“I didn’t know you were looking for her,” Trevor said. “I was there, saw her fight with Randy. I was recording it on his phone, but then he got a call from home. His dog died or something.”
I filled them in on how much worse it was than that. Maureen shook her head sadly.
Trevor said, “I wonder if he’ll pack it in. The whole running-for-mayor thing.”
I said it was probably too soon to tell. He reached into the fridge to grab a beer for me, but I waved him off. “Have to go back out.”
“Are you sure?” Maureen said. “You’re not the only cop in town.”
It took all the energy I had to smile. “I’m not so sure about that.”
“You know you haven’t been breathing normally since you walked in here,” she said.
“What?”
“Yeah,” Trevor said. “You keep taking really deep breaths.”
“I’m fine,” I said. “I’m just tired, that’s all.”
“You think that’s all it is?” said Maureen, donning mitts and taking the lasagna out of the oven.
“I’m positive,” I said. They weren’t wrong in their observation. I was taking in deep breaths, then letting them out over several seconds.
Exhaustion.
“I just have one more thing I want to do,” I told them. “Then I’ll come home and go into an eight-hour coma.”
Maureen did up three plates. A garden salad on the side. Trevor hoovered his in seconds, and I wasn’t far behind him. But halfway through my serving, I put down my fork.
“What?” Maureen asked.
“It’s nothing. Just a little light-headed.” I laughed. “I think all the blood’s rushing to my stomach, and that’s a demanding area to service.”
No one laughed with me.
“I’m fine, really.” I wanted to change the subject by saying to Trevor, “I hear you guys handed out thousands of cases of water today.”
“We did.”
“That must have felt good, doing that.”
Trevor shrugged. “Yes and no. I mean, it was good to help people, but some of them were really ugly about it. You kind of wanted every family to get a case, but some people tried to come back and get extra cases, more than their share, you know?”
“Yeah.”
“And the whole thing was the Finley Show anyway.”
“Yeah,” I said again.
“He was just soaking up the attention. I mean, it cost him a fortune in product, but it was the kind of advertising you can’t buy, you know?”
I nodded.
“All day I wondered if he did it.”
Maureen looked stunned. “What are you saying?”
I broke in. “For a while, I entertained the idea, too, that he’d done something to the water so he could come to the rescue. But for God’s sake, all that to be mayor of Promise Falls? And wouldn’t he have made sure his wife didn’t end up becoming one of the casualties?”
“A dead wife just buys him even more sympathy,” Trevor said.
“Oh, that’s awful,” Maureen said. “No one would do that.”
I let dinner settle before I went back out again. We moved into the living room, where I dropped into my favorite chair. Maureen tuned in one of the national newscasts to see what they had on Promise Falls; then Trevor grabbed the remote and channel surfed to see what the other networks had done.
The entire country knew all about Promise Falls.
One of the networks had turned us into a backdrop headline: THE CURSE OF PROMISE FALLS. They’d folded in material on the drive-in collapse, a look back at the Olivia Fisher case.
Sometime later, I felt someone nudging me in the shoulder.
“Barry,” Maureen said. “Barry.”
I had fallen asleep. “Shit,” I said, stirring suddenly. “How long was I out?”
“It’s okay. I didn’t want to bother you. You needed to rest.”
“What time is it?”
“Nearly ten thirty,” Maureen said. “Trevor asked me to say good-bye for him. He was pretty tired, too, and left about half an hour ago.”
“Jesus,” I said, pushing myself out of the chair. “I have to go.” She didn’t argue.
She’d spent enough years with me to know there was no point.
I slipped on my jacket, grabbed my keys, and was out the door. Once I was behind the wheel and had the engine going, I gave myself a minute. Heading out of the house so quickly after waking up hadn’t given me time to gain back my equilibrium. I was woozy.
But I was fine.
I headed for Victor Rooney’s house. Save for one light over the front door, the place was in total darkness when I got there.
I knocked on the door anyway. Hard.
“She died.”
I turned around. A man was standing on the sidewalk, watching me.
“Pardon?” I said.
“The lady that lives there. She was one of the ones what died this morning.”
I didn’t know, but there was no reason to be surprised that Victor Rooney’s landlady-it took me a moment to call up the name: Emily Townsend-would be among the dead.
“The water,” I said, since it was always possible she had died of something else. A heart attack, a fall down the stairs.
“Yep. They found her in the backyard.” He pointed to a house down the street. “Mr. Tarkington didn’t make it, either. His wife’s probably going to live, but their daughter says she could have brain damage.”
“Awful,” I said.
The man pointed to the house north of the one I was standing in front of. “I live next door. Me and the wife heard the warnings before we drank anything. Ms. Townsend wasn’t so lucky. They came for her late this afternoon. She was lying out there for hours.”
I said, “My name’s Duckworth. I’m with the police. I was actually looking for the man she rented to. Victor Rooney.”
“Oh yeah,” the neighbor said. “I’ve seen him around. But I guess he’s not home.”
“I guess not,” I said.
But I tried banging on the door one more time, just in case. There was a part of me that was grateful. Anything I wanted to ask Victor tonight I could just as easily ask him tomorrow morning.
I went home. I had nothing left. I went up to bed and slipped into that coma I’d promised myself.
FORTY
CRYSTAL found Celeste up in the main bedroom where she slept every night with Dwayne, folding clothes on the bed, putting things into drawers.
“Where’s Cal?” she asked, clipboard and paper in her hand as always.
“I don’t know, sweetheart,” Celeste said. “I haven’t seen him in a while. He’s probably in the living room watching TV with Dwayne.”
“No, he isn’t.”
“Well, I’m not sure. Look around. I’m sure he’s somewhere.”
Crystal went back downstairs. The television was still on, tuned in to some sports channel that Dwayne had wanted to watch. But Dwayne was not there watching it. She went into the kitchen, then down into the basement. She looked in the furnace room, and a dingy rec room with a Ping-Pong table that had no net, and a small workroom where Dwayne kept his tools and had a workbench.
Crystal went back up two flights and entered the main bedroom again, but Celeste was not there. She found her in the bathroom, putting up fresh towels.
“I still can’t find Cal,” Crystal said.
“Darlin’, it’s been two minutes since we last talked, and I haven’t seen him in that time. Didn’t you look in the living room?”
“Yes. And I looked in the furnace room and the workroom and the kitchen and the other bathrooms and a room with a lot of tools in it and I didn’t find him anywhere.”
“Did you ask Dwayne?”
“I didn’t see Dwayne,” Crystal said.
“How could you go in every room of the house and not see Dwayne?”
Crystal said, “I don’t know.”
“Maybe they’re both outside.”
“It’s dark now.”
“Well, if it’s dark, just turn on the outside lights. They’re right by the door. I just want to finish a couple of things up here and if you haven’t found Cal by then, I’ll help you.”