Crane liked the way it felt on his face, the wind, the snow. There was some ice mixed in with it, and it whipped him, like a sandstorm. He stood in the playground shivering, hands in the pockets of his light summer jacket.
Billy was wearing a parka. He and two other boys passed right by Crane. Billy didn’t look at him. Crane wasn’t sure if he was being ignored or just hadn’t been seen. He did know that he had the odd urge to grab the boy, hug him, hold him to him. The feeling lasted only a moment, and Crane didn’t understand it: he genuinely disliked the kid.
Over to the left, on the same side of the street as the playground, a local cop car was parked, its motor running. The officer he’d talked to in the candy shop, five weeks ago, was sitting in it, alone, keeping an eye on the kids. Thin, dark-complected guy named, what was it? Turner. Officer Turner.
He walked over and knocked on the driver’s window and Turner rolled it down. He said, “Yes? Got a problem?” Turner’s breath was visible, like pollution.
“Just saying hello,” Crane said. “We spoke a month or so ago, about my fiancée’s death.”
“Oh, sure. Crane, isn’t it? How’s it going?”
“Not bad. How about you?”
“Can’t complain.”
“Kind of slow in Greenwood these days?”
“Yeah. Kind of. You know how it is.”
“Sure. You probably haven’t had a suicide since Thursday.”
“What?”
“Nice seeing you, officer. Keep up the good work.”
He turned his back on Turner and walked across the street and into the school. It was pretty well cleared out, very few kids, just a few teachers.
He quickly found the cafeteria. It was a big white room full of long tables with no one in it, except Mrs. Price, who was sitting drinking a cup of coffee. She looked tired; she seemed to have lost some weight. She was wearing a gray dress and little makeup and her red hair was rather mussed.
“Mr. Crane,” she said, with a perfunctory smile, getting up, sitting back down. “There’s coffee over there. Help yourself.”
He did.
He came back and sat down and sipped black coffee from a Styrofoam cup. Slipped off his wet jacket and draped it over the back of his chair.
“Well,” she said. Hands folded. “You said you wanted to see me.”
“Thank you for agreeing.”
“I didn’t think you were asking so much.”
“Mrs. Woll did. So did Mrs. Meyer.”
“Pardon?”
“I called them, too. I wanted to arrange a meeting between the four of us. Three widows of suicides, and me: the two-time loser.”
Mrs. Price winced, swallowed, said, “The other young woman... Ms. Boone... has she...?”
“Died? No. She’s still in her coma. I spent the morning with her.”
“I’m sorry, Mr. Crane. I don’t know how you can hold up under it.”
“I’m holding up fine. I’m fine.”
“You don’t look like you slept much last night.”
“Neither do you.”
“Well,” she said, shrugging. “I haven’t slept terribly well for over a month. Not since you came around and started me thinking.”
“Is that what I did?”
“Of course you did. You know you did. You started me thinking about George. The second George, that is. Well, and the first George, too. They both worked at Kemco. Maybe it killed them both.”
“Bet on it.”
“You seem very convinced, Mr. Crane.”
“Aren’t you?”
“I don’t know. I know I’m not sleeping. What about the other woman... Mrs. Meyer, and who?”
“Mrs. Woll. Neither of them would see me. Either alone, or in a group of the four of us. Mrs. Woll still works at Kemco, and said to get involved would be to risk her job, and after all she has a daughter to raise, and has no suspicions in particular about her husband’s suicide. Mrs. Meyer didn’t give me a reason: she just hung up on me. I take that to mean she’s steadfast in her loyalty to her late husband’s company.”
She shook her head. “How can they ignore it? Suicide upon suicide...”
He felt a lump growing in his throat. He sipped the coffee. The lump didn’t go away. He put the coffee down. He put a hand to his face. Tears were streaming down his face. He could feel them.
“Mr. Crane...”
“I’m sorry... I’m sorry...”
Then she was beside him, her chair pulled in beside him, and she put an arm around him; comforting him. Patting him.
“I’m sorry, Mrs. Price,” he said, better now. “I... I guess it just hadn’t really hit me yet, about Boone. I’m... I’m fine. Maybe it’s that I can’t believe it, that somebody else is actually acknowledging what’s going on.”
She scooted her chair away from his a bit, just to give him room, then gave him a warm, weary smile and said, “I don’t claim to know what’s going on here. But something is going on.”
“If you and Mrs. Woll and Mrs. Meyer and I were to band together, and contact the Hazardous Waste Strike Force, and any other appropriate or even goddamnit inappropriate agencies, and if we’d tell our story to the media, then maybe, just maybe something, something, would be done.”
“Yes, but about what? What really is going on here in Greenwood?”
“Kemco is killing people.”
“Be specific, Mr. Crane.”
“Boone, and the others, your husband included, stumbled onto something Kemco wanted kept quiet. The illegal hazardous waste dumping, I imagine.”
“Are you sure? That’s not the sort of crime you go around killing people over.”
“Kemco’s capable of it. Kemco’s capable of anything.”
“Mr. Crane, you’re talking about Kemco as if it were a person, an entity, a monster. That just isn’t the reality of it.”
“I used to think that way, Mrs. Price. I know the truth now. I’d blow the goddamn place up, if I thought it would do any good. If there weren’t a hundred more goddamn plants that would need blowing up as well.”
She touched his hand. “Mr. Crane. Try to keep your self-control.”
“I am. I’m fine.”
“Have you considered that perhaps Ms. Boone’s research turned something else up? I know she’d compiled disturbing statistics about diseases among Kemco employees and their families. But I understand there was a fire at her home, not long before she allegedly took an overdose of sleeping pills. Was her research material destroyed?”
“Yes.”
“If someone is killing people and making it seem like suicide, they’re doing a thorough job of it; each victim’s been a likely candidate for self-destruction. Is it true her husband had filed for custody of Billy?”
“Yes. Where did you hear that?”
“It’s a small town, Mr. Crane.”
“So everyone tells me. But nobody seems to be overly concerned about a galloping suicide rate.”
“Too many people collect Kemco paychecks, here, Mr. Crane, to get overly concerned about anything. In times like these, a paycheck comes in handy. The suicide rate — and the cancer rate — would have to go considerably higher before Greenwood would wake up.”
“I’ll wake them up. I’ll wake everybody up.”
“How?”
He smiled. “You see, I’m the next victim.”
“What?”
“I went out to Kemco yesterday. I made myself noticed. So they’ll be coming around to see me. To try to make a suicide out of me. Or accident, or whatever. Only I’ll be waiting.”