Into the Inferno - Earl Emerson [16]
“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