Once Burned

by Gerry Boyle

  “I would hope so,” I said. “All he’s been through.”

  The elevator took me to fourth floor west. I walked past the nurses’ station, followed the signs to the east wing. The corridor led into an open waiting area, people sitting as far apart as the plaid couches and chairs would allow. The television was set to a game show, on mute, the contestants jumping up and down in excitement, captions running across the screen.

  The nurses’ station was at the far end of the room. I walked over, waited until a young guy hung up the phone. He was in green hospital scrubs, a stethoscope slung around his neck.

  He looked up.

  “Hello,” I said. “I’m hoping to see Woodrow Harvey. Or his family.”

  I smiled. He looked me up and down.

  “You family?”

  “Friend.”

  “I’m afraid visitors are restricted to immediate family,” he said.

  “Are they here?” I said.

  “His mom is in the room,” the guy said. “I mean, they come and go. As you probably know—”

  “I know he’s in a—”

  “Right, so they just sit.”

  The phone buzzed and he peered at it, reading the number, then reached for the receiver.

  “Listen, Woodrow’s sister’s here. She can probably tell you when Mom’s coming out.”

  He started talking into the phone.

  I walked back to the visitors’ area, scanned the people for sister material. A girl and a boy, maybe ten and twelve, peering at the TV. A woman in her twenties, heavyset and mannish, texting furiously. A girl, thirteen or fourteen, in shorts and flip-flops, dark-rimmed glasses and hair tied back, staring into a laptop.

  I walked over, sat down next to her. She had earphones in, was chewing her nails.

  “Hi,” I said.

  I put my hand out, waved it in front of the screen. Her head jerked back and she yanked the earphones out, looked at me.

  “Hello,” I said. “Are you Woodrow’s sister?” I smiled.

  “Who wants to know?” she said.

  “Jack McMorrow,” I said. “I’m a reporter.”

  “Oh, you want the deputy. He sits at the door of Woodrow’s room. I’ll get him. I have family clearance.”

  She started to get up.

  “Wait,” I said.

  “You want my mom?” she said.

  “Sure, but first could I talk to you?”

  She looked at me, then around the room.

  “What newspaper?” she said.

  “New York Times,” I said, handing her my card.

  “Really,” she said. “You’re the one.”

  “Who’s writing about the fires,” I said. “I’m Jack.”

  I smiled and put out my hand. She took it and squeezed, her fingers moist from her mouth.

  “I’m Willa,” she said.

  “Nice to meet you,” I said. “Well, sort of. Under the circumstances.”

  While she shut something down on the screen, I looked at her. Her hair was wavy and dark, corralled into a ponytail. The glasses were rectangular and possibly stylish. Her skin was fair and flawless with a barely discernible pinkish glow. She wasn’t pretty, but her coloring was striking. She closed the laptop and looked over at me with an intense, assessing stare.

  “So why do you care about my brother?”

  “Because I’m writing about the fires—”

  “I heard about how they killed that old doctor.”

  “Yeah. Very sad.”

  “Totally sucks,” Willa said.

  Another pause as she chewed her lip, took out a tube and smeared her lips. Strawberry.

  “My brother never set anything on fire,” Willa said. “Woodrow never did any of that.”

  I slipped my notebook out, a pen from the other side of my jeans.

  “Apparently not,” I said. “But he’s still part of the story.”

  “Because kids trash him on Facebook?”

  “Yup.”

  She thought for a second, her nails drumming the top of the laptop.

  “You never do anything wrong and somebody says you did a crime, so all of a sudden you have to be in the story? That’s not fair.”

  “Life’s not fair,” I said. “When it is, it’s by accident.”

  “And now he can’t even defend himself.”

  Her eyes filled, wet beneath the lavender eye shadow.

  “I’m sorry, Willa. How is he . . .”

  “Doing? He’s not doing anything. He’s in a coma. They induced it. He’s got a drain in to keep the swelling down. On his brain.”

  “Is it going to be okay? Have they said?”

  “Okay for somebody who got his head kicked in,” she said. “As in, no.”

  “Why would anybody do this to Woodrow?”

  “They don’t need a reason, except they’re hateful, horrible people.”

  “Not all of them. He must have some friends.”

  “Sure. There’s lotsa good kids, but there’s some really bad ones, too. It’s like the rules don’t apply to them. And they decided to make my brother’s life hell.”

  I wrote that down, looked up to see her reaction. Her jaw was set, defiant. She was going to defend her brother.

  “Why did they pick Woodrow?” I said.

  “Because he’s different. He’s not a redneck like them. And he’s not gonna kiss their butts.”

  “You came from the city, right?”

  “Portland. It’s barely a city.”

  “But way more of a city than Sanctuary.”

  “Sanctuary’s barely a town. Hicksville in the middle of nowhere,” Willa said.

  “You didn’t want to move there?”

  “You kidding?”

  “So why did you?”

  Willa hesitated, looked toward the closed door to the unit.

  “My parents thought Woodrow needed a change.”

  “He didn’t like Portland?”

  “These jock guys down there were bothering him. They’d say things, get him to fight and stuff, and he’d get in trouble.”

  “But when he got up here it wasn’t much better?”

  “Instead of jocks it was rednecks.”

  “That’s too bad,” I said.

  “Yeah, it sucks,” Willa said. “Because he’s a really good kid. He just has sort of a temper. He’s on the spectrum, you know.”

  “I heard,” I said.

  “Asperger’s. It’s like autism. But not really that bad. It’s a condition, like asthma or something.”

  I wrote that down.

  “Autism is a medical condition, like asthma or something. They have no right to discriminate against him.”

  “No.”

  “Once they figured out that he had a temper, they just kept going at him.”

  “Baiting him?” I said.

  “Right.”

  “They put a video on YouTube of somebody biting the head off a bat and they said it was Woodrow, but it wasn’t. They got blood from some meat and smeared it on his locker, said he’d been sacrificing animals. They held him down and put a dead squirrel down the front of his pants.”

  “That’s sick,” I said.

  “When he got in fights with them, like, after school, they put that on YouTube, too. Woodrow all beat-up and dirty and crying.”

  “Did he lose the fights?”

  “Some of these guys are bigger than him. And stronger. Woodrow’s tall but he’s not a fighter. He’s really pretty gentle.”

  “With you,” I said.

  “Yeah. He’s a wicked good big brother. They figured that out, so they’d say things about me and he’d go freakin’ crazy.”

  We paused. I caught up with her in my notes. I saw her glancing toward the door.

  “So your parents, they must be devastated.”

  “Yeah. And they feel even worse because it was their idea to come here.”

  “You going to move?”

  “They say they bought the house at the peak of the market,” Wi
lla said.

  “If they sell now they’ll lose a lot of money.”

  “So you’re staying?”

  “Me and my mom are. My dad, he’s got this girlfriend. Jessie. So he’s here but he’s not here, you know? But yeah, I guess you could say right now we’re just thinking about Woodrow, how he’s gonna be.”

  She suddenly seemed smaller, more beaten down.

  “We don’t know. Until they let him wake up. He could be—”

  The heavy woman looked over at us, scowled at me.

  “These bullies,” I said. “Do you think they beat Woodrow up? This time, I mean.”

  Willa looked down, flipped the laptop open and closed. Left it closed. Glanced toward the door.

  “I don’t know,” she said. “I kinda doubt it.”

  “Why?”

  “Because there was nobody else there to watch.”

  “Nothing on YouTube,” I said.

  “Nobody to show off for.”

  “In the middle of the night, out in the woods,” I said.

  “Right.”

  Willa hesitated, pushed her glasses up.

  “And besides,” she said. “If they killed Woodrow, who would they have left to pick on?”

  “I see,” I said. “But if it wasn’t these bullies, then who?”

  “I don’t know,” Willa said. She ran a hand through her hair, took it out of the elastic thing, put it back in. I put my pen down on the notebook, the interview coming to an end. Willa saw that, leaned closer.

  “I have a theory,” she said.

  “What’s that?”

  “What if the fire-starter freak, he didn’t like it that people were saying it was Woodrow.”

  “Stealing his limelight?” I said.

  “Right. So he has to show it isn’t Woodrow.”

  “And to do that—”

  “He has to hurt Woodrow. Put him in the hospital,” Willa said. “And then burn another place.”

  From the mouths of babes.

  It was so smart, a piece of the puzzle that I’d been turning around and around, and this kid had just dropped it in place. I was still considering how it fit when Willa raised her eyebrows, nodded, then looked over my shoulder. There was a clacking, the door to CCU opening. I turned as a woman walked out, a straw bag clutched in front of her. She saw us and we both stood. I waited for her to approach, then said, “Mrs. Harvey.”

  She looked like her daughter—tall and pale, dark hair pulled back, angular frame, awkward walk. Her eyes were glazed with worry and exhaustion and fear.

  “Yes,” she said, and I gathered myself up for the part of the job I hated most.

  “I’m Jack McMorrow. I’m a reporter. I’m really sorry to bother you, but I couldn’t reach you at home. I’m writing a story about the fires in Sanctuary. I’m very sorry about what’s happened. Actually, I’ve met your son. He was—”

  Her face tightened into a scowl, then a sneer of disgust. “I have no comment for the press,” Mrs. Harvey said.

  She reached past me, yanked her daughter by the wrist, wheeled around. As they strode away, Willa turned and our eyes met. “Sorry,” she mouthed, and they were into the corridor and gone. The heavy woman in the waiting room glared, her eyes filled with loathing for me and my kind.

  “Bothering people in a hospital,” she said. “You should be ashamed of yourself.”

  “Sometimes I am,” I said.

  I slipped my notebook into my back pocket, the pen, too, then walked to the wooden door to the unit, peered in the window. There was an intercom button on the wall, and when a young man and woman came up behind me, I stepped aside. The guy reached for the button, pushed it, and said, “Steve Gaylord to see Butch Gaylord.” Someone buzzed the door and he pulled it open, held it for the woman. The woman held the door for me.

  I followed them past the nurses’ station, down the corridor. The walls were glass, and so were the doors to each room. I walked along, looking left and right. The rooms were filled with electronics and pumps and tubes, blinking lights. The patients were plugged in, connected to IVs. There was a middleaged woman, her belly bloated. A guy in his twenties, his arms and one leg in casts, a Red Sox banner stuck on the wall.

  And then in the next room, an empty chair outside the door, a book on the floor. Doctor Sleep. Stephen King.

  I stopped, said, “Oh, Woodrow. I’m sorry.”

  He was on his back in the bed, the whole thing behind the glass like a body lying in state. His eyes were purple and yellow and swollen shut, and the top of his head was bandaged. There was a tube running from underneath the bandages at the side of his head, tubes coming from his nose, an IV connected to his arm, a catheter tube from underneath his hospital gown at his waist. The machine beside him blinked red and green. There were flowers on a table, getwell cards set up in a row on the radiator. I could see one had been signed by a bunch of people, like it had been passed around a classroom. I looked back at him, the angry, confused kid in the long black coat, now pale and broken.

  He didn’t deserve this. He didn’t deserve any of it.

  “I’m gonna find out who did this, buddy,” I said. “I’m gonna make sure they—”

  And then I heard voices coming from the other end of the hall, the squawk of a police radio. A sheriff’s deputy, an older woman in brown and tan, turned the corner. She was chatting with a guy in scrubs, pushing a cart. I turned and headed for the exit. When I got to the door, I pushed. It was locked. I turned to the station, smiled at the woman standing there.

  “Could you buzz me out, please?” I said.

  She looked down at the counter, picked up a pen. “And who were you visiting?” she said.

  “Mr. Gaylord,” I said.

  “And your name is?”

  “Jack,” I said.

  She peered down at the sheet, but she buzzed the door as she spoke and it swung open and I walked through, heard it click shut.

  23

  We were in the parking lot of the Quik-Mart again, standing beside Davida Reynolds’s idling Suburban. She was waiting for Frank Derosby, who had been interviewing people about the Talbot house, tracking down those who lived on the back side of the land that abutted Lasha’s property. The usual questions: Did you see anything unusual? A car or truck parked by the side of the road? Someone walking in the woods? Someone driving away fast when everyone else was hurrying to the scene?

  “So a serial arsonist assaults someone to keep them from taking credit for the fires?” Davida Reynolds said.

  “That’s the theory,” I said. “Take them out of the running. Woodrow’s sister came up with it. She said she wondered if the real arsonist was mad that other suspects, like Woodrow, were stealing all the glory.”

  “Adds a whole other layer of craziness to the perpetrator.”

  “Can’t they be nuts in more than one way?” I said.

  “Sure,” Reynolds said. “But what about this: What about the firebug trying to kill Woodrow because Woodrow knows who he is.”

  “And now he’s praying to hell that Woodrow doesn’t wake up,” I said.

  She looked at me, flashed a weary smile.

  “You know, I liked it better when we had the case locked. It was just you lighting fires to fill the news pages.”

  “If only life were so simple,” I said.

  I pulled out as Derosby, in his own Suburban, this one dark gray, pulled in. I saluted as we passed and he glared back.

  I headed east, then turned off and followed the back roads to Sanctuary. It was a route that made me think of the watershed here, streams running through the hollows, flowing into bigger streams, and then the Sanctuary River. There was an inevitability to it, like the questions that drew me to the troubled town, and would until they were answered.

  I slowed as I called home, waited. Roxanne answered, Sophie’s clatter and chatter in the background.

  “Hey,” I said.

  “Hi, honey,” she said.

  “Hi, honey,” Sophie called, laughing.r />
  I asked what they were up to.

  “We’re going to look at the school,” Roxanne said. “Get the lay of the land before the big day of—”

  “Kindergarten,” Sophie shouted.

  “We’re going to check out the playground,” Roxanne said. “See if we can see the kindergarten classrooms. Eleven more days, right, honey?”

  “Nine, ten, eleven,” Sophie said.

  “Nothing from Beth?”

  “Not a word.”

  “Good,” I said.

  “How was she with you?” Roxanne said.

  I hesitated.

  “Fine,” I said. “She definitely had gotten herself together. Talking about her plans.”

  “Great. Maybe that was just a bump in the road.”

  “Right. And the next bump, she’ll be somewhere else.”

  A pause and I said, “How are you doing?”

  “I’m good.”

  “Better?”

  “Yes. Something about the light of day and Sophie.”

  “Yes,” I said. “There is.”

  I asked how long they’d be gone and she said a couple of hours. Unless they decided to go to Bangor to go school shopping. If they did that, they’d get supper there.

  “Girls’ night out,” I said.

  “We’ll see.”

  “Call me,” I said.

  “You’ll be—”

  “Talking to people. For the story.”

  I told her about Woodrow, the hospital, Willa and her theory.

  “And I caught the investigator. Now I’m headed into town. Check in with Lasha. Some other people.”

  “The artist who cut herself.”

  “Yeah.”

  “A lot of that going around,” Roxanne said.

  “Yes,” I said. “I guess there is.”

  There was a pause, Roxanne telling Sophie to go find her other sandal. Sophie running off, Roxanne saying, “Sorry.” Another pause and then Roxanne said, “This artist woman.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Tell her to keep her hands off my man.”

  I chuckled. Roxanne didn’t.

  I called but Lasha didn’t answer. I texted and she didn’t reply, so I drove through town, past the common, and up the ridge, rattling up the drive. Lasha’s Jeep was parked in the dooryard. I parked beside it, walked to the side door. There was music coming from the studio. Alison Krauss playing loud, over the buzz of a power tool.