Into the Inferno (28 page)

53. CATCH ME IF YOU CAN

Nobody warned me Stevenson had been a running back on his high school football team or that Ron Holgate, who looked overweight, jogged five miles a night and competed in 10K races, that in the past five years he had twice run down suspects on foot. I found all this out later, after I dashed past the rubble that had been my house, past the two sad-eyed volunteers standing guard over Achara’s fire-stiffened body.

Lurching into the darkness in the field behind our house, I plotted a path toward the bank of the Middle Fork two hundred yards away. The moonlight was hazy under a pall of smoke that represented our vaporized house and belongings. There were firs in the middle of the field and a few more at the south end, but I was headed for the small cluster of deciduous trees on the riverbank.

The riverbed of the Middle Fork was mostly rock at this time of year, and you could wade across the stream in a multitude of places, although if you got caught in the deeper sections, the current could sweep you away. About once a summer we pulled a body out, usually some hapless local teenager who got trapped under a log and couldn’t escape because of the immense pressure of the flowing water.

“Stand in your tracks, asshole!” yelled Stevenson. I ran faster. He yelled twice more, as did Holgate, their voices giving away their positions. Both were close and getting closer, especially Stevenson, whose last words sounded as if they’d come from my hip pocket.

I swore to myself that if he knocked me down, I was going to fight. I had one day left on the planet, and I wasn’t going to let small-minded suspicions and bureaucratic megalomania steal those precious hours from my girls. I’d already robbed them of enough time myself.

I wasn’t the swiftest runner, but I was flying tonight.

Toward the center of the field, we would cross a series of furrows. Obscured by tall grasses, they would be hard to see even if you were expecting them. They were perilous during the day, worse in the dim moonlight.

I stepped into the first furrow, stumbled, righted myself, and leaped up onto the ridge beyond it, then down into the next ditch, quickly establishing an up-and-down rhythm, as if riding a miniature roller coaster. I was panting now, gasping for air, windmilling my arms wildly to maintain balance.

Behind me, one man screamed, “Oh, shit!” and I heard the
thwack
of a body striking the soft earth.

The other voice was still close. “You asshole!”

Stevenson didn’t sound nearly as winded as I was, but even so, I had gained ground on him. I could swear I was breathing so hard my lungs were bleeding. My legs were about to buckle.

I was almost to the riverbank when I heard him closing in on me again.

Barely visible in the moonlight, the path ran downstream along the bank for maybe a hundred fifty yards before it came to a dead end. On hot summer afternoons teenagers jumped off the steep dead end into a deep greenish-blue pool, skinny-dipping and drinking beer. For years a rope swing had dangled over the pool. I could only hope it was still there tonight. Behind me, I heard Stevenson cursing as branches and blackberry vines slapped at him.

I was breathing so hard, I could hear only two things now, the air rushing in and out of my throat and the slap of Stevenson’s shoes on the rocky path as he closed in.

“Thought you were . . . going to . . . get . . . away . . . didn’t . . . you . . . ?” he said as I reached the end of the pathway and launched myself out into space over the river. I couldn’t see the rope swing, but I knew where it should be out there in the dark over the river, and as I sailed out on faith I reached out for it, clawing at the air like a drunken Superman, just as if I could see it, the rope, hoping some Good Samaritan hadn’t tied it up out of the way.

By some miracle I got a grip on the rope and swung almost in slow motion out over the black, moonlit pool. I could feel Stevenson brushing my backside. And then I was free. Free and swinging. Below, I heard him splash noisily into the pool. I could still hear him shouting and wallowing in the cold water long after I jogged downstream along the bank.

Forty minutes later I found myself in the brush off Reinig Road near Miss Squiggly’s favorite spot on earth. We locals called it Unemployment Beach; the county called it Three Forks Park. Easily one of the most panoramic sites in the area, Unemployment Beach was a sandy spot where the three forks of the Snoqualmie fed into one another; another mile and a half downstream, the river dropped almost three hundred feet over Snoqualmie Falls.

Several vehicles came past, including a volunteer fireman returning home from my place, a fire engine, and the tanker that had responded from Snoqualmie.

When I saw Holly’s red Pontiac, I stepped out into the headlights and waited. As the car pulled alongside, I leaned down to the half-open passenger-side window and greeted my sleepy daughters in the backseat. I looked at Stephanie, who said, “I know. I agree. Totally. Your time is too short. They knew that. They were being assholes. Excuse my French, girls. Where to?” Stephanie asked, after I climbed in.

“The Sunset Motel.”

“Oh, no. We’re not going to—”

“Just a visit.”

“You’re not going after them?”

“They have to be the ones.”

“Why can’t we just go to a hotel? What are you going to do? Beat them up?”

“I have no idea. Just go by the Sunset.”

We headed toward Snoqualmie on back roads. I was sore all over but hadn’t felt it until now. I had five or six smallish burns, including my knees, where I’d crawled over hot spots in the fire. My left knee was aching as a result of our footrace in the dark. My feet were wet and cold from crossing the river.

I turned around and peered into the backseat. Tilted against each other like stuffed animals on a shelf, both girls had fallen asleep under the blanket I’d tucked around their legs.

“They out?” Stephanie asked.

“Sawing z’s.”

“We were so damn lucky. Somebody tried to kill us. All of us.”

“I think I know who.”

“You think Hillburn and Dobson killed . . .” Stephanie looked over the seat back to ascertain whether the girls were really asleep.

“You saw them tonight. They looked guilty as hell. And Donovan was all over town asking questions. It wasn’t like they wouldn’t have known about her.”

“Jim, if you go there tonight, they’ll find you. You’ll be arrested. I don’t want you to do anything you’ll regret.”

“You mean something I’ll regret for the rest of my life?”

Stephanie followed my directions and drove through Snoqualmie, past the high school, and back to North Bend on the old highway. I would be surprised if they hadn’t checked out, but if they hadn’t, I had no idea what I was going to do.

The Sunset Motel was lit up like a carnival ride, three county police cars crowding the street and entranceway, along with our own North Bend aid unit. Stephanie drove past while I slid down in the seat until only my eyes were above the window ledge. Hillburn and Dobson were standing outside in slacks and T-shirts, talking to the female evidence technician we’d seen at the fire.

“Maybe they’re arresting them?” Stephanie said.

“Not likely.” I saw a Latino man with blood on his shirt, a couple of hysterical Latina women screaming at him from across the courtyard. “There must have been a fight.”

“What do you want to do?”

“I don’t know why those bastards are still hanging around.”

“Let’s go to Seattle and put the girls to bed.”

“They must have figured their frame-up was perfect.”

“We’ll find a nice hotel with a pool.”

“It has to be them. The coincidence of the events in Chattanooga and here is too much. The syndrome is discovered. An explosion wipes out most of the survivors or, in our case, almost wipes us out. There’s a house fire in which key investigators are killed. Jane’s lies to me every time I talk to them. It’s gotta be those bastards.”

“We don’t have proof.”

“I don’t need proof.”

“Besides, if it’s Jane’s, those two are probably just errand boys. The real culprits are a thousand miles away.”

“You’re right. I’ll fly to California.”

“Jim . . .”

“I’m kidding. Let’s find a place to stay.”

“Jim? I love you.”

“Where did that come from?”

“We might not have a lot of time. I wanted to say it.”

I could have returned the sentiment, but right now I didn’t feel anything but relief that my daughters were alive and an irrepressible anger at the men who’d tried to take them from me.

“I wish things were different for you.”

“I’ve got one day left. A day is all I need. Most people don’t really live twenty-four hours. I never did. One day will be plenty.”

She didn’t say anything else, but it wasn’t too much later before I heard her crying in the dark.

DAY SIX

54. A BREEDING GROUND FOR NEUROTICS

In the morning I found her watching me with something akin to amusement in her dusty-blue eyes. There was no telling how long she’d been awake. I remembered we’d taken a suite at the Warwick in downtown Seattle. We’d situated the girls in a king-size bed in the other room in front of a television and an episode of
Love Boat
, one of their favorites; they wanted so much to believe in romance, particularly after the failure of mine with their mother. And also perhaps after the failure of mine with a long line of women after Lorie. Still, they were both asleep inside of a minute.

Stirring under the sheets, I quickly became aware that pajamas for the adults hadn’t been on the “to buy” list the night before. I glanced at the clock: nine-thirty. I was waking up later each morning. Tomorrow was day seven. I might not wake up at all tomorrow.

Stephanie’s skin was like liquid silk, her body warm when she rolled onto me, warm everywhere except her cold feet. Our lovemaking was ferocious, even more so than last evening at the Sunset Motel. This morning we had the added impetus of being on the run as well as the knowledge that time was running out. Afterward as I lay there recovering from the exertion, I said, “Me, too. I love you, too.”

She rolled her head over to look at me. We were lying side by side. “You don’t have to say it.”

“I’m a guy. Believe me, I know I don’t have to say it. I want to say it.”

“You know, you’re a lot nicer than you think you are.”

“Don’t count on it.”

“But you are.”

My ears were ringing louder than ever today. Besides the burns, there was a tweak in my right knee and another in my lower back. Minor quibbles. Except for these, I felt like a million bucks.

“Jim, I’ve been thinking. Do you still want to spend the whole day with your girls?”

“I do and I don’t. We need to work on this if there’s still a chance, but I can’t let my girls down, either. They need time with me. Especially if this is my last day.”

“Let me call Donovan and my aunt. This is Saturday, but I have cell phone numbers for both of them.”

“When you talk to Donovan, find out if he has Achara’s papers or if they were with her in the fire. I think she was on to something before she died. She gave me a string of numbers to memorize. They may be part of a chemical formula, maybe for an antidote. And I need to call Steding in Tennessee. He must have proof by now that JCP, Inc., was involved there. For me, that’s the final part to the puzzle. If Jane’s knows all about this, maybe there’s an antidote and they have it.”

“If they haven’t given it to us by now, they’re not likely to.”

“No.”

“Can I ask a favor, Jim?”

“What?”

“I know a lawyer here in town. I treated his son in Tacoma at the hospital. I’ve called him and he’s agreed to come out and write up some papers for us to sign.”

“What sort of papers?”

“I know how worried you are about your girls. . . . Well, if you don’t make it. I’d like you to assign me as their guardian.”

“You’d do that?”

“Listen. I’ve lived my life pretty much in a vacuum. I don’t go out. I don’t see people. I work and then I work some more. It’s been like that since high school, when my parents died. It took Holly and now you to open my eyes and make me realize I haven’t been living any kind of life. I love you. I love your girls. I want to be part of your family.”

“And you’ve got this attorney on tap?”

“He’s already drawn up the paperwork. All we have to do is sign it.”

“You’ve been a busy girl.”

“Yes, I have.”

For myself, I’d come to terms with my fate, and whether it happened today, tomorrow, or in two minutes, I was good to go. What I had not come to terms with was abandoning my children. I especially did not want to leave them with Wes and Lillian Tindale, whose home was now and always had been a breeding ground for neurotics.

“You realize this will be forever?”

“I’m fully aware of that.”

“You planning to take them with you, or relocate here?”

“I’ve had an offer at Tacoma General.”

“You got a deal, babe.”

We kissed and then, charged with the excitement of the moment, she leaped out of bed and began trotting out purchases she’d made while I slept. “I found most of this stuff downstairs in the gift shop, but I had to go down the block for the swimsuits. I got red sandals for Ally. A doll for Britney, a teddy for Ally, and a Monopoly game. What do you think?”

“I think if you keep parading around like that, you’re going to have to dole out another MF.”

“MF?”

“Mercy fuck.”

She laughed, crawled over the bed and kissed the tip of my nose, and was gone before I could grab her. After we showered and dressed and she’d applied Silvadine to my burns, we woke the girls. She’d purchased haircutting utensils and fingernail polish in the same shade Achara Carpenter used, Stephanie’s covert tribute to a woman who’d befriended us at the cost of her own life.

Within half an hour both girls had bobs matching Achara’s, were sitting on the edge of the tub in the bathroom painting their fingernails and toenails, jabbering away about Achara, who they didn’t yet know was dead.

Their house had been leveled. Every personal possession they’d ever owned had gone up in smoke. The family pet was dead. Any sense of security they’d ever felt was compromised. They didn’t need to hear about Achara. Not today.

We had a leisurely breakfast delivered from room service, and after that it was a race to see who got to Boardwalk first. As sick as I was of Monopoly, I was glad to be alive to play it. Glad my girls were alive to play it. “This is good,” Allyson said, “because we lost the old wheelbarrow, and I always wanted it.”

“I like the thimble,” said Britney in a tiny voice.

“What do you like?” Stephanie asked me.

“Whatever’s left.”

“I’ll take the little dog, then.”

We played for an hour, Stephanie and I making cell phone calls in between our moves, she to her aunt, who’d heard about the fire in North Bend and was sick with worry for all of us, and me to Carl Steding in Chattanooga to get the final word on Jane’s. Steding could not be reached. We changed into our swimsuits and went downstairs and swam, nearly two hours of cavorting in the pool, interspersed with telephone calls trying to track down Steding or, at this point, Charlie Drago or anybody else in Chattanooga who might know what was going on. Stephanie taught Allyson to dive while Britney and I floated around in the shallow end. Except for the constant ringing in my ears and the chlorine biting my burns, I felt pretty darn good.

Later, in the suite, I noticed Allyson, who was not ordinarily given to neatness, had arranged the toothbrushes and hand towels in the bathroom in perfect descending order, mine, Stephanie’s, hers, and then her little sister’s. I knew Allyson had done it, because Britney would have arranged it with the mother and father toothbrush at either end. Poor girls. They so much wanted the one thing they were destined never to have, a real family.

It would have been a perfect day if it hadn’t been for the fact that I would be brain-dead in less than forty-eight hours, maybe less than twenty-four, a thought that wedged itself into my brain like an ax blade every five minutes. Just around the time I managed to stop thinking about it, it came back again.

I wondered if I was going to feel
anything
for the next forty years.

After a snack downstairs in the Brasserie Margaux, Stephanie and I led the girls to a private room off the lobby. There we met the attorney she’d befriended in Tacoma and she and I signed the legal documents, having already consulted with the girls about our plan.

Attorney Davies was a tall, plum-faced man with a bad toupee—his wife, who’d come along as a witness, was a short, bulging-eyed woman with crooked teeth and a personality wound tighter than copper wire on a stick. We’d bought bouquets from the gift shop for the girls, trying to make this more of a celebration than a wake.

Every once in a while Allyson would get a look in her eyes as if she were about to cry, but Britney was contained in the event, grinning ear to ear.

The rest of the afternoon was spent in our rooms either making phone calls or in a chatty marathon four-handed game of Monopoly. The girls were losing their father tomorrow and you might think we’d be talking about that, but none of us did. With a smidgen of help from Stephanie and a wink from Allyson, Britney won the Monopoly game and declared herself queen of the world.

It was three when I finally reached Carl Steding. “Carl. Jim Swope here. From North Bend. You were going to look for a complete list of the companies that had packages at Southeast Travelers for me?”

“Yeah, yeah. I said I would do it and it’s done. I’ve been calling your fire station all morning. Had a long chat with a young woman there. She’s kind of wigged out. Says she has the syndrome.”

“That would be Karrie.”

“Yeah, that was her name. Does she really have it?”

“I think so. What’d you find?”

“No JCP, Inc., involved. Nowhere. I even went as far as to find out if any of their two subsidiaries might have been involved. Or anyone who ships to them. Near as I can tell, they didn’t have a thing to do with it.”

“Are you absolutely sure?”

“As sure as anyone can be. If I were you, I’d start looking someplace else.”

I felt as if I’d been hit with a two-by-four. Everything had pointed to JCP, and now on my last good day I find out they had nothing to do with it and I’d been looking in the wrong direction all along. I was on the verge of panic but knew I had to think this through calmly. My brain was cycling through everything I knew about the Southeast Travelers incident and our own accident response in February, trying to sort it all out. “Tell me something, then. That young woman you said died in the house fire?”

“Which young woman?”

“You told me the daughter of one of your firefighters died in a house fire around the time you guys were investigating this.”

“Oh, yeah. Anastasia Brown. Sure. What about her?”

“Did Scott Donovan know her?”

“Yes. Of course. In fact, they were working together right before the fire.”

“Thanks.”

Stephanie looked at me after I hung up. “Jane’s didn’t have anything there?”

“Nope.”

“So what do you think?”

“I think if it wasn’t Jane’s, it was somebody closer.”

Stephanie and I looked at each other for a moment. Allyson said, “So what are you going to do, Daddy? Is there no hope? No hope at all?”

“There’s always hope, sweetheart.”

Twenty minutes later Stephanie contacted Donovan by phone for the first time that day. She’d left half a dozen messages on his voice mail, but he hadn’t returned any of them. I listened at the earpiece, the warmth of our cheeks mingling. “Good God,” Stephanie said. “Have you made
any
progress? Have you figured out this syndrome?”

“No, I’m sorry to report. I’ve been consulting with people from the company about Achara’s death all day. It’s shaken people up pretty bad. There’s so much going on. The sale of the company. This business out in North Bend. What happened to Achara. I still don’t understand it. Say . . . where are you guys? I’d like to come over and see how you’re doing.”

“We’d better not say right now. So what do you think happened to Achara? When was the last time you saw her?”

“Last time I saw her was the last time you saw her. She was headed for the library. I was supposed to go pick her up, but I never got the call.”

“Listen,” Stephanie said. “I’ll leave my cell phone on. If you come up with something, call.”

“Oh, you bet I will, Dr. Riggs. I’m not giving up on this. No way I’m giving up on this.”

After she hung up, Stephanie and I looked at each other. I said, “A young woman investigating the syndrome dies in a house fire in Tennessee. Another one dies here. There’s an explosion in Tennessee. There’s another one here. Somebody was in both places.”

“Orchestrating it.”

“Daddy? Who died?”

“What?” Allyson had asked the question and Allyson wasn’t easy to fool.

“You said a woman died here.”

“Nobody you know.”

“She died in our fire, didn’t she?”

“Yes, dear.”

Stephanie and I finished the conversation in the other room. “If it wasn’t JCP, Inc., who was it?” I said. “How many possibilities are there? There is only one other company involved in both incidents. You rule out the possibilities one by one, and then, no matter how unlikely, you’re left with the culprit. Those are Donovan’s words.”

“I don’t want to believe my aunt was the cause of my sister’s problems. I can’t believe that. Besides, Canyon View was only shipping books in Holly’s truck. How could books have caused this?”

“The manifest said it was books. Maybe it wasn’t. After all, books aren’t exactly their business.”

“That’s true, but I assumed they were industrial manuals or research textbooks or something.”

“So did I. Achara wanted to meet with me. She wanted to tell me something about those numbers she gave me. I think the main purpose of getting rid of her was so we would not have that meeting.”

“What are we going to do?”

“I’m going to wait until it gets dark.”

Stephanie looked at me for a long moment. “That cuts your time down even more.”

“My time’s been running out all week. I’m getting used to it.”

At dinner downstairs, Britney said, “This place sure is ’spensive.”

“What makes you think that, honey?” Stephanie asked.

“The man in the lobby said it was so ’spensive they were billing him twenty-five cents every time he cut a fart.” We laughed so hard the table rocked, and then one of the girls farted and we really went to pieces.

After dinner we went upstairs so the girls could check out the TV fare, but they fell asleep before we got through the schedule. It was seven-thirty.

Stephanie left quietly while I tugged off their shoes and tucked them in, kissing them good night. Or maybe it was good-bye. I knew Stephanie had done me a favor leaving me alone with them, that she’d wanted desperately to stay and be part of my final farewell.