A crossroads up ahead sported a convenience store—not one like you find in the suburbs, but one offering bait and country ham and hunting and fishing licenses along with the only fuel for miles. I pulled in with a grateful sigh.
Ethan still hadn’t stirred by the time I finished getting the gas and taking care of my business, so I bought a roll of paper towels, soaked a couple in cold water and took them out to the car. I didn’t want to scare Ida by pulling up at the house with him unconscious in the passenger seat.
I lowered the driver’s seat and worked awkwardly from beside him to take stock. The skin covering the bone under his left eye was red and swollen, but the eye itself wasn’t puffy. He’d be spared an ugly shiner. His lip, though, would be sore and thick. No more sweet kisses for a few days.
I touched the wet paper towels to his forehead and his throat and spoke to him.
“Hey, baby. Time to wake up. Come on. Naptime’s over.” He groaned and turned his head slowly, but he still didn’t open his eyes. I tried the towels against his temple, where there was another ugly bruise. “Come on, Ethan. Open those baby blues. Can you hear me, Ethan? Wake up, hon.”
He moved—an arm, a leg, his chest as he dragged in a big, uneven breath—and at last he opened his eyes and looked at me. “Asia?”
“Yeah, baby.”
He started to sit up, then winced and fell back. “Shit.”
His voice was so weak it scared me. “Take it easy, babe. Just lay there a minute.” Maybe this wasn’t such a good idea. Maybe he needed to go to a hospital. I lifted his head and put a couple of the cool towels on the back of his neck. I put another one on his forehead and kept it there.
He opened his eyes again. They were a little clearer this time.
“Thirsty. Got anything to drink?”
I reached for a bottle of water, popped the cap, and held it to his lips. He grimaced again as he tried to function around the injury to his mouth, but he was thirsty enough that he kept at it. In a couple of minutes he was able to sit up, though it was obvious to me he was still pretty woozy.
“Where are we?” He peered through the window.
“About five miles from Clay Fork, close as I can figure.”
He smiled, a wispy shadow of his usual transforming grin. “Should I even ask what happened after I passed out?”
“Is your head still hurting?”
“Like a sonofabitch.”
“Then I’ll save the story for later when you can enjoy it.” I looked him over. He was pale and shaky, and I figured Ida was still in for a shock, but we needed to be on the road. After all, if he was awake, so were the Beastie boys back in Bristol.
“Do you want something to eat? A Coke or something?”
He blanched. “Maybe a Coke in a minute. Help me out of here.”
I climbed out of the car, circled around to his side and held out a hand for him. He unfolded in slow motion and stood up, leaning heavily on the car door and my arm.
I wasn’t sure he was going to stay vertical. “Christ, what was in that stuff?”
“More than I accounted for, apparently.” He took a few stiff steps. “I’ll tell you one thing, though. I’ll never sedate a patient using that shit again without a damn good reason.” He stretched his back and rubbed at his neck, then glanced toward the store. “Give me a minute.”
“You sure you don’t need help?”
He shook his head and mustered the effort to lift himself the four inches from the pavement to the sidewalk in front of the building. I watched as he shuffled inside and waited anxiously for him to reappear.
A few minutes later Ethan came back, blinking like an owl as he emerged into the daylight. He made his torturous way to the car, opened the front passenger door, and dropped into the seat with a sigh. He reached into the glove compartment and pulled out a pair of sunglasses, though the sun had yet to break through the blowing clouds. The glasses completed his new sexy gangster look. Poor Ida.
“Let’s go,” he ordered.
Who was I to argue with Scarface?
The old Beemer toiled around the mountain curves that took us to Clay Fork, and with every swing and sway of the vehicle I imagined the pull of gravity on Ethan’s battered body. He tried to hide it, but I caught him with a hand on his ribs a few times. I slowed down as much as I could without making it obvious I was doing it for him.
His sunglasses tilted in my direction. “Did you find any identification on those guys at the motel?”
“No, nothing. No badges, no driver’s licenses. No room keys, either. Or cell phones. Guess they were real pros at whatever it is they do.”
Ethan’s brows came together. Apparently his thinking process was still slower than usual. “Pros, but probably not government officers. If they were FBI or Homeland Security or someone like that they would have flashed badges first. They wouldn’t have found it necessary to drug us and kidnap us.”
“If you ask me, they would have saved themselves a lot of trouble by pretending to be FBI. It’s not like we would have fought them if they had flashed a badge at us, even if the badge was fake.”
“Okay. So professionals of a certain, let’s say, criminal type. That is, not very smart.” Ethan’s smile tipped up the corners of his mouth. “They expected us to run. Why?”
“Why any of this, Ethan? None of this makes sense.” I took a breath, my heart in my throat. I didn’t want to tell him what I knew I had to say. I felt guilty, like I should have known this was coming. “There was a guy, back in Nashville. For a few days a couple of weeks ago I felt like I was being . . . I don’t know . . . stalked. I think this may be connected.”
Ethan’s head snapped around, and I could see it hurt him to move so suddenly. “What?”
“Yeah, uh, I’m not sure if the goons that attacked us were connected or anything, but there was this guy in a white Impala—”
“Shit! How long had you known about him, Asia?”
He was furious, his hands catching the dash in a white-knuckled death grip. Where the hell had that come from?
“I don’t know. A few weeks.”
“And you didn’t think to tell me about it?”
I found myself getting heated in response to an anger that seemed to make no sense. “So you could reconsider whether I might be crazy after all? No, I didn’t think to tell you.” I held up a hand. “And before you even ask—yes, I called the cops, but they told me it was nothing. I saw the guy a few times. It was creepy. I was extra careful. Nothing happened. End of story.” Until now.
He let his head fall back against the headrest, closed his eyes and let out a breath that was almost a groan. “I saw the man in the white Impala outside your apartment yesterday. I thought it might be your ex-husband.”
I gaped at him. Now who was keeping secrets?
“I haven’t seen Ronnie for years. It’s not him.”
“Anyway, it doesn’t matter.” His jaw clenched. “You could have been hurt.”
I swallowed, unwilling to think about what might have happened. “But it doesn’t make sense. If they wanted me, why did they wait?”
He turned his head and met my gaze, but had no answer for me.
We pulled into Clay Fork for the second time in two days and took the left turn that led up the mountain toward Ida Mickens’s place. Ethan fell silent as we climbed that last mountainside, whether lost in thought, or struggling to pay the toll in pain each hairpin turn exacted from his badly bruised ribcage, I couldn’t tell.
The last part of the drive was bumpy and slow as I maneuvered around the potholes in the long dirt drive up to the house. I risked a glance over at Ethan; he was the color of an oyster and holding grimly to the door safety handle. I rounded the last bend, fully expecting to breathe a sigh of relief, and found instead that I suddenly couldn’t breathe at all, that my heart was stopped in my chest, the blood motionless in my veins.
Something was wrong at Ida’s little farmhouse.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
Se
veral cars were pulled up in Ida’s yard, including a long, black Cadillac with a discreet sign on its side advertising its sole purpose. People were standing on the porch; some of them were crying, or looked like they wanted to. They turned to look at us, the strangers coming up the drive, the ones who hadn’t heard the news yet.
“Ah, Jesus,” Ethan whispered. It was the most broken-hearted sound I’d ever heard.
I found a place to park that wouldn’t block anyone. Then we took a moment to collect ourselves before we got out of the car. Ethan took off his glasses, and the pain in his eyes when he looked back at me now was much more than physical. It was all I could do to keep from bursting into tears at the sight of him. I squeezed his hand instead, took a deep breath, and opened the door.
We made our way up onto the porch and nodded to a few of the folks in the outer ranks as we shuffled toward the doorway. Ethan seemed to know someone to ask for, and we were ushered into the tiny living room. In a few seconds, a short, round woman in a pink sweatshirt and gray knit pants came bustling out of the bedroom to greet us. Her eyes were red with tears—she held a wad of tissue in her hand against any fresh onslaughts of grief—but the lines in her face showed she was usually of the inclination to smile.
She stuffed the tissue in a pocket and held out a hand to Ethan. “I’m Helen Lazeby, Ida’s niece. You’re Dr. Roberts, aren’t you? Aunt Ida said you were coming up this weekend.”
Ethan took her hand. “That’s right. Ethan. And this is Asia Burdette. We were just here yesterday to see Mrs. Mickens. What happened?”
“Nice to meet you, Asia. Lord, I hate to be the one to tell y’all this.” She stopped, the tears threatening once more. “Mrs. Connors over there”—she nodded across the room at a frail woman being comforted by several others—“came by to check on Aunt Ida since she wasn’t at church this morning. She found her in bed. She’d died in her sleep, I reckon.” This last was delivered in a soft sort of wail, a tale no easier to get through for the number of times it had been told already that afternoon.
I knew what was expected of me, though I’d just met the woman. I put an arm around her round shoulders in sympathy.
“I’m so sorry, Helen. She seemed just fine yesterday.”
Ethan put a hand under her other elbow. “This must be so hard for you.” He led her to the nearest chair. “Come on and sit down for a minute. Asia would you get Helen a glass of water?”
“Sure.” I went off to the kitchen, glad to be of help. By the time I got back, Ethan was kneeling at Helen’s side, and she was confiding in him like he’d grown up in Clay Fork with everyone else in the room. In fact, no one there seemed to notice the fresh bruises on his face or the turn of phrase that marked him as a city boy. They all just seemed to be standing a little bit closer to him, like he was a fire on a cold night.
“It’s just that it was so sudden,” Helen was saying. “She hadn’t been sick or anything. It had been years since she’d been so bad off with them headaches that she came to see you for, Doctor.” Helen smiled at Ethan. “Oh, she set great store in you. Said you just about saved her life.”
Ethan’s gaze dropped to the floor, and I thought he might lose the control he’d so flawlessly maintained. I put a hand on his shoulder, and after a time I felt him breathe again. The softest tremor shook his voice when he spoke. “She was more than a patient. She was a very good friend.”
“She was a special lady.” Helen started sniffling again. “Anyway, the doctor said there weren’t nothing for it. It was just natural causes.”
Ethan nodded, but the lines between his eyes told me he didn’t quite believe it. I admit the timing seemed much more than coincidental, but where was the evidence that anyone had been here to do Ida harm? And why would they kill her? The thugs who’d broken into our hotel room had meant to kidnap us, not murder us. Had this one gone wrong? Or were our imaginations just working overtime trying to fit an old woman’s natural death into our private paranoid delusion?
The questions wouldn’t leave me alone as we sat in that living room and minutes turned into an hour, then two. The hearse left for the funeral home with Ida’s body. People pressed food and coffee into our hands; neighbors came and went, offering condolences; relatives introduced themselves. Helen asked for Ethan’s help in making the choices one has to make at those times, and he was steady, thoughtful, kind. I looked around and wondered whose shoulder poor Helen would have leaned on if he hadn’t been there.
At the end of that long afternoon Helen asked us to follow her into the kitchen.
“I think Aunt Ida musta had something she wanted to give y’all.” She reached under the table and hauled out a big basket filled with heavy glass jars of canned fruit and jam. Colorful dish towels had been stuffed between and under the jars to keep them from breaking. It was beautiful—and almost more than Helen could manage. Ethan took it from her to keep her from straining her back.
“Oh, my God, that’s gorgeous. We can’t take all that!” What I didn’t say was that Ida Mickens couldn’t possibly have known we were coming back that afternoon. She must have forgotten it the day before.
“Please, she wanted you to have it,” Helen insisted. “There’s a note for you on the top there.”
Ethan put the basket down and picked out the envelope. He put it in his pocket.
“I guess y’all won’t be staying for the funeral.”
“We have to go back to Nashville today. I have patients to see tomorrow. I’ll try to get back. When do you think? Tuesday?”
“Probably. I’ll call. You know, it’s funny how things work out, isn’t it?” Helen’s lip quivered. “Aunt Ida said last week you were just coming for the day and were going straight back home.”
I had to admit the way my world had changed in the last twenty-four hours would not have been predictable using anybody’s crystal ball. Meanwhile, Ethan was apparently still fishing around in a blank mind for an adequate explanation, so I spoke up.
“I have relatives over near Princeton, so we decided to spend some extra time.”
“Oh, well, I’m so glad you did. If you hadn’t, I wouldn’t have had your help today, Dr.—Ethan, and I really needed it. Thank you so much.”
Ethan’s eyes went dark. “It was the least I could do. Your aunt meant the world to me. I’m going to miss her.”
Helen reached up and wrapped him in a big hug. When she pulled back she was tearing up again. Before she had a chance to say anything, someone came into the kitchen looking for her.
“They want to know if you’re ready to go to the funeral home, honey.”
Helen nodded and dabbed at her reddened nose with the ever-present tissue. Then she turned to me and gave me a hug. “You take good care of our doctor now.”
“I will.” So many assumptions in that little exchange. He was theirs now. And mine. To take care of, as he had taken care of them. The thought settled on me like a warm blanket.
I started out through the living room, but Ethan grabbed my arm. “No. I’ve had enough.” He turned me toward the back door. “This way.”
We slipped out the door and threaded our way through the haphazardly parked pickups and Jeeps and old Chevys to the Beemer. The others had left the BMW surrounded at close quarters, and I wasn’t sure I trusted myself to extricate it unscathed. But Ethan moved directly to the passenger side and got in without a word. I got behind the wheel and started her up, but I didn’t put her in gear just yet.
Instead I turned to Ethan and waited until he looked up at me. “Are you gonna be okay?”
“Eventually.” He reached in his pocket and took out the letter from Ida. He held it for a long, silent minute. “I’m afraid to open it.”
I touched his face. “Ethan, baby, you know Ida. Whatever demons she had to live with, she’d lived with them a long time. She probably just forgot to give us the basket yesterday and meant to have it shipped.”
He nodded, but he didn’t look reassured. And to tell the truth, he’d spooked me no
w. My hands tightened on the steering wheel as I watched him open the envelope.
He scanned the first few lines and his hands began to shake. He glanced up at me with a gale of grief darkening his blue eyes. He read:
Dear Ethan and Asia,
Please forgive my messy writing, but I don’t have much time.
A man came to the door after you left tonight. I don’t much like strangers after dark, so I had the shotgun on him. Good thing, too, since it appeared like he meant me harm. Came at me on the porch waving some kind of pistol like they use to give polio shots with. Well, I set him down for a talk—he didn’t say a whole lot!—but in the end I just had to use that “injector” to put him to sleep for a while so I could think. Good thing it wasn’t poison in there, huh? Ha!
Now the good Lord and I had a little talk after that, and I believe He will forgive me for what I plan to do. I surely hope you will, too. You see, I figure this man was sent by the ones who took me so long ago. And I don’t aim to go back there ever again. No, sir. I got lucky this time, but maybe I won’t be lucky the next time they come for me. I’m 83 years old. Had plenty of time on this old Earth. Reckon it’s time to go home to Jesus. I’d much rather be there than wherever this man wanted to take me.
There’s a bunch of little bullets for this injector—surely enough to do the job I got planned. I aim to use them all so it’ll look like I died in my sleep. I reckon the man will just skedaddle when he wakes up and sees me dead in the bed. No one else will know. It’s not like Raylan Givens will be investigating my death!
I tried calling the number you gave me today, but it’s storming up here on the mountain, and the call won’t go through. So I’m writing it all down and leaving it for my niece to send to you. When you get this, I guess you’ll understand, if anyone will.
And BE CAREFUL! If they came for me, they’ll be coming for Asia, too! She knows deep down in her heart, Ethan, like I always did: that place she sees in her dreams is REAL. And if she’s half the woman I think she is, she’ll fight the Devil himself rather than go back. I thank the good Lord that she has you now to help her.
Unchained Memory (The Interstellar Rescue Series Book 1) Page 17