“It’s Nesbitt. Steve Nesbitt.”
“Oh, jeez.” Cate sat down on the bed, relieved. “How did you know I was here?”
“Your friend Gina. She called me at the Roundhouse and said you were going home. She’s worried about you.”
“I’m fine. It feels good to be alone, me and my Cracker Barrel. I’m developing a taste for Velveeta wedges on iceberg.”
“You called off the feds, and your bodyguard is eating pancakes at Gina’s. You think that was a good idea?”
“Yes.”
“When are you coming back?”
“I don’t know.” Cate hesitated to tell him she’d been fired, but he already knew much worse about her, so she did.
“I figured Sherman for a better man than that.”
“Thanks,” Cate said, touched.
“I don’t know if you’re safe up there. We still don’t have Russo, and Frackville’s not that far from the city.”
“But how would he know I’m here?”
“He could dig a little. He knows there’s a state prison in Frackville, all of us do. Does your bio show your hometown?”
“No, and Frackville isn’t my hometown anyway.” Cate had made sure to keep that to herself, in the snotty Philly bar. “Up here, I feel safer than I have in a long time.”
“I won’t take that personally.”
Cate caught herself. “I didn’t mean it that way.”
“I could call the local police. Ask them to check in on you.”
“No, that’s okay. I doubt they can spare the car, and I like that no one up here knows my story, or cares.”
“Look, it’s Sunday, and I’m off duty. I could come up, keep an eye on things. We could have dinner.” Nesbitt added quickly, “Obviously, I don’t mean anything by it. I mean, well, you know what I mean. Not like a date.”
“I got you in, I’ll get you out. I told you that. So what do you say? Should I come up tonight?”
“I could sit in the parking lot, keep an eye out.”
“That’s okay, thanks.”
“Well, I’ll give a call and check in on you. Take care, Judge.” Nesbitt hung up.
Cate set the receiver down on the hook, feeling a warmth that evaporated when she eyed the snow-covered scene outside the window.
Bracing herself for what was to come.
CHAPTER 35
Cate’s was one of the few cars on Route 61, which had been plowed and salted, its shoulders triangles of clumped snow. She felt fortified by a fresh cup of Mobil-station coffee, her windshield newly cleared by a cheap scraper. The route snaked around tree-covered hillsides into the town of Ashland, and she traveled the main drive, which ended in an immense bronze statue of Whistler’s
The road was a single lane each way, and the modest houses were built close to the street. She drove through the entire town in about ten blocks, then traveled straight up a steep grade and reached the mountain that signaled she had arrived home. A tall, white sign marked the spot, but it didn’t bear the town’s name. Instead, this sign read: WARNING-DANGER.
Cate felt an angry twinge inside her chest as she passed the sign, following Route 61 as it had been rerouted to the right, and traveled to the summit, where the school and church used to be, sitting across the street from each other like family at a holiday table. St. Ignatius Cemetery was off the road on the left; her mother was buried there, but Cate wasn’t ready for that yet. She drove ahead, down the valley, passing the abandoned landfill, where it had all begun. Locust Avenue, as this stretch had been called, used to be lined with two-story row houses, but the houses were gone. Cate descended into the valley and encountered a sight that looked like hell on earth.
The trees were dead, their tops stumps and their branches reaching brittle into the gray sky. Green street signs remained, jutting pointlessly from the new-fallen snow. Billowing smoke burned from various holes and wafted in white drifts that rolled across Locust Street. The smoke looked as innocent as the homey white curls from a chimney, but it contained carbon monoxide, carbon dioxide, and toxic steam. Its stench, acrid and sulfurous, seeped into Cate’s car; the odor defined her childhood, along with baking apple pie and Play-Doh. It used to make her light-headed, and her mother had been among the first to realize that it wasn’t her child who was sick. It was the town.
A fire had been raging underground for decades, fueled by a seam of anthracite coal that lay under Centralia and the surrounding towns. The fire started back in 1962, in the dump behind Cate’s school, and state and federal governments botched chances to put out the fire when it was still possible. As a result, row houses that had housed fourteen hundred people had been demolished, and the town had ceased to exist. Whoever said you can’t go home again must have been from Centralia.
Cate took a left, then another, driving up the street, the toxic smoke momentarily engulfing the Mercedes. She held her breath and pulled up at the top of the street, where her house used to be. Under the snow, only a rim of black asphalt remained of their sidewalk, and a sinewy trail of poison smoke snaked from where her living room had been. The gases had seeped in through their basement, causing her mother to fall asleep in her recliner at night. The Fantes were told that the gas levels were safe, but they still kept the windows open on the coldest winter nights and shared a gas monitor with neighbors, placing it in the basement, so that its alarm would wake them before the poison gas sent them to a more permanent slumber. Cate eyed the snake of poison smoke in the middle of the ghost town that was her hometown.
Time to go. She turned around and drove to St. Ignatius Cemetery, set among the bare trees. Steam rose everywhere around the graves. Local lore always held that the mine fire never reached underneath St. Ignatius, but Cate doubted it. Her mother had still wanted to be buried here. Cate drove through the gates, left open, but the asphalt road up the center hadn’t been plowed. She cut the ignition, got out of the car, and steeled herself. The cold air hit her fully in the face, along with the awful sulfur odor, and she flipped up the collar of her coat. She approached her mother’s grave, her jaw set and her chest constricted. She stood almost immobile at the corner, her feet in warm slush, reading a monument she had never seen before, because she could never bring herself to visit.
DEIRDRE FANTE, it read. APRIL 10, 1937-FEBRUARY 23, 1989. Underneath was BELOVED MOTHER, because that said it all.
Cate bowed her head, and her gaze fell upon the rounded monument next to her mother’s, a tiny, white angel, its cherubic cheeks pitted from the natural and unnatural elements in the air.
WILLIAM FANTE. JANUARY 11, 1970-JANUARY 11, 1970.
Cate’s baby brother, stillborn. He had been born severely underweight, his brain underdeveloped. Her mother didn’t have the heart for the autopsy, she would tell Cate much later. The cause of death was filling their nose, and making their eyes water, anyway.
Cate felt suddenly stiff as she looked at the miniature tombstone. Her brother’s birth and death marked the Before and After of her mother’s life. Before, her mother had been a vital woman, a natural force, a blonde of the flashiest magnitude, her star brightly set in relief against this dark, grimy mining town. Cate remembered her as laughing, dancing, and making jokes-before the baby was born, and died. Her mother never recovered, blaming herself, the gases, the mine fire, and the borough council. Her father left them just after.
Cate bit her lip, realizing she hadn’t brought any flowers for either of them.
