'Kathy,' she tried, 'look around and tell me what you see.'
'Nikki… Nikki… Nikki. You sent them, didn't you. You sent them to silence my music. I'll get you for this, Nikki. I'll get you if it's the last thing I do.'
'I love you, Kathy. You're my friend. I would never do anything to hurt you. In your heart you know that. Honey, you're not thinking clearly right now. You've got to come home. Let me help you.'
'Help… me…'
'Kathy, just tell me what to do.' There was a prolonged silence.
'Kathy?'
Nikki waited for another thirty seconds before slowly setting the receiver in its cradle. Then, making no attempt to deal with the cadaver of Roger Belanger, she burst into tears and raced from the room.
CHAPTER 5
It was a gray, blustery day — a day totally befitting a funeral. Matt was one of just twelve mourners at the graveside service for Darryl Teague. The other eleven were relatives of one sort or another, all of whom lived in the hills north of town. The irony was hardly lost on Matt that in clear view of the dreary, overgrown cemetery were the tall hills that housed the BC amp;C mine.
But the day held another irony.
It wasn't until he stepped off his Harley and approached the rectangular pit that he realized this was the first funeral he had been to in nearly four years. The last one was his wife's. Matt recalled that day with painful clarity — the crowd, the limousines, the flower-bedecked hearse bearing what remained of the woman he had all too happily pledged to love until death did them part. Only death hadn't ended his love for her. Not at all.
The ill-kept cemetery, bordered by an irregular row of shrubs, was at the center of a broad, rolling, treeless field. Teague's grave, on the far west side, was marked by a hastily erected, rough-cut chunk of marble with the initials 'D.T.' crudely chiseled into it. Nothing more.
Virginia McLaren Rutledge
Beloved Daughter, Sister, and Teacher
Beloved Wife of Matthew Rutledge
Matt stopped by his mother's house three or four times a week, but he visited Ginny's grave nearly every day, often leaving a leaf or sprig of her hawthorn tree, sometimes a flower. Sometimes he would stay only a few minutes, but others he would sit for an hour or more by her stone, reading or just staring off across the valley. Each visit seemed to strengthen the bond he felt with the only woman, save his mother, he had ever truly loved. Of his friends and family, only Mae Borden knew how often he went to the Saints and Angels Cemetery.
'Matthew,' she had said several times in one way or another, 'we all miss her and love her, but we love you, too. It is time for you to pick up the pieces and move on. You have room in your heart for Ginny and for someone new. I know she wouldn't have wanted you to spend your life this way.'
Matt would respond with a shrug or a grunted acknowledgment, and head off. There was no sense in discussing something that simply wasn't going to happen.
The gaunt preacher performing the ceremony for Darryl Teague had little to say. To his credit, he made no attempt to lie. He called Darryl a carefree, playful child who had grown away from God and had become an angry and troubled young man at the time of his death. He read some bible passages, and issued appropriate words of consolation to Darryl's parents and sister.
'God works in mysterious ways,' he said as four men grasped heavy ropes and prepared to lower the plain pine box into the gaping maw in the earth. 'God works in mysterious ways.'
There were rumblings around the hospital that Matt was the last person known to have been in Teague's room before his heart stopped irretrievably. But no one could come up with a sensible explanation for why he might have saved the man's life one day and taken it just a few days later, so natural causes became the consensus around town.
Hal Sawyer's autopsy contributed little to solving the mystery. As Matt suspected, Teague's cracked sternum was the cause of the torn vessel that had resulted in his near-fatal tamponade. Beneath that fracture, the heart muscle was bruised. It was certainly the sort of injury that could have caused electrical instability and irregular rhythms in his heart. Hal signed the man out as a fatal arrhythmia secondary to a cardiac contusion secondary to accidental blunt chest trauma. The lumps over Teague's face and head were nothing more than neurofibromas. The brain itself was grossly normal, leaving Hal with no immediate explanation for Teague's coma. Full toxicology studies would not be available for another week or two, but a preliminary screen had shown none of the depressants Matt had wondered about.
A sharp gust of wind whipped across the field, swirling dust around the small assembly of mourners, who were singing a hymn Matt vaguely remembered from his youth. He found his thoughts drifting to his father. BC amp;C had been found blameless in the cave-in that killed Matthew Rutledge, Sr., but Matt, only fifteen then, had heard rumors of safety funds diverted, corners cut, and even men paid off.
'We will close our service with the twenty-third psalm. Pallbearers may lower the casket as we recite, 'The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want…''
No one except Matt had even suggested that Ginny's bizarre cancer was tied to the mine.
'You yourself said that there are several hundred of these types of lung cancers around the country every year,' BC amp;C president Armand Stevenson had said to him. 'And with each of those cases, I am sure there's a factory close by, or a lab of some sort, or even a mine. I know you're frustrated, Dr. Rutledge. Your wife has just died. I know you're angry and want to blame us. Well, BC and C is not to blame. I repeat, the company is not to blame for your wife's death any more than it was to blame for your father's.'
' '… He restoreth my soul…' '
Matt watched as the casket was slowly lowered down onto the floor of the grave.
Someone from the mine killed you, Darryl, didn't they?… Why?… What did you know?… Had you stayed alive, what could your body have told the world about them?
' '… Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death…' '
Matt forced his careening thoughts aside and joined the others in the final lines of the psalm. When the service was over, he accepted heartfelt thanks from Teague's family for having tried to save his life, then took a long, slow walk out toward the hills and back. Ginny would have wanted him to keep pushing for answers. Now she was joined by Darryl Teague and Teddy Rideout. Their conditions were different, but maybe the toxins responsible were different, too.
Well, don't worry, Gin, he thought. Sooner or later, one way or another, we're going to nail them.
The one way or another clearly did not include the offering of a $2,500 reward. Matt had printed three hundred of the magenta fliers. Mae had posted half of them around Belinda, and he had tacked up the other half in the adjacent towns. Within twenty-four hours, nearly all of them were gone. There had not been one response. So much for the Healthy Mines Coalition. Another battle lost, Matt thought, but not the war. Not the goddamn war. He swung the Harley around and headed back to his office. Patients were waiting.
As it turned out, there was a message waiting for him as well — a message from Armand Stevenson requesting that Matt come to the mine offices to meet with him and some of those in the company responsible for health and safety. Mae was smiling as she passed the note over.
'Yes!' Matt exclaimed, pumping his fist.
'I thought you might be interested in going, so I cleared you for tomorrow afternoon,' she said. 'You're due out there at one.'
'It seems a bit presumptuous of you to assume I was interested in going,' he said.
'I know, I know,' Mae replied.
Matt kissed her on the cheek and settled in his office to await his first patient of the day. Not a minute later, his uncle called.
'Hey, Hal, we are officially off dead center. I'm going out to the mine tomorrow to meet with Stevenson.'
