"Matthew," she had said several times in one way or another, "we all miss her and love her, but we love you, too. It is time for you to pick up the pieces and move on. You have room in your heart for Ginny and for someone new. I know she wouldn't have wanted you to spend your life this way."
Matt would respond with a shrug or a grunted acknowledgment, and head off. There was no sense in discussing something that simply wasn't going to happen.
The gaunt preacher performing the ceremony for Darryl Teague had little to say. To his credit, he made no attempt to lie. He called Darryl a carefree, playful child who had grown away from God and had become an angry and troubled young man at the time of his death. He read some bible passages, and issued appropriate words of consolation to Darryl's parents and sister.
"God works in mysterious ways," he said as four men grasped heavy ropes and prepared to lower the plain pine box into the gaping maw in the earth. "God works in mysterious ways."
There were rumblings around the hospital that Matt was the last person known to have been in Teague's room before his heart stopped irretrievably. But no one could come up with a sensible explanation for why he might have saved the man's life one day and taken it just a few days later, so natural causes became the consensus around town.
Hal Sawyer's autopsy contributed little to solving the mystery. As Matt suspected, Teague's cracked sternum was the cause of the torn vessel that had resulted in his near-fatal tamponade. Beneath that fracture, the heart muscle was bruised. It was certainly the sort of injury that could have caused electrical instability and irregular rhythms in his heart. Hal signed the man out as a fatal arrhythmia secondary to a cardiac contusion secondary to accidental blunt chest trauma. The lumps over Teague's face and head were nothing more than neurofibromas. The brain itself was grossly normal, leaving Hal with no immediate explanation for Teague's coma. Full toxicology studies would not be available for another week or two, but a preliminary screen had shown none of the depressants Matt had wondered about.
A sharp gust of wind whipped across the field, swirling dust around the small assembly of mourners, who were singing a hymn Matt vaguely remembered from his youth. He found his thoughts drifting to his father. BC amp;C had been found blameless in the cave-in that killed Matthew Rutledge, Sr., but Matt, only fifteen then, had heard rumors of safety funds diverted, corners cut, and even men paid off.
"We will close our service with the twenty-third psalm. Pallbearers may lower the casket as we recite, 'The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want…'"
No one except Matt had even suggested that Ginny's bizarre cancer was tied to the mine.
"You yourself said that there are several hundred of these types of lung cancers around the country every year," BC amp;C president Armand Stevenson had said to him. "And with each of those cases, I am sure there's a factory close by, or a lab of some sort, or even a mine. I know you're frustrated, Dr. Rutledge. Your wife has just died. I know you're angry and want to blame us. Well, BC and C is not to blame. I repeat, the company is not to blame for your wife's death any more than it was to blame for your father's."
" '… He restoreth my soul…' "
Matt watched as the casket was slowly lowered down onto the floor of the grave.
Someone from the mine killed you, Darryl, didn't they?… Why?… What did you know?… Had you stayed alive, what could your body have told the world about them?
" '… Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death…' "
Matt forced his careening thoughts aside and joined the others in the final lines of the psalm. When the service was over, he accepted heartfelt thanks from Teague's family for having tried to save his life, then took a long, slow walk out toward the hills and back. Ginny would have wanted him to keep pushing for answers. Now she was joined by Darryl Teague and Teddy Rideout. Their conditions were different, but maybe the toxins responsible were different, too.
Well, don't worry, Gin, he thought. Sooner or later, one way or another, we're going to nail them.
The one way or another clearly did not include the offering of a $2,500 reward. Matt had printed three hundred of the magenta fliers. Mae had posted half of them around Belinda, and he had tacked up the other half in the adjacent towns. Within twenty-four hours, nearly all of them were gone. There had not been one response. So much for the Healthy Mines Coalition. Another battle lost, Matt thought, but not the war. Not the goddamn war. He swung the Harley around and headed back to his office. Patients were waiting.
As it turned out, there was a message waiting for him as well — a message from Armand Stevenson requesting that Matt come to the mine offices to meet with him and some of those in the company responsible for health and safety. Mae was smiling as she passed the note over.
"Yes!" Matt exclaimed, pumping his fist.
"I thought you might be interested in going, so I cleared you for tomorrow afternoon," she said. "You're due out there at one."
"It seems a bit presumptuous of you to assume I was interested in going," he said.
"I know, I know," Mae replied.
Matt kissed her on the cheek and settled in his office to await his first patient of the day. Not a minute later, his uncle called.
"Hey, Hal, we are officially off dead center. I'm going out to the mine tomorrow to meet with Stevenson."
"I know. That's why I'm calling."
"What do you mean?"
"I just ran into your friend Robert Crook. He told me Stevenson had invited you out there. Crook's going to be there, too, as the head of the physician advisory committee for health and safety."
"Any idea what they want?"
"None, but I'm calling to urge you to keep your cool no matter what."
"You mean you think I shouldn't tell them up front that they killed my father and are probably responsible for my wife's death as well, and now they're poisoning miners?"
"Something like that. Matt, you've got a reputation with those people as a hothead. Try not to give them any reason to fire back at you."
"Not to worry. I'm going to be just like Mr. Rogers. 'Oh, it's a beautiful day in the neighborhood, a beautiful day for a neighbor. Would you be mine?'… See, I'm practicing up."
"Seriously, Matt, those people hold all the cards in this community. I should think by now you would have figured that out. I just want you to go easy — have them view you as a responsible man."
"I'll do my best, Hal. I promise. Listen, thanks for calling. Give Heidi a hug for me. And don't worry. Responsible is my middle
name.
At twelve-thirty the following afternoon, Matt placed his two overstuffed BC amp;C files into a gym bag, strapped it onto the Harley, and headed west out of town. Hal only wanted what was best for him, but he was a worrier. This meeting was, perhaps, the first real break he had gotten. He wasn't about to screw things up.
Next to medicine and motorcycles, the thing Matt knew most about in the world was coal. He had learned about it at the knee of his father, and later on the Internet and in the library. He knew that the Belinda Coal and Coke Company, and indeed the town itself, owed its existence to a huge deposit of semibituminous coal, first discovered in 1901 deep within the tall hills west of the town. Semibituminous coal, also called smokeless coal, was found at only three sites in the state. Smokeless coal was relatively free of impurities, making it the choice for generating steam and also for producing coke. The founders of BC amp;C had the foresight to construct coking and chemical plants near the mine, as well as a rail spur to speed their products wherever they needed to go.
The entire BC amp;C operation was located on a vast, dusty plateau, and was completely surrounded by several miles of nine-foot-tall chain-link fence, much of it topped with barbed wire. Matt had been to the mine just once since his father's death, on a guided tour he and Ginny took shortly after he started work in the ER.