He glanced at me one last time with that indulgent look John had dubbed “humor the crazy lady” and then went inside. I watched the steel door close behind him with a sense of relief that he was gone, but a residue of unease remained.
I paced back and forth a bit, trying to think but my mind continued to be restless. Thoughts of John kept interrupting my attempts to reason out the string of murders that plagued me and thwarted my attempts to rest easy about my son. The thoughts were so real and persistent it was almost as if he were with me. The thought of John only raised my anxiety instead of calming it. I kept shoving him out of the way, that act of will Father Matt talked about, but he kept coming back, insisting. I wondered if I finally had lost my senses. As I leaned over to pick up Ben’s laptop, I heard John’s voice.
“Jane. Leave. Now. Go back inside.”
I heard his voice as clearly as I ever had. I looked around. There was no one there, least of all John. I stopped in my tracks. Another flash caught the corner of my eye, from another direction, brief and evanescent as lightning.
“Now, Jane! Now! Go!”
There was no mistaking the urgency, even if it couldn’t be John.
A chill went up my spine, and the garden wasn’t a place of repose any longer. Now it menaced me, taunting me with memories of my dead husband and fears for my son so vivid I couldn’t bear it. I turned abruptly, away from the wall that overlooked the Telluride Trail.
They say you never hear the shot that hits you. I can vouch for that. I heard no sound, but felt a sudden pain in my right breast, hot, incapacitating. My hand went to the spot and came away sticky, and I couldn’t breathe. I fell on my knees, doubled over, trying to catch my breath in the shelter of the wall, making mental inventory of what might have been hit given the entrance wound. If I was lucky, nothing too vital.
I stayed there in the shade of the wall as precious minutes ticked by, too afraid and in too much pain to move. I’d examined countless gunshot wounds but never considered how they felt, except in response to questions on the witness stand. Next time I’d give a better answer. Yes, it hurt. Yes, the victim was in pain. As a matter of fact, it hurt like hell, like nothing I had ever experienced before.
I finally struggled to my feet, splinting my side with my right arm to ease the pain. I still couldn’t breathe well, and blood was now starting to drip from my side, never a good sign. I paused at the trellis before wrestling the door to the stairwell open, hoping there wouldn't be another shot, all too aware that I was an easy target. It was a shock to realize someone wanted me dead. Why? What had I done? I wanted to confront my assailant, drag the answers out of him, a response I found oddly comforting. If I could be angry, I couldn’t be dying, right?
I lurched forward through the door to the safety of the building’s interior, leaning against the wall to make sure of my balance before going any farther. A gunshot wound was bad enough. A broken neck from a fall would be much, much worse. I tried to smile at the irony of my forensic examination of my own plight, but it hurt too much. I paused again, hoping to gather some strength, but I couldn’t. The pain kept coming in great waves, and my breathing was increasingly shallow. I was shaking.
I started down the steps, cursing myself for once again leaving my cell phone on my desk. The pain increased with every step, and I could feel the blood dripping onto the steps as I stumbled down them. Just my luck, I thought. Only Ben knew where I was, and no one would find me. I’d collapse and bleed to death in this damn stairwell, and no one would ever find me.
As I came to the first landing, another wave of pain, worse than any of the others, brought me to my knees. I sank onto the cool tile, grateful for its reassuring feel on my face, something other than the pain in my chest. My breaths were shallower now, not enough to sustain movement, even down stairs. It would be so easy just to lie here, just give it up, let it go. The voice again.
“Get up, Jane. Only five more steps.” John’s gentle encouragement. “Come on, Mrs. Doe.” His pet name for me. We were the Does. John and Jane.
I pulled myself up by the rail. One step, two, three. I collapsed again on the fourth step, gasping in air as hard as I could, but getting no relief. The door to the third floor tantalized me, so close, so unreachable in front of me. I closed my eyes, gathering my strength and my will to reach it. I pulled myself up again, not quite to standing, doubled over but mobile again. Fifth step. Landing. My hand was on the lever of the door, and I pushed with all the strength I had left.
A buzzing rose in my ears, my head started to swim, and darkness started to close off my vision like an encroaching tunnel. Where was the light? Wasn’t there supposed to be light? Where was John? Wasn’t he supposed to meet me?
“Oh, dear God,” I whispered, as the last of the light slipped away and I fell into darkness, “I am so sorry.”
**********
Connor couldn’t believe that he was driving like a bat out of hell along the highway to Montrose, couldn’t believe that he cared so much, that she was — as far as he knew — hovering between life and death and there was nothing he could do about it. Damn the road, damn the cell-holes that kept him out of touch, though he doubted he’d be able to get any information, anyway. He’d given her son his number as he climbed aboard the life-flight, his eyes red, his hands shaking. Damn the man who’d shot her.
It would be almost an hour before he knew anything. Sixty interminable minutes. He gunned his car past a camper-truck, chugging along the Divide, oblivious to the notion that there might be something coming the other way. Damn them, too, they’d just have to get out of the way.
She’d managed to get down the stairwell to the third floor and had collapsed through the door, a motionless heap, her blood staining the floor outside the lounge. That Navajo tech had roused the troops and called everyone he could think of, thanks be to God, and he’d been among them. He’d arrived just as the paramedics were pumping her full of fluids and calling for the helicopter. She was pale and silent, eyes closed, a purpling bruise on her temple, her right breast obscured by an enormous wad of bandages, what he could see of her shirt stiff with the blood she’d spilled onto the floor.
He’d touched her hand, warm and limp, before they pushed him away to load her onto the gurney. Her son was sobbing like a child, and he’d put a strong arm around him. “It’ll be fine, Ben, she’ll be fine.” Ben hadn’t been able to say a word, had just gone with the paramedics, still weeping. The priest had arrived in time with another cleric in tow, and that one anointed her before the helicopter lifted off, and the two of them had stood there, silent, praying, watching it disappear down the valley.
And now here he was, racing to see what happened. As if getting there a minute earlier would make any difference at all. She was in God’s hands, God’s and the Blessed Mother’s, and the doctors’. It reminded him of too many such trips in Belfast and Derry. Most of those had turned out badly, and how often he’d stoked the anger that came out of the following grief before he realized how futile it was. He’d done exactly what she had been doing, and he’d chastised her the last time they spoke, and they’d parted badly. And now he might never get the chance to apologize.
Why did it matter so much? She wouldn’t give him the time of day, so tied up she was in that dead husband of hers. She was cross and businesslike and temperamental and enchanting and brilliant and altogether lovely, with those black eyes and curly hair she’d never bothered to darken once it started to gray. There was a spark of life in her that was compelling, that demanded response, even now, in the midst of her despair. It was something that Dead John must have known and loved, something he could still see himself as hard as she tried to hide it. Something her own anguish hadn’t yet extinguished.
He sighed. Even if she did give him the time of day, not much good it would do him, him having no standing to court her even if she were inclined. Not since Fiona had abandoned him and then lied about it for spite, and not since Holy Mother Church ruled that the marriage was v
alid, nonetheless. It had never really bothered him, not until now. Now, for some reason, it mattered. No, not for some reason. It mattered because she mattered. Perhaps he would ask the Tribunal again, if she recovered. Perhaps Fiona would be honest this time.
He wanted her to live, wanted her to bridge that awful distance she had set up between her and the rest of the world before it made her hard and set and bitter and used up in sorrow. He wanted her to get past all that anger, all that sadness, and he wanted to be the one to help. He wanted that life to be there, revealed, visible, warming, engaging. He wanted...
He realized that what he wanted didn’t matter as much as what really was and what was going to be. It was the same lesson he’d learned that August morning in Ulster so many years ago. Let it go, he told himself, and began the prayers his mother had taught him as a boy. It wasn’t the same as praying at his bedside, with his mother’s hand on his back, but it would have to do. Hail Mary...
He made the turn onto Highway 550, pushing the accelerator another fraction, and throwing in an intercession for open roads and no police.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
JUNE 21
I couldn’t decide which hurt worse: my head, my throat or my side. I finally settled on my side. A dull, persistent ache that was like the drone on a set of pipes, always there, constant, never changing, over which the pain in my throat when I swallowed, and in my head when I even thought of opening my eyes provided a varying, if unpleasant, melody line. I was pretty sure that meant I was still alive, though my mind was foggy enough I wasn’t entirely certain. I strained to think, which pained me in yet another way, sorting out what happened. I remembered the roof garden, hurrying Ben away, that peculiar flash and then being shot, that was it. I remembered the stairs and passing out. I even had a vague and impossible memory of John’s voice, and that was the last full fabric of recollection I had.
But there were bits and snatches after that. I remembered hearing voices, feeling hands — strong ones — maneuvering me even though I saw nothing and said nothing, and could not even respond with a purposeful movement. I remembered the sweet smell of something unexpected and the touch of a soft hand on my face, my hands. My hands. I strained to remember: was there a rougher touch as well, gentle, but not so soft? I gave up trying to sort it out, but the impression of it remained.
I remembered coming around in a bright, cold recovery room, a familiar spot. Surgery. There must have been surgery. I remember trying to sit up, a firm hand on my shoulder, pain everywhere, and then the closing in of darkness again, this time with a dizziness of mind that somehow reassured me this was just sleep. Much needed sleep.
And now this. The pain in my head subsided, secondary now to my raw throat. Did I dare open my eyes? I lifted one lid cautiously, forcing the other one shut in anticipation of the pain of light.
There was no pain, and the light was soft. I opened both eyes, and shifted my head, looking around, orienting myself to the surroundings. I was in a hospital bed, in a private room, rails up, pillows under my head, uniform, thin cotton blankets tucked military style around me. I must have been sedated. My bedclothes never looked this good after a night’s sleep; they are all tussled and knotted from my fretting through the night. An IV in my left hand, something bulky on my right side — a chest tube? Ugly blue print hospital gown that — by the feel of it — was open along my back. Great.
I ventured to lift my head a bit more and saw a figure in a chair next to the bed. I wrinkled my brow in confusion. It wasn’t John; John had a beard, and anyway, John was dead, I knew that, but who was this man, slumped in the chair, head on his chest, snoring gently? Silver hair, cheeks stubbled, cotton shirt. A cold pipe on his lap, cold, but a pipe, nonetheless. I wondered once again how he smuggled it in, and moreover, why? Connor? What was Eoin Connor doing at my bedside?
I croaked out his name. My scratchy throat and the ache in my side made it not much more than a whisper, but he heard it and was up in an instant. His pipe clattered to the floor as he stood, but he retrieved it in a single smooth movement and was standing over me, smiling, laying a gentle hand on mine, the one with the IV in the back of it. It was the rough hand I remembered through the fog. What had Eoin Connor been doing at the Center when I was shot?
“What are you doing here?” I finally managed. It was an effort to speak; my mouth was dry and nothing seemed to work quite right.
“Waiting for you.”
It was a simple answer, but still foggy, I struggled to process its meaning. I must have looked perplexed, because he continued.
“Ben’s off at the airport getting Adam — isn’t he the daredevil in Alaska? Turns out there’s quite an alliance of flying priests and parishioners — he's coming in on someone-or-other’s Lear jet. Literally hitchhiked his way across country in the air.”
Connor’s head shook in admiration, and he smiled to himself.
“Ben didn’t get through to Beth until he already knew you were out of danger, so he told her to stay home and finish her classes. Zoe’s sick in bed with morning sickness so bad she can’t get more than a few feet from the bathroom, but Ben keeps her and Seth — that's the one in Rome, right? — updated by texting.”
He was reading from the screen of his phone, unable, I supposed, to keep up. Not surprising, given my far-flung family. But something he said jarred me into complete wakefulness, my heart racing, unaccustomed pleasure rising.
“Morning sickness? Zoe’s pregnant?”
A grandchild. My Zoe. My only married child, Zoe, wife of Zach, who worked in advertising in Manhattan. Zoe, who wanted to start a shop in Brooklyn, where they lived, one that would be a haven for mothers and their children, with books and toys and storytellers and a soda fountain. Zoe, the first girl to steal John’s heart clean away when she put her tiny hand around his fingers that first day in the hospital. Zoe was pregnant?
Connor’s face flushed, aware that he’d made a misstep. He stammered out a reply. “I’m sorry, I thought you knew, Ben didn’t tell me...”
His voice petered out, then resumed again as he valiantly changed the subject, jerking his head in the direction of another, more distant chair.
“And that one, that one drove straight through from Oregon when he heard, came in last night after midnight, exhausted but wouldn’t hear of leaving.”
I lifted up a little higher and saw Luke’s form draped over another chair, wedged into the corner of the room. He was wearing the paint-spattered tee-shirt and jeans that were his trademark; he hadn’t taken time to change but had come right from whatever construction job needed his artisan’s skill. He covered the seat and the arms of the chair like an overgrown cat. Tears again, but this time grateful ones. Connor pulled a tissue from the box on the bedside table and dried my eyes.
“You’ve quite a brood,” he said as he pressed more tissues into my hand for future use. “And he sleeps like a stone, that one. I’ve never seen anything like it.”
I laughed, but only briefly, because it hurt.
“That he does. When he was a teenager, a tornado took out a tree right outside his bedroom. The whole house shook, and Luke slept right though it.”
I paused, not quite knowing what to say, nor how to say it, overwhelmed at how my children had dropped everything in their own lives to surround me, but overwhelmed too that this stranger — and one I’d been more than churlish to — had done the same.
“Eoin.” I finally said, using his Christian name with him for the first time. “Thank you for being here.”
His hand closed over mine, and he looked as though he was going to speak, but Luke stirred in his chair. Realizing that I was awake, he bounded over to the bedside, elbowing Connor out of the way in his enthusiasm. He grabbed my hand in his and leaned over to give me a kiss. He smelled like work, salty and with the faint aroma of paint, sweat and dirt, my workingman son. An unruly brown curl fell over his face, and his cheeks, like Connor’s, were stubbled from lack of shaving.
“Mom! Are
you all right? You scared us to death.”
“I’m fine. Or I will be. Or at least, I think I will be,” I amended as I realized I really had no idea about my medical state. Connor would know. I lifted my head to peer around Luke, who still held my hands firmly, and called out his name.
But he’d slipped out, leaving me alone with Luke. I was surprised at the empty twinge it added to the symphony of my bodily aches and pains as I settled back on the bed to listen to my carpenter son’s welcome voice.
**********
Luke was still there, and Ben had returned with Adam when the doctor came in to check on my progress, breaking up a slightly tearful and very noisy reunion as all three of my sons tried to edge each other out in telling me news and asking me questions, just as they had when they were children. This time, I noticed that Ben more than held his own, a certain confidence in jockeying with Adam and Luke that he had not displayed before. And it was Ben who sat protectively—if illicitly—on the foot of my bed, imposing himself as protector and guardian. How life changes.
The doctor was a tall, balding man whose age, about my own, I found reassuring. He shooed my protesting sons out the door, closed it, and returned to my side. In the best bedside manner, he held my wrist in his fingers as he read from the chart and introduced himself as Dr. Butcher. Bad name for a surgeon, I thought.
His routine reminded me of those first classes in medical school, introducing us to patient care. An aging professor, notable for having been the man to administer the first dose of penicillin in the US, instructed us to take the patient’s hand whenever we came into a room. You can learn so much, he had told us. If it’s warm, fever; cold and clammy, shock. Feel the pulse, look at the nail beds. Is there cyanosis? Clubbing? Pitting? It’s all a clue to what is happening inside.
I doubted my hand revealed much other than I was alive, had good vital signs, no interest in manicures and had recently crushed a wine glass, but Dr. Butcher’s touch was comforting if for no other reason than that I could feel it. Most of the hands I touched in the course of my professional life, after all, were past feeling. They were cold and stiff, and almost anything I wanted to learn I had to wrest from them by force and intrusion. The enormity of my experience was beginning to settle in. My hand was warm, and it connected me at that moment to the man who had saved my life.
Dying For Revenge (The Lady Doc Murders Book 1) Page 30