Kitabı oxu: «Bloodstream»
Bloodstream
Tess Gerritsen
Copyright
This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.
HarperCollinsPublishers 1 London Bridge Street London SE1 9GF
The HarperCollins website address is: www.harpercollins.co.uk
First published in the USA by Pocket Books
Copyright © Tess Gerritsen 1998
Tess Gerritsen asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
Ebook Edition © MARCH 2010 ISBN: 9780007370788
Version: 2018-04-30
Dedication
To Tim and Elyse
Contents
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Prologue
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
23
24
25
Acknowledgments
TESS GERRITSEN
BY THE SAME AUTHOR
ABOUT THE PUBLISHER
Prologue
Tranquility, Maine, 1946
If she was still enough, quiet enough, he would not find her. He might think he knew all her hiding places, but he had never discovered her secret niche, this small hollow in the cellar wall, concealed by the shelves of her mother’s canning jars. As a young child she had easily slipped into this space, and every game of hide and seek had found her curled up in her lair, giggling at his frustration as he thumped from room to room, searching for her. Sometimes the game would go on so long she’d fall asleep, and would awaken hours later to the sound of her mother’s voice worriedly calling her name.
Now here she was again, in her cellar hiding place, but she was no longer a child. She was fourteen and barely able to squeeze into the niche. And this was no lighthearted game of hide and seek.
She could hear him upstairs, roaming the house, searching for her. He rampaged from room to room, cursing, slamming furniture to the floor.
Please, please, please. Someone help us. Someone make him go away.
She heard him roar out her name: ‘IRIS!’ His footsteps creaked into the kitchen. Approached the cellar door. Her hands balled into tight fists, and her heart was a banging drum.
I am not here. I am far away, escaping, soaring into the night sky…
The cellar door flew open, slamming into the wall. Golden light shone down, framing him in the open doorway at the top of the stairs.
He reached up to pull on the light chain and the bare bulb came on, dimly illuminating the cavernous cellar. Cowering behind the jars of home-canned tomatoes and cucumbers, Iris heard him descend the steep stairs, each creak bringing him toward her. She pressed deeper into the hollow, flattening herself against the crumbling stone and mortar, and closed her eyes, willing herself to be invisible. Through the slamming of her own heartbeat she heard him reach the bottom of the steps.
Don’t see me. Don’t see me.
The footsteps moved right past the canning shelves and headed toward the far end of the cellar. She heard him kick over a box. Empty jars shattered on the stone floor. Now he was circling back, and she could hear his harsh breathing, punctuated by animal grunts. Her own breaths were coming short and fast, her hands clenched so tightly she thought her bones would shatter. The footsteps moved to the canning shelves and stopped.
Her eyes shot open, and through a chink between two jars she saw him standing right in front of her. She had slid down until her gaze was level with his belt. She cringed even lower, dropping as far below his line of sight as she could. He took a jar off the shelf and smashed it to the ground. The smell of pickles, sharp and vinegary, rose up from the stone floor. He reached for a second jar, then suddenly put it back, as though a better thought had occurred to him. He turned and walked up the cellar steps, yanking the light chain as he exited.
Once again she was in darkness.
She realized she had been crying. Her face was wet, sweat mingling with tears, but she didn’t dare release even a whimper.
Upstairs the footsteps creaked toward the front of the house and then there was silence.
Had he left? Had he finally gone away?
She remained frozen, not daring to move. The minutes went by. She counted them off slowly in her head. Ten. Twenty. Her muscles were cramping, the spasms so painful she had to bite her lip to keep from crying out.
An hour.
Two hours.
Still no sound from above.
Slowly she emerged from the hiding place. She stood in the darkness, waiting for the blood to recirculate in her muscles, for the feeling to come back in her legs. Listening, the whole time listening.
She heard nothing.
The cellar had no window, and she didn’t know if it was still dark outside. She stepped through the broken glass on the floor and crossed to the stairs. She climbed them one at a time, pausing after each step to listen some more. When at last she reached the top, her palms were so slick she had to wipe them off on her blouse before she could open the cellar door.
The lights were on in the kitchen, and everything looked startlingly normal. She could almost believe the horror of last night was simply a bad dream. A clock ticked loudly on the wall. It was five A.M., still dark outside.
She tiptoed to the kitchen doorway and peered into the hall. One glimpse at the splintered furniture, the splashes of blood on the wallpaper, told her she had not been dreaming. Her palms were wet again.
The hallway was deserted, and the front door hung open.
She had to get out of the house. Run to the neighbors, run to the police.
She started up the hall, each step bringing her closer to escape. Terror had primed her five senses to such acuity that she registered every fragment of splintered wood on the floral carpet, every tick of the clock in the kitchen behind her. She was almost at the front door.
Then she cleared the banister and came within view of the stairs, where her mother had toppled, head down. She couldn’t stop herself from staring at the body. At her mother’s long hair draping the steps, like black water rippling downhill.
Nausea surging up her throat, she lurched toward the front door.
He was standing there. In his hand was an ax.
With a sob she spun around and darted up the stairs, almost slipping on her mother’s blood. She heard him pounding up the steps after her. She had always been faster than he, and terror made her fly up the stairs like a panicked cat.
On the second floor landing she caught a glimpse of her father’s body, lying halfway out of his bedroom doorway. There was no time to think about it, no time to absorb the horror; she was already dashing up the next flight of stairs and into the turret room.
She slammed the door and latched it just in time.
He gave a roar of rage and began pounding on the closed door.
She scurried over to the window and forced it open. Staring down at the ground far below, she knew she could not survive a fall. But there was no other way out of the room.
She yanked on a curtain, pulling it off the rod. A rope. Have to make a rope! She tied one end to a radiator pipe, wrenched a second curtain down, and tied the two lengths of fabric together.
A loud thud sent a splinter of wood flying at her. She glanced back and to her horror saw the tip of the ax poking through the door. Saw it pried loose again for the next swing.
He was breaking through!
She yanked down a third curtain, and with shaking hands, knotted it to the first two.
The ax came down again. The wood splintered wider, more chunks flying.
She yanked down a fourth curtain, but even as she frantically tied the last knot, she knew the rope was not long enough. She knew it was too late.
She spun around to face the door just as the ax broke through.
1
The Present
‘Someone’s going to get hurt out there,’ said Dr Claire Elliot, looking out her kitchen window. Morning mist, thick as smoke, hung over the lake, and the trees beyond her window drifted in and out of focus. Another gunshot rang out, closer this time. Since first light, she’d heard the gunfire, and would probably hear it all day until dusk, because it was the first day of November. The start of hunting season. Somewhere in those woods, a man with a rifle was tramping around half-blind through the mist as imagined shadows of white-tailed deer danced around him.
‘I don’t think you should wait outside for the bus,’ said Claire. ‘I’ll drive you to school.’
Noah, hunched at the breakfast table, said nothing. He scooped up another spoonful of Cheerios and slurped it down. Fourteen years old, and her son still ate like a two-year-old, milk splashing on the table, crumbs of toast littering the floor around his chair. He ate without looking at her, as though to meet her gaze was to come face to face with Medusa. And what difference would it make if he did look at me, she thought wryly. My darling son has already turned to stone.
She said again, ‘I’ll drive you to school, Noah.’
‘That’s okay. I’m taking the bus.’ He stood up and grabbed his backpack and skateboard.
‘Those hunters out there can’t possibly see what they’re shooting at. At least wear the orange hat. So they won’t think you’re a deer.’
‘But it looks so dorky.’
‘You can take it off on the bus. Just put it on now.’ She took the knit cap from the mitten shelf and held it out to him.
He looked at it, then finally, at her. He had sprouted up several inches in just one year, and they were now the same height, their gazes meeting straight on, neither one able to claim the advantage. She wondered if Noah was as acutely aware of their new physical equality as she was. Once she could hug him and a child would hug back. Now the child was gone, his softness resculpted into muscle, his face narrowed to a sharp new angularity.
‘Please,’ she said, still holding out the cap.
At last he sighed and jammed the cap over his dark hair. She had to suppress a smile; he did look dorky.
He had already started down the hallway when she called out: ‘Good-bye kiss?’
With a look of exasperation, he turned to give her the barest peck on the cheek, and then he was out of the door.
No hugs anymore, she thought ruefully as she stood at the window and watched him trudge toward the road. It’s all grunts and shrugs and awkward silences.
He stopped beneath the maple tree at the end of the driveway, pulled off the cap, and stood with his hands in his pockets, shoulders hunched against the cold. No jacket, just a thin gray sweatshirt against a thirty-seven-degree morning. It was cool to be cold. She had to resist the urge to run outside and bundle him into a coat.
Claire waited until the school bus appeared. She watched her son climb aboard without a backward glance, saw his silhouette move down the aisle and take a seat beside another student – a girl. Who is that girl? she wondered. I don’t know the names of my son’s friends anymore. I’ve shrunk to just a small corner of his universe. She knew this was supposed to happen, the pulling away, the child’s struggle for independence, but she was not prepared for it. The transformation had occurred suddenly, as though a sweet boy had walked out of the house one day, and a stranger had walked back in. You’re all I have left of Peter. I’m not ready to lose you as well.
The bus rumbled away.
Claire returned to the kitchen and sat down to her cup of lukewarm coffee. The house felt hollow and silent, a home still in mourning. She sighed and unrolled the weekly Tranquility Gazette. HEALTHY DEER HERD PROMISES BOUNTIFUL HARVEST, announced the front page. The hunt was on. Thirty days to bag your deer.
Outside, another gunshot echoed in the woods.
She turned the page to the police blotter. There was no mention yet of last night’s Halloween disturbance, or of the seven rowdy teenagers who’d been arrested for taking their annual trick-or-treating too far. But there, buried among the reports of lost dogs and stolen firewood, was her name, under VIOLATIONS: ‘Claire Elliot, age forty, operating vehicle with expired safety sticker.’ She still hadn’t brought the Subaru in for its safety inspection; today she’d have to drive the truck instead, just to avoid getting another citation. Irritably she flipped to the next page and was scanning the day’s weather forecast – cold and windy, high in the thirties, low in the twenties – when the telephone rang.
She rose to answer it. ‘Hello?’
‘Dr Elliot? This is Rachel Sorkin out on Toddy Point Road. I’ve got something of an emergency out here. Elwyn just shot himself.’
‘What?’
‘You know, that idiot Elwyn Clyde. He came trespassing on my property, chasing after some poor deer. Killed it too – a beautiful doe, right in my front yard. These stupid men and their stupid guns.’
‘What about Elwyn?’
‘Oh, he tripped and shot his own foot. Serves him right.’
‘He should go straight to the hospital.’
‘Well you see, that’s the problem. He doesn’t want to go to the hospital, and he won’t let me call an ambulance. He wants me to drive him and the deer home. Well, I’m not going to. So what should I do with him?’
‘How badly is he bleeding?’
She heard Rachel call out: ‘Hey, Elwyn? Elwyn! Are you bleeding?’ Then Rachel came back on the line. ‘He says he’s fine. He just wants a ride home. But I’m not taking him, and I’m certainly not taking the deer.’
Claire sighed. ‘I guess I can drive over and take a look. You’re on Toddy Point Road?’
‘About a mile past the Boulders. My name’s on the mail box.’
The mist was starting to lift as Claire turned her pickup truck onto Toddy Point Road. Through stands of white pine, she caught glimpses of Locust Lake, the fog rising like steam. Already beams of sunlight were breaking through, splashing gold onto the rippling water. Across the lake, just visible through fingers of mist, was the north shore with its summer cottages, most of them boarded up for the season, their wealthy owners gone home to Boston or New York. On the south shore, where Claire now drove, were the more modest homes, some of them little more than two-room shacks tucked in among the trees.
She drove past the Boulders, an outcropping of granite stones where the local teenagers gathered to swim in the summertime, and spotted the mailbox with the name Sorkin.
A bumpy dirt road brought her to the house. It was a strange and whimsical structure, rooms added haphazardly, corners jutting out in unexpected places. Rising above it all, like the tip of a crystal breaking through the roof, was a glassed-in belfry. An eccentric woman would have an eccentric house, and Rachel Sorkin was one of Tranquility’s odd birds, a striking, black-haired woman who strode once a week into town, swathed in a purple hooded cape. This looked like a house in which a caped woman might reside.
By the front steps, next to a neatly tended herb garden, lay the dead deer.
Claire climbed out of her truck. At once two dogs bounded out of the woods and barred her way, barking and growling. Guarding the kill, she realized.
Rachel came out of the house and yelled at the dogs: ‘Get out of here, you bloody animals! Go home!’ She grabbed a broom from the porch and came tearing down the steps, long black hair flying, the broom thrust forward like a lance.
The dogs backed away.
‘Ha! Cowards,’ said Rachel, lunging at them with the broom. They retreated toward the woods.
‘Hey, you leave my dogs alone!’ shouted Elwyn Clyde, who had limped out onto the porch. Elwyn was a prime example of an evolutionary dead end: a fifty-year-old lump bundled in flannel, and doomed to eternal bachelorhood. ‘They’re not hurtin’ nothin’. They’re just watchin’ after my deer.’
‘Elwyn, I got news for you. You killed this poor creature on my property. So she’s mine.’
‘What you gonna do with a deer? Blasted vegetarian!’
Claire cut in: ‘How’s the foot, Elwyn?’
He looked at Claire and blinked, as though surprised to see her. ‘I tripped,’ he said. ‘No big deal.’
‘A bullet wound is always a big deal. May I take a look at it?’
‘Can’t pay you…’ He paused, one scraggly eyebrow lifting as a sly thought occurred. ‘Less you want some venison.’
‘I just want to make sure you’re not bleeding to death. We can settle up some other time. Can I look at your foot?’
‘If you really want to,’ he said, and limped back into the house.
‘This should be a treat,’ said Rachel.
It was warm inside the kitchen. Rachel threw a birch log into the wood stove, and sweet smoke puffed out as she dropped the cast iron lid back in place.
‘Let’s see the foot,’ said Claire.
Elwyn hobbled over to a chair, leaving smears of blood on the floor. He had his sock on, and there was a jagged hole at the top, near the big toe, as though a rat had chewed through the wool. ‘Hardly bothering me,’ he said. ‘Not worth all this fuss, if you ask me.’
Claire knelt down and peeled off the sock. It came away slowly, the wool matted to his foot not by blood but by sweat and dead skin.
‘Oh God,’ said Rachel, cupping her hand over her nose. ‘Don’t you ever change your socks, Elwyn?’
The bullet had passed through the fleshy web between the first and second toe. Claire found the exit wound underneath the foot. There was only a little blood oozing out now. Trying not to gag on the smell, she tested movement of all the toes, and determined that no nerves had been damaged.
‘You’ll have to clean it and change the bandages every day,’ she said. ‘And you need a tetanus shot, Elwyn.’
‘Oh, I got one of them already.’
‘When?’
‘Last year, from ol’ Doc Pomeroy. After I shot myself.’
‘Is this an annual event?’
‘That one went through my other foot. ‘Tweren’t a big deal.’
Dr Pomeroy had died back in January, and Claire had acquired all his old medical records when she’d bought the practice from his estate eight months ago. She could check Elwyn’s file and confirm the date of his last tetanus shot.
‘I guess it’s up to me to clean that foot,’ said Rachel.
Claire took out a small bottle of Betadine from her medical bag and handed it to her. ‘Add that to a warm bucket of water. Let him soak in it for a while.’
‘Oh, I can do that myself,’ said Elwyn, and got up.
‘Then we might as well just amputate right now!’ snapped Rachel. ‘Sit down, Elwyn.’
‘Gee,’ he said, and sat down.
Claire left a few packets of bandages and gauze wrappings on the table. ‘Elwyn, you come into my office next week, so I can check the wound.’
‘But I got too much to do –’
‘If you don’t come in, I’ll have to hunt you down like a dog.’
He blinked at her in surprise. ‘Yes, ma’am,’ he said meekly.
Suppressing a smile, Claire picked up her medical bag and walked out of the house.
The two dogs were in the front yard again, fighting over a filthy bone. As Claire came down the steps, they both spun around to stare at her.
The black one trotted forward and growled.
‘Shoo,’ Claire said, but the dog refused to back down. It took another few steps forward, teeth bared.
The tan dog, spotting opportunity, snatched the bone in its teeth and began dragging away the prize. It got halfway across the yard before the black dog suddenly noticed the thief and streaked back into the fight. Yelping and growling, they thrashed around the yard in a tangle of black and tan. The bone lay, forgotten, beside Claire’s pickup truck.
She opened the door and was just sliding in behind the steering wheel when the image registered in her brain. She looked down at the ground, at the bone.
It was less than a foot long, and stained a rusty brown with dirt. One end had broken off, leaving jagged splinters. The other end was intact, the bony landmarks recognizable.
It was a femur. And it was human.
Ten miles out of town, Tranquility Police Chief Lincoln Kelly finally caught up with his wife.
She was doing about fifty in a stolen Chevy, weaving left and right, the loose tailpipe kicking up sparks every time she hit a dip in the road.
‘Man oh man,’ said Floyd Spear, sitting beside Lincoln in the cruiser. ‘Doreen got her snookerful today.’
‘I’ve been on the road all morning,’ said Lincoln. ‘Didn’t get a chance to check up on her.’ He turned on the siren, hoping that would induce Doreen to slow down. She sped up.
‘Now what?’ asked Floyd. ‘Want me to call for backup?’
Backup meant Hank Dorr, the only other officer on patrol duty that morning.
‘No,’ said Lincoln. ‘Let’s see if we can’t talk her into pulling over.’
‘At sixty miles an hour?’
‘Get on the bullhorn.’
Floyd picked up the mike and his voice boomed out over the speaker: ‘Hey, Doreen, pull over! C’mon, Sweetheart, you’re gonna hurt someone!’
The Chevy just kept dipping and weaving.
‘We could wait till she runs out of gas,’ Floyd suggested.
‘Keep talking to her.’
Floyd tried the mike again. ‘Doreen, Lincoln’s here! C’mon, Sweetheart, pull over! He wants ta ‘pologize!’
‘I want to what?’
‘Pull over, Doreen, and he’ll tell you himself!’
‘What in hell are you talking about?’ said Lincoln.
‘Women always expect a man to apologize.’
‘But I didn’t do anything!’
Up ahead, the Chevy’s brake lights suddenly lit up.
‘See?’ said Floyd as the Chevy rolled to a stop at the side of the road.
Lincoln pulled up behind it and climbed out of the cruiser.
Doreen sat hunched behind the steering wheel, her red hair wild and tangled, her hands shaking. Lincoln opened the door, reached over his wife’s lap, and removed the car keys. ‘Doreen,’ he said wearily, ‘you gotta come back to the station.’
‘When are you coming home, Lincoln?’ she asked.
‘We’ll talk about that later. Come on, Honey, let’s get in the cruiser.’ He reached for her elbow but she shook him off and slapped his hand for good measure.
‘I just want to know when you’re coming home,’ she said.
‘We’ve talked about this and talked about this.’
‘You’re still married to me. You’re still my husband.’
‘And there’s just no point in talking about it any more.’ Again he took her elbow. He already had her out of the Chevy when she hauled off and slugged him in the jaw. He staggered back a few steps, his whole head ringing.
‘Hey!’ said Floyd, grabbing Doreen’s arms. ‘Hey now, you don’t wanna go doing that!’
‘Lemme go!’ screeched Doreen. She broke out of Floyd’s grasp and took another swing at her husband.
This time Lincoln ducked, which only made his wife madder. She got in one more swing before Lincoln and Floyd managed to get her arms secured.
‘I hate to do this,’ said Lincoln. ‘But you’re just not being reasonable today.’ He snapped the handcuffs on her wrists. She spat at him. He wiped his sleeve across his face, then patiently guided his wife into the backseat of the cruiser.
‘Oh man,’ said Floyd. ‘You know we’re gonna have to book her.’
‘I know.’ Lincoln sighed and slid in behind the wheel.
‘You can’t divorce me, Lincoln Kelly!’ said Doreen. ‘You promised to love and cherish!’
‘I didn’t know about the bottle,’ said Lincoln, and he turned the car around.
They drove at a leisurely speed toward town, Doreen cussing a purple streak the whole time. It was the drinking that did it; it seemed to pop the cork off her bottle of demons.
Two years ago, Lincoln had moved out of their house. He figured he’d given the marriage his best effort and ten years of his life. He wasn’t by nature a quitter, but the despair had finally gotten to him. That and the sense that, at forty-five, his life was racing by, joyless and unfruitful. He wished he could do right by Doreen, wished that he could recapture some of that old affection he’d felt for her early on in their marriage, when she’d been bright and sober, not bubbling over with anger as she was now. Sometimes he’d search his own heart for whatever trace of love might still linger, some small spark among the ashes, but there was nothing left. The ashes were cold. And he was tired.
He had tried to stand by her, but Doreen couldn’t even see clear to help herself. Every few months, when her rage boiled up, she’d spend the day drinking. Then she’d ‘borrow’ someone’s car and go for one of her famous high-speed drives. People in town knew to stay off the roads when Doreen Kelly got behind the wheel.
Back at the Tranquility police station, Lincoln let Floyd do the booking and locking up. Through the two closed doors leading to the cell, he could hear Doreen yelling for a lawyer. He supposed he should call one for her, though no one in Tranquility wanted to take her on. Even down south as far as Bangor, she’d worn out her welcomes. He sat at his desk, flipping through the Rolodex, trolling for a lawyer’s name. Someone he hadn’t called in a while. Someone who didn’t mind being cussed out by a client.
It was all too much, too early in the morning. He shoved away the Rolodex and ran his hand through his hair. Doreen was still yelling in the back room. This would all be reported in that nosy Gazette, and then the Bangor and Portland papers would pick it up because the whole damn state of Maine thought it was funny and so very quaint. Tranquility police chief arrests own wife. Again.
He reached for the telephone and was dialing the number for Tom Wiley, attorney at law, when he heard a knock at his door. Glancing up, he saw Claire Elliot walk into his office, and he hung up.
‘Hey, Claire,’ he said. ‘Got your safety sticker yet?’
‘I’m still working on it. But I’m not here about my car. I want to show you something.’ She set a dirty bone down on his desk.
‘What’s this?’
‘It’s a femur, Lincoln.’
‘What?’
‘A thigh bone. I think it’s human.’
He stared at the dirt-encrusted bone. One end was splintered off, and the shaft showed the gnawings of animal teeth. ‘Where did you find this?’
‘Rachel Sorkin’s place.’
‘How did Rachel get it?’
‘Elwyn Clyde’s dogs dragged it into her yard. She doesn’t know where it came from. I was over there this morning, after Elwyn shot himself in the foot.’
‘Again?’ He rolled his eyes and they both laughed. If every village had an idiot, then Tranquility’s would be Elwyn.
‘He’s okay,’ she said. ‘But I guess a gunshot wound should be reported.’
‘Consider it done. I already have a folder for Elwyn and his gunshot wounds.’ He gestured to a chair. ‘Now tell me about this bone. Are you sure it’s human?’
She sat down. Though they were looking directly at each other, he felt a barrier of reserve between them that was almost physical. He had sensed it the first time they’d met, soon after she’d moved to town, when she had attended to a prisoner suffering from abdominal pain in Tranquility’s three-cell jail. Lincoln had been curious about her from the start. Where was her husband? Why was she alone raising her son? But he had not felt comfortable asking her personal questions, and she did not seem to invite such intrusion. Pleasant but intensely private, she seemed reluctant to let anyone get too close to her, which was a shame. She was a pretty woman, short but sturdy, with luminous dark eyes and a mass of curly brown hair just starting to show the first strands of silver.
She leaned forward, her hands resting on his desk. ‘I’m not an expert or anything,’ she said, ‘but I don’t know what other animal this bone could come from. Judging by the size, it looks like a child’s.’
‘Did you see any other bones around?’
‘Rachel and I searched the yard, but we didn’t find any. The dogs could’ve picked this up anywhere in the woods. You’ll have to search the whole area.’
‘Could be from an old Indian burial.’
‘Possibly. But doesn’t it still have to go to the medical examiner?’ Suddenly she turned, her head cocked. ‘What’s all that commotion?’
Lincoln flushed. Doreen was shouting in her cell again, letting fly a fresh torrent of abuse. ‘Damn you, Lincoln! You jerk! You liar! Damn you to hell!’
‘It sounds like somebody doesn’t like you very much,’ said Claire.
He sighed and pressed his hand to his forehead. ‘My wife.’
Claire’s gaze softened to a look of sympathy. It was apparent she knew about his problems. Everyone in town did.
‘I’m sorry,’ she said.
‘Hey, loser!’ Doreen yelled. ‘You got no right to treat me like this!’
With deliberate effort, he redirected his attention to the thigh bone. ‘How old was the victim, do you think?’
She picked up the femur and turned it over in her hands. For a moment she held it with quiet reverence, fully aware that this broken length of bone had once supported a laughing, running child. ‘Young,’ she murmured. ‘I would guess under ten years old.’ She lay it on the desk and stared down in silence.
‘We haven’t had any missing children reported recently,’ he said. ‘The area’s been settled for hundreds of years, and old bones are always turning up. A century ago, it wasn’t all that unusual to die young.’
She was frowning. ‘I don’t think this child died from natural causes,’ she said softly.
‘Why do you say that?’
She reached over to turn on his desk lamp, and held the bone close to the light. ‘There,’ she said. ‘It’s so crusted over, you can barely see it through the dirt.’
He reached in his pocket for his glasses – another reminder of the years’ passage, of his youth slipping away. Bending closer, he tried to see what she was pointing at. Only when she’d scraped away a clot of dirt with her fingernail did he see the wedge-shaped gash.
It was the mark of a hatchet.
2
When Warren Emerson finally regained consciousness, he found he was lying next to the woodpile and the sun was shining in his eyes. His last memory was of shade, of silvery frost on the grass and bulging pockets of soil, heaved up from the cold. He’d been splitting firewood, swinging the ax and enjoying the sharp ring it made in the crisp air. The sun had not yet cleared the pine tree in his front yard.
Now it was well above the tree, which meant he had been lying here for some time, perhaps an hour, judging by its position in the sky.
Slowly Warren sat up, his head aching as it always did afterwards. His hands and face were numb from the cold; both of his gloves had fallen off. He saw the ax lying beside him, its blade buried deep in one end of a maple log. A day’s worth of firewood, already split, lay scattered around him. It took him a painfully long time to register these observations, and to consider the significance of each in turn. The thoughts came to him with effort, as though dragged from a great distance, arriving tattered and in disarray. He was patient with himself; eventually it would all make sense.
He had come out soon after sunrise to split his wood for the day. The result of his labor now lay all around him. He had almost completed the morning chore, had just swung his ax into that last log, when the darkness came over him. He had fallen onto the woodpile; that would explain why some of the logs had rolled off the top. His underwear was soaked; he must have wet himself, as he often did during a fit. Looking down at his clothes, he saw that his jeans were saturated.
There was blood on his shirt.
He staggered to his feet and walked slowly back into the old farmhouse.
The kitchen was hot and stuffy from the woodstove; it made him feel a little dizzy, and his vision had started to fade around the edges by the time he reached the bathroom. He sat down on the chipped toilet lid, clutching his head, waiting for the clouds to lift from his brain. The cat came in and rubbed against his calf, meowing for attention. He reached down to her and drew comfort from the softness of her fur.
His face was no longer numb from the cold, and he was now aware of pain throbbing insistently in his temple. Clutching the sink for support, he rose to his feet and looked in the mirror. Just over his left ear, the gray hair was stiff and matted with blood. A streak of it had dried across his cheek, like war paint. He stared at his own reflection, at a face deeply etched by sixty-six years of hard winters and honest work and loneliness. His only companion was the cat, now meowing at his feet, not from affection but hunger. He loved the cat, and someday he would mourn her passing with tears and a solemn burial and nights of longing for the sound of her purring, but he was under no illusion that she loved him.
He removed his clothes, the frayed and bloodstained shirt, the urine-soaked jeans. He undressed with the same care he devoted to every other task in his life, leaving his clothes in a tidy heap on the toilet lid. He turned on the shower and stepped in without waiting for the water to warm up; the discomfort was only momentary, scarcely worth a shiver in the context of his cold and uncomfortable life. He washed the blood out of his hair, the laceration stinging from the soap. He must have sliced his scalp open when he fell on the woodpile. It would heal, as all his other cuts had. Warren Emerson was a walking testament to the durability of scar tissue.
The cat renewed her meowing as soon as he stepped out of the shower. It was a pitiful sound, despairing, and he could not listen to it without feeling guilty. Still naked, he walked to the kitchen, opened a can of Little Friskies chicken bits, and spooned it into Mona’s cat bowl.
She gave a soft growl of pleasure and began to eat, no longer caring whether he came or went. Except for his skill with a can opener, he was extraneous to her existence.
He went to the bedroom to dress.
Once it had been his parents’ room, and it still contained all their possessions. The spindle bed, the bureau with the brass knobs, the photographs hanging up in their tin picture frames. As he buttoned his shirt, his gaze lingered on one photo in particular, of a dark-haired girl with smiling eyes. What was Iris doing at this moment? he wondered, as he did every day of his life. Did she ever think of him? His gaze moved on to another photo. It was the last one taken of his family, his mother plump and smiling, his father ill at ease in a suit and tie. And wedged between them, with his hair slicked to one side, was little Warren.
He reached out, fingers touching the photo of his own twelve-year-old face. He could not remember that boy. Up in the attic were the toy trains and the adventure books and the brittle crayons that once belonged to the child in that photo, but that was a different Warren who’d played in this house, who had stood smiling between his parents for a Sunday photograph. Not the Warren he saw when he looked in the mirror.
Suddenly he felt a terrible longing to touch that child’s toys again.
He climbed the steps to the attic and dragged the old blanket chest under the light. With the bare bulb swinging overhead, he lifted the chest lid. Inside were treasures. He took them out one by one and set them on the dusty floor. The cookie tin with all the Matchbox cars. The Lincoln Logs. The leather pouch of marbles. At last he found what he’d been looking for: the set of checkers.
He lay out the board and set up the checkers, red on his side, black on the opposite.
Mona came padding up to the attic and sat beside him, her breath smelling of chicken. For a moment she regarded the board with feline disdain. Then she tiptoed over to it and sniffed at one of the black pieces.
‘Is that your first move then?’ said Warren. It was not a very smart move, but then, what did one expect from a cat? He moved the black piece for her, and she seemed satisfied.
Outside the wind blew, rattling loose shutters. He could hear the branches of the lilac tree scratch against the clapboards.
Warren advanced a red checker and he smiled at his companion. ‘Your move, Mona.’
At six-thirty, as she did every weekday morning, five-year-old Isabel Morrison crept into her older sister’s bedroom and climbed under the covers with Mary Rose. There she wriggled like a happy worm in the warm sheets and hummed to herself as she waited for Mary Rose to wake up. There would always be a great deal of sighing and moaning, and Mary Rose would turn from one side to another, her long brown hair tickling Isabel’s face. Isabel thought Mary Rose was the most beautiful girl on earth. She looked like the sleeping Princess Aurora, waiting for her prince to kiss her. Sometimes Isabel would pretend she was Prince Charming, and even though she knew girls weren’t supposed to kiss each other, she would plant her lips on her sister’s mouth and announce: ‘Now you have to wake up!’
One time, Mary Rose had been awake all along, and had sprung up like a giggling monster and tickled Isabel so mercilessly that both girls had fallen off the bed in a duet of happy squeals.
If only Mary Rose would tickle her now. If only Mary Rose would be her normal self.
Isabel leaned close to her sister’s ear and whispered, ‘Aren’t you going to wake up?’
Mary Rose pulled the covers over her head. ‘Go away, pest.’
‘Mommy says it’s time for school. You have to wake up.’
‘Get out of my room!’
‘But it’s time for –’
Mary Rose gave a growl and lashed out with an angry kick.
Isabel slithered to the far side of the bed, where she lay in troubled silence, rubbing her sore shin and trying to understand what had just happened. Mary Rose had never kicked her before. Mary Rose always woke up with a smile and called her Dizzy Izzy and braided her hair before school.
She decided to try again. She crawled on hands and knees to her sister’s pillow, peeled back the sheets, and whispered into Mary Rose’s ear: ‘I know what Mommy and Daddy are getting you for Christmas. You wanna hear?’
Mary Rose’s eyes shot open. She turned to look at Isabel.
With a whimper of fear, Isabel scrambled off the bed and stared at a face she scarcely recognized. A face that frightened her. ‘Mary Rose?’ she whispered.
Then she ran out of the room.
Her mother was downstairs in the kitchen, stirring a pot of oatmeal and trying to hear the radio over the screeches of their parakeet, Rocky. As Isabel came tearing into the kitchen, her mother turned and said, ‘It’s seven o’clock. Isn’t your sister getting up?’
‘Mommy,’ Isabel wailed in despair. ‘That’s not Mary Rose!’
Noah Elliot did a 360 kick-flip, popping the skateboard off the curb, into the air, and landing it neatly on the blacktop. All right! Nailed it! Baggy clothes flapping in the wind, he rode the board all the way down to the teachers’ parking lot, ollied the curb, and came around again, a sweet ride all the way.
It was the only time he felt in control of his life, when he was riding his board, when for once, he determined his own fate, his own course. These days it seemed too many things were decided by other people, that he was being dragged, kicking and screaming, into a future he’d never asked for. But when he was riding his board, with the wind in his face and the pavement streaking by, he owned the moment. He could forget he was trapped in this nowhere town. He could even forget, for one brief and exhilarating ride, that his dad was dead and that nothing could ever be right again.
He felt the freshmen girls watching him. They were standing in a tight group behind the trailer classrooms, glossy heads bent close together as they made giggly girl sounds. All their faces moved in unison as their eyes tracked Noah on his board. He rarely talked to them, and they rarely talked to him, but every lunch period, there they’d be, watching him as he worked through his repertoire.
Noah wasn’t the only skateboarder at Knox High School, but he was definitely the best, and the girls kept their focus on him, ignoring the other boys whizzing around on the blacktop. Those boys were just posers anyway, dudes pretending to be skaters, all dressed up in gear straight out of the CCS catalogue. They had the uniform down right – Birdhouse shirts and Kevlar shoes and pants so big the cuffs dragged on the ground – but they were still posers in a hick town. They hadn’t skated with the big boys in Baltimore.
As Noah circled around to make his return run, he noticed the gleam of blond hair at the edge of the track field. Amelia Reid was watching him. She stood off by herself, cradling a book as usual. Amelia was one of those girls who seemed dipped in honey, she was so perfect, so golden. Nothing at all like her two jerky brothers, who were always hassling him in the cafeteria. Noah had never noticed her watching him before, and the realization that her attention was at this very moment focused on him made his knees go a little wobbly.
He ollied the board and almost lost it on the landing. Focus, dude! Don’t bite it. He zipped down to the faculty parking lot, spun around, and came rumbling up the concrete ramp. There was a handrail on one side, slanted downward. He spun around, and popped up onto the railing. It would’ve been a sweet slide all the way down.
Except for the fact Taylor Darnell chose just that moment to walk in front of him.
Noah yelled, ‘Outta the way!’ but Taylor didn’t react in time.
At the last possible instant, Noah rolled off his board and tumbled to the pavement. The skateboard, its momentum established, slid all the way down the rail and smacked into Taylor’s back.
Taylor whirled, yelling: ‘What the hell, man? Who threw that?’
‘Didn’t throw it, dude,’ said Noah, picking himself up from the ground. His palms were both scraped, and his knee was throbbing. ‘It was an accident. You just got in the way.’ Noah bent down to pick up the skateboard, which had landed wheels up. Taylor was an okay kid, one of the first who’d come up to say hello when Noah first arrived in town eight months ago. Sometimes, they even hung out together in the afternoons, showing each other new skateboard tricks. So Noah was shocked when Taylor suddenly shoved him, hard. ‘Hey! Hey, what’s your problem?’ said Noah.
‘You threw it at me!’
‘No I didn’t.’
‘Everyone saw it!’ Taylor looked around at the bystanders. ‘Didn’t you see it?’
No one said anything.
‘I told you, it was an accident,’ said Noah. ‘I’m really sorry, man.’
There was laughter over by the trailer classrooms. Taylor glanced at the girls and realized they were watching the exchange, and his face turned a furious red. ‘Shut up!’ he yelled at them. ‘Idiot girls!’
‘Geez, Taylor,’ said Noah. ‘What’s your problem?’
The other skaters had popped up their boards and were now standing around, watching. One of them joked,
‘Hey, why did Taylor cross the road?’
‘Why?’
‘Cause he got his dick stuck in the chicken!’
All the skaters laughed, including Noah. He couldn’t help it.
He was unprepared for the blow. It seemed to come out of nowhere, a sucker punch to the jaw. His head snapped up and he stumbled backwards and fell, his butt hitting the blacktop. There he sat for a moment, ears roaring and vision blurred as his shock gave way to hurt rage. He was my friend, and he hit me!
Noah staggered back to his feet and lunged at Taylor, tackling him head on. They both sprawled to the ground, Noah on top. They rolled over and over, both boys flailing, neither one able to get in a decisive blow. Noah finally pinned him, but it was like holding down a spitting cat.
‘Noah Elliot!’
He froze, his hands still trapping Taylor’s wrists. Slowly he turned his head and saw the principal, Miss Cornwallis, standing over them. The other kids had all backed away and were watching from a safe distance.
‘Get up!’ said Miss Cornwallis. ‘Both of you!’
At once Noah released Taylor and rose to his feet. Taylor, his face by now almost purple with rage, screamed: ‘He shoved me! He shoved me and I tried to defend myself!’
‘That’s not true! He hit me first!’
‘He threw his skateboard!’
‘I didn’t throw anything. It was an accident!’
‘Accident? You liar!’
‘Both of you, be quiet!’ yelled Miss Cornwallis.
There was shocked silence in the schoolyard as everyone stared at the principal. They’d never heard her yell before. She was a prim but handsome woman who wore suits and low heels to school and kept her blond hair neatly tucked into a French twist. To see her shouting was a revelation to them all.
Miss C. took a deep breath, swiftly recovering her dignity. ‘Give me the skateboard, Noah.’
‘It was an accident. I didn’t hit him.’
‘You were pinning him on the ground. I saw it.’
‘But I didn’t hit him!’
She held out her hand. ‘Give it to me.’
‘But –’
‘Now.’
Noah walked over to his board, lying a few feet away. It was well-worn, one chipped edge crisscrossed with electrician’s tape. The board had been a birthday gift when he turned thirteen. He’d added the decals underneath it – a green dragon with red fire shooting out of its mouth – and had broken in the wheels riding the streets of Baltimore where he used to live. He loved this board, because it reminded him of everything he’d left behind. Everything he still missed. He held it for a moment, then, wordlessly, handed it to Miss C.
She took it with a look of distaste. Turning to address the other students she said, ‘There’ll be no more skating on school grounds. I want all the skateboards brought home today. And if I see any boards tomorrow, I’ll confiscate them. Is that clear?’
There was a silent nodding of heads.
Miss C. turned to Noah. ‘You’re in detention until three-thirty this afternoon.’
‘But I didn’t do anything!’
‘You come to my office now. You’re going to sit and think about what you did do.’
Noah started to argue, then swallowed his words. Everyone was looking at him. He glimpsed Amelia Reid standing by the track field, and his face flushed with humiliation. In silence, head down, he followed Miss C. toward the building.
The other skaters sullenly parted to let them through. Only as Noah was walking away from them did he hear one of the boys mutter:
‘Thanks, Elliot. You screwed it up for the rest of us.’
If one wished to take the pulse of the town of Tranquility, the place to go was Monaghan’s Diner. This was where the Dinosaur Club met every day at noon. It was not really a club, but a coffee klatch, six or seven retirees who, for want of a job to go to, hung around Nadine’s counter, admiring the pies under the plastic bells. Claire had no idea how the club got its name. Her guess was that one of the men’s wives, in a fit of pique over her husband’s daily absence, one day blurted out something like: ‘Oh, you and that bunch of old dinosaurs!’ And the name stuck, as good names do. They were all men, all well past sixty. Nadine was only in her fifties, but she was an unofficial Dinosaur because she worked behind the counter and had the good humor to tolerate their bad jokes and cigarette smoke.
Four hours after the thigh bone was found, Claire stopped in at Monaghan’s for lunch. The Dinosaurs, seven of them today, all wearing blaze orange over flannel shirts, sat in their usual place, the far left barstools near the milkshake machine.
Ned Tibbetts turned and nodded as Claire came in the door. Not a warm greeting, but gruffly respectful. ‘Mornin’, Doc.’
‘Morning, Mr Tibbetts.’
‘Gonna be a mean wind blowing in today.’
‘It’s already freezing outside.’
‘Coming out of the northwest. Could have snow tonight.’
‘Cup of coffee, Doc?’ asked Nadine.
‘Thank you.’
Ned turned back to the other Dinosaurs, who’d variously acknowledged her entrance, and were now back in conversation. She knew only two of them by name; the others were merely familiar faces. Claire sat alone at her end of the counter, as befitted her outsider status. Oh, people were cordial enough to her. They smiled, they were polite. But to these natives, her eight months in Tranquility was but a temporary sojourn, a city girl’s fling with the simple life. Winter, they all seemed to agree, would be the test. Four months of snowstorms and black ice would drive her back to the city, as it had driven off the last two doctors from away.
Nadine slid a steaming cup of coffee in front of Claire. ‘Guess you know all about it, don’t you?’ she said.
‘All about what?’
‘That bone.’ Nadine stood watching her, patiently waiting for her contribution to the community pool of knowledge. Like most Maine women, Nadine did a lot of listening. It was the men who seemed to do all the talking. Claire heard them when she walked through the local hardware store or the five-and-dime or the post office. They stood around and gabbed while their wives waited, silent and watchful.
‘I hear it’s a kid’s bone,’ said Joe Bartlett, swiveling on the stool to look at Claire. ‘A thigh bone.’
‘That right, Doc?’ another one asked.
The other Dinosaurs turned and looked at Claire.
She said, with a smile, ‘You already seem to know everything about it.’
‘Heard it was whacked up good. Maybe a knife. Maybe an ax. Then the animals got at it.’
‘You boys sure are cheerful today,’ snorted Nadine.
‘Three days in those woods, raccoons and coyotes clean your bones straight off. Then Elwyn’s dogs come along. Hardly ever feeds ‘em, y’know. Bone like that’s a tasty snack. Maybe his dogs’ve been chewing on it for weeks. Elwyn, he wouldn’t think to give it a second look.’
Joe laughed. ‘That Elwyn, he just plain doesn’t think.’
‘Maybe he shot the kid himself. Mistook it for a deer.’
Claire said, ‘It looked like a very old bone.’
Joe Bartlett waved at Nadine. ‘I made up my mind. I’ll have the Monte Cristo sandwich.’
‘Whooee! Joe’s goin’ fancy on us today!’ said Ned Tibbetts.
‘What about you, Doc?’ asked Nadine.
‘A tuna sandwich and a bowl of mushroom soup, please.’
As Claire ate her lunch, she listened to the men talk about whom the bone might belong to. It was impossible not to listen in; three of them wore hearing aids. Most of them could remember as far back as sixty years ago, and they batted the possibilities around like a birdie in play. Maybe it was that young girl who’d fallen off Bald Rock Cliff. No, they’d found her body, remember? Maybe it was the Jewett girl – hadn’t she run off when she was sixteen? Ned said no, he’d heard from his mother that she was living in Hartford; the girl’d have to be in her sixties now, probably a grandmother. Fred Moody said his wife Florida said the dead girl had to be from away – one of the summer people. Tranquility kept track of its own, and wouldn’t someone remember if a local kid had vanished?
Nadine refilled Claire’s cup of coffee. ‘Don’t they just go on and on?’ she said. ‘You’d think they was planning world peace.’
‘How do they know so much about it, anyway?’
‘Joe’s second cousin to Floyd Spear, over at the police department.’ Nadine began to wipe down the counter, long, brisk strokes that left behind a faintly chlorinated smell. ‘They say some bone expert’s driving up from Bangor today. Way I figure, it’s gotta be one of those summer people.’
That, of course, was the obvious answer – one of the summer people. Whether it was an unsolved crime or an unidentified body, the all-purpose answer served. Every June, Tranquility’s population quadrupled when wealthy families from Boston and New York began arriving for their lakeside vacations. Here, in this peaceful summertime colony, they would linger on the porches of their shorefront cottages while their children splashed in the water. In the shops of Tranquility, cash registers would ring merrily as the summer folk pumped dollars into the local economy. Someone had to clean their cottages, repair their fancy cars, bag their groceries. The business from those few short months was enough to keep the local population fed through the winter.
It was the money that made the visitors tolerable. That and the fact that every September, with the falling of the leaves, they would once again vanish, leaving the town to the people who belonged here.
Claire finished her lunch and walked back to her office.
Tranquility’s main street followed the curve of the lake. At the top of Elm Street was Joe Bartlett’s gas and garage, which he’d run for forty-two years until he retired; now his daughter’s two girls pumped gas and changed oil. A sign above the garage proudly proclaimed: Owned and Operated by Joe Bartlett and Granddaughters. Claire had always liked that sign; she thought it said a lot for Joe Bartlett.
At the post office, Elm Street curved north. Already that northwest wind was starting to blow in across the lake. It blasted through the narrow alleys between buildings, and walking along the sidewalk was like passing through a series of icy wind tunnels. In the window above the five-and-dime, a black cat gazed down at her, as though pondering the stupidity of creatures out in such weather.
Next to the five-and-dime was the yellow Victorian where Claire had her medical practice.
The building had once served as Dr Pomeroy’s business and residence. The door still had the old frosted glass with the lettering: MEDICAL OFFICE. Although the name James Pomeroy, M.D., had been replaced by Claire Elliot, M.D., Family Practice, she sometimes imagined she could see the shadow of the old name lingering like a ghost in the pebbled glass, refusing to yield to the new occupant.
Inside, her receptionist, Vera, was yakking on the phone, her bracelets clattering as she flipped through the appointment book. Vera’s hairstyle was like her personality: wild and woolly and a little frazzled. She cupped her hand over the receiver and said to Claire, ‘Mairead Temple’s in the exam room. Sore throat.’
‘How’s the rest of the afternoon look?’
‘Two more coming in, and that’s it.’
Which added up to only six patients all day, worried Claire. Since the summer tourists departed, Claire’s practice had contracted. She was the only doctor with an office right in Tranquility, yet most of the locals drove the twenty miles to Two Hills for medical care. She knew why; not many in town believed she’d last through one hard winter, and they saw no point getting attached to a doctor who’d be gone by the following autumn.
Mairead Temple was one of the few patients Claire had managed to attract, but it was only because Mairead owned no car. She’d walked a mile into town, and now she sat on the exam table, still wheezing slightly from the cold weather. Mairead was eighty-one and she had no teeth or tonsils. Nor did she have much deference for authority.
Examining Mairead’s throat, Claire said, ‘It does look pretty red.’
‘I coulda told you that myself,’ Mairead answered.
‘But you don’t have a fever. And your lymph nodes aren’t swollen.’
‘Hurts wicked bad. Can’t hardly swallow.’
‘I’ll take a throat culture. By tomorrow we’ll know if it’s strep. But I think it’s just a virus.’
Mairead, her eyes small and suspicious, watched Claire peel open a throat swab. ‘Dr Pomeroy always gave me penicillin.’
‘Antibiotics don’t work on a virus, Mrs Temple.’
‘Always made me feel better, that penicillin.’
‘Say “ah.”’
Mairead gagged as Claire swabbed her throat. She looked like a tortoise, leathery neck extended, toothless mouth snapping at the air. Eyes watering, she said: ‘Pomeroy was in practice a long time. Always knew what he was doing. All you young doctors, you coulda learned a thing or two from him.’
Claire sighed. Would she always be compared to Dr Pomeroy? His gravestone sat in a place of honor in the Mountain Street Cemetery. Claire saw his cryptic notes in the old medical charts, and sometimes she sensed his ghost dogging her on her rounds. Certainly it was Pomeroy’s ghost that now came between her and Mairead. Dead though he was, he would always be remembered as the town doctor.
‘Let’s listen to your lungs,’ said Claire.
Mairead grunted and tugged at her clothes. It was cold outside, and she had dressed for it. A sweater, a cotton shirt, thermal underwear, and a bra all had to be pulled free before Claire could set her stethoscope on her chest.
Through the thump-thump of Mairead’s heart, Claire heard a distant tapping and she looked up.
Vera stuck her head in the room. ‘Call on line two.’
‘Can you take a message?’
‘It’s your son. He won’t talk to me.’
‘Excuse me, Mrs Temple,’ Claire said, and went into her office to take the call. ‘Noah?’
‘You have to pick me up. I’m gonna miss the bus.’
‘But it’s only two-fifteen. The bus hasn’t left yet.’
‘I’m in detention. I can’t leave until three-thirty.’
‘Why? What happened?’
‘I don’t wanna talk about it now.’
‘I’m going to find out anyway, honey.’
‘Not now, Mom.’ She heard him sniffle, heard the tears break through his voice. ‘Please. Please, can you just come and get me?’
The phone went dead. Haunted by the image of her son, crying and in trouble, Claire quickly dialed the school back. But by the time she reached the secretary, Noah had already left the office, and Miss Cornwallis was not available to speak to her.
Claire had an hour to finish with Mairead Temple, see two new patients, and drive to the school.
Feeling pressured now, and distracted by Noah’s crisis, she stepped back into the exam room and was dismayed to see that Mairead already had put her clothes back on.
‘I’m not quite finished examining you,’ said Claire.
‘Yeah, y’are,’ grunted Mairead.
‘But Mrs Temple –’
‘Came for penicillin. Didn’t come to get no Q-Tip shoved down my throat.’
‘Please, won’t you just sit down? I know I do things a little differently from Dr Pomeroy, but there’s a reason for it. Antibiotics don’t stop a virus, and they can cause side effects.’
‘Never caused me no side effects.’
‘It only takes a day to get back the culture results. If it’s strep, I’ll give you the medicine then.’
‘Gotta walk all the way into town. Takes up half my day.’
Suddenly Claire understood what the real issue was. Every lab test, every new prescription, meant a mile-long walk into town for Mairead, and then another mile walk home.
With a sigh, she pulled out a prescription pad. And for the first time that visit, she saw Mairead’s smile. Satisfied. Triumphant.
Isabel sat quietly on the couch, afraid to move, afraid to say a word.
Mary Rose was very, very mad. Their mother was not home yet, so Isabel was all alone with her sister. She had never seen Mary Rose behave this way, pacing back and forth like a tiger in the zoo, screaming at her. At her, Isabel! Mary Rose was so angry, it turned her face wrinkled and ugly, not like Princess Aurora anymore, but more like an evil queen. This was not her sister. This was a bad person inside her sister’s body.
Pulsuz fraqment bitdi.
