by Erin Healy
He would. Chuck was scowling at the mess. This was exactly the kind of stunt Ward loved to pull. Lexi sighed again and got off the floor, then walked over to the empty booth. The menu was still lying on the table. If Ward had any decency, which he didn’t, he would have left her a few bucks before taking off. It was irrational of her to hope for it, and yet she did. She dropped the sopping wet bar towels in a bin under the drink station, then took three steps to number eleven and picked up the menu.
Instead of cash, there was a photo. Lexi knew the photo well. It was of her and her daughter, a snapshot taken at a Mother’s Day tea Molly’s class had hosted back when she was in first grade. Another mom offered to take their picture, then sent them a copy. Lexi kept it in the Volvo, tucked into the plastic panel that covered the speedometer.
Her hand shook as she lifted it off the table. Ward had drawn on the print, bold black concentric circles forming a target. The bull’s-eye obscured Molly’s sweet face. A message was printed on the outside ring, one line of handwritten block letters.
“Come and get her.”
Lexi felt her fingers go cold. The message made no sense, but the writing . . .
The writing was hers.
Turning, she scanned the dining room a second time, wanting Ward to explain this to her. No sign of him. She shoved the photo into her apron pocket.
One of the cooks leaned out into the dining room from the kitchen. He was waving a cordless phone receiver over his head.
“Lexi, call for you.”
As one, Mom, Grant, Simone, and Chuck turned her way. The cook interpreted Lexi’s surprised expression correctly. She never took calls at work unless . . .
“It’s an emergency.”
{ chapter 10 }
When Lexi took the receiver, Molly’s agitated voice came over the line. “Mom, I’m going to the hospital!” she announced.
“Are you okay?”
“I’m fine, Mom, but Gina’s super sick.”
“She’s driving you?”
“No. Mort’s driving me. He let me use his phone.”
Lexi tried to stay calm. “You’re going to have to start at the beginning, hon. What happened?”
“Mort saw the ambulance come, and he helped.”
“An ambulance, huh?”
“Gina threw up, and she was shaking, and she he wouldn’t talk to me. I don’t know if she could hear me. She was in the bathroom, but she left the door open.”
“So Gina’s with the paramedics?”
“I called 9-1-1.”
“You did good, Molly. That was really quick thinking. I’m proud of you. Are you scared?”
“Nah,” Molly lied. She hadn’t hit the age where she was good at hiding things from her mother, and Lexi was glad for it.
“Don’t worry about a thing, okay? They’ll take care of Gina. They know what they’re doing. Which hospital are you going too?” She was already in the pantry-coat-closet passageway, shrugging into her jacket. Molly turned her mouth away from her phone and asked Mort.
“St. Luke’s,” she said when she came back on.
Lexi stayed only long enough to call Debbie and beg her to take over the shift, then she was out the door and driving down the mountain in her lopsided car toward St. Luke’s, which was a good thirty minutes away in Riverbend.
With some guilt, because her relief came at Gina’s expense, Lexi felt like she’d escaped a worse situation.
Somehow, she reached the hospital before Molly and Mort did. She found Gina but wasn’t allowed to see her. They were stabilizing her, the staff told Lexi, and running some tests. That was all the information she got. No one would say whether Gina would be okay or what was wrong, and Lexi accused a nurse of being an undercover secret service agent preventing her access to the doctors.
Separated from Gina by a brigade of scrubs and several secure hospital doors, she paced the floors looking for Molly and Mort, wishing she had his cell phone number. She couldn’t imagine what was taking them so long. They should have arrived ahead of her, if not at roughly the same time.
The clerk who sat at the front of the ER admitting patients watched Lexi out of the corner of her eye. Lexi made a triangular trek around the floor, meandering from the main desk, to the door that separated her from Gina, to the emergency room entrance, expecting to see her daughter and friend. A fluorescent light fizzled out, turning the seafoam green carpet a darker shade of gray. An elderly man, the only other person in the waiting room, who had not moved since she arrived, held a cup of coffee that he did not drink and watched an infomercial.
Twenty minutes passed, and Lexi’s anxiety rose. If Mort didn’t show up in the next five minutes, she decided, she’d get in her car and drive the route from the hospital to her home.
Her mind went to Angelo’s great big pink truck. There was no doubt in her mind, though she knew nothing about him, that he would have been happy to drive around looking for Mort and Molly. Lexi figured it was wishful thinking and left it at that.
On one of her return trips to the front doors, a siren drew her outside.
Two sirens, belonging to two ambulances whose flashing lights slapped her face and reflected off the ER windows. She watched them drive into the bay twenty feet to her right and park next to each other.
Their arrival was followed by a practiced scurrying of medics, quick but not frantic, self-assured, assessing information at a rate that outpaced Lexi’s tired mind. Two gurneys came out of the first ambulance. An EMT started rambling to a nurse as the gurneys were pushed toward the swinging doors. Lexi thought it was a nurse—nurse, doctor, PA, resident; she couldn’t tell the difference, no more than she could understand all the lingo.
The other vehicle’s rear doors parted, and a sheriff ’s deputy emerged first.
A sheriff’s deputy?
He was almost as large as Angelo, and he helped pull the gurney out of the back of the first vehicle with one hand.
Lexi was pondering the incongruity of an officer in the back of an ambulance when a small voice lit a fire under her feet.
“Is my mom here?”
Molly’s voice. Molly’s voice, coming from the gurney that was being wheeled into the hospital. Dear Jesus, my daughter’s on a gurney.
Dear Jesus, we’re uninsured.
Lexi was horrified for thinking it, but there it was—the truth of her fears rearing up before anything else. Just as quickly, the ever-present reality of never having enough money for what was necessary vanished, and she was running, chasing that bed on wheels into the emergency room.
“Molly!”
“Mom!” The girl tried to sit up and managed to get propped on an elbow. She had a bandage on her cheek but she looked to be in one piece. She wasn’t even bloody. Thank you, Jesus.
Lexi grabbed her outstretched hand and Molly smiled, then started sobbing. The person pushing the bed had the kindness to stop so Lexi could embrace her. She glanced at the tech, a soft-cheeked woman who probably could shush wailing infants with that tender gaze. That she had been the one with Molly was a balm to Lexi’s sick heart.
“This brave soul busted her ankle up,” the woman said, “but she’s otherwise fine. It could have been so much worse.”
“What happened?”
Lexi didn’t get the story right away, but piecemeal from Molly, and eventually from Mort, who almost didn’t make it. It was an unbelievable story made simple by Molly’s childlike point of view, in which life happens without question.
Lexi found it to be a story that was hard not to question, though witnesses confirmed it.
After Molly called her mom, she handed the phone back to Mort as they passed through a major intersection six blocks from the hospital. A call came in before she’d even handed it off, and Mort flipped the phone open. He did not see, though Molly said she did, the government-licensed Suburban that ran the red light and came right at them.
Molly even claimed to have seen the driver, and she remarked on this to Lexi because she said his
long narrow face and sunken cheeks reminded her of Cruella De Vil driving her motor car at reckless speeds.
The Suburban T-boned Mort’s SUV precisely at the driver’s seat. Mort suffered all manner of injuries that the doctors said would take him many months to recover from, including a ruptured spleen and six broken ribs, one of which punctured his lung.
Molly was thrown from the car, squirted like a grape from its skin out the passenger-side window. She swore she was wearing her seatbelt, and the investigator who examined Mort’s car confirmed that her belt buckle was firmly latched. The strap, however, was snapped apart in two places, across the shoulder and across the lap, frayed as though it had been chewed in two by a mouse.
He’d never seen anything like it in his twenty-year career, the detective said.
As if the same force that broke her seatbelt also broke glass, Molly’s window was snapped off at the door frame, broken clean, though it was rolled up, snug against the chilly evening in its tidy little window seal. Apart from this being a physical impossibility, the detective said, the safety glass should have shattered when Molly hit it. She should have been severely injured. And yet investigators found the pane lying in the street, whole, twenty-five yards away from the point of impact.
Strange, all of it, but inconsequential compared to what happened after Molly flew out of the car.
A truck driving parallel to Mort’s SUV was approaching on the inside lane and was entering the intersection when the Suburban hit. There was the impact, then Molly flying out the window, then her hitting the windshield of the truck as its momentum carried it through, swooping her away from disaster. The truck that caught her accelerated and shot out of the way, while the Suburban plowed Mort’s car across all three lanes and into oncoming traffic, where an eighteen-wheeler shaved off the passenger side like a potato peel. The passenger side. The side where Molly had been sitting, where she had been securely belted in.
When Lexi heard this story she vomited into a trash can. There were so many ways Molly should have died within that five-second span. The weight of them all landed like a virus in her stomach.
Lexi hated hospitals. She hated the death-defying smell and the colorless rooms and the squeaky floors. And she especially hated hospitals at night. They were eerie as the dead, with those unnatural lights and cryptlike halls and staff moving around like zombies.
The only thing she hated more than hospitals at night was being at the hospital at night with a loved one. Two loved ones.
By twelve thirty Friday—make that Saturday morning—she’d been sitting in the molded plastic chair of the emergency room bay for hours, disbelieving the impossible chain of events that had put her there.
Lexi waited for Molly to be splinted and discharged, and then they waited together for news of Gina and Mort. Holding hands, they sat in the desolate waiting room with the same lonely, head-bowed man, Molly finally collapsing into sleep, breathing noisily through her open mouth, her foot propped up in the wheelchair.
Gina’s mother rushed in at twelve forty with uncombed hair and a wildeyed expression. She hugged Lexi and promised to bring whatever news she could get. At five minutes to one she returned to the waiting room and said Gina was slipping in and out of consciousness.
“Could it be the flu?” Lexi asked. “She wasn’t feeling well when I left her today.”
Mrs. Harper was holding her purse to her chest as if it were a comforting pillow. “If it’s the flu, it’s the worst case I’ve ever seen.”
“What are the doctors saying?”
“They don’t know. They just don’t know.”
Lexi took Mrs. Harper’s hand. “I’ll stay with you tonight.”
“No, no.” She shook her head and squeezed Lexi’s fingers, then looked at Molly. “You get that little girl home. She needs rest. And she needs you like Gina needs me.”
Lexi nodded, relieved but also worried. Mrs. Harper went back to Gina.
Molly stirred as Lexi prepared to leave, and a detective entered the waiting room. His name tag said Reyes. He was taking a report of the accident asked if he could speak to her. During the conversation, the detective speculated that Molly broke her ankle because it snagged Mort’s window frame as the truck caught her and barreled through.
A Chevy truck.
A magenta Chevy truck.
Angelo’s truck.
Lexi gripped the arm of Molly’s wheelchair.
“I know that truck,” she said. Detective Reyes and Molly seemed surprised. “It’s Angelo’s.”
Reyes checked his notes and allowed himself a half grin. “Michael.”
“Right. I just met him today—yesterday. Where is he?”
“We released him at the scene. He isn’t implicated in anything except a little heroism.” He winked at Molly.
“You can take me to work with you tomorrow to meet him, Mom,” she said.
“Or you can meet him yourself right now,” Lexi said, rising, because with the same kind of timing he had demonstrated in saving Molly’s life, Angelo approached the emergency room doors and caught her eye while he was still outside.
He waved, then ducked slightly to come through the entrance without hitting his head. Molly gave Lexi a wide-eyed “wow” look.
Angelo nodded at Reyes and extended his hand for a shake.
Lexi crossed her arms over her aching stomach and cleared her throat, then took a step toward him. “I think I should say thanks,” she said, itching to know how he’d come to be where Molly was right when he was most needed. “Except that it seems inadequate.”
“You don’t have to say anything. How are ya, Molly?”
She grinned, uncharacteristically shy. Her right cheek was bruised. Lexi looked back at Angelo. “I have a million questions . . .”
She stopped midsentence, because she didn’t realize until that moment that two people had come into the hospital behind Angelo and now stood a short ways off.
Grant and Alice. Again.
Her mother made a beeline for Molly, who lifted her arms for a hug. Grant stayed put.
“What are they doing here?”
“You’ll need their help,” Angelo said.
“You don’t know anything about what I need,” she said without thinking, then closed her eyes, overcome with embarrassment. “I’m so sorry. I didn’t mean to snap at you.”
“I understand.”
“How can you possibly understand? I just met you. You don’t even know these people.”
“Your mother, your husband,” he said, possessing all the kindness and patience exhaustion had stolen from her.
“My ex-husband.”
“You’re still married.”
“Good grief! How do you know that?”
Angelo placed his forefingers at his temples and closed his eyes. “I can read minds,” Angelo said. He opened his eyes. “Of course, it’s much easier to do that when people tell me what I want to know.”
Lexi didn’t know whether to feel grateful or ticked. This man was sticking his nose into her business. Considering he was the hero of the day, though, and the fact that her gratitude was at an all-time high, she didn’t dare accuse him. She wasn’t sure she had the right.
“Grant told you,” she said.
Angelo nodded.
She intentionally avoided looking at the people she’d only recently escaped. Molly was holding Alice’s hand but looking at Grant, who was the obvious question in her mind. Lexi had never shown Molly a picture of him, having burned them all after he left. She had tried to compensate by preserving a decent image of him in her mind.
“Having them here, now, doesn’t help me at all,” Lexi told Angelo.
“You might be surprised.”
Another detective came in through the secure doors to join Reyes.
“I’ve had enough surprises for one day.”
Angelo glanced at the ER windows, reflective like black mirrors against the night, as he said, “Then brace yourself.”
There was no
time to ask what he meant. The man who joined Reyes was named Matthas, according to his name tag.
“He’s still unconscious,” Matthas told Reyes. “It could be a while before we get his take on things.”
“Mort’s unconscious?” Lexi said. He was sedated but aware when she’d seen him an hour earlier.
“Not him,” Reyes said. “The guy in the Suburban.”
“The driver?” What a terrible night this was turning out to be. Lexi sank back into her chair.
“Passenger. Driver’s fine—a walking testimonial to seatbelts and airbags, which says a lot for a penitentiary transport.”
“A what?”
“Guy’s a felon,” said Matthas. “They were transferring him to the prison downtown. He was cuffed but not belted. Bounced around inside the cab and split his head open.”
Lexi cringed.
“Don’t waste your sympathy on this one. Like I said, he’s a con.”
“Even so.”
“A killer,” Reyes said. “You might have heard of him a few years back.”
“I don’t follow the news too closely,” Lexi muttered, ready for everyone except maybe Angelo to leave her alone with her daughter. “No time.”
“Murdered a young woman at a shopping mall,” Matthas said. Angelo caught Lexi’s eye, and his gaze alone held her upright. That was when she understood he’d seen this coming. “Name’s Norman Von Ruden.”
{ chapter 11 }
Warden Pavo stood on the outside of the ER looking in, seething, his hot breath fogging the glass.
Blast that Craven! A car wreck, of all things. If bodily harm was his aim, he should have sent Mort Weatherby skiing off a mountainside, or brought the dead cat’s grieving owner after him with a shotgun. That flimsy twig had no idea what he was messing with, no idea what he had set in motion.
Warden snatched his knit cap off his head and wrapped his left fist in it, condemning Craven with every vile curse he knew. He would not allow the creature’s insignificant business with Mort to interfere with his own plans again.
Grant turned away from the hospital scene where he was not welcomed and stared at his reflection in the black glass of the hospital waiting room, pretending to look outside. For many years Grant had wondered what Lexi told Molly about him. Life in a cage had given him more time to think than he wanted. He’d spent weeks beating his head on the cinderblock trying to create enough noise to drown out the truth: he was a waste of a man. No matter what terrible things Lexi might have to say about him, they couldn’t be worse than that fact. There could be no kind way of stating the kind of man he was, the kind of husband who’d failed his wife, the kind of father who’d disappointed his only child.