by Karen Harper
She turned to her phone messages. The machine was still blinking behind her and she hadn’t thought to listen to them first. Two were from clients desperate for updates, one from a possible new client, whom she’d call tomorrow, and the fourth one—
“Ms. Kinsale, Jim Manning here. There’s one thing I thought I’d better tell you. I forgot about this. I think the reason you might be mixed up about your having a baby—’ sides the fact you seemed pretty out of your head that night in the snow, and you know how some of those meds they give out screw up people’s minds—is there was a rumor kinda like that.”
Tara bolted straight out of her chair. She leaned on her desk, staring at the answering machine.
“I mean,” Jim’s message went on, “not a rumor about you, but you probably overheard it and got mixed up. I heard a nurse say that people hear things while in a coma sometimes. So, anyway, I heard from a custodian sometime that winter that a wealthy patient had delivered a child that died somewheres on clinic grounds, and the clinic wanted it all kept hush-hush. I didn’t see nothing myself, but you know them and their clients—no publicity. ’Sides, the clinic could get themselves sued, I s’pose, ’cause the baby died. You know, like they didn’t take the person to a regular hospital in time. Anyhow, thought you should know that’s prob’ly where you got so mixed up…”
Tara sank back in her chair, put her face on her knees and grabbed handfuls of hair. You got so mixed up… That could be part of it. Maybe she did overhear something like that. After all, she thought she recalled hearing organ music in her coma, and now she knew why. So maybe she thought she heard something about a baby. But what about two doctors telling her she’d been pregnant, possibly to full term, and had had a vaginal delivery? And why did those last two words haunt her? Had she heard someone tell her she was going to have a vaginal delivery? Or was she going completely crazy?
She went to the front door to call Nick in to hear the phone message, but she heard voices. A woman’s shrill tones? Someone shouting, as if she were hearing her own inner screams.
Tara saw a car had pulled up in the driveway. A woman got out. It was dark, but in the wan glow of houselights, Tara could see spiky blond hair and the glitter of something bright on her back. And Nick was holding her, or at least, the stranger was hugging him.
His arm around the woman, who leaned against him as if she could barely stand, Nick brought her up toward the house; they went in the door to the lower level. Tara closed the front door and hurried down to meet them.
“What is it?” she asked him. “Who—”
“Marcie Goulder, a friend of Rick Whetstone’s. You know, who I visited last Friday. She says Rick committed suicide this morning.”
Tara’s hands flew to her mouth; she gasped. “That’s terrible! I’m so sorry,” she told the woman, who merely nodded. But, Tara mouthed to Nick behind Marcie’s back, why is she here?
Nick just shook his head and led Marcie up the stairs into the great room. Tara noticed she was really built and might be pretty; her face was so ravaged with grief that Tara couldn’t tell. Her running mascara had made dark half-moons under each eye. She wore tight jeans thrust into boots and a denim jacket embroidered with a starburst of gold and silver sequins on the back. One of the threads had broken, and an occasional sequin dribbled off as if she left a trail of glitter. Nick sat her on the sofa where she put her head into her hands and moaned.
“Marcie has no family, and Rick had only Clay,” he told Tara. “Since I had stopped by to see him and was family, she thought I should know. She tracked me down through my last name in the Conifer phone book.”
Tara was thinking that the woman could have called, but the poor thing was obviously distraught. In Marcie’s condition, it was amazing that she’d found her way safely way up here in the dark. Tara had comforted many bereft women, but this one had loved the brother of the man who had killed her best friend, Claire’s mother—and Nick’s sister—so why did he have to be so solicitous?
“I’ll get her some water,” Tara volunteered.
“Yes, that would be good,” he said. “And Beamer’s still outside. The crazy dog jumped in her car, so I closed him in there rather than letting him run loose.”
Tara brought Marcie a glass of water, and, with a nod of thanks, she sipped it.
“Sorry to crack up like this,” she choked out. “I just couldn’t stand being alone in the place where he did it. He overdosed on pills I didn’t know he had. No warning. I thought things were good. He was earning money, we had plans. Left me a note on my computer, which the police took—the whole PC, I mean. And it’s brand new. Gotta check out suicides, I guess.”
“Yes,” Tara told her, “that’s standard procedure. But if he left a note, they’ll just take a look at the computer, then give it back.”
“I read the note,” Marcie said with a sniff. “It said he was gonna kill himself, but not exactly why. Just overwhelmed, nothing to live for. Damn, ain’t that a kick in my pants. They’re gonna do an autopsy—regulation, they said. Hate the idea of that. Ugh!” She took a big swig of water. “I blame myself in a way, ’cause I had no idea—no idea he was so shook to do something like that. Listen, I’m sorry to bust in like this, but I had nowhere else to go. Couldn’t go to the L Branch where I work, not with everyone talking, and Nick seemed so nice when he dropped by.”
At that, Tara decided to shelve her own quandary for a few minutes. Heartfelt feelings for hurting women stirred. She sat down beside Marcie and asked in a gentle voice, “Do you have anyone you’d like to call, even if they can’t be here? Or do you have a pastor or church to—” She shook her head hard; the spikes of stiff white-blond hair hardly budged, but her hoop earrings bounced. “Came here from Santa Fe, met Rick. We hit it off—talked marriage too. But he was always moody and nervous. I don’t know, maybe since something was wrong with his brother, it ran in the family.”
Ran in the family, Tara thought. The Lohan family had circled the wagons, but there might be a way into what they knew. Family…then she remembered Beamer was outside. “We forgot Beamer,” she told Nick.
“I’ll go get him. Maybe you can fix Marcie something.”
“How about some herbal tea and soda crackers?” Tara suggested.
“Oh, I couldn’t eat. But if you got any hot chocolate mix, I’d like that. I’d love a stiff drink but I can’t drink and drive, and I’ve gotta go home to that apartment, where I found him….”
Tara and Nick looked at each other. She frowned; he narrowed his eyes and tipped his head. “You can stay here tonight if you want,” he said. “I’ll sleep up here on the couch, and you can have the run of my place in the lower level. But shouldn’t you call the cops so they don’t think you’ve taken off, in case they need you?”
“I can’t thank you enough. I can’t sleep there, I know that. I’ll call the officer who gave me his number and tell him I’m here. I gotta make a call to our—my—landlord after that. And I’ve got to call Clay tomorrow…sorry,” she said with a loud sniff and blew her nose hard. “Didn’t mean to mention him here, not after what he did.”
“Be right back with Beamer,” Nick said. “I’ve still got your key, Marcie. Beamer was really misbehaving, Tara, rubbing against her. He almost knocked her over. When he doesn’t have his work collar on, he turns back into a spoiled pet.”
“You’ve made a friend in Beamer,” Tara told Marcie, as Nick went outside. “In the morning, after breakfast, when we get our girl—Nick’s niece—off to school, we’ll be sure you get back home safely.”
“You’ve both been great. Is it okay if I use your bathroom? I’m—I’m a mess.”
“Sure. Up those steps, first door on the right, then there’s one downstairs, too. There are extra towels on the far rack. I can loan you a T-shirt to sleep in if you want. But one thing. If you see Claire in the morning, don’t tell her why you’re here, all right? Rick’s her uncle, and she’s already had some terrible losses. Rick might remind her of her father,
Clay, and she’s had nightmares about his coming back to hurt her. She even thought he was hiding up in the tree line above the house.”
“No kidding,” Marcie said, her bloodshot eyes widening. “Poor little thing. I sure sympathize with her now, having to live with something like that, losing someone in such an awful way.”
And then it hit Tara. Maybe she had a devious mind because of all the terrible situations she’d heard of with her clients. Maybe it was Laird and Jen’s betrayal that made her want to trust no one. But what if, through Rick, Clay had somehow gotten to this woman and hired her to snatch Claire again, or something even worse?
As Marcie took her purse and went up to use the bathroom across from Claire’s bedroom door, Tara feared they’d made a terrible mistake to allow the woman to stay here tonight. Had they let a sort of Trojan horse into their safe haven?
Beamer interrupted her agonizing when he bounded into the room. He sniffed the floor and the couch, which Tara saw was dusted with a few gold and silver sequins. Then the lab hustled up the steps and sat outside the bathroom door until she called him and the dog came back downstairs.
“Nick,” Tara said, keeping her voice low, “I’m sure she’s telling the truth, but with Claire so close here—”
“I was going to suggest you go online to read the local papers. Even though she said he killed himself this morning, it should be online by now. I’m thinking the same thing, since Rick mentioned that he had as much right to Claire as I did. But she’s obviously distraught. And don’t worry. The reason I’m going to be awake on this couch all night and she’s downstairs is because I’ll be between you and Claire, and her.”
Nick and Tara were thankful their suspicions about Marcie were wrong. Nick, who muttered something at breakfast to Tara about being used to no sleep at night the past two years, said Marcie hadn’t budged from the downstairs area, but he’d heard her pacing and sobbing at times. After Tara had verified that Rick Whetstone, brother of a “convicted murderer,” had indeed “committed suicide in Evergreen on Monday morning,” Tara had sat up half the night with Nick while they discussed Tara’s problem. He didn’t want her trying to get into the clinic without permission, but he admitted that Laird’s running off with Jen DeMar was another reason she couldn’t trust her former husband for a straight answer about a possible dead child, even if she did phone him.
Marcie didn’t even appear until Claire was off to school, and then she looked wan and subdued. “I should never have crashed in on you like that,” she told them. “I can’t thank you two enough for welcoming and tending to a stranger. You don’t need to go back down the mountain with me. Your kindness and a little sleep got me settled down. And Beamer sure took to me. I guess it’s ’cause I got cat hairs on me from the live-in pet at the L Branch. Well, back to real life today, back to being alone without the man I thought would work out. Back to getting over another big loss.”
Tara’s heart went out to the woman. She knew exactly how she felt.
13
Veronica Lohan paced the sitting room of her cabin at the clinic. Rain rattled against the roof and smeared itself down the windows. Not only was she feeling claustrophobic, but she thought walking—ten paces over and ten back—might be a good way to make the desire for those damned drugs leave her system. She must have been mad to take them again.
But she knew she wasn’t mad. And that left only one conclusion. Someone had slipped the pills into her food or drink. It could be Rita, who had sold her the Vicodin for a pretty price when she truly was abusing drugs and alcohol. Perhaps she hoped to get her hooked again. Or, obviously, it could be someone else. Who that someone else might be scared her to death.
“Hello, darling,” Jordan sang out as he came in the door. He didn’t look a bit wet from the rain. The nurse, who had just popped into the bedroom, evidently heard him and came back out from the bedroom.
“Is it all right if I take my break now, Mr. Lohan?”
“Fiddledy-de-de!” Veronica said with an exaggerated, pseudo-Southern drawl. “Mr. Lohan is not the doctor or the overseer of this here plantation, though he does sometimes act like Simon Legree. And I do declare, I realize that’s not from Gone With The Wind, y’all.”
“Yes, fine,” Jordan said to the nurse, waving a sheaf of papers. “I see Mrs. Lohan’s feeling more herself this morning.”
“Papers to have me committed to the insane asylum, dear?” Veronica asked as the nurse gladly vacated the premises, and Jordan sat in an armchair by the hearth. “Not needed, since I’m already a prisoner here.”
“I rather thought you’d like to see these cute get-well notes from Thane’s three,” he said, ignoring her dramatics and tossing the papers onto the end table.
She snatched them up. “I was hoping you didn’t have to tell them. And, yes, I am feeling better. But just like last time,” she said, shuffling through the darling drawings and large-print notes, “I’d be helped immensely by being able to play.”
“Tag? Hide-and-seek?”
“Very funny,” she said, glaring down at him. “The chapel organ. You only paid one-point-eight million dollars for it, so it might as well be played by someone who knows what they’re doing.”
“Like last time, just go in there and play alone?”
“You are welcome to come or to bring the entire current clientele.”
“You’d need to have the nurse with you.”
“How about Elin Johansen?”
“Maybe. Let’s make a deal, Miz Scarlett. By the way, how in the world did you get onto that old chestnut of a movie?”
“I suppose I was thinking about Tara. Her mother named her for the plantation in that book, you know. What deal?”
“When Susanne dropped off those notes for you, she said Tara’s been asking around about things, and Susanne blurted out about Laird and Jen.”
Veronica’s insides cartwheeled, and she sank into the other chair. “Poor Tara. I mean, I thought she would discover it herself, that she should know all of it eventually, but—”
“Not from us!” he said, and smacked the table with his fist so hard that the lamp rattled. “But,” he went on, his voice controlled again, “she’s good at getting things out of people, always was. It’s that social work background of hers, along with that sordid P.I. practice. That’s one reason it wasn’t a good idea for you to go off to some picnic reunion with her. But here’s my proposal,” he said, leaning forward with his elbows on his knees. “You play that little five-thousand-pipe organ to your heart’s desire, and I’ll handle Tara.”
Since she’d gotten one thing she desperately wanted, Veronica kept her mouth shut. She’d considered saying, Frankly, my dear, I don’t give a damn to his attempt to control her life—Tara’s too—but if he was going to tell more lies to Tara, she actually cared a great deal.
Sitting in her truck down the street from Jim Manning’s house in the rain, Tara waited for him to emerge. She didn’t intend to question him further, nor get him involved, at least not directly. She planned to follow him back to the clinic after his midday break at home, then dart in on foot before the service entry electronic gate swung shut. Hoping he didn’t look in his rearview mirror, she vowed not to look in hers anymore. However terrified she was to learn the truth, it was full bore ahead from here on out, no matter what.
She turned her cell phone to mute, then just turned it off, so it wouldn’t give her away. And so Nick couldn’t call to try to stop her. She had told him she had some errands to run and that she might stop by to see how Marcie was doing on the way home. All that was true. She just hadn’t told him that, despite the windy, rainy weather, she intended to sneak into the clinic grounds to talk to Veronica.
Nick had gone to see a buddy he used to train dogs with; he’d admitted he was looking at all his options before he signed another government contract. The fear he’d take Claire and leave sat in Tara’s stomach like a big, cold lump, but she had something else to worry about now. Even if she lost Claire, sh
e could visit her. But if she’d lost her own child, she had to know where the precious mite was buried. Whether the little grave was nearby or in Seattle or in Timbuktu, she was going to find out and find it.
She had finally abandoned her policy of no risk taking and plunged into the bleak, black land of desperation. After Claire and Nick had left this morning, Tara had replayed Jim Manning’s phone message over and over. Surely, that rumor he’d recalled was about her. It was like that old kid’s game of telephone, where you whispered a fact into someone’s ear and, as it went around the circle, the message got slightly skewed. She had even gotten back online to reread those articles about the two women who had given birth while comatose. Those babies had lived, of course, but she was certain hers had not.
Laird had probably seen it as a miracle that she’d gotten pregnant on the pill and had gone—at least almost—to full term, despite her coma. He must have been devastated when the child died. It had been the last straw in their rocky relationship, and he’d turned to Jen for comfort and for a new marriage and a future family. Oh, yes, Jen would gladly toe his Lohan line, Tara thought as she hit her fists rhythmically against the steering wheel.
The rain drummed on the truck roof and provided a screen for her when Jim drove by. Still, she slumped in her seat. Once he was past, she kept up with him without getting too close. She took a side street and sped up near the clinic so she could be on foot when the gates opened for him. How she’d get back out, she wasn’t sure. But she was sure that if Nick knew what she was doing, he’d be frantic and furious.
“Can’t help it, can’t help it, have to, have to,” she recited to herself as she locked her truck and stood back under the trees near the service entrance. No umbrella today. It might catch someone’s eye.