Same Place, Same Time

by C. J. Carmichael

  CHAPTER TEN

  THE HAWTHORNE FILE. Trista didn’t know why she’d hadn’t thought of it earlier. Ever since the night her office had been broken into, Morgan had been keeping the Walker file locked in his home safe.

  But what about the Hawthorne file? Assuming the murderer was interested in the one, wouldn’t he want the other, too? Trista knew it was still in the gray cabinet, filed under H where it belonged, because she’d added a note about Sylvia’s visit late Wednesday afternoon.

  The thought came to her while she was locking up the campaign office after Suni’s abrupt departure, and she went back into the office to make a quick phone call to Morgan.

  Once again she had to leave a message.

  Back in the subway, traveling east on Bloor, Trista fumed as her body swayed from side to side with the movement of the train. The car was almost full with people of all ages, all nationalities. Beside her, a Jamaican girl popped gum in time to the music playing on her portable disc-player. An Asian woman held the hands of two pre-school children seated on either side of her. And standing at the door, his arm firmly grasping a metal pole for support, an old man muttered impatiently in Italian.

  What if it was hours before Morgan checked his messages? The office locks were scheduled to be changed tomorrow. That meant the file would be vulnerable all night long.

  She couldn’t wait for Morgan. She had to get that file.

  At the back of her mind was the thought that Morgan would be furious if he knew what she was up to. But that didn’t stop her. At the Spadina subway stop she grabbed a streetcar, which bumped and ground all the way to King Street.

  She would just run into her office and get the file. It would take less than a minute.

  By the time she reached her office, it was after seven, and the lobby was deserted except for the security guard manning his post by the entrance. She signed her name in the register and asked Joe how things were going.

  “Fine, Ms. Emerson. Say, I’m sorry about the mix-up with your locks being changed. I thought we’d decided that no one had broken into your office so I told them not to bother.”

  Trista waved aside the apology. Since it was too late to change anything now, there was no point in getting angry with Joe. “I’m going up to the office to get some papers I need. I’ll just be a minute.”

  “No problem.”

  Trista was used to being in the building after hours, but this time when she stepped into the elevator she felt as exposed as an animal in a cage. What could she do to protect herself if when the elevator stopped, the doors opened to reveal an intruder? There was nowhere to run in an elevator. Nothing to hide behind. No one would even hear her screams…

  The bell sounded arrival at the top floor and Trista gave a small jump. Now she was being ridiculous. See? Off the elevator, and no bogeyman waiting to gun her down. The doors made a funny creaking noise as they closed. Heart pounding, she pulled her office keys out of her purse. The key slid into the lock easily, but met with no resistance when she gave it a twist. The door wasn’t locked.

  Trista’s nervous system fired up again. She knew she’d locked the door behind her when she’d left the empty office earlier that afternoon. So who had unlocked it? Not Joe, certainly. And Brenda had said she was leaving the city for a few days.

  An intruder. Shakily, Trista withdrew her key. What if he was still there?

  Slowly and quietly, Trista returned to the elevators. She pressed the down button, frowning when she saw both had returned to the main level. If there was someone in her office, he could come out any second. She didn’t want to be standing here if that happened. She decided to take the stairs.

  Walking around behind the elevator bank, she pushed at the heavy, fireproof door that led to the stairwell. It gave way with a dull creak, and suddenly she placed the sound she’d heard when she’d stepped off the elevator. But the insight came too late.

  A numbing pain at the back of her head, along with a brief sensation of inevitability, was all she felt before she collapsed forward onto the concrete landing. Then there was nothing.

  MORGAN STEPPED out of the elevator on Trista’s floor and listened intently. For a split second he’d thought he’d heard a thud, but now there was only silence. According to Joe, Trista had said she’d only be a minute or two. Why wasn’t she on her way down yet?

  Morgan figured he’d listened to her message about the Hawthorne file about half an hour after she’d sent it. He should have known she wouldn’t simply sit and wait for him.

  Why couldn’t the woman get it through her thick skull that she was in danger? What could have possessed her to come back to her office, alone, after closing hours? Morgan looked at the door in front of him, the brass plaque with black lettering: Emerson Counseling. His sixth sense told him that something was wrong here. Noiselessly he reached for his gun before trying the door. It wasn’t locked.

  He didn’t think Trista would have left the door unlocked behind her. Surely even she wasn’t that foolhardy. Fighting an ominous sense of foreboding, he cautiously eased the door open. The lights were off and the rooms were dull in the early dusk.

  Well, she wouldn’t be in here with the lights off. But if she wasn’t here, then where was she? Joe would have seen her if she’d come back down the elevators. Could she have been going down while he was coming up? That was probably it, but while he was here, he figured he’d look things over.

  After turning on the lights, he searched the three-room office but saw nothing out of the ordinary. No sign of any struggle. And no sign of Trista. For a moment he paused in front of the file cabinets. Since Trista was gone, undoubtedly she had the file already. But on impulse he pulled open the drawer and searched under the H’s.

  There it was. Hawthorne, Daniel and Sylvia. Morgan pulled it out and stared at the cover, adrenaline buzzing through his veins. Where the hell was Trista?

  He returned to the hallway and stood silently for several minutes. And then, on a hunch, he headed for the stairwell. But he couldn’t open the door. Something heavy was blocking the entrance. Heart pounding, he ran back to the elevators and pounded the button. When the door opened, he jumped inside and pressed the button for one floor down. As soon as it made its jerky stop, he flew out and raced to the stairs.

  He ran up the first half flight, and as he turned the corner, he saw, dimly in the darkness, why he’d been unable to get through.

  Sprawled on the concrete landing was the outline of a human body. In the faint light from the door’s window, dull gold shimmered in the hair of the victim.

  It was Trista.

  He sprinted up the last few stairs and knelt beside her, pain knifing through his chest as he spotted traces of blood on the floor beside her. Please let her be all right!

  Quickly he checked for a pulse, and swallowed a sob when he found it. Kneeling closer, he placed his face next to hers and reveled in the soft warmth of her breath against his cheek. Giving in to impulse, he pressed his cheek closer, right next to hers, and breathed a short prayer of relief.

  Then he pulled himself up short. There was work to do here. He’d have to call the office and have someone come down to investigate. But first, and foremost, he had to get Trista to the hospital.

  TRISTA MOANED as she began the journey back to consciousness. Images and sounds came to her in disjointed sequences. She was aware of colors. Red. Blue. A flash of yellow. She heard the occasional word. Something was pressing her down. She felt overwhelmed by the sensations, unable to put them in any sort of context.

  Then she became aware of her own body. Her head throbbed with pain. She realized that she was lying down but she had no idea where. She tried to think what had happened to her, where she’d been, but she couldn’t remember anything. Instinctively she opened her eyes and tried to make sense of the blur of shadow and light.

  It was a ceiling. She struggled to bring the line where the wall met the ceiling into focus. Three lines merged to two and finally to one. There.

&
nbsp; She turned her head. The movement caused a spasm of pain to shoot through her head, starting at the back and moving, with excruciating slowness, forward to her temples. She winced, then opened her eyes again. Now she saw a pale beige curtain pulled back to the wall, not quite hiding the narrow bed just a few feet away, and beyond that, a door into a brightly lit corridor.

  Of a hospital. Her thoughts began to swirl in her mind, moving faster, faster, funneling into a tornado of anxiety. And fear.

  She gripped the metal railing of her bed convulsively. There was something wrong. Now she remembered. Something terrible, horrible, uglier than her worst nightmare. “No!” She fought against the memory, against consciousness. Give me back the darkness, please. I can’t take this, I can’t!

  He’s dead. He’s dead. A voice sounded in her ear. She tried not to listen. She knew it belonged to Morgan.

  “No! It’s not true! It’s not true!” She saw the truck coming at them from the corner of her eye. The metal grill-work filled the passenger windows on the right-hand side of her car. Andrew’s car seat was back there. She threw her hands up around her head to block the sounds—crunching metal, squealing brakes, smashing glass, a baby’s cry abruptly silenced.

  Forever.

  “It’s okay, Trista. You’re going to be all right.” The voice confused her. Where was it coming from? How could she be okay? This had to be some kind of cruel joke.

  “Trista, Trista,” the voice continued. She felt someone stroking her hand.

  Oh, God, she prayed. This can’t be true. Andrew can’t be dead. Let me rock him once more, just for a few minutes. He’ll come around. Let me hold him. He’s mine. He needs me. She tried to get up, to go and find him, but she felt herself being pressed back. She looked wildly around her. Something was wrong here. It didn’t make sense.

  “Lie down, Trista. Please, please, calm yourself.”

  That voice again. The words didn’t fit. She opened her eyes and concentrated, really concentrated. It was Morgan beside her, but he was different. She forced herself to keep looking, to figure out what was wrong. He was older. That was it. A piece of the fog lifted from her mind and she realized this was a different time. Suddenly exhausted, she fell back limp onto her bed, turning on her side, away from Morgan.

  She felt his hand on her back, gently stroking her. She wanted to tell him to stop, but the truth was it felt so good, and suddenly she could think of no reason to object to his touch. She took in a long breath. It was shaky, like the drawn sob of a child who’d been crying a long, long time.

  She knew now that the accident had happened years ago, but she felt the pain, as raw as if it had been only hours. Against her will the scene replayed in her mind. All the little details that she’d fought so hard to suppress.

  Don’t hold back, Trista. She could hear the voice of her therapist. You have to come to terms with this.

  She was a counselor, herself. She knew what he said was right. But how could she come to terms with the death of her own child, knowing that she could have prevented it?

  She remembered her fear that cold winter night as Andrew’s cough got worse and worse. Morgan was working and couldn’t be reached. She’d turned the hot water on in the bathroom and created a room of steam. Held him in there for half an hour. But it didn’t help. He was having trouble breathing. She didn’t think he was getting enough oxygen. In desperation, she’d decided to take him to emergency. She would never forget the last time she had held her baby alive, when she placed him in his car seat. He had been so miserable. Sick and scared. And she had hated to put him by himself back there, but she’d done it for his safety.

  His safety. The bile rose in her throat. It turned out to have been the most unsafe place she could have put him.

  Trista began to sob. She could see, as if he was right here beside her, the soft blond hair, the small dot of his nose, the pink curve of his mouth. She remembered the fear she’d felt for him that night, the desperate kiss she had planted on his soft, plump cheek, before closing the door and running to the driver’s seat.

  The last time she had kissed her darling baby boy. She had driven like someone possessed, headed for the nearest hospital. She would never forget the sound of Andrew’s hoarse heavings from the back seat as she rushed to get him medical aid. If only Morgan was here, she remembered thinking. He could get us a police escort or something. Every stop sign, every red light was agony as she felt her lungs burn with her child’s need for oxygen.

  And then she reached the corner of Mount Pleasant and Eglinton. The light turned yellow just as she neared the intersection. After a split-second hesitation she put her foot down heavily on the gas pedal. And then, from her right, came the truck. She had only the briefest awareness, a desperate thought of her baby in the center of the back seat, until the world had turned to darkness.

  If only it had stayed that way.

  “Trista. Oh Trista. I’m so sorry.” Morgan put his arms gently around the woman who had once been his wife and rocked her gently. “I’m so sorry.”

  She turned to face him then, accepting the refuge his arms offered. He was crying too, she realized, wondering why she should be surprised by that, then remembering that he hadn’t the first time, when he’d told her about Andrew.

  “Shh.” She felt the warmth of his breath mingling with the coolness of his fresh tears against her ear. “It’s okay, Trista. You’ve had a knock to the head.”

  “I have?” Her voice came out sounding like a couple of croaks.

  “At your office,” he elaborated, and then she remembered. The unlocked door, the murders, the break-in, the divorce, the emptiness. Her mind rewound the events from today leading back to the day of the accident over four years ago.

  “I remember.” She closed her eyes, suddenly aware of nothing but pounding pain.

  I SHOULDN’T HAVE BROUGHT her to the hospital, Morgan berated himself even though he knew he’d had no choice. It hadn’t occurred to him that she might react like this. It was, after all, a different hospital. But similar enough. When she’d had the car accident, she’d been in a room not unlike this one, with a bad concussion and the possibility of internal damage. Then, as now, at the moment she regained consciousness, he’d been by her side.

  With the worst news that either of them could have had. It had been the hardest moment of his life, but he’d tried to be strong for her. Not that his supposed strength had done anybody any good. There was nothing he could do to save his baby, and nothing he could do or say to provide any comfort to his wife.

  He’d lost more than his son in that terrible accident four years ago. He’d lost his wife too, although mercifully he hadn’t realized that at first. It was only thoughts of Trista that had helped him get through those first few days and weeks. She would need him. He had to be strong for her. That was what he’d told himself.

  But she hadn’t needed him. Not from the moment he told her that Andrew had died in the accident. She hadn’t cried then, like she was now. Her eyes had grown blank, her face, expressionless. She’d turned away from him without a single word. It was as if she had died, too. In everything except body.

  In the weeks and months that passed, he kept waiting for her—the real Trista—to come back from whatever hell she was visiting and inhabit the body of his still-beautiful wife, but she never did. Her face kept that look, that blank expression where her eyes never really seemed to be in focus.

  They lived in polite silences, pretending to sleep during long, dark nights, and avoiding each other when they were awake. Moving about in the same house, sharing meals and a bed, but not talking or touching. If he so much as placed a hand on her shoulder, she would wince, as if in pain.

  And she never did cry. At least, not when he was in the house. He remembered many nights when, unable to sleep and unable to share his thoughts with his wife, he’d gone into his son’s bedroom. He would touch the crib, the blankets, the stuffed toys. He’d open the books he’d once read for hours: I do not like green
eggs and ham. I do not like them Sam-I-am.

  And then he would cry. Quietly. So as not to disturb Trista. Muffling his sobs with the flannel blanket they had wrapped around Andrew after he was born and they took him home from the hospital.

  This time they hadn’t been able to take him home from the hospital.

  Trista’s sobs were losing their intensity and he lowered her body back down on the pillows. All that crying couldn’t have done her injury any good, and he wished the doctor would come in and examine her.

  “How’s your head?”

  Trista twisted her mouth into a small smile. Her eyes were almost swollen shut from sobbing, her skin was blotchy and her lips were swollen. He thought she’d never looked so precious to him.

  “It hurts,” she admitted.

  “I should say so.” The doctor’s loud voice startled them both as he walked briskly into the room from the hallway. “You’ve had quite a bump there, Ms. Emerson. What happened?”

  “Trista was in the wrong place at the wrong time, Doctor,” Morgan replied, pulling his badge out of his pocket and showing it to the doctor. “She interrupted an attempted burglary.”

  The doctor looked Morgan up and down and then turned his eyes back to his patient. “You’ve been crying. Is this man upsetting you?”

  “Not at all,” Trista replied hastily. “It’s a long story, Doctor. I don’t think we need to get into it.”

  “If you say so. But extended periods of crying aren’t going to do your head injury any good. Now, if I could have a moment to examine my patient.” He looked expectantly toward Morgan.

  “Of course.” Morgan gave Trista’s shoulder a soft squeeze before he slipped out of the room.

  “SO WHAT did he say?” Morgan wanted to know after the doctor had left.

  “They want to keep me in overnight. For observation.” Trista grimaced. The last place she wanted to spend the night was in this godforsaken hospital. But the doctor had made it clear she had no alternative.