Into the Inferno - Earl Emerson [97]
“Never heard that, but I wouldn’t doubt it. For a while here we had private investigators and legal aides crawling all over the place. And Charlie has a way of failing to ingratiate himself with people. It’s just a way he has. I wouldn’t put too much stock in what Drago says. He’s a little over-the-top these days.”
“I gathered that. Thanks.”
42. WE’RE A LITTLE LATE TRYING TO SAVE YOUR LIFE,
BUT WE GOT THE CAR WASHED
Minutes before the funeral, Wes Tindale found me in the fire station. “Mamie and Lill ready?” he asked.
“Who?”
“Mamie and Lill.”
I’d forgotten my in-laws penchant for renaming our kids, forgotten that their need for control was so overwhelming they couldn’t bear to utter the names their daughter and I had given their grandchildren.
“Allyson and Britney have a couple of hours free this morning. After lunch I’m going to need them back.”
“Really?”
“I’m going to need them back.” For someone who often blustered like a whale coming up for air, Wes was easily hurt and nursed grudges for years. I’d always assumed his thin hide was one of the reasons for the drinking.
More surgically than any family I’d ever known the Tindales could express disapproval with a look or an exhalation or a mere twitch of the lips. The expression they used most often on my girls, sometimes mouthed in perfect synchronicity, was, “That’s a no-no.”
Disapproval of those around them was constant. Living in Arizona with them would be worse for my girls than being in a seventeenth-century Moroccan prison.
Crazed with the thought that I’d uncovered a conspiracy of some sort, or that Carl Steding from the Chattanooga Times Free Press had, that somebody or something was orchestrating the events of the past week, I sought out Stevenson and Shad. I found them in the kitchen munching doughnuts meant for the volunteers who’d come in to empty the hose beds and decorate the fire engine that would serve as Stan Beebe’s hearse. Bloated with sugar and grease they’d washed down with free coffee, Shad and Stevenson shrugged off my news about the coincidence of explosions in Tennessee and Washington.
“That’s what fire departments are about,” Shad said. “They respond to emergencies.”
“I don’t think you can equate this trailer explosion with an LPG incident three years ago in Tennessee,” Stevenson said. “An LPG truck that rolls over on the highway is an accident. What we have up the hill there was a triggered explosion. You sure you don’t know anything about how it started?”
“Wait. Let me try to remember. Yeah. I killed Caputo and then almost blew up my little girls.”
“You did?” Shad asked.
“You guys need to lay off the junk food.”
Stan’s funeral was held in the white wooden-frame Lutheran church on Northeast Eighth, a few blocks north of the station.
When Karrie Haston spotted me on the church steps, she ran over and hugged me until I could feel my own ribs against her small breasts, the buttons of her dress uniform coat pressing against the buttons on mine, our shared grief dulling the hard feelings between us.
Stephanie, who hadn’t known Stan and who said she had a million phone calls to make, skipped the service. Along with a group from Beebe’s church, Ian and Ben and Jeb Parker acted as pallbearers. I’d been asked to help but was afraid I’d fall while we were packing the coffin out of the church.
Mary McCain arrived at the church without her husband, sparing us all the sight of a former coworker with a brainpan full of mush. I knew the spectacle would have been too much for me and certainly would have been devastating for Karrie, who was still balancing on a tightrope of denial. When I asked Mary how Joel was doing, she replied, “There are definite signs of improvement.”
Maybe this wasn’t terminal after all. Maybe Holly and Jackie and I had a chance. Maybe with time and therapy . . . or with Christian Science. At this juncture, I would eat dirt to have a healing. “Can he talk?”
“Not exactly. But he tells me what he wants.”
“He blinks? Taps his fingers? What?”
“Well, no.”
“So how do you know what he wants?