“Yes, Billy.”
Billy left the table.
“He’s a charmer,” Crane said.
“He’s not a bad kid. He doesn’t like Patrick and me not living together.”
“Well. No kid in his situation likes that.”
“I don’t think Billy’s going to warm to you, Crane. You might as well get used to it.”
“It doesn’t bother me. I’ve lived with younger brothers. I can put up with it.”
“Good. Thank you.”
“Now that Billy’s gone, there’s something I need to ask about your husband.”
“Yes?”
“How much does he know about this book you’re doing?”
“Nothing, really. Patrick knows I’m writing a book, but he’s never bothered to ask what about. Which is fine with me. As far as I know, nobody at Kemco knows what I’m up to, exactly. And now that ‘suicides’ are becoming an epidemic around here, that’s probably a good thing.”
Earlier she’d told him that she had not yet confronted Patrick with what she knew Mary Beth had seen: that exchange of money between him and a questionable-looking trucker. Now looking across the kitchen table at her, in the house she’d lived in with her husband, Crane could see that as much as she disliked Patrick, as much as her hatred for Kemco was tied in with how she felt about him, she didn’t like thinking Patrick might’ve been part of what happened to Mary Beth.
“This afternoon,” Crane said, “I tried to absorb as much information as I could.”
“I know.”
“I’m just getting started, really. But already something is bothering me.”
“What bothers you?”
“The ‘suicide’ victims. Okay, they all worked at Kemco. But otherwise I see no connection... we have a maintenance man, a foreman, an executive. Then there’s Mary Beth — a secretary, temporary summer help.”
“So?”
“It’s just that the list is too disparate. It’s not a group of people working together, in similar jobs, with similar access to information.”
“They all worked at Kemco. That’s connection enough.”
“No it isn’t. As you’ve said, everybody around here works at Kemco. What other connection did they have? Boone, I’m going to talk to the wives of those ‘suicides’ myself.”
“Fine.”
“Alone.”
“That’s fine, too.”
“You see, I don’t share your basic assumption that Kemco is evil. That all big business is the enemy of the people. I just don’t buy that naive leftist bullshit, okay?”
“Please. I’m still eating.”
“I just want you to understand that I’m in this only for one reason: Mary Beth. I want to know what really happened to her.”
“That’s easy. Kemco killed her.”
“Kemco didn’t kill her. Possibly some people that work for Kemco did.”
“Kemco killed her. You’re playing games with semantics, Crane.”
“I’m not playing any kind of game!” He was standing. Angry.
“It hurts, doesn’t it, Crane?”
“S-sorry,” he said. Sitting back down.
“I know it hurts.”
He felt words tumble out. “I dream about her. Every night. It’s not the same, exact dream every night. But it’s always Mary Beth, and she’s alive, and we’re together, and we’re doing something, anything. Picnic, a play, at home listening to music and talking. Then I remember she’s dead. Sometimes she touches my lips and shakes her head, smiling: ‘Don’t think about it,’ she’s saying. Sometimes she just disappears.”
He was dreaming now. Mary Beth was sitting by him in a car.
“Crane,” Boone was saying, “wake up.”
He opened his eyes. Lights were coming down on them.
“It’s a truck, schmuck,” she said, crawling over on him, awkwardly.
They embraced.
The truck roared by; emblazoned on its side was KEMCO.
“One of their own,” Boone said, still in his lap, looking back at the receding semi. “That’s no midnight hauler. They’re carrying product, not waste.”
“Here comes another.”
They kissed for a while, as half a dozen trucks rolled by; one truck honked, and they looked up, startled: a truck driver was smiling and waving at them.
When the trucks had passed, Boone got back over in the driver’s seat and said, “We might as well call it a night.”
“Right.”
“They’re not hauling any waste out of here tonight.”
“Right.”
Boone started the car, pulled onto the road. Crane felt uneasy, and a little ashamed, as he had back in the church, at Mary Beth’s funeral, when he’d seen Boone and got an erection. Like the one he had now.
Boone seemed a little uneasy herself.
Behind them, Kemco, like a bad dream, faded. And lingered.
Chapter Ten
Harry Woll, a foreman at Kemco, had been dead just over a year. He’d taken an overdose of sleeping pills, washing it down with Scotch; that was the story. The house he’d lived in was two blocks from Boone’s. Crane walked there.
It was another cool night. Crane wore his jacket, but it didn’t keep his teeth from chattering. He supposed that was nerves, more than anything. He didn’t like doing this. He couldn’t have felt more uncomfortable.
Woll’s house was one of several newer, one-story homes at the tail end of Woodlawn, a side street. There was a well-kept lawn with some shrubbery around the front of the pale green house, but there were no trees, which was unusual for Greenwood. The porch light was on.
Crane knocked on the front door.
A pretty redheaded girl of about fourteen, wearing snug jeans and a white T-shirt, answered. The T-shirt had a TWISTED SISTER logo on it; under it were pushy, precocious breasts that made the logo bulge. She looked at Crane and pretended to be sullen, calling out, “Mom! It’s that guy who called.”
The girl leaned against the door and a smile tugged at the corners of her pouty mouth. Crane gave her a noncommittal smile and looked away.
“Mr. Crane?”
Mrs. Woll was a slender, attractive woman about forty doing a good job of passing for being in her mid-thirties. She wore a light blue cardigan sweater over a pastel floral blouse and light blue slacks. Her hair was dark honey blonde and rather heavily sprayed. She had the face of a cheerleader or homecoming queen, twenty years later.
She extended a hand to him and gave him a dazzling smile. “It’s nice to see you, Mr. Crane.”
He managed to return her smile, but the warm reception threw him: why was she so pleased to see him? She’d never met him before.
He stepped inside.
“Take Mr. Crane’s jacket, dear,” she told her daughter.
The daughter took his jacket, brushing her breasts against him as she did, and tossed the jacket in a chair by the door.
“Would you like some coffee?” Mrs. Woll asked him, taking his arm, leading him to a sofa nearby, a painting of the crashing tide above it, one of several undistinguished oil paintings that hung in a living room of white pebble-plaster walls and contemporary furniture. The place was immaculate; either she was some housekeeper or had cleaned up because company was coming.
He said thanks, yes, to her offer of coffee and she left him to go get it. The fourteen-year-old redhead stood and looked at him and let her pout turn into a full-fledged smile and, butt twitching, walked into the next room, from which he soon heard a situation comedy and its laugh-track, TV turned up loud enough to be annoying on purpose.
Mrs. Woll brought Crane the coffee, smiled, and went into the room where the fourteen-year-old had gone, and the TV sound went down. Some.