by Earl Emerson
“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.
Later, we made love one last time. It was as gentle as a whisper at a wedding.
And then I was asleep.
I’d had a lot of stress along with a series of long days. Or maybe it was a guy thing. You had sex. You nodded off. Or . . .
Maybe my time was up.
55. HERE’S THE KICKER
Everything appeared to be shaking.
It took a few moments to realize it wasn’t an earthquake, that somebody was jiggling the bed. My ears were ringing or I would have identified the sound sooner. A woman crying.
I was on my back, the blankets tight around me, as if I’d been tucked in by a mortician. When I lifted my head ever so slightly, I spotted our baby-sitter, Morgan Neumann, hands clasped in front of her, standing at the foot of the bed, tears staining her pale cheeks. Stephanie was beside me, one arm thrown across my chest as if playing out an Elizabethan melodrama.
When I reached out and touched her hair, Stephanie stopped crying and crawled higher on the bed, kissing my cheek repeatedly. Still sniffling, she laid her head on my shoulder.
“Oh, God. I tried so hard to wake you. I even stuck a pin in you. I’m sorry.”
“You can take it out now.”
“It was just a little prick.”
“Just like me.”
“Don’t joke around, Jim. I know ten or fifteen more hours aren’t all that much, but I was counting on every one of them.”
I might have climbed out of bed, but I was naked and Morgan was watching. “Hey, Morgan. What are you doing here?”
Wiping her wet cheeks with the sleeve of her shirt, she said, “I was going to sit with the girls.”
“Sit with the girls? Where were you going, Steph?”
“Morgan, would you mind waiting in the girls’ room?” After Morgan was gone, Stephanie said, “I’m going to Canyon View.”
“Alone?”
“I thought you were . . .” She kissed me. “I talked to a librarian at the North Bend Library who said Achara had been there until closing. Know what she was doing?”
“Tell me.”
“Sitting in front of that big wall of picture windows. Sitting and staring at the mountain for hours. Does that sound like a woman researching a problem?”
“That sounds like a woman trying to make a decision.”
“That’s exactly what I thought. You don’t think she took the gasoline to your house and torched the place, do you?”
“I think she was deciding whether or not to betray her employer. Donovan must have caught wind of her intentions. He drove her to the gas station, gave her some song and dance about needing the gasoline can filled up, then took her out to my house and did whatever he had to do to make it happen. Knocked her out. Strangled her. Dragged her inside. Poured gas all over. Remember how surprised Donovan was when he saw us last night? He thought he killed us—or me at least—in that fire.”
“Then he’s the one who left the note on the door of the fire station. He had some woman call the fire investigators and leave those messages.”
“That’s what I think,” I said.
“I can’t believe he would do that. I can’t believe my aunt had anything to do with this.”
“Maybe she doesn’t know about it. You said she hasn’t been in charge that long.”
“When you met my aunt at Tacoma General, did you tell her about the syndrome, that there were other people who had it in addition to Holly?”
“I told her there were people in North Bend going down. She could have figured out the rest—”
“—If she already knew about the syndrome and what causes it.”
I threw the covers off and swung my feet over the side of the bed. “I’m going. You stay here.”
“You don’t know what to look for.”
“You stay here with—”
“You want to get stubborn? You’ve come to the factory. There is no possible scenario where I stay.”
“Why not?”
“For one thing . . . I already paid the baby-sitter.”
We looked at each other for half a minute. I could love this woman like I’d never loved any woman. I could love her until we were both a hundred and five. I could love her until the earth crumbled. “At the first sign of trouble, I want you out of there.”
“I never bail out. It’s my trademark.”
“At the first sign of trouble. That’s an order. As the designated guardian of my children.”
“Okay. Yes, sir. You feel strong enough to do this?”
“I’ll make it.”
56. EXCEPT FOR BURGLARS AND LOCKSMITHS
After ten minutes of driving around the wooded neighborhood, we ascertained that Canyon View was locked but empty, found a strip mall abutting the back of the property, parked the Pontiac behind a row of buildings, shimmied up a rockery, and climbed a low fence. Below us was the roof of the strip mall, which consisted of ten or twelve single-st
ory occupancies fronting a busy thoroughfare.
Stephanie produced a five-battery flashlight and other paraphernalia from a small gray bag. “Where’d you get all that stuff?” I said.
“I went to a store down the street from the hotel while you were sleeping.”
“A burglar store?”
“Yeah.”
Blundering through the darkness, we found a culvert with a small stream trickling along the bottom of it, then a natural embankment at the top of which was a Cyclone fence with a sign, red lettering on a white background: PRIVATE PROPERTY—KEEP OUT—VIOLATORS WILL BE PROSECUTED. The fence was far enough from the road that we could no longer hear the occasional car, nor see the glow of lights from the auto dealership across the street.
Stephanie had brought latex gloves for both of us, along with an assortment of tools: a small pry bar, flashlight, wire cutters, duct tape, and a screwdriver. I climbed the fence and used the wire cutters to sever the razor wire running along the top, cutting my thumb in the process.
Managing to get both of us over the fence and onto the Canyon View campus without further bloodshed, we worked our way through the trees and past the elephant-sized rhododendrons. I think at that point we both felt a little like Alice in Wonderland. What we were attempting was so far from our normal lives, it didn’t seem real. But then, nothing seemed real these days.
We came to the smaller building first, two dark stories with a small loading dock on one side, a shipping and receiving facility.
The next building was the size of a small college campus administration building. All the lower windows were wired for security. Stephanie tried one of the back doors while I tromped through the flower bed along the wall of the building and searched for an unsecured window.
I couldn’t shake the feeling the Redmond police were about to come barreling around the corner and arrest us.
If there was one thing I knew, it was breaking into buildings. Except for burglars and locksmiths, firefighters broke into buildings more often than anybody. An ordinary residence had a door most firefighters could kick in with their boot or, at the least, one they could jimmy with a Halligan tool. You could also take an ax and knock off the lock, remove the guts, and kick in the door. We didn’t have a Halligan tool or an ax, and the doors on this building were built to withstand an atomic blast. Even if they weren’t, there would be a security system in place that would trigger an alarm if we broke in.