Into the Inferno by Earl Emerson Read Free Book Online

been a ghastly hour, though I gotta say the current one was stacking up to be worse.
    In the days and weeks after that phone call, Holly had gradually faded from my thoughts and I believed I’d faded from hers.
    All the while she’d been right here.
    Comatose.
    From the look of her, she hadn’t thought about anything during the past month, least of all me.
    “The electric meter reader went to the rear of her duplex and spotted her on the floor. He called the police, who called the fire department. By then she’d been on the floor God knows how long. Naked. Hypothermic. We think she went down right after that phone call with you.”
    Okay, I admit it was all too easy to visualize Holly naked on the floor of her house. To my embarrassment the first time we’d made love popped into my mind. It had been right there on her kitchen floor. We’d been too entranced with each other to do anything but kiss and drop to the linoleum after we came through her back door. The second time on her floor was the last time we made love, a desperate tryst instigated by Holly and calculated, I later realized, to replicate the circumstances of our first lovemaking, as if the cold kitchen linoleum would rekindle my ardor. Except for my sore knees, the sex had been good, but the affection had not returned. I wondered if she hadn’t planned to be found on that floor as some sort of message to me.
    Feeling my legs beginning to give way, I made a fierce effort to remain standing—nothing would be worse than fainting in front of this man-eater.
    She hadn’t brought me here to tell me about her sister. She could have done that in North Bend. Or on the phone. She’d brought me here to shock and humiliate me, and then to use that to extract information.
    She brought me here to see me in pain.
    This was turning out to be a summer in hell. Chief Newcastle’s hiking accident, Joel McCain’s fall, Jackie Feldbaum’s car wreck. Me running into this cannibal.
    Holly.
    If Holly’s current condition had anything to do with me, I would never forgive myself. Holly was a sweet woman, natural and unaffected, and for a time I’d genuinely loved her. For a variety of reasons it hadn’t worked out, perhaps because she’d been too clingy. Or because I’d been unfaithful.
    “She loved your little girls, and she loved you,” Stephanie said. “For some reason she thought you felt the same about her. But then, that was before she found out you were sleeping with another woman.”
    “We never said we were exclusive. As far as I knew, she could have been seeing other people, too.”
    “You know she wasn’t!”
    “She could have been! We never made any rules.”
    Stephanie Riggs looked at her sister. “It’s strange how much you recreational womanizers don’t know about women. It’s strange that no matter what you want to believe, women are never quite the sluts you men are.”
    For half a second I thought this was a sick joke the two of them had concocted, that any minute Holly would jump out of bed and laugh at me. But it was too intricate and grim to be a joke. To begin with, Holly had lost an enormous amount of weight. She’d lost color, too, which I didn’t think could be faked.
    I jammed my trembling hands into my pockets to keep Stephanie from seeing them. I could run into a house fire no problem; angry women took my breath away. I wanted Holly’s sister to like me more than I’d ever wanted anybody on this planet to like me, but it was not going to happen.
    Not now and not ever.
    “Why did you bring me here?”
    When she spoke, her voice, which had been rising steadily since my arrival, returned to the quiet, thoughtful tones of our conversation on the phone over an hour earlier. “We believe whatever caused this is systemic, some sort of sophisticated poison, something that has affected her brain and nervous system at a basic cellular level. I thought she might have had access to industrial solvents, insecticides, that sort of thing. I