Bubbles Ablaze

by Sarah Strohmeyer

  “I don’t give a damn about that story.” McMullen perched his butt on the communion rail. “I don’t give a damn about mining permits or union contracts or coal. Period. I detest this business. I inherited this company from my father and he inherited it from his father who inherited it from his father. I never asked to be a coal baron.”

  I watched him suck on the cigarette. Spoiled child, I thought. Life handed to him on a silver platter and it wasn’t good enough. He should be spanked and sent to his room. “So, you didn’t know about your own company digging beyond its permits? Or fudging maps to escape the regulators?”

  “I could care less. That’s why I have people working for me, to keep an eye on shit like that. You know what I told the state when they asked me why the company dug three hundred feet into the Dead Zone? I told them maybe the miners didn’t know they’d gone that far. It’s dark down there.”

  I choked back a laugh, appalled as well that he was blaming his company’s crime on the workers.

  “Lookit, I have to get in touch with Carl Koolball,” he said, tossing the cigarette onto the chapel floor. (The chapel floor!) “You’re the only one who’s had contact with him since Price’s murder. How do I find him?”

  My jaw dropped. “How did you know that—?”

  “If I don’t get hold of Koolball,” he interrupted impatiently. “I am in some deep, deep shit.”

  “For digging under the Dead Zone?”

  “Nooo.” McMullen massaged his temples. He was barely, barely tolerating me. “For a separate matter altogether. For something that I am absolutely not discussing with a two-bit, Podunk reporter named Bubbles Yablonsky.”

  “For shooting Bud Price in the chest.” I held my breath and mentally crossed my fingers.

  McMullen dropped his hands. “Don’t tell me the press knows already. Donohue said he wouldn’t make it public.”

  It was my turn to say, “Nooo. I guessed. And you fell for it.”

  “Bitch.”

  “You say that like it’s a bad thing.” I’d seen that on a bumper sticker once and I’d been waiting to use it on the next man who cursed me out. “Why don’t you fill me in on what’s going on and, when we’re done, we’ll talk about Stinky.”

  “Hard ass,” he said.

  I patted my rear. “Thank you. Now that you mention it, I have been Sommersizing.” I pulled out my reporter’s notebook and pen. “Let’s start with the first question. Did you murder Bud Price?”

  “If my lawyer were here—”

  “You wouldn’t have a chance in hell of getting hold of Stinky Koolball.”

  He folded his arms and glared at me. “No, I did not murder Bud Price. Like I said, I don’t give a damn about the coal business. I just stay in it because it earns me over a million dollars a year. Tell me, would you give up a million-dollar paycheck for doing nothing?”

  I ignored that. It was insulting to a hardworking single mother like myself who was barely raking in twenty grand despite two jobs. “Then, why does Donohue suspect you?”

  Hugh got out that pack of Dunhills again. “Because—and I have no clue as to how this happened—the Keystone cops here claim that the bullet that killed Price allegedly came from my gun, a Smith and Wesson, which last I knew was locked up in my house back in Pittsburgh.”

  “Where is it now?”

  “Out of the case. Missing. Wouldn’t be surprised if Chief Donohue took it himself.”

  “Yup.” I wrote this down. They were going to have to start calling me Bubbles Blockbuster Yablonsky around the newsroom.

  “Were you in Pittsburgh the night of the murder?”

  “Actually, there’s been some misunderstanding about that. I was here in town, staying with a friend I’ve known for years.”

  “Friend’s name?” I positioned my pen.

  “Is none of your business.”

  “Funny name, ‘none of your business.’ Isn’t none of your business providing you with an alibi?”

  “That’s why I’m in this hell hole with you.” He lit another cigarette and exhaled. “That’s why I look this way. That’s why I need Koolball. My friend is scared. The cops in this town have threatened to lock her up in jail if she sticks by me. So she finked. Friends will do that, you know.”

  Not mine. “How can Stinky save you?”

  “You figure it out.” He approached me, his mouth set and mean in a schoolboy-tantrum way. “I’ve answered enough of your stupid questions. You said you’d tell me how to find Koolball.” He grabbed the back of my neck. “Now tell me where he is.”

  I blinked and tried to remain peaceful. McMullen had just crossed into the brink of some psychotic hostile territory. In short, he was flipping out.

  “Calm down, Hugh,” I said, putting my hand on his. “Calm down. I’m not exactly sure how to find Stinky myself. Not right now.”

  “What?” He shook off my hand and raised his fist. I covered my face and prayed he wouldn’t hit me. I don’t like getting hit. It’s so . . . painful.

  There was a crash as one of the wooden chairs went flying.

  “You bitch! And I mean that like it’s a bad thing.”

  “Hit me, Hugh. Lay one finger on me,” I said, lowering my hands, “and Donohue has a legitimate reason to throw you in jail right now. I never said I’d bring Stinky to you, only that we could talk about him. Stinky’s in hiding. If I see him, I’ll tell him you need to speak with him.”

  Hugh stamped out his cigarette and snatched up his coat and tie. “I’ll find him myself.” He gave another chair a kick and then put his fist into the chapel wall before flinging open the door and stomping out, making sure to slam it hard as he left.

  Whew! I let out a long sigh and collapsed onto one of the hard wooden chairs that McMullen hadn’t broken. What a brat. My knees were shaking so hard the chair was rocking.

  Outside the door came the shuffling of footsteps. Oh, super. Baby Hughey was back to lay into me. The shuffling stopped. There was a sound by the floor, as though someone were trying to slip something under it. And then came the click. I don’t like clicks.

  I blew out the candles, felt my way along the wall and put my hand on the knob. Just as I feared. Not only was the knob locked—it was hot.

  “When in danger or in doubt, run in circles, scream and shout.”

  That was the children’s rhyme that ran through my mind as I broke two nails and completely ruined my fifteen-dollar manicure for nothing while attempting to pry open the door. It was sealed shut. I deduced that some evil devil had stuffed the space between the bottom of the door and the basement floor with a heavy cloth. Perhaps a coat.

  A coat like the one McMullen had been wearing.

  I put my trusty old cheerleading talents to good work by screaming my head off until my throat burned. Then I began to get lightheaded and dizzy. A distinct buzz grew in my ears. It was sickening and at times I was close to throwing up Mona’s Wonder Gobbler with Slime. I grabbed a chair, sat down and put my head between my knees, which were shaking and weak.

  Carbon monoxide poisoning. Odorless. Invisible. CO. Who had told me about its symptoms? Donohue. Donohue had listed all the ills—headache, dizziness, nausea. He said it started off like the flu and you ended up either dead or debilitated. I did not want to be spoon-fed pudding at the nursing home. I did not want to die, either, for the record. All I wanted was sleep.

  My eyelids drooped heavily and a nap became a top priority. I could assess this situation much better after a few winks. That’s dangerous, Bubbles. Go to sleep and you may never wake up, a voice in my head said.

  She was right, that voice in my head. She’d been right eighteen years ago about not skipping up to that Lehigh fraternity party where Dan the Man lay in wait, slurping on a funnel of beer. She’d been right about the Radio Shack clerk with whom I shared five minutes of sexual deviance in the back of my Camaro.

  Even though she was right, I had to sleep.

  Leaning against the wall for support, I shoved my hand in
to my purse and pulled out my wallet. Okay, credit cards were a long shot, but I’d seen Stiletto work them on a door in Dutch Country. I yanked out the infamous Visa and tried to focus.

  Rolling along the wall, my hands slid down the crack in the doorjamb. Wiggling the card into the slim space, I let out a weak cry of joy when the Visa, so flexible after years of overuse, broke the seal in the lock. The door popped open.

  Vaguely, I was aware that whatever had been stuffed against the door was not a coat. It was a blue plastic tarp. Super, I thought, not really caring, just wanting to sleep.

  The hallway outside had fresh air but even so I couldn’t take another step. A little nap wouldn’t hurt now that I was out of danger. I threw my purse on a musty smelling loveseat in the hall and collapsed, drifting into a haze of worries. Where was Jane? What had happened to McMullen? Why wasn’t Stiletto here? And finally, what was my name?

  My name. I could not remember my name. What was my name? It was something sophisticated that befitted a journalist like myself, Diane Sawyer or Maureen Dowd. Of that I was pretty positive.

  Chapter 15

  “Bubbles! Bubbles Yablonsky!”

  Oh, that’s right. It was Bubbles. Well, that wasn’t very sophisticated, was it? Strippers and cartoon characters were named Bubbles. What genius had given me that annoying name, I’d like to know.

  “We need to get you out of here.”

  Yes we do, I agreed mentally. Right after this snooze. “Let me sleep.”

  Muscular arms surrounded my chest and lifted me up. A man began praying out loud, “Dear Lord. Please save this lamb in your flock from an untimely end. Give me the strength to carry her to safety as you have given so many in your flock the power to do great feats in times of hardship. Amen.”

  My head fell back and I let out a loud snore. That roused me a bit, enough to be conscious of the baseball cap and tousled blond hair. Zeke Allen.

  “Hey, sleeping beauty.” He slapped my cheeks gently. “Wake up. Wake up or you’re history. And we know how you are with history.” He threw me over his shoulder. “How much do you weigh?” he asked.

  “One-eighteen.” Like most women, I could lie about my weight under any condition, CO poisoning, fire, crashing airplane, you name it. I was one-eighteen, come hell or high water. “Don’t forget my purse.”

  “Leave it.”

  “Get it. It’s my purse. A girl’s gotta have her purse.”

  He knelt slowly and picked up my purse.

  “And my shoes,” I added, since they had slipped off my feet when I lay on the couch.

  “Man, no one would have gotten off the Titanic if you’d been around.”

  A few minutes later Zeke carried me up the stairs and into the church. The air was better, but my head was still splitting. Oww.

  “Was that you praying?” I asked.

  “Never hurts, does it?”

  He took me outside where there was bright sunshine, blue sky and plenty of clean air—at least as clean as it gets in Limbo, PA—and laid me carefully on the dry grass. I clamped my head between my hands and wished for sleep. Why won’t people let me sleep? Always moving me from this place to that place.

  Zeke bent over me. He leaned down and pressed his soft lips against mine. They were full and alive. For the teeniest, tiniest moment, I felt twenty-two again. Vibrant. Carefree. A virile man caressing me. My chest rose into his and I let go. Breathless. Choking. . . .

  “Get off!” I said, pushing him away and coughing. “What are you doing?”

  “Mouth-to-mouth.” He sat back, offended. “You stopped breathing.”

  My heart was racing. Whatever Zeke’s motivations, I had to admit he had stirred my juices either by pumping in oxygen or, well, you know. . . . My lungs were now working and blood pounded in my brain so hard I could hear my pulse.

  “You didn’t have to give me mouth-to-mouth,” I whispered.

  “Are you kidding? When I found you in the church you were nearly dead. Although you wouldn’t have been in there in the first place if I’d been able to do my job as your bodyguard.”

  There was a sound like an amplified mosquito in my ears. Eeeeee. “What happened?” My question came out like a wheeze.

  “Darned if I know. I stopped by the bank to cash a check while you were at the Main Mane. When I left the bank, I found all this white junk in my tailpipe. It was stuffed in my carburetor, too.”

  Zeke took off his baseball cap and ran his fingers through his sandy hair. He was tan and healthy from life in the outdoors. He would’ve made a great surfer—if the Pacific Ocean ever moved to Eastern Pennsylvania. “I may be crazy, but I swear it was mashed potatoes.”

  Genevieve strikes again. Guess she was securing more than Roxanne’s home when we were at the Main Mane.

  “By the time I went home and got my Dad’s tow truck, your car was gone from the salon. I sweet-talked your cousin Roxanne into telling me you went to Limbo. Located your car parked on Elm Street and ran into Pete Zidukis, who said you were up by the church. That’s where I found you, passed out and half dead. All because of mashed potatoes.”

  “Guess that should teach you not to spy on people.”

  Zeke plucked a blade of grass. “Spying on you?”

  “Confess,” I said, still too woozy to raise my head. “The only reason Steve Stiletto hired you was so that you could report back to him on what kind of progress I was making on this story while he was in New York.”

  “No, ma’am. I’d never do something like that and Steve doesn’t pry. All he asks me are a few questions about how you’re doing. I say ‘fine.’ He asks what you did during the day. Sometimes we talk about his stint in India and his plans to open another AP bureau in England. For that he pays me five hundred bucks a day. Never made money so easy in my life.”

  I started coughing again, this time out of shock. “Five hundred bucks a day. That’s—”

  “Almost one thousand bucks so far. I didn’t set the price, he did. He said if I kept a bead on you for a week he’d pay thirty-five hundred bucks wired straight into my checking account.”

  Hey, that could buy an engagement ring.

  I put out my hand and Zeke helped me up. I swooned in dizziness and had to lean against him to get my balance. I was surprised by how tall he was, how his shoulders were so well built. How he smelled like cut hay. He was a hick. A cute hick, but a hick nonetheless. I couldn’t help comparing him to Stiletto, who was so worldly, so sure of himself. Zeke was more like a rough piece of marble, ready to be chiseled into David by the right hands.

  He supported me around the waist as I attempted to take a few baby steps.

  “The thing is, my gravy train’s not gonna pull into the station if my boat keeps getting plugged with spuds,” he said. “Over forty now, my car smells like french fries. I’m just glad I’ve got the tow truck as backup. Otherwise no self-respecting woman would go out with me.”

  “And I suppose you’re lousy with women?” I asked.

  “Afraid not.” He held me steady. “The ones around here are too silly. I’m looking for a woman of strong moral character. A woman who’s more mature—like you.”

  Had he just called me old? I closed my eyes and opened them deliberately. Each time the earth swiveled a bit. “I’m, ahem, mature enough to be your babysitter, Zeke.”

  “Since when do you babysit twenty-three-year-olds?”

  I tried to take longer steps, but my knees buckled.

  “Are you okay?” His grip tightened. “All joking aside, CO poisoning is dangerous business. You’re still not out of the woods. It can take hours, even days to flush it from your system. Maybe we should get you to the hospital. They got a pressure tank there just to remove the CO from your bloodstream.”

  “No, thanks.” I took another step. Instinct told me that the more I moved, the faster the CO would leave my body. I had to find Jane. I had to track down McMullen and ask him why he locked me in the chapel. I took another step, which was easier than the one before. �
��I think I’m getting better.” Though my head still hurt like hell.

  Zeke gave my shoulder a quick squeeze. “Glad to hear it. Stiletto would kill me if you bit the dust on my watch. Okay, now spill. What happened in the church?”

  “Promise you won’t tell Stiletto?”

  “And admit that I let you slip out of my sight? What do you think?”

  So as Zeke and I circled St. Ignatius’s, I told him everything, including, for some reason, the part about Jane and my fears that she had a crush on Professor Tallow. Zeke was an amazingly rapt listener. Occasionally he asked me a few questions when I drifted off topic, but mostly he kept his mouth shut. The only comment he made referred to Pete Zidukis’s claim that Limbo sat on a gazillion dollars worth of coal.

  “That’s a load of horse hockey. That rumor about the Mammoth Basin is a tall tale I’ve heard since childhood. The town never owned the rights to that coal, anyway.”

  “Then the government didn’t move everyone out just so they could sell the land to a coal company?” We had reached Zeke’s tow truck.

  “The government moved everyone out so they could dig up the town and stop the fire,” he said. “As long as there are holdouts, they can’t do that and the fire burns on and on. But what does a crazy old fart like Zidukis care? He’ll be dead in twenty years and by that time the whole town will have caved in.”

  That’s when we heard the shouts from over the hill. At first they were faint and then louder. It was clearly a desperate call for help.

  “That’s my daughter,” I said. “She’s in trouble.”

  Zeke opened my door in the tow truck. “It’s coming from old Route 61, the portion that’s been closed off because of the fire,” he said, helping me in. “We better hurry. There are some huge craters on that road. You can go straight down into the pits if you step on the wrong spot.”

  I had prepared myself for a gruesome scene. Jane submerged below smoldering macadam, only her blue-topped head sticking out among the steam and smoke.

  What we found instead was G, headphones on, in a bright yellow, egg-shaped vehicle completely surrounded by black rubber bumpers about a foot thick. From each of its two windows bulged white airbags, which must have been activated when it drove into a pothole the size of a wading pool.