking myself for being a sap.

  “I’m at Tacoma General until midnight. On the third floor.”

  As I was on my way out the door, Allyson said, “Is she foxy, Dad?”

  “This is business.”

  “Oh, yeah? So her house is on fire?”

  “Okay, she’s foxy.”

  “That’s what I thought.” The girls exchanged looks while the baby-sitter put on a mood like a coat. My girls had solved the conundrum I couldn’t solve: why I was wasting my time.

  All day I’d fumed over Stephanie’s verbal assault. It didn’t help that Click and Clack had gotten wind of it—Ian Hjorth and Ben Arden reporting to work that afternoon to take up the slack after Stan Beebe went home sick, sick of heart over our friend Joel. Click and Clack commentated on my love life with remarks that alternated between the lewd and the hilariously lewd.

  Normally they were a positive addition to the atmosphere, poking fun at everything, including themselves. But their favorite target was my love life. To hear them rehash it, my tongue-lashing at the hands of Holly’s sister was the funniest thing ever. At one point, Ben got a sympathetic look on his face, turned to me, and sang to a melody of his own invention, “Somebody got a spanking.” Ian laughed so hard, his knees buckled. I suppose after what we’d learned about Joel McCain, our department needed a diversion.

  Downtown Tacoma sat on a hill overlooking Commencement Bay. On top of the hill, a block or so from Wright Park and fronting Martin Luther King Junior Way, stood Tacoma General Hospital.

  It was almost eight o’clock and still light out when I approached the nurses’ station on three. A barrel-chested woman with eyebrows plucked too thin gave me a questioning look from behind the counter, then reached over to thumb the intercom. She drew her hand back, glanced past my shoulder, and said, “There she is.”

  She wore clogs and hospital scrubs with a stethoscope draped around her neck, her hair shoulder-length and loose. She wasn’t wearing a name tag, and it was a split second before I remembered how proud Holly had been of her older sister.

  “You’re a doctor,” I said.

  “Don’t act so stunned.” Any hint of flirtation in her demeanor had vanished.

  “Holly said you worked back east somewhere.”

  “Ohio. I’ve been volunteering here for a few weeks.”

  “Terrific. Most people on vacation would never think of volunteering.”

  “No, I suppose they wouldn’t.”

  Holly had been proud of her older sister, said she was smart as a whip, had graduated from high school a year early and did the same in college, even though she had to work the whole time because their parents were dead. Their mother died of cancer. Six weeks later Holly came home from middle school and found their father hanging by his neck in the garage. Stephanie had been in her last year of high school.

  Turning away from me, she said, “I have a patient to check on. Come along?”

  “You sure it’s okay?” She walked away without replying.

  When I caught her, she said, “Funny how all hospitals are pretty much alike. Don’t you think? You get inside and you could be in New York or Toronto or Timbuktu.”

  The breeze from our pace brought tears to her eyes. She stopped at a patient’s room, glanced at the chart on the wall, pushed the door open with her fingertips, and went in. After a moment alone in the hallway, I followed.

  It was a small room with one bed, the foot toward the door, a dark television high on a bracket on the wall. The only light was provided by the evening twilight whispering in through the blinds. The patient was silent and motionless. From where I stood, I could see only a swatch of lusterless hair on the pillow.

  “I’d better leave,” I whispered.

  “No. Stay.”

  “You sure I’m not . . . ?”

  “Take a look. You don’t recognize her?”

  “I don’t know anybody in Tacoma.”

  “Oh, I think you do.” It was at this point I realized all the sweet talk on the phone had been part of a ruse. I was always slow on the uptake, which explained why I was attracted to dim females, females who couldn’t fool me, but I’d never been this slow. On the drive down, I’d alternated between euphoria and apprehension, seesawing between the thought that she’d summoned me either to slake her lust or to de-man me with a scalpel. I could tell now by the sudden edge in her voice I was scalpel-bound. “Step around here. You’ve seen patients before. You’re a big brave fireman. Take a look.”

  She moved aside to make room for me. It was a woman, older, faded, devoid of makeup, her features flavored with that lack of vitality a long-term patient acquires, her body so tiny and frail and motionless, I had to look twice to be certain she was breathing. When I turned to Stephanie, her eyes were like blue lasers.

  “You don’t know her?”

  I turned back to the patient. “I don’t think so.”

  “Look again. Sometimes it’s difficult to recognize a person when they’re horizontal. But you’ve seen her on her back before. That was the whole point, wasn’t it? Getting her horizontal?”

  It was with a queasy feeling that I realized we were standing over Stephanie’s sister, Holly. I’d cherished Holly, made love to Holly, woken up beside her, and yet I barely recognized the skeleton she’d become. “Oh, God.”

  “Her doctors don’t think so, but I believe she hears everything around her. I believe she’s listening to us right now. You know how a stroke victim can hear what you say but can’t respond. You ask them to move their hand, their brain sends the signal, but the signal never arrives. It’s got to be the most frustrating feeling on earth.”

  “What happened?”

  “A cerebrovascular accident, although so far nobody’s been able to figure out exactly what caused it. We think she had an aneurysm.”

  “This is incredible.”

  “Is it?”

  “She’s the second person I’ve seen today in basically this same situation.”

  “I’m sorry you’re having such a bad day.”

  “That’s not what I meant.”

  “I know what you meant.”

  “I don’t get it. She’s twenty-eight. People her age don’t have strokes.”

  “Not unless there are special circumstances. I was hoping you might be able to shed some light on what those circumstances might have been.�
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  “That’s why you came to North Bend? If I’d known she was sick, I never would have . . . Holly was in perfect health the last time I saw her.”

  “Perfect mental health?”

  “What are you getting at?”

  She reached under the blanket for her sister’s hand. “We think she tried to kill herself. You wouldn’t know anything about that, would you?”

  8. FREAK ME OUT

  Nothing she might have said could have rendered me quite so speechless.

  At least now I knew the primary source of her antipathy toward me: Stephanie Riggs thought I had driven her sister to suicide—and a botched job at that.

  Ten years ago our department responded to a young man who’d tried to hang himself in the woods; he was found minutes later by his brothers, who revived him so that he could spend the rest of his life in a vegetative state. We all thought about that patient from time to time. All of us who’d been on the alarm thought about him. There were endings worse than death.

  What had happened to Holly, for instance. It was one thing to be ninety and have a stroke—live a couple more years. It was quite another to be twenty-eight and have a stroke, consigned to a bed for another half century.

  “This was because of you,” Stephanie Riggs said. “Because of your shabby affair.”

  Our relationship had fizzled after Holly discovered I was seeing one of the Suzannes. I had treated her shabbily.

  “I can’t believe Holly would kill herself. I certainly never saw any hint of depression or—”

  “Not until you dumped her. They found her forty-some hours after you last spoke. As far as we could ascertain, she didn’t speak to anyone else or leave the house after that last phone call with you.”

  I remembered it.

  The conversation had been one-sided and rambling, an hour during which Holly had cried over the fact that we were no longer an item, as if two people had never decided to go their separate ways before. Looking back on it, I could see now that our breakup had been my fault. What’s tricky to explain without making me sound like a jerk, and what I would never admit to her sister, who already thought I was a jerk, was that during our last phone conversation I’d nodded off.

  Twice.

  Fallen asleep. I felt bad about it even as it was happening, but as was Holly’s custom, she’d phoned late, after the girls were in bed, after I was in bed, having lost sleep the night before fighting one of North Bend’s infrequent house fires. I don’t believe she’d been threatening suicide. Still, there were a number of minutes during that conversation when I didn’t participate.

  “I remember the call,” I said.

  “Not that you’re going to answer me truthfully, but how did Holly sound?”

  Boring, I thought. The way any jilted lover sounds when she pisses and moans and tries to rationalize her partner back into a relationship the partner wants no part of. “If you’re asking if she threatened suicide, the answer is no. She wasn’t happy we were breaking up, but she never hinted she was going to do anything like this.”

  “What would you say if I told you she wrote in her journal she’d been talking to you about killing herself?”

  Holly had never mentioned a journal and Stephanie’s question was most likely a subterfuge, but I had no way of knowing for certain. She hadn’t said Holly’s journal included mention of suicide, had only asked what I would say if it had. It was a trick trial attorneys and cops used, one my father had often wielded on me as a child, one the elders in our church had used on him and my mother both, on all the adults in the commune, a contrivance I was thoroughly familiar with. The secret was to not let the other person buffalo you into admitting something there was no proof of.

  As far as I knew, during the minutes of that phone call when I was asleep Holly had continued talking about our relationship, nothing else. It had been a ghastly hour, though I gotta say the current one was stacking up to be worse.

  In the days and weeks after that phone call, Holly had gradually faded from my thoughts and I believed I’d faded from hers.

  All the while she’d been right here.

  Comatose.

  From the look of her, she hadn’t thought about anything during the past month, least of all me.

  “The electric meter reader went to the rear of her duplex and spotted her on the floor. He called the police, who called the fire department. By then she’d been on the floor God knows how long. Naked. Hypothermic. We think she went down right after that phone call with you.”

  Okay, I admit it was all too easy to visualize Holly naked on the floor of her house. To my embarrassment the first time we’d made love popped into my mind. It had been right there on her kitchen floor. We’d been too entranced with each other to do anything but kiss and drop to the linoleum after we came through her back door. The second time on her floor was the last time we made love, a desperate tryst instigated by Holly and calculated, I later realized, to replicate the circumstances of our first lovemaking, as if the cold kitchen linoleum would rekindle my ardor. Except for my sore knees, the sex had been good, but the affection had not returned. I wondered if she hadn’t planned to be found on that floor as some sort of message to me.

  Feeling my legs beginning to give way, I made a fierce effort to remain standing—nothing would be worse than fainting in front of this man-eater.

  She hadn’t brought me here to tell me about her sister. She could have done that in North Bend. Or on the phone. She’d brought me here to shock and humiliate me, and then to use that to extract information.

  She brought me here to see me in pain.

  This was turning out to be a summer in hell. Chief Newcastle’s hiking accident, Joel McCain’s fall, Jackie Feldbaum’s car wreck. Me running into this cannibal.

  Holly.

  If Holly’s current condition had anything to do with me, I would never forgive myself. Holly was a sweet woman, natural and unaffected, and for a time I’d genuinely loved her. For a variety of reasons it hadn’t worked out, perhaps because she’d been too clingy. Or because I’d been unfaithful.

  “She loved your little girls, and she loved you,” Stephanie said. “For some reason she thought you felt the same about her. But then, that was before she found out you were sleeping with another woman.”

  “We never said we were exclusive. As far as I knew, she could have been seeing other people, too.”

  “You know she wasn’t!”

  “She could have been! We never made any rules.”

  Stephanie Riggs looked at her sister. “It’s strange how much you recreational womanizers don’t know about women. It’s strange that no matter what you want to believe, women are never quite the sluts you men are.”

  For half a second I thought this was a sick joke the two of them had concocted, that any minute Holly would jump out of bed and laugh at me. But it was too intricate and grim to be a joke. To begin with, Holly had lost an enormous amount of weight. She’d lost color, too, which I didn’t think could be faked.

  I jammed my trembling hands into my pockets to keep Stephanie from seeing them. I could run into a house fire no problem; angry women took my breath away. I wanted Holly’s sister to like me more than I’d ever wanted anybody on this planet to like me, but it was not going to happen.

  Not now and not ever.

  “Why did you bring me here?”

  When she spoke, her voice, which had been rising steadily since my arrival, returned to the quiet, thoughtful tones of our conversation on the phone over an hour earlier. “We believe whatever caused this is systemic, some sort of sophisticated poison, something that has affected her brain and nervous system at a basic cellular level. I thought she might have had access to industrial solvents, insecticides, that sort of thing. I looked all over her house. I even went back through all the shipping manifests to see what she’d been hauling. I was hoping you might have some ideas. Was there some prescription medication that came up missing from your place? I know she hadn’t been there
recently, but before?”

  “I have two little girls. I don’t even keep Weed and Feed around my place. I need drain cleaner, I use it and throw the can away.”

  It hadn’t occurred to her that I was capable of loving anyone, much less two anyones. You could see it by the look on her face. “Did you ever talk to Holly about poisons? Or ways people might commit suicide? You ever discuss suicide at all?”

  “No. Didn’t she leave a note?”

  “I haven’t found one.”

  “Then how do you know it was a suicide attempt?”

  “I know.” Stephanie Riggs turned her attention away from her sister and looked at me. “Except for trace amounts of fluoxetine hydrochloride, which she’d been taking for the last year, the toxicologist’s report came up negative. My last hope was she’d left some clue with you during that phone call.”

  “What’s fluo—?”

  “Prozac.”

  The sketchy details of our phone call were coming back like pricks from a bed of nails. During the conversation she’d dissected our relationship from the time we met until she discovered, through a stupid slip of the tongue—mine—that I’d been seeing another woman.

  After we broke up, she’d begged to be friends and I’d tried hard to accommodate her, but you couldn’t be friends with someone you’d been intimate with a week earlier. One of you was bound to be hurt. Besides, she didn’t really want to be friends; she wanted to be married.

  In the end, she’d gotten so desperate, her attitude alone became the barrier against getting back together. It wasn’t anything I could have told her sister—that Holly had been a whiner.

  Anyway. Holly wasn’t whining now.

  Another thing I didn’t want to tell her sister was that a few days after I’d made the final break, she’d said something that had stuck with me. “What kind of life am I going to have without you? I won’t have any life without you.”

  Suicide must have crossed my mind at the time, because I’d worried that the guys at work would find out a woman had killed herself over me. As if my embarrassment would have been the worst of it. Then I’d quickly put the whole thing out of my mind.