Angel's Verdict

by Stanton, Mary

  “As well as anything can that involves a jealous step-father, an overconcerned high school history teacher, and a teenager barraged by too many hormones.”

  “But nobody died.”

  “Nobody even got seriously hurt. You weren’t by any chance calling to say that you’re free tonight?”

  “Not only am I free, Antonia’s over at the theater until late. Would you be able to come over?”

  Bree hoped she read the silence on the other end of the line correctly. But she and Hunter had been dancing around long enough. She wanted a real person in her life, in her bed, in her heart. She wanted a life of her own.

  “I can be there in five.”

  “Movie speak,” Bree said. “Ugh.”

  He laughed. “You don’t know the worst of it.”

  “We’ll swap horror stories.” Her heart was beating a little faster. She was swept with a wave of happiness. “Have you had dinner yet? I’m at B. Matthew’s right now. I can order something for you.”

  “Fish tacos,” he said promptly. “I’ll meet you at your front door.”

  The night outside was warmer than it had been. Bree left her winter coat unbuttoned. She tucked the take-out bag under her arm, stood at the crosswalk, and punched the Walk button. Somebody waved at her from across the street. Bree narrowed her eyes to see better. It was Hunter. He wore a black leather jacket. Like hers, his coat was open to the warmer air. He looked good to her: solid, tall, reassuring, and very dear. She waved. He threw her a kiss, which was so uncharacteristic for Hunter she had to laugh.

  The little white running figure beeped at her, and she set one foot in the street. There was a whisper of sound behind her.

  Then she didn’t remember anything else for a long time.

  Ten

  More needs she the divine,

  Than the physician.

  —Macbeth, William Shakespeare

  Bree woke up flat on her back, staring at an unfamiliar sky. Her arms were at her sides. A pale mist blanketed her breasts and legs. The light was soft, golden, like sunlight through trees in a forest. The air was scrubbed with the scent of roses.

  I’m in the Sphere.

  Happiness welled up in her.

  She was surrounded by five columns of intense color. The columns varied in height and width, but they were spinning, eddies in a whirlpool of soft air.

  “Well, child.” The voice from the violet column was soft and known to her.

  “Lavinia?” Bree said. Or tried to. Her lips were stiff. And she hurt, terribly, all over. She narrowed her eyes against the violet glow. For some reason, it was much brighter than the others.

  The silver-ash column that was Petru said, “My dear Bree.”

  Bree reached out to him, but her arm wouldn’t move.

  “We are all here,” Professor Cianquino said. His form was a steady blue flame. “There is nothing we can do for you, my dear. Except hope.”

  “I don’t believe it.” The green-blue column that was Ron sounded testy.

  “You know the rules.”

  That fiery column. Was that Gabriel? She hadn’t seen him for such a long time. Gabriel and his coin-colored eyes.

  “This is a temporal matter,” Gabriel’s voice was calm. “We cannot interfere.”

  “We can hope,” Ron said.

  She felt his smile. All their smiles. Better than hope...

  She drifted away.

  Bree woke up flat on her back, staring at an unfamiliar ceiling. Her arms were at her sides. A white sheet was drawn up across her breasts and legs. The light was strong, bluish white. Stainless steel railings barred her on either side. The air was scrubbed with an unpleasant odor. Disinfectant of some kind.

  She shoved her hands flat and sat up. Something tugged at her arm like an angry wasp, and she slapped at it reflexively before she had a chance to look. A piece of opaque tape covered a tube and the tube held a needle. The needle disappeared into skin that wasn’t her own: bright pink, slightly charred at the edges, covered with an oily goop.

  She hurt. All over.

  “Well, there you are. How are you feeling?” A mournful face hovered in the air above her. The face—which resembled a basset hound more than a person—was attached to a body dressed in hospital whites. Bree registered his name tag: Ollie.

  “I don’t know,” she said cautiously. Then, “Where am I, Ollie?”

  “The hospital,” he said reassuringly. “Savannah General. Which is in Georgia,” he added unnecessarily, “although I shouldn’t tell you too much before you tell me who you are.”

  “You don’t know?” Bree said.

  “Of course I do, dear. But we need to know if you do, you see. Name, age, and current date. It’s called being oriented times three.” He smiled, which lifted his jowls. He was in his late forties, perhaps—Bree wasn’t very good with ages—and his face was a roadmap of hard living.

  “Brianna Winston-Beaufort. I’m twenty-eight, and I’m a lawyer, with a practice in Savannah. And it’s the fifteenth of January.”

  “You are so right,” Dent said. “Except it’s the seventeenth. Are you in any pain?”

  “The seventeenth!” She felt dizzy. Where had two days gone?

  “You are in pain,” he said sympathetically.

  “Not much.” This wasn’t strictly true. Pain was there all right, waiting to jump on her, but she was pretty sure the IV glugging whatever into her arm had some pain-killers in it. “Thank you for asking.” Bree sank back. There was a pillow, but it was hard and flat. She hated being horizontal when everyone else was vertical. Hospital beds could be elevated, couldn’t they? She fumbled around the mattress. No buttons.

  “You want to sit up,” Ollie said in a kindly way. “I think that’ll be okay.” He pressed a button and Bree raised partway up without any effort at all.

  The room was small. Grayish tile covered the floor. A half-open door led to a bathroom equipped with a tall toilet, stainless steel handholds, and an efficient-looking shower. A narrow floor-to-ceiling window with vertical blinds looked down on a parking lot. From the slant of the sun Bree judged it was late afternoon. An orange chair of molded plastic held a bulging tote. Bree knew that tote. It belonged to her little sister, Antonia. She did know who she was and where she was. Bree sank back against the pillows. It was a slight effort, this examination of the room, but it exhausted her.

  “Oh my God! You’re awake.”

  Antonia swept into the room, stopped short, and flung up her hands. “I take two seconds to go down to the Coke machine, and what happens?”

  “I wake up?”

  “You wake up!”

  Antonia looked like she hadn’t slept for a week. Her gray University of North Carolina sweatshirt had coffee stains on the front, and it looked as if she’d bitten off a couple of her carefully manicured fingernails. Bree took all this in with a glance and said, “I’m fine, you know.”

  “Of course you are,” Antonia said heartily.

  She burst into tears.

  “Oh dear,” Ollie said. He lifted Antonia’s tote off the orange chair and put a gentle hand on her shoulder. “Sit down, sit down. No, don’t go mauling your sister around. Leave go of her foot, dear. You don’t want to fool around with burn patients. Scarring. Infection. You just leave her be.”

  Antonia released Bree’s foot and sank into the chair. She swiped her forearm under her eyes. “Right, right.”

  Bree put her hands up to her cheeks. The skin on her face was tender but intact. Her left forearm was wrapped in gauze, but her hands seemed to be okay. Her right forearm, the one with the IV in it, was one step beyond a bad sunburn. She shifted her legs under the light sheet that covered them. Both legs were in immobilizer casts.

  “She’s awake now,” Antonia said. “She should see a doctor, Ollie. Go get one. Right now.”

  “Tonia. For heaven’s sake. You can’t just order people around like that.”

  “Don’t you for-heaven’s-sake me! Push that little thing-gummy, Ollie, th
e emergency button.”

  Ollie winked at Bree. “Don’t go anywhere, Ms. Beaufort. I’ll be right back.” He closed the swinging door gently behind him. It opened again, almost immediately. Hunter stepped into the room. The skin around his eyes was drawn tight. Like Antonia, he looked exhausted.

  “Not you again,” Antonia said. “Not now. She just woke up. Come back later, Lieutenant. Unless you came to tell us you shot the guy that did this to her.”

  “Not yet.” Hunter stepped to the foot of the bed. He took in the bandages, the IV, and Bree herself. His face was expressionless, but there was a glitter in his gray eyes Bree hadn’t seen before. Rage? “I’d ask how you’re feeling, but you look pretty doped up.”

  “I’m fine,” Bree said. “A little drifty maybe.” She smiled. “Sorry I didn’t get to deliver the fish tacos.”

  “Yeah.” He ducked his head. Was he crying? Bree struggled once more to sit up.

  “Lie down, sister!” Antonia sprang out of the chair and joined Hunter at the foot of the bed. “I don’t know why you’ve been hanging around here, Hunter. You should just leave and go shoot the guy like I said before. She needs to sleep. She needs to see a doctor. She needs my mother, who’ll be here any second. She doesn’t need you.”

  “Oh dear,” Bree said. Francesca and Royal lived at Plessey, some two hundred miles away in North Carolina. “Did you really have to call them, Tonia?” Then, “What guy?” She closed her eyes in an effort to remember. “What happened?”

  “Oh my God.” Antonia bit off another fingernail. “Brain damage. I knew it. Where’s that damn doctor?”

  “Right here.” The door to the room swung open and a portly man Bree didn’t know walked in. He was dressed in hospital whites. A stethoscope hung around his neck. He was followed by a slight, dark-haired familiar figure. “Dr. Lowry!”

  The pathologist grinned and wiggled her fingers in a half wave.

  The other doctor picked up the chart at the foot of the bed and flipped through it. “You know this patient, Dr. Lowry?”

  “Bree Beaufort? Sure. I’ve given her a hand with a case or two.” She went up to the head of the bed and peered into Bree’s eyes. “How’re you doing?”

  “Pretty well,” Bree said cautiously. “How are you, Megan? Have you been appointed to the coroner’s office?”

  “You mean, am I here to see how fast I can get my hands on your corpse? Nope. Still working there part-time and helping out with my brother’s live practice.”

  “Excuse me.” The other doctor, whose name tag read ERIC CAUSTON, moved Megan aside. He flicked his ophthalmologic scope on and shined it into Bree’s eyes.

  “You’re doing remarkably well,” Megan said reassuringly. “Just what I’d expect in a patient with the kinds of vital signs you walk around with. I’ve never seen burns heal so fast in my life! I thought maybe you’d let me take a few tissue samples and haul them on down to the lab.”

  “Hoping for another Latts cell culture, Doctor?” Causton’s tone was sarcastic. He snapped the light off, felt the sides of Bree’s throat with cool dry fingers, and then put his fingertips on the pulse at her wrist.

  “You never know,” Megan said eagerly. “Cells are amazing things.”

  Megan Lowry was exceptionally thin, very tiny, and wore thick tortoiseshell spectacles. Bree bet she wasn’t much older than Antonia. She’d suspected that Megan was some kind of medical wunderkind when she’d first met her on the O’Rourke case, and the irritated attitude she was getting from Causton bore that out. Established physicians didn’t like competition from brash young newbies anymore than anyone else. “Causton’s taking your pulse himself because he doesn’t trust the machines. You’re going to be amazed, Causton. This woman’s the fittest patient I’ve ever had.”

  “Ever treat real athletes, Lowry? The kids on the basketball team at Duke, for example? You wouldn’t believe how fast they heal. Youth, good health, motivation. It all goes into the picture.”

  She pushed her spectacles up her nose with her forefinger. “Can’t say that I have.”

  “Then I’d keep my bright ideas to myself.” He looked down at Bree. “But you’re healing remarkably quickly.”

  Sam moved to the other side of the bed and took Bree’s undamaged hand in his. “The intake report documented extensive burns on the legs, forearms, back. She has a tibia plateau fracture of the right leg and a cracked collarbone. I want a prognosis.”

  “And a concussion,” Megan said with relish. “You got a whack on the occipital area that should have felled a horse. But it just put you in la-la land for a few days!”

  “I want to know the origin of each of the injuries, too,” Hunter said.

  Causton glanced at Megan with dislike. “She can tell you that.”

  “I don’t think so,” Hunter said. There was something in the tone of his voice that made Causton straighten up. “Cooperation makes better medicine, same as police work. I’d like to hear what both of you have to say.”

  “You didn’t see her at intake, Causton,” Megan said. “There was some question about whether or not she was going to make it.”

  Sam’s hand tightened painfully on Bree’s.

  “So I got over here as fast as I could. I mean, she’s a patient of mine, for goodness’ sake. Plus, I thought I could maybe get a tissue sample right off. She checked in with concussion, fractures, et cetera, et cetera. What he said. You gave a very accurate summary, Lieutenant. Hunter. Anyhow, I talked to one of the EMTs, and in the twelve minutes that it took to get you here, you already had visible signs of burn healing.”

  “Nonsense,” Causton said.

  “You didn’t go over her with a magnifier, like I did. I mean, it was barely visible, even under a strong scope.”

  “Healing begins immediately,” Causton said disapprovingly. “There’s nothing unusual about that.”

  “Not visible to the naked eye!”

  Causton made a disgusted movement.

  “Tell me about the head wound,” Sam said. “Now.”

  Causton’s fingers were surprisingly gentle at the back of Bree’s head. “A depressed fracture, right here.”

  “Could that have happened when she was hit by the car?”

  “I was hit by a car?” Bree said.

  Causton frowned. “Possibly.”

  Megan said, “Absolutely not.”

  Causton reached the end of his patience. “What the hell, Lowry. You seem to know it all. Go ahead.”

  “I took a few bits and pieces when she was in the ER, just to get a head start. The blood and tissue sample from the occipital area showed evidence of ... guess what?”

  The silence in the room was heavy, and not encouraging.

  “Cast iron!”

  “Cast iron?” Hunter said.

  “Yes. The kind of cast iron you’d find in a frying pan. As a matter of fact, I’m pretty sure that’s what it was.”

  “Somebody hit me with a cast iron frying pan?” Bree closed her eyes. “You know what? There was a cast iron frying pan on the wall of the restaurant. Along with a lot of other stuff.”

  “Do you remember anything else?” Antonia asked.

  “Don’t bite your fingernails,” Bree said. “No. I don’t remember a thing about the accident. What happened?”

  Hunter’s hand still gripped her own. His voice was a little hoarse. “You punched the Walk button to cross Bay to come home. A beer truck went through the intersection just as the light turned green. When the truck passed, I saw you lying in the street. A car came zipping around the corner, swerved to avoid hitting you, flipped up onto the sidewalk, and burst into flames. I went across the street and got you out from under the car.”

  “What about the driver?” Bree asked.

  “Jumped free. And there was no one else in the car, thank God, or I would have been patching up two victims instead of one.” Causton tucked the end of his stethoscope into his jacket pocket. He crossed his arms. “You think someone hit her from behind before she was
hit by the car?”

  “I’m sure of it. Knocked her into the path of the car. We cited the driver for failure to yield, dangerous driving, and a couple of other infractions.”

  “I’d like to get my hands on him,” Antonia said.

  “He’s in the Chatham County Jail at the moment, pending the results of the traffic investigation.”

  “Anyone I know?” Bree asked.

  Hunter nodded slowly. “Phillip Mercury.”

  “Really.” Bree absorbed this for a long moment.

  “Claims he did what he could to avoid you.”

  “The newspapers said he was drunk,” Antonia said. “Or high. You cited him for DUI, didn’t you, Sam?”

  “We did.”

  “So he’s going to jail for a long time. Of course, not as long as if ...” Antonia’s voice choked with sobs.

  “Well, I didn’t die,” Bree said tartly. “Get a grip, sister.”

  The door to the room burst open. A small, red-gold whirlwind spun into the room, followed by a tall, handsome man with gray hair.

  “Mamma!” Antonia threw herself into Francesca’s arms. “You’re here, Mamma. She’s going to be all right. She’s not going to die! I was so sure she was going to die!”

  Bree smiled at her heart’s true father, Royal Winston-Beaufort. “Hey, Daddy. That’s my diva sister for sure. I’m fine. It’s like they say. The whole thing was a long way from my heart.”

  “Darlin’ girl,” her mother said. “We’ve come to take you home.”

  Eleven

  There was never yet philosopher,

  That could bear toothache patiently.

  —Much Ado About Nothing, William Shakespeare

  “I’m not staying in this bed a minute longer!” Bree shouted. She wasn’t in the best of tempers. Sasha was curled on the floor nearest her right hand. Once in a while he lifted his head and bumped her hand.

  It’d been a three-day hassle to get out of the hospital, and it was even more of a hassle to resist the efforts of her parents to take her back to Plessey. At least she was set up at the town house. Her mother and father had taken over Antonia’s bedroom. Antonia was set up in the living room on the pull-out couch. Bree herself was in her own room, propped up in her bed, feeling like a turkey trussed for stuffing.