Into the Inferno - Earl Emerson [88]
When I finally opened my eyes, I was unable to move my limbs or even roll my head to one side. In a flash of terror it occurred to me that my life was over. As of now.
Right now.
Then Britney walked across my thighs on her knees, and I jerked my legs involuntarily. A moment later I was able to sit up, nerves and reflexes intact.
I inhaled deeply.
Slowly, the events of yesterday afternoon and evening came back to me.
We’d stayed in Redmond for hours.
As a student, Achara, it turned out, had researched Legionnaires’ disease. Donovan had at one time worked for the Pentagon studying the effects of biological weapons on chimpanzees. Odd they would both end up at Canyon View, where the focus was on liquid metals.
I noticed Achara was quieter with Donovan in the room. It was a societal given that young women tended to defer to men. Because of this, I’d been considering sending Allyson and Britney to a girls’ prep school in Bellevue, had been trying to work out how I could afford it.
After we’d gone over the syndrome ad nauseam, Stephanie asked Donovan to tell us what happened in Tennessee.
Riffling through the file he’d brought with him, Scott Donovan began his story with a call he’d received three years ago from Phil, Marge’s late husband and the founder of the company. Achara sat with her hands in her lap. Donovan spoke at his own pace, giving a blow-by-blow account of the second phone call, and the third, going so far as to include what he was thinking before, during, and after each call. Donovan had a way of dragging a story out that made you want to scream. Had he not been the individual who was probably going to save my life with his attention to detail, I might have strangled him. Believe me, I was still tempted.
It was apparent as the story unfolded that he believed if he’d been given free rein in Tennessee, he might have solved the riddle, that the only thing preventing it was the interference of inept government officials.
Somehow, after listening to Donovan outline the events in Tennessee for almost an hour, most of which was taken up with the politics in Chattanooga, I came to the conclusion that if one of these two was going to come up with a solution, it would be Achara.
Everything was moving along too slowly, considering the clock I was on, but to make matters worse, when he learned about the North Bend explosion, Donovan begged me to tell him every little detail. Before I knew it, I had squandered twenty minutes laying out Max Caputo’s bizarre history and ultimate end.
On the way home we’d picked up sandwiches so that when Wes and Lillian showed up with the girls we’d have something to eat. I knew from experience they would be twenty minutes early to their own funerals, and I wasn’t disappointed when they were already waiting for us in front of the house at ten to five.
Lillian let loose a couple of snide cracks about a cold dinner. When she’d been a mother, her girls always ate a hot meal. That’s right, both her drug-addict daughters ate hot meals when they were growing up.
I skipped dinner, not yet confident enough of my stomach to put food in it. Afterward, Wes and Lillian insisted we sit in the living room like grown-ups, the four of us desperate to forge a conversation. I told them about the girls’ latest exploits, though it turned out there wasn’t much in my daughters’ lives they approved of, not the spring softball for Allyson nor the karate classes Britney had begged for. Not even the Monopoly games.
Even when Lorie had been around to finesse things, talking with these two had been difficult, but on this particular night we plumbed the depths of discomposure. Scooping my eyeballs out with a spoon would have been more fun. Time wasters. First Donovan and Carpenter, and now Wes and Lillian. But for the disturbing fact that they would be my daughters’ guardians in three days, I would have gotten rid of them.
When Stephanie left the room for a moment, Lillian turned to me and whispered, “Who is she again?”
“A friend.