Dirty Blonde (29 page)

“So what did my mother have to do with that? Was it because of the stillbirth?”

“No. Your father.”

Cate frowned. “What about him?”

“When I saw that he died of black lung, I went to see your mother and see if she wanted to join the class.”

“Black lung?” Cate blinked, confused. “My father didn’t die of black lung. He had a heart attack.”

“No, it was black lung. His death certificate said so. Coal workers’ pneumoconiosis. That was my job, to review the death certificates in the region, for black lung or any similar disease. Progressive massive fibrosis or silicosis. Most of those cases were in Kentucky, Virginia, and West Virginia, but plenty were up here. My beat was the mining counties. Schuylkill, Carbon, Luzerne, Northumberland, Lackawanna, Columbia, and Dauphin. Sullivan County, too.”

Cate listened, reeling.
Black lung?

“Usually I heard somebody got sick and went to visit while they were alive or on oxygen, at home or in the hospital. They all got sick, sooner or later. But a few would slip through the cracks, like your father, and I’d pick him up when I reviewed the death certificates. I used to pay a clerk to tip us off, too.”

“Do you remember where you found his?”

“Columbia County, I think. He stayed close to Centralia. Your mother told me he didn’t see you much.”

“Not at all.”

“That’s too bad,” Ed said, with sympathy. “Then I used to go find the family and see if they wanted to sign up. They usually did, they’d be mad as hell about the black lung. They’d authorize the release of the medical records, and I’d review them and see if they qualified for the class, which they always did, if they wanted in. Is this really news to you, about your father?”

“Yes. My mother said he died of a heart attack.”

“No, black lung. He died young from it. He was only fifty. Most miners die or at least show symptoms around that age. Shortness of breath, wheezing, coughs that won’t quit.” Ed wrinkled his bony nose. “I don’t buy all that hooey about when coal was king. Coal was hell for miners.”

“But my father wasn’t a miner.”

“Yes, he was. Can’t die from black lung and not be a coal miner. It’s caused by the coal dust that gets in the lungs.”

“I know, but…” Cate didn’t finish the sentence. She knew what her own father did for a living, at least she had thought she did. “He had a motorcycle shop. I went to it when I was little. I remember.” She did remember, the visits stamped on her brain with a child’s impressionism. “The shop was dark and smelly and a little cold. He went there every day. I still have a T-shirt with the name of the shop on it. Mike’s Bikes.”

“Maybe he did that for a time, but Deirdre told me he was a miner.”

“You can’t be right. We had motorcycles parked out front of the house, all the time. People came to see him.” Cate flashed on the engines roaring. The black exhaust smoke. Her father’s greasy hands. “Maybe he became a miner after he left?”

“That’s not what Deirdre told me. Or what the certificate showed. She told me he mined and she wasn’t surprised when I told her what he died of.” Ed brightened. “Then she told me they were divorced, so I asked her out.”

“But my father wasn’t a miner,” Cate repeated, then remembered something. The small bathroom wastebasket at their house. Used Kleenex tissues stained with black dirt against the white.
Don’t touch that!

“She told me no. Said she didn’t want to date anyone. She had her job, up at the school, and she was busy. I didn’t know then about the baby, of course. So I called her about fifty more times, and she finally gave up. Only woman I ever met with a will stronger than my own.”

For a second, Cate could almost hear something. An echo. The hack of a cough, first thing in the morning. A racking that wouldn’t stop. Was she imagining it? Was it the power of suggestion?

“We didn’t go out much in the beginning, but after a while we did, and always out of town. I told her she used to make me feel like we were cheating. I figured out it wasn’t your dad she felt like she was cheating on.” Ed slapped his leg. “Hold on, I’ll go get you those pictures. I keep the boxes in my little office.”

Ed shuffled from the room, leaving Cate with her questions. Why had her mother kept Ed a secret? Why had she kept her father’s job a secret? Then she realized the answer, with a start. She hung her head, and by the time Ed returned with a cardboard box, she felt overwhelmed by sadness. With one little fact, everything about her family was explained, once and for all. She reached for her cola and took a shaky sip.

“This is only the first box.” Ed set the box down and pushed back the strand of white hair that had fallen onto his forehead. “It could take all afternoon to go through them. That’s okay with me, if it’s okay with you.”

Cate looked up at Ed, who was reaching into the box and handing her a first stack of photos. “Well, did you figure out why they didn’t tell me about the black lung?”

Ed stopped the photo stack in midair, and his cheer vanished.

“My father had to have been a bootleg miner. That would explain it. He had the bike shop in the day, but he mined at night, right?”

“Probably.” Ed set the photos down on the coffee table. “Don’t judge too harshly, Judge. A bootleg miner was only a petty thief. A man who poached coal and undersold it, to make extra money on the side. It’s a tradition going back to the Molly Maguires.”

“But in Centralia, you know what it means to be a bootlegger as well as I do. As well as my mother did. Part of the reason the mine fire couldn’t be put out was because of the bootleg mines. Wasn’t that right? Bootleg mines didn’t show on the mine maps.”

Ed nodded, his lower lip buckling. “Yes. Bootleg miners did what’s called robbing back, working the mine the wrong way, back to front, chipping away the coal pillars that were left to support the mine roof. They took out the pillars, collapsing the mines. It made it impossible to stop the fire when the government filled the shafts with fly ash in the seventies, and again in the eighties.”

Cate felt a wave of shame. “She must have known he was bootlegging.”

“Of course, but it was extra money, and times were tough. Nobody liked the bootleggers, it’s true, but mostly they looked the other way. They hated the coal company even more. They couldn’t foresee the fire. That the bootlegging would jeopardize everyone. The entire town.”

“And a little baby,” Cate added, dry-mouthed. “No wonder she blamed herself.”

Ed fell silent, and she reached over and picked up the photos.

To meet the stranger who was her beloved mother.

CHAPTER 37

It was almost dark by the time Cate was back in the car, driving south toward the Holiday Inn in Frackville. Trees etched crooked black lines against the overcast sky, an odd gray-purple that deepened to ink behind the mountains. The temperature had dropped to twenty-eight degrees, according to the car thermometer, and the tires rumbled where cold tread met salted road. Only a few cars traveled Route 61, and there was an old black Continental behind her.

Don’t touch that

Cate had spent the afternoon looking at the photos Ed had taken. Her heart felt full and her head tired. An emotional exhaustion weakened every muscle in her body. Ed had served her a thick cheeseburger and a hot coffee, which revived her for the drive. He’d also given her a full box of photographs, and it sat beside her on the passenger’s seat, along with something else, something even more precious, which gave her a purpose.

Don’t touch that

Cate kept her foot on the gas as an old Continental switched into the fast lane to pass her. Her thoughts rumbled along. She would never have guessed that her father had been a bootlegger. Her mother had carried that pain to her grave, lying now beside the child whose death she believed she’d caused.

Don’t touch that

Cate bit her lip, driving down into the next valley, where it grew darker. She had always sensed the whispers about her and her mother, and thought it was because her mother wanted more for her. But maybe the gossip was about her father. Bootlegging couldn’t have been an easy secret to keep in a town of miners. No one would have been fooled by their secret; no one except their three-year-old.

The Continental switched lanes to get in front of her, its red taillights vivid in the darkness, two round red eyes against the black. Cate flashed on a fleeting memory. The red-eyed monster with the black face, her childhood fear. She’d seen it in her house, coming through the front door at night. She’d run screaming to her mother.

Just your eyes, playin’ tricks on you

Cate stared into the red taillights of the black car. It wasn’t a monster coming through their front door—it was a miner. Coming home from bootlegging, his face black with coal dust. His eyes red and irritated. Her
father
. It all made sense, jibing with what Ed had told her. So many secrets, consuming them all as a family, burning them alive in a town of fire.

A passing truck jolted Cate out of her reverie, and she decreased her speed, approaching Centralia. Steam rose like ghosts from the earth, and it killed her to think that her father had contributed to this calamity, and her mother had been complicit. She steered the car through steam, hot and wet enough to leave momentary condensation on the windshield, and began the drive up the hill to St. Ignatius Cemetery. She parked outside the gates, set her emotions aside, and cut the ignition, then grabbed what she needed, and got out of the car.

The frigid air hit her in the face, more brutally than it had this morning, and she walked up the center aisle of the graveyard, yanking her coat close to her neck and trying not to breathe. It was almost dark, and steam rose everywhere, rolling in eerie drifts across the marble gravestones and shrouding the stone crucifixes. Cate froze at a shadow behind the smoke. Then it was gone.

Just your eyes, playin’ tricks on you

Cate steeled herself. She had something important to do. The task wouldn’t get easier, and the sky wouldn’t get lighter. She made her way to her mother’s grave, and its smooth rose marble seemed to glow in the lessening light, as if the memorial had managed to marshal every last particle of luminescence.

Cate blinked back tears, feeling more fully than ever how much she loved her mother, and how sorry she felt for all her suffering, so needless. Even now that she knew her secret, and her sacrifice, too.

“You should have kept this, Mom,” Cate whispered, bending over and plunging her fingers into the cold snow, then burrowing deeper, until she hit earth, scratching a tiny hole. Then she took the small black box containing the engagement ring and placed it inside the hole, burying it with snow. “I love you.” She wiped her eyes and turned to go. It was getting dark fast, and colder, and she was beginning to feel woozy and nauseated from the gas.

Good-bye, Mom.

Cate made her way down the road, her feet getting colder in the soaked sneakers. She reached the gates and headed toward the car, digging in her pockets for the keys. Smoke rose around her, and she held her nose, accidentally dropping the keys.
Damn
. She squinted at the snowy ground in the dark. A wave of smoke obscured her view, and she got a powerful whiff of toxins. Cate waited for the nausea to pass, but it didn’t. She bent over but couldn’t see the keys in the snow, even though the black plastic should have been easy to spot. She plunged her hands into the nearest snowdrift as she heard the sound of a car coming up the road.

Two headlights, on high beams, appeared over the crest of the hill, and Cate took advantage of the temporary illumination to search the snow. She kept fishing and heard the sound of the car as it accelerated. She looked up, struck by a vague sense of alarm. The car was going too fast to make the sharp turn down the new part of Route 61. She could get hit if it didn’t turn soon.

Cate straightened up, and what happened next went so fast she couldn’t do anything but react. The car gunned its engine, accelerating. The dark hood sped toward her with frightening speed.

Cate heard herself scream and sprang out of the way, diving headlong into the plowed snow by the side of the road. She rolled away just as the car zoomed past her, spraying snow and salt into her face, aiming straight for the Mercedes.

Metal crashed into metal with an ear-splitting
bam
! The dark car slammed into the Mercedes’s trunk. The impact sent the car sliding into a snowbank. Exhaust filled Cate’s face, and she screamed again, scrambling frantically away. She popped bolt upright in time to see the car’s red taillights as it sped away, careering crazily down Route 61.

Her heart jumped through her coat. She was too stunned to think. Her stomach roiled in protest. She scrambled to her feet, brushing wet snow from her cheek and digging a clump from her neck. Snow soaked her sweatpants and covered her coat. What was going on? She could have been killed. Hadn’t the driver seen her? Was he drunk?

She ran to the Mercedes and saw its back end smashed. The trunk lid had popped up, but the front end of the car looked untouched. She could still drive it if she could find the damn keys. She had to get out of here. Her phone was locked in the car. There were no police in Centralia. She was too far from any of the few remaining houses, even if they were occupied. Her car would signal Roadside Assistance, but it could take forever for a tow truck to get here.

Suddenly she heard a car coming back up the road. Her gut tensed. Two headlights popped over the crest of the hill from the other way. She couldn’t tell if it was the same car. If it was the same driver, he already knew she was here. If it wasn’t, she’d get the help she needed.

“Help! Help!” Cate hurried around the Mercedes and waved her arms frantically. It was a dark car. She couldn’t tell the make. The driver switched his high beams on. She waved, ducking behind her car just in case. “Please! Help!”

Suddenly the dark car charged the Mercedes, its engine roaring.

“No!” Cate screamed at the top of her lungs, jumping backwards as the dark car barreled into the Mercedes. She was almost pulled under her car as it piled her way, but staggered backwards. She caught a glimpse of the driver, his teeth clenched in rage.
Russo.