Читать книгу Shadow Lake - B.J. Daniels, B.J. Daniels - Страница 10

WITH MORE THAN A little relief, Dr. Brubaker checked his only patient and found her sound asleep. Telling the nurse to beep him when Anna woke again, he left the hospital to go home, shower, shave and change clothes.

As was his routine, he turned in the gate to the cemetery on his walk home and headed for his wife’s grave.

Gladys had picked out the two plots, saying she wanted to be able to catch the morning sun. She’d always loved that about her kitchen window. He’d so often see her standing in front of the sink, her face tilted up to catch the morning sun, that sometimes even now when he came into the kitchen he caught glimpses of her for just an instant.

Better to see her there, in the sunlight, rather than the hospital bed where she’d spent the last months of her life. Gladys had wanted to die in their home so he’d moved one of the hospital beds into the living room.

She’d been so small lying there. He’d watched her grow thinner and thinner, disappearing from his life with each passing day. At the end, he’d feared that he would wake from the bed he’d made next to hers and find that she had wasted away to nothing as if she’d never existed.

As it was, she’d been nearly child-size by the time she’d died, way too small for the casket he’d picked out for her.

He recognized the names on the gravestones as he walked through the rain-soaked cemetery. A light drizzle fell, the clouds gray and dark over the lake. He’d known a lot of the people buried here.

Some of them he’d brought into the world, a lot of them he’d kept alive as long as he could before they’d passed on. The thought gave him little comfort.

Through a weathered iron fence and veil of pine boughs, he caught a glimpse of freshly turned earth. The wind must have blown off the green tarp the funeral home used until it quit raining long enough to lay the sod. Or had the tarp come off when Big Jim Fairbanks started rolling in his grave, Brubaker wondered.

Unlike Gladys, Big Jim had fought until the very end. He’d wanted to live and had said he was too damned young to die even though he was older than most, Doc included. Big Jim hadn’t gone peacefully. Nor did Doc suspect Big Jim Fairbanks rested easy, either.

Brubaker realized as he stared at Big Jim’s grave that he believed in retribution, if nothing else. There was a price to be paid for what was done on this earth. A man had to pay for his sins. And a man like Big Jim Fairbanks would be paying dearly about now.

And soon so would Gene Brubaker, he reminded himself.

Turning, Doc went to spend time with his wife as he had done every day since her death.

“OH DEAR, WHAT HAVE YOU DONE?”

Anna woke with a start as an older gray-haired nurse rushed to her bedside. “Pulled out your IV, have you?” Her name tag read Connie. “Must have really tossed and turned in your sleep to do that.”

Anna said nothing as the nurse reattached the IV. She’d lost the scrap of memory she’d had just before she’d been awakened. In frustration, she looked toward the window, saw the lake and closed her eyes to keep from shuddering.

“There, that should hold this time,” the nurse said. “How are you feeling?”

Anna could only nod.

The nurse studied her. “You want me to call the doctor?”

“No. I just want to sleep.” She really just wanted to be alone, not sure she wanted to call back the memory. She could feel an uneasiness and knew that if she tried to force the memory it would turn to anxiety, then panic.

“I’m fine,” she told the nurse and closed her eyes, waiting for her to leave.

The moment the nurse closed the door behind her, Anna sat up, feeling desperate and scared.

Calm down. Calm down. She heard her husband Marc’s voice. Calm down. Only he was no longer her husband. The divorce was to be final yesterday. Was that true? Only yesterday?

Her hand was shaking as she picked up the phone and dialed. Gillian Sanders had been her friend since college and was now a successful lawyer. Anna knew she wouldn’t have made it through the past two months without Gillian.

Gillian’s cell phone rang four times and voice mail picked up. “It’s me, Anna.” Her voice sounded panicky even to her. She considered leaving the hospital number but knew that would scare Gillian. “I’ll try back later.”

She hung up, disappointed she hadn’t reached her. Right now she needed Gillian’s logical calming influence. Gillian had a way of seeing to the heart of things. Like when Anna had come to her for advice about Marc.

“Don’t fight the divorce, honey,” Gillian had advised. “He’s a bastard. Have you ever really been happy with him?”

“Yes, when Tyler was born…”

“Come on. You were happy because of Tyler—not Marc. Admit it.”

Anna had started to cry. Admitting that her marriage had been anything but happy from the beginning was devastating.

Gillian had pressed a business card into her hand.

“What is this?” Anna had asked through her tears.

“A damned good divorce attorney. But you didn’t get it from me.”

“I want you as my lawyer.”

“Anna, I’m not a divorce lawyer and I know both you and Marc. You want someone who is impartial and tough as nails. Believe me, Marc will get the toughest lawyer money can buy.”

“But I want someone who will protect my interests.”

“I am, sweetie,” Gillian had said, taking her hand. “Divorce the asshole before he can file first. You can do better.”

But Anna had waited and let Marc serve the papers on her. The divorce lawyer Gillian had recommended had taken care of everything. All Anna had to do was sign the papers and wait for the dissolution of her marriage to be final. She’d only managed to get through it by pretending it wasn’t happening. She’d lost her son. Now her husband.

Coward that she was, she’d also pretended that she didn’t know why Marc had wanted the divorce.

As of yesterday, she was no longer Mrs. Marc Collins.

She realized she was still gripping the phone. She needed to talk to someone. If not Gillian, then Mary Ellen. Mary Ellen was a mutual friend of Anna and Gillian’s, a college sorority sister. Blond, buxom, a bit scatterbrained, but a talented interior designer, Mary Ellen had gotten through life on “cute” and good taste.

Anna dialed Mary Ellen’s number trying to get into the mood to talk to her always bubbly friend. She was tired of calling her friends crying and desperate. She was tired of being depressed and morbid and scared. And she knew they were even more sick of it than she was.

The phone rang four times and Anna was about to hang up when Mary Ellen finally picked up.

“Hello?”

“Hi, it’s me.”

“Oh, hello.”

Anna was momentarily taken aback by Mary Ellen’s blasé reaction. This was not like her. “Is everything all right?”

Silence. “Yes, I’m in the middle of something right now. Can I call you back?”

Anna sat up a little straighter in the bed at Mary Ellen’s overformal tone. “Okay, I mean, no. I…” She glanced at the phone, unsure of the hospital number. “I’ll call you back later.”

“That would be fine.” Mary Ellen hung up, but not before Anna heard a man’s voice in the background.

She stared at the phone as she replaced the receiver. What had that been about? The voice she’d heard definitely hadn’t been Mary Ellen’s husband, David.

The voice had sounded like…

Anna felt a wave of nausea wash over her.

Marc. The voice had sounded like Marc’s, but that wasn’t possible. Marc didn’t like Mary Ellen. He’d never liked any of her friends. But while he made fun of Mary Ellen, he was much harsher when it came to Gillian. He could barely be civil to Gillian—and vice versa.

So it couldn’t have been Marc’s voice Anna had heard in the background.

She fought her disappointment in not being able to talk to Mary Ellen. She needed to talk to a friend. Gillian and Mary Ellen were the only ones she still saw. The rest of her so-called friends had disappeared.

She thought about calling Marc, just to prove to herself that it hadn’t been his voice she’d heard at Mary Ellen’s. But she had nothing to say to him. Gillian was right. Tyler had been the reason Anna had stayed with Marc. She’d so desperately wanted Tyler to have a father even if Marc had been a disappointing one. She’d hoped that as Tyler got older, Marc would get better.

Her throat closed at the thought of Tyler, her chest aching as tears again burned her eyes, blurring everything.

You have to stop this, Anna.

Marc’s voice again and a memory so clear it hurt. “You have to stop, Anna, before you drive us both crazy. I can’t take any more.” Possibly his last words to her before he moved out of their house. Or maybe more recently. They’d had so many fights she couldn’t remember the last one.

She dried her eyes and dialed Gillian’s cell again. Still no answer. She hung up without leaving a message.

Had it only been yesterday that she’d had Gillian and Mary Ellen over for lunch? Mary Ellen and Gillian had made a point of not mentioning the divorce or the fact it was to be final later that day.

Needless to say, the lunch had been strained. Anna frowned as she recalled how distracted Gillian had been. Even Mary Ellen had been unusually quiet. At the time, Anna had thought it was just her pending divorce causing it, but now she recalled she’d picked up an undercurrent. Mary Ellen and Gillian had seemed upset with each other.

Funny she would realize that now. She’d thought she was doing so well yesterday, but apparently she’d been numb to what had been happening around her.

She felt a sliver of anxiety burrow under her skin. Since she’d come out of the coma she’d been picking up weird vibes from everyone, especially Marc. But often Mary Ellen and Gillian, as well. Either they were all walking on eggshells around her, or they were keeping something from her.

When she’d mentioned this to Marc, he’d accused her of thinking everyone was plotting against her—especially him. But she still couldn’t shake the feeling that from the moment she’d opened her eyes two months ago in another hospital, her husband and friends had some secret they didn’t want her to find out about.

She knew that was crazy thinking. No secret was as horrible as the reality of what she’d awakened to.

Closing her eyes, she lay back on the bed. Her head ached and she felt sick to her stomach. She pulled the sheet up to her chin. It felt cool and smelled fresh from the laundry. Her stomach did a slow sickening roll as she recalled her friend’s stilted part of the conversation. Mary Ellen hadn’t even used Anna’s name during the call.

Because Mary Ellen didn’t want whoever was there to know it was her?

Marc would say this was just another case of her imagining things. What did she think Mary Ellen and Marc were doing? Plotting against her? It might not even have been Marc’s voice she heard.

She was acting irrational. She battled the urge to call Mary Ellen back and demand to know what was going on. She could feel another panic attack coming on. Marc had told her she was delusional enough times. She felt delusional.

She tried her friend Gillian’s cell phone again. Still no answer. Gillian always had her cell phone with her. It wasn’t like her not to answer unless she was in court.

Anna didn’t leave a message. Instead, she tried Mary Ellen again.

Mary Ellen answered this time on the first ring. “Anna?” Apparently she’d been waiting by the phone. “Where are you? Are you all right? We’ve been worried sick about you.”

Hearing the concern in her friend’s voice, Anna started to pour out her story about the accident, but she heard herself say “We?”

Mary Ellen’s voice softened. “Honey, Marc is really worried about you.”

Anna closed her eyes. It had been Marc’s voice she’d heard earlier in the background. Just as she wasn’t mistaken about the recrimination she now heard in her friend’s voice.

“I’m sure Marc has better things to do than worry about me,” she said. “We’re divorced. I’m not his concern anymore.”

An odd silence then, “Honey, Marc didn’t go through with the divorce. The papers were never filed.”

“What?” Hadn’t that been her hope, her prayer? Losing Marc had made Tyler’s death more real somehow. Anna had clung to the marriage because it was all she had.

“He changed his mind,” Mary Ellen was saying. “But, honey, I was sure he told you that last night.”

“Last night?”

AFTER OFFICER D.C. WALKER disconnected his call with Marc Collins, he had started to dial his boss when he noticed Mac was having a problem with the winch. He walked back over to the side of the mountain and saw nothing in the mist but water.

“Hook came undone,” the wrecker operator yelled to him. “Divers are down reattaching the cable.”

Walker stared at the lake with the rain clouds mirrored in it, still shocked by what he’d learned from Marc Collins. The gloomy gray day did nothing to lift his spirits. Where the hell was spring?

The news he’d received had left him angry and upset. What else was the woman in the hospital keeping from him?

One thing was for sure: he needed to let Chief Nash in on what was going on. He started to call him, but stopped as the divers reappeared below him on the shore and signaled to the wrecker operator that the car was ready again. Mac gave Walker a thumbs-up and the tow motor revved once again.

What worried Walker was how the chief had sounded earlier when he’d called. Was there some kind of trouble in Pilot’s Cove that his boss wasn’t telling him about? Or had the chief gone to the county seat to pick up the paperwork before he announced his retirement?

Walker brightened at the thought. He’d been waiting for twelve years for that job to open up. He couldn’t stand the suspense. He stepped away from the wrecker to call the Pilot’s Cove office.

“I was hoping to catch Chief Nash,” he told the woman who answered.

“Chief Nash from Shadow Lake?”

“Is there another Chief Nash I don’t know about?” He instantly regretted the sarcasm. “Sorry, it’s important I speak with him.”

“We haven’t seen Chief Nash in about four months,” she said, her voice as chilly as the lake below him.

“He was over there yesterday doing something with your department.”

“Afraid not. Maybe he was at Dam City or—”

Walker hung up when the engine on the tow truck let out an ear-piercing whine as the cable to the Cadillac began to grow taut again. The huge steel cable hummed.

Walker walked back over to stand next to the wrecker, still a little stunned. Chief Nash had lied. Walker couldn’t have been more shocked by that. He had great respect for the man. Nash was from the old school of justice, tough as nails, but fair and straight as an arrow.

There had to be another explanation.

The rear end of the overturned Cadillac broke the surface of the water. It looked like a blue turtle flipped over on its shell.

Walker stared at the path the Cadillac had taken down the mountain, a path of broken saplings, tire tracks and carnage. The same path the car would have to take this time, only on its top.

It was a miracle the woman had gotten out of the lake alive. Since talking to Marc Collins, Walker was even more convinced Anna Drake Collins hadn’t planned it that way.

Suddenly the whine of the wrecker’s winch intensified and then the cable snapped.

Walker watched the long snaking link of steel shoot like a rubber band back up the mountain—headed straight for him.

DOC STOOD IN THE DRIZZLE, unaffected by the cold and the rain while he talked to his dead wife the way he always did. It didn’t seem to matter what he talked about, just that he did.

Today he told Gladys about his latest patient.

“She’s pretty. She has hazel eyes that remind me of yours,” he said as he bent down to pull a weed that he hadn’t noticed before beside his wife’s headstone.

“I’m worried about her, but you know me,” he said with a laugh. “You always said I took on everyone’s worries because I didn’t have enough of my own.” His eyes misted over for a moment and he had to bite his lip before he could continue.

“Her four-year-old boy might have been in the car with her when it went into the lake. I’m just sick at heart at the thought. I don’t think she’s strong enough to take that news.”

He cleared his throat. “Walker is on the case.” Gladys had always been fond of Walker and his friends. She’d made them their favorite cookies and would call the boys up on the porch whenever they passed by. She liked to watch them eat a half-dozen cookies each, washed down by the homemade lemonade she kept for just such a visit. She’d ply the boys with treats in exchange for conversation.

It still hurt that he and Gladys had never been blessed with their own children. Gladys had loved children so. She would have been like a mother hen with Anna. Gladys could sense need in people. Gene had always thought it was one reason she’d married him.

“Walker’s afraid the woman tried to kill herself. I don’t believe it. Especially if her son was in the car. She wouldn’t do that. Not this woman.”

He brushed off rainwater that had puddled on top of Gladys’s stone. “I miss you.” He stopped, unable to continue. There was more he wanted to say, but he couldn’t find the words. Just as, for a long time, he hadn’t been able to tell Gladys she was dying.

But she’d known. She’d suspected it was cancer. Still, it had been the hardest thing he’d ever had to do, to tell her it was inoperable, to tell her she had only a short time left.

She’d taken it much better than he had. But then that was Gladys. She’d never worried about things she couldn’t change. He wished he could be more like her.

He looked down at his wife’s grave again. “Can you ever forgive me?” But it wasn’t Glady’s forgiveness he knew he was seeking. His wife had been the most forgiving person he’d ever known.

He brushed a hand over her headstone, tears blurring his eyes, his nose running. He made a swipe at his eyes, nose, looking to the lake. Summer felt a long way off. Doc had no plans to see it.

He cleared his throat. He needed to get on home. Soon he’d have to return to the hospital and make sure Anna was all right. She needed him. At least for a while.

CHIEF ROB NASH HAD TO take a piss. He’d lost count of the beers he’d drunk in an attempt to fight off last night’s hangover. It wasn’t working.

But as he passed the bed, he saw that he had another message on his cell phone from Walker. Nash picked up the phone, those old habits so conditioned it took everything in him not to return the call.

Walker could handle whatever it was, he told himself as he tossed the phone back on the bed and proceeded to the bathroom. He knew Walker wanted his job. And soon, he would get it.

Nash realized he should have retired a long time ago. He was past his prime and clearly couldn’t trust his instincts anymore. Marrying Lucinda proved that.

As he stood in front of the toilet, he caught his reflection in the mirror. He looked as if he’d aged overnight.

He was fifty-five years old. Most cops his age had quit a long time ago. He had his years in. He could retire on his pension. He’d worked hard his whole life, saved all his money, never really given retirement much thought. Because he knew he would go crazy within a week.

Standing there bent over the motel-room toilet, sick and tired and hurting like hell, he admitted he didn’t know what he was going to do. Which was strange because he couldn’t shake the feeling that a decision had been made for him the moment he saw his wife get into that car with that man.