“But what if we were to gather all the circumstantial evidence, and it points to a connection? What then?”
“Then we have headlines and lawyers and media, all the things you just told me you didn’t want.”
“I know,” I said as I reached for my bag. “And I don’t want those things. But they don’t know that, and it’s a good threat, don’t you think? Threats are what it’s about. It’s about giving the impression that you have a foolproof case. Northwood has to understand what they stand to lose if they choose to fight.”
I was, of course, referring to Northwood as though it included the triumvirate of Sandy, Aidan, and James, when in fact James planned a coup. A bloodless coup, he had said. I wondered what he had in mind, whether he could pull it off, and what would happen if he didn’t. I guessed he would have to leave town. He would get another job. He could get a better job. He might even move to Washington. That would be promising.
Promising for me. Not so for Middle River. The town needed him. For that reason, I was praying that his bloodless coup would succeed. In that spirit, I knew that any evidence I could bring to the board meeting would be a help.
“We have Phoebe,” I said, mustering hope as we stood and shouldered our things. “There have to be others like her.” When I started forward, Tom held me back with a light hand on my arm.
“I haven’t thanked you,” he said quietly.
“Thanked me for what?” I asked, though I knew.
“Being exactly the same today as you were yesterday.”
I was touched by the way he said it, and felt the need to make a point. “Are you a different person today from who you were yesterday? No.”
He smiled sadly. “No. It’s the perception that changes. In a town like Middle River, that’s the name of the game. Y’know?”
Chapter 27
OUR FLIGHT was delayed. We sat on the runway for forty minutes while mechanics tried to fix a problem. When they failed, we returned to the jetport, deplaned, changed gates, replaned, and finally took off ninety minutes late. By the time we had landed in Manchester, found Tom’s pickup in the parking garage, and made the drive to Middle River, it was nearly as late as it had been when I had first returned to Middle River for my vacation on a day that seemed like an eon ago.
I would be lying if I said I wasn’t pleased to be back. Of course I was pleased. Returning tonight was different from that other night. There was excitement this time, anticipation.
It was stagnantly warm; still, we rolled down the windows of the pickup as soon as we crossed the town line. We had barely passed Zwibble’s when I smelled something odd.
“What’s that?” Tom asked, clearly smelling it, too.
“Not gasoline,” I said. “It almost smells like the kind of wood fire you’d burn in the middle of winter—almost, but not quite.” I studied the buildings on Oak as we passed, but they were their usual inert nighttime selves, lit only to show their wares.
Something was definitely burning. A fine whisper of smoke had begun to collect in the air. As we drove on, the whisper grew louder and the smell more acrid.
We were nearly at Cedar, where Tom would turn to drop me at Phoebe’s, when I saw the glow above the treetops ahead, up on the north end of town.
“The mill?” I asked in dismay.
Without a word, Tom drove straight ahead rather than turning. We were passing homes now, too many of which were lit this time of night. Coming up behind the taillights of another car, we drove around it and on. Its headlights grew smaller behind us, but they didn’t disappear. Someone else was headed for the mill.
“It’s brick,” Tom said. “How can it burn?”
“Maybe the insides?”
“There’s a sprinkler system.”
“Maybe the woods around it?” I didn’t know what else to suggest. The Gazebo was the only structure made purely of wood, but that had already been torched and rebuilt.
Torched. It was a harsh word, though it did describe what had been done both to the Gazebo and the Clubhouse. There was only one suspicious building left to burn.
“Omigod,” I said as we turned in at the stone wall that marked the entrance to the mill. The smoke was heavier here, the smell sharper. “The Children’s Center,” I said. “Go there.”
We didn’t get half that far. Too soon we found ourselves behind a line of cars, with a mill guard flagging us down. We saw flames ahead—heard their crackling, the pounding of water from hoses, the bark of a bullhorn. Parking behind the other cars, we continued on foot.
The crackling actually came from the trees that surrounded the Children’s Center. There was nothing left to burn of the center itself. It was little more than a brick shell.
We passed clusters of people. None seemed hurt. Still Tom ran on.
I caught his arm. “A fire here can mean only one thing. There’s a mercury leak. Don’t go on. It’s not safe.”
“I have to,” he said. “I need to make sure no one’s hurt. You stay here. I’ll be back.” He held up a finger in promise, then disappeared into the glare of spotlights and fire.
I had just lost sight of him when someone came up on my right. It was one of Omie’s grandnieces. “The building was completely engulfed when the trucks arrived,” she said. “It spread to the wood equipment in the playground, went along the whole row of them and up the kids’ tower into the trees. That’s what we’re seeing now. The trees.”
“How did it start?”
“No one knows,” she said. Several others had joined us. I recognized more of Omie’s relatives, Marylou Walker’s son, a Harriman or two.
“Is anyone hurt?” I asked.
“No,” said the Harriman. “I was up at the front a couple minutes ago. All’s left is to contain the blaze. They’ve got it, I think. Big flames, short life, but more excitement than we’ve had here in a while.”
I was thinking that they should only know what’s coming, when I saw James emerge from the smoke. Remaining separate and off to the side, he put his hands on his hips and turned to watch.
I slipped away from the others. He didn’t see me until I was close to his side, and then he was startled, but only briefly. His eyes returned to the fire.
I turned to watch with him, moving close enough so that we were arm to elbow. “Is there a leak?” I asked softly.
His voice was tight. “My monitors said no. They’re checked twice a day.”
“Your monitors. Ah-ha.” I should have guessed. Hadn’t he told me he would know if the Children’s Center drums sprang a leak? Monitors would tell him that. Still, he sounded angry. “Are kids getting sick?” I asked.
“No.”
“Did you set the fire?”
“No.”
“Your father?”
“Not personally, but I’m sure he ordered it done.”
Angry? James wasn’t angry. He was furious.
“But isn’t this a victory for you?” I reasoned. “Isn’t it an admission from him that the drums underneath need to be removed?”
“Oh yeah, only no one will ever know it,” he said through clenched jaws. “It’s another coverup in too long a string. He’ll get those drums outta there so that no one’ll ever be able to claim his child got sick from something leaking into the water supply in the playground bubbler. He’ll tell the board there are no toxic sites at the mill—and it’ll be a lie, because there are other ones, only he ran out of pretty little diversionary buildings to put over them, so they’re away from where people go, which is good, at least—and the board will go home and sleep well with the reassurance that Sandy Meade is on top of things. He knew they were starting to talk. Word about your sister spread faster than this friggin’ fire. He was starting to get phone calls.”
“Was he the one who called tomorrow’s meeting?”
For a minute James’s mouth was a rigid line. Then he took a breath. In the orange sheen of the fire—diminishing now—I saw the brief flare of his nostrils. “Nope. It was me. Only he reframed t
hat fact by calling each of the board members and setting forth his agenda. The stakes are rising. This is an anti-me move. But it’s typical of my father—trying to one-up anyone who crosses him. Well, fuck it, I’m not going away. I’m tired of coverups. I’m tired of working at a place that is dishonest enough to put its employees at risk. There’s so much that’s good in this mill, but it all gets diminished by the stain of graft.”
“Graft.”
James shot me a look. “The guys who do the cleanup? Ever wonder why they don’t tell what they’ve done? The answer’ll make your blood boil.”
“Money for silence?”
“Big-time.”
“Do they know they’re handling mercury?”
“No. They’re told it’s ‘production waste’ that may have turned toxic over time. They’re protected—masks, coveralls, you name it. And the work is done after hours, so if you’re wondering why the rest of Middle River doesn’t guess what’s wrong, don’t.”
He went silent. I might have said he had run out of steam, if I didn’t continue to feel his anger. It came off him in a rigid pulse. That arm cocked on his hip? It was glued there, and it was iron-hard. I knew that, because I touched it. It was my pathetic attempt to give comfort.
Very quietly—timidly, actually, because I didn’t know him well enough to know how he reacted in situations like this—I asked, “Are we set for tomorrow?”
“I am,” he said tersely. “Are you?”
“Yes.”
“Good.”
That was all he said before he vanished into the night.
Phoebe was upstairs in bed, but Sabina was in the parlor, asleep on the sofa in weirdly similar fashion to the way I had found Phoebe the very first night I had come. The difference came when Sabina awoke. She sat up, instantly alert.
“There was a fire at the mill,” she said. “I’d have gone over, but I couldn’t leave Phoebe.”
“Tom and I just came from there,” I said and told her what we had seen. We moved into the kitchen for tea, and it didn’t seem to matter that it was one in the morning. I wanted to know the latest on Phoebe; Sabina wanted to know about my afternoon meeting. I wanted to know if Sabina had talked with Ron; Sabina wanted to know how it had gone with Greg.
We went through several cups of herbal tea, went on talking longer than either of us would have imagined, but Sabina didn’t seem to want to go to bed any more than I did. We had never done this before, she and I. I mean, never. For the first time, we seemed to be more alike than different. For the first time, we were friends.
That was why, when a telltale ring came from my purse at two in the morning, after I answered, talked, and ended the call, I put the phone on the table and met Sabina’s curious eyes.
“You heard. I said I’d go over.”
“James Meade? Calling you at this hour?”
“We have this…this thing going on. We kept bumping into each other mornings when we were out running, and I had no idea it would amount to anything, because you remember the mess I got into with Aidan, but then it just kind of…became…something.”
“Sex?” she asked.
“I’m not a virgin, Sabina. It was only when I was growing up here that I was a total nonwoman.”
She was smiling. “Sex with James Meade? That’s amazing. He doesn’t do it with anybody. I mean, there’s a reason he had to adopt a child.”
I might have enlightened her on that score if I felt it were my place to do it, but it wasn’t. As much as I liked this new honesty between Sabina and me, I couldn’t betray James. So I put the cell phone back in my bag and took my car keys from the basket of keys on the counter. “I don’t know as we’ll be doing that tonight. He’s upset about the fire, and he’s nervous about tomorrow. I think he just doesn’t want to be alone.”
Sabina remained amazed. “James Meade is always alone. Either that image is bogus, or you’ve done something to him.”
“The image is bogus,” I said on my way to the door. I paused with a hand on the knob and looked at her reflection in the mullioned glass. “I may not be back until morning. I mean, it won’t be about sex, but if he wants me to stay, it might be in all of our best interests. I’m going to be lobbying for your job.”
There was enough teasing in Sabina’s smile to make it even through the glass. “I’ll just bet you are.”
James saw my headlights and was waiting at the side door. He wore nothing but jeans, and much as I might tell my sister that this visit wasn’t about sex, I was ready when he pressed my back to the wall.
So was it only about sex after all? Had he called with that in mind, needing physical release in a time of stress, as so many men did? Was I fooling myself, as so many women did?
No. Absolutely not. It was just that we were newcomers at communicating, and in this way we did it very well. And then, just to show you how really new we were at understanding each other, he asked a question that took me by surprise. Actually, it wasn’t even the question that took me by surprise, as much as the confrontational tone of his voice.
“How was Greg?”
I was tingling inside. He had just left me, but my legs were still wrapped around his waist, with his hands holding them there. My back was still to the wall—my bare back, now, because our clothes were strewn about—and my arms were around his neck.
Freeing one, I swatted at his head. “You jerk!” I cried. I would have separated from him completely, if his torso hadn’t been so fixed. “Is that what this is about—you marking your territory?”
Had he smiled, I would have hit him again. But he didn’t. His face was as sober as I’d seen it. “It’s about my feeling too much for you and wondering when the hurt’s gonna come.”
My heart melted. “You are a jerk,” I said, but more gently. Then I told him about Greg. It was not a betrayal of Greg’s privacy, because James and I had crossed some kind of line into a relationship that included trust. He trusted me with the truth about Mia; I trusted him with the truth about Greg. I didn’t make him promise not to tell anyone about Greg, any more than he had made me promise not to tell anyone about Mia—any more than Tom had made me promise not to tell anyone what I’d learned about him. Trust was implicit in each of these instances. It went with the territory of being a true friend.
Tom was that. And yes, James was that, too.
We talked more. We spent most of the night at it. The light of day had already risen beyond his bedroom window before we finally fell asleep, but Mia woke us shortly thereafter. Since neither of us felt comfortable having her see us in bed, I let James go to her while I showered and slipped back into my clothes.
James caught me at the door just as I was about to leave. Yes, he was holding Mia, but she didn’t see anything remotely untoward. All he did was put a hand on my cheek.
“Thank you,” he said. “I needed that.”
I nodded. “Today is important.”
He raised his brows in wry agreement. “See you at four?”
I nodded again. Touching the tip of Mia’s tiny nose, I said, “Bye, Mia.”
She put a finger in her mouth and smiled.
You love him, Grace said, but it wasn’t an accusation. After my blasting her on the plane, she had mellowed.
I don’t know, I said.
I think you do. Will you marry him?
Aren’t we getting ahead of ourselves here?
Are we? she asked. Isn’t this what girls do? We dream, and then we picture how things will be in those dreams. When I was in high school, I’d doodle “Mrs. George Metalious” in my notebook.
Well, I’m not in high school. There are weighty decisions to be made, and I don’t have the facts. James may or may not take over his company, he may or may not be leaving Middle River, and he may or may not love me. He has never used those words.
Do you want him to?
I don’t know.
Do you want him to take over the mill?
I don’t know.
What about leaving Middle
River? Do you want him to do that?
I don’t know. Why are you asking me all this? I’ve told you I don’t have the facts.
Facts? Facts don’t matter. It’s the heart that counts.
Thank you, Dear Abby.
Now wait just a minute. Aren’t you the one who spent half a plane ride givingmeadvice? You said I moved around too much and thatmaybe if I’d stayed in one place and put down roots, I’d have been happier. So was that about facts? It was not. It was about heart. That’s what happiness is. It’s about heart.
I couldn’t argue with that. Nor was I surprised that she said it. Grace had lived life with her heart on her sleeve. It made sense that she would see it. And me, I was prevaricating. That was all.
I may have botched the execution of it, she went on, but I knew what I wanted. I wanted success. I wanted the freedom to live life on my own terms, and I wanted a man to do it with.
You wanted a man to dote on you.
Okay. Yes. Fine. And I wanted children, lots of children, only my body gave up after three, so my books became my children, and then they failed me, too, but at least I tried, because those were the things I wanted. So maybe you don’t want those things. But do you know what you want? Do you know?
I did not. And I couldn’t spend time right now thinking about it. A revived Phoebe—not perfect, but improved after a day of therapy, three days of rest, and a huge dose of optimism—insisted on being at the store, and if the crowds were big when she had been at the clinic, they were even bigger now. Sales were strong. But affection? Through the roof. It was one large community show of love for our sister, and Sabina and I were impressed.
That said, we were also distracted. Mindful of a four o’clock deadline, we made phone call after phone call trying to find one more person who would testify to the tie between exposure to mercury at Northwood and chronic illness. We had a significant list by this time, though, of course, most of the people on it were being taken care of by the Meades and had no desire to rock that boat. I ran down the street, caught Emily and Tom McCreedy at their store, and made my arguments yet again. I drove across town and did the same thing with Susannah Alban, but none of the three would commit. Sabina even managed to dig deep enough into mill records to identify the chef who had prepared dinner for the Women in Business that night in March so many years ago. He had cooked; his wife had served. They had left Middle River soon after the fire to work at a resort in Vermont, but when we called there, the manager said that the pair hadn’t been reliable enough to keep on for more than a year, and he had no idea where they had gone.
Looking for Peyton Place Page 36
