According to the same online article, Arthur Merrens was in a coma, but his partner and family were optimistic about his chances for a full recovery.
“Well, you better hope he never wakes up,” Brodie had been told. “Obviously, Sheila has no idea what happened to him. And I don’t think the garage where he works knows he was headed to her place on Thursday afternoon. So for now, you’re reasonably safe, except for all the people who saw you with him at the lake on Thursday.”
She wasn’t happy with him at all. And she could be a first-class, raving bitch when she wasn’t happy.
“You must be brainless to have chosen such a crowded spot to get rid of him,” she said. “And then you did a half-assed job of it. If he wakes up, he’ll connect what happened to him with the O’Rourkes, and our whole plan will be shot to hell. I wanted to take my time with this whole thing, but now I’ll have to wrap this up as soon as possible. You just better hope he dies.”
So Brodie decided he had to nip this in the bud before it became a real problem. That was why he was at the hospital now. It was why he’d already walked around the place and checked out all the entrances and exits. It was why he’d parked on the street close by, instead of in the pay lot, to prepare for a quick getaway if he needed one.
He’d thought about smothering the guy with a pillow. It depended on how many monitors were hooked up to the guy—and how far the nurse’s desk was from his room. Or maybe he’d just make it quick and sloppy. Brodie might not have been wearing his big army jacket, but there was still plenty of room in the pocket of his khakis for a switchblade. And it only took a few seconds to slit a sleeping man’s throat.
The receptionist finished talking on her headset and finally got around to acknowledging him. “Thanks for waiting,” she said, smiling. “How can I help you?”
“I have a delivery for Arthur Merrens.” A bit of water spilled out of the cheap vase as he lifted it to show her the flower arrangement. “I need the room number.”
“He’s in intensive care,” she said, not needing to look up the location of their newsworthy patient. She pointed to the elevators. “Just go up to the second floor, turn left, and follow the signs to the ICU. You can leave the flowers at the nurse’s desk up there.”
“Does he have a room number?” Brodie pressed.
“Just leave it with the nurse at the desk. One of them will sign for it.” Then the women turned away like she was finished with him. “Good evening,” she said into the headset. “Swedish Hospital, how can I help you?”
Frowning, Brodie headed into the elevator and rode up to the second floor. He followed the signs and found a pair of closed glass doors with “Intensive Care Unit” in black and silver lettering on one of them. Beyond the doors was an L-shaped counter. A heavyset, black, thirtyish nurse with severely close-cropped hair sat at the desk. She was scribbling something down while talking on a corded phone. Brodie was pretty certain she hadn’t yet noticed him.
He ducked into an alcove for a stairwell door. This would take more finessing than he’d thought. He’d have to sneak past the nurses’ station to reach the rooms, then poke his head in each one until he found Merrens. It wasn’t a big hospital, so maybe there were only a few rooms in this unit. If he timed it right and acted quickly, maybe he could be in, out, and down the stairs within two or three minutes.
Brodie peeked around the corner of the alcove. The nurse was still at her desk. She glanced up—toward him.
Brodie quickly shrank back. “Crap,” he muttered under his breath.
He looked up toward the corridor’s ceiling to see if they had any cameras recording activity in the hallways, but there were none. At least, he didn’t see any from where he stood. Brodie waited a few more minutes, then cautiously peered around the corner again.
The nurse’s station was deserted.
Brodie smiled. He stepped out of the alcove and hurried through the glass doors. They were still swinging shut behind him when he slithered past the nurses’ desk. He spotted the stocky nurse in the back room, checking something in a binder notebook. Brodie continued on down a short corridor. He accidentally spilled water from the vase onto the floor as he peeked into the first patient room, where an old woman lay in bed. The nurse tending to her had her back to the door. Brodie tried the room across the hall: empty.
Creeping down the corridor, he poked his head into the next room down. A man lay in bed shirtless, with a big bandage on his shoulder and upper chest. His face was bruised and scratched—from falling through the tree branches. It was Merrens, all right. He had a tube in his nose and a cuff around his arm, just above the ACE bandage around his wrist. It looked like he was sleeping. Behind the headboard was a barrage of wires, cables, and monitors. Flowers and cards covered a table on the other side of some kind of monitor on wheels. With their long ribbons tied to the table leg, two “Get Well” helium balloons floated above the little impromptu altar.
No one else was in there with him. It seemed perfect.
Glancing over his shoulder, Brodie skulked into the room. He approached the bed and carefully set down the vase of flowers on the already cluttered bedside table. An empty glass almost fell off, but he caught it just in time. He placed it back on the tabletop.
Brodie reached into his pocket for the switchblade.
“Hey, what are you doing in here?”
Brodie swiveled around to see a tall, wiry Latino guy with a goatee. He was in his late twenties and wore jeans and a sweater. He held a folded newspaper in one hand. He looked annoyed.
“I’m just delivering flowers, man,” Brodie muttered. He pointed to the arrangement on the night-table. “Everything’s cool.”
“No one’s supposed to be in here,” the goateed man said, stepping inside the room. “How did you get past the nurses’ station?”
The man’s eyes narrowed, and Brodie sneered at him. “Why don’t you just chill, dude?”
Heading for the door, he kept his hand around the switchblade inside his pocket. He was prepared to cut the son of a bitch if he had to. Brodie brushed past him.
It looked like the guy was about to grab his arm. “Hey, hold on a minute . . .”
Brodie didn’t stop. He didn’t even slow down. “I don’t have time for this shit. I got deliveries to make.” He ducked out the door and hurried down the hallway.
Brodie could hear the guy talking on the phone: “Hello? Yeah, this is Richie Cansino, Artie Merrens’ partner, in the ICU. Can you get security up here right away?”
Rushing past the nurses’ station, Brodie saw the nurse out of the corner of his eye.
“Sir?” she called to him. “Wait—”
He just kept moving through the double doors and to the stairway access.
His footsteps echoed in the cinderblock stairwell as he raced down to the first floor. Having studied the hospital layout, he knew there was a gift shop with both hallway and outside entrances. He’d cut through there and make a beeline to his car on the street. Brodie was pretty confident they wouldn’t catch him.
But they’d be looking for him if he tried to make a return visit.
Minutes later, once he was inside his car, Brodie checked his rearview mirror. It didn’t look like anyone was following him. He pulled into traffic and tried to catch his breath.
You damn well better hope he never wakes up.
He would have to break the news to her that things got screwed up again. She’d probably go ballistic. They’d just have to take a chance with the coma. Maybe the guy would wake up, maybe not.
She couldn’t take her sweet time as she’d originally planned. Everything would have to be accelerated.
If the wife and the kid were going to die, it needed to happen soon.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
Friday—11:20 P.M.
Seattle
“Hey, honey, what have you got there?”
The house was quiet. Steve had snuck into the den while his mom sat at her computer desk in the kitchen. She’d had
the radio on low—some oldies station. He figured she wouldn’t be able to hear him or see him from there. But he must have timed it wrong, because she’d come around from her office nook to refill her water glass at the refrigerator.
Steve stopped in his tracks. He tucked the old photo album under his arm. “I was just going to look at some pictures before I went to bed.”
The glass of water in her hand, she moved closer to him. He knew she could tell from a glance at the maroon cover that the photo album was the old one, the one with pictures from his parents’ wedding and before they’d even met. Steve knew his dad had looked at this album just recently because he’d mentioned how much Eden had looked like his mom in an old photo.
Steve noticed his mom frowning slightly at the album he’d chosen. But then she worked up a smile. “I’m sorry,” she sighed. “With everything that’s gone on today, I can’t remember if you have a game or gymnastics practice tomorrow . . .”
“Gabe’s got a game. But I don’t have anything going on.”
She nodded and then kissed him on the forehead. “Well, thanks for skipping practice for me this afternoon. Hope I didn’t get you into trouble with the coach.”
He shrugged. “It’s okay.”
“And thanks for the help with the garden tonight.” She reached up and touched the side of his head, by his ear. “Your hair’s growing back. It looks good.”
“Thanks.” He faked a yawn. “Well, I’m going to get ready for bed.”
She sighed again. “And I guess those bills online aren’t going to pay themselves. I better get back to them.” But she didn’t move, and her eyes narrowed as she looked closely at him. “Stevie, I know, with everything that’s been happening lately, it’s been pretty strange. But are you okay?”
He nodded a few more times than necessary. “Sure, I’m all right. It’s cool.”
“Because if anything is bothering you, anything at all, you can talk to your dad or me.”
“Nothing’s bothering me,” he lied. “I’m fine.”
“Well, g’night,” she said.
With the photo album still tucked under his arm, Steve turned and headed up the stairs to his bedroom. He really wished his mom hadn’t seen him with it.
Before ducking inside his room, he glanced down the hall. From the crack under the closed door, he could see the light was on in Eden’s bedroom. His dad had been in there earlier, talking to her about his conference with Ms. Warren.
Earlier tonight, Steve had tried to convince his mom that Eden hadn’t wrecked the garden. But in pleading Eden’s case, he hadn’t been completely honest with his mother. He hadn’t told her—or anyone else, for that matter—that he’d seen Eden’s boyfriend outside school today. The guy hadn’t been in Portland for the past two days, Eden had confided. To Steve, it felt like a secret between his half sister and him.
For all Steve knew, the guy could still be in town. He could have lied to Eden about leaving for Portland this afternoon. He could have lied to her about a whole bunch of things. Steve wondered what kind of power this scumbag held over her.
Minutes ago, he’d come close to telling his mom the truth about Eden’s boyfriend. He’d also come close to asking her about Aunt Molly.
But it was obvious his mom was emotionally fragile right now. So Steve hoped to find something in the old photo album. Though he’d looked at these pictures dozens of times over the years, maybe he’d missed something.
He wanted to study the photos of his mom’s side of the family. His mom was supposed to be an only child. At least, that was what his parents had led him to believe. But his faith in his parents’ word had been shaken lately. He couldn’t help thinking that his mom had a sister who had died, or maybe this Aunt Molly was in an institution someplace.
The album was a fat binder with photos arranged on each page under a transparent peel-back plastic sheet. The pictures were secured in place with some mild adhesive coating that had made the page edges turn brown. Searching through the book, Steve didn’t see anyone who looked like a sibling in any of his mom’s early childhood photos. In group shots, she was clearly with friends—like in the grade school graduation shot, with four young girls in their caps and gowns, and what must have been a high school prom picture, with a tall, dorky-looking, basketball-player type in a tux.
But Steve noticed something strange. His dad’s childhood and young adult snapshots—on the opposite page from his mom’s—were always a standard size: 3” × 5” and 4” × 6”, with a rare 5” × 7” in there. But many of his mother’s early family photos were an irregular size—as if someone had cut them down, or maybe cut a certain person out of the shots. Even a few of his parents’ wedding photos were like that.
Steve flipped back several pages to his mother’s early childhood pictures. He carefully peeled back the plastic sheet and pried some of his mom’s irregular-size photographs off the page. In Steve’s own baby pictures, before photos went digital, his mom had written his name and the date on the back. He hoped to find some names and dates on the back of his mom’s childhood pictures.
Some photos had notations on the back, but nothing that revealed someone had been eliminated from the shot.
But then Steve found a photograph of his mother as a preteen, standing on a beach, squinting in the sun. She looked very cute, and happy. But there were two shadows on the sand behind her. And it looked like another child’s elbow was at the very edge of the cropped image.
Steve peeled the photo off the adhesive page and looked at the back. He read the faded script, which must have been his grandmother’s handwriting, because it wasn’t his mom’s. Half the caption had been cut off:
Suddenly it seemed possible that his mom had a sister. But why had they hidden Aunt Molly from him and Hannah and Gabe?
Last week, Steve might not have believed it.
But then, last week, he’d had no idea about his half sister.
Saturday, September 29—12:47 A.M.
Dressed in an old Sting concert T-shirt and sweat shorts, Sheila turned down her bedcover. No spiders, thank God.
She’d already flossed, brushed her teeth, and washed her face. The drapes were drawn, and the bedroom was dark except for her bedside lamp. She had the door locked. She’d fallen asleep last night without any bourbon or Ambien. At dinner tonight, she’d drunk a couple of glasses of red wine, but nothing else. She had a good book for bedtime. She would just read until she got tired—like a normal person.
The game of musical beds was still going on between her and Dylan.
Sheila had noticed when he’d come back from the teacher conference earlier tonight that he’d smelled of perfume.
“Do I?” he asked, taking off his suit coat and throwing it on the cushioned seat in their breakfast booth. He headed to the refrigerator for a beer. “It’s probably Eden’s teacher, Ms. Warren. She was one of those touchy-feely, close-talking, personal-space invaders. And I noticed she kind of overdid it on the perfume, too. I’ll shower and change before I eat so you don’t have to smell it all night.”
He took a swig of his beer. “So—I heard the neighbor’s dog bark a few times last night just as I was hitting the sheets, but that was it. Still, I didn’t sleep well in our bed alone. So what are the sleeping arrangements tonight? Could you please just tell me now? I’d like to turn in early. I was actually getting used to Gabe’s bottom bunk. I’ll go back there tonight if that’s how you want it.”
Standing at the stove, Sheila wasn’t sure how to answer him. She imagined a sexy English teacher hanging on Dylan the way she’d seen other women at social gatherings touch his arm or shoulder when they talked to him. She should have gotten used to it years ago, but still.
She finally shrugged. “I’m still not ready to go back to sleeping together like everything’s fine, because it isn’t.”
He said he understood. He went to bed in Gabe’s room at eleven o’clock.
Sheila thought he’d given in way too easily.
So n
ow she had their bed to herself and a good book as a consolation prize. She got half a chapter read before the words started to blur. Switching off the light, Sheila slid down beneath the covers. She thought about Steve, taking the photo album up to his room tonight. She rarely looked at that particular album because none of her children were in it.
At least, that was her excuse.
But the truth was, even with so many of the photos cut down, she couldn’t cut out the memories of when—and with whom—they were taken. She’d altered or completely destroyed so many of her family snapshots seventeen years ago. At the time, going through the collection had confirmed what she’d always thought. Her sister had gotten all the attention.
Molly was prettier—blond, blue-eyed, and dimpled, with perfect skin. No wonder their dad took so many photos of her. Sheila was six years older, the babysitter, the responsible one, the one who did everything her parents expected of her. In junior high and high school, she always made the honor roll. In her bedroom, she had a shelf full of sports and community service awards. And yet, it never seemed to be enough for her parents.
Molly called her a suck-up, Miss Goody-Two-Shoes, a total drag.
Their parents let Molly get away with everything. She went through school with Cs and Ds because she didn’t apply herself. She wasn’t even thirteen when she started drinking, breaking curfew, and going out with the wrong guys. Sheila remembered telling her: “I’m the suck-up, but you’re the fuckup.”
The remark had made Molly cry.
At the time, Sheila was in college, studying accounting and working part time to help pay for her room and board. Thirteen-year-old Molly had just been arrested. She’d been in a speeding car full of drunken high school kids when a cop had pulled them over. The other kids were two or three years older than her. Molly had drunk three Miller Lites, and one of the boys had talked her into taking off her bra under her T-shirt.
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