The Long Count

by JM Gulvin

  ‘OK then, I tell you what,’ Quarrie said. ‘I’m still in Shreveport right now so don’t go getting him out of the shower. Tell him I’ll talk to him tomorrow. There’s a chance I might even make it home but don’t tell him that in case it doesn’t happen.’

  ‘Whatever you want,’ she said. ‘Listen, while I’ve got you on the phone, your captain called here this afternoon wanting to get ahold of you. Told me you don’t check in with him nearly as often as you should.’

  Quarrie chuckled. ‘That what he said?’

  ‘Yes, he did. Said for you to call him just as soon as I gave you the message.’

  Hanging up, Quarrie called Van Hanigan’s number and again he had to call collect.

  ‘Knew it’d be you, John Q,’ the captain said when he picked up. ‘Nobody else would phone me at home and make sure it’s me that paid for the phone call.’

  ‘I’m in Louisiana,’ Quarrie told him.

  ‘Yeah, the operator said as much. So what you doing over there?’

  ‘Hanging out with a real nice lady, a secretary at Bellevue Hospital. I’m coercing her, Captain; persuading her into doing something that she shouldn’t.’

  ‘You think I want to hear about that?’

  Quarrie worked a hand through his hair. ‘So anyway, Eunice said how you were looking for me?’

  ‘Yeah, I was. Austin took a message from Isaac Bowen. His brother and all, he called to tell you he’s figured out what’s going on.’

  Quarrie stood straighter where he was leaning against the wall. ‘Isaac said that?’

  ‘Yes, he did, yesterday; last night in fact: early hours of this morning.’

  Again he dialled the operator and this time asked her to connect him to the Bowen house in Fannin County. The phone rang and rang but Isaac did not pick up. Settling the receiver back on the hook, Quarrie returned to the table where his steak was waiting.

  Back at the hospital a couple of hours later he and Alice walked from the gate to the main entrance where all was quiet. With the patients locked in their rooms for the night there was only a minimal number of staff on duty. Using Beale’s keys again, Alice took him into the women’s wing where this time the common room was empty. Formica tables and chairs neatly stacked, the floor had been freshly polished and there was no light at the nurses’ station. They passed beyond the next locked door and the one after that, and then they were outside the door to the isolation corridor.

  On the other side of the glass panel Quarrie could see that the hall was only dimly lit and no nurse occupied the desk.

  ‘That station isn’t staffed at night.’ Alice repeated what she had told him earlier. ‘There’s no need, the patients are checked by an orderly every couple of hours but usually things are pretty quiet.’ She looked doubtful all over again, weighing the keys in her hand then clutching them tightly. ‘I’ll have to come with you,’ she said. ‘And I hate going down there. You know this could cost me my job.’ She peered back the way they had come. ‘Look, I’m not sure anymore. I’m really worried. This is Miss Annie we’re talking about. Just about anything could happen.’

  Taking her hand Quarrie held it tightly. ‘All you have to do is get me the key from the nurse’s desk. I can do the rest.’

  She snorted. ‘How do you think she’s going to react to some stranger in her room in the dead of night, a woman as unbalanced as that? She’ll think you’re there for her baby. She thinks everyone wants to take her baby away from her and she might try and hurt you. She’s capable of just about anything, you know. In Texas she put out the eye of an orderly.’

  He nodded. ‘I know, Alice. I’m aware of that. But I’ve got an idea how I can deal with her.’

  ‘I’m sure you can handle her physically,’ Alice went on, ‘but that’s not the point. No matter what you tell me, if we’re found down here I will lose my job.’

  Again Quarrie peered through the panel. ‘Alice,’ he said, ‘you’re not going to lose your job. Look, I understand how you feel but I have to do this and we’re here already. Miss Annie won’t attack me. And if she does I can deal with it.’ He tapped the weight of the door. ‘These are fire-proof. Any noise she makes won’t be enough to disturb anybody.’

  Inside the corridor Alice re-locked the door behind them and together they walked the floor all the way past Miss Annie’s room to the nurse’s workstation. Locating the keys, Alice worked them around the ring until she came to the one she wanted. Prising it loose she handed it to him and Quarrie stripped off his jacket. Unbuckling his shoulder holsters, he placed his weapons on the desk and was about to leave his hat as well, but then he remembered Miss Annie had seen him wearing it.

  Alice took a seat at the desk. ‘Try not to let her make too much noise because fire doors or not, if the other patients start up you’ll be able to hear the racket clear across to Texas.’

  Quarrie glanced at her. He could feel his heart beating a little bit faster than he would’ve liked, and he could not help but be reminded of two dark nights at the ruin in the Piney Woods. ‘Wish me luck, Alice,’ he said.

  ‘I’ve already done that.’ She wasn’t smiling. ‘On account of how badly I figure you’re going to need it.’

  Quarrie walked back the way they had come with the key in his palm and his palm sweating. When he got to the door he looked the length of the corridor but could no longer see Alice’s face where she was hidden deep in the shadows.

  Through the reinforced glass panel he could see the bed and the frail-looking figure of its occupant under the glow of a nightlight. Alice had told him that Dr Beale agreed to humor Miss Annie with the light for the sake of her baby. Apparently she’d had one like it at Trinity.

  Inside the room she did not stir. With the door closed, Quarrie stood with his back to it and listened to the sound of her breathing. It was even and regular, coming in little whistles from deep in her throat. Quarrie could not quite believe he was there, and now that he was, he wasn’t sure if his plan would work. He wondered what he would do if she attacked him.

  ‘Miss Annie,’ he said softly. ‘My name’s John Q and I’m a Texas Ranger. I’m the guy in the hat who came by this afternoon and I’m here to protect you and your baby.’

  Her breathing stilled, the whistle died to nothing. Still he remained with his back to the door and she lay exactly where she was, only he could no longer hear any sound.

  And then she sat up.

  Hunched against the wall where stick children played she peered through the darkness and he could just about make out those bulbous blue eyes that, once upon a time, might have been her best feature.

  She did not speak. She just stared at him, but he noted how she did not clutch the doll to her breast like he’d thought she would, it remained on the pillow.

  ‘I’m on guard, Miss Annie,’ he told her. ‘I know they try and take your baby away from you, but I’m on guard tonight to make sure nobody does.’

  Still she remained silent and Quarrie indicated the chair by the side of the door. ‘If it’s all right with you I’m going to set down here so I can keep a better watch on the corridor.’

  Slowly, he lowered himself onto the chair. Hat on his head and hands on his knees he was barely two feet from the bed. Still Miss Annie sat there. She was absolutely silent and Quarrie was close enough that he could see her face, pinched and bitter and looking so much older than it ought to.

  She lay down. He could hardly believe what he was seeing but Miss Annie lay down again and curled up next to her porcelain doll. Quarrie peered through the gloom where the emerald-colored nightlight cast a ghoulish glow across her face.

  ‘All right then,’ he said. ‘I’m here to protect the two of you, so if you want to go back to sleep you-all go ahead.’ He waited a moment before he added. ‘On the other hand I know how you don’t get a lot of company, so if you want to chat awhile that’d be just fine too.’

  Thirty-one

  Isaac watched as his mother packed an overnight bag, her movements a little sti
ff as if she had not yet recovered from the shock of seeing him. Leaning in the doorway he had his arms folded across his chest.

  ‘Fifteen years is a long time, Mom,’ he said. ‘I know how you feel because it’s as difficult for me as it is for you. It was all I could do to summon the courage to drive up here.’

  Taking fresh clothes from her dressing-table drawer Clara placed the garments in the bag.

  ‘Make sure you pack plenty,’ Isaac said. ‘I don’t know how long it’ll be before you can come back here so make sure you have enough.’

  ‘Why don’t we just stay here? If you think you have to protect me, why can’t you do that here?’

  Isaac shook his head. ‘I told you, it’s not safe. You have to trust me. I’m good at this. I know what I’m doing. I was long-range recon just like Dad. Escape and evasion, extraction; we’d go in after American prisoners and get them out without the enemy knowing we’d ever been there.’ He nodded towards the window. ‘This position cannot be properly defended. He could come from any number of different directions and I can’t cover them all. No,’ he said. ‘I know where we’ll be safe, and even if he figures it out it’s somewhere I’ll be able to deal with him.’

  Expelling an audible breath his mother sat down heavily on the bed. Head bowed, she seemed to be thinking.

  ‘It’ll be all right,’ Isaac assured her. ‘It’s difficult to get a handle on it all, I know. But it’s been hard on me too. Dad dead and Ish missing, then this Ranger shows up and tells me Dad didn’t kill himself when the other cops are saying he did.’ He threw out a hand. ‘I didn’t know what hit me. I mean, I figured it couldn’t get any shittier than it was over there in Nam, but it sure did, I can promise you.’ His eyes had darkened slightly. ‘Fifteen years without a single word. Why didn’t you call? Why didn’t you get in touch?’

  Clara was trembling. She opened her mouth as if she wanted to explain it to him but she closed it again and sat there staring at her bag.

  ‘It’s OK,’ Isaac said more gently. ‘It’s been too long and this is too much of a shock. We don’t have to do this now. We can talk about it later. We can talk about it as much as we want.’ He nodded as if to himself. ‘I got so many questions. After all this time you have no idea how much I want to talk. I tell you what though, when that Ranger first suggested they try and get a-hold of you I couldn’t see the point. I mean, you’d taken off and I figured you wouldn’t want to see me. But that was before I knew about Ishmael. We’ve got a lot of time to make up,’ he said. ‘Now I’m here and we’re talking like this all I want to do is make up for the time we lost.’

  *

  Quarrie was sitting just feet from a woman who had stabbed her husband three times and jammed a knitting needle through the eye of an orderly. A woman who had been locked up for twenty-five years, she was sleeping with a porcelain doll, and despite how macabre the whole thing was, he felt nothing but a deep-seated sense of sadness.

  ‘You like to draw, Miss Annie, don’t you? The walls of this room are the same as the walls of your old one back at Trinity.’

  She sat up again and he could see her eyes where they were almost too big for her emaciated face. She seemed to consider him very carefully, resting on the palm of her hand she was hunched over the doll now as if to make sure he could not grab it.

  ‘You must really love children,’ Quarrie went on. ‘I understand that. I got a boy of my own. His mother passed away back when he was a baby. Not quite a year old, it’s been him and me since then, and I guess we’re similar you and me. I mean both of us being sort of single parents. His name’s James by the way. Did I tell you that? My boy’s called James. What do you call your baby?’

  Miss Annie did not answer. She just looked at him and then swung her legs from underneath her and sat on the edge of the bed. If she reached out now she could touch him.

  ‘What are you doing in my room?’ Her voice sounded chill and she peered at him, her bone-thin arms reminiscent of those in the drawings where the sleeves of her pajamas swamped them.

  ‘I told you,’ Quarrie’s tone was gentle still but he could feel the way a chill was working through him. ‘I’m here to protect you. I’m here because I know everyone wants to take your baby away and I’m not going to let that happen. I’m a policeman, Miss Annie, a Texas Ranger, and protecting people is what I do. I’m not a doctor or a nurse or an orderly. That means we could be friends. It means you can talk to me if you want to. What’s your real name by the way? I know it’s not Miss Annie.’

  Miss Annie lay down again only on her back this time and she drew the doll very close. She soothed it, stroking its hair where it was thin as hers and making little cooing sounds in her throat.

  ‘You had a room like this at Trinity,’ Quarrie said. ‘I saw that room, Miss Annie: on the second floor it had a window that overlooked the grounds. That was a nice room, really nice, overlooking the garden like that. This room doesn’t have a window.’

  ‘They moved me,’ her voice came as a crackle, rasping a little where she lay. ‘They took me away from Trinity.’

  ‘You used to be a nurse there, didn’t you?’

  The silence that followed seemed to hold the tiny room in its grasp and the images on the walls crowded around them ever more closely. Quarrie sat where he was with his gaze fixed on the bed. ‘Do you remember that? Do you remember working at the hospital?’

  She did not reply. She was cradling the doll and he could hear the whistle again of her breathing.

  ‘Can you remember anything about that time?’ he asked. ‘Do you remember working with Nurse Nancy?’

  She sat up. A sudden movement, she was cupping the doll in one arm and blinking at him through the half-light cast by the lamp.

  ‘Nancy.’ She tasted the word, as if she knew the name but could not remember where or why she had heard it.

  ‘Nancy McClain,’ he said. ‘Nurse Nancy; she works here now. She looks after you just as she did at Trinity.’

  Slowly, as if finally she remembered, Miss Annie nodded. ‘She follows me. She follows me everywhere I go. She walks where I walk because she wants to steal my baby.’

  ‘Why would she want to do that?’

  She worked her jaws; he could hear the way her teeth were grinding.

  ‘That’s what she wants. She always wants to take my baby. Nurse Nancy wants to take my baby away from me.’

  ‘Why would she want to do that?’

  ‘Because he’s special, a special case; they told me my baby was special.’

  ‘Who told you, do you remember? Was it Nancy that told you?’

  She did not answer.

  ‘Dr Beale perhaps? Was it Dr Beale who said your baby was special?’

  Again she did not answer.

  ‘What’s your real name?’ Quarrie asked. ‘Who were you before you were Miss Annie?’

  Still she did not speak. She hunched forward now, the globes of her eyes fixed steadfastly on his.

  ‘When you were a nurse at the hospital,’ he prompted, ‘what did they call you?’

  He heard her sucking a breath. ‘When I was a nurse,’ she echoed. ‘What did they call me?’

  ‘You used to be a nurse at Trinity. Do you remember that? Do you remember what they called you when you were a nurse at the other hospital?’

  For a long time she looked at him and then those massive eyes seemed to light up, only the light was a little brittle. ‘Peggy,’ she murmured. ‘They used to call me Peggy.’

  *

  Half an hour later Quarrie was back in the car, driving as fast as he could with the red light flashing under the clamshell grille. Isaac had left a message telling him he understood what was going on and now Quarrie thought he too might just have an idea. In his mind’s eye he could see Miss Annie as he had left her, a wretched creature hunched on the end of the bed with that porcelain doll clutched once more to her breast.

  It was 2 a.m. when he got to the Bowen house. The pickup was in the yard and the garage doors were c
losed but not locked and when Quarrie opened them he saw the sedan was gone. The security lights were on but all the windows in the house were dark, and those lights were bright enough to wake the dead.

  For a moment he stood by the garage doors and considered the weight of the metal trapdoor. With another glance across the driveway, he lifted the trap to reveal the deeper darkness below. Backwards he made his way down the ladder, scrabbling for the light switch he was not able to find it, and it was the same in the storm shelter. Using the flame from his Zippo to see his way, he crossed the room to the second passage and walked to the door that opened onto the wooden panelling.

  It took him a few minutes to locate the hidden switch but he did so eventually and the panel swung open. Inside the study it was coal black just as it had been in the passage. He could make out the desk by the flickering flame from his lighter and he fumbled for the switch on the lamp. Finally the shadows were banished and he slipped the overheated lighter back in his pocket. He was thinking about Miss Annie. He was thinking about what Alice had told him about the poor woman having been a nurse at Trinity before she was admitted as a patient.

  Stripping his hat from his head he worked a hand across his scalp then sat down at Ike Bowen’s desk. Opening the top drawer he considered the sheaf of letters Isaac had sent home from Vietnam, then he put them to one side and concentrated on the rest of the drawers. He did not know what he was looking for but he did know he would recognize it if he found it. He didn’t find it. He could see nothing in any of the drawers that gave him a clue as to what Isaac might have discovered and he got up from the desk again.

  Upstairs in the kitchen he considered the work surfaces and closets, thinking how everything was just as spotlessly clean now as when he had been here the first time. Isaac had the same sense of detail, the same fastidiousness as his father – he had seen that in the way he pressed his uniform.

  In the living room he found the family photograph upright once more and in its proper place on the mantelpiece, though the glass was smashed. Quarrie took a good long look: Ike and his wife, the two boys who were alike but not identical, though Isaac had said they’d been born with only fifteen minutes between them.