Valley of Ashes (29 page)

My ass was numbly asleep on the cold concrete, but I was still rocking myself, forward and back, forward and back.

Getting dark now.

I felt a hand gripping my shoulder.

“Madeline, what the hell are you
doing
here?” Mimi’s voice. “There’s a fatality. We haven’t even—”

“Cary,” I said, cutting her off.

I kept rocking.

“Madeline?”

“His bike’s out front. In the parking lot. I wanted you to know. And this was started with gasoline, Mimi. Not acetone. You can still smell it. McNally told me you could, even after they hit a place with water. He was right.”

Mimi squatted down in front of me, got a grip on both my shoulders. “Look at me.”

She made me stop rocking. I started shivering instead.

“You’re in shock, Madeline.”

“Yeah,” I said. “No shit.”

“We need to get you home.”

The ambulance started up with a growl. It raced past us, sirens cranking up.

I tried to make my eyes focus on Mimi. “How’s Kevin?”

I figured they wouldn’t be going fast if he’d died, so it might be safe to ask.

“He’s all right,” she said. “Broken collarbone. Lucky as shit.”

“Good. That’s good.”

“I’m going to get you a blanket, okay? And something to drink. You gonna be all right sitting here by yourself for just a minute?”

I nodded and started rocking again, arms tighter around my knees.

I saw her walk away. Couldn’t really focus my eyes, or even shift what I was looking at. A line of trees. Nothing special about them.

When Mimi came back, she had an army blanket and a bottle of apple juice.

“I want you to drink this,” she said. “You need a little sugar.”

I drank down half of it and started coughing again. Hacked and spat on the sidewalk, once I’d gotten my breath back.

“Let’s get you home,” she said.

“I think I know who did this, Mimi.”

“You drove here?” she asked. “I thought you couldn’t drive?”

“
Listen
to me.”

“Madeline, we have to leave.”

“Mimi?” I started crying. “You have to look at Bittler for this.”

“Just get back in your car,” she said, grabbing me by the shoulders and turning me around. “Passenger side. I already cleared it with Benny. I’m going to drive you home now.”

I didn’t move, so she pushed me forward until I stumbled into movement, then walked behind me around to the other side of the car.

She leaned me against the back door, opened the front one for me.

“Jesus, Madeline,” she said, looking into the backseat. “You brought your
children
?”

I was about to nod but instead I leaned forward and puked the apple juice back up, all over her shoes.

Mimi didn’t say a word—just cradled me into the car and fastened my seat belt.

She used the blanket I was still wearing to wipe off my face.

So gently.

Then she shut my door, walking quickly around the front of the car.

The door on that side opened. She climbed up behind the wheel and started the engine.

India said, “Mimi!”

Parrish said, “Winnie-the-Pooh.”

I couldn’t stop crying, the whole drive home.

I tried really hard not to make too much noise, hoping I wouldn’t scare my children.

When we parked in front of the house, I realized that I didn’t even care anymore that Dean was away.

He couldn’t have comforted me, not even if he’d been waiting for all of us on the front porch, arms opened wide to gather us in.

I didn’t want my husband. Because this was all too awful.

I wanted my mom.

M
imi announced that she was staying over that night. She put the girls in the playpen. Then told me to go to bed.

“I have to make dinner for the girls,” I said.

“I’ll do it,” she answered. “Don’t worry about it, all right?”

I didn’t even have the strength to feel guilty about burdening the poor woman with my life. I just thanked her.

Climbing the stairs was exhausting. It felt like it took three days.

I thought I wouldn’t be able to sleep, but I was out before my head hit the pillow. Just too painful to be awake, I guess.

A long time later I woke up. Mimi was standing in the doorway of my bedroom, backlit.

“You awake?” she asked.

“Yeah.” I sat up, suddenly terrified. “Are the girls okay?”

“They’re fine.”

I slumped forward. Relief wiping the will to sit up right out of my spine.

Tears started leaking down my face again.

“Hey there,” said Mimi. “None of that.”

She walked over and sat down on the edge of my bed.

“I’m so sorry. I don’t know what I…” and then I couldn’t even think of anything to say, after that.

“Listen,” she said, as though I hadn’t spoken. “I made them dinner.
Some of the tortellini you had in the freezer. With apples. They were just fine with that. They’re fast asleep now. Gave them a bath first, before I put them down.”

I looked up at her.

She smoothed a lock of hair off my forehead.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “I probably shouldn’t have woken you up, but I thought I should tell you that your husband called. I explained what happened today.”

“To Cary?”

I watched her nod.

“So I was right, then?” I asked.

“I’m so sorry, Madeline.”

“Dean’s not coming home early, though, is he?”

“He’s going to try.”

“Asshole,” I said.

“He was devastated, Maddie. He wept on the phone.”

“Won’t change his ticket, though. Just watch.”

“You should go back to sleep.”

“Has anyone notified Cary’s family? They live in Cincinnati.”

“I’m sure they have,” she said. “Don’t worry about all that. Just lie back down and get some rest.”

I did, but I cried for a long time first. The same words echoed all around inside my head, over and over again:

Terrible mother, terrible wife, terrible friend.

Mimi was feeding the girls breakfast downstairs in the kitchen by the time I woke up the next morning.

I felt a lot more clearheaded. Clearheaded enough to suffer the full weight of my own idiocy the day before: angst-ridden and self-recriminatory as shit.

What the hell had I been thinking, driving out to that warehouse with my
children
in the car?

Asshole
.

I walked down the stairs and joined the breakfast party.

Mimi took one look at me and handed me a paper towel.

I blew my nose, wadded up the towel, and put it in the garbage can under the sink. Black snot, of course.

“Listen,” I said, turning back toward her. “I am so grateful to you for last night. Everything you did… I was such an idiot, and you totally came to my rescue. I don’t know how to
begin
to thank you.”

“Drink some coffee,” she said. “After that, don’t worry about it.”

I was tempted to burst into tears again, hearing that.

Mimi looked at her watch. “I have to take off in a few minutes. They need me down at the scene. Anyone I can call to help you out today?”

“Um,” I said, “not really.”

“That woman Setsuko?”

“She’s on vacation. Skiing somewhere. And she should stay doing that. Bad enough she has to find out about Cary when she gets back here. They were pals.”

“His parents should be out here by the end of the day.”

Then she got quiet.

“What?” I asked.

“Someone else will want to talk with you. Today, as soon as possible. I can have them come here to the house.”

“From your department?”

“Police,” she said.

“So you guys think this is a homicide?”

“Yes. But that’s all I can say, all right? It’s not appropriate for me to discuss any further details with you.”

“Of course,” I said. “This is when it gets official. That’s how it should be. I completely understand.”

She looked relieved.

“But Mimi,” I continued, “I still want to finish telling you what I started to say yesterday. Before I puked on you and everything.”

“Okay.”

“I think I know who was involved in this. A guy named Bittler. Cary worked under him at Ionix. Remember, the guy we were trying to avoid at the community meeting? There was a lot of weird crap
going on in their office. Like, embezzlement. That’s why Cary wanted to get into the warehouse—to follow up on stuff he suspected Bittler was doing. I told him not to go.”

“That’s why
Cary
wanted to get into the warehouse?”

“Yeah. And I guess he crowbarred the door open, after all. Bittler had the only keys to the place.”

“He didn’t,” she said.

“Didn’t what?”

“Crowbar anything open. Our guys had to bust in. It was locked up tight.”

“But Cary was inside. How the hell did
he
get hold of Bittler’s keys?”

“We don’t know that he did,” she said. “There weren’t any keys on him.”

“So he wasn’t…” I stopped.

Couldn’t bring myself to say, “burned to death.”

But he couldn’t have been, if they knew there weren’t keys in his pockets, right? I mean, he had to have still had pockets.

I found incredible relief in that thought. But I didn’t want to picture anything beyond it.

“He was dead before the fire started, Madeline,” said Mimi. “He didn’t suffer.”

“How do you know?” I asked.

“We can’t discuss this.”

“Mimi, Bittler’s the only one with keys. If Cary didn’t have them, that’s another thing pointing to him. Who else could’ve locked him in?”

“Madeline,” she said, “I
cannot
talk to you about this.”

I looked down at the floor. “Okay.”

“Would you like me to come back after work?”

“I want to say no, after everything you’ve done for me already. But it would be magnificent if you could.”

“I’ll swing by here around six thirty, then. Now finish that coffee.”

“If you and I were lesbians, Mimi Neff,” I said, paraphrasing my favorite-ever greeting card, “I’d move to Vermont with you so we
could adopt Vietnamese orphans and open an organic bakery together. But since we’re not, let’s just celebrate the burgeoning splendor of this already magnificent friendship.”

“You never know,” she said. “Next incarnation—should we both come back as lesbians—I say we go in for the orphans and baked goods. Always liked Vermont, and I make a
killer
sourdough rye.”

I
held it together until I’d waved Mimi to her pickup from the front porch.

Then I walked back inside and started crying all over again.

I stayed just outside the kitchen doorway, leaning against the dining room wall out of sight so I wouldn’t freak the girls out. Peeked in on them now and again, though, to make sure they still had waffles to chow on.

Then the phone rang.

I blew more black snot out of my nose, took a deep breath, and picked up in the office.

“Bunny? Are you all right?” Dean’s voice, with no drunk colleagues clinking barware in the background this time.

Small mercies.

“No,” I said, sliding down to the shag-rugged floor. “Not even fucking close.”

“I’m so sorry,” he said. “I wish I could be there with you.”

“Get on a plane, then.”

“I can’t. Things are really complicated here.”

“Fuck you, Dean Bauer.”

“Bunny—”

“He was our
friend
. Cary was our friend, and you should be on your goddamn way home right now.”

I heard my husband starting to cry, all those thousands of miles away.

Well, good. He should be crying.

Schmuck.

And then I heard someone knocking on my front door.

“I have to go,” I said.

“Bunny, talk to me.”

“I can’t right now. I think there’s a homicide detective at the front door. And the girls have finished their breakfast so I’ve got to get them out of their booster seats.”

“I’ll call you back, then.”

“Sure,” I said. “Why don’t you
do
that.”

I slammed the phone down and went to answer the door.

There were actually two people from homicide. A man and a woman. Young, tanned, fit. Both of them blond.