Midnight Haul

Chapter Eight

“I thought you’d be back,” Boone said. “But I didn’t think you’d bring your suitcase.”

She was standing in the doorway with her arms folded, properly smug.

“It looks like I might be around for a few more days,” Crane said. “I can’t afford the motel much longer. Can you put me up?”

“I can put you up,” Boone said, not budging in the doorway. “The question is, can I put up with you?”

“Right. I’ll just go back to the motel and stay till my money runs out.” He turned to go.

She put a hand on his shoulder. “You needn’t pout. Come on in.”

She led him upstairs, took him into one of the rooms, a big, completely empty one — nothing but smooth white walls and dark wood trim and polished light wood floor.

“I told you my ex took all the furniture,” she said, shrugging. “The only two beds in the place are mine and Billy’s.”

“I can guess how your son would feel about sharing a bed with me.”

“Right. About the same way I would.”

“That’s not what I’m here for.”

“I know you’re not. That wasn’t fair. I have a sleeping bag you can use, and there’s a desk in Billy’s room with a chair, which we can bring in and make this nice and homey.”

“Thanks.”

He followed her across the hall to a small room with a window and a big metal desk and not much else. To one side of the desk was a two-drawer gray steel file; on the other a couple wastebaskets. On the desk was a manual typewriter, around which were scattered notecards, tape cassettes, pages of rough draft and pages of manuscript. Above the desk was a bulletin board with newspaper and magazine articles pinned to it: “DO ‘AGENT ORANGE’ HERBICIDES DESTROY PEOPLE AS WELL AS PLANTS? THE EVIDENCE MOUNTS,” “THE POISONING OF AMERICA,” “KEMCO PROFITS UP.”

“To which you no doubt say, ‘Up Kemco Profits,’ ” Crane said, looking back at her archly, where she stood watching him take all this in.

“You will, too, once you hear the story,” she said.

Crane poked around her desk a bit, just tentatively, waiting for her to stop him. She didn’t.

“You can’t be working on just an article,” Crane said. “There’s too much here for that. Is this the manuscript, so far?” He hefted the box of typescript. “There’s a couple hundred pages, here.”

“It’s a book,” she said.

“How long you been working on it?”

“Since Patrick and I split. Year and a half.”

“Is it for a publisher? Do you have an advance?”

“It’s on spec. I won’t have any trouble selling it.”

“How do you live?”

“Alimony. Child support.”

“From Patrick? Who gets his money from Kemco?”

“I see it as ironic.”

“I see it as hypocritical.”

“Fine, coming from somebody who’s freeloading in the first place.”

“Yeah, well, you’re right. That was uncalled for. Sorry. You wouldn’t happen to have some coffee or something?”

“Herbal tea.”

“That’d be fine. Can we go someplace where there’s furniture? I’d like us to sit and talk, awhile.”

“Sure.”

Downstairs, he returned to the faded red sofa of the evening before, and she brought hot tea for them both, and sat next to him.

“Why did you come back, Crane? Why are you staying?”

“Because I don’t think Mary Beth committed suicide. That’s been my instinct from day one. And now I’ve learned something that convinced me.”

“I suppose you found out about the other suicides.”

“You mean you knew?”

“Of course. If you hadn’t been so quick to classify me as a loon, I’d have been able to tell you that by now. I’ve been doing research into Kemco for a long time, Crane. I know a lot of things that you don’t.”

“What do the suicides have to do with Kemco?”

“All five suicide victims were Kemco employees.”

“Jesus.”

“Of course that could just be a coincidence. A lot of people around here work for Kemco.”

“Jesus. Maybe they did kill her...”

“Where have I heard that before?”

“Why would they do it, Boone?”

“I don’t know exactly. I may know. But I can’t be sure.”

“Tell me what you do know.”

“The book I’m doing... it’s called Kemco: Poison and Profit... it mostly centers on what working at the Kemco plant near here has done to the residents of this and half a dozen other small towns, whose workforce Kemco draws upon. What I’ve come up with is a pattern of miscarriages, birth defects and cancer, among Kemco employees and their children.”

Crane sat and thought about that for a while.

“And Mary Beth knew about all this,” he said.

“Of course. You know, I was in high school with Mary Beth’s sister, Laurie, and Laurie and I were good friends back then, though we long since drifted apart. But even in those days Mary Beth was a sharp little kid — she was in grade school and way ahead of her age — and we used to talk. Then, this summer, we got together again and got kind of close. She was interested in my writing, my research, and I felt, considering how close she was to this, considering the tragedies in her own family, which related to the Kemco thing, it, well, seemed natural to let her in on it.”

“No wonder she was depressed about her father... and little Brucie... she was seeing them as symbols of something larger...”

“It explains why she was blue, Crane, but it doesn’t explain suicide. Because she didn’t commit suicide. Not unless you believe it’s possible for Greenwood to have ten times the national suicide rate.”

“That’s exactly what Roger said.”

“Roger?”

“Friend back home. I called him, earlier this afternoon. When I told him there’d been five suicides here in a little over a year, he said that was about ten times the national average... without taking into account that rural areas have a ‘markedly lower rate,’ he said. Less pressure in the lives of ‘rural residents’ as compared to ‘city dwellers.’ ”

“He talks like a sociologist.”

“That’s what he wants to be when he grows up.”

“How about you, Crane? What do you want to be?”

“What do you mean?”

“You’re supposed to be a journalism major. Why don’t you dig in and help me with this goddamn thing.”

“Your book? No. No thanks. That’s not what I have in mind.”

“I know it isn’t. But you came here, to me, because you know we share a common purpose.”

“I came here because you seem to know more about what’s going on than the Greenwood cops do.”

“The cops here are a joke. They’re nothing.”

“The guy I spoke to seemed competent enough.”

“If they were competent, they wouldn’t swallow these phony suicides whole.”

“They’re not all phony. One of them was a guy who shot his wife and kids — and then himself, in front of a cop.”

“Fine. He’s the one suicide Greenwood is statistically allowed. What about the other four?”

He looked at her. Nodded. Sipped his tea. It was still warm.

“Okay, then,” he said. “You still have to explain some things. What was Mary Beth doing, where Kemco was concerned, that could’ve gotten her killed?”

“Maybe she stumbled onto something.”

“What’s that supposed to mean? What aren’t you telling me?”

Boone got up and began walking around the braided rug, pacing, as she explained.

“You’ve got to understand,” she said. “The book I’m doing deals with a lot of things. Agent Orange, for one. I’ve talked to dozens of Vietnam vets who came in contact with it, corresponded with another twenty or twenty-five. But I haven’t come up with anything new, really... much of what I have on Agent Orange is secondary source material. You’re a journalism student, Crane, I don’t have to tell you that firsthand, primary source material would carry more weight.”

“I can see that,” Crane said, keeping a calm tone. Trying to give her room to say what she wanted to say. “The story of Agent Orange would have a place in your book, but the book couldn’t depend on that... it’s a story that’s been told elsewhere.”

“Exactly! And the interviews, the statistics, laying out the pattern of illnesses here in Greenwood and other nearby small towns, whose populations largely consist of families supported by one or more Kemco employees, it’s impressive, it’s shocking even... but it’s circumstantial. And, damnit, I’m no scientist. I can’t say I’ve really proven anything.”

“Can’t you get inside the plant, to check on safety conditions and so forth?”

“Are you kidding? How, by asking Patrick, my ex-husband, for a tour? And what would I see on a company-directed tour? I’d get the standard P.R. shuffle, right? And suppose I got in on my own somehow, to really snoop around? What would I be looking for? How would I know how to judge the safety conditions in a chemical processing plant?”

“What you’re saying is your book lacks something.”

“It sure as hell does. I need a smoking gun, Crane.”

“A smoking gun.”

“Right! Something really tangible. Don’t you get it? Don’t you understand, Crane? Kemco is fucking malignant, festering, a bed of corruption and negligence...”

“I see,” Crane said, hoping her journalistic style was somewhat more subdued.

“I need to be able to show Kemco being criminally negligent. Not just a big well-meaning corporation that may have had some problems with plant safety.”

“It doesn’t sound to me like you have anything remotely like that.”

“Oh but I do. In one of my interviews, with a company employee who was a friend of one of the ‘suicide’ victims, I learned that Kemco’s playing dump-and-run.”

“You’ve lost me.”

“Kemco has to account to the federal government for the disposal of any potentially hazardous waste material; like this stuff PCB, which is used to insulate electrical transformers. Kemco makes that, and the waste from it can be dumped at only three federally approved sites. For years these companies dumped their shit wherever the hell they wanted... sewers, creeks, rivers. You know what they used to think? ‘Dilution is the solution to pollution.’ Only it didn’t work out that way; there are plenty of toxic substances that don’t harmlessly break down in water. So they started burying the stuff — Kemco, and Dow and Monsanto and DuPont and Hooker and all the others. Usually in 55-gallon steel drums, which eventually corroded and started to leak out into the ground, contaminating farmland and water supplies and people.”

She was starting to rant; he tried to stop her: “Boone, I’ve heard of Love Canal. I know about things like that. But those are dump sites from twenty years ago. Things are more regulated than that now.”

“In theory. You know, I’m glad you’ve heard of Love Canal, because so has Kemco, only they don’t give a fuck. They are still hiring lowlife truckers to come dump this stuff God knows where, and with Christ knows what results on the environment and the people living nearby.”

“What does any of this have to do with Mary Beth?”

“She was working this summer in Kemco’s secretarial pool. A lot of the execs used her — she was good, and well liked; the daughter of a late, trusted employee. She heard some things. Saw some things.”

“Such as?”

“One major thing, specifically: one evening, when she was working alone, staying late, trying to catch up on some work, she saw one of the executives give an envelope to a rough-looking guy who might’ve been a trucker. The trucker took some cash out of the envelope and counted it.”

“That’s it? That’s what she saw? That’s thin, Boone. That’s goddamn thin.”

“I don’t think that’s all she found out.”

“Don’t you know?”

“I was out of town for about three days, doing some research on the Agent Orange aspect of the book. When I got back, there were half a dozen messages for me to call her. I called. She was dead.”

“She was snooping around for you, then. For your book.”

“Crane, blaming me won’t do any good.”

“I’m not blaming you. Do you know the name of the exec she saw handing the money over?”

“Yes. It was Patrick.”

Chapter Nine

From the highway, glancing over to the left, yellow-orange light stained the horizon, just above the trees. It was as if the sun were coming up at midnight. They turned off onto a blacktop and followed the signs that led them from one blacktop onto another, and another, and the stain against the sky became a city. A city of lights and smoke.

As the city’s skyline emerged, the only skyscrapers were smokestacks, a dozen of them, emitting ever-expanding grayish white clouds that made seductive patterns as they rose.

Crane had expected the Kemco plant to be big, and it was; but it was more spread out, and closer to the ground, than he’d thought. There was an eerie, almost underwater look to it all, with the shifting smoke backdrop, the green-yellow-aqua outdoor lights strung about like bulbs at a particularly drab pool party. The taller, larger buildings resembled greenhouses, their walls sheets of mottled aqua-colored plastic, cross-hatched with metal, rising up amidst massive inter-twines of steel pipe. There was a massive electrical substation nearby. Numerous one-story buildings. Countless chemical tanks. Off at the sides, huge, squat, silo-like structures huddled like metal toadstools. Just inside a full-to-capacity parking lot, an American flag flapped against a grayish white breeze. The plant was going full throttle, but Crane had yet to see a human being.

Other than Boone, of course. She was driving. They were in her yellow Datsun. They passed a green tin building half a block long: the loading dock for Kemco trucks.

“That’s where the trucks come out,” Boone said, pointing as they approached a graveled area to the left of the loading dock; a small brick building served as a clearing booth for departing trucks, of which there were none at the moment.

“Where do we watch from?” Crane asked.

“You’ll see.”

Opposite the Kemco plant, on the other side of the road they were driving down, was a flat open field; in the darkness it was hard to see how far the field extended. It resembled farmland. They’d passed several farms, within half a mile of the Kemco facility, on this same road; but this field wasn’t being used for farming, or anything else, though perhaps it had once been a dump site for wastes — the proverbial “back forty” used by many chemical plants — long since filled up and smoothed over.

There was room alongside the road to park, which they did, a quarter of a mile down from the truck loading area.

“Are we going to be okay, here?” Crane asked.

“Sure. Nobody’s going to think a thing about us.”

“Yeah, right. What’s conspicuous about sitting out here in the open like this?”

“It’s dark. Nobody’ll see us.”

“A car going by will see us. A truck.”

“Crane, one of the few nice things about the Kemco plant is it’s out in the boonies... and you know what people in parked cars out in the boonies do, don’t you?”

“I think I can guess, but I don’t know what it has to do with us.”

“If a car or a truck goes by, we pretend to be making out. Think you can handle that?”

“I suppose. But be gentle.”

Boone frowned at that, but it wasn’t a very convincing frown.

They sat and watched for an hour, saying very little, waiting for something to happen. Nothing did. The plant down the way, from this distance, looked like a cheap miniature in a ’50s science-fiction movie. The longer he stared at it, the less real it seemed; yet at the same time, it struck him as being something breathing, something alive. It was the constant billowing smoke that did it, he figured.

Another uneventful half hour passed.

“I don’t know about this,” Crane said. “We haven’t seen a car or truck since we got here.”

“Crane, if we’re patient, we can catch them in the act. You got that? We can wait and watch for the sons of bitches who are hauling Kemco’s shit, follow them to wherever they’re illegally dumping it...” She paused to point at the Nikon SLR camera on the floor between her feet. “... take a few nice candid shots, and we got them.”

“And you’re sure this is going to happen at night.”

“It will probably be at night. They aren’t called midnight haulers because they work days.”

“It doesn’t look like tonight’s going to be the night.”

“It’s too early to tell. But tonight might be the night. Or tomorrow night, or the next night, maybe. This place turns out a lot of waste. We won’t have to wait forever.”

“That’s encouraging.”

“Take a nap. I’ll wake you if anything happens.”

“Don’t let me sleep more than eight or ten hours.”

“Crane, we only have to watch a couple hours a night. Between midnight and two, is all.”

“I still don’t know how you arrived at that.”

“I guessed, okay? But they would probably wait till after third shift went on at 11:30, and, if they’re going any distance at all to do the dumping, they wouldn’t want to get started any later than two.”

“I guess that makes sense.”

“Take a nap.”

“Okay.”

Crane got as comfortable as he could in the Datsun, with her in the driver’s seat. He was following her lead in this because he didn’t know quite what else to do; she had the information, the insights, he needed. So he was going along with her on this effort to link Kemco with “midnight haulers.” But it seemed to him ill-advised at best; and he didn’t want to think about what it was at worst.

This afternoon, at Boone’s, he’d listened to three cassette tapes — interviews with the wives of the three other suicide victims — and he’d found that, for a “journalist” who’d been working on a book for a year and a half, Boone had somewhat less than a professional interviewing style. She pushed her subjects, led them, tried to get them to help her make her preconceived points. (She had not interviewed any of the members of the Brock family — Mr. Brock being the man who killed his wife and two children and himself — as there was no one left to interview.)

Despite her lack of professionalism in interviewing, Boone was an amazing researcher and, from what he’d read so far, her writing style was considerably less hysterical than he’d supposed. Actually, it was a nicely understated style, getting her anti-Kemco points across convincingly. The Agent Orange section of the manuscript alone was devastating — her interviews with Vietnam vets were much more effective than those with Greenwood residents — and she may have been wrong in assuming the book could not stand on Agent Orange alone to find her a publisher.

He was halfway through the manuscript and would finish it tomorrow; but he would need days to absorb Boone’s file cabinet of data on Kemco’s adverse effects on the citizens of Greenwood.

She had cooked supper for him, and it was delicious: lasagna, his favorite. They — Crane, Boone, Billy — ate in the kitchen, a big off-white room with plants lining the windows. Her husband had been nice enough to leave her all the appliances, but then most of them were built-in.

“This is really good,” Crane told her, between bites.

“You sound surprised.”

“It’s just great. I hope you’ll let me help out on the groceries, while I’m here. And I can do some of the cooking, if you like.”

“You can cook?”

“Isn’t that kind of a ‘sexist’ question?”

Boone smiled. “What’s your specialty?”

“I’m glad you like Italian,” he said. “I do terrific spaghetti and meatballs.”

“Sounds wonderful. Only I’m a vegetarian.”

“Really.”

“You don’t sound surprised.”

“Well, I noticed the lasagna was meatless, of course, but, then I fix it that way myself. I like it with spinach and cottage cheese like this.” He turned to the boy. “Are you vegetarian, Billy?”

“No!” the boy said. He was looking at his plate as he ate.

“I fix Billy hamburgers or tacos, when he wants,” Boone explained. “I don’t try to force vegetarianism on him. It’s not a religion with me.”

“Daddy feeds me steak,” Billy said. Still looking at his plate.

“Daddy can afford steak,” Boone told her son.

“How long are you going to live here?” Billy asked Crane, turning and looking at him for the first time. His expression was that of a prosecutor with an accused mass murderer on the stand.

“Just a little while, Billy,” Crane said.

“Daddy won’t like it,” Billy said.

“Daddy won’t know about it, either,” Boone said.

“I might tell him.”

“Not unless you don’t want to live with mommy anymore.”

“I might live with Daddy. If he’s gonna live here, I might.”

“Mr. Crane is my friend, Billy. He’s helping me work. He won’t be staying here long.”

“He better not.” Billy pushed away from the table. “Be excused?”

“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.

While this was going on, he glanced at the far end of the room, where a color studio photo of the Woll family, taken perhaps five years ago, hung above a spinet piano. In the picture, Mrs. Woll looked heavier, sadder; an older daughter, about fifteen in this picture, wore a lot of makeup and wasn’t quite as pretty as the younger daughter (who was just a kid, here) was turning out to be. Mr. Woll was a jowly redheaded man, whose smile seemed forced even for a studio portrait.

Mrs. Woll came back and sat down next to Crane. “Now. You said you wanted to talk to me.”

“It’s very considerate of you to see me, Mrs. Woll. To agree to talk with me.”

“Mr. Crane, I understand what you’re going through, losing someone you love. If I can be of any help to you, in such a difficult time, I’m more than happy.”

“Your husband’s... death. Did it come as a shock to you?”

“My husband’s suicide, Mr. Crane. It’s important not to evade reality. You can use euphemisms, if you like, but I’ve found they’re not really helpful. The sooner you face up to your fiancée’s death as suicide, and deal with it honestly, the sooner you can get back about the business of your life.”

“Yes. But did it come as a shock to you? By that I mean, did it happen out of left field, or was Mr. Woll suffering from depression in the weeks preceding his... suicide?”

“I can’t really say. My guess would be, yes, he was depressed.”

“Your guess?”

“Mr. Woll and I were separated at the time of his suicide. We might have gone on to get a divorce; it’s hard to say.”

“What was the problem, if you don’t mind my asking?”

“His moods. He’d always been a moody individual, but it had gotten worse lately. At times, he even hit me. His daughters, as well. We have two girls, Jenifer you’ve met, Angie, who’s nineteen, moved out and got her own apartment when she turned eighteen.”

“Was that before or after Mr. Woll died?”

“Killed himself. Before. Harry couldn’t handle the changes I was going through.”

“Changes?”

“Mr. Crane, for nineteen years of marriage I worked, just like he worked. In fact, I brought in only a few dollars a month less than he did. But in addition to my job, I was supposed to be a full-time housewife, as well — do all the cleaning, cooking, laundry. What extra effort did Harry make to help out around the house? Nothing. Not a thing. I put up with it for years. Years. Then finally I guess my consciousness got raised, like with a lot of women, and I put an end to it. I told Harry we could afford a cleaning woman. He blew up! But I hired her anyway. I told him he could either learn to cook, or start taking us out for meals. He laughed at that, but it didn’t strike him so funny when he started coming home from work to no supper prepared, every other night. And so we started going out to eat a few nights each week. Our life-style changed — but Harry didn’t, not really. I thought sharing the work load fifty-fifty was only fair, but he didn’t see it that way. He said he was old-fashioned, like that explained it. And he drank, he drank too much. I tried to get him to enroll in AA, and that made him furious. We had some very unpleasant months around here.”

“I see.”

“Harry and the girls weren’t getting along too well, either. He and Angie were always going at it, because he felt she had loose morals. He accused Jenifer of the same thing, and she was only thirteen. Why, she’s still a baby! Can you imagine?”

“No.”

“So Harry took an apartment over the hardware store. That’s where he took his pills and Scotch.”

Crane sat there and tried to absorb what he’d just heard. Make some sense of it.

“Mrs. Woll, I need to ask you something that may seem a little... off the wall...”

“All right. Ask.”

“Was there anything at all suspicious about Mr. Woll’s death?”

“Suicide. No. I think he hoped someone would stop him. I don’t think he really meant to do it.”

“No, I suppose not. What I mean to say is, did you at the time — or do you now — have any suspicions, whether based on fact or just a feeling you might have, that Mr. Woll’s death might have been something other than suicide?”

“I don’t understand.”

“Mrs. Woll, there have been five suicides in Greenwood in a little over one year. Mr. Woll was one; my fiancée, Mary Beth, was another. All five worked for Kemco.”

“I still don’t understand what you’re driving at.”

“Five suicides in a town the size of Greenwood is about ten times the national average. That strikes me as odd. And all five suicide victims worked for Kemco. That seems odd to me, too.”

She smiled; she really was a beautiful woman. “Now I understand. Mr. Crane, accept your fiancée’s death for what it was: suicide. It sounds harsh, but the truth often does. Just because Harry and I were separated when he killed himself doesn’t mean I’d stopped loving him. We weren’t divorced, after all. We might’ve gotten back together. It was a crushing blow to me. I cried and cried. But I learned to accept it. Live with it. Life goes on.”

“Uh, right. But that doesn’t make the coincidences I mentioned any less odd.”

“It also doesn’t make them anything more than coincidences.”

“Perhaps.”

She touched his leg. “It’s only natural that you find it hard to accept the fact that your fiancée took her own life. It’s normal for you to try to make it be something else. Accept her suicide as her suicide, and not an accident or some conspiracy or other such nonsense — and get on with your own life.” She leaned forward and, with a smile, lifted her hand from his leg and wagged a motherly finger at him. “Just because someone else threw their life away, doesn’t mean you have to. More coffee?”

“No, no thanks.”

“It’s no trouble...”

“No, really,” he said, rising. “Listen, it was really very nice of you to see me. Talk to me.”

“My pleasure.”

He moved toward the door. “Well, anyway, thank you. I know it must’ve seemed strange, getting a phone call from somebody you never heard of...”

“Don’t be silly. I knew who you were.”

“You did?”

“Of course. I knew Mary Beth. Isn’t that why you came? Because you needed to talk to someone who’d known Mary Beth? Someone who’d been through what you’re going through now, which I have, with my husband’s suicide?”

“Uh, well. I didn’t know how well you knew her.”

“I didn’t know her well, but I knew her. She was a wonderful person. It’s a tragic loss.”

“Did she talk to you about me?”

“Not really. She mentioned you. The girl was crazy about you, I’d judge. And I didn’t blame her.” She gave him an openly flirty look; her mouth was her daughter’s. “I’d seen your picture, after all.”

“She showed it to you?”

“No, it was on her desk.”

“You worked with her?”

“Yes. I’m in charge of the secretarial pool at the Kemco plant. You knew that, certainly?”

“Uh. Certainly.”

“Well, good night, Mr. Crane.”

“Good night.”

Just as the door was closing, the volume on the TV went up; he could hear the canned laughter.

Chapter Eleven

The barrels were stacked four high, and everywhere. Toxic Tootsie Rolls, standing on end, more rows deep than Crane dared guess. In their midst was a sprawling warehouse, faded red brick with black windows, its loading-dock area clear, but otherwise surrounded by fifty-five-gallon barrels.

And the barrels looked sick. Piled haphazardly, unlabelled, many of them pockmarked, stained by unknown fluids that had streaked them like dried blood. Some of the bottom barrels were so corroded that weeds grew in and out of them, God knew how.

They’d taken the New Jersey Turnpike to Elizabeth, and Boone had guided the Datsun down this industrial waterfront stretch lined with storage tanks of gasoline and natural liquid gas that loomed like silver UFOs; the air hung with the smell of industry. At the end of this unshaded lane was Chemical Disposal Works, this Disneyland of waste drums they were now wandering around, like tourists, complete with camera.

“I thought you said you’d already been here,” Crane said, uneasy that she was strolling around at two in the afternoon, and a sunny one at that, taking pictures of what had to be a criminal operation.

“Sure,” Boone said. She was cheerful today, her long hair pulled back by a bright yellow headband, an incongruity next to her faded denim jacket and jeans and black-on-white NO NUKES sweatshirt. “But last time I was here they only had twenty thousand barrels. I’d say they’re up to thirty, now.”

“I mean, this is illegal, right?”

“I can take pictures here if I want. They don’t have any no trespassing sign up, that I can see. We didn’t climb a fence to get in.”

“I’m not talking about that. I’m talking about this.” He gestured to the barrels stacked on either side of the cinder drive they were walking along; the warehouse was up ahead, fifty yards.

She shrugged. “I contacted the Solid Waste Administration about it.”

“And?”

“I was told this was a licensed facility.”

“Jesus.”

“I sent photos I took, and never heard anything. So I called back and was told Chemical Disposal Works had been ‘administratively required’ to clean up their site, within a ‘reasonable amount of time.’ ”

“When was that?”

“Three months ago.”

They had reached the warehouse. No one seemed to be around. Boone took pictures of the loading-dock area; there were no trucks present, however, just a battered-looking tan station wagon, which indicated perhaps someone was around. Crane was getting nervous.

“What’s in those things, anyway?” Crane asked.

“The barrels? Who knows. Could be anything. Solvents. Plasticizers. Nitric acid. Cyanide. Pesticides. You know.”

“That sounds... dangerous.”

“You might say that. If they got certain compounds in ’em, exposure to the air could explode them.”

“Explode.”

“It’s happened before. Not here, but it’s happened.”

“Does Kemco use this place?”

“I don’t know. I just know I wanted you to see this place. It’s not the only one of its kind, you know.”

“I’m convinced,” he said. “It’s a real eyesore. Can we leave?”

“In a minute.”

She was still at it with the Nikon.

Despite the sun, it was chilly. Crane buried his hands in his jacket pockets. The air here had a funny smell; not like the acrid industrial odor he’d noticed earlier, but something not unlike an unpleasant perfume, and reminiscent at the same time of rubber.

To the left of the loading dock a door opened. A short, stocky man in a blue quilted work jacket and brown slacks leaned out. He had a pale face in which thick black streaks that were eyebrows obscured all else.

He yelled at them: “Hey! What’s the fuckin’ idea?”

Boone stopped taking pictures and gave the man, who was about ten feet away, a bigger smile than she’d given Crane so far and said, “We’re taking some pictures for our school paper. We’re trying for a mood, here, you know?”

The eyes below the bushy black streaks narrowed: the guy didn’t seem to be buying Boone as a teenager. It seemed a little lame to Crane, too, actually, but he didn’t figure at this point he had much choice but to go along with it.

He moved toward the man, who was still in the doorway, and got between Boone and the guy, blocking her from view — Crane figured he had a better chance of passing for a school kid than she did — and said, “We’re going for contrasts, like, uh, things that’ll look neat in black and white.”

“Horseshit,” the man said, and moved forward, brushing Crane aside, and pointing a finger at Boone like a pissed-off father. He stopped in front of her, his finger almost touching her nose.

“I remember you,” he said. “You were around here last summer asking questions. Taking pictures. Right before the state came down on our butts.”

Boone kept smiling, but the manner of it changed.

The guy returned her smile, but his was as heavy with sarcasm as hers. “Honey,” he said, “it’s been many moons since you were a teenager.”

“Go fuck yourself,” Boone told him.

The guy didn’t take that well. He grunted, and reached at the camera with one hand, latching onto one of her arms with the other, and squeezed. Boone yelped. But she didn’t let loose of the camera.

Crane grabbed the guy by a depressingly solid bicep and tugged, but the guy didn’t give any ground.

“Let her alone,” Crane said, still tugging, still getting nowhere. “Let her alone, will you? We’re leaving now, all right?”

The guy turned away from Boone, though he still held her by the arm, and said, with a spray of bad breath that almost matched the rubbery perfume of the air around them, “You’re goddamn fucking well told you’re leaving, but the film in that fucking camera isn’t,” and he ripped the camera out of her hands, opened the back of it and tore the film out, and flung the film against a nearby wall of barrels.

Then he handed the camera back to Boone and smiled and nodded and Boone swung a small fist at his face and connected, leaving the man’s mouth bloody, the red looking garish in his pale face. He pushed her face with the heel of his hand, like Cagney in the old movie, but minus the grapefruit.

Boone was on the ground, but she wasn’t hurt; she was sitting there swearing up at the guy, who was laughing at her, sort of gently, and Crane swung a fist into the man’s stomach, and surprisingly, doubled him over.

If they had run for it, then, it might have been over, but Crane got greedy. He took another swing, toward the guy’s face this time, and the guy batted it away, even while doubled over, and then came out swinging himself, first into Crane’s stomach, then into the side of his face, and Crane was unconscious for a while.

When he woke up, a minute or so later, Boone was cradling his head in her lap, sitting on the cinders, saying, “Crane? Crane?”

“Is he gone?”

“He went inside.”

“Good. Can we go now?”

“Yes.”

“He didn’t break your camera did he?”

“No. The film is good and exposed, though. Did he break anything of yours?”

“My self-esteem. Otherwise, I’m fine.”

“You’re going to have a nasty bruise.”

“No kidding.”

She helped him up; he felt a little dizzy. She went and got her camera off the ground while he tried to stay on his feet. Then she walked him toward the Datsun.

“Go fuck yourself,” Crane said.

“What?”

“That’s what you told that guy. I can’t believe you sometimes.”

“I guess I do lack tact,” Boone admitted. “Are you starting to understand?”

They were at the car.

“Understand what?”

She opened the door on the rider’s side. “The seriousness of this.”

He touched the side of his face. “I understand pain, if that’s what you mean.” He got in the car. She went around the driver’s side and got in.

“I also understand why that guy was pissed off at us,” Crane said. “Like anybody in his place would be.”

“You can rationalize anything, can’t you, Crane? Even getting the shit beat out of you.”

She started the car. Crane looked back at the barrels, standing on top of each other, as if to get a better look at them as they drove away.

Chapter Twelve

They were parked alongside the road again. The midnight skyline of the Kemco plant was a study in plastic and steel and soft-focus green-yellow-aqua light, against a backdrop of smoke and smokestacks.

“Why doesn’t it make any noise?” Crane asked. “It’s creepy that it doesn’t make any noise.”

“It isn’t a noisy operation,” Boone shrugged. She was leaned back casually in the Datsun’s driver’s seat, munching on sunflower seeds. The near-darkness they were sitting in made for interesting shadows on her face; she looked quite lovely, for a girl, woman, eating sunflower seeds.

“What are they making in there, anyway?” he asked her.

“Herbicides. Pesticides. Plastics. Lots of things.”

“Useful things,” he countered.

“Right. Like Agent Orange.”

“Are they still making that?”

“Yes, and PCB, until a year ago.”

“Isn’t that a little unfair?”

“Bringing up the recent past? I don’t think so. I don’t think there should be a statute of limitations, just because the murder you committed was ten years ago.”

Crane said nothing.

“I don’t object to everything they make. I know a lot of farmers depend on the stuff... though personally I can’t see eating anything that isn’t organically grown.”

“Jeez, who’d have guessed?”

“What’s with you, Crane?”

“What do you mean?”

“You’re really on the rag tonight.”

“I guess I am. Sorry.”

They sat. Boone ate her sunflower seeds, watched the loading-dock area. It seemed a quiet night: not a Kemco truck to be seen. Crane was still studying the Kemco plant itself, fighting ambivalent feelings. His face hurt, from where he’d been hit.

“What are those things?” he asked her, pointing.

“Those fat silo things? Storage vats.”

“What’s in them?”

“Waste, I guess.”

“They’re fucking huge.”

“That they are.”

“You can’t be right. There isn’t that much waste coming out of this one plant.”

“You been reading my research material, Crane. You’re up on how much hazardous waste is produced in this country every year.”

Yes he was. Thirty-two million tons. But somehow it seemed obnoxious of her to mention it right now.

“I also know,” Crane said, “that this plant, like most chemical processing plants, has its own waste-disposal unit. They are not dumping all that shit illegally.”

“Of course they aren’t. Most of it gets dumped in the river.”

“What river?”

“The Delaware River.”

“Where’s that?”

She pointed back behind the Kemco plant. “We can drive straight into it, if you like... we aren’t a mile from it.”

Feeling foolish, he said, “The stuff’s processed when it goes in, isn’t it? It’s probably cleaner than the river it’s going into.”

“Maybe. But that’s not what we’re here for. We’re here to find out about the stuff they can’t run through their disposal unit. The stuff they have to dump.”

“Yeah. Okay.”

“Something’s wrong, isn’t it, Crane?”

“No. Yes. I’m just... trying not to get caught up in your... crusade. It’s dangerous, what you’re doing. It’s not what a journalist does.”

“What does a journalist do?”

“You keep an open mind when you look into something. You don’t set out to prove something. You set out to find the facts, whatever they are.”

“Yes, and your problem is you can’t face facts, when you find ’em.”

“No! My problem is keeping myself reminded, in the midst of your leftist hysteria, that there are two sides to everything. Even to Kemco.”

“It’s that talk you had with Mrs. Woll, isn’t it? That’s what’s bothering you.”

“No.”

“I think we should talk about that.”

“I told you what she told me.”

“But you can’t handle it, can you?”

The windshield was fogged up from their talking; that was okay, because if anyone drove by, it would reinforce the idea that he and Boone were making out. Which was hardly the case at the moment. He turned to her. Calm. Rational.

He said, “Mrs. Woll opened up to me, a little bit, possibly because I’m male, and also because I know how to interview better than you. But for the most part, she didn’t say anything that wasn’t on the tape of your conversation with her, a year ago.”

“There was the news that she worked with Mary Beth at Kemco.”

“News to me. You knew about it, ’cause Mary Beth would’ve told you. You just wanted me to find out for myself.”

“Maybe,” she smiled. “When I interviewed her originally, not long after her husband’s ‘suicide,’ she was a secretary at City Hall. Had been for some years. Since then, she’s been given a, shall we say, enviable position at Kemco. Head of the secretarial pool, no less.”

“And into that, I suppose, you read all kinds of conspiratorial under- and overtones. Tell me, did Kemco kill Kennedy?”

“Which one?”

“Boone, Kemco offering an employee’s widow a position with the company could be a strictly benevolent act on their part. It isn’t necessarily anything sinister.”

“She was qualified for the job, I grant you. But surely you find it slightly suspicious...”

Crane looked away from her. Said nothing.

“Of course you do,” Boone said. “That’s what’s bothering you. Isn’t it?”

He sighed, shook his head. Turned and looked at her.

“Yes,” he admitted. “That, and that we’ve made a connection between Mary Beth and one of the other ‘suicide’ victims. An indirect connection, but a connection.”

Boone nodded. “She’s connected to another victim, too: Paul Meyer. He was an exec, and Mary Beth was the darling of the secretarial pool, where the execs were concerned.”

“Which could explain how she stumbled onto some high-level shenanigans. Well. Anyway, I’ll be talking to Meyer’s wife tomorrow; we might get some insights, there. This is all very flimsy, from an evidence standpoint, you know.”

“Maybe. But maybe we should both try to keep an open mind.”

“Yeah. Maybe you’re right.”

“A truck.”

“Huh?”

“That could be a truck.”

Light caught the corner of Crane’s eye and he turned. Down the road, about a mile, were the high-beams of what appeared to be a truck, approaching Kemco.

“Get in the back seat,” Boone told him.

He did. She passed the Nikon to him.

The truck — it was a truck — came into view. It was a big flatbed with the sides built up; a tarp was flung over the back of it, tied on. This they saw as it pulled into the graveled loading area.

“Did you notice the clearing booth was empty tonight?” Boone asked him.

Crane, in the back seat, feeling nervous, said, “No I didn’t.”

“Well it was.”

“That isn’t one of Kemco’s trucks, is it.”

“It sure isn’t,” Boone said. She was smiling. “It’s an independent. Come to pick something up.”

Chapter Thirteen

Boone drove by the loading-dock area at about twenty-five miles an hour. Crane, out the back window of the Datsun, took half a dozen pictures of the flatbed truck, which was waiting near the big green tin shed while one of the two men in its cab, a burly guy in a thermal jacket, hopped out to talk to a Kemco hard hat, who was gesturing, giving instructions for where the truck was to go to pick up its load.

The Kemco plant receded behind them.

Boone looked at him in the rearview mirror. “How did you do?”

“I’m not sure,” he said, crawling back up in front, giving her the camera as she drove. “I hope there was enough light.”

“You had it wide open, didn’t you? There was plenty of available light. I’m sure they’ll come out.”

Crane hoped so. It was a clear night, with stars and a moon; that and the lights of Kemco itself should’ve made for some good shots.

“What now?” he asked.

“Wait half an hour and go back.”

She pulled over to the side again; they were about a mile down from Kemco, now. She turned the motor off.

“Don’t we have enough already?” Crane asked.

“You’re kidding. We’re just getting started.”

“If you say so.”

“Are you nervous?”

“Of course I’m nervous. I’m scared shitless. Aren’t you?”

“Somewhat. There’s really nothing to worry about.”

“You must not’ve seen the three-hundred-pound trucker that climbed out of that rig.”

“Nobody spotted us. Nobody’s going to spot us.”

“Next on the program, I suppose, is some shots of the truck pulling out of Kemco, loaded up.”

“Right.”

“Surely we’re not just going to go tap dancing by again, are we?”

“No. We’ll pull into their parking lot. We can get some good shots from there and we won’t be noticed. I’ve got a zoom lens in the glove compartment. I’ll take the next shots. You drive.”

“All right. We might as well switch places now.”

He got out of the car and walked around to her side. The night air felt chill but he rather liked it; it was like splashing his face with water in the morning to wake up — it reminded him he was still alive. He opened the car door for her and she got out.

They stood there for a while, leaning against the front of the car, enjoying the stillness, their backs to Kemco, looking out at the night. Pale ivory moonlight bathed the farmland around them with a quiet beauty. It didn’t look so bad on Boone, either.

Half an hour was up.

Crane drove back to Kemco, pulling into the parking lot, which was, as it had been last night, nearly full; but they found a place, and from it they could see the American flag, which Kemco flew twenty-four hours a day, and, just across the way, the loading-dock area. The truck was nowhere to be seen.

“Did we miss it?” Crane asked her.

“I don’t think so.”

“Couldn’t it have pulled out and gone down the other direction?”

“Possibly. If so, it wasn’t loaded up; hasn’t been time for that.”

“Where is it, then?”

“Somewhere on the Kemco grounds picking up its cargo. My guess is they didn’t want to store the stuff in their normal loading area. What they’re doing here isn’t something they want to advertise, you know, not even to their own employees.”

They sat and watched.

Boone opened the glove compartment and got the zoom lens out and began attaching it to the Nikon. Crane got a glimpse of something else in the glove compartment, something that, although metallic, didn’t look anything like a camera attachment.

“Have you got a gun in there?” he asked her.

She didn’t look up from the Nikon she was fussing with. “I might have.”

“You might have a gun in there.”

“Okay, I have a gun in there. All right?”

“How’d it get there? Or did it just grow there, organically?”

“I put it there, what do you think?”

“Boone, that’s it. That’s the end.” He started turning the key in the ignition.

She reached for his hand and stopped him. Gently.

“The gun used to be Patrick’s. He left it with me.”

“He took the furniture, and left the gun. What a guy.”

“He didn’t leave it on purpose. He forgot it. Look, I don’t like the damn thing. I never liked it when Patrick kept it in the house.”

“Which is why you keep it in the car.”

“Crane, think. You wouldn’t be here if you didn’t figure there was a good possibility Mary Beth was murdered.”

He said nothing.

“And if that is what happened to Mary Beth,” she continued, “and if those other ‘suicide’ victims were murdered, too, then looking into it, like we’re doing, could be a little risky, right?”

He said nothing.

“So,” she said, “we just might have to protect ourselves.”

She took the gun — a .38 — out of the glove compartment.

“Give me that!” Crane said.

She did.

“This isn’t loaded, is it?” he asked.

“Of course it’s loaded.”

He stuck it under the seat.

“You got a choice, next time,” he said, his face feeling hot. “You can bring me along, or the gun. Not both.”

“There’s the truck again.”

He turned and looked back at the loading area. The flatbed, its tarp tied over a full load, was wheeling out. No one, not even the hard hat that had been there before, was around; no one checked them out: the clearing booth was still empty.

Boone sat recording all this with the Nikon.

The truck turned right onto the blacktop, away from them.

“I better drive.” Boone said.

“No,” said Crane. “I can handle it.”

He waited a few minutes and then pulled out of the Kemco lot, after the flatbed.

“One of its back lights is broken,” Boone said, pointing.

Ahead, one of the taillights on the rig glowed white.

“That’s a break,” she said. “You can stay back and still not lose sight of him.”

Crane sat forward, back straight, hands gripping the wheel, intensity squeezing the nervousness, the fear, right out of him. A couple times he felt himself creeping up too close on the truck — which was going a nice legal fifty-five — and Boone eased him back. There were a few other cars on the road, and occasionally he was able to put one of them between him and the truck, the tarp on the back of which was flapping loose a bit, giving them a glimpse now and then of the black drums of waste sitting bunched in the back like illegal immigrants.

“Don’t sweat losing him,” she said. “I think I know where he’s headed.”

And she did.

From the blacktop that wove through Garden State farmland, the truck went to a four-lane highway, where it was easy to stay way back and not lose track of the white light on the truck’s tail.

“You know where he’s headed now?” Crane asked Boone.

“Maybe,” she said.

Soon the truck turned off onto a toll bridge.

They pulled off. Waited till the truck was across. Then followed.

Once over the bridge, Boone said, “Welcome to Pennsylvania, Crane.”

They were still on a four-lane.

“I’ve lost him,” Crane said, hitting the steering wheel with the heel of his hand.

“No,” said Boone, pointing. “He’s just turning off. Up to the right. See him?”

And there was the white light of the rig as it turned onto an off-ramp.

Crane followed suit.

After fifteen miles of sporadic two-way traffic on a primary road, the truck turned off onto a blacktop.

“Has he spotted us?” Crane asked.

“No.”

“He could be leading us out into nowhere to deal with us, you know.”

“I don’t think so. You’ve stayed well back. He hasn’t seen us.”

“I’m going past it anyway.”

He did, not turning off at the blacktop, glancing down it as they drove by to see if the truck had pulled over, to wait for them.

But it hadn’t: the white eye was getting smaller as the truck lumbered down the blacktop.

Crane turned around on a side road and went back. Followed the truck down the blacktop.

Or tried to.

“This time I did lose him,” he said. “I got overcautious, damnit.”

“Keep going.”

“It’s no use. I blew it. He’s gone.”

“What’s that?”

“What?”

“There’s a sign up there.”

And there was: white letters on green, SANITARY LANDFILL, with an arrow to the right, and another blacktop.

Crane pulled in. Slowly. Just around the corner was a second sign, black letters on white: DEAD END.

He paused. “What do you think?”

“We’ve come this far,” she said.

He drove down the narrow blacktop. The clear, moonlit night gave them a good view of the land on either side: at the right the land was flat, with bare, black clay, ground that had been turned over, like farmland prepared for planting; at the left another stretch of similar ground dropped off into a deep man-made gulley, the earth scarred by bulldozer tracks, the ground ripped at various seams, as if the aftermath of an earthquake.

“Cut your lights,” Boone told him.

He did.

They came around a bend and the road ended and opened out into a graveled area, just in front of a chain-wire fence with gates and two signs, a small one — ALL TRUCKS MUST BE COVERED — and a larger one — SANITARY LANDFILL, with a permit number listed underneath, operating hours (8 AM to 4 PM Monday thru Friday, 8 AM to Noon Saturday), and regulations (Public access during operating hours only; Scavenging not permitted; Unauthorized disposal punishable by $100 fine). Beyond the chain-wire fence were a couple of tin sheds, a large one at left for equipment storage, probably, a smaller one at right that was apparently the office. Several bulldozers stood unattended. At the left and right were high ridges of earth that blocked anything else along the horizon from view, from this vantage point at least. In the center was the drop-off of a landfill ditch.

The flatbed was already inside the chain-wire fence. The two guys from the truck — the bruiser in the thermal jacket and his partner, a tall skinny guy in denim work clothes and heavy gloves — got down out of the truck and were joined by a couple of guys in hard hats and work jackets. One of the hard hats began using a small forklift truck to unload the fifty-five-gallon barrels from the flatbed. The truckers helped him, guided the drums onto the forklift. The other hard hat watched and waited.

Boone used her Nikon.

It took over an hour to unload the truck and haul each drum over and dump it. Crane wondered why he and Boone hadn’t left yet; but she was still taking pictures, onto her second roll, now.

Then the hard hat who’d been standing, watching, climbed up on one of the bulldozers and started it up. It rumbled over to the landfill ditch. From where Crane and Boone were they couldn’t see it, exactly, but it was clear what the bulldozer was doing: the drums were being covered with a layer of dirt.

“Those truckers won’t be needing to hang around,” Crane whispered. “We better take off before they do.”

“Okay,” Boone said, still snapping the Nikon.

Crane backed out, around the corner, turning the car around in the road in five long, slow turns, expecting the headlights of the flatbed to bear down on them momentarily.

But that didn’t happen.

And they exited the blacktop onto the other blacktop and drove and, as they neared the four-lane that would lead them to the toll bridge and New Jersey, Boone said, “There’s a motel over there. What do you think? I’m dead.”

“I wouldn’t mind stopping myself,” he said.

They took a room. It had two double beds. Boone took a shower, came out in a towel and discreetly got into one of the beds. She then began snoring.

He smiled. He didn’t blame her for being tired: it was four-thirty in the morning, and the intensity of what they’d just been through had been draining.

He didn’t bother with a shower; he was too exhausted. He got in the other bed and was just about asleep when he heard a truck out on the highway. Just a truck going by.

He went out to the Datsun, got the gun out from under the seat, and slipped it under the bed.

Then he slept.

Chapter Fourteen

Her voice woke him.

She wasn’t talking to him; she was on the phone, checking in with the neighbor she’d left Billy with, another young divorced woman who’d been very nice about looking after the boy from midnight till two each night, no questions asked. Boone had explained to her friend that any one of the nights might turn into an all-night thing, as it had yesterday.

“Billy got off to school all right?” she was saying. “Good. Thank you, Kate, you’re a pal.”

Boone was sitting on the edge of the bed Crane was in, using the phone on the nightstand between the two beds. Her back was to him. Bare back.

Soon she hung up and went over and got back in her own bed, sitting up, blankets down around her waist. She stretched and yawned. Scratched her head. Her hair was tousled. Her breasts were not large, not small. Firm white breasts, delicately veined; pert pink tips. He noted this through eyes that pretended to be shut.

She smiled at him. “You’re awake, aren’t you, Crane?”

He opened his eyes. Smiled sheepishly.

She didn’t cover her breasts.

“Good morning,” she said.

“Hi,” he said. Sitting up.

She got out of bed and walked bare-ass into the bathroom. Water ran in the sink.

She came back out, smiling. Her body was very lean, with a high, rather bony rib cage, making her breasts seem larger than they were. Her pubic triangle was wispy, like a young girl’s.

She sat on the edge of the bed, hands on her knees. “Go rinse out your mouth,” she said. “You’ll feel better. It’s not like having toothbrush and paste, but it’ll help.”

He did so. He was in his shorts but still felt embarrassed walking in front of her, knowing she was looking him over just as he had her. When he came back, she was in bed. His bed.

He got in with her and kissed her, tentatively. She kissed him back, not at all tentatively, and put one of his hands on one of her breasts. The nipple hardened. He was already hard. They kissed and stroked each other for a while. Made love.

It was over rather quickly, too quickly, and he rolled off her, feeling empty.

“Sorry,” he said.

“What are you apologizing about?” she said. “That was nice.”

He sat up in bed and stared at the blank TV screen across the room.

A minute went by, and she said, leaning on an elbow, studying him, “You’re going morose on me, aren’t you?”

“What?”

“You’re feeling guilty. You’re thinking about Mary Beth and feeling guilty.”

“Don’t be silly.”

“You think you cheated on her, don’t you?”

“Boone, please.”

She touched his shoulder. Not wanting to, he looked at her. Her smile was faint, sad, understanding; it was a smile he couldn’t evade.

He looked away and said, “Don’t be with anybody else, she said. ‘Don’t be with anybody but me.’ I can still hear her saying it.”

“She’s gone, Crane.”

“No. Never.”

He cried for a while; she kept her hand on his shoulder.

She said, “This was the first time I’ve done it since Patrick.”

He looked at her again. “No kidding?”

She wiped his eyes with a corner of the sheet, smiling, her chin crinkling. “No kidding.”

“I thought you hippie types slept around.”

“Don’t believe everything you hear. I was with two other boys, before Patrick. Nobody since. Until now.”

“I’ve never been with anybody but Mary Beth. Till now.”

“No wonder you’re feeling guilty.”

“I’m not feeling guilty. Exactly.”

“I know you loved her, Crane. And me, you don’t even like, exactly. But this was bound to happen, and I’d rather it happen here than at home where Billy might see us.”

“Now who’s sounding guilty?”

“I just want it clear that when we get back to the house, you’re to keep to your sleeping bag across the hall.”

“Fine. I like sleeping on the floor. It’s natural. Organic, even.”

“Smart-ass. I’m not saying it won’t happen between us again. Billy’s at school all day, you know.”

He leaned over and kissed her, briefly. They exchanged friendly smiles.

“Looks like we’re starting to get along,” he said.

“Why not? We’re quite the team. We’re about to bring a corporate giant to its knees.”

“Are we?”

“I think so. I think we really got something last night.”

“The ‘smoking gun’ you said you needed.”

“Exactly.”

“So where do we go from here?”

“I admit I’m tempted to sit on this, save it and use it in my book, not break it till then. But the right thing to do is contact the proper authorities.”

“Which are?”

“There’s a couple of possibilities. New Jersey’s a heavily industrialized state. It has more than its share of problems of this sort, but it’s also ahead of a lot of states in dealing with those problems.”

“So you’ll be taking your photographs and your suspicions to a state agency, as opposed to the feds.”

“The Environmental Protection Agency, you mean? They basically just provide guidelines to state agencies, though in a way they’re who I’ll be going to. I plan to go to the Hazardous Waste Strike Force, in Princeton.”

“That sounds like a cop show.”

“It is, sort of. It’s an investigative unit, a joint effort by the EPA and the state of New Jersey. They’re doing some good things.”

“But they’ve never nailed Kemco.”

“They never tried, as far as I know. And they’re relatively new. Which means they’re tackling the really blatant offenders. It’s a big problem, Crane. It’s been estimated something like 80 % of the waste shipped in New Jersey is illegally dumped. It’s a multimillion-dollar racket.”

“What we saw last night was just one truck. That’s no multimillion-dollar operation.”

“First, you got to think of what Kemco saves. They pay maybe fifty bucks a barrel to the hauler, which is sure cheaper than processing that foul fucking shit. And then the hauler takes it and dumps it in a landfill, like last night, or just on the ground someplace or even along a roadside. So last night they dumped, what? Fifty or sixty drums? That’s approaching $3000 for that one load. Let’s say that truck is picking up just one illegal load per week. That’s $150,000 in one year.”

“Jesus. This is starting to sound like organized crime.”

“Of course it is. It’s the goddamn Mafia, or anyway I wouldn’t be surprised if it was.”

“What happens when these people get caught?”

“The haulers? Sometimes nothing. You want to know how to make a million dollars? Rent some land. Don’t buy it, rent it. Get a permit to pick up and store drums of waste on your land. Let the drums pile up. Wait till you have twenty or thirty thousand drums sitting there, full of Christ knows what. And then go bankrupt and go away. Let the state worry about cleaning up after you. Just lean back in your cabana chair and sip your Piña Colada and enjoy the Bahamas breeze.”

“Is that the game Chemical Disposal Works is playing?”

“Probably. They haven’t gone bankrupt yet, but give ’em time.”

“That’s scary.”

“You’re goddamn right it’s scary. But the way I figure it, you just write the haulers off. Forget about them. They’re just lowlife fucking criminals, and there will always be lowlife fucking criminals around to do the shitwork for the likes of Kemco. It’s Kemco and the other corporations like it that have to be stopped. That have to be made to clean up their acts or else.”

“Or else what?”

“Criminal penalties. Civil penalties. People are going to jail, Crane.”

“That’s it, then, isn’t it?”

“What?”

“This is what Mary Beth and the others were onto. The midnight hauling. It is something that could’ve got them killed.”

“Of course. Of course! What do you think I’ve been talking about for the last three days?”

“But what do you have on them, Boone, really? Just some photos. A truck coming out of the Kemco plant. A truck being unloaded at a landfill. Photos that could’ve been taken any time.”

“No, Crane. We have pictures of a truck leaving Kemco at night, driving to an out-of-state landfill at night, where fifty or sixty drums were dumped. All very suspicious. And I have a feeling that the license plates on that truck will lead to some independent hauler with a less-than-spotless reputation. No, we have quite a lot for the Hazardous Waste boys to go on.”

“It still strikes me as...”

“Let me guess. Thin? It strikes you as thin? Pearl Harbor would strike you as thin, Crane. Understand this much: New Jersey has a manifest system, and what that means is paperwork; every drum of hazardous waste that exits a plant like Kemco’s is supposed to be recorded, from ‘cradle to grave,’ which is to say from Kemco, to the hauler, to the landfill. Do you suppose all the correct paperwork was filed for last night’s moonlight dumping? Of course not.”

“Jesus.”

“Starting to dawn on you, is it Crane? Just what it is we’re into? Still want me to leave the gun at home?”

Crane managed an embarrassed smile as he reached under the bed, pulled the gun out and handed it to her. “Maybe you ought to start wearing this in your belt,” he told her.

She returned his smile, put the gun on the nightstand, with a clunk. “There’s nothing to worry about,” she said. “Kemco doesn’t know we’re alive.”

“They knew Mary Beth was alive. And now she isn’t.”

“Well at least you seem to be accepting it.”

“What? That Mary Beth’s dead? Or that ‘Kemco killed her.’ People killed her, Boone. Corporations don’t kill people. People kill people.”

“You sound like a bumper sticker.”

“Fuck you,” he said, good-naturedly.

“I thought you’d never ask,” she said.

Fifteen minutes later, as they were dressing, Boone said, “I don’t hear you apologizing, this time around.”

“What’s to apologize for? I was terrific.”

“You weren’t bad. Where’s the camera?”

“Why? What did you have in mind?”

“No, seriously.”

“Didn’t you bring it in with you?”

“I was so tired last night all I could think about was flopping into bed. I must’ve left it in the car. Anyway, I want to get that film developed this afternoon. Do you want to come to Princeton with me?”

“No. I still have some people in Greenwood to talk to. I think you can handle the ‘Hazardous Waste Strike Force’ by yourself... though the notion of seeing you trying to work with some Jack Webb type tempts me to go along.”

“You can stay home and baby-sit with Billy.”

“Ouch.”

They were ready to leave.

Crane opened the door for her. “There’s a coffee shop down by the motel office. You want some breakfast?”

“Sure. Walk down or drive?”

“Drive. Why not be lazy?”

They got in the car.

The camera was gone.

Chapter Fifteen

“Shit!” Boone said.

They had searched the car thoroughly, looked all around it, underneath it, checked with the motel manager, everything. The camera was gone. Now they stood next to the car, one on either side of it, its doors standing open. Stood and stared at the car as if it might speak to them. It didn’t.

“Shit, shit, shit,” she said.

“Boone,” Crane said.

“Cocksuckers. The cocksuckers!”

A man a few doors down from their room was coming out of his; he looked at them with wide eyes, having heard what Boone just said, then walked quickly past them toward the coffee shop, looking at the ground as he did.

“Boone,” Crane said. “Please settle down.”

“Settle down my ass!”

He closed the car doors.

She was pacing. Then she stopped and pointed a finger at him.

“Now what do you think, skeptic? Now what do you think?”

“I think we ought to have some breakfast.”

“You think we ought to have some breakfast. You’re unbelievable.”

“Let’s have some breakfast and talk about this before we head back.”

She paced some more.

Then she said, “Okay. All right.”

She walked ahead of him. She walked fast, propelled by anger. He followed her into the small coffee shop and they took a booth by a window overlooking the highway. Trucks were rolling by, normally an innocuous enough sight; not today.

He ordered coffee and some biscuits; she asked for tea, in a tone of voice that scared the waitress.

“Take it easy, Boone.”

“Jesus you’re a wimp.”

“Boone. Just settle down.”

“Aren’t you mad, Crane? Aren’t you the slightest bit pissed off?”

“Of course I am. It’s just at the moment, you seem to have the hysteria market cornered.”

She let go a wry little smile at that; couldn’t help herself.

“You’ve made your point,” she conceded. “But do you realize what this means?”

“What does it mean.”

“Somebody knows what we’re up to. It means somebody’s trying to stop us.”

He took one of her hands in two of his. He smiled at her in such a way as to remind her, he hoped, that they’d been in bed together not too long ago.

“Boone,” he said, “I admit it’s possible we were seen by those truckers last night. That they followed us and stole the camera.”

She pulled her hand away. “Possible? What else could it have been?”

“Maybe your ex is on to your Kemco investigation. Maybe we were seen in your Datsun staking out the place.”

She thought about that.

“You think it might have been somebody from Patrick’s end of it who took the camera? Not the truckers.”

“Possibly,” he shrugged. “We were following the truck. Maybe somebody was following us.”

She thought about that, too.

The coffee and biscuits came; the tea, too.

“And,” Crane said, quietly, carefully, “there’s another possibility.”

“Which is?”

“Somebody walked by and saw a camera in the car and stole it.”

“What?”

“Back in Iowa, when you leave a camera in an unlocked car overnight, you aren’t shocked when it’s gone the next morning. Is it different in New Jersey?”

“Pennsylvania.”

“Well, that makes all the difference.”

“Somebody happened along and just stole it, you mean. Just coincidentally stole it.”

“Boone, there’s nothing coincidental about a hundred-and-fifty-buck camera getting stolen out of an unlocked car.”

She slammed a small but china-rattling fist against the tabletop between them. People were looking at them.

“You just won’t believe it, will you, Crane? You just aren’t capable of accepting what’s really happening here.”

He sipped his coffee. Waited for some of the eyes to stop staring. Then he smiled at her. Calmly. “It’s not that. I’m frightened, if that’s what you want to hear. I personally agree with you that somebody, those truckers or your ex-husband or somebody related to Mary Beth’s ‘suicide,’ took that camera out of your Datsun while we slept a few feet away, and it further frightens me, it frightens fuck out of me in fact, to think that we might never’ve stopped sleeping, if whoever it was had come those few feet closer.”

“I’m glad you’re finally looking at this rationally.”

“Rationally? I’m telling you my emotional reaction, Boone. Gut feelings. My mind tells me, rationally tells me, that the camera was probably stolen by some doper looking for something to hock.”

“Shit!” she said.

People were looking at them again. Crane glared at them and they stopped looking.

She was leaning against the tabletop, her hands on her forehead.

“You know I’m right, don’t you?” he said.

“You’re not right. Somebody wanted that film destroyed. That’s why the camera was stolen.”

“Maybe. I’ll go as far as probably. But we can’t prove it. That’s the point I’m trying to make. We have nothing, Boone. Not a goddamn thing.”

They sat in silence for a while. He finished his coffee and biscuits. She drank two cups of tea. Then without a word she rose, picking up the check and paying for it, and walked out to her car. He followed her. She acted as if he weren’t there.

They were well into New Jersey before she acknowledged his presence again.

“I’m still going to Princeton this afternoon,” she said, driving.

“I don’t know that it’ll do any good.”

“I want to tell the Strike Force what happened. What we saw. That we took pictures and our camera was stolen.”

“Okay.”

“It might be enough to make them go out and check the landfill. See what sort of shit is in those drums.”

“Boone, if the truckers did see us leaving the site, and followed us, don’t you think they’d have gone back and dug the drums up and hauled them away?”

“Maybe. But I have to try, Crane. Do you understand that?”

“Of course. I’m on your side, you know.”

She smiled over at him. Reached over and touched his face. “I know. I don’t mean to treat you like the enemy.”

“Assuming there is an enemy,” Crane said.

“Are you starting up again?”

“No. I’m not going to Princeton with you, though.”

“I know. You’re going to look after Billy for me, and talk to a few people.”

“Right.”

“I should be back by midnight.”

“Good. Uh, Boone.”

“Yes?”

“Nothing.”

He took the gun out of his jacket pocket and put it back in her glove compartment.

Chapter Sixteen

Mrs. Paul Meyer lived in a pale yellow house in the same housing development as Mary Beth’s family. Just a block down, in fact. The major difference between the two houses, other than color, was the For Sale sign in the Meyer lawn.

Mrs. Meyer had told Crane on the phone that he was free to drop by any time after lunch and before her children got home from school. It was now two in the afternoon.

He knocked on the door.

She opened the door slowly and looked at Crane the same way. She was slender, about thirty, with short dark hair and piercing, pretty eyes as dark as her hair; her lips were a thin red line as she appraised him, tilting her head back a bit so she could look down on him, a hand poised at the base of her neck, around which hung a thin gold chain, which settled comfortably in the soft folds of silk of her cream-colored blouse.

The glass of the storm door still separating them, she said, “Yes?” and he told her who he was and she gave him a small twitch of a smile and let him in.

This split-level house was built from the same plans as Mary Beth’s family’s home, and it was disturbing to be in a living room so much like the one he sat in with Mary Beth’s mother a few days ago. Even the furniture was similarly arranged — the couch was opposite the front door as you came in — but on a closer look it began to look quite different. The furniture, here, was antique: walnut, mostly. Expensive. Tasteful.

Like Mrs. Meyer, who stood in front of him with a glacially polite smile, one hand on a trim hip (she wore rather clingy black slacks), the other gesturing toward the brocade couch.

He sat. So did she. Across from him, in a love seat.

“I’m sorry about your fiancée, Mr. Crane,” she said.

You couldn’t tell it by her voice.

“Thank you,” he said. “I appreciate your willingness to see me.”

“I don’t understand why you want to talk to me, actually. I do understand that we have something in common.” She got up and walked to the coffee table between them, where she took a cigarette from a silver box and lit it. Pulled smoke into her lungs, let it out, sat down again. “My Paul killed himself. Your Mary Beth killed herself. Tragic. But not uncommon.”

Not in Greenwood, anyway, he thought.

“Could I ask you a few questions, Mrs. Meyer?”

“If you like.”

“When did your husband die?”

“Six months ago. He shot himself in the temple.” She smiled. “That’s a punch line you know.”

“Pardon me?”

“Punch line of an old ‘sick’ joke. One man says to the other man, did you hear about Jones? The other man says, no I didn’t. The first man says, killed himself. The second man says, no! how did it happen? The first man says, shot himself in the temple. And the second man says, that’s funny — he didn’t look Jewish.” She smiled again. A forced smile. Her eyes were a little wet.

“I shouldn’t be intruding. I can go...”

“You can go if you like. That little story is as close to coming unglued as I’m going to get. So you don’t have to worry, Mr. Crane.”

“Mrs. Meyer, you and I have more in common than just having someone we loved commit suicide.”

“You presume quite a bit.”

“Pardon?”

“You presume I loved Paul.”

“Didn’t you?”

“Yes. But what does that have to do with you?”

“I better go.”

“If you like. I don’t mean to be rude. Really. I’ve invited you into my home. I’ve agreed to talk with you. It’s just that I want to make clear that I’m not a person to turn to in your hour of grief. I have no free advice for you on how to handle this situation. Just because I happen to be somebody else whose... loved one died of self-inflicted wounds, doesn’t mean...” She stopped herself. Her eyes were getting wet again. She waved some smoke from her cigarette away from her face.

“Mrs. Meyer. I’m not here for that. I’m not here for... group therapy, or something.”

She looked surprised for a moment. “Why are you here, then?”

“As I started to say, we have more in common than just the suicides of Mary Beth and your husband. Or rather I should say that they had more in common than suicide.”

“What do you mean?” The words were clipped.

“They both worked at Kemco.”

“So?”

“Are you aware that there have been five suicides in Greenwood, in not much more than a year? And that all five victims worked for Kemco?”

“A lot of people around here work for Kemco.”

“Five suicides, Mrs. Meyer. Ten times the national average.”

She thought about that a moment. “That’s an interesting random statistic. But I don’t see your point.”

“It just seems suspicious to me, is all. My fiancée was not the type of person who would commit suicide. I doubt she did commit suicide. I think it was something else.”

“Such as what?”

“Something else.”

She got up, put her cigarette out in an ashtray on the coffee table. She sat back down. She and the empty side of the love seat stared at him. “What do you want from me?” she asked.

“I want to ask you a few questions.”

“Ask, then.”

“Did your husband know Mary Beth?”

“I really don’t know.”

“He never mentioned her? She was working out of the secretarial pool.”

“I never heard him mention her. I never heard of her at all, until a friend told me a young woman down the street killed herself. Where is this heading?”

“Do you have any suspicions about your husband’s suicide? If you don’t mind my asking.”

“No, I haven’t any suspicions, and yes I mind.”

“Mrs. Meyer, I have reason to believe Kemco is and has been involved in some illegal practices. I think it’s possible that Mary Beth and possibly your husband and others among those ‘suicides’ may have been well aware of those practices, and... well, now you should be able to see where I’m headed.”

She stood. “There,” she said. She was pointing at the front door. “That’s where you’re headed.”

He got up. “I’ll be glad to leave. I know I’m intruding. Please excuse me and I’ll go.”

“You’ll go, but not till I’ve had my say. My husband killed himself. There’s no doubt in my mind that he did. He had emotional problems, which I’d rather not discuss with a stranger. They were problems that ran deep. He had them before he met me. We tried to work them out together. We failed, or I failed, or maybe he failed. But one night he went in his study, where he sometimes slept, and in the morning I found him dead. By his own hand. By his own hand, Mr. Crane!”

“Please, Mrs. Meyer...”

“Kemco was one of the few things in Paul’s life that he was satisfied with. He was assistant plant manager, and he had a good future... this was just a first, small step for him with the company. I’ll tell you something about Kemco, Mr. Crane. Paul lied to them when he filled out his application forms; he withheld information, namely that he had been in a mental institution, and more than once. This came out, after Paul’s suicide, of course. But they are paying me the full pension due Paul. Which they have no legal obligation to do.”

“Doesn’t that seem suspicious to you?”

“Suspicious?” She raised a tiny fist as if to strike him, then quickly lowered it. “It seems humane. It seems very moral. It does not seem suspicious. Don’t bad-mouth Kemco around me, Mr. Crane. The Kemco people have been kind to me. Generous. I think your suspicions, your accusations, are as irresponsible as they are unfounded.”

“I do have suspicions. But I’m not making any accusations.”

“By implication you are. Mr. Crane. I don’t mean to fly off the handle at you. I’m not a cold person, really. I, if anyone, can understand how you feel. What you’re going through. You can say you didn’t come here for advice, and I said I wouldn’t give you any if you asked. But I do have some. Let go of her. Your fiancée. Let her die. Let her be dead. Accept it. Go on living. Stop this vain attempt to place the blame for what happened on somebody or some thing. Even if someone was to blame, she’d still be dead.”

He couldn’t tell her, didn’t know how to tell her, that this had gone beyond that; that he had started to share Boone’s conviction that there was a criminal conspiracy, here, endangering lives.

So he just said, “Thank you. I’ll think about what you’ve said.”

“Good,” she said, smiling her thin red line, extending her hand, which he took and shook, as a way of signing a truce.

And he left her, standing in the doorway, watching him go.

Even a block away, as he walked by Mary Beth’s, he could feel those dark eyes on his back.

Chapter Seventeen

The grade school was a one-story modern building on the west edge of town. It was approaching three o’clock. Crane stood near the playground across from the school, leaning against a telephone pole, watching school buses pull up for the farm kids, while older kids, who served as crossing guards, were getting in place at the curb.

He didn’t imagine too many of the kids would be making a beeline for this playground, which was a dreary little place, just a flat piece of land running back to a fence that separated it from the backyards of some modest, modern homes. There was a jungle gym, slide, swings and so on on it, but no trees or bushes, just some puddles scattered around, from a recent rain.

Soon the kids were streaming out from the school, and among them was Boone’s kid, Billy. He was wearing a blue zipper jacket and striped T-shirt and jeans. And a sullen expression. Or at least the expression was sullen once he’d seen Crane.

“What do you want?” he said.

“Your mom isn’t home right now,” Crane told the boy.

“So?”

“I just thought you should know.”

“I can walk home by myself. You aren’t walking me.”

“I’m not here for that, Billy. I came to talk to somebody at the school. But I wanted to catch you so you didn’t wonder why the house was empty when you got home.”

“Well. Okay.”

“I’ll be home in a little while.”

“I don’t care.”

The boy walked away. Another little boy, a tow-headed kid in a denim jacket, joined Billy. They roughhoused as they walked along, picked up some rocks from the playground and hurled them at each other, narrowly missing, the rocks careening off the sidewalk, flashing bright colors. Crane supposed he ought to tell Billy to quit throwing rocks, but as much as he liked Boone, he just couldn’t find it in him to give a damn about her bratty kid.

He entered the school and went to the front office and was directed to room 714, where Mrs. Alma Price was waiting for him.

She was behind her desk, grading some papers. Behind her, on the blackboard (which was green), were some multiplication problems and a geography assignment. The little tan-topped desks that filled the fourth-grade classroom seemed very small to Crane, incredibly small compared to the fourth-grade classroom in his memory.

Alma Price was a redheaded woman in her late forties, not unpleasantly plump, with a wide attractive face and the same sort of smile, which she gave Crane generously as she rose from behind her desk, smoothing out her green dress, greeting him with an outstretched hand.

He shook it and smiled back.

“There’s a normal-size chair over there,” she said, gesturing to one corner, as she returned to her desk. “Pull it up and we’ll talk.”

He did so.

“I hope you don’t mind my asking to see you here at school,” she said, still smiling, but some strain in the smile, now.

“Not at all,” he said. “I’m just grateful you were willing to put up with this.”

“Having gone through something very similar to what you are, I’m more than happy to give you whatever benefit my experience might give you. I take it Mary Beth must’ve mentioned me.”

That caught him by surprise.

“Uh, no,” he said.

That caught her by surprise.

“Why did you come to see me then? Who told you that Mary Beth had been a student of mine?”

“No one,” Crane admitted. “I didn’t know. I’m fascinated to find it out, but I didn’t know.”

She pushed her hands against the edge of her desk, as if about to rise, but remained seated, studying Crane. “Then just what are you doing here, Mr. Crane?”

“As I said on the phone, I’m aware that you lost your husband, several months ago...”

“Seven months ago.”

“And that like Mary Beth, he committed suicide.”

“In our garage. Shut himself in there, stuffed all the air openings with cloth, turned on the car and lay down near the tail pipe. He went to sleep and never woke up.”

She said that matter-of-factly, but there was a tremble under it.

“I’m sorry, Mrs. Price.”

“I’m sorry about Mary Beth. I’m sorry for you. She’d have been a wonderful wife. Now. Excuse me, please, Mr. Crane, but what exactly brought you to me? Is it simply the fact that we both have suffered the suicides of someone we loved? If so, I will try to help. But I’ll be frank: time won’t heal the wound. You’ll learn to live with it, but you won’t forget it, and it won’t heal over. I’m sorry, but that, I’m afraid, is the reality of it.”

“Mrs. Price, your advice is appreciated, and taken to heart, believe me. But it’s not why I’m here. I’m here because there is something your husband and Mary Beth had in common beyond suicide.”

She nodded. “They both worked for Kemco.”

“You knew that?”

“Of all the students I ever had, Mary Beth was my favorite. Of all the teachers she ever had, I was her favorite. I kept track of her. She kept in touch with me. Of course I knew she was in town this summer, working for Kemco. Of course I knew that.”

“I think Mary Beth may not have committed suicide, Mrs. Price. I think it may have only looked like suicide. I think it may have had something to do with Kemco.”

“I see.”

“You don’t sound surprised.”

“I don’t know what I am. But ‘surprised’ isn’t it.”

“Then you had similar suspicions about your husband’s death?”

“Yes. Of course.”

“And?”

“I eventually dismissed them.”

“Why?”

“It’s natural to want to explain away the suicide of your husband. Or wife, or fiancée. It’s human to want to reject the notion that someone you loved, someone that loved you, would want to end his or her life.”

“So you decided your suspicions were groundless?”

“Not groundless. But I did decide that they were just suspicions and nothing more.”

“Why do I sense there’s something you’re not telling me?”

“There’s much I’m not telling you.”

“Mrs. Price, this is very important to me. I think you can understand how important.”

“Of course I can. But I don’t want to encourage this... excuse me, obsession of yours.”

“Do I sound obsessed?”

“No. You seem rational. In control. But that’s your outward appearance. I believe that, inside, you’re avoiding reality. That you will do whatever you have to to convince yourself Mary Beth did not take her life.”

“Was your husband the sort of man who would take his life?”

“Yes. He did, after all.”

“And you’re convinced of that.”

“I am. I can see there’s no way around this. I’m going to have to share something personal with you. I’d like not to. But I will if you insist. And I’m going to make you insist, Mr. Crane.”

“Please, Mrs. Price.”

“If you insist. My husband, George, had a problem. The problem was my first husband. My late first husband, by whom I had two children, boy in college, daughter married and here in town with children of her own. I married just out of high school, and it wasn’t until my first husband died, fifteen years ago, that I went to college. You see my first husband’s name also was George. George Waters. I loved him very much. He died of cancer, when he was just thirty-seven years old. You know he seemed so much older than me when we were married; I always thought of him as being so old. And now I’m forty-seven, ten years older than he was when he died. Well. So three years ago my other George came along. A sweet, caring man. When we were just seeing each other, we had no problems. After we married, well... the coincidence of having the same name as my first husband started to bother him. He didn’t like it when my friends would talk about my late husband, referring to him as ‘the first George,’ or ‘George the First.’ He came to resent my two children, both of whom were grown by the time he came into my life. He was jealous of a memory, which to make it worse had his same name. He seldom would discuss his frustrations about my late husband; he just brooded about it. Sometimes he drank. For the year before he took his life, he was quite depressed.”

“All because he and your first husband shared the same first name?”

“And the same wife, don’t forget. And similar jobs.”

“Oh?”

“Both of them worked in maintenance at Kemco. My first husband didn’t have as good a job as my second, who was head of the maintenance crew. But it was in the same area. And the coincidence of it bothered him.”

“I admit it’s kind of strange, but why get obsessed with it?”

“George — the second George — worked at another chemical processing plant in the Midwest, before coming to Greenwood. It wasn’t a Kemco facility; I believe it was Monsanto. He felt Kemco was... this is what I hesitate to get into with you because I’m afraid it will only serve to reinforce your obsession.”

“Mrs. Price. Please go on.”

“He felt Kemco was borderline negligent. At the other plant he worked at, when the government would hand down a pollution level, for example, the company would set its own, stricter policy, well below what the government would allow. But at Kemco, George said, they would push it to the limit, and beyond, if they felt they could get away with it.”

“I see.”

“And he generally felt that the safety procedures at the local plant were lax. He and other workers had been exposed to dangerous chemicals, hazardous substances. But he could never do anything about it. Neither management nor union seemed to care. He said.”

“I’m still not sure if I understand how this relates to his obsession about your first husband.”

“Simple. He thought he was getting cancer.”

“Was he?”

“I have no way of knowing. He would never see a doctor about it.”

“Was there an autopsy?”

“Yes, and nothing was turned up.”

“But cancer wasn’t what they were looking for.”

“If it was advanced, they’d have found it.”

“If it was in beginning stages, they might not.”

“Possibly. But it was probably all just the delusion of a jealous, neurotic man. The ‘other’ George caught cancer working at Kemco, so now the same thing was happening to him. He thought.”

“Do you think there could be any truth to it?”

“I don’t know.”

“Do you know a friend of Mary Beth’s named Anne Boone?”

“Yes, I’ve met her. She’s doing research of some sort, gathering data on Greenwood itself. She interviewed me, several months ago.”

“But you didn’t tell her all of what you’ve told me.”

“No. Judging from the questions she asked, she would’ve been interested in hearing about my husband’s concerns about safety and other problems at Kemco. But I didn’t tell her.”

“Why are you telling me?”

“I don’t really know. How do you happen to know about my conversation with Ms. Boone?”

“I’ve heard the tape of it.”

She stiffened. “Oh really?”

“It’s all right — I’m working with Ms. Boone. We’re compiling evidence that may show Kemco negligent in several areas... including the areas that concerned your husband. Are you aware that the cancer rate in Greenwood is well above the national average?”

“No...”

“And the same is true for birth defects, and miscarriages. Not to mention the suicide rate: five suicides in not much more than a year. All by Kemco employees.”

“I take it you don’t believe they’re suicides.”

“Not all of them. At least one does seem to be a legitimate suicide.”

“Of course. The man who shot himself and his family. I remember. I had the children in school.”

“But I suspect Mary Beth had information about Kemco’s negligence, which may have cost her her life.”

“And you think my husband had the same or similar information?”

“If he was as obsessed with Kemco’s negligence as you say he was, wouldn’t he have sought it out?”

She thought about that.

Then she rose.

“Mr. Crane,” she said, and from her tone it was clear school was being dismissed, “I have work to do.”

Crane got out of the chair, put it back where he’d found it.

He said, “I hope you’ll think about what I’ve said.”

“I will. But I have to warn you. I don’t share my late husband’s opinions where Kemco is concerned. Kemco has a solid record of civic concern in Greenwood. They donated the land this school is built on. They provide work for many of our city’s residents. Some of the people who run that plant are former students of mine. I’m seeing a man right now who is employed there. So don’t look at me as an ally. I’m still of the opinion that you are very much on the wrong track. George killed himself. As much as I hate to think it, I’m afraid Mary Beth did the same.”

“I’m staying at Ms. Boone’s, if you think of anything else I should know.”

“I doubt you’ll be hearing from me.”

“Well, just in case.”

“All right. Now, I don’t like to seem ungracious, but I do have papers to mark.”

He said, “Of course,” and walked to the door.

As he was about to go out, he heard her voice from behind him: “If we do talk again, Mr. Crane, perhaps I could tell you about Mary Beth. Some things I remember about her from when she was in my class.”

“Was it this classroom?” Crane asked.

“Yes. The first year the school was built. First class I ever taught.”

“Where did she sit?”

“That seat to your left. Last one in the third row.”

Crane walked over to it and touched the back of the seat.

Then he went to the door, turned and said, “We’ll talk again,” and left.

He walked the several blocks to Boone’s house, confused, not knowing quite what to make of Mrs. Price. Or Mrs. Meyer, for that matter. He was almost on top of it before he noticed the blue Chrysler with the Kemco logo on the door, parked in front of Boone’s house.

A guy in his twenties with short black hair, mustache and a short-sleeved white shirt with black-and-white striped tie got out of the car and said, “Are you Crane?”

“Yes.”

“Boone would like to talk with you.”

Boone? What would she have to do with this guy?

Then he understood.

“Patrick Boone, you mean?”

“That’s right,” the guy said. “He said if you’re willing to come talk, I’m to give you a lift out to Kemco.”

Crane got in the car.

Chapter Eighteen

This was the first time he’d seen the Kemco plant in the daytime, and it seemed less impressive, and not at all sinister: the sheets of mottled aqua plastic that were the walls of the larger buildings looked somehow insubstantial, houses of cards that might topple momentarily; the pipes twining in and out and around these plastic-sheeted structures reminded him of the jungle gym in that dreary little playground he’d been standing near just an hour or so before.

The drive here had taken fifteen minutes but it had been a long ride just the same: the guy with the short black hair and mustache and black-and-white striped tie did not introduce himself and did not speak for the ride’s duration; he did push a tape into the player in the dash of the company car: Willie Nelson. Crane had hoped people in the East didn’t listen to Willie Nelson; no such luck.

He felt a nervousness in his stomach, like opening-night butterflies. But he wasn’t scared. He knew that if Mary Beth had been murdered, Patrick Boone was very likely, in some way, shape or form, involved. But he didn’t fear for his life, not sitting in a Chrysler with a Willie Nelson fan in a tie; not pulling up in front of a chemical plant that in the daylight looked anything but ominous.

Anxious was what he felt. He wondered why Boone’s ex-husband had called him out here. Was the man really onto what he and Boone had been doing? Would he toss Boone’s empty Nikon in Crane’s lap? Or maybe one of the people he’d been asking questions of called up Patrick Boone and informed him somebody named Crane was nosing around; Mrs. Meyer, the Kemco loyalist, most likely.

The executive offices of the plant were in a sprawling one-story building just off the parking lot, near the ever-flapping American flag. The nameless junior exec led him through a surprisingly shabby, claustrophobic lobby where a pair of plaid-upholstered couches met at a corner of the room and shared an end table littered with chemical company trade magazines. Over one of the couches was a framed quote from the founder of Kemco (Willis P. Connor, 1880–1955): “Industry is people.” A receptionist was walled within at right and the nameless exec spoke to her through a window, checking them in. The receptionist asked if they would need hard hats and safety glasses; the exec said no. Crane was glad. He followed the exec through a turnstile into a hallway.

The building was nothing fancy: tiled floors, plaster walls, tiled ceilings, as impersonal as this exec he was trailing after. There was a studied informality about the place: the people they passed in the halls all spoke, on a first name basis (the nameless exec’s name was Chuck, it seemed) and wore white shirts and ties but with the coat invariably off, either over one arm or left behind. Doors on either side of the wide hall stood occasionally open, one of them revealing a laboratory wherein a dozen or so technicians worked. Another open door revealed several people attending computer terminals; another contained half a dozen desks with women of various ages typing — had one of these desks been Mary Beth’s? Then came closed doors, reading BOOKKEEPING DEPARTMENT, PRODUCTION SUPERINTENDENT, MAINTENANCE SUPERINTENDENT, PLANT MANAGER. They stopped at the door reading PERSONNEL MANAGER. Chuck opened the door for him, peeked in and said, “Mr. Crane to see Patrick, Sharen,” turned to Crane and said, “Nice meeting you,” and left. Crane stepped inside.

A pretty blonde secretary, in her own, small outer office, rose from her desk, smiled, and opened the door to the inner office for him, without announcing him. He went in.

Patrick Boone was already up and out from behind his desk with a hand extended for Crane to shake. He was a slender man, about Crane’s size, pale, handsome, vaguely preppie, despite his hippie roots, with dark curly hair and, with the exception of a wispy mustache and wire frame glasses, the spitting image of his son Billy.

“I’m glad you agreed to come, Crane,” Patrick Boone said as he shook Crane’s hand, a firm, friendly shake. He smiled as he spoke. It wasn’t a bad smile.

He got Crane a chair before getting behind the desk, where once seated, he said, “Can I order you up some coffee? Or something?”

Crane shrugged. “I could use a soft drink. Anything.”

Patrick Boone smiled again, and Crane admitted to himself that if he were meeting the man cold, he’d probably like him. “Sharen,” he was saying into his intercom, “a couple of Pepsies for us, if you would.”

While they waited for the Pepsies, the preppie smile disappeared and he leaned forward, both arms on his desk.

“I can’t tell you how sorry I am about Mary Beth,” he said. “I only knew her slightly. She did a little work for me. But my impression was she was a fine person.”

“I didn’t catch you at the funeral.”

“I wasn’t there. I didn’t know her well enough to intrude on her family and friends. And, too, Annie would’ve been there.”

“Annie?”

“My ex-wife. Let’s not pretend you don’t know her. I’d like us to be more up front than that.”

The secretary, Sharen, brought the Pepsies in.

As she handed them around, she said, “I need to pick my son up after Scouts today. Do you mind if I leave a little early, Patrick?”

He glanced at his watch. “It’s four-fifteen now. Why don’t you just take off.”

She beamed at him. “Thanks.”

After she’d left, Patrick explained, “We don’t stand on ceremony around here. We like to keep it a bit, uh...”

“Informal?”

“Yes.”

“Mr. Boone...”

“Patrick.”

“Patrick, then. I know your ex-wife. I won’t pretend I don’t. I just didn’t know anybody called her ‘Annie.’ ”

“Well, she’s taken to being called just ‘Boone,’ these days. Some kind of feminist stand, I suppose. But if that’s the case, why not revert to her maiden name?”

“Probably because she’s raising your son.”

“You’re probably right. Well. I suppose you know why I asked you to stop by.”

“Not really.”

“I know what Annie’s up to. Oh, maybe not exactly, I don’t. But I know it’s another one of her articles. Or maybe it’s a series of articles.”

He paused, perhaps hoping for Crane to enlighten him.

When Crane didn’t, Patrick went on: “She’s been asking questions around Greenwood for months. Researching Kemco. Trying to catch us doing something she doesn’t approve of. Which won’t be hard, considering anything any chemical company does would be something she wouldn’t approve of.”

“Maybe.”

“Then you won’t deny she’s rather narrow-minded on the subject?”

“Well...”

“Surely the basis of her hatred of Kemco is apparent to you.”

Crane said nothing.

“It’s me, Crane. It’s me she hates. Kemco’s a surrogate. Or scapegoat or whatever you want to call it. A perfect target for her outdated late ’60s/early ’70s radical liberalism.”

“Didn’t you used to lean that way yourself?”

“Of course. Didn’t you?”

“No.”

“Well, then, but you’re younger, aren’t you, so that explains it. Almost everybody on college campuses in those days felt that way. You would’ve had to live through the draft to understand. It was a valid enough point of view in its day, naive as it may have been. Some of us, like Annie, stay stuck in time. Some of us move on.”

“Move on and sell out?”

He grinned, swigged the can of Pepsi, pushed back in his swivel chair. “For somebody who sold out, I lead a pretty drab existence, wouldn’t you say?” he said, gesturing around an office that was four paneled walls and a couple of framed photos, one of the plant, the other of the home office in St. Louis. “All I make is a little over thirty grand a year, a goodly chunk of which goes to Ms. Woman’s Lib of 1969.”

“You’re young. You’re moving up in the company.”

“I will be. What’s wrong with that? Don’t you believe in capitalism, Crane?”

“The problem is I do. I do believe in it, and it pisses me off when I see it get twisted up.”

“Boy, you have been listening to Annie, haven’t you? She can be persuasive, I know. What kind of horror stories has she been telling you?”

“About you, or about Kemco?”

“Crane. Please. I want you to know something. I want you to know that I understand where you’re coming from. Or at least I think I do. Hope I do. Shouldn’t presume that I do, really. But I’m guessing that you took Mary Beth’s suicide hard. That you found it hard to believe anyone as full of life as Mary Beth could end that life, voluntarily.” He stopped and rubbed his forehead. “I’m sorry. I don’t mean to sound so trite. To sound like I’m trivializing this. Christ. May I go on?”

“Yes.”

“I think you ran into Annie. Possibly at the funeral, or maybe later at Mary Beth’s mother’s home, or whatever. And Annie filled your head with her crazy leftist lunacy. Normally you might not have bought it. But it was easier accepting what Annie was saying than accepting Mary Beth’s death as suicide. I’m not far wrong, am I?”

Crane said nothing.

“I know that you’ve been asking some questions,” Patrick said. “I know that you have some suspicions.”

He’d been right: it was Mrs. Meyer. Patrick did not know about the trip to Pennsylvania last night. Did he?

“There are some disturbing statistics,” Patrick was saying. “We’re aware of the number of suicides in Greenwood; we’re aware of some illnesses that may be related to Kemco employees and their families. We’ll be looking into it ourselves.”

“I’ll look forward to that investigation.”

Patrick smiled sadly and shook his head. “She’s really poisoned you, hasn’t she? Don’t you see it? Don’t you see that this is a family squabble? That Annie is getting at me through the company I work for? I sold out, remember? It’s not enough to attack me. She has to attack the institutions I sold out to.”

“All because the poor kid’s stuck in time.”

“That’s right. It’s the ’80s now, Crane, in case you haven’t noticed. Damn near the ’90s, chilling thought though that is.”

“I noticed.”

“How close to her are you?”

“What do you mean?”

“I understand you’re staying at her house.”

“I’m just crashing there.”

“Crashing. There’s a Woodstock-era word for you. Did she tell you why we split up?”

“No.”

“Drugs.”

“What do you mean?”

“I was doing drugs. Nothing much. Some hash. Some coke.” His frankness was surprising, if somehow smug.

“You buy coke on thirty grand a year?”

He shrugged. “I dealt a little on the side. That upset her, too. Almost as much as me wearing a suit to work.”

“She said she wasn’t into drugs.”

“She’s lying. Oh, she isn’t now. But back in our college days, she was deep in it, deeper than me. She dropped acid like you take Alka Seltzer.”

“I don’t take Alka Seltzer.”

“Well you get my point. Then she reformed. There’s nothing worse than a reformed anything. She got on her health-food kick. She read books and articles on the bad effects of acid. Same with pot, for Christsake. Said it ruined brain tissue, affected the sexual organs, some bullshit. I don’t know. But she turned fanatic. I tried to do right by her. I stopped dealing. It was dangerous for me, anyway, now that I was with the company. I needed a straighter life-style. So no more coke, no more anything except smoke a little dope now and then. But even that was too much for her. I remember saying to her, the last generation liked its martinis, right? Well I like my pot. But that didn’t cut it with her, because alcohol’s on her shit list, too. It was like living with a religious fanatic. The screaming fucking arguments we had. Christ. But that’s neither here nor there. It got to be too much.”

“It broke up your marriage.”

“Yeah. She was on a real guilt trip, and believe me, it all ties in with what she’s doing now, where Kemco is concerned. She’s worried she fucked up her chromosomes dropping acid. She’s worried about Billy. The repercussions her doper days will have on our son.”

“Aren’t you worried?”

“No. I don’t believe that alarmist bullshit. But she does.”

“I’ll tell you something. Maybe Boone’s motivation for all this does stem from her hating you. But I’ve been reading up on some of your precious chemical industry, and some of what I read scares me.”

He shrugged, swigged the last of the Pepsi. “Haven’t you heard that TV commercial? Without chemicals, life itself would be impossible?”

“So would cancer.”

“You really believe that bullshit Annie tells you?”

“I believe 350,000 Americans will die from cancer this year. And I believe the reason is largely chemical companies unleashing untried, untested chemical compounds on an unsuspecting environment.”

“You even sound like her. Like a goddamn pamphlet. You’re a writer yourself, I understand.”

“I’m working on it.”

“Studying journalism?”

“That’s right.”

“Everybody needs a hobby.”

“Like dumping hazardous wastes in the middle of the night?”

Patrick sat up. “Some of that goes on. Not here.”

“Are you sure?”

He shrugged. “I won’t say some of it hasn’t. I don’t know that any’s going on now. We have a manifest system in this state. We keep track of everything we dump.”

“So you say.”

“So we say. And if somebody says otherwise, they better be prepared to prove it.”

“Maybe somebody will.”

Patrick smiled. “It won’t be you and Annie.”

“Is that a threat?”

“No.” He laughed. “Are you kidding? Annie has no credibility as a journalist. She’s published a few pieces in minor league leftist nothings. You? You’re just a grad student. She’s the ex-wife of an exec at Kemco she wants to crucify. You have your own grudge, where your late fiancée is concerned. With credibility like that, you and Annie are finished before you start. Get serious.”

“You’re as much as admitting...”

“Nothing. I’m admitting nothing. Let me ask you something. Is that shirt you’re wearing one hundred percent cotton?”

“No...”

“You’re goddamn right it isn’t. We probably made fifty or sixty percent of that shirt. You want to talk chemicals? You’re wearing ’em!”

“I don’t see what that has to do with anything.”

“It has to do with everything. You and Annie and everybody else can blame the chemical industry for America’s environmental ills. But you conveniently ignore the major accomplice: the American public. A public that wears clothes made of synthetic fibers. A public that drives cars made of plastic parts. A public that eats food raised in chemicals, and wrapped for sale in chemicals. A public whose collective ass rests on plastic furniture. A public that includes people like Annie, who buys her ‘No Nukes’ and ‘Live AID’ albums ignoring the fact that records are a petrochemical by-product, then plays them on her stereo, thanks to nuclear-generated electricity.”

“Now who sounds like a goddamn pamphlet?”

“Hey, I’m not ashamed to be working in the chemical industry. I think we provide a service, many services, the public wants. Needs. Demands. The chemical industry’s booming, pal — recessions don’t touch us. $133 billion last year. And next year, who knows?”

“Kind of like cancer statistics.”

“Don’t be an asshole. We don’t live in a zero-risk environment. Never have and never will. And if we tried, there’d be no creativity. No scientific advancement. Innovation would be stifled.”

“Let me see if I got this straight. If we want to keep listening to ‘No Nukes’ albums and Willie Nelson, we need to accept the fact that the environment may get fucked over.”

“Crane, it’s bad business to market hazardous products; it’s good business to market safe products. Have you been around Annie so long that the simple logic of that is lost on you? It’s crazy for you or Annie or anyone to think the chemical industry is going to make a practice out of being irresponsible. Just to make an extra buck or two. It just ain’t necessary, Crane. It ain’t good business.”

Crane sipped the Pepsi. His first sip. It was warm now. “Then why do some Kemco plants still make Agent Orange?”

“You mean 2,4,5-T.”

“Yes. They’re not dumping it on Vietnam anymore. But it’s still being dumped on American forests.”

“Of course it is. It’s an established tool of forest production.”

“It’s got dioxin in it.”

“Yes.”

“Dioxin is only the worst foul fucking thing in the world, Patrick. It causes cancer. Birth defects. You name it. Good shit, as a retread ’60s doper like you might put it.”

“Accusations like that have been leveled at 2,4,5-T for years, but the government has yet to ban it. And we believe it provides an important service.”

“Sure.”

“I’m surprised you haven’t realized yet how one-sided Annie’s research is, Crane. How conveniently she ignores the facts she doesn’t like. The U.S. Forest Service did a study on the use of 2,4,5-T in the Northwest, and found that discontinuing the use of the herbicide would have an economic impact of several hundred million dollars on Oregon alone. That’s jobs that would be lost, Crane. Families that would suffer. All because without that herbicide, the brush would come in and take over what would’ve been a healthy new forest. Did Annie’s research tell you that?”

Crane said nothing.

“You know, Crane, these well-meaning leftists are engaging in what you could call ‘chemical McCarthyism.’ The chemical industry makes such an easy target. The public doesn’t understand the science, the technology involved. The environmentalist types come along and spout some half-truths and whole lies, all because of an irrational, unscientific distrust of anything that isn’t ‘natural,’ that might tamper with Nature in a way God didn’t intend, only most of them don’t believe in God, so go figure. I don’t know. I’m just a guy trying to make an honest buck. I never hurt anybody.”

Crane said nothing.

“I’ll get somebody to take you home,” Patrick said. No more smiles. No more rhetoric. He seemed tired.

“I’m sorry about Mary Beth,” he said. “I really am.”

The hell of it was Crane believed him.

Chapter Nineteen

Crane was sitting on the couch in Boone’s house, watching a late movie without paying attention to it, when Boone got home.

He could tell things hadn’t gone well for her. Her face looked tired. Her hair was messy, greasy. But she still looked pretty, as she gave him a weary smile and came over and joined him on the couch.

“I could use a kiss,” she said.

“Who couldn’t?” he said, smiling a little, kissing her.

He put an arm around her and she cuddled against him.

“How did you and Billy get along?” she asked.

“Swell. He spoke twice: ‘What’s for supper?’ and ‘I’ll stay up as late as I want.’ ”

Tired as she was, she managed a smile. “You cooked for him?”

“Sure. Another of my specialties: frozen pizza.”

“When did he get to bed?”

“Half an hour ago.”

“He’s got school tomorrow.”

“That’s his problem.”

“Well, you didn’t fare much worse than most of his baby-sitters.”

“How did you fare?”

“With the ‘Hazardous Waste Strike Force,’ you mean?”

“Yeah.”

“Don’t ask.”

He didn’t say anything for a while; neither did she.

Then she rose and said, “How about some wine?”

“Sounds almost as good as another kiss.”

“Doesn’t it?”

She went away for a few minutes, came back with a bottle of red wine and some wineglasses. She poured. They drank. They kissed again. Then she got thoughtful.

“It was like talking to you,” she said.

“What was?”

“Telling my story to the Task Force guy. His name was Hart. Sidney Hart. He was a nice guy, about my age. A special investigator assigned through the state police to the Task Force. He spent hours listening to me.”

“What did he say?”

“Like I said, it was like talking to you. He was interested in what I had to say, polite, but skeptical. He said he’d heard rumors about Kemco, but that the company had never been caught in a major violation. He questioned what we’d really seen last night. Yes, it’s suspicious for trucks to haul waste to a landfill at night; but it isn’t necessarily illegal.”

“What about the manifest system? What if Kemco didn’t report the dumping?”

“Then it’s just our word against Kemco’s that any dumping took place at all. We didn’t even write down the license number of the fucking truck, ’cause we thought we had it on film.”

“It was New Jersey plates.”

“But you don’t remember the number, do you? Me either. So all we’ve got is our story, and who’s going to take us seriously? Who are you, but the fiancé of a woman you think Kemco killed? And who am I, but the disgruntled ex-wife of a Kemco executive, out for blood, right? What kind of credibility does that give us?”

“That’s what Patrick said.”

“Patrick?”

“Yeah. I talked to him this afternoon.”

“You talked to Patrick?”

Crane told her about the Kemco car stopping for him, about going out there and spending half an hour with her ex-husband.

“I can’t say he struck me as... a monster or anything.” Crane said.

She moved away from him on the couch, just a little. “How did he strike you?”

“I didn’t exactly like him. And I can understand why you couldn’t put up with his attitudes. But I find it difficult to believe he’s in any way involved with Mary Beth’s death.”

“He must be.”

“You really think your ex-husband is a murderer? Your son’s father?”

“Patrick is... it’s possible.”

“You can’t say it, can you? The guy’s selfish and self-centered and I think he’d do a lot of shady things if his bosses asked him to... like maybe pay off some midnight haulers in cash... but not murder. I just don’t buy it. And I don’t think you do either, if you’d be honest with yourself.”

“It’s a criminal conspiracy, Crane. It’s Watergate. It’s something that got out of control, that people got caught up in. And Patrick was one of them.”

“It’s not Watergate, Boone, and even if it was, I don’t remember anybody getting killed over Watergate.”

“Who really knows?”

“Oh Christ. Let’s not sing the Paranoid Conspiracy Nut Blues again.”

“What do you think happened to Mary Beth, then? You think she killed herself?”

Crane put down the wineglass. He looked at Boone. Their eyes locked.

“Yes,” he said.

“Crane...”

“I don’t like it. I don’t want to believe it. But yes. I think she killed herself.”

“No...”

“Yes.”

“What about all the other ‘suicides’?”

“They were suicides. I talked with Mrs. Meyer today. She’s fiercely loyal to Kemco; feels they’ve done right by her. I found something out from her that you didn’t, when you interviewed her for your book: her husband had a long history of mental illness. He had very deep emotional problems that didn’t have a goddamn thing to do with Kemco.”

“Ten times the national suicide rate, Crane!”

“That’s just a fluke. I talked with Mrs. Price, too, and her husband was an emotionally disturbed person, headed for a breakdown. Headed for suicide.”

“Crane, Mary Beth knew something. It’s Karen Silkwood all over again. She was killed because she had something on Kemco.”

“What did she know? About the midnight dumping? We know about it. We’re still alive.”

“What did you say to Patrick about last night?”

“Nothing.”

“Does he know about it?”

“If he does, he didn’t indicate it.”

“Maybe they don’t know about us. Maybe we weren’t seen last night.”

“Fine, but that shoots your theory about the truckers stealing your camera, doesn’t it? You can’t have it both ways. To steal it, they’d have to know about us. And if they know about us, our lives are in danger.”

“Well maybe our lives are in danger.”

“I don’t think so. If a decision had been made to add us to the suicide rate, why would Patrick bother having me out for a talk this afternoon? No, Boone, it doesn’t make sense. It’s all very confusing, but there’s nothing sinister going on here at all.”

“Dumping hazardous waste in an ordinary household dump, in the middle of the night, isn’t sinister?”

“It’s criminal, Boone. You’re right about that. I don’t doubt for a moment that Kemco is a criminally irresponsible company, but...”

“A baby girl with a cleft palate, Crane. That sinister enough for you? Liver disorders? Nervous conditions? High miscarriage rates? High cancer rates? Any of that strike you as sinister?”

“It strikes me as depressing, and since you exposed Mary Beth to your crusade, as you have me, it’s no wonder she was depressed, living in the house where her father died of cancer, living in a house where across the hall little Brucie in his crib paws the air with no hands, and you come along and fill her with your bleak vision of a chemically contaminated America, it’s no wonder she slashed her wrists.”

Boone sat quietly for a moment, staring into the redness in her wineglass. Without looking at Crane, she said, “So. Finally it comes around to this.”

“To what?”

“To it being my fault. Mary Beth’s suicide.”

“No. You’re wrong. I don’t blame you.”

“You’re just too fucking generous, Crane.”

“You’re right about one thing: it was suicide. I believe that now. I don’t like it. But I believe it.”

“Then maybe you better go back to Iowa.”

“Maybe I better.”

She rose, slamming her glass down on the coffee table, splashing wine. She looked down at him, giving him a cold, sarcastic look, the likes of which he hadn’t seen from her since their early, off-on-the-wrong-foot moments together.

“Go back to school, Crane. Learn something.”

“All right.”

She walked toward the stairs.

“Boone...”

She stopped; her back was to him.

“Is this the way it has to be?”

“I don’t know,” she said. There was no sarcasm in her voice, now. It sounded very small.

“Your book, Boone. It’s good. It’s more than good: it’s important. What you say about Agent Orange and its effect on the Vietnam vets. Your study into the effects of Kemco on its workers and their families, their town. The midnight hauling story. That can go into the book. Our staking out the Kemco plant; your camera maybe being stolen, that can be a nice ambiguous touch... all of it. You’ve got enough, Boone. You don’t have your smoking gun, exactly, but what you’ve got is good. But Mary Beth killed herself, and so did the others. Accept it. Leave it behind. And go ahead and finish your book and publish it and tell your story on Donahue. Wake America up. But be a journalist. Don’t be a conspiracy nut.”

Without turning, she said, “I’m going to bed.”

“I still believe in what you’re doing.”

“That’s nice.”

“Boone.”

“What?”

“What about this morning?”

“What about it?”

“Why don’t you come over here and sit down with me.”

“And what?”

“And we won’t talk anymore.”

“And it’ll be just like this morning? At the motel?”

“I hope it will.”

“Your timing sucks, Crane.”

She went upstairs.

He sat on the couch all night, without sleeping.

In the morning she drove him to where he could catch the bus that would take him to the airport. She didn’t say anything the whole way, but just as he got out, she leaned over and kissed him, and then drove away and left him.