by Chaz McGee
They would get there again. I felt it. It would take time. but, with love, they would get there again.
Chapter 35
Colin Gunn was waiting for Maggie on the front porch of his house, a bottle of Maker’s Mark at his side. He knew she’d be coming, and sooner rather than later. She always visited him after she closed a case.
“Did you hear?” Maggie asked as she mounted the front steps. Her smile was wide. Her father’s house was the one place in the world where she allowed herself to show joy and pride in what she could do.
Colin raised a glass in a toast to her, even though it was not yet noon. This qualified as one of his many special occasions. “Eight phone calls from the boys already and the phone is still ringing. You’ve become a legend, Maggie May.”
“Gonzales is pissed. I skipped out on his press conference.”
“Gonzales is down at St. Ignatius throwing quarters into the votive box and starting a month-long novena of thanks that God sent you to him. You made that walking, talking, ladder-climbing, ass-kissing mannequin look good.”
Maggie laughed and took her customary seat on the porch, in the rocking chair next to his wheelchair. “You heard who the perp was, right? Bobby D’Amato.”
“I heard.” Her father’s voice was sad. He knew what the odds were and what lay ahead. “I thought the boy was dead. Not so sure it’s better this way.”
“I think his parents are prepared,” Maggie said. “They seem willing to stand by him no matter what.”
“The boy deserves no less after all he’s been through. And the man who took him?”
“Still alive,” Maggie answered. “If you call that living.” She hesitated, not sure if she should even tell her father what she had to say next. “They’re going to keep him alive,” she finally said. “At least for as long as it takes to try Bobby D’Amato for the fire and for taking Tyler Matthews. The hospital is grateful to Bobby for his help solving the Harker murder, even if the killer was one of their own. This is their way of saying thanks. So long as they can keep Howard McGrew alive, Bobby D’Amato won’t face murder charges, at least. And if he dies after the trial is over, the DA has already said he won’t file new charges.”
“That’s a generous gesture on the hospital’s part, considering how much it will cost them. They wanted four thousand dollars from poor Mrs. Nevins down the street just for setting her broken arm. And Maggie?” Colin looked at his daughter, shaking his head. “You will forgive me if I say that every minute that man lies in his bed in the burn unit consumed with agony is a minute of agony he deserves. He was going to burn sooner or later, whether in hell or here on earth. He brought that fate on himself.”
“It’s okay, Dad,” she said. “You’re not the only one who thinks that. Can I have a glass of that?”
He poured her a tumbler of whiskey. She took a deep sip, and then laid her head back against the rocker and sighed. “I asked Gonzales to give Calvano another chance.”
“Did you?” her father asked, surprised. “Oh, boy. You’ve got more than a drop of your mother in you. The bums she used to feed. The old friends she never gave up on.”
“Do you ever talk to her?” Maggie asked suddenly.
“Your mother? Of course I do.” He was silent, thinking about it. “I talk to her more now than I did when she was alive.”
“Does she answer?”
“Are you daft?” Colin took another sip of whiskey. “The day she starts answering me is the day I want you to wheel me down to the VA and put me in the drooler ward.”
“I just wondered.” Maggie hesitated. She wanted to say more but did not know how to begin.
“What is it?” her father asked. “What’s got your mind buzzing?”
“If I told you, you’ll think I was crazy.”
“A hunch?” he guessed. “My little girl had a hunch that was heaven-sent?”
“What’s that?”
“It’s when you do something crazy because your gut tells you to do it, and it turns out you were right, and you can’t tell anyone else because then they’ll think you’re either crazy or, well, they’ll think you’re crazy.”
“You had those?”
“Sure I did. Solved a good eighth of my cases with them. You don’t talk about it, though. It’s like changing your underwear when you’re on a winning streak. If you’re smart, you just don’t do it.”
“I do,” Maggie said emphatically. “Change my underwear, that is.”
“Tell me about this hunch,” he asked curiously. “I want to know what happened.”
Another gulp of Maker’s Mark convinced her, and Maggie ended up telling her father all about the drawing the little girl had given her in the hospital and how it had led her to Tyler Matthews.
“You see?” her father said when she was done. “That’s why your mother and I made you go to Sunday school and church every week.”
“I don’t see what getting beaten with a ruler by a bad-tempered nun who smells like onions has to do with it,” Maggie said grudgingly. I had to smile. I’d caught a glimpse of a reluctant young Maggie, being scrubbed for church, protesting the entire time.
“Oh, ye of little faith,” her father retorted. He filled his glass again, happily, and I started to wonder just how long he’d been sitting out there on his front porch waiting for his daughter.
“Maggie?”
As soon as I heard the voice, I knew who it was.
He had come for her.
Christian Fletcher stood at the end of the walkway, dressed in a golf shirt and pants. The bastard even looked good out of his doctor clothes. He looked like the king of the country club.
Maggie stood so abruptly, I thought the rocking chair might tip over.
Oddly, her father seemed neither surprised nor perturbed.
“How did you find me?” Maggie asked him.
“Your friend Peggy told me.” He glanced at Colin quickly. Aha. Colin had told Peggy that Maggie would be stopping by. Those two old lovebirds were up to something.
“Peggy?” Maggie asked. She was walking slowly toward Fletcher, as if she could not quite control her body. I don’t think she was even aware of what she was doing. He was near—and she wanted to be nearer to him.
“Yes,” Fletcher explained. “I stopped by the station house to offer my help with the case. To tell you what I know about Serena’s movements over the past few months. Not that I know much, apparently, about my own wife.” He looked Maggie straight in the eye. “I didn’t know about it, Maggie. I swear to you, I didn’t. I had no idea what Serena was doing or what she had done. It makes sense now, of course. I understand why Fiona was acting the way she was around me, the time she suggested we get coffee, and then asked me about my marriage.” He ran out of words to say and just shrugged, hoping she would trust him.
“I know,” Maggie said. “I believe you.”
“Then why did you act like you didn’t even see me in the lobby? Why did you avoid me in the hospital?”
“Christian, this is probably going to be the longest and most difficult court case of my career. Your wife is going to take us to the mat. I can only imagine the lawyers she can afford, the fight she’ll put up. She’s going to drag me through the mud, and you, too. I have to be able to sit up there on the stand and tell the truth when I’m asked if I have a personal relationship with you.”
“I understand,” he said quickly. “I get that part. I’m not here to ask you to do anything except promise me that you’ll wait. That you’ll wait until . . .” He searched for the right words. “Until we have the chance to give it a shot.”
She didn’t say anything at first, and I could tell Christian Fletcher’s heart was undergoing a torturous moment of regret and indecision as he began to think that he had been a fool, that he should never have put his heart on the line. Oh, how people are like that. They offer their hearts, but a heart can never be offered without the fear of rejection attached—and that fear can be as paralyzing as tangled marionette strings
. “I’m sorry,” he said into the silence. “I never should have come—”
“Of course I’ll wait,” Maggie interrupted. “Christian, waiting is nothing for me. I haven’t dated a man in . . . I don’t know, two years?”
“Three and a half,” her father called down from the porch.
Maggie turned and glared at him. “Dad,” she said firmly.
“I’m going to go freshen my ice,” Colin Gunn declared, then wheeled his chair through the front door with a whole lot of unnecessarily conspicuous effort.
“Sorry about that,” Maggie told Fletcher. He didn’t care. Her father could have raced down his access ramp naked and done wheelies down the sidewalk for all Fletcher cared. All he saw and heard was Maggie.
I understood how he felt.
“You’ll wait?” he asked, still not sure of his good fortune.
“Of course,” she said, stepping closer. She looked up into his eyes, and I felt the thought pass between them again: This is real.
I knew it was real as well, and I knew something else that they did not know. I knew it because I had squandered moments like this in my life—laughed through them, slurred through them, run from them as fast as I could. Because of that, I had thrown away my chances of feeling what they were experiencing now. But at least I had learned from it. What I knew, that they did not, was this: It was real because they both had the courage to acknowledge it was real. It was real because they both had been through enough loneliness and unhappiness to realize how rare that feeling of two hearts merging is, and how much of a waste it would be to throw that feeling away because you were afraid you might get hurt by it one day. Letting yourself feel like that is like leaping off a cliff into the darkness and letting the momentum take you. Sure, you step out into the abyss, but oh, when you do, what a rush it is.
“It might be a long time,” Maggie told him. She had put her hands on his arms, and he pulled her closer. It was physics, I knew, physics of the heart. For every emotion, there was a corresponding motion.
Oh, to be alive again.
“I don’t care how long it takes,” Fletcher said. He bent down and kissed her, and when I felt what that kiss meant to each of them, how it changed each of them forever, I knew it was time for me to walk away. This was not my world. It was not my turn. It was time to surrender the battle.
And yet, I needed to be a part of their joy, even if only by proximity. I returned to the front porch just as Colin Gunn was wheeling himself back outside, extra glasses of ice balanced precariously on his lap.
He did not give the walkway a glance. He wheeled over to his favorite comer of the porch, where shrubs hid Maggie and Fletcher from his view, and lined up the glasses neatly on the ledge of the stone porch, filling each one with two fingers of whiskey.
I counted the glasses: there were three of them. Was he going to invite Fletcher to join them?
“The third one’s for you, Fahey,” I heard him say.
The shock electrified me to my core. Colin Gunn was talking to me.
“Relax, Fahey,” he said cheerfully, raising a toast in my general direction. “I can’t see you, but I know you’re there. You always smelled like tomato sauce and stale beer. You still do. Here’s to you, son—salute.”
He raised his glass to me, gulped at his whiskey, and smacked his lips in satisfaction. He dropped his voice to a whisper.
“I won’t say anything to Maggie,” he promised me. “But I know you’re here to watch over her. So long as you keep my little girl safe, you and I are going to get along just fine.”
Epilogue
A man lies on an inflatable bed in a dimly lit hospital room. The air is hot and moist, though he can only feel it on his face, where the smallest of areas around his eyes remains uncovered. His body has been wound in bandages that peel off his charred skin when the nurses come in to change them. They reapply the salve that smells like metal and do not know he sees them. They think he is unconscious.
He knows he must stay awake.
The room is filled with soft hums. Respirators and humidifiers pump out the oxygen that keeps him alive. His lungs feel as if they are filled with liquid fire. Each breath sears his body from the inside out. The agony is unendurable, but he must endure it.
He knows he must stay awake.
Few are allowed inside his room. The risk of infection is too great. He sees only the shadows of people walking past in the hallway, voices hushed.
He sees the darker shadows, too.
They cling to the ceiling above him. They creep along the walls. They are gathering, watching his every twitch. When he closes his eyes, they inch forward, probing, tasting, feeding on his pain.
He knows he must stay awake.
It will get worse, the pain. He has heard the nurses whispering outside his room. When the blackened flesh is scraped away and the nerves regenerate, his present pain will seem like a respite. They want to put him under, to keep him deep in twilight where he will have no control. Where he will not even be able to open his eyes.
When the time comes, he will fight them.
He sees the shadows now, slinking closer. They hide in the corners of the room, biding their time. They live under his bed, and their dark power radiates upward with a magnetic pull.
Pain floods his body, but he fights to stay awake. He knows what will happen if he closes his eyes.
He knows they have come to take him.