Into the Inferno - Earl Emerson [31]
“It’s going to be tough telling her,” Meyers repeated.
My brain seemed to be lagging behind everyone else’s. As the senior officer of North Bend Fire and Rescue, it fell on me to inform Stan’s wife. In another town the chief or the mayor might do it, but we didn’t have a chief and our mayor was pretty much worthless for that sort of thing—had in fact already proved himself useless in regard to Stan today. There’d been a lot of bad news doled out in North Bend the past few months, and Steve Haston had done even more ducking and weaving than I had when it came time to appoint bearers of bad news. The Mountain Rescue Team had pulled the short straw after they found Harold Newcastle’s body. When Jackie Feldbaum nearly decapitated herself in her Miata, Joel McCain bit the bullet and told Jackie’s old man at the lumber mill.
Yesterday Stephanie Riggs told me about her sister, but if I used her methodology, I would be dragging the stretcher into Marsha Beebe’s living room and saying, “Hey, take a look under the blanket.”
Before we left the site, I located the state trooper in charge of the investigation and asked how it had happened.
“To tell you the truth,” said the trooper, “your friend caused it. Veering all across the freeway, from one side to another. All our witnesses are in agreement.”
“The truck in the woods caused the accident?”
“These guys over here have been drinking, but it was your friend. Witnesses say it looked like he purposely tangled with one of those eighteen-wheelers. Knocked him to one side. That’s when he bumped into all these other people.”
16. WE’RE ALL GOING TO BE ZOMBIES
My intention was to dither around the station and solicit opinions on how to do this, to recruit an aide-de-camp with experience in dispensing bad news or maybe even to find someone who would volunteer to take the load off my shoulders, but the longer I delayed, the more likely it was that Marsha would learn of her husband’s death through the grapevine.
And that was not going to happen. Not on my watch.
Three years ago, when I learned my wife was having an affair, everybody else in town knew it before I did. The grapevine had been hot with the electricity of someone else’s misfortune. Mine. Nothing was uglier than realizing the whole town had worn out your bad news before you even got to try it on.
Fearing I would ask him to tag along, Ian had been avoiding me since we got back to the station. I told him to find a replacement to fill my slot for a few hours. Then I signed out of the daybook and walked around the corner in the sunshine, pushing open the tall glass door to the mayor’s office. Shirtsleeves rolled up, Steven Haston was leaning on a countertop, having returned once again from his tax and accounting business on North Bend Way to catch up on city obligations.
Haston was almost six feet, seven inches, lantern-jawed and lugubrious, born in Norway, a catch for any woman who didn’t mind a man who never laughed.
I mean never.
Despite the dilemmas confronting the fire department these past few weeks, until this morning nobody in the department had seen or heard from Haston since Harold Newcastle’s funeral. It was okay with me. He and I made a point of avoiding each other.
“Steve,” I said. “Wonder if you have a minute?”
“What’s going on?”
“Stan Beebe has just been killed out on I-90. I’m driving over to tell his wife.”
The secretary in the back of the room gasped. Haston said, “What?”
“You were supposed to be baby-sitting him.”
“I didn’t know how to stop him.”
“Well, he’s dead now.”
“She home? His wife?”
“I don’t know. I’m not going to call to find out if she’s there and end up having to say hold up that trip to the QFC; I’m coming over with some bad news.”
“I know what you mean. Thing is, I’ve got some meetings and there’s no way I can get out of them. People are coming in from Seattle.”
“Seattle,” I said, surprised at the indignation in my voice. “My God, Seattle! We wouldn’t want to put someone from