Into the Inferno - Earl Emerson [15]
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