Into The Inferno Part 4

"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 l.u.s.t 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, G.o.d."

"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 n.o.body'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 circ.u.mstances. I was hoping you might be able to shed some light on what those circ.u.mstances might have been."

"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 relations.h.i.+p had fizzled after Holly discovered I was seeing one of the Suzannes. I had had treated her shabbily. 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 partic.i.p.ate.

"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 p.i.s.ses and moans and tries to rationalize her partner back into a relations.h.i.+p 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 relations.h.i.+p, 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 G.o.d 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 embarra.s.sment 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 circ.u.mstances of our first lovemaking, as if the cold kitchen linoleum would rekindle my ardor. Except for my sore knees, the s.e.x 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 h.e.l.l. 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 s.l.u.ts 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 s.h.i.+pping 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 p.r.i.c.ks from a bed of nails. During the conversation she'd dissected our relations.h.i.+p 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 att.i.tude 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 any life without you." 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 embarra.s.sment would have been the worst of it. Then I'd quickly put the whole thing out of my mind.

The trouble with emotional blackmail was once you let it start, there was no way to make it stop. I knew all about it.

Lorie had been a seasoned pro.

Now Holly was in a coma, drool oozing down her face, a pool of it on the sheet next to her.

I would give anything to deliver her out of this.

Maybe I'd been wrong to dust her off. Maybe I really was the heartless heel her sister thought I was.

I couldn't get over the astonis.h.i.+ng coincidence that Joel McCain and Holly Riggs were both bedridden. Two people who'd been close to me. Had Stephanie told me the truth in the cul-de-sac outside Joel's house, I might have learned of their fate within minutes of each other.

What were the odds, I wondered, that these two situations would be almost identical?

It freaked me out.

9. POOR BABY, TELL AUNT MARGE.

A few minutes later, clad in a svelte navy business suit, Margery DiMaggio swept into the room as if she were about to accept an Oscar from the Academy, which, to the best of my memory, was how she swept into most rooms. DiMaggio was Holly and Stephanie's aunt, sister to their deceased mother.

I'd met her twice before, and each time we'd gotten along famously.

"G.o.d, this is all my fault," she said melodramatically. "If I was a Catholic, I'd confess to a whole roomful of priests. If they could tear themselves away from their little altar boys. Oh, what a detestable thing to say. I'm sorry, Steph. I just get so depressed coming here. I thought she was happier in the hospice. They played that music. I know you didn't like it, but it was was soothing." soothing."

"I didn't mind the music, Marge. Or the hospice. We needed to run more tests. This was the place to do it."

As they hugged, the remnants of a family standing over its youngest living member, Stephanie looked over the older woman's shoulder at the ceiling before her eyes lowered to me. I'd been brought here for interrogation and retribution, and now my presence had become offensive. Stephanie had used me the way she'd accused me of using her sister. Worse, for I'd never intentionally set out to hurt anyone. If people got hurt because of my actions, it was strictly on account of my own ignorance, stupidity, or lack of grace or because of their their unrealistic expectations. Stephanie, on the other hand, had planned this a.s.sault like a four-star general. unrealistic expectations. Stephanie, on the other hand, had planned this a.s.sault like a four-star general.

I started for the door.

"Oh, Jim, honey," DiMaggio said, speaking as if we'd last seen each other only yesterday. "Good of you to come. You didn't hear what I said, did you? I hope you're not Catholic."

"I'm not anything. I'm sorry the circ.u.mstances have to be so . . ."

"I feel like it's all my fault. She came to Was.h.i.+ngton because of me. This is my fault. Every bit of it."