Mirror Image

by Sandra Brown

  Addressing Jack again, he said, “You should see to getting help for Dorothy Rae before it’s too late.”

  “Maybe after the election,” he mumbled. Looking at his brother, he added, “I’ll only be an hour’s drive away if you need me.”

  “Thanks, Jack. I’ll call as developments warrant.”

  “Did the doctor give you any indication when they’d do the surgery?”

  “Not until the risk of infection goes down,” Tate told them. “The smoke inhalation damaged her lungs, so he might have to wait as long as two weeks. For him it’s a real dilemma, because if he waits too long, the bones of her face will start to heal the way they are.”

  “Jesus,” Jack said. Then, on a falsely cheerful note, he said, “Well, give her my regards. Dorothy Rae’s and Fancy’s, too.”

  “I will.”

  Jack went down the hall toward his own room. Nelson lingered. “I talked to Zee this morning. While Mandy was asleep, she slipped down to the ICU. Zee said Carole was a sight to behold.”

  Tate’s wide shoulders drooped slightly. “She is. I hope to God that surgeon knows what he’s talking about.”

  Nelson laid a hand on Tate’s arm in a silent gesture of reassurance. For a moment, Tate covered his father’s hand with his own. “Dr. Sawyer, the surgeon, did the video imaging today. He electronically painted Carole’s face onto a TV screen, going by the pictures we’d given him. It was remarkable.”

  “And he thinks he can reproduce this video image during surgery?”

  “That’s what he says. He told me there might be some slight differences, but most of them will be in her favor.” Tate laughed dryly. “Which she should like.”

  “Before this is over, she might believe that every woman in America should be so lucky,” Nelson said with his characteristic optimism.

  But Tate was thinking about that single eye, bloodshot and swollen, yet still the same dark coffee brown, looking up at him with fear. He wondered if she was afraid of dying. Or of living without the striking face that she had used to every advantage.

  Nelson said good night and retired to his own room. Deep in thought, Tate turned off the TV and the lights, stripped, and slid into bed.

  Lightning flashes penetrated the drapes, momentarily illuminating the room. Thunder crashed near the building, rattling panes of glass. He stared at the flickering patterns with dry, gritty eyes.

  They hadn’t even kissed good-bye.

  Because of their recent, vicious argument, there had been a lot of tension between them that morning. Carole had been anxious to be off for a few days of shopping in Dallas, but they’d arrived at the airport in time to have a cup of coffee in the restaurant.

  Mandy had accidentally dribbled orange juice on her dress. Naturally, Carole had overreacted. As they left the coffee shop, she blotted at the stained, ruffled pinafore and scolded Mandy for being so careless.

  “For crissake, Carole, you can’t even see the spot,” he had said.

  “I can see it.”

  “Then don’t look at it.”

  She had shot her husband that drop-dead look that no longer fazed him. He carried Mandy through the terminal, chatting with her about all the exciting things she would see and do in Dallas. At the gate, he knelt and gave her a hug. “Have fun, sweetheart. Will you bring me back a present?”

  “Can I, Mommy?”

  “Sure,” Carole replied distractedly.

  “Sure,” Mandy told him with a big smile.

  “I’ll look forward to that.” He drew her to him for one last good-bye hug.

  Straightening up, he asked Carole if she wanted him to wait until their plane left the gate. “There’s no reason for you to.”

  He hadn’t argued, but only made certain they had all their carryon luggage. “Well, see you on Tuesday then.”

  “Don’t be late picking us up,” Carole called as she pulled Mandy toward the Jetway, where an airline attendant was waiting to take their boarding passes. “I hate hanging around airports.”

  Just before they entered the passageway, Mandy turned and waved at him. Carole hadn’t even looked back. Self-confident and assured, she had walked purposefully forward.

  Maybe that’s why that single eye was filled with such anxiety now. The foundation of Carole’s confidence—her looks—had been stolen by fate. She despised ugliness. Perhaps her tears hadn’t been for those who had died in the crash, as he had originally thought. Perhaps they had been for herself. She might wish that she had died instead of being disfigured, even temporarily.

  Knowing Carole, he wouldn’t be surprised.

  * * *

  In the pecking order of assistants to the Bexar County coroner, Grayson was on the lowest rung. That’s why he checked and rechecked the information before approaching his immediate supervisor with his puzzling findings.

  “Got a minute?”

  An exhausted, querulous man wearing a rubber apron and gloves gave him a quelling glance over his shoulder. “What’d you have in mind—a round of golf?”

  “No, this.”

  “What?” The supervisor turned back to his work on the charred heap of matter that had once been a human body.

  “The dental records of Avery Daniels,” Grayson said. “Casualty number eighty-seven.”

  “She’s already been IDed and autopsied.” The supervisor consulted the chart on the wall, just to make certain. A red line had been drawn through her name. “Yep.”

  “I know, but—”

  “She had no living relatives. A close family friend IDed her this afternoon.”

  “But these records—”

  “Look, pal,” the supervisor said with asperity, “I got bodies with no heads, hands without arms, feet without legs. And they’re on my ass to finish this tonight. So if somebody’s been positively IDed, autopsied, and sealed shut, don’t bother me with records, okay?”

  Grayson stuffed the dental X-rays back into the manila envelope they had arrived in and sailed it toward a trash barrel. “Okay. Fine. And in the meantime, fuck you.”

  “Sure, sure—any time. As soon as we get all these stiffs IDed.”

  Grayson shrugged. They weren’t paying him to be Dick Tracy. If nobody else gave a damn about a mysterious inconsistency, why should he? He went back to matching up dental records with the corpses as yet to be identified.

  Three

  The weather seemed to be in mourning, too.

  It rained the day of Avery Daniels’s funeral. The night before, thunderstorms had rumbled through the Texas hill country. This morning, all that was left of them was a miserable, cold, gray rain.

  Bareheaded, impervious to the inclement weather, Irish McCabe stood beside the casket. He had insisted on a spray of yellow roses, knowing they had been her favorite. Vivid and flamboyant, they seemed to be mocking death. He took comfort in that.

  Tears rolled down his ruddy checks. His fleshy, veined nose was redder than usual, although he hadn’t been drinking so much lately. Avery nagged him about it, saying an excessive amount of alcohol wasn’t good for his liver, his blood pressure, or his expanding midsection.

  She nagged Van Lovejoy about his chemical abuses, too, but he had showed up at her funeral high on cheap Scotch and the joint he had smoked on the drive to the chapel. The outmoded necktie around his ill-fitting collar was a concession to the solemnity of the occasion and attested to the fact that he held Avery in higher regard than he did most members of the human family.

  Other people regarded Van Lovejoy no more favorably than he did them. Avery had numbered among the very few who could tolerate him. When the reporter assigned to cover the story of her tragic death for KTEX’s news asked Van if he would shoot the video, the photographer had glared at him with contempt, shot him the finger, and slunk out of the newsroom without a word. This rude mode of self-expression was typical of Van, and just one of the reasons for his alienation from mankind.

  At the conclusion of the brief interment service, the mourners began making their way
down the gravel path toward the row of cars parked in the lane, leaving only Irish and Van at the grave. At a discreet distance, cemetery employees were waiting to finish up so they could retreat indoors, where it was warm and dry.

  Van was fortyish and string-bean thin. His belly was concave and there was a pronounced stoop to his bony shoulders. His thin hair hung straight down from a central part, reaching almost to his shoulders and framing a thin, narrow face. He was an aging hippie who had never evolved from the sixties.

  By contrast, Irish was short and robust. While Van looked like he could be carried off by a strong gust of wind, Irish looked like he could stand forever if he firmly planted his feet on solid ground. As different as they were physically, today their postures and bleak expressions were reflections of each other. Of the two, however, Irish’s suffering was the more severe.

  In a rare display of compassion, Van laid a skinny, pale hand on Irish’s shoulder. “Let’s go get shit-faced.”

  Irish nodded absently. He stepped forward and plucked one of the yellow rosebuds off the spray, then turned and let Van precede him from beneath the temporary tent and down the path. Raindrops splashed against his face and on the shoulders of his overcoat, but he didn’t increase his stolid pace.

  “I, uh, rode here in the limousine,” he said, as though just remembering that when he reached it.

  “Wanna go back that way?”

  Irish looked toward Van’s battered heap of a van. “I’ll go with you.” He dismissed the funeral home driver with a wave of his hand and climbed inside the van. The interior was worse than the exterior. The ripped upholstery was covered with a ratty beach towel, and the maroon carpet lining the walls reeked of stale marijuana smoke.

  Van climbed into the driver’s seat and started the motor. While it was reluctantly warming up, he lit a cigarette with long, nicotine-stained fingers and passed it to Irish.

  “No thanks.” Then, after a seconds’ reconsideration, Irish took the cigarette and inhaled deeply. Avery had gotten him to quit smoking. It had been months since he’d had a cigarette. Now, the tobacco smoke stung his mouth and throat. “God, that’s good,” he sighed as he inhaled again.

  “Where to?” Van asked around the cigarette he was lighting for himself.

  “Any place where we’re not known. I’m likely to make a spectacle of myself.”

  “I’m known in all of them.” Left unsaid was that Van frequently made a spectacle of himself, and, in the places he patronized, it didn’t matter. He engaged the protesting gears.

  Several minutes later Van ushered Irish through the tufted red vinyl door of a lounge located on the seedy outskirts of downtown. “Are we going to get rolled in here?” Irish asked.

  “They check you for weapons as you go in.”

  “And if you don’t have one, they issue you one,” Irish said, picking up the tired joke.

  The atmosphere was murky. The booth they slid into was secluded and dark. The midmorning customers were as morose as the tinsel that had been strung from the dim, overhead lights several Christmases ago. Spiders had made permanent residences of it. A naked señorita smiled beguilingly from the field of black velvet on which she had been painted. In stark contrast to the dismal ambience, lively mariachi music blared from the jukebox.

  Van called for a bottle of scotch. “I really should eat something,” Irish mumbled without much conviction.

  When the bartender unceremoniously set down the bottle and two glasses, Van ordered Irish some food. “You didn’t have to,” Irish objected.

  The video photographer shrugged as he filled both glasses. “His old lady’ll cook if you ask her to.”

  “You eat here often?”

  “Sometimes,” Van replied with another laconic shrug.

  The food arrived, but after taking only a few bites, Irish decided he wasn’t hungry after all. He pushed aside the chipped plate and reached for his glass of whiskey. The first swallow played like a flamethrower in his stomach. Tears filled his eyes. He sucked in a wheezing breath.

  But with the expertise of a professional drinker, he recovered quickly and took another swig. The tears, however, remained in his eyes. “I’m going to miss her like hell.” Idly, he twirled his glass on the greasy tabletop.

  “Yeah, me, too. She could be a pain in the ass, but not nearly as much as most.”

  The brassy song currently playing on the jukebox ended. No one made another selection, which came as a relief to Irish. The music intruded on his bereavement.

  “She was like my own kid, you know?” he asked rhetorically. Van continued smoking, lighting another cigarette from the tip of the last. “I remember the day she was born. I was there at the hospital, sweating it out with her father. Waiting. Pacing. Now I’ll have to remember the day she died.”

  He slammed back a shot of whiskey and refilled his glass. “You know, it never occurred to me that it was her plane that went down. I was only thinking about the story, the goddamn news story. It was such a piss-ant story that I didn’t even send a photographer along. She was going to borrow one from a station in Dallas.”

  “Hey, man, don’t blame yourself for doing your job. You couldn’t have known.”

  Irish stared into the amber contents of his glass. “Ever had to identify a body, Van?” He didn’t wait for a reply. “They had them all lined up, like…” He released an unsteady sigh. “Hell, I don’t know. I never had to go to war, but it must have been like that.

  “She was zipped up in a black plastic bag. She didn’t have any hair left,” he said, his voice cracking. “It was all burned off. And her skin… oh, Jesus.” He covered his eyes with his stubby fingers. Tears leaked through them. “If it weren’t for me, she wouldn’t have been on that plane.”

  “Hey, man.” Those two words exhausted Van’s repertoire of commiserating phrases. He refreshed Irish’s drink, lit another cigarette, and silently passed it to the grieving man. For himself, he switched to marijuana.

  Irish drew on his cigarette. “Thank God her mother didn’t have to see her like that. If she hadn’t been clutching her locket in her hand, I wouldn’t even have known the corpse was Avery.” His stomach almost rebelled when he recalled what the crash had done to her.

  “I never thought I’d say this, but I’m glad Rosemary Daniels isn’t alive. A mother should never have to see her child in that condition.”

  Irish nursed his drink for several minutes before lifting his tearful eyes to his companion. “I loved her—Rosemary, I mean. Avery’s mother. Hell, I couldn’t help it. Cliff, her father, was gone nearly all the time, away in some remote hellhole of the world. Every time he left he asked me to keep an eye on them. He was my best friend, but more than once I wanted to kill him for that.”

  He sipped his drink. “Rosemary knew, I’m sure, but there was never a word about it spoken between us. She loved Cliff. I knew that.”

  Irish had been a surrogate parent to Avery since her seventeenth year. Cliff Daniels, a renowned photojournalist, had been killed in a battle over an insignificant, unpronounceable village in Central America. With very little fuss, Rosemary had ended her own life only a few weeks after her husband’s death, leaving Avery bereft and without anyone to turn to except Irish, a steadfast family friend.

  “I’m as much Avery’s daddy as Cliff was. Maybe more. When her folks died, it was me she turned to. I was the one she came running to last year after she got herself in that mess up in D.C.”

  “She might have fucked up real bad that one time, but she was still a good reporter,” Van commented through a cloud of sweet, pungent smoke.

  “It’s just so tragic that she died with that screwup on her conscience.” He drank from his glass. “See, Avery had this hang-up about failing. That’s what she feared most. Cliff wasn’t around much when she was a kid, so she was still trying to win his approval, live up to his legacy.

  “We never discussed it,” he continued morosely. “I just know. That’s why that snafu in D.C. was so devastating to her.
She wanted to make up for it, win back her credibility and self-esteem. Time ran out before she got a chance. Goddammit, she died thinking of herself as a failure.”

  The older man’s misery struck a rare, responsive chord in Van. He gave the task of consoling Irish his best shot. “About that other—you know, how you felt about her mother? Well, Avery knew.”

  Irish’s red, weepy eyes focused on him. “How do you know?”

  “She told me once,” Van said. “I asked her just how long you two had known each other. She said you were in her memory as far back as it went. She had guessed that you secretly loved her mother.”

  “Did she seem to care?” Irish asked anxiously. “I mean, did it seem to bother her?”

  Van shook his long, stringy hair.

  Irish withdrew the wilting rose from the breast pocket of his dark suit and rubbed his pudgy fingers over the fragile petals. “Good. I’m glad. I loved them both.”

  His heavy shoulders began to shake. He curled his fingers into a tight fist around the rose. “Oh, hell,” he groaned, “I’m going to miss her.”

  He lowered his head to the table and sobbed brokenly while Van sat across from him, nursing his own grief in his own way.

  Four

  Avery woke up knowing who she was.

  She had never exactly forgotten. It was just that her medication, along with her concussion, had left her confused.

  Yesterday—or at least she guessed it had been yesterday, since everyone who had recently come within her range of vision had greeted her with a “good morning”—she had been disoriented, which was understandable. Waking after having been comatose for several days to find that she couldn’t move, couldn’t speak, and couldn’t see beyond a very limited range would confound anyone. She was rarely ill, certainly not seriously, so being this injured was shocking.

  The ICU, with its constant light and activity, was enough to hamper anyone’s mental process. But what really had Avery puzzled was that everyone was addressing her incorrectly. How had she come to be mistaken for a woman named Carole Rutledge? Even Mr. Rutledge seemed convinced that he was speaking to his wife.