by Julia Keller
“I’m Belfa Elkins. County prosecutor. We met the other day. How’re you feeling?”
Lindy’s expression didn’t change. She set down the cup on the bedside table and peered at her right index finger, to the tip of which was affixed a small white clamp that looked like a plastic clothespin; the clamp, in turn, was attached to a cord and the cord to yet another monitor. In the crook of her other arm, an IV line had been inserted.
The lights were low. The patient beds Bell had passed on her way to Lindy’s were bathed in the strange, flickeringly iridescent ambience that defined ICU units. Even though this area of the hospital lacked windows, somehow you still could tell that it was late at night. Kind of like Crazy Dave’s, Bell thought. Probably the first and last time that particular comparison would ever be made.
A nurse arrived, black-haired and bustling. It wasn’t the nurse who had called her, and Bell was required to explain why she was there; visiting hours were severely restricted in the ICU. The nurse checked Lindy’s temperature and blood pressure. “You’re a very lucky young lady,” she said. “Hope you know that.”
Bell addressed the nurse while she refolded the blood pressure cuff. “I’m going to have some questions about these injuries. This is a criminal investigation. Where’s the nursing supervisor?”
“She’ll be right back. Said she had a phone call to make. Something personal.”
The nurse departed. Bell stood uncertainly by Lindy’s bed, not sure if she should offer a sympathetic platitude or two before diving in. Bell had often interviewed victims and witnesses in hospital rooms, but usually there were family members here, hovering at the periphery, and they handled the emotional duties, doling out the optimism, so that Bell could focus on the fact-gathering. Lindy, though, was alone.
“Look,” Bell said. She didn’t want to bother the other patients and so she spoke softly, as softly as she could without whispering. Whispering attracted more attention than shouting. “I know you feel like hell right now, and I’d love to let you rest, but I have to find out what happened. No easy way to ask this—so I’m just going to do it.” Her eyes locked on to Lindy’s. “Did your father attack you? Is he the one who did this?”
Lindy’s body recoiled. Her small hands fluttered on top of the blanket. She swallowed before she spoke, frowning at the feel of what must’ve been, Bell thought, a red-raw, severely dry throat. “Daddy? No, no, no. God, no. He didn’t—he couldn’t—no. No. No.”
“So you remember the attack.”
“Yeah. I mean—well—” Lindy shook her head. That brought another frown, tailing off into a wince. “Okay, no. But it wasn’t him. I’m positive, okay?”
Bell waited. When Lindy was first brought in, the ER doctor had told Bell that most trauma patients don’t remember their ordeals; they believe they do, picking up on clues from what other people say must have happened. But their own memories stop well short of the event that caused the injury.
Lindy looked down at the white sheet. She smoothed out a wrinkle. Fingered the hem. “Okay,” she said. The anger had been replaced by resignation. “Okay. Fine,” she went on. “The whole thing’s pretty much a blank. I drove home after my shift ended at seven and—and that’s it. Nothing past that. I woke up here.” She grew agitated again. “But it couldn’t be Daddy. It couldn’t be.”
“You don’t know that. You don’t remember.”
“I’m telling you. It wasn’t him. It had to be somebody else.”
Another ICU nurse showed up, drawn there by the rising agitation in Lindy’s voice. She was a thin-cheeked woman in bulky black glasses who wore her frizzy gray hair in two stubby braids. When she reached up to adjust the dial on a monitor, the ends of her braids twitched against her shoulders.
“Everything okay?” she asked.
“Fine,” Lindy said.
Gray Braids nodded and checked a second monitor, eyeballed the IV drip, then looked sternly at Bell. “Okay, but let’s wind this up,” she said. “She needs her rest.”
In the silence that ensued until Gray Braids departed, the swishing noise seemed to grow louder and more assertive. It was coming, Bell realized, from a ventilator hooked to the patient in the adjacent bay.
And then they were alone again. “That nurse was right. You’re damned lucky,” Bell declared. “Had you been hit harder with that rock—or at a slightly different angle—you could very well have been killed. Or suffered an even more serious brain injury. As it is, whoever attacked you must’ve been in a hurry. They weren’t able to do much damage. They hit you once with a glancing blow. Not full force.”
“I know what you’re getting at. That somebody hit me who didn’t really want to hurt me. Or maybe thought they did—and then couldn’t go through with it.” Softer now: “Like Daddy.” Lindy swallowed and winced, swallowed and winced. “But it wasn’t him. Couldn’t be.” The certainty was pure theater; she was plenty scared, a fact that Bell had picked up on the moment she’d stationed herself at Lindy’s bedside.
“You’re not sure,” Bell said quietly. “No matter what you say to me, I know that you suspect him, too.”
“No.” Softly, but urgently. “No. No. No. No. No.” Her eyes drilled into Bell’s with dark intensity.
“You’ve wondered for some time,” Bell went on, “about your father. Wondered if he was capable of something like this. Because there are days when he doesn’t even know who you are. And he lashes out at you.”
Bell was guessing. She had no idea if she was correct or not. But she had glimpsed, within Lindy’s instant reaction to the idea that Odell Crabtree had attacked her, something more than mere defensiveness. More than daughterly love. Bell had seen something desperate and inchoate in those eyes. Lindy might be horrified at the idea of her father’s guilt, but she also was not entirely surprised by it.
“No,” Lindy said firmly. “No.”
Bell switched tactics. “Okay, then. Let’s say it wasn’t your father. Who else, then? Who might’ve done this? Who’d attack you? And why?”
“Whoever did those other murders, maybe. The ones everybody’s talking about.” A thought flared in her mind: “Where’s Daddy? What’ve you done with him?”
“He’s fine. We took him into custody.” Bell cut off Lindy’s protest. “Protocol. It’s a temporary hold. He’s safe, though. From the look of him, he can’t take care of himself. He’ll get hot meals and a place to sleep. Until you’re out of here, it makes sense. Don’t you think?”
Lindy wouldn’t look at her. A tacit acknowledgment that Bell was right.
“So,” Bell said. “How long? How long has your father been like this?”
Lindy’s gaze remained stapled to the blanket on her lap. A minute passed. She lifted her face. “Long enough.”
She coughed. Bell picked up the cup from the bedside table and handed it to her, making sure the straw was angled in the right direction.
“Tell me,” Bell said as soon as Lindy had had her fill and handed the cup back to her, “what it was like before.”
In the faint glow of the monitors, Lindy’s face looked even younger than her years, her skin infinitely malleable, like sculptor’s clay minutes before the touch of the artist’s thumb sets the features into place permanently. Lindy’s voice was low and lilting, stripped of the belligerence that had inhabited it during the earlier part of their conversation.
“My mother was wonderful,” Lindy said. She’d waited, deciding whether to trust Bell, and then went forward. “And Daddy—well, he always had a lot on his mind. He grew up rough.” She coughed again. Bell reached for the cup, but Lindy shook her head. The problem with her throat right now wouldn’t be alleviated by a drink of water. It wouldn’t be alleviated by a thousand drinks of water. “And then my mother died. Daddy lost his job in the mine and—and it was all too much for him. He’d already been having some problems—he was forgetting things, and there was one day when he got lost while he was driving home, the same drive he’d been making for fifty years. He called m
e in a panic from a stranger’s house out on Coon Path Road. He was scared. Real scared. He was—he was slipping away. Not just from me. He was slipping away from everything. From his own memories. From the world. And he started to get real mad about it. Frustrated.”
“Violent?”
Lindy waited. “Yeah,” she said, after the kind of pause that made her affirmative reply redundant. “Sometimes he gets violent.” She reached out and put a hand on Bell’s arm. “But you have to understand. It’s not his fault, okay? Things are just so different from when Mom was alive. She had a way of calming him. She used to tell me about how they met and they fell in love. I didn’t know much about that until right before she died. Daddy, she said, never thought he’d marry. Didn’t expect to find anybody to care about him that way. But a friend took him to Mom’s church one day, and it was like—like she’d been waiting her whole life to meet somebody like Daddy, and he’d been waiting his whole life, too, to meet her, even though he was a lot older. Never thought they’d have kids, but then I came along.” A smile, brief but prideful. “My mother named me. She loved Anne Morrow Lindbergh—she was always reading and she loved those essays about nature and the seashore and such—but she didn’t like the name Anne. Said it was too ordinary. Too common for the likes of me. Because I was going to be special. And so she named me Lindy.”
Tears were spilling out of Lindy’s eyes. She had continued talking while the tears came, her voice unaffected by them, as if tears were just something you had to put up with, pass through, like a light rain on the way to your car. Bell didn’t rush to comfort her. There was still more Bell needed to know, and comfort could be a muzzle: It closed off revelations.
After a pause to let the sorrow crawl back in its box, Lindy went on. “But there’s still so much I don’t know about my parents. And it eats at me. It does. Because that’s the only way I can hang on to my mother now—by finding out more about her life.” Lindy’s voice acquired a frantic edge. “It’s all I’ve got. You see that, right? I don’t have anything else to remember her by. I found some letters the other day, from an old friend of hers, somebody she’d never talked about—but that’s it. And if something happens to my father—if I lose him too—”
Lindy stopped. It was unthinkable, being left with just bits and pieces of her parents’ lives. A haphazard, half-finished jigsaw puzzle. A random jumble. She would have no way back to the past, no route she could follow. She’d be marooned in the present. Stranded with no frame for her life, no facts to fill in the picture.
Bell understood. She understood it better than Lindy could ever appreciate; like Lindy, she lost her mother early and had virtually no extended family. There were differences, of course: Bell had hated her father, while Lindy loved Odell Crabtree. And Bell had a sister. But the broad outlines—the quietly terrifying sense of having no context for yourself, of having few close family members left who could tell you where you’d come from or who you really were—matched up.
Another time, another place, Bell might have discussed this with Lindy. Consoled her. Right now, however, there was a crime to investigate.
“I need you to think hard about something,” Bell said. “I know you don’t want to believe your father attacked you. So help me out here. Let’s figure it out. If not to rob you—and nothing seemed to be missing, including your billfold and your computer—then why else would somebody assault you?”
“Told you. I don’t know.”
“I think maybe you do.”
Seeing Lindy’s look of confusion, Bell elaborated. “I mean that sometimes we know things we don’t realize we know. Any friends or coworkers pissed off at you? For something that happened on the job, maybe? Anybody threatening you?”
Lindy snorted. “More like the opposite.”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean that I’ve got a ton of people—too damned many—trying to protect me. Giving me advice. Telling me it’s not a good idea to work at night. Or to live alone with my dad. Taking care of him. Telling me I should leave Acker’s Gap.”
Maybe they’re right, Bell wanted to reply, but didn’t. No sense in provoking the young woman. Not yet, anyway. “Okay,” Bell said. “Let’s go over your actions yesterday—up until the moment you were attacked. You work until 7 A.M., right? With an assistant? Same guy every night?”
“Yeah. Not last night, though.”
“Why not?”
“Jason took a personal day. Didn’t come in to work. He and his brother had to drive their dad to Charleston.”
“Jason have a last name?”
“Brinkerman.”
“Right.” Bell would find out if Jason Brinkerman really had driven to Charleston—or if that was just a made-up excuse and his absence had been strategic, enabling him to get out to the Crabtree house and lie in wait. He would know what time Lindy returned home from her shift. “Who covered for him?”
“Bonnie Somebody. Can’t remember her last—Wait. It’s Skinner.” Lindy made a sound in the back of her throat that indicated how perturbed she was with herself. “How come I could remember that but I can’t remember the attack?”
“Just the nature of concussions,” Bell said. “Mind’s a funny thing. Okay, go on. So you drive home. You park. House look odd in any way?”
Lindy gave her a sharp glare. Bell realized that the question could have been intended as a wisecrack, a cheap joke; the Crabtree house was a godforsaken mess. Had been for years. The only oddity would have been if it suddenly appeared presentable: paved driveway, picked-up yard, shiny new roof, gutters that didn’t dangle like random severed limbs.
“I mean,” Bell added, “did you see any evidence that anyone had been there overnight? Tire tracks, cigarette butts, a porch rug moved a little bit, that sort of thing?”
“Nope.”
“Okay.” Bell nodded. “Listen, you need your sleep. Guess I’d better get out of here before they throw me out.” Lindy’s fatigue wasn’t her only reason for leaving. She was eager to check on Jason Brinkerman. If the culprit wasn’t Odell Crabtree, then Lindy’s assistant looked good for the attack.
“I’ll come by again later,” Bell said. “You’re doing great. Nurse told me they’ll probably be moving you out of ICU in a few hours. Put you in a regular patient room. You take care, okay? And can I bring you anything when I come back? Something to read, maybe?”
A light came into Lindy’s eyes. “You’d have to go to my house,” she said.
“That’s okay. Which book? Lots to choose from, as I remember.”
“Not a book. Like I told you, I found some letters the other day that belonged to my mom. I’d like to have them here. Truth is, with nobody in the house—well, I’m kind of worried. If there was a fire—” She looked concerned. “They can’t be replaced.”
“I’ll pick them up. Bring them here. Soon as I can.”
Lindy’s features were instantly smoothed out by relief. “Great,” she said. “They’re under the dresser in the bedroom. In a little box. You’ll have to move some things around, but you can find it.”
“Okay.”
“One more thing.”
“Hey, don’t push your luck,” Bell said, aiming for a jocular tone. “If you’re going to ask for a cheeseburger or something, I’ll have to check with the nurses first.”
Lindy’s face was serious. “What do you do if—? How do you—?” She faltered.
Bell waited.
“Look,” Lindy said, “I don’t believe Daddy did this to me. But what if—” Still struggling to find the right words, she plucked nervously at the sheet that covered her. “What if you find out something about somebody you know—something terrible?” She looked beseechingly at Bell. “What if you find out something you wish you didn’t know? How do you—How do you live with it? It’s so hard to think that somebody you care about might be capable of—something really, really bad. You know?”
“People are capable of anything, Lindy,” Bell said. She said it solemnly, with no cyn
icism in her voice. This wasn’t a matter of cynicism; it was the deepest, saddest truth she knew.
“Even somebody you love?” Lindy said.
“Especially somebody you love.”
* * *
Bell sat in her Explorer in the hospital parking lot. Nick Fogelsong was an early riser. But maybe not this early, she told herself, pausing before she touched the digit on her speed-dial that was assigned to his home number. She canceled the call and dropped the cell onto the car seat beside her. In five minutes it would be 6 A.M.; she’d call him at one minute past the hour, and if he sounded sleepy and vaguely pissed off, she’d say, Hell, Nick. It’s after six.
She’d left Lindy’s bedside in the ICU a while ago. Sunrise was imminent, its mix of red-gold colors simmering behind the mountain. She fired off a text to Rhonda Lovejoy, asking her to dig up some background information on Jason Brinkerman and his family.
Then she unilaterally canceled her earlier plan. She’d call Nick later and check on Odell Crabtree. Right now, she decided, she needed to be on the road. To be in motion. First she’d stop somewhere and get herself a cup of coffee, and then she’d head over to Jason Brinkerman’s house to question him. She wanted to do that right away, before he found out from anyone else that Lindy had been attacked. Jason’s initial reaction might tell her a great deal.
Thirty seconds later Bell was turning out of the hospital parking lot when a phalanx of black Cadillac Escalades nearly scraped the paint off the driver’s-side door of the Explorer. The sleek swarm came up swiftly and silently, like phantom cars spiraling out of the gray morning mist. They were three separate vehicles, but they followed each other so closely, one virtually connected to the next, that they seemed like a single creature, linked and segmented, turning off Rathmell Road and into the large square lot like a continuous string of flexible chrome and stretched-out black.
Bell pulled to the side of the road to watch. There was a military precision to the way the Escalades operated, a vehicular rigor that reminded her of news footage of presidential motorcades. The muscular machines seemed slightly dreamlike, unreal.