“What’s the matter?”
He tossed the phone to me. “Dial 911. Give them the address. Tell them there’s someone unconscious inside, you don’t know the cause. Tell them to send an ambulance.”
“What’s wrong? What’s—”
“Just do it, Mike,” he said.
He stepped back a pace and went at the door foot-first. He had to kick it twice before he got it open, and by then I had a 911 dispatcher on the line. My voice was shaking as I gave her the information. I hung up and went inside.
Mrs. Jhun was lying on the living room floor. The teacup she had been carrying the last time I saw her lay shattered nearby. Riel was bending over her.
“She’s breathing,” he said, and he sounded relieved, which scared me. It hadn’t occurred to me that she might not be. “Hand me that blanket.”
I grabbed the knitted blanket that Mrs. Jhun had draped over the back of her couch. Riel laid it over her, covering her up to her chin.
“You get through to 911?” he asked.
I nodded. “They’re sending someone.” I looked at Mrs. Jhun. I always used to tease her that she looked so young, but she didn’t look young anymore. She looked old and frail, and it started to seem possible that she was dying.
“Sit down, Mike,” Riel said.
I heard the words, but couldn’t make myself act on them. I kept staring at Mrs. Jhun lying there, looking so helpless.
“Mike!”
I looked from Mrs. Jhun to Riel.
“Sit down, Mike, before you fall down.” Again with the calm voice, the one that made you think he had the situation under control, even if he didn’t. I backed over to the couch and dropped down onto it.
Pretty soon I heard the bleating of an ambulance siren. Car doors opened and slammed. Footsteps thundered on the porch steps, then on the porch, and then the room filled with paramedics and equipment and a gurney. Riel calmly filled them in, then stepped back. He nodded to me.
“Come on.”
“I want to see what’s happening.”
He touched my arm. “Let’s wait outside, Mike, and let the professionals do their job.”
I didn’t want to leave, but I got up anyway, and we went outside. By now, any neighbors that were around had come out of their houses and were either standing on their porches or down on the sidewalk, wanting to know what had happened.
“You think she’s going to be okay?” I asked.
“I don’t know,” Riel said. At least it was an honest answer.
The paramedics came out of the house with Mrs. Jhun on the gurney. Her eyes were still closed. Riel followed them to the ambulance. I saw him asking questions as they loaded her inside. My heart almost stopped when they slammed the ambulance door. Riel came back onto the porch.
“They’re taking her to East General,” he said. “You want to go?”
I nodded and headed for the car. He tossed me his keys.
“I’ll be right there,” he said.
I wanted to tell him, “Now! I want to go now!” Then I saw what he was doing. He went over to the small group of people who were standing on the sidewalk and started talking to them. I don’t know what he asked, but one of the people stepped forward. I recognized her. She lived next door to Mrs. Jhun. Sometimes they had tea together. Riel talked to her, gesturing back toward the house. He took a notebook out of his pocket, wrote down something, then tore out the sheet and handed it to the woman. Finally he came back to the car.
“The next-door neighbor is going to call someone to fix the door,” he said as he turned the key in the ignition. “She says most of the family is back in Korea but that there’s a niece in Vancouver. You know their names or how to get in touch with them?”
I didn’t. “But they write to her all the time,” I said, “and I know she telephones them on Sundays. She always waits until the rates are low.”
Riel nodded. “I’ll drop you at the hospital, then come back and see if I can find their phone numbers.”
The East General emergency room was packed, but it didn’t take long for Riel to find out that Mrs. Jhun was there and being seen by a doctor.
“This could take a while,” he warned me.
I didn’t care. I didn’t have anything better to do.
“I’ll be back as soon as I can,” Riel promised.
He was back thirty minutes later. He went straight to the nurse on duty, and I saw him give her a piece of paper. He talked to her for a while. When he came and claimed the chair next to mine in the waiting room he said, “Apparently she’s had a stroke.”
“Is that bad?”
“It can be really bad,” he said, which surprised me. A lot of grown-ups would have just told me not to worry.
We waited through three cups of coffee for Riel and two cans of Coke for me and still nothing happened. Riel asked me if I wanted something to eat. My stomach had settled down a lot, but I wasn’t interested in food.
“I’m not hungry,” I said.
He didn’t push the issue.
Then I saw a woman with a stethoscope slung around her neck talking to the same nurse Riel had spoken to. When the nurse pointed out Riel, the woman looked faintly surprised. She came toward us. I nudged Riel and we both got to our feet.
“John?” she said. There were little frown marks between her eyes.
“Susan.” Riel turned to me. “Mike, this is Dr. Thomas.”
“You know Mrs. John?” Dr. Thomas asked Riel.
“Jhun,” I said. “It’s Jhun.”
Riel introduced me and said, “She’s a family friend of Mike’s. We found her.”
“Do you know how to contact her family?”
“I gave the information to the nurse,” Riel said.
“How is she?” I asked.
Dr. Thomas glanced at Riel before saying, “Her condition is grave. We’ll contact her family, John, but …” She shrugged.
“Can I see her?” I asked.
“Not right now, Mike,” Dr. Thomas said. “Maybe in a while.”
Maybe. Not definitely.
It was late in the day by now. “I’m going to take Mike home,” Riel said. “You’ve got my cell number. Call me if anything happens, Susan, okay?”
She said she would.
Riel drove me home—it wasn’t far—but I couldn’t make myself get out of the car, not without knowing for sure.
“Grave, that’s not good, is it?” I said. That’s how Dr. Thomas has described Mrs. Jhun’s condition. Grave.
Riel looked straight at me and shook his head. “It’s about as bad as it gets,” he said. Jeez, the guy never sugar-coated anything. “But it doesn’t mean the situation can’t turn around.”
“You think it will?”
I couldn’t read what was in the long, hard look he gave me.
“I’m not a doctor, Mike. I really don’t know.” It was quiet in the car again. It seemed like it was quiet in the whole world. Then, “You had anything to eat today?”
I shook my head. For the first part of the day, food was about the last thing I wanted to think about. After that, everything else had crowded out the idea.
Riel turned the key in the ignition. “I don’t think too well on an empty stomach,” he said.
We ended up at a tiny restaurant down on Queen Street near Coxwell. I guessed it wasn’t much of a coincidence that there was a cop shop right up the street. Riel claimed the booth in the very back and flagged the waitress over.
“They do great ribs here, Mike,” he said. “You like ribs?”
The last time I had had ribs, they had been home-cooked. By my mother. I had liked them just fine.
It turned out that the ribs at this restaurant weren’t anything like the ones Mom used to make, but I liked them just fine, too. So did Riel, from the way he polished them off. He pushed his plate aside, signaled for a refill on his coffee, and fished a pen and a piece of paper out of his jacket pocket.
“Tell me what she said,” he said. “The exact words, if you c
an remember them.”
I told him again, as well as I could recall.
He wrote down what I said. “That’s it, just a shiny mouth?”
I nodded.
“What did she mean?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “She’s always saying stuff like that. She said my eyes reminded her of flowers.”
“Did you ask her what she meant?”
“I started to,” I said. “But she said she was tired and she went inside.”
He stared down at the words he had written. “Shiny mouth,” he muttered. “That could be someone with braces on their teeth. A kid, maybe? Could be someone with a gold or silver cap, or several of them. Could be someone with a gold toothpick or something like that in his mouth.” He sighed. “I guess it could even be a drag queen with glitter lipstick or one of those kids that hang out down on Queen, the ones with the spiky hair.”
“Man, that’s so old,” I said. I knew there were still guys like that around. When were they going to figure out that the eighties were long gone?
He shook his head. “Did she say that she got a good look at the guy?”
I didn’t know.
Riel looked at his notes again. “The man with the shiny mouth,” he murmured. He peered at me again. “You sure that’s what she said? The man with the shiny mouth, not a man with a shiny mouth?”
A, the? I wasn’t sure.
“What difference does it make?” I asked.
“Maybe none. But think about it. She remembers a guy with a shiny mouth, she’d tell you, I saw a guy with a shiny mouth. But if she’d seen the guy around before somewhere and had already noticed that he had a shiny mouth, then maybe she’d think of him as the man with the shiny mouth. Which means maybe she knows him or could at least give a good description of him.”
“Yeah,” I said, and felt fluttery feathers of hope in my heart.
Riel waved for the bill.
“I’m going to take you home,” he said, “then I’m going back to the hospital to check on Mrs. Jhun. Maybe she can tell us something.”
“I’m coming with you.”
“Mike, you’ve been out all day. What about your uncle?”
That was a good one. “Billy’s probably not even home,” I said. “So you can either take me with you, or I’ll walk over on my own. Either way, I’m going back to the hospital.”
He slapped some money down onto the table and didn’t argue when I followed him back to the car and got in the passenger side. He’d just parked the car and we were about to get out and cross the street to the hospital when his cell phone rang. He dug into his pocket for it.
“Riel,” he said. He glanced at me as he listened to whatever his caller was saying. He hit “off ” and slipped the phone back into his pocket. “Sorry, Mike,” was all he said.
I started to cry. I felt like a big baby sitting there, tears running down my cheeks. Riel handed me a couple of tissues.
“She was nice,” I said, wiping at my tears. “She used to make me tea. I helped her paint her kitchen. I fixed her step.”
Riel didn’t say anything. He waited until I calmed down. Then we went into the hospital. Riel talked to one of the nurses, and then we sat in the waiting room until Dr. Thomas showed up again. Riel asked her a couple of questions.
“She never regained consciousness,” he said as he was driving me home for the second time that day. “That means she wasn’t in any pain, Mike.”
That was good. But it also meant that she hadn’t said anything to anybody about the man she had seen. That’s at least one reason why Riel had wanted to talk to Dr. Thomas.
I remembered something else Mrs. Jhun had told me. “She said she wanted to be buried with Mr. Jhun,” I said. “Do you think she will be?”
Riel shrugged. “I guess that depends on her family.”
The house was dark when Riel pulled up in front.
“You going to be okay?” he asked me.
If he meant, was I going to be happy, no, I wasn’t. I still couldn’t believe she was gone. She was such a sweet old lady. But would I survive? Sure. I’d got through worse. It wasn’t easy. It stung and burned and ached all at the same time. But—
“Yeah,” I said. I got out of the car. Then, I couldn’t help it, I ducked down to ask, “So is that the end of it? Nothing else anyone can do?”
“About Mrs. Jhun?”
“About Mom.”
“I said I’d look into it, Mike.”
“But you already told me your friends are too busy.”
“I’m not too busy,” he said. “And I’ve got a lot more friends. See you at school, Mike. And do your homework, okay?”
CHAPTER TEN
It was an all-round lousy weekend. I hung out near Jen’s house on Sunday morning, hoping to catch her. After about an hour, I saw one of her neighbors peeking out from behind the curtains. The guy was probably a heartbeat away from calling the cops on me, so I took off. I tried phoning her from a pay phone, but her mother answered, so I hung up. I figured there was maybe half a chance that her mother would say something to Jen and Jen would know it was me who had called and she’d try to contact me, so I raced home and sat around there for a couple of hours. The phone didn’t ring even once.
Billy dragged himself out of bed at around three in the afternoon. I hadn’t seen him since he’d dropped me off on Saturday morning. When I told him what had happened to Mrs. Jhun, it took him a long time to even figure out who I was talking about. To top it off, neither Vin nor Sal was allowed to leave the house. Sal was still pretty much under house arrest. Vin was doubly busted because he had gone out Friday night when he was supposed to have been in his room. Billy said I was lucky. He said he’d never ground me, no matter what I did. It never accomplished anything, he said. My mom had grounded him a couple of times a week, he said, and look how much good it had done her, not to mention how much good it had done him.
I did all of my homework that night.
I stopped by Riel’s desk on the way out of history class.
“Nice to see your assignment on my desk first time I asked,” he said. He actually smiled at me. Then he got serious. “You holding up okay?”
I nodded. I wanted to ask him if he’d found out anything but figured it was probably too soon.
“I’ve got some appointments after school, Mike,” he said. “Maybe I’ll drop by your place later, okay?”
Big surprise. Billy was home when I got there. Dan and Lew were with him on the porch, feet up on the railing.
“Got any cupcakes, Mike?” Lew said. He loved to tease me about getting busted. “I sure love cupcakes.”
“How’s the girlfriend?” Dan asked. “Is it true she’s rich?”
I glowered at both of them.
“Mike’s best friend died,” Billy said.
“Jeez,” Dan said. He sounded shocked.
“She had a stroke,” Billy said. “It was that old Chinese woman—”
“Korean,” I corrected. Couldn’t he ever get it straight?
“She was, like, seventy-five or something,” Billy said.
Lew laughed. Dan didn’t. He jabbed Lew with his elbow.
“Sorry to hear it, Mikey,” he said. “Really.”
I pushed open the rickety screen door and went inside to see if there was anything to eat.
“Hey,” said Billy. He’d come in behind me.
I rummaged through the kitchen cupboards. Something definitely had to be done about the food situation around here.
“You see the paper today?” Billy said.
Was he kidding? I hardly ever read the paper. Neither did he. Billy wasn’t big on reading, unless it was the big number in the corner of paper money or the label on a bottle of beer.
“There was an article about your friend,” he said.
Okay, now he had my attention. I turned from the cupboard to look at him.
“I know you didn’t like Mrs. Jhun,” I said. “But I did, Billy. So lay off, okay?”
; “Whoa,” he said. He held up his hands, like he needed to protect himself from me. “I don’t mean her. I’m talking about that guy Riel. It says in the paper that you and Riel found the old lady in her house.”
“Yeah? So?” I abandoned the cupboard and crossed to the fridge.
“Why are you hanging around with that guy, Mike?”
I shut the fridge in disgust.
“Jeez, Billy, would it kill you to buy a few groceries every now and then? A guy could starve to death around here.” I thought about the steak and salad I had seen Riel make. Mom used to make me eat salads all the time. I’d forgotten how good they tasted.
“I asked you a question, Mike.”
“I’m not hanging around with him,” I said. “He’s my history teacher.”
“Right. And you and him just happened to be at that old lady’s house at the same time. It was pure coincidence, right?”
“I already told you. I’ve been trying to get him to look into what happened to Mom.”
“You ever heard that expression, let sleeping dogs lie?” Billy said, all annoyed. “Nancy’s gone. She’s been gone a long time now. Besides, what can Riel do? The guy isn’t even a cop anymore. Worse. He’s a coward. You shouldn’t hang around him.”
“What do you mean, a coward?” I asked.
“He used to be a cop, now he’s not a cop. What do you think I mean?” When I still didn’t get it, he said, “Don’t you ever wonder about stuff, Mikey? Didn’t you ask yourself how come a guy who used to be a cop is teaching school now?”
I had wondered, sort of.
“It made the news a couple of years ago,” Billy said. “Him and his partner, they were going into this apartment after some guy. Riel’s partner was supposed to go in first. Riel was the backup guy. So his partner busts down the door and the guy inside starts shooting and, guess what? Riel just stands there. Doesn’t get even one shot off. His partner goes down. Then Riel goes down. Next thing you know, Riel’s not a cop anymore.”
“No way,” I said. No way Riel would just stand there.
“It was in the papers, Mike.”
“The papers get things wrong sometimes,” I said. At least, that’s what people said. They must have got this wrong, too. Riel wasn’t the kind of guy who would let his partner get killed and not do a thing about it.
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