Dear Irene ik-3

by Jan Burke

  I caught my reflection in some glass along the hallway, and realized I looked anything but natural. I was too scared to carry it off.

  Suddenly, down the hall, I saw one of the last people I wanted to see at that moment. She stopped and briefly studied me, then came walking toward us, smiling.

  “Do you know her?” Davis asked, tightening his grip on my wrist.

  I nodded.

  “If you don’t want her to die, you’d better give a star performance.”

  “Hello, Sister Theresa,” I said as naturally as I could.

  “Irene! You’ve got a new haircut. And who is this?”

  “This is my friend — Jimmy.”

  “Pleased to meet you,” she said with a nod, and I thanked God that she hadn’t tried to get him to shake hands.

  “Well, I’ve got to rush,” she said. “So much going on here at St. Anne’s tonight — but let me see here—” She reached into her habit. I could feel the tension in my captor and watched him reach into his left-hand jacket pocket.

  Please God, no — please God, no — please.

  I was on the verge of screaming a warning when she brought her hand back out with — of all things — a holy card. I stared at it dumbly and she pushed it into my left hand. A holy card of St. Jude. I wanted to break into hysterics.

  “Thank you, Sister,” I croaked out.

  “You do know your saints, don’t you, Irene?”

  “Yes, Sister.” She nodded and went on down the hall.

  SEVEN PEOPLE KILLED BECAUSE OF HOLY CARD. What a headline that would make. HOLY CARD BLAMED IN HOSPITAL MASSACRE. ST. JUDE SHOOTING SPREE.

  I had to inwardly shout at myself to get myself to pull it back together.

  We walked outside and through the cold, heavy rain as if it were not falling. He opened the passenger door to a blue van. He pulled the gun out and said, “Get in.”

  He climbed in behind me, poking me in the ribs with the gun. “You drive.”

  As I crawled into the driver’s seat, I noticed something like a backpack in the back of the van. There was only one.

  “Get going. Head out to Dunleavy Road.”

  I did as he said. I started to reconsider the backpack notion. Dunleavy Road led out to a private airstrip. It was about six miles out of town, up in the hills.

  “Doing some parachuting?” I asked.

  “You’ll be dead by the time I do.”

  “Nasty weather for it.”

  “That’s merely a reprieve for you. But the storm is letting up, and by tomorrow, when we take off, the skies should be that glorious blue that only rain or a Santa Ana wind can bring to Southern California.”

  “This storm doesn’t look like it’s letting up.”

  “Oh, but it is. This is just the tail end of it. I’ve monitored this storm quite closely. You’ll see. Before long, it will hardly be drizzling.”

  We fell into silence as I made the series of turns that would take us out to Dunleavy. Once or twice I thought someone was following us. My hopes would soar, then be dashed at the next intersection.

  “I know your mother was killed,” I said. “But why blame people who were only children? Why not go after people who were adults at the time?”

  “Ah, so your curiosity is still alive. Good, good. It will make these last hours of yours pass more pleasantly.” He didn’t say anything for a while, then answered. “They set themselves up as gods. The Olympus Center and its little gods. It was time for them to fall from Olympus.”

  “But they were children.”

  “Children are the most cruel beings on earth.”

  “They didn’t even remember the incident.”

  “Exactly. The most painful, awful time of my life. And to them? Nothing. They caused my mother’s death. They blamed her. They were wrong.”

  “She did lose her temper.”

  “No. They said she lost her temper, but she didn’t. You see, they were false judges. None of them saw what happened very clearly. But they took advantage of us. We were poor. My mother couldn’t afford the kind of attorney that could have saved her life.”

  “She didn’t deny hurting the boy.”

  “Don’t you see? She was trying to protect me. I shoved that miserable sonofabitch into the wall. I did! The little bastard was choking me to death. She ran over, she tried to pull him off me, but I was the one who shoved him into that wall! They were liars! They were all liars! They hated me and they lied!” He was shouting, and scaring the hell out of me. His eyes were wild and angry, and I berated myself for bringing the whole subject up.

  He grew quiet, then said, “She was the best mother in the world.”

  I looked over at him. He was crying.

  We turned onto Dunleavy. There’s about a five mile strip of it that runs along a flood control channel. As he had said it would, the rain had lightened to a drizzle, but the road was slick and muddy from rain and road construction. Bulldozers and graders sat idle on the right shoulder.

  I glanced into the side mirror and felt knots forming in my stomach. We were being followed. I was fairly sure it was Frank’s car. I realized it would be much harder for him to stay out of sight on this dark, deserted road.

  Jimmy looked into the mirror on his side.

  “What about Maggie Robinson?” I asked, trying to distract him. “She was a good mother, wasn’t she?”

  He turned to glare at me. “She was a rotten bitch who did nothing but punish me for her son’s death for years. She was a little worried at first, afraid the Social Service people would come around, check on her. Afraid they hadn’t made me disappear.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Don’t pretend you don’t know. Your detective friend was looking into it. You know what he learned. I was just so much lost paperwork. When my stepmother began to realize that she and J.D. had pulled it off, she started beating me. She used to tie me up and burn me with cigarettes. Look!” He pulled back a sleeve. There were rounded scars all along the inside of his arm. “I’d scream bloody murder, but did anyone ever help me? No. I was that poor Mrs. Davis’s problem child.”

  He was silent for a moment, brooding. “I learned from her, though. I learned how to be invisible. It was the only way to be safe. I learned how to avoid attracting attention. She needed attention — couldn’t get enough of it. I didn’t. It made me stronger than her. No one knew what I was thinking, what I was feeling.”

  “Why didn’t you just kill her?”

  “I thought about it,” he said. “Especially after my mother died. Peggy wouldn’t let me grieve for my own mother. She’d tell me over and over how glad she was that my mother was dead. ‘Now we’re even,’ she’d say. But I didn’t let her know what I felt. It didn’t matter. She didn’t matter. She was mean, she was greedy, she was selfish — but she wasn’t the one who caused the problem in the first place. The little liars caused it. Not her. Peggy Davis. Pathetic. She wasn’t any more real than I was. She made sure I wasn’t. Made me change my name. My name! My father was a war hero and I couldn’t use his name!”

  “So Margaret Robinson became Margaret Davis,” I said softly, trying to get him to lower his own voice, to calm down. “It took me awhile to make the connection between the nicknames for Margaret; she just changed from Maggie to Peggy. And you became Justin Davis.”

  He was looking in the mirror again and didn’t answer me.

  “Jimmy,” I asked, trying to get his attention away from it, “why now? Why did you wait all these years?”

  He looked back at me. “She would have told on me.”

  “Who, Edna?”

  “No, no. Peggy. I used to be afraid of her. Not now. Not now… but before, before I learned that she was weak, she knew how to scare me. She was in control. That’s what it’s all about, you know. Being in control. She knew about me, so she was in charge. The person in control has to know everything. That’s why I’m in control now. I know you. I’ve studied you. I know your secrets. Peggy… she knew all kinds of thi
ngs. We had…” his eyes darted away from me for a moment. “We had secrets,” he said, watching me again, as if looking for some reaction. When I said nothing, he went on. “But then the funniest thing happened. She forgot! She forgot everything! I thought it was one of her tricks at first, but it wasn’t. She couldn’t tell anyone anything. Nothing at all! Isn’t that funny?”

  He smiled at me. It was the first time I had ever seen him smile for more than a few seconds. A big, gentle smile. It transformed him somehow, and oddly, for a brief moment, he wasn’t so frightening. There was a small boy there, an eight-year-old, perhaps. What kind of monster wouldn’t pity Jimmy Grant? he once asked me. There was a killer beneath his smile, yes — but I wondered who he might have become if someone as monstrous as Peggy Davis hadn’t been allowed to raise him.

  He looked over at the side mirror.

  The smile was gone.

  “You bitch! You had us followed. It’s your boyfriend, isn’t it? Step on it — go on, speed up!”

  “The road is muddy here—”

  “Goddamn it! I said speed up!”

  I stepped down on the accelerator. It was all I could do to keep the van under control.

  “Damn you! Why did you have to ruin everything! It could have been so wonderful! I would have been good to you, you know.” He rolled down his window and leaned out with the gun. “Say good-bye to Mr. Harriman. He’s about to die, Cassandra.”

  Suddenly I didn’t care what Jimmy Grant might do to me. I only knew that I wouldn’t let him kill Frank. I used the only weapon I had on hand. I jerked the steering wheel hard to the right.

  27

  FOR A FEW SECONDS, it was dream like; an unreal combination of motion and time that didn’t fit in the usual order of either. The van went into a spin, the mud from the construction removing all friction from beneath the wheels. We glided along at an amazing speed. With a deafening bang, we tore through a chain-link fence, then suddenly there was a sensation of moving through space. Which, of course, is exactly what we were doing.

  For an instant I saw the concrete walls of the flood control channel sailing by in the headlights. Then all too soon, a bone-jarring impact, an explosion of sound, blackness.

  I don’t know how long I was out. When I came to, I thought for a moment that I had been blinded — it was pitch black. I hurt like hell all over — but my right side was killing me. The left side of my head throbbed, and I couldn’t even figure out what I had hit it on. I could hear the roar of water rushing by me. Jimmy Grant was groaning and pleading for help. I had no idea where he was. I had no idea where I was. I had never felt such an utterly complete sense of disorientation.

  My eyes began adjusting to the darkness — no, not adjusting. The moon was coming out. But my perspective on my surroundings seemed odd to me. Gradually, I realized that the van had landed on its side in the channel, blowing out the windows and headlights with the impact. I was covered with bits of glass, suspended above the water by my seat belt, which was pressing painfully into my right hip and my chest. I felt for and found the steering wheel, gripping it to ease some of the pressure from the belt. I straightened my legs, bracing my feet against the floorboard to help as well.

  It was then that I got my first look at Jimmy Grant. His face was a bloody mess, and it was the only part of him that was above water. A mask, eyes wide with fright. “Help me,” he said. I was still dazed, and couldn’t figure out at first what was wrong. Then I saw that he was being pressed against the seat by the force of the current, and that he had somehow tangled himself in his seat belt. The moon went behind a cloud, and I lost sight of him.

  I tried reaching down to him with my right hand. He must have somehow worked a hand free, because I felt his left hand grasp on to mine, skin chilled and wet. “Help,” he said again, as if he expected none.

  I pulled him up a little farther. The water was cold, and he had heavier clothes on than I did. They were weighing him down. Debris from the channel, sticks and old beer cans and small stones were coming in through the windshield, striking hard against him.

  “I can’t,” he said weakly. “I can’t hang on.”

  The moon came out again and I took another look at him. With horror, I saw that his right arm was almost completely severed. He had to be losing a lot of blood from it. His grip was weakening, and I knew I wouldn’t be able to hold him by myself. Panic filled his face. Suddenly a large dark object rocketed against him; there was a loud cracking sound as it rammed into his head with an awful force. A tree limb, I realized, as it spun back out into the current. He suddenly released his grip and fell back into the water, his head at an odd angle.

  There was a creaking sound, and I felt the van move. Every few minutes, objects from the channel would bang against it. Fearing the kind of blow I had just seen kill Jimmy Grant, I used every ounce of strength I had to pull myself back up away from the water. I had to get out.

  The driver’s-side window above me was broken, but jagged edges made me loath to try to go through it. I tried opening the door. It wouldn’t budge. I’d have better luck with the window. I took my jacket off slowly, afraid that if I moved too much I’d end up in the water with Jimmy Grant.

  Finally it was off. I covered my arm with it, awkwardly bracing myself as best I could, and smashed out the remaining pieces of glass. For a moment, I thought I heard a voice, but it was lost in the roar of the water. I shouted back, hoping someone could hear me over the noise.

  Now I faced a dilemma. If I loosened the seat belt, and didn’t have the strength to pull myself out, I’d fall into the channel. If I didn’t, the belt would continue to hold me to the seat, but I’d never be able to crawl out of the window.

  I gripped the edge of the window sill with one arm, and loosened the belt. My legs braced me for a moment, and I put the other hand up. I tried to push myself up. I slipped. In one arm-wrenching motion, I was left hanging, my arms above me, my legs in the cold water, the rest of me getting splashed with it. My headache was suddenly galloping through my skull. There was something soft beneath my feet. With alarm, I realized it was Jimmy Grant.

  The horror of standing on him brought a surge of energy to me. I used my legs to scramble up on to the console between the seats and out of the water. I rested a moment, then straightened my legs. Gradually, pulling with my arms and pushing with my feet, I managed to get myself through the window. Sick and dizzy, I crawled out on to the side of the van.

  I lay there shivering, utterly exhausted. I heard my name.

  “Irene!” I rolled on to my side and looked over at the bank. Frank was standing there.

  I waved a tired arm at him.

  “Are you okay?” he shouted.

  “I’m okay!” I shouted back, even though it made my head hurt.

  “Stay there, help is coming.”

  Stay there. I wanted to laugh. I guess he thought I would try swimming ashore. I could barely move. Even if I had the strength, I knew not to try it.

  Frank was pacing the bank like a tiger in a cage. I could tell he wanted to do something, was frustrated.

  “Relax!” I shouted.

  I could hear him laugh. A nice sound.

  Soon I also heard sirens. Red lights pulsed as police and emergency vehicles pulled up. Spotlights were turned on and aimed at the van.

  A helicopter arrived. They lowered a man down, who wrapped me in the welcome warmth of a big blanket. He helped me into a harness, and I was taken up into the hovering helicopter.

  I was a little pissed off that my first helicopter ride was such a short one, but I was anxious to reach Frank and reassure him. Paramedics stepped in before I could do much along those lines. They talked about taking me to the hospital, but I managed to convince them that I wasn’t suffering anything worse than bruises and a headache.

  The rescue workers had warmed me up again with more blankets and warm liquids. I was battered but lucid, no longer suffering the worst part of the coldwater soaking. Eventually I answered questions from som
e of Frank’s coworkers. They seemed to believe they’d know where to find me if they had more questions. I didn’t want to stick around to watch Jimmy being taken from the water.

  I knew Frank was really shaken, because he didn’t talk much while all of this was going on; he just took my hand between his and held onto it for a long time. Finally, someone said I could go home. We were both ready for that.

  We crawled into bed together and he rubbed my sore muscles while we told each other stories about our evenings. He had been walking away from Steven Kincaid’s room when a nun came running up to him and told him I was in danger. Good old Sister Theresa. She hadn’t missed a thing. Jimmy Grant just didn’t know what he was up against. The holy card hadn’t just been a stalling tactic, she told me later. St. Jude is the patron saint of hopeless causes.

  EVEN THOUGH WE were both worn out, Frank and I talked for a long time that night. We fell asleep spooning, and all things considered, I’ll take spooning with Frank over a helicopter ride any old day.

  THE NEXT DAY, the Express ran a short story on the death of Death, or Thanatos. It provided details Mark Baker had worked hard to gather: Jimmy Grant/Justin Davis had rigged his own fuel mix in an attempt to draw suspicion away from himself. As Justin Davis, he had provided software for some of the computer security for Mercury Aircraft, and made sure he had access to it as long as he needed it. As the police were already learning by the time he abducted me, Davis had also done work for Las Piernas College, including providing a card key system for employee access. It wasn’t difficult for him to get into Edna Blaylock’s and Don Edgerton’s offices. He planted the voice synthesizer in Edgerton’s office.

  While Edgerton was the buyer of a hunter’s slingshot, the police suspected that during the time Jimmy Grant was stalking his intended victims, he learned of the purchase. He obtained a similar one.

  Edgerton, it turned out, was trying to write a baseball book on the rise and fall of the Pacific Coast League, a strong minor league that had boasted the likes of Joe DiMaggio in the days before the Dodgers or the Giants moved west. Edgerton, self-conscious about his writing, had become nervous when he saw me getting near his manuscript. He later hired Mark Baker to help him write the book.