Threshold

by G. M. Ford

  By the time he walked back, the uniforms had patted the pair down and found the two nine-millimeter automatics and the pair of wallets now resting on the roof of the car.

  “Both of ’em heeled,” said the other uniform.

  “We got carry permits,” the driver whined. “We’re licensed private detectives.”

  “Shut up, Jerry,” said the passenger.

  Dolan read them their rights.

  “Take them to holding,” he said to the cops. “Book ’em on Hindering a Police Officer in the Performance of His Duty, Interfering with a Police Officer, Resisting Arrest, and Reckless Driving. Call the garage. Impound the car.”

  The uniforms hauled the pair to their feet and started stiff-legging them down the alley toward the black-and-white.

  “It’s a public street,” the driver yelled.

  “Shut up, Jerry,” said the passenger.

  The big cop looked back and grinned.

  Grace lingered in the fifth-floor stairway for the better part of thirty minutes. Joseph was garnering a great deal of attention from the staff today. A veritable parade of doctors and nurses coming and going. Wasn’t until the nursing shift changed around 5:00 p.m. that things quieted down sufficiently for Grace to slip into his room.

  She’d never seen him without the breathing and feeding tubes. Here and there on his face, tape and tubes had rubbed him raw, but, despite the abraded areas, a healthy glow was beginning to color his cheeks.

  The sound of the door hissing pulled his attention in Grace’s direction. Grace took the baseball cap off and shook out her hair.

  Joseph’s dark eyes followed her as she walked to the side of the bed, reached down, and covered his hand with hers. He swallowed twice, licked his lips, and croaked out something unintelligible.

  Grace gently squeezed his hand. “You rest,” she said in a low voice.

  Instead, he once again tried to speak. She leaned close to his lips.

  “I thought I dreamed you,” he whispered on about the fifth try.

  She patted his hand. He closed his eyes and went to sleep.

  That’s when the door opened and his mother walked in. Mid-forties. Even-featured. Wasp-waisted in a burgundy wool coat with brass buttons. For a moment, the sight of Grace immobilized her. She stared disbelievingly, took several steps into the room, and stopped and stared again. The door closed automatically.

  “You’re her,” she finally said.

  Grace didn’t respond.

  “You were in here with Paul when Joseph . . . when he . . .”

  Grace gathered her hair, gave it a tight twist, and covered it with her Red Sox cap.

  “You had no right,” the woman said.

  “To what?” Grace asked as she zipped her jacket.

  “To . . .” She pointed at the bed. “My son . . . you had no right to . . . whatever you did.”

  Grace started for the door. “You mean like as opposed to pulling the plug on him?” she asked as she took the doorknob in her hand.

  Without warning, the well-turned-out middle-aged woman came completely unglued. A guttural growl rose from her chest as she launched herself at Grace like a SCUD missile, talons extended, fully intending to rip Grace’s face off.

  Grace feinted one way and then dodged the other, allowing the out-of-control woman to rocket past her. Grace pirouetted and spread her feet for balance. Eighteen months in juvenile detention hadn’t been good for much, but had done absolute wonders for her self-defense skills. Turned out it wasn’t necessary, however.

  The former Mrs. Reeves wobbled on her spike heels, turned an ankle, and went down like a cinder block, clipping the sink with her forehead on her way to the floor. The painful sound of bone meeting porcelain bounced around the room.

  As Grace opened the door, the woman struggled to her knees. Her mouth hung open. An ugly bruise was already forming on her forehead. She looked like maybe she’d bitten through her tongue when she clipped the sink. She began to scream, thick-lipped and spittle-laced, but at terrific volume. “Eeeelp me! Eeeelp me!” The effort caused her great pain. She brought both hands to her head and began making a high-pitched keening noise.

  Grace shot a quick glance at Joseph. His dark eyes were open.

  She stepped into the hall, turned hard right, and ducked back into the stairway. A final glance through the little square window showed a pair of burly security guards sprinting in her direction. Grace turned and ran, taking the stairs two at a time, up four risers to the eighth floor, where she hurried down the corridor to the elevators, rode the nearest car down to the first level of the parking garage, and then began jogging toward the smell of fresh air.

  As Dr. Edward Burke removed the yellowing pile of newspaper from the seat of the wing chair, several decades of dust rose majestically toward the ceiling.

  He looked a bit like Paul Bunyan. Big strapping guy with a full beard and a plaid shirt. No ox, though. Living proof that one of the major perks of the academic life was that you could be beyond the Valley of Eccentric and still function.

  Burke gestured toward the chair, which, as nearly as Dolan could tell, may have at one time been a floral print.

  “Have a seat, Sergeant . . . er . . . ?”

  “Dolan. Michael Dolan,” he said as he eased himself onto the seat, making sure that only the seat of his pants touched the maybe-floral chair.

  They were in what looked an old Edwardian library. Bookcases wall to wall, floor to ceiling, except the wall the door was on. Rolling ladder broken in two in the back corner of the room. A scene from an old black-and-white movie, except there were no guys in tuxedos, just enough dust for a Saharan storm, and enough litter for an obstacle course. Burke seemed to read his mind.

  “This is the old university archives building,” he said. “These days, everything has gone digital. Nobody uses the archives anymore. I use it to store the messier parts of my collection.” He grinned. “Some of my departmental colleagues took umbrage at the clutter. So I moved it out here. I still keep office hours in Taylor Hall with the rest of them, but as long as it’s not too cold, I generally work here.”

  As Dolan pulled out his notebook, Dr. Burke picked his way through the academic debris covering the floor, and settled himself behind the desk.

  “How’d you get my name?” he asked.

  “At the Colton Clinic,” Dolan said.

  “Somebody at Colton recommended me?” He seemed incredulous.

  “Not exactly,” Dolan hedged.

  “What, then?”

  “Your name came up as they were throwing me out of the place.”

  “Ah,” he said knowingly. “That makes more sense.”

  “This doctor named Seacrest seemed to feel I was wasting his time.”

  “Both the Colton Clinic and Gerard Seacrest are quite traditional.” His blue eyes crinkled at the corners. “Hidebound, one might even say.”

  “Seemed to piss him off that I had the nerve to even ask about it. He looked at me like I was claiming to have been abducted by aliens, then told me I was as crazy as that Burke idiot, over at Forman University.”

  “It’s nice to be remembered,” Burke said with a grin.

  “Exactly what is it you’re a doctor of?” Dolan asked.

  “Anthropology,” Burke said. “I specialize in urban folklore.”

  “So what did you ask him about that got you on the idiot list?” Dolan asked.

  “The Silver Angel.”

  Dolan was somewhat taken aback by the sudden candor. His first stop at the Colton Clinic, the city’s swankiest head trauma clinic, had been a complete bust. About three seconds after he told Dr. Seacrest what he was there about, Seacrest had asked if he had a warrant and then invited him to leave. No offense to our noble police department, of course, but we don’t have time for such foolishness. Don’t call us; we’ll cal
l you.

  “So what do you think?”

  “Despite what it says in the Yellow Pages about trauma treatment, the Colton Clinic is in the money business, Sergeant Dolan, not the cure business. Nine thousand dollars per patient, per month, makes cures counterproductive. As they see it, any alternative therapy, especially something as unscientific and off the wall as a layperson supposedly able to accomplish what they can’t . . . that’s just not in their best interests.”

  “And the Silver Angel?”

  Burke thought it over. The chair let out an anguished groan as Burke leaned back. His lips pursed in and out several times. Dolan could see the lecture emerging. He groaned inwardly and poised his pen.

  “Among the nearly innumerable subtypes of urban folklore, Sergeant,” Burke began, “one is what I call the good story. It’s just what the name implies. The one with the cute punch line. You can find thousands of them on the Internet. ‘The Hook’ is a good example. Couple parked out on lover’s lane hears on the radio that there have been a series of serial murders committed by a guy with a hook on one hand. They hightail it out of there, only to find the hook hanging from one of the door handles when they get home. It’s cute campfire material. Everybody claims they read it in the paper, or were there when it happened, or knew the people it happened to, or heard it from somebody who knew them.”

  “And everybody knows it’s a crock of shit, but doesn’t say anything,” Dolan said.

  “Exactly. That’s what gives this type of apocryphal lore a life. The unwritten rules. You’re obligated to shut up. That allows the storytelling process to continue. You can learn quite a bit about a society by studying what they add to and what they remove from oral tradition stories.”

  “What’s the other type?” Dolan pressed.

  “The other type isn’t a good story. There’s no hook. No punch line. Just a persistent rumor, which seems to have a life of its own. Those tend to have at least some basis in reality.” He raised a cautionary hand. “Which is not to say they’re true, in the strictest sense. What it says is that something about the story is likely grounded in fact.”

  Burke read the policeman’s frown. “Like the story of the ice-skating giraffe.”

  “Never heard that one,” Dolan said.

  “Because giraffes don’t ice skate.”

  “So you’re saying you think there’s something to this Silver Angel stuff?”

  Burke shrugged and made a maybe face. “I never got a chance to follow up. My Fulbright kicked in and I was off to Bulgaria. But”—he waved a professorial finger— “if you ask me, she probably has, on at least one occasion, somehow managed to extricate somebody from a coma.” He spread his hands in resignation. “I mean, look at the alternatives. Either she arranged for it to look that way, and fooled absolutely everyone, including the comatose person, or she got lucky and an awakening just happened while she was present. Both of which are, as far as I’m concerned, considerably more far-fetched than the possibility that she really did it.”

  “Because giraffes don’t ice skate.”

  “Exactly,” Burke said.

  “Then . . .” Dolan frowned and searched for words. “Then whatever she’s figured out has to have some kind of medical or scientific basis . . . right?”

  Burke grinned. “Does this mean you’re not open-minded to the possibility of miracles or magic?”

  “Oh, mine’s wide open,” Dolan said with a smile. “But you’d have to meet my boss.”

  That photo from Jennifer’s thirtieth birthday party was staring him in the face from his phone again.

  He answered with, “Dolan here.” Real businesslike.

  “Mickey.”

  “Hey,” he said.

  “How are you doing?”

  “You mean like in general? Or how am I doing for a guy whose wife walked out on him for another woman?”

  “The second one,” she said.

  “In that case, I’m hanging in there.”

  Awkward silence.

  “I’m sorry,” she said, into the void.

  He hated it when she said that. Somehow, it never seemed to cover it. Like getting hit by a speeding bus and saying, “Ouch.”

  “I’ll get over it,” Dolan said.

  “We didn’t have much to get over,” she said.

  He wanted to argue, but stopped himself. She was right. Something vital had always been missing. Some spark. The fiery thing that makes it worthwhile to put up with the rest of the shit. At best, they’d been comfortable.

  “Whatcha need, Jen?” he asked, trying to keep weariness out of his voice.

  “Joanna and I wanted to use the cabin next weekend. Just wanted to make sure you didn’t have any plans.”

  The cabin was just that. A log cabin right smack in the middle of the Spellman Wilderness Area, hard by the rocky banks of Bluewater Creek. Her great-great-grandfather had homesteaded the place back in the 1830s. Before it became a national park. They hadn’t liquidated it with the rest of the community property because the terms of the original deed stated that should the title no longer be held by a direct descendant of the original landowner, the title would automatically revert to the federal government, which made it impossible to sell.

  Besides which, if he and Jen ever had a place that could be considered “theirs,” it was the cabin. It was where they’d always gone when things got tough. Whenever one or both of them slowed down enough to be reminded that something just wasn’t right, they’d head up to the cabin for the weekend, hoping that somehow the peace and serenity of the place would rub off on them, and they’d be able to embrace that ever-elusive something that didn’t seem to have a name.

  “I’ve got no plans,” he said.

  An awkward silence followed. The phone company was right, you could hear a pin drop. Dolan was busy picturing exactly which of the vast cornucopia of lesbian sexual acts Jennifer and Joanne would be perpetrating upon one another when Jen caught his negative vibe and blithely segued. “What are you working on?” she asked.

  “Domestic violence thing. Missing family.”

  “Missing how?”

  He told her. About the family and their sealed records. About the suspicions regarding the Women’s Transitional Center. The rumors about Grace. All of it, except the names of the players. Jen was a good listener.

  “I’ll ask a few people I know. Women’s movement people.”

  “That what it’s about, Jen?” he asked. “The movement?”

  “It’s about having somebody I can talk to.”

  Click.

  Grace jogged up the concrete ramp and out onto the sidewalk. It was still light, but the streetlights were on. The nearby buildings were beginning to empty, as people headed home for the evening. She could smell rain in the air.

  Before she could fully assess her situation, a voice boomed, “You there. Stop.”

  Another rent-a-cop had come trotting out the front door of the hospital, and was hurrying in her direction. Heavy-set white guy, bald head, pointing at her as he huffed along the sidewalk, his equipment belt flopping as he ran.

  Grace bolted into the street, dodged a couple of taxis and a UPS truck, then sprinted hard for the south side of Harmon Road.

  A quick glance over her shoulder showed a wave of traffic engulfing Harmon Road like the Red Sea closing behind the Israelites. The guard was nowhere in sight.

  A flash of yellow in her peripheral vision pulled her eyes to a cab running along the curb. She hailed it, got in, and gave the turbaned driver an address.

  As they pulled away from the curb, the rent-a-cop came into view. Red-faced and gasping for air, he staggered across the last lane and threw himself up onto the sidewalk.

  Grace waved goodbye through the back window.

  “You sure you wanna go over there to Coaltown, Missy?” the taxi driver asked. “We
’re not supposed to bring people down there. That’s a bad place. Nothin’ down there for a nice young lady like you.”

  She passed another twenty over the seat. “I’m sure,” Grace told him.

  He turned off the meter.

  “Their lawyer made bail before they’d cleared booking,” Marcus Nilsson growled. “They tell me he threatened to sue us over the broken car window.”

  “I showed my badge and ordered them out of the car a half a dozen times,” Dolan said defensively.

  Nilsson waved him off. “The black-and-white had the dash cam on. I’ve seen the tape. The uniforms back your story a hundred percent. Those two in the car got what they were asking for.” He raised a bushy eyebrow. “The shotgun may have been a bit over the top, but the rest of it was by the book, as far as I’m concerned.”

  “DA gonna charge ’em?”

  Nilsson made a no way face and shook his big head. “Not enough meat on the bone for those guys. Budget being what it is, they’ve got bigger fish to fry than hampering and hindering charges.”

  “I don’t suppose they coughed up why it was they were following me?”

  “Not a peep.”

  “We know who they work for?” Dolan asked.

  Nilsson reached out and shuffled the pile of papers on his desk. Handed one to Dolan.

  “Richard Coffee and Gerald Robbins. Employees of Western Security,” Dolan read. “For All Your Security and Information Needs.”

  “I feel safer and better informed already,” the C of D sneered.

  “On the Royster family front . . .” Dolan began. “Family Court’s got the Royster family’s records sealed up tighter than a bullfrog’s ass. I already called the DA’s office; they say there’s not a damn thing they or anybody else can do about it.”

  “What have you got?”

  “No action on any of Cassie Royster’s credit cards.”

  “Phones?”

  “The mother’s got a cell, of course, and the girls split one of their own. Nothing out of either of them.” He tapped his notes. “Last ping from the girls’ cell phone is estimated to have come from . . .” He read the coordinates.