“Tickles….”
“It’s supposed to. What about your right foot, feel that?”
“No....”
“That’s because I didn’t do anything. How about now?”
“Tickles.”
He put the sheet back, then stood next to Robert. “Can you tell me your name?”
“...gotta be...kidding....”
“Yes, I’m famous throughout the medical community for my Noel Coward-like wit. Do you know your name?”
“Londrigan.” He swallowed painfully. “Robert Londrigan.”
“Do you know what year it is?”
Robert answered that one correctly.
“Know what day it is?”
“Not really.”
“It’s Tuesday. Do you know where you are?”
“Making a cameo in the new Alien Autopsy sequel?”
“He’s fine,” said Steinman, patting Robert’s shoulder, then checking the dressing on the head wound. “We gotta stop meeting like this or people are going to talk.”
Steinman was then pushed gently aside by a puffy-eyed Lynn, who looked at her brother’s face and said, “Oh, Bobby. I was so scared.” She touched his cheek. “You know who I am, right?”
Robert looked at Steinman. “I’ve never seen this woman before in my life.”
Both Lynn and Steinman blanched slightly.
“Oh, lighten up!” said Robert.
“Bobby...?”
“Yes, Lynn?”
She smacked his arm. Kind of hard. Ouch.
“Oh, I’ll just bet you think that’s funny. Laugh it up, Uncle Chuckles—you’re not the one who tried getting in touch with your sorry ass for almost two days and then found you unconscious with all that blood on the bed. I—why the fu—why are you smiling?”
“I love you, Sis.”
“I love you, too, but right now if we were alone in this room I’d pinch your oxygen tube just to watch you turn blue for a second.”
“No, you wouldn’t.”
“No, I wouldn’t...but I’d sure think about it.”
Robert reached through the bed railing and took hold of his sister’s hand. “Thank you,” he said, his voice cracking slightly on the second word. “If you hadn’t found me, I’d probably be dead right now.”
“Like that hadn’t occurred to me?”
“How long have you been here?”
Lynn sniffed, pulled her hand away, and took a tissue from her purse to wipe her eyes. “A little while.”
“She’s left here only twice since you were brought in,” said Steinman. “And even then her husband and little boy had to come and physically remove her from the room.”
Lynn shot Steinman an irritated glance. “Are you still here?”
“Looks like.”
“Now, now,” said Robert.
Steinman laughed, made a notation on Robert’s chart, then gave further instructions to the nurse before turning to leave. “You can have liquids for the rest of the day, Jell-O and tea or coffee for breakfast. We’ll start you on solids at lunch tomorrow.”
“How much longer will you need to keep him?” asked Lynn.
“At least forty-eight hours. Get home and get some sleep tonight, Lynn. The nurses’ll make sure he behaves himself.”
“I promise. Thanks, doctor.”
“Hey, it’s why they pay me the big bucks.” He looked at Robert. “When your head gets to hurting—and trust me, it will—press the call button next to your hand and they’ll bring you something.”
“A Demerol cocktail?”
“The best in town.” Steinman left.
Lynn pulled a chair up beside the bed and sat down. “You look like shit.”
“I can’t tell you how much that lifts my spirits.”
She laughed a little. “Come on, Bobby—between that scar on your nose and the bandage on your head, you almost don’t look like the same person. Which reminds me—” She looked around for something, spotted a magazine lying on the windowsill, and picked it up. “Gene MacIntyre stopped by last night with this. He wanted me to tell you how sorry he was that you didn’t get any warning about it, but even he didn’t know they were going to do this until the magazine came out.” She held out the new issue of Columbus Monthly; there, on the cover, full-bleed and in less-than-flattering color, was a photograph of Robert. “You’re famous—at least in the tri-state area. When did they take this picture?”
“That’s a publicity shot the station had taken last year.” Robert took the magazine from Lynn and read the caption over his head:
When Newscasters Become the News:
The story of one Central Ohio television reporter’s personal tragedy
“Ah, fuck me with a fiddlestick!” snarled Robert, throwing it down.
Lynn picked up the magazine and opened to a dog-eared page. “But it’s a really nice story, Bobby, not at all sensationalistic or pandering. The people who wrote this have a lot of sympathy for you. They even talked to a bunch of Columbus and Cincinnati television reporters and asked them how they’d react in the same situation. You ought to read it.” She offered the magazine to her brother once more; when he didn’t take it, she folded it open to the story and laid it on the bedside table. “Well, I’ll leave it here anyway, in case you change your mind later.”
Robert gave it an irritated glance. “Thanks. Maybe later.”
Lynn shifted her position in the chair, then cleared her throat and removed a handkerchief from her purse. “This is going to sound strange, but you left this at the house the night before the funeral. I found it outside the next day. I guess you dropped it when you left.”
“And you’re giving it to me now because...?”
“Because all the time you were unconscious, I kept holding it and praying. I just thought that if I could touch something of yours, then it was like you were still with me, okay? And don’t you dare laugh at me about that. Here.”
Robert took the handkerchief. It was neatly-folded to display his meticulously-embroidered initials.
He remembered when he’d had the nosebleed in the movie theater and had given this to Ian in exchange for a clean one. Ian must have washed it and then
(Boy’s a wonder with a needle and thread, aren’t you, Ian?)
stitched his initials into it as a gift.
(Ian sew good.)
For several moments neither of them said anything, then Robert placed the handkerchief on his lap, reached out, and took hold of Lynn’s hand again. “You look tired.”
“Yeah, well....”
“Why don’t you go home? I’ll be fine?”
“Do you want me to go?”
“Not really, no. I hate hospitals.”
“After what happened to you the last time you were here, that doesn’t surprise—oh, shit!”
“What?”
“I promised Bill Emerson I’d let him know the minute you were awake. That’s what he said when he stopped by here yesterday—‘The minute he’s awake. It’s very important.’”
“Did he say what it’s about?”
Lynn smiled. “Yeah. It looks like they caught the guy who attacked you.”
Robert could feel the color drain from his face. “Wh-what?”
“I know! Isn’t that great?” She picked up the phone from the bedside table, took a card from her wallet, and dialed the number written on the back. “Yes, hi, is Bill Emerson in? Lynn Connor, Robert Londrigan’s sister.” She smiled while she waited for Emerson to come to the phone. “Detective? Hi, this is—okay, right, sorry—Bill. Yes. Uh-huh, about twenty minutes ago. I know, I know, I’m sorry, I was just so happy that he—of course.” She wrinkled her brow at something Emerson said. “I don’t know, I’ll ask.” Covering the mouthpiece, she leaned forward and said, “He wants to know if you’d like him to bring some of his wife’s brownies. She made a fresh batch just for you.”
Robert shrugged. “Sure, yes, that would be...fine?”
“He said yes, thank you very much—and he
said to tell your wife that it was very sweet of her to do that, he really appreciates it.”
“My interpreter,” whispered Robert, then lay quietly as Lynn finished her conversation with Emerson, all the while feeling his stomach tighten at the prospect of perhaps having to lie to the detective again. He didn’t want to. He liked Emerson.
Lynn hung up and poured some fresh ice chips. “Here you go.”
“How’d you know?”
She shrugged. Robert accepted the chips and relished the expansive coolness as it spread through his mouth, trickled down his throat, then spread its beautiful ice-wings through his center.
“He’ll be here in about forty minutes.”
“Maybe you should go home.”
“And miss this? No way, Bigbro. I want to see the bastard who stole my niece’s body and then attacked you twice.”
“Twice?”
Lynn stared at him for a moment. “Well, yes. I mean, he was the one who broke into the house and hit you with the lamp, wasn’t he?”
“I...I couldn’t say for certain. I just came awake and...and....”
Lynn squeezed his hand. “Don’t worry about it, Bobby. Bill said he didn’t think you would’ve gotten a look at him this second time.”
“How the hell can he even make the assumption that—”
“The police found something. I don’t know what, exactly—I sure as hell didn’t see anything besides you and the lamp at the house—but Bill says they’ve got something that might prove this guy’s the one they’re looking for.”
Robert closed his eyes and thought about Ian and Andrea and Rael and all the children he’d seen at Chiaroscuro. Did you do this? he wondered. Is this guy another one of your parlor tricks, Rael?
“Bobby?”
Startled by Lynn’s voice, Robert snapped open his eyes. “What?”
“Sorry. You’ve had your eyes closed for a little while and I was worried that—”
“Still here. My head hurts like a son-of-a-bitch, but I’m still here.”
“Want me to get the nurse to give you a shot?”
“Not yet. I—how much longer until Bill gets here?”
Lynn checked her watch. “Any time now.”
“I was out for over half an hour?”
“That’s why I got worried—I mean, at first I figured you were tired, you know, and a little nap probably wouldn’t hurt too much, but then I got to wondering if letting you sleep this soon after you just woke up was a good idea, so...I got worried.”
“Jesus...I—no, don’t call the nurse, I don’t want a shot until this business with Bill is over. I want to be rid of this. You know?”
“I know.” She leaned in and kissed his cheek, then stroked what hair of his that wasn’t hidden under the bandages. “I don’t know how you’ve held up, Bobby, I really don’t.”
“I don’t think I have.”
“Yeah, but you never did give yourself credit for being as strong as you are.”
“I got nothing on you, Sis.”
“I am woman, hear me roar.”
Robert grinned. “Do you have any idea how many times you played that damn record when you were a kid? I used to hear it my sleep and wake up screaming.”
“I got on your nerves a lot, didn’t I?”
He shrugged. “You were the little sister. It was your job to get on my nerves. What are you doing about your classes?”
“Why do you think God made substitute teachers? This close to Thanksgiving and Christmas, it was easy to get a sub. Stop worrying about me, okay?” She kissed his cheek again, then sat holding his hand in loving silence.
Robert began to drift off again but the throbbing inside his skull kept him from succumbing to sleep; but even if he had fallen asleep, Emerson’s noisy entrance would have wakened him.
The detective came in pushing a television/VCR unit on a squeaky-wheeled cart. “Sorry, but this was the only one they could find for me. Sounds like nails across a chalkboard, doesn’t it?” He positioned the unit at the foot of Robert’s bed, unwound the cord, and plugged it in. “Oh, here you go.” He reached into the large shoulder bag he was carrying and removed a fat plastic bag filled with brownies. “I’ll have you know she put pecans in this batch,” he said, pronouncing it pee-cans. “She never puts pecans in them when she bakes ‘em for me, claims it binds me up.” He looked at Lynn. “Sorry. Probably more information than you needed, huh?”
Lynn was trying not to laugh. “That’s okay.”
“Yeah, well....” He turned to Robert. “No way I’m leaving here without a few of those, just so you know—and yes, they do bind me up but they’re just so tasty I don’t care.” He readied the VCR, inserted a pre-cued tape, took off his coat, and pulled the other chair next to the side of the bed. “So, how’re you doing?”
Robert held up the bag of brownies. “I can’t eat anything solid yet.”
Lynn and Emerson reached for the bag at the same time. Lynn got there first.
“I’ll hang on to these,” she said. Then, to Emerson: “And she’s right not to give you pee-cans if they bind you up.”
“I’m a cop, I could arrest you.”
She looked at Robert. “Do something—I’m being hassled by The Man.”
“You took my brownies. You’re on your own.”
Emerson grinned, then busied himself for a few moments taking several items from his shoulder bag. He placed a few on Robert’s tray-table; others he either kept in the bag on the floor near his chair. “Hey, the damnedest thing happened to me a couple days ago. I got a job offer from a local advertising agency. Guess what they want me for?” He held up his too-delicate hands and wiggled the fingers. “A hand model. Can you believe it?”
“Well, they are very nice hands,” said Lynn. “They look better than mine. Wanna trade?”
“I know,” replied Emerson. “They want to use ‘em in jewelry ads. Pay’s real nice, to boot. My wife, she keeps making jokes about me becoming the super model of hands.”
“Are you going to do it?” asked Robert.
“Oh, heck yes! I already submitted a written request for permission from the department. Don’t think they’ll turn me down on it—you know, good PR and all that. Besides, there’re so many cops that moonlight anyway and don’t report it that they wouldn’t dare say ‘no’ to one who goes through all the right channels.”
“And if they said no you’d do it anyway and live with the slap on the wrist it’d get you?”
“Read my mind.” Emerson fiddled with the remote control to the TV/VCR unit for a second, took a deep breath, and released it slowly; as he breathed out, the aura of good humor that usually surrounded him dimmed. It was now time for Things Serious.
Bill stepped into the background; Detective Emerson moved forward.
“Okay,” he said to Robert, his voice a bit more formal, “I’m guessing that your sister told you that we think we caught the guy who attacked you?”
“Yes.”
The detective nodded, looked at Lynn, then at the large brown envelope on the tray-table. “Miss Connor—”
“If I have to call you Bill and keep you away from pee-cans, then it’s Lynn.”
The detective smiled. “Sorry, I forgot. Look, Lynn, I don’t mean to sound like some old-fogey, sexist fart—I’m not one of those guys who figure that just because a woman’s got ovaries she can’t handle the nastier aspects of life—but...you’re a mother, right?”
“Right...?”
Emerson winced slightly, as if what he was about to say next physically stuck in his throat. “The thing is, some of the stuff I have to show your brother is...fairly ugly. On the way over here I was trying to figure out how I was going to ease into the more unpleasant aspects of this, but the truth is almost every aspect of this is pretty nasty. It might be doubly so for someone such as yourself—a parent, I mean.” The detective huffed in frustration. “Do you know what I’m trying to say here?”
Lynn looked at Robert for a second before answerin
g. “I don’t want Robert to go through this alone, Detective. If you show him something that I don’t think I can look at, I’ll avert my eyes or something, but I won’t leave the room, if that’s what you’re hinting at.”
“Okay,” said Emerson. He started the tape, waited until an image appeared on the screen, and pushed the “pause” button.
On the screen was a bland room with soundproofed walls. A long metal table sat in the center of the room. A man who looked to be somewhere around forty-five or fifty, dressed only in a tattered overcoat, sat at the table, facing the camera. The shadowy back of a second figure—probably another detective—loomed in the right hand side of the frame.
“Okay,” said Emerson. “What happened was this: Two nights ago, around ten-thirty, we got a call about a body that was discovered along the banks of the Licking River near the Church Street Bridge in Coffin County—that’s an old nickname for the East End of Cedar Hill,” said Emerson. “There used to be a big casket factory there that burned down in 1969, took out a couple of blocks of businesses when it went. The area never recovered. Anyway, this call comes in, and we hightail it over there to find these three kids who’d been playing down by the water, throwing rocks at the rats and such. They’re pretty shaken up about the body. They showed us where it was and it was...it was fairly gruesome, but it doesn’t really have any connection to what happened next, except that it prompted a search of the immediate area, which was no piece of cake. You’ve been out of it, so you probably don’t know that we had quite a shift in the weather around here. What was supposed to be snow turned out to be snow and freezing rain. Made walking along those banks a real picnic, especially for my trick knee.
“About a half-mile or so down the bank, one of the officers on the scene spots this inflated inner-tube floating in the water. Looks to him like there’s some kid riding in it, so he wades out and manages to get hold of the thing and pull it in....
“The body of a dead infant had been strapped into the inner-tube and set afloat. The body itself wasn’t all that wet, so we figured that it hadn’t been in the water for very long. We called for backup and expanded the search area. A couple miles farther along the bank, we came across this old woman who was holding another dead infant. She kind of went nuts when we tried to take it away from her, kept saying stuff about how she was a good mother, how the county shouldn’t have taken her Jenny away from her. It was pretty pathetic. We let her hang onto the body for a little bit because that was the only thing that seemed to keep her lucid, and she told us to head on ‘over there, the Devil’s work is done over there.’ About a hundred yards away we discovered this plywood and tin lean-to that had been built underneath the Church Street Bridge. There was no door, just a blanket nailed across the top of the thing. The blanket was pinned back so it was easy to look inside.
In Silent Graves Page 27