"Tighten your seat belt. We're going for a little detour."
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
Aodhagan veered wildly to the right and crashed through the barrier fence to somebody's property. I couldn't imagine what he was thinking. All I could see for miles were barren mesas and ravines, jutting up and dipping down wildly.
"You're going to kill us!"
Aodhagan headed straight into the nearest cluster of hills. "No, he's going to kill us. We'll never outrun him. We'd have to go on racing for hundreds of miles. But here, here I think I can outrun him. It's a calculated risk, but I don't see a lot of options at this moment, so if you have any better ideas, speak now or forever hold your peace."
I didn't have any better ideas, but I wouldn't have been able to answer him even if I did, because my teeth were too busy slamming violently together as we flew over one of the hills and landed with a thud. I looked in the rearview mirror, and I could barely see the truck working its way up the sandy incline. "What makes you so sure?"
"Honey, I'm anything but sure. But if you want to know one of my real convictions, it's that people who don't go off-roading shouldn't own off-road vehicles. I've done this before."
The truck crested the hill behind us, and a bullet tore through the back window, shattering the glass and disappearing somewhere. Aodhagan headed for the most difficult terrain available to us, in a way that made it clear he really had done this before. He didn't strike me as the rugged type, but I was glad I was mistaken or right about now we could just ask Norma Jean herself who'd killed her.
Aodhagan was right. Garth was falling behind. That didn't stop him from shooting at us though. Another bullet pinged into the side of the Land Rover and left a gaping hole in the backseat driver's side door. "I think he's stuck in the sand." I turned to get a better look. "He is. I can see his wheels spinning. It probably won't take him too long to get out though."
Aodhagan abruptly changed direction, headed left instead of further into the mesa. He was probably hoping to reconnect with the highway a few miles down the road. We'd gone so far that I could see very little of Garth and his beached pick-up, but I could tell that he was still stuck. He was getting out of the cab.
There was no telling how long it would take him to get out of there, but it would be long enough that we would be long gone and safe. For now, anyway. A part of me very much wanted to go back and confront the driver just to see if we knew him. But my instinct for self-preservation was slightly stronger than my curiosity. But it was very slightly.
Suddenly, Aodhagan's curiously flat voice interrupted my thoughts. His single expletive could have thrown me off since he never really cussed, but mostly it was just the way he said it. He slammed on the brakes and turned the car sharply to the right with precision. It didn't really help though. I didn't see what he had seen until we were falling, almost as if in slow motion, down a twenty-foot ravine.
* * *
I don't know how much time had elapsed before I woke up, since I had no concept of time at the moment. Really, no sense of anything. Everything looked somehow wrong. It took me several long seconds before I realized I was hanging upside down. I wasn't exactly in pain, but I certainly didn't feel right either. Mostly I was dazed, and I was having a lot of trouble focusing my eyes. Suspended upside down by my taut seat belt, I knew I had to do something, but I had no idea what. My head was starting to hurt.
I looked toward the driver's seat and had a horrible stab of fear when I saw that it was empty. Had Aodhagan been thrown from the car? No, surely not. He always wore his seat belt. That meant he had gotten out. Yes, getting out seemed like a good idea. With a trembling hand, I released my belt and fell to the floor, or the ceiling I guess, with a dull thud. It took me another undefined period of time to get onto my hands and knees and crawl out my shattered window. Time had no actual meaning.
I took another freeze-frame period to just lie on my stomach in the dirt and stare. The blinding sun was excruciating. I had to close my eyes for a long time to dull the stabbing. I was fairly sure I was going to throw up. Or maybe I already had. I had no idea what to do next, but it didn't matter. I passed out again.
Everything felt different when I woke up. I couldn't seem to crack my eyes open, but I could feel that I was now on my back. Not dirt, material. Cool air, instead of hot. I lifted my hand with a struggle, to push something irritating away from my face and bashed myself in the head with something small and plastic. It took a long moment, but I finally made a connection. IV. Obviously, I was now in the hospital.
It took monumental concentration for me to open my eyes, and then I wished that I hadn't. Blinding pain tore through my head, stunning me into incapacity. If the headaches had seemed bad outside, they were pleasant compared to this. A low, cracked groan worked its way through my badly chapped lips.
"Hey, doc, we got a live one," I heard somebody call from far away. This time, I just sort of drifted away to sleep, despite all the poking and prodding that I was getting. It was better than passing out again, though.
It was blissfully dark in the room, the next time I opened my eyes. In the dim green glow from the hospital machines, I could tell that there were two people in the room with me, both women. One had wildly teased bangs and a set of scrubs decorated with teddy bears holding balloons. The other was a middle-aged woman about to bust out of her pale pink scrubs.
"Where am I?" My voice sounded hoarse and hollow, the voice of someone who hadn't spoken in decades.
"UNM," the pink lady told me.
"Where?"
"Albuquerque, New Mexico."
"Why?" My throat was painfully dry, and my tongue felt numb and too big for my mouth. I tried to move it around, hoping to encourage some saliva. How long had it been since I'd had a drink of water?
"It's the only level-one trauma unit in the area," Bears, Bangs, and Balloons filled in.
She might as well have not been speaking English, for all the sense that it made to me. "I don't understand what you're talking about."
"Of course you don't. You took a pretty hard knock on the head." B, B, and B told me. "I'm Kayli. I'm your nurse. I'm just going to get Dr. Fielding to talk to you about your injuries."
"Where's Aodhagan?"
The women looked at each other. In the darkened room, I couldn't make out their expressions very well, but their pause was nauseatingly significant.
"Room 234," Kayli clarified for the pink lady.
"Oh, him." She said him with a sickening amount of meaning. He was notable to them, and I could only think of one reason why.
"Him who? Where is he? What's the matter with him?" I struggled to sit up, to tear my arm away from B, B, and B.
"Look, I can tell you're upset. You're going to make yourself sick. Why don't I see if it's okay for the doctor to come and see you now? How does that sound?"
I had seen plenty of movies. I knew the doctor only came in to tell you when somebody was dead. If he were all right, they would have told me themselves. "No. No, this can't be happening."
My head spun from all my sudden movements, but I didn't lie back down. I practiced deep breathing to stop myself from throwing up all over nurse Kayli.
"Okay, you need to lie back down." Kayli was not gentle anymore.
"No!" I tore my arm away. "I want to see him, no matter where he is." Even if I had to see him in the morgue, to my twisted brain that seemed to be better than never seeing him again at all.
"Go get Dr. Fielding," Kayli told the pink lady. "I'll see about the other doctor."
"What other doctor?" I demanded. Then it occurred to me what the other doctor might be for. "Don't even think about sedating me," I shouted, trying to get out of bed.
"Okay, calm down. There's no need to get upset, Ms. Harding. We'll talk about your friend in a minute. Lay back down." I did but only because she promised that we would talk about Aodhagan.
Hopefully, he hadn't been in pain. No, I couldn't even bear to think about it. It was too awful. I sh
ut my eyes against stabbing head pain and blinding misery. Kayli must have taken my overwhelming horror and guilt as acquiescence, because she patted my arm. "There you go. You just lay there for a minute, and everything will be fine."
She was wrong. Nothing would ever be fine again. I had killed someone, just as sure as if I had picked up a gun and shot him. I waited until I heard the door shut, and then I eased myself up. I had to get out of there. I didn't know where I was going, but anything was better than this room. I pulled the IV out of my arm, an action that I expected to hurt, but which I hardly felt. Panic and misery were fueling me now. I just needed to go.
I swung my legs off the bed and sat for a few moments, regaining my equilibrium. Standing on shaky, weak legs wasn't easy, and my balance was way off, but I was able to take a step or two before I had to rest. I didn't know where my clothes were, and I didn't think I'd be able to get out of the hospital unnoticed in my white gown. I couldn't put thoughts together well enough to reason where my clothes might have gone. It didn't matter anyway because I wasn't going to get away. I heard the click of the doorknob, and the door slowly eased open, letting in a little arc of unbearably bright light. One of the doctors was here to make me go back to bed.
It took me a moment to focus, but my stomach dropped when I saw who it was. "Aodhagan?" My shaky voice was barely a whisper.
He shut the door behind him and put a finger to his lips. "I'm not supposed to be here or out of bed. And you shouldn't be either. Where are you going?"
He sounded better than I did, sounding endearingly annoyed that I was breaking the rules, but he looked awful.
"I thought you were dead." I could barely make the last word come out. Tears pooled in my eyes and stayed suspended there, defying gravity and saving me from embarrassment.
He tottered toward me on one good leg and one casted leg. He also only had one cast-free arm. The opposite of the leg. He had a mother of a black eye, and above that a four-inch line of stitches snaked its way through his eyebrow and up his forehead like some kind of macabre caterpillar.
We met in the middle of the room and simultaneously embraced. One of us said, "Thank God you're okay." At the same time as the other said, "I was so scared for you, honey." I was pretty sure that the first one was me, because I wasn't likely to use the word honey, but I was still pretty out of it though, so who knew. I couldn't even be sure what was coming out of my mouth, even after I'd said it.
I buried my face in his neck, and when I shut my eyes the tears spilled over, but I didn't care. I was ill from the depth of my emotions, and I didn't like it, but I had no means to control myself.
"Oh no. This time they're both out of bed." I realized that the door was open, and the dour pink lady was staring daggers at us. "What do you think you're doing?"
I might have answered her, but my body suddenly decided that I'd had enough. I felt my legs just sort of start to crumble before the world faded to familiar black.
I was really starting to get used to this passing out in one place and waking up somewhere else. When I opened my eyes I was back in bed, another IV was in my arm, and a man in a white lab coat stood at the foot of my bed. Light filtered in from between the slats of my blinds, but it didn't hurt as much as it previously had. It was more like a low, persistent throbbing, as opposed to a painfully aggressive stabbing.
"Good morning, Miss Harding. How are you today?"
He was actually waiting for an answer. "Okay, I guess." My mouth felt like it had a rag shoved in it. "Could I have a drink?"
The man indicated to Kayli, whom I hadn't noticed before. She poured me a glass of water from a cream-colored plastic pitcher and handed it to me with a look that was half-sympathetic, half-disapproving.
"I'm Dr. Fielding, your supervising physician here at UNM, and I just wanted to go over what happened to you and what you might expect to feel for the next few weeks."
He tapped a pen against his clipboard. "You have a cerebral contusion. That's basically a bruise on your brain. Do you remember hitting your head?"
I didn't. But even without his comments, I would have known that I had. There was no other explanation for my symptoms. "I don't remember anything, except the car going off the side."
"Well." His mouth compressed into a tight line of disapproval that almost rivaled Aodhagan's. "You got incredibly lucky. It's like a concussion, only worse. You could have sustained brain damage or even died. As it is, you're doing very well. We're not even seeing significant swelling."
His censorious tone wasn't appreciated, as if it had been my choice to take a flying leap off the edge of a cliff. I felt like some idiot Nancy Drew character who was always getting hit over the head. This was now effectively my third head wound in a week.
"When will I be able to go?" I still had Penny's murder to solve, even if I intended to leave Aodhagan out of it from now on. Even thinking I'd led to his death was too much to handle.
"Maybe tomorrow but probably Wednesday."
"Today's Monday?" I was stunned. The passage of time had occurred much quicker than I'd been aware of. I felt like one of those UFO abductees who swore they had lost hours they couldn't account for. I had lost days.
"Yes, the helicopter brought you guys in on Saturday afternoon. It took them a little while to find you. Your boyfriend's directions weren't very good. By the way, when you feel better, the police will want to speak to you."
"The police." It wasn't really a question. It was more like resignation, but he answered it anyway.
"Yes. Apparently, they're curious to know why there were bullet holes in a car that was run off the road just last week in Lubbock, Texas." He gave me another disapproving look, like I was some kind of kingpin drug runner, to whom this sort of thing was always happening. He said good-bye and left me to Kayli, who got busy taking my vitals and doing all the other things nurses did.
She looked like she wanted to ask me herself about the accident and the bullet holes, but instead she said, "I'm glad you're feeling better. That'll get your boyfriend off my case. You're a braver girl than me. That guy's a real hard-ass."
"Excuse me?"
"Sorry," she apologized sheepishly, paying very close attention to my blood pressure cuff.
"I'm sorry, are we talking about the same person here? Tall, black hair, really, really pale."
She smiled at me. "That's the one. He's been all over the hospital since they released him, ordering the whole staff around. When you passed out on him, I thought he was going to tear my head off. And Dr. Fielding… Jeez, I don't think I've ever seen anyone talk to him that way. I mean, he's the head of the department.
"He was mad enough to spit when your boyfriend started telling him what to do in regards to your care. He was hopping all over the place, yelling at him to mind his own business, because he was your supervising physician, not him. It was like watching WWE. For a second there, I thought they were going to come to blows."
"Oh." It didn't sound like Aodhagan at all, but maybe I was still disoriented, and she was talking about something else entirely. Delusional was my modus operandi since the accident. I focused on the single part I understood. "He's not my boyfriend."
She grinned at me. "Uh-huh. That's what he said too. He said he's your cousin. But where I come from, the term kissing cousins means something a little different."
I was totally befuddled. "When were we kissing?"
She smiled again, probably at my confusion. "It's just a figure of speech. I just meant, you know, the way he looked at you while you were sleeping and how concerned he was for you. It wasn't very friendly, if you know what I mean."
I decided not to think about him looking at me while I was sleeping, regardless of the look he wore. "I guess he is sort of my cousin, in a weird kind of way."
She handed me another cup of water and a handful of pills. "Actually that's almost exactly how he said it. 'She's sort of my cousin, I guess, in a weird kind of way.' I thought he just wanted to see you though. Fielding had barred hi
m from the room under the pretext that he wasn't family. He said he was the closest thing that you had to family around here. Then he told us the cousin thing."
I shut my eyes. "He's right. He is the closest thing." Closer really, at least he was willing to fight on my behalf. "I'm sleepy."
"Sure, just let me get this curtain." She pulled the heavy curtains over the windows and turned out the light. "I hope that everything works out for you and your…cousin." She shut the door behind her.
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
While I slept, I started a whole new round of dreams, or maybe they were hallucinations. This time I was a child again. Penny and I were sitting on the porch of the Port Victoria house, watching the tide come in. She looked over at me and said, "Helen, I want to teach you a nursery rhyme. Do you want to learn one?"
"Yes." I folded my legs under me and looked at my fingernails. She'd painted them red that morning. When my parents came back from their club, they would make me take it off, but right then, I was feeling pretty sharp for a seven-year-old.
"Good. I want you to pay very close attention to me, Helen, because I want you to remember this rhyme for the rest of your life. Can you do that?"
"Yes, Aunt Penny." I wriggled my toes, trying not to lose circulation. I hated it when my limbs fell asleep. It felt strange and creepy.
"Of course you can, honey. You're a smart girl, right?"
"I guess so." I wanted her to get to the rhyme. I liked to memorize things.
"Good. Now here it is." While she told it to me, the sky got darker, until it began to rain desperately. We sat there like we didn't notice, until we both got washed away in the tide.
The next thing I knew, I was playing jump rope with some other girls outside of Upper Elton School for Young Ladies. Instead of the normal jumping songs, we sang the one my aunt had taught me. "17,17 I had a friend named Norma Jean. 13,13 she got killed on Halloween. 39,39 it was by a friend of mine." Over and over until I was about to bust a lung from jumping. I turned to beg the other girls to stop, but when I did, they were all faceless and wearing identical pink party dresses.
Digging Up Bones (Birdwell, Texas Mysteries Book 1) Page 21