Into the Inferno (5 page)

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.

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 astonishing 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.

“God, 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
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
unrealistic expectations. Stephanie, on the other hand, had planned this assault 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 circumstances have to be so . . .”

“I feel like it’s all my fault. She came to Washington because of me. This is my fault. Every bit of it.”

“Aunt Marge, don’t be silly,” said Stephanie, glaring at me. “It’s not your fault.”

“I feel so bad for you,” Marge said. “At least I can go home. You have to go back to Holly’s little place, where you’re surrounded by her things. Even her cat. This whole experience must be so dreadful for you.”

“I like being surrounded by Holly’s things. In fact, I’ve been wearing her clothes just to feel closer to her. It’s Holly we have to be concerned for. Getting her back to her old self.”

“You’re not still hoping for a miracle?”

“Of course I am.”

Two months ago when Holly and I had been seeing each other, I’d met Marge DiMaggio at an auction to raise money for muscular dystrophy research, an affair for which I’d had to dig up my tuxedo from the darkest part of my closet. Marge DiMaggio had been thrilled to death to see her niece out on the town with, as she’d put it, “a handsome and eligible fireman,” describing me in terms of marriage, the way so many women described men, as if that was our primary function in life, to be married to them. Marge liked me from the moment she set eyes on me. I guess she thought she was looking at a future nephew-in-law, though you’d better believe she didn’t get the idea from me.

Even though she was twenty years older than I was, Marge had flirted with me and with every other male that night, a mannerism I attributed at the time to habit and alcohol rather than ambition and inclination; she’d gone on to belie her flirtations with self-deprecating remarks about being too busy to think about a private life. Marge was chic, smart, candid, and seductive in a sophisticated manner that went way over my head. My impression was that she was one of those older women who had always been a coquette and just couldn’t stop.

DiMaggio was the CEO of an Eastside research company. She’d explained it to me once, but the details were fuzzy. Having resigned a profitable position as an executive in a New York department store chain ten years earlier, Marge had joined her husband’s fledgling research outfit. Then, out of respect for her husband’s memory, she’d stayed on with the company after his death. According to Holly, Canyon View now held patents that aided scientists across the country in gene and DNA research, patents that had enticed megacorporations to pump big bucks into Canyon View’s coffers.

When Stephanie and Aunt Marge turned to me, I could see the family resemblance. They were both relatively short, the older woman a couple of inches taller than her niece, both with slightly squarish faces, a trace of freckles, light-colored eyes. Marge displayed an openness I found comforting under the circumstances, perhaps because there was already so much guile and manipulation in the room. “Jim . . .” she said.

“It’s such a shock to see her like this. I—”

“A shock?” Stephanie said loudly. “You sonofabitch. The only thing Holly ever meant to you was a romp in the hay.”

“Despite what you may believe, Dr. Riggs, I feel awful. She’s the second friend I’ve seen like this today.”

“Yes, you’ve already told me how you’re having such a bad day,” Stephanie mocked. “Poor baby.”

“Okay. Sure. I could have treated your sister better. You probably could have, too. And maybe Aunt Marge could have. Maybe
everybody
could treat everybody better. But at least I don’t take my guilt out on total strangers.”

I stalked out the doorway.

For a moment Stephanie was speechless; then she yelled at my back and her shrieking voice told me how close I’d gotten to the heart of the matter. “Get out! Don’t ever come back! Get out! Get out of here, you stupid bastard!”

I was halfway down the corridor when I realized Marge DiMaggio was following me.

“Jim. Don’t listen to her. She’s been out of sorts. She cried for two days when she first got here.”

DiMaggio stopped in front of me and hugged me, and after a few moments I could feel her heaving against my chest as she wept. She was fashionably New York thin, the flesh of her arms and back stringy and soft. “Jim, I can’t get over how good it is to see you. It was wonderful of you to come. And never mind Steph. You want to see Holly, you come any time.”

It was hard to see a point in a second visit. Holly hadn’t known I was here tonight and would hardly jump up to greet me if I came again.

“I’ll come as often as I can. I would have been down here sooner if I’d known.”

“I know, dear.” Standing close, Marge DiMaggio held my elbows. She was about the same age as my mother, her hair dyed the same stark black as my mother’s, though, as far as I know, my mother hadn’t yet resorted to cosmetic surgery the way DiMaggio obviously had. “I feel so bad about all of this.”

“It’s not your fault.”

“No, it is. I should have done more for Holly. She came up here from California because I was the only family she had on the West Coast. At first I gave her a job with my company, but she didn’t want to work indoors. And she had no skills. So then when this truck-driving idea developed, I treated her to the driver’s school. I even threw work her way. That company she drove for in Seattle? It belongs to an old friend of mine. In fact, you two wouldn’t even have met if it hadn’t been for me.”

“Really? How do you figure that?”

“She was on her way to Canyon View to drop off a couple of boxes of books we’d ordered from back east. Now tell me. You said you had a friend who was ill?”

“A firefighter I worked with. Finding out about him was a shock, but then to find out Holly’s in basically the same condition . . . I don’t even know what the odds of that are. I’ve been trying to reconcile this whole—”

“He tried to commit suicide? Your friend?”

“Fell off a roof. Marge, I feel so sick about Holly. She had her whole lifetime ahead of her.”

“Tell me about your friend.”

“I . . .”

“I know how this works, Jim, and you need to talk this one out. I know exactly what you’re going through. Tell Aunt Marge all about it. I’m not going to take no for an answer.”

I told her about our alarm to Joel McCain’s house, about his choking, about the family’s religious objections to medical intervention. At one point I must have mentioned Stan Beebe’s disjointed theories, because she homed in on it. “Syndrome? You say somebody out there thinks there’s some sort of disease going around that all these people are catching? And it’s a syndrome?”

“Stan Beebe. One of our full-time department employees. He’s a good firefighter, but every once in a while he comes up with something a little wacky.”

During our chat I watched the door to Holly’s room down the hallway, lest Stephanie come sprinting out to rip me a new asshole. I’d been an idiot to drive all the way down here.

Maybe it was the way she listened or the way her gray-blue eyes stared up at me so relentlessly, but talking to Marge DiMaggio made me feel much better. Strange how tragedies can unite comparative strangers.