"I think so. That would make the truck accident the most likely source, wouldn't it?"

"I've spoken at length to a neurologist in San Francisco, a doctor named Parker. He thinks Holly went down as a result of exposure to an insecticide. He said the pathophysiology of it affects the CNS, causing euphoria, dizziness, confusion, CNS depression, headache, vertigo, hallucinations, seizures, ataxia, tinnitus, stupor, and ultimately coma. That's not exactly the way it happened with Holly, but close enough. The way I'm thinking about this, if it were just people from your fire department, it could have been anything. But you cross-reference it with the fact that Holly got it, too, and n.o.body else in Washington or even on the West Coast has it, it narrows down the possibilities."

"The truck accident. That's the hypothesis I should work from."

"I agree. But you're off by one p.r.o.noun. It's the hypothesis we we should work from. I'm in on this, too." should work from. I'm in on this, too."

"Trouble is, there wasn't anything hazardous in either of those trucks."

"That you recall."

"One truck had nothing but chickens. The other truck was the one Holly drove, and as I remember, it had a pretty standard array of items. Lots of cartons and packages. Some comic books. Bibles. Coca-Cola extract. It was a sticky mess."

"The chickens interest me. H5N1. That was the Hong Kong virus. Birds have spread disease to humans before. I'll do some research. The trouble is, these aren't flu symptoms you guys are coming down with, and that's what H5N1 presents as. Flu symptoms." She looked at me and I saw flickers of the compa.s.sion that must have originally attracted Stephanie Riggs to medicine. Maybe she wasn't such a b.i.t.c.h after all. "You ready to run some tests?"

"Now?"

"We don't have a whole lot of time."

I felt like a man being dragged down the corridor to the gas chamber. I could only hope Stephanie couldn't sense my terror. In fact, I was almost more afraid of her finding out how afraid I was than I was of the syndrome. For reasons I had trouble explaining to myself, I wanted her to like me more than I'd ever wanted any woman to like me. Jesus, I thought. I still had the steely taste of vanity in my mouth even when they were hauling me to the boneyard. Maybe I was was a p.r.i.c.k like everybody said. a p.r.i.c.k like everybody said.

"As far as I'm concerned, and until we find out otherwise, you and my sister have the same thing."

"Which is?"

"I don't have a clue. Neither does any doctor I've consulted. I'm hoping, because you're still up and walking around, you'll present differently. If you'll let me test you, it just might be enough to give us the missing parts to the puzzle. You all right? You look a little pale."

"You find out what it is, you think you'll be able to reverse it?"

"Maybe for you. Holly had a brain aneurysm. I'm afraid there's no going back."

"But you told your aunt you were still hoping for a miracle."

"You're a patient. I have to tell you the truth, even if I don't want to face it myself."

"Run the tests."

The rest of my day was spent on an examining table or in a waiting room flipping through magazines: Field & Stream, Ladies' Home Journal, Architectural Digest. Field & Stream, Ladies' Home Journal, Architectural Digest. Stephanie Riggs drew blood, and then in a back room a technician drew more; a few hours later, Dr. Riggs drew blood again. The probing was the worst, umpteen feet of coil with a miniature camera on the end of it shoved up my r.e.c.t.u.m like a plumber's snake. I was X-rayed, given CT scans. Nothing is more exhausting than lounging around a hospital all day with your heart in your mouth. Samples of my hair, urine, sputum, stool, fingernails, and skin were taken away. Stephanie Riggs drew blood, and then in a back room a technician drew more; a few hours later, Dr. Riggs drew blood again. The probing was the worst, umpteen feet of coil with a miniature camera on the end of it shoved up my r.e.c.t.u.m like a plumber's snake. I was X-rayed, given CT scans. Nothing is more exhausting than lounging around a hospital all day with your heart in your mouth. Samples of my hair, urine, sputum, stool, fingernails, and skin were taken away.

Just before eight that evening, Stephanie came into the lounge area where I was waiting and told me I was free to go home.

"What'd you find?" I asked, trying on a smile I knew was a little tight.

"Too soon for most of it. Your X rays and CT scan were fine. The blood workups haven't told us a thing. You're slightly anemic, but that may be normal for you. The dermatologist says the growth on your hands is the same as Holly has on her hands. I'll be here most of the night. I want to hand-carry some of these samples through the lab, watch the tests myself. You take care of yourself. Stay hydrated. Get lots of rest. If anything changes tonight or tomorrow morning, call me. If I don't hear from you, I'll be in touch tomorrow morning." She gave me a slip of paper with her cell phone number on it. "You have somebody who can watch out for you?"

"My girls."

"I mean an adult."

"They'll do."

"Okay."

I'd been feeling anxious in North Bend, but the dramatic change in Stephanie Riggs was bothersome to say the least. I'd driven down here thinking I might might have some contagion, but now a knowledgeable doctor thought I was going to be a vegetable. She hadn't said it outright, but you could see it in her face. have some contagion, but now a knowledgeable doctor thought I was going to be a vegetable. She hadn't said it outright, but you could see it in her face.

She thought I was headed for the same fate as her sister.

I'd been hopeful on the drive down, but that was before we found out my symptoms and those on Stan's list correlated with what Holly had doc.u.mented in her diary. Odds were if Stan hadn't died on I-90, he would have ended up in the brain ward-just as he feared. Odds were I would be forced to make the same decision Stan had: turn into a vegetable or commit suicide. Trouble was, I didn't know if I had the guts to kill myself. Would you? I mean, one day I'm walking around worried about weeds in the yard; the next I'm trying to figure out if I should kill myself. It was too weird.

I was trying to figure out which option was better for my daughters. Which did I not not want to put them through? want to put them through?

"I'm sorry about your sister," I said. "I wish things had turned out differently."

"Let's not talk about it."

"I'm a firefighter. I signed up for a bad ending. I didn't think anything was going to happen, but in the back of my mind I always knew it might. Holly didn't sign up for anything more than sweetness and light. That's what she deserved."

When tears began creeping down Stephanie's face, I said good-bye and got out of Dodge.

DAY THREE.

21. BAD HEADACHE, DIZZINESS, FALLING DOWN.

Disoriented and somewhat confused, I came fully awake on the floor next to the bed. I was clad in pajama bottoms and a T-shirt, my usual nighttime attire, but it was morning, the sky bright and blue outside my bedroom window.

Wednesday.

Day three.

I knew I hadn't stumbled or tripped but had simply lost my balance on the way to the p.i.s.soir, and not with a topsy-turvy feeling of light-headedness as in a faint, but as if I'd been caught by a trip wire.

I'd gone down like a sack of s.h.i.t falling off the back of a manure truck.

The on-again off-again headache from yesterday had returned with a vengeance. Headache, dizziness, falling down-it occurred to me with a jolt that I had all of the symptoms for day three.

When I spotted the cotton ball taped to the inside of my arm, the events of the previous day flooded my consciousness.

Arriving back in North Bend the night before, I'd driven straight to the mayor's house. Haston lived on the eastern edge of town, three hundred feet down the road from the ranger station, in a small yellow house with a modest yard. A neighbor's dog barked at me from inside a chain-link fence. Two desolate wooden planters sat on the concrete stoop but contained only weeds. They must have been Gloria's.

Aside from a single phone call when we initially discovered the extent of our joint betrayal, Steve Haston and I never sat down and discussed what had happened between our former wives. Though neither of us had said it aloud, Steve thought I was responsible for the mess, while I thought he was.

When Lorie and Gloria decided to leave town together, Gloria stripped Steve of his spare cash, emptied their bank account, cashed out their certificates of deposit, stole the Land Cruiser, and sold their schnauzer. The dog was the only thing he got back.

On our side of town, Lorie swiped Britney's piggy bank-Britney had been four at the time. I managed to replace it before she figured out what happened. When I accused her on the phone, Lorie claimed Gloria must have taken it. I hated the thought that Gloria Haston had been prowling my house and making love to my wife while I was a mile away at work.

For some reason the two women had filled themselves with enough venom to justify anything. Maybe it was the rain. North Bend was a beautiful town, green as h.e.l.l, but it rained more than a hundred inches a year, and the clouds and moisture drove people mad. Later, somebody from the FBI called my home trying to get a line on Lorie, told me she was kiting checks all over the Midwest.

"Mind if I come in?" I asked Haston. It wasn't that I was afraid people would overhear us on the stoop; it was more that my legs needed a rest.

"The place is a mess. Sit down anywhere." Despite his demurrals, Haston's housekeeping was impeccable. He told a lot of little lies like that, falsehoods designed to make you doubt your own eyes. I confess I hate people who do that. I took the sofa, while he perched across from me in a leather armchair that looked as if he'd taken furniture polish to it. "Terrible about Stan. Just terrible."

"Especially in light of how easily it could have been avoided."

Haston ignored my sarcasm. "Everyone in town's talking about it. They're starting to call it the Bad Luck Fire Department."

"There's more coming."

"What do you mean?"

"You heard Joel McCain's a vegetable?"

"Karrie told me about him."

"Jackie Feldbaum's a vegetable, too."

"Well, yes. We knew that. The accident."

"Stan thought they all had the same disease. He thought Newcastle died out in the woods as a vegetable. I've been with a doctor in Tacoma all day and she thinks they were part of an epidemic."

"Good G.o.d!"

Without telling him about my own symptoms or about Holly, I filled him in on Stan Beebe's theories, adding facts I'd gleaned on my own. By failing to mention Holly I'd left out a lot, including the truck accident in February. There hadn't been much up there but s...o...b..a.l.l.s, chickens, and Coca-Cola extract. I didn't want to have to admit that to Haston.

In presenting my case as a fire department issue, I'd left it in a neat little package, stressing my concern for the families of Stan, Joel, Jackie, and Chief Newcastle. I had another rationale for not talking about my own symptoms. Like a child hiding under the blankets, for some nonsensical reason I felt as if not talking about my involvement would somehow make the symptoms less real. But this wasn't like a cold, where I could resign myself to riding out the symptoms and knew I would be better in a week.

"You think all these people have a.r.s.enic poisoning or something?"

"n.o.body's exhibiting the symptoms of a.r.s.enic poisoning. Or cyanide or anything else the doctors are familiar with. This is a whole lot more exotic."

"How can the accidents be an epidemic?"

"These people had accidents because they were sick."

"As mayor I've never been faced with anything-"

"None of us have."

"I only took over the job to help out after Gloria left town. The biggest problem I've had so far is that squabble with the Army Corps of Engineers over our dikes. I wouldn't know where to start with something this complex."

Steve Haston had been timid in his day-to-day decision making, his leadership at the monthly council meetings alternately limp-wristed and carping.

His sole contributions to handling the fire department's problems were a single phone call to the station one day to ask if I was "okay" and then letting Stan out of his sight. Essentially, I was running the fire department by myself.

"We should have a meeting," I said. "Start with Brashears. He treated Jackie and Stan both. Bring in McCain's doctors. Get Eastside Fire and Rescue involved. It could just as easily be them next time. If it's a chemical hazard pa.s.sing through our district, it's moving by truck, which means it's going through their district, too. The State Department of Transportation should be involved. The State Patrol."

"You believe this was something you folks got on the job?"

"I do."

"The city is self-insured. This is going to destroy our cash flow. Look, Jim, I'll clear the docket and we'll work on this full-time. I'll call the King County Executive. One of us will have to speak with the governor. Maybe we can get disaster relief from the feds."

"Who's there? Anybody home?" Karrie Haston walked into the room and stood awkwardly beside her father when she saw me.

It was easy to see the family resemblance. They were both tall, Steve around six-seven, Karrie five-ten. They both had long arms and lantern jaws. Although most people would have said Karrie was attractive, her father's face was just this side of ungainly, and the only thing you could say about his normal expression was that it resembled that of a man about to fall off a donkey.

Even though Karrie and I had been on a businesslike basis since the Christmas party, she flushed when she saw me in her father's living room.

At this late date, it was easy to see how improvident it had been to fool around with the daughter of the mayor. To trifle with the feelings of a probationary firefighter. For all I knew, she'd been on the couch because she thought it would further her career. Get her past McCain's critical reports. But more than that, attempting to seduce the daughter of the woman who'd seduced my wife had enough Freudian implications to keep a psych cla.s.s writing papers for years. I didn't even want to think about it.

"Jim was just leaving," Steve said, flashing his bird-s.h.i.t gray eyes at me as a signal that he didn't want Karrie to know what we'd been discussing.

I knew what he was thinking. If Stan had been sick, if Joel and Jackie were sick, Karrie might have contracted it, too.

As far as accepting this on a personal level, Steve was on the same page I was.

When I got home that night, the girls and I lit candles, set out the Monopoly board, and fell into a freewheeling discussion about life and our lives in particular, talking about why their mother wasn't with us anymore, a frequent conversation in our household and one I generally avoided. I answered Allyson's and Britney's questions more candidly than ever. None of us had laid eyes on Lorie since she left town three years earlier.

I felt I owed it to the girls to be as honest as I could. It wasn't as if they'd be able to ask later.

There wasn't going to be any later.

22. DON'T YOU HANG UP ON ME, YOU b.a.s.t.a.r.d And now, this morning, I was on the floor.

A spectacularly ign.o.ble way to begin one of my last days as a human being.

"Oh, Daddy. Quit horsing around. You have to get ready for work. Morgan's already here." Britney was standing behind me, her arms twined around my neck. I remained seated on the hardwood floor. I had no idea how long I'd been ruminating about last night, about Lorie. Or how long Britney had been in my bedroom.

"Not going to work today, sweetie."

"You're staying with us?"

"I'm going to spend as much time with you as possible." She hugged me closer, her tiny rib cage pressed against my back. Though I had a couple of days to work it out, I had no idea who was going to take care of her after I was gone. Their grandfather couldn't take care of himself. My mother was in j.a.pan-or was it Shanghai?-going through an extended second childhood and in no shape to take on two girls. Lorie's parents were not the kind of people I wanted to leave them with.

"Want me to tell Morgan to go home?" Britney asked.

"Let's keep Morgan. I might have to run some errands."

"Oh, goody. Me and Ally and Morgan and you. This was too much to hope for. It's going to be like Morgan's our mommy, isn't it?"