Sacrifice

by Farris, John

  "Was she conscious when you got there?" I asked the trooper. His name was Brooker. There were some Brookers on my mother's side, but I didn't think we were related; his people were all from down around Eufala, Alabama.

  "LOC times one," he said, med-tech shorthand for "Level of Consciousness."

  "She didn't respond when I asked her name. She couldn't tell me anything about the accident."

  "Didn't have anything to say at all?"

  "Oh, a few words. Blood kept coming to her lips. I just held her hand, the one I could reach, while we waited for the fire department to cut her out of that mess."

  "Could you make sense out of what you heard?"

  He paused to light a cigarette. "Greg. Kept saying his name, over and over. Looking right at me. "'Greg—not Greg.'"

  "Oh."

  "We'd already pulled him out of the wreck. I told her he was okay, he was going to be just fine."

  "That must have been some comfort to her," I said sympathetically.

  "I don't know. Probably she didn't understand, because she kept saying the same thing, over and over."

  "Greg—not Greg. Did she say anything else?"

  He shook his head. "Well, I didn't pay close attention. You know, it was pissing rain and there was a lot going on, we just wanted to get her out of there and into the hospital, although when you've seen enough of the real bad ones, you get a sixth sense for who's going to make it."

  I leaned back enough to stay out of the smoke curling from his cigarette, so I wouldn't have a coughing fit.

  "She did ask for somebody . . . might have been family, or a minister. I didn't catch the name right off. They were putting her on a gurney then."

  "Sharissa? That's her daughter."

  "No, don't believe that was it. Maybe one of the medics heard what she said. If it's important."

  I couldn't say that it was. Brooker was working a four-to-midnight and had to get the unit back to GSP on 41, a couple of miles from the hospital. I returned to outpatient and looked in on Greg Walker and Sharissa in the cubicle where she was lying down.

  A chaplain was with them. He spoke in low tones. I looked at Sharissa's glazed face and at the back of Greg's bent head. There was nothing I could do; it was no time to intrude. Caroline's father and mother and other family members were en route. Greg, I recalled, from some casual conversation or other, was an orphan.

  The sky was clearing and the moon was visible when I walked out of Emergency. In the covered driveway the medical technicians who had responded to the accident call were straightening up in the back of their truck. I walked over to them and identified myself.

  "I wonder if she said anything on the way?" I asked one of the team, a gum-chewing redhead named Kristy McIlwaine.

  "Oh, she was muttering some. Nothing coherent," McIlwaine said.

  "Low sick?"

  "Well, I didn't think with her vitals we'd get her to the door, and then traffic was a fuckin' nightmare, as you can rightly imagine. But she'd rally."

  "One of the troopers said she asked for somebody. Maybe her husband?"

  "The one they transported in the patrol car? What's his Christian name?"

  "Greg."

  "No, that wasn't what she was saying." Mcllwaine called to her partner, who was in the front seat making a log entry. "You recall her talking out loud, Witt?"

  "Yeah, she did a time or two."

  "Know what name she was saying?"

  "Let me think on it. Van, something. She was breathing real ragged. Didn't she say Rick, too? I believe she did. Rick, Van. Those her kids' names? That's about all I heard out of her."

  "Well, thanks," I said. I had my notebook out, force of habit. I jotted the two names down. Then I stood there, looking at what I had written in the sodium vapor light of the covered driveway.

  Van

  Rick

  It didn't mean anything to me. I put the notebook away.

  Some people were crossing the street from one of the parking lots. Two of them elderly, both with white hair cut almost identically, walking slowly but resisting the solicitations of the younger members of the family. I heard their footsteps, saw the tears on her cheeks as they came closer to the light. Caroline's mother and father, I assumed. They didn't know me, and I had no reason to introduce myself. I left Sharissa and her family to their grief and drove back to Sky Valley, feeling leaden and defeated, although I couldn't name just what it was I had lost.

  The service for Caroline Walker, at First Iconium Baptist, was crowded. She was from a large family, and, according to Sharissa, she'd kept up with nearly everyone who had been a friend during her school days. Senator Claude Gilley delivered the eulogy. The burial was private.

  A week after Caroline's funeral, Sharissa went back to school for her senior year. I heard from her less often. She would call to see if I knew of any progress in Bobby Driscoll's case. From her tone of voice it was obvious she was having a tough haul recovering from the double tragedy. A couple of times I said we ought to get together for a match, and she said, without enthusiasm, Fine, but I don't think I can this week, and I said, Fine, well, we'll make it another day. By the middle of October, I guess it was, she stopped calling.

  We both worked downtown, so I saw Greg Walker occasionally. He looked thinner to me. There wasn't much trace of the shooting accident that had almost cost him his life three months ago. We exchanged a few words in passing. He was polite enough, but that was it. When I asked about Sharissa all he said was, She's a very brave girl.

  My mother had another stroke, came back from it but not all the way. I figured one more, with luck she would go peacefully. She was seventy-three. I took ten days off from work, did some repairs around the house, raked leaves. I thought about Sharissa more than was good for me. I went over every word of every conversation I'd had with her. A specialist I went to gave me some expensive prescriptions for stuff that was supposed to retard hair loss. I didn't notice any difference. Maybe I was pulling it out in my sleep.

  When I got back to work there was, among other notes on my desk, the phone number of an administrator at the North Georgia Mental Health Center. Re Roxanne Sullivan. I'd almost forgotten about her. I called the hospital, talked to a woman named Wilkins. Mrs. Sullivan's liver was no longer functioning, and she was comatose. Wilkins said that probably she wouldn't last out the week.

  "I was wondering if you'd managed to locate her daughter, or perhaps her husband."

  "No, ma'am. Nothing's ever come back from the Canadian authorities." I had the case file in front of me. Husband Frederick Sullivan, daughter Bonnie. Whereabouts unknown.

  "Thank you, sergeant. I'll begin work on the forms for state burial."

  "Did she ever come out of it?" I asked, doodling on my notepad.

  "Let's see—she was in a condition of tonic immobility when admitted, I believe . . . no. Neither of her doctors noted any progress whatsoever during her stay here. It's possible her poor physical condition had something to do with her persistent catatonia."

  "Sorry we couldn't be more help," I said.

  After I hung up I sat and thought for a few minutes about the night Mrs. Frederick Sullivan showed up at the Ovenbird to claim Greg Walker as her long-missing husband. He'd had an interesting summer, to say the least. Near-tragedy, farce-tragedy, real-tragedy . . . I looked at my notepad, and then it just leaped out at me. I picked up my pen, an old Waterman my father had used during his years as headmaster of Tarleton Day School, and nearly broke off the point underscoring two parts of her name.

  Mrs. Frederick Sullivan

  Then I thumbed through my notebook to the night Caroline Walker had been killed on I-75, and saw that I'd remembered correctly; they were the words I had written after talking to the med techs at Kennestone Hospital. Rick, Van. Those her kids' names?

  No. But maybe what Caroline had been trying to say was, Frederick Sullivan.

  Why?

  Because Frederick Sullivan was on her mind. Because—just possibly—he was the
other passenger in the car with her at the time of the accident.

  Greg—not Greg. Not Greg. Is not Greg!

  Nice going, Holmes, I thought; but I have to admit I was dazzled by this surmise, conjecture, hypothesis, whatever the hell it was—so much that I hit my knee hard against the desk when I stood up suddenly.

  A cup of black coffee sobered me, and then I didn't have much time to think about the—call it a cockeyed notion—for the rest of the day. Crack cocaine was all over the county this fall, a plague in some of the schools. We were making a lot of busts, and that meant additional court time for the arresting officers. Most of the youthful offenders, so called, were being shipped off to a work-camp in Coweth to give them the opportunity to think about what the hell they were doing with their lives.

  After a tough day and a meat loaf dinner that didn't set too well on my jumpy stomach, I went back to the office about nine o'clock. I was beginning to feel a little foolish, but I pulled the file on Roxanne Sullivan again, and signed out everything we had in the evidence room.

  It didn't make much of a pile on my desk. Letters and photographs and documents, the pistol she'd threatened Greg Walker with—an old nickel-plated Beretta, obviously secondhand—and a small envelope containing the gold locket we'd found in the parking lot outside the Ovenbird Restaurant.

  I studied all of the documentation again, trying to make it work.

  Frederick Sullivan. According to the marriage certificate, he was thirty-five years old when he married Roxanne in September of 1954. There was a faded post-wedding photograph of the grinning bride and groom, taken by an amateur with a cheap camera. Too much contrast. Hard to make out what Frederick really looked like. A year later, he and his wife opened a cocktail lounge in New Lost River, British Columbia. They operated the lounge for eighteen years. Until Frederick abruptly took off, accompanied by their adopted daughter Bonnie. That was in 1973. The war in Vietnam was winding down. I was thirteen years old. The two of them disappeared, apparently without a trace, and Mrs. Roxanne Sullivan lost enough of her marbles to warrant confinement in a mental hospital.

  In 1973, if the birth date recorded on his marriage certificate was legitimate, Frederick Sullivan was fifty-four years old. His present age, if still living, was about seventy-three. That would make him one year older than my father, who walked with two canes after a hip-joint replacement, and who had maybe forty percent of his hearing left.

  Some people age faster than others. But nobody at the age of seventy-three was as fit as Greg Walker, particularly after surviving a bullet to the brain.

  Bullshit, Holmes, said Dr. Watson. There is no earthly way Frederick Sullivan could be—

  I was tired and annoyed. Annoyed at being nagged by the stubborn feeling that something was very, very wrong. I dropped a couple of Alka-Seltzer in a glass of Evian and drank it slowly and stared out the bullpen windows at the Civil War statue a block away on the square. Made of bronze, and built to last. A hundred, two hundred years, unless a tree fell on him . . . but we were all flesh and blood: the body, except for irreplaceable brain cells, renewing itself about every six weeks. Always with a difference, each copy of the original cell-blueprint a little fuzzier until, after fifty years or so, you had to look hard to see whatever trace of the boy remained in the old man to each of us there is a season, and so forth. My father would know the exact quotation. Greg Walker might know, too; he read his Bible and went to church. He had raised a fine daughter and was true to his wife, as far as anyone knew. Worked hard, kept himself in shape, made no waves in his community. People liked him, but who really knew him? All I knew about Greg Walker was, he had a lot of luck. And a woman named Roxanne Sullivan had been convinced he was her husband. She had married a man who, as far as we had been able to find out, had no background. None.

  And Greg Walker . . . wasn't he an orphan?

  I had picked up Roxanne Sullivan's locket. Wasn't really conscious of running the chain through my fingers as I let my mind wander. The locket had a very well-concealed catch. I had opened the locket once before, but had forgotten how. Little things like tricky metal watchbands defeat me. I'd never been able to solve Rubik's Cube, either. But there was something inside I needed.

  After I repacked the evidence carton and returned it, I headed home. The locket was in a pocket of my jacket. My mother always had been a light sleeper. The last stroke hadn't changed her habits. She couldn't get out of bed without help anymore, but her hands were as deft as ever. Ten seconds after I handed her the locket, she had it open. She looked at me, smiling, and then at the snippet of hair inside.

  "Whose?" she said.

  "I'm almost afraid to find out," I told her.

  I didn't have an excuse for visiting Greg and Sharissa, but I paid a call anyway, two nights later, when I knew she would be off from Burger King.

  Sharissa was doing her homework at the kitchen table when I drove up. She let me in by way of the back door.

  "Hi! What's new?" She looked sharply and hopefully at me.

  "Nothing about Bobby, I'm afraid."

  She accepted that with a thinning of her lips and a tight shrug. Sharissa had lost weight, and the hollows of her eyes were dark bronze from fatigue or stress.

  "I need to talk to Greg about a couple of things," I said. "That old case—the woman at the Ovenbird?" Before she could be alarmed, I added, "It's routine. Mrs. Sullivan's never going to be a threat to anyone."

  "Dad's in the den. Could I get you something, C.G.?"

  "Apple cider?"

  "I'll bring it to you."

  The pocket doors to the den were half open. I saw Greg inside, in his favorite chair, head to one side, eyes closed. His Bible was in his lap. I knocked. He gave a little start.

  "Sharissa?"

  "No, it's me, Butterbaugh. Mind if I—?"

  "Come on in, C.G. Must have dozed off." He marked his place in the Bible and stood, shook my hand. "Keeping busy?"

  "We could use some extra help. Frankly, we've been swamped."

  "This drug problem?"

  "And everything that goes with it. Burglaries, stickups, two drive-by shootings in the West End last week. They're shooting at us, too. Two-time losers for crack cocaine possession get life in this state, can't do much worse if you kill a cop while you're at it. Thirty-seven thousands deaths by guns in this country last year, while the pro-gun lobbyists invoke the sanctity of the Second Amendment. Bullshit. It was a good idea once, now it's just a bad law."

  He shook his head wearily. "You read about all the drugs, and you think, well, it's a ghetto problem. Big cities. But here in Sky Valley . . . our high school? I'm glad Sharissa will finish her course requirements in January. And it's pretty well helped us make up our minds."

  "About what?" I glanced at the doorway as Sharissa came in with two glasses of cold cider.

  "Dad, thought you might like a drink."

  "Thanks, honey. How's the paper coming?"

  "I'm going to lick it tonight, or else." She looked at me with a wan smile. "C.G., if you'll excuse me—"

  "Sure. Get back to work."

  I settled down on the brass-studded green leather sofa, facing Greg. He picked up his Bible again and sat back holding it unopened in his lap.

  "You said you'd made a decision about something—?" I prompted him.

  "Oh. Well, Sharissa and I have been meeting with the group at our church that sponsors our missionaries in the field, and the more we talked about it, the more it seemed like something we really want to do. Sharissa's very enthusiastic. I think it's just what she needs. Of course Caroline's parents were horrified—"

  "You're going to become missionaries?"

  "Oh, it's not something permanent—" He smiled at me, as dead earnest as I'd ever seen him. "At least not for Sharissa. A year, at the most, then we want her to go on to college. They'll hold her scholarship for her, but if they don't, well—Caroline's life insurance policy. It paid double if she was doing work-related travel, I didn't know about that. So the
re's—plenty of money, you see."

  I nodded and drank half of my cider. He stroked the black buckram binding of his Bible, lightly; not looking at me, eyes softly unfocused, smiling slightly.

  "It'll be especially good for me," he said. "I need to—detach myself. From my life here. And do a service. Something lasting for the Lord."

  "Where do you plan to go?"

  "Oh, Central America. Not sure which country yet. We'll be assigned wherever the Mission Board feels we can be most useful. Of course we'll be working with experienced career missionaries." He cleared his throat, looked at his glass of cider but didn't touch it. "It'll do us a lot of good," he said hopefully.

  Greg didn't say anything else for at least a minute. I listened to the ticking of the mantel clock. I heard, from the kitchen, Sharissa ripping out a page of notebook paper, crumpling it. She got up, walked around, sat down again, banging the legs of her chair on the plank floor.

  "We're putting the house on the market," Greg said.

  "You are?"

  "I've arranged a bank loan for Scott Bisco. He's worked for me three and a half years. He'll be taking over the business."

  "Sounds as if you don't plan on coming back, Greg."

  He looked slowly around the paneled den. "I don't know. But I think—it would be very hard for us to come back—to this house."

  I finished my cider. Before I put the glass down he said, "You can have mine, if you want it."

  I drank his cider, too. Greg said, "The girl across the street—Erica Lashley—she and two of her friends were arrested for possession of narcotics. Thank God none of that has ever touched Sharissa."

  "She's too fine a person. All credit to you and your—"

  "Did you want to see me about something tonight, C.G.?"

  "Oh. I did have some news. I hope it's not unpleasant for you, my bringing this up? Do you remember Mrs. Sullivan?"

  His smile was slightly twisted. "Will I ever forget?"