Eclipse

by Hilary Norman

  ‘Thanks, Al,’ Grace said. ‘And you both be careful, please.’

  ‘Always,’ Martinez said.

  ‘And make sure he calls me when he can.’

  ‘You got it,’ he said.

  Grace put the phone in her bag, took a moment.

  Whatever he’d said, Martinez was troubled about something.

  Didn’t mean it had to be Sam.

  But if Martinez was worried, then she was too.

  She sighed, got out of the car, locked it.

  Forced herself to direct her concentration on Felicia Delgado.

  And whatever it was that she wanted to tell her.

  ‘Will you be OK if I go get a little fresh air?’ David asked Mildred.

  Alvarez and Riley had departed just minutes before, on their way to find George Wiley.

  ‘I wish you wouldn’t,’ Mildred said.

  ‘I want to check on Adams, too,’ David said. ‘See what’s holding him up.’

  Mildred shook her head.

  ‘Please try and keep your head still,’ David reminded her. ‘And rest a little.’

  ‘I’ll rest better if you stay with me.’

  ‘I just need some air,’ he persisted. ‘A few minutes.’

  ‘Please be careful,’ she said.

  ‘I know we have pollution,’ David said lightly, ‘but I don’t think five minutes of Florida air’s going to kill me.’

  Mildred’s uncovered eye looked at him hard.

  ‘Please don’t do anything foolish, old man,’ she told him.

  ‘I don’t plan to,’ he told her.

  And was out the door in an instant.

  ‘Oh, dear Lord,’ Mildred said quietly.

  They had lived on a farm in south Louisiana. A widowed father and his two daughters, soybean and corn their main crops, their lives comfortable and, to outsiders, contented and respectable.

  Except that Jacques Grand – Jake to his friends, an attractive, hard-bodied, hard-working farmer – had been sexually abusing his older daughter, Antoinette, without compunction or constraint for years. Until one day in the fall of 1987 when she was ten, an hour after he had raped her once too often, Toni – as she was known – had summoned all her courage and had gone looking for him. Finding him in one of the barns, she told Jake that if he ever touched her again, she would tell her teachers exactly what he had been doing to her.

  Toni had not seen Katherine, her eight-year-old sister, come into the barn behind her.

  Had not realized that Kate had heard every word.

  Kate, who adored their papa.

  So that when Jake Grand had gone crazy, had called Toni a ‘lying bitch whore’ and thrown a pitchfork at her, Toni had ducked, and the big lethal tool had flown over her head and speared Kate’s left eye.

  In the local hospital, Jake said that Kate had tripped and fallen onto the pitchfork, and Toni, who had used up her resources of courage, did not contradict him because, after all, the pitchfork had been meant for her, and if she hadn’t ducked, this terrible thing would not have happened to her little sister.

  Kate had lost the sight in that eye. And because her right eye was already severely myopic, the child was now seriously sight impaired. Glasses were vital, but Kate had always disliked them. Now that she was virtually blind without them, she hated them more than ever, deliberately and repeatedly losing or breaking them. An optician suggested a contact lens, but Kate said it hurt her, wept when made to insert it, then took it out and stamped on it.

  ‘I’m so sorry, baby, I’m so sorry,’ Jake would tell her over and over, crucified with guilt because of what he’d done to her.

  ‘It’s OK, Papa,’ Kate always told him. ‘It was Toni’s fault, not yours.’

  For a while after that, Jake had left Toni alone, and so far as she knew, he never laid a finger on Kate. Yet her younger sister seemed sexually aware, and when the day came that Jake caught Kate masturbating, he yelled at her, said she was a whore, just like her sister.

  The beatings started after that.

  Always against Toni.

  ‘Without you,’ Jake lashed at her, ‘your sister would have her sight! Without you, she would have remained decent.’

  Kate knew all about it, saw Toni cowering, heard her cries of pain and fear, but since there was nothing she could do about it, and since she believed their father was right about it all being Toni’s fault, she never protested, and anyway, Jake still did everything for her, was the perfect daddy.

  And then one day in 1992, Toni couldn’t take it anymore.

  ‘It was during Andrew,’ she said now, almost twenty years later.

  It took Sam a second to realize that she was talking about Hurricane Andrew, which had hit Louisiana after it had smashed through Florida, and he was so sucked into Toni’s tale that he might almost have forgotten the gun pointed at him.

  1992. Toni would have been fifteen. Kate thirteen.

  ‘Jake had two guns,’ Toni said. ‘An old Remington pump-action shotgun, and his Colt pistol.’

  ‘This one,’ Kate said.

  It was the first time she’d spoken since Toni had begun, but there was excitement of a kind building in her now, Sam could almost feel it.

  Whereas Toni, the storyteller, seemed calm.

  In the eye of her own storm.

  ‘Papa had beaten me that morning for no reason at all.’ She shook her head, her dark eyes distant. ‘The weather had made me feel strange – I’m often affected by storms, but not like that. It seemed to be feeding something inside me – strength, maybe.’ She looked at Sam. ‘I went looking for the Remington. I’d always admired it, and our father loved it. I’d held it a few times, trying to absorb its power, I guess, but it always scared me too.’

  She stopped.

  The room was silent. No more sounds except the low hum of cars and, now and then, farther away, sirens.

  ‘That day, he’d used his belt and fists and he’d kicked me, too – and I was just so sick of it. And we’d all been hearing about the hurricane coming, and the wind was whipping up, and the storm was making me feel . . .’ Toni tailed off, then blinked. ‘So anyway, I found the shotgun, and picked it up and went looking for him. And found him.’

  ‘Only I’d been following her again,’ Kate said. ‘I’d seen her take the gun.’

  A slight tremor shook her hands, but she steadied herself, appeared very controlled, Sam thought, and the Colt that had once been their father’s was still pointed at him, and he had to presume that her dark glasses were prescription, that the vision in her right eye was perfectly corrected . . .

  ‘Kate saw me take aim,’ Toni said, ‘and she shouted out and ran at me, dragged the gun away from me. She was stronger than I’d realized, but still, if I’d fought her harder, I could have kept hold of it, but I remember being afraid that the gun might go off and shoot her, so I let her have it.’

  Sam waited.

  ‘And then a tree, a Bald Cypress – our very own Louisiana state tree – decided it couldn’t take the wind one second longer, and it fell, and I could see that it was going to hit Kate, so I hauled her out the way, and the gun went off and hit our father right between his eyes.’

  ‘It made a big, black hole,’ Kate said, and shuddered.

  A long shudder, seeming to pass all the way to her fingertips.

  Yet still she held fast to the Colt.

  ‘That was the moment when my mind came back,’ Toni said. ‘And when my little sister lost hers.’

  Mildred’s floor had been deserted except for a single nurse at the station near the elevators.

  ‘I’m looking for Doctor Wiley,’ David had told her casually.

  ‘First-floor lounge.’ She smiled. ‘I just directed your friends.’

  Friends and plain-clothes cops.

  He’d debated. Four stories down. Old legs and heart. Had chosen the elevator.

  He’d tried to sit it out with Mildred, just wait, like the retiree he was supposed to be, and let the cops do their jo
b, and if anyone respected the police, it was surely David Becket, whose pride in his detective son frequently filled his soul to bursting point. And Mike Alvarez and Beth Riley were more likely than anyone, except perhaps Sam, to see to it that that man – that doctor – got his.

  Yet he had not been able to sit it out. He wanted – needed – to see with his own eyes the moment when George Wiley was placed under arrest and removed from the Adams Clinic.

  He needed to know that Mildred was safe from him.

  On the first floor, he saw them. The lieutenant and the sergeant and him.

  They were talking. Alvarez was just talking to the sonofabitch.

  David strode toward them. ‘Why haven’t you cuffed him?’

  ‘It’s OK, Doctor Becket,’ Alvarez told him, ‘but I’d rather you stayed—’

  ‘What’s OK about it?’ David erupted. ‘This man needs restraining, he needs locking up.’

  ‘We’re dealing with it,’ Riley told him quietly.

  ‘Did you find the instrument,’ David demanded, ‘or did he get rid of it? Lord knows he had plenty of time.’

  ‘I’m just giving these officers my side of the story,’ George Wiley said. ‘Two sides to every story, Doctor Becket, remember?’

  ‘Don’t you dare patronize me, you—’

  ‘Hey,’ Alvarez said gently. ‘Let’s take it easy here.’

  ‘I was just telling the lieutenant about Mrs Becket’s hysteria about her eyes,’ Wiley said. ‘The fact that her considerable overreaction to eye exams was well-documented even before she checked in here.’

  ‘What the hell is going on here?’ David turned on Alvarez. ‘Why is this man being allowed to talk about my wife this way?’

  ‘Diazepam before the simplest of eye tests,’ Wiley went on. ‘If Doctor Ethan Adams were not so understanding—’

  ‘So help me,’ David said to Alvarez, ‘if you don’t shut this man up, I will.’

  ‘Hey,’ Beth Riley said. ‘Take it easy.’

  She reached out to touch David’s forearm, but he pulled away.

  ‘I wouldn’t have dreamed of mentioning such things,’ Wiley went on, ‘but medicine is my life, and I just can’t allow a neurotic patient—’

  ‘OK, that’s enough.’ Alvarez took a stand. ‘George Wiley, I am arresting you on suspicion of simple battery.’

  ‘Simple,’ David said, still fit to explode.

  ‘You won’t make it stick,’ Wiley told the lieutenant, then turned back to David. ‘And you will regret it, Doctor Becket.’

  In silence, Riley cuffed him.

  ‘Anything you say,’ Alvarez began.

  ‘What a very nice scene,’ a voice said from behind them.

  Ethan Adams’s eyes were angry.

  ‘Thank God,’ Wiley said.

  ‘Shut up,’ Adams said, and then, while Alvarez went on with the Miranda, he turned to David. ‘I apologize most sincerely for the delay, Doctor Becket, but I suggest that our priority now is for me to see my patient.’

  ‘Good,’ David said.

  ‘Doctor Adams,’ George Wiley began.

  And was silenced by one of the coldest, most damning stares that David Becket could remember seeing.

  Adams nodded at Alvarez and Riley, then turned his back on Wiley.

  ‘Shall we, Doctor Becket?’ he said.

  The stunned, lost expression on Wiley’s face was satisfaction of a kind for David.

  The rest, he guessed, could wait.

  Her father and the nurse had been asked by Felicia to stay out of her room.

  She would speak only to Dr Lucca.

  Grace knocked quietly. ‘Felicia, it’s Grace Lucca.’

  ‘OK,’ Felicia’s voice said.

  Opening the door, it took a moment for Grace to locate her. The drapes were open, but her dimmed bedside lamp was the only real light in the room, and the teenager was sitting on the floor on the far side of the bed. She was tucked into the corner near the window, her body twisted so that she half faced the wall, her legs drawn up, arms wrapped around her knees. She was not wearing her big dark glasses, though they were close at hand on the bedside table.

  She looked up at Grace. ‘Can you close the door, please?’

  Grace stepped back to do so, then stood still.

  This had to be driven, at least initially, by Felicia. The glasses were off and her face was not concealed, yet her position and body language spoke of hiding, and Grace knew that if she pushed too hard, the girl might just shut down again.

  ‘Where would you like me to sit?’ she asked.

  ‘I don’t mind.’

  The side of the bed might seem intrusive, Grace felt, the chair too formal and interview-like, but though choosing the floor would place them on the same level, it might also make Felicia feel trapped.

  Grace decided on the bed, near the foot, giving the teen space.

  ‘OK?’ she said.

  ‘Sure,’ Felicia said.

  ‘Your father called me,’ Grace said.

  ‘I asked him to.’

  Felicia shifted a little, and with more light now illuminating her face, Grace saw that she had been crying. Her eyes were brown, and though the whites were pink from weeping, they appeared normal, healthy eyes.

  ‘Don’t read too much into it,’ Felicia said. ‘I often take off the glasses, usually when I’m alone.’

  ‘It’s nice to see your whole face,’ Grace said.

  ‘I don’t know,’ Felicia said. ‘All that stuff, about my . . . You know.’

  ‘Yes,’ Grace said.

  ‘It doesn’t seem so important anymore.’

  Grace waited.

  Felicia licked her lips. ‘Not when I think about my mom.’

  She began to cry, very softly, and Grace wanted to get down and put an arm around her shoulders, but she stayed where she was, went on waiting for the fourteen-year-old to be ready.

  And then, suddenly, she was.

  ‘We had a fight,’ Felicia said.

  ‘We left that same day,’ Toni said. ‘While the chaos of the storm was still happening, everyone occupied. I wiped our prints off the Remington and put it in our father’s hands, made it look as if he’d shot himself. And then I came back to the house and wrote a note for Mrs Larsson, my father’s part-time housekeeper and, I figured, the next person who’d come by. I wrote that we’d found Jake’s body, that he’d killed himself, told her where to find him, said that I couldn’t take any more and that Kate and I were leaving.’

  ‘I didn’t want to leave,’ Kate said. ‘She made me.’

  ‘Why did you leave?’ Sam asked Toni. ‘Your father’s death wasn’t Kate’s fault. It was an accident.’

  ‘I’d brought the shotgun, which made it my fault.’

  ‘And she knew that if we stayed,’ her sister said, ‘I might have told them she was the one who’d shot him.’

  ‘Is that why you ran?’ Sam asked Toni.

  ‘Partly,’ she said. ‘Mostly it was because I knew that even if they believed the truth, they’d have taken Kate into care, maybe locked me up, maybe not. Either way, I knew I was the only person who understood my sister’s needs, so I couldn’t let them split us up. I had to protect Kate.’

  ‘What did you do next?’ Sam asked.

  ‘I took the Colt pistol and most of the cash in our father’s safe – there was much more than I’d expected – a lot of cash, I mean a lot – I don’t know where it came from. It was easy enough, because all I had to do was take his keys off him, then lock up the safe again and put the keys back on his belt, and I don’t suppose anyone but Jake knew how much money he’d put away over the years, or where he got it from.’

  She’d called that ‘easy’, Sam registered: returning twice to the horror of her father’s body. Not many grown men, let alone fifteen-year-old daughters, would call that easy.

  ‘And then we packed what we needed, got on the road, hitched a few rides and made our way to Florida.’

  ‘Didn’t anyone come after you
?’ Sam asked.

  ‘I don’t know, but they never found us. We changed our surname to Petit, and maybe they believed that Jake Grand had shot himself. It was crazy that night, trees falling, crops getting wiped out. One farmer less to make insurance claims, maybe. Two less kids to take care of, and no one to miss us. Mrs Larsson used to keep to herself, did her work and went home again, so I don’t think she’d have cared.’

  ‘She didn’t like me,’ Kate said.

  Sam felt less intensity flowing from her now, wondered if she might tire any time soon.

  ‘Did you make your name change official?’ he asked.

  ‘Of course not,’ Toni said. ‘I wouldn’t have known how to take care of something like that without drawing attention. We had more than enough for our start, and I’d always been good at sewing, so I made a living from dressmaking. My customers pay me in cash or, sometimes, in the early years, I bartered for stuff we needed.’

  ‘I don’t work,’ Kate said flatly. ‘And I can’t claim disability, because she made us run away.’

  There was a moment’s silence.

  ‘Why did you take the Colt?’ Sam asked. ‘After what had happened?’

  ‘Kate told me to take it,’ Toni said. ‘She was in a bad way. She said having the gun would make her feel safer. She said if we didn’t take it, she wouldn’t come with me. So I took it.’

  ‘I’d been a bitch for two days,’ Felicia said, ‘because my mom had tried to make me go to the doctor because . . .’

  Too hard to talk about her eyes, plainly.

  ‘I know about that, Felicia,’ Grace said gently, ‘because your mother told Doctor Shrike what happened.’

  ‘The other shrink,’ Felicia said.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I was a bitch after that too.’ She paused. ‘I thought shrinks aren’t supposed to say what a patient’s told them.’

  ‘That is mostly true,’ Grace said. ‘But Doctor Shrike wasn’t repeating anything you said to her.’

  ‘It doesn’t matter anyway,’ Felicia said, ‘because what I’m going to tell you isn’t secret. I just couldn’t tell my father, and you . . .’

  Grace said nothing.

  Felicia took a breath, seemed about to speak, but more tears welled up.

  ‘Don’t worry,’ Grace said. ‘You cry if you need to.’

  ‘But it’s late.’ Felicia looked at the clock on her bedside table, pulled two tissues from the Kleenex box beside it, blew her nose. ‘It’s almost midnight, and you’ve come here specially.’