The Edge of the Gulf

by Hadley Hury

He looked first at the ceiling, then to the side at Camilla, and then over her shoulder, at him.

  “Charlie,” she said, gripping his hand.

  Hudson stood beside her. “We’re right here, Charlie.”

  The lips trembled, not quite parting.

  “Don’t try to talk right now,” Camilla said. “Just rest. You’re doing fine, now, okay? You can talk to us soon. Just rest and let your strength keep coming back.”

  The eyelids drooped, closed, opened again.

  But before they closed again, Hudson saw the sort of abject confusion and fear in them that he had not seen since the aneurysm had stunned them at the breakfast table and Kate had slumped toward him, and in four or five infinite seconds, away from him, forever.

  He had been helpless, of course, to do anything then.

  A sudden prayer shook him with the conviction that he wouldn’t be now.

  ***

  Chaz called around three. He’d just heard from Victor about the morning’s breakthrough.

  When Hudson hung up the phone, Camilla said quietly, “You didn’t tell him about…just now.”

  “No,” he said, almost to himself. “No, I didn’t.”

  ***

  They talked for nearly an hour, alternating between fits and starts of suppositions and silences. They took turns holding Charlie’s hands and, uncertain as to whether he might somehow hear them from his still, twilit space, they tried to keep the urgency from their voices.

  They called Libby, who was ecstatic with the news and talked with them in turns to savor every possible detail and nuance.

  The joy subsided quickly enough, however, and there was a long, heavily shadowed pause.

  Hudson had the phone, and he finally heard Libby sigh, “Well, I have thought and thought and thought until my head feels like it’s just gonna come unglued…and I get absolutely nowhere. Have you come up with anything other than our instincts?”

  “No. But I think we may just have to work with that for now.”

  “But work how? Where?”

  “Right here. We’re not budging. I don’t know what else to do.” He turned his back to the bed. “I don’t know why or how, but there’s a connection. I don’t know if there’s some bizarre link to some crazed right-wing organization or if it’s just as unbelievably personal. But there’s a connection.”

  “What’s the plan? They’ll be there from ten till six.”

  “So will you.” He lowered his voice even more. “Whoever or whatever wants Charlie not to come back has to make their move soon because he’s getting better. That’s all I know. It means you’ll have to be here from your regular gig at six until six in the morning and we hate that because we know how worn out you are already.”

  “Oh, you know old people don’t need much sleep. So I just keep my eye on him?”

  “Exactly. Nothing’s going to happen so long as one of us is there. All you have to tell them is that you just don’t want to leave. There’s nothing they can do about it. Can you play a willful old lady?”

  “Ask Brad. What if nothing happens?”

  “Then Charlie keeps improving and gets well and we figure the rest out as we can.”

  “Have you talked with the ATF folks about what we know?”

  “Not yet. Camilla and I are torn between alerting them or not right now. We don’t want to alert them. We’ll keep thinking about that. We’re going to my house from here and we may decide to call them tonight. I don’t know. I don’t know much. I just know I believe that if somebody’s going to try something it’s going to have to be in the next twenty-four to forty-eight hours.”

  “I’ll be there before six.” She paused. “Put Camilla on, sweetie, before I go.”

  Camilla took the phone and listened, looking across the bed at Hudson. “I think you must be right,” she said. “See you soon.”

  She hung the phone up and Hudson lifted his eyes in question.

  “Don’t be embarrassed,” Camilla smiled. “She said ‘I told you he’s not just a pretty face.’”

  ***

  The doctor came by at four-thirty. He was guardedly optimistic.

  Then, their waiting resumed. Camilla read a magazine while holding Charlie’s hand. Hudson stretched and paced. His eyes roved the walls of the room, fitted with various and sundry metal plates and extensions and wires, as if looking for a means of escape. He distractedly examined the impersonal hardware, the monitors, machines, equipment, and tubes, what whirred and clicked, and invaded the body of their beloved friend, holding him back from the edge.

  ***

  And then, just before five, as Hudson was mopping Charlie’s forehead with a damp cloth and Camilla was finishing up a bit of business with Fentry on the phone, a man they did not know knocked on the door and, with a modest smile, entered.

  “My name’s Tim Faraday. I’m the administrator here at St. Andrews.”

  He shook hands with Camilla and then Hudson as they introduced themselves. “Now, you’re not Charlie’s cousins, the newlyweds?”

  “No,” said Camilla. “Old friends.”

  “So am I.”

  He walked to the bed and very gently touched Charlie’s cheek, and then stood for a moment, holding his hand. He was an attractive man. His very deep, husky voice seemed not to match his tall, thin frame. He was perhaps fifty, wore round wire-rimmed glasses, and had thick sandy hair that kept falling in a slant across his high brow.

  He turned to them. “May I sit with you for a few minutes?” he asked, indicating the sofa. “Please,” said Hudson. Camilla sat beside him and Hudson drew over the chair.

  “I’ve been at a conference in Richmond. Got back last night. I just learned today that Charlie was here.” He paused. “I’ve spoken with his doctors. They tell me he may be turning a corner.”

  “We hope so,” said Hudson.

  “I don’t get to the 26-A as often as I’d like, but haven’t I seen you there?” Faraday asked Camilla.

  “Yes, you have. And now that you mention it, I believe I recognize you, too.” Over the next few minutes, she and Hudson reviewed their histories with, and their fondness for, Charlie.

  Faraday nodded often, smiling. Occasionally they even allowed themselves to share a discreet laugh.

  “I moved down here twelve years ago. A native of St. Louis. Didn’t know a soul. I met Charlie at a fundraiser for our new pediatric cancer unit. An interfaith tennis tournament sort of thing, actually. We played each other in the first round. July. Hot as hell. I remember him saying to me when I won that I hadn’t played too badly for a Yankee Lutheran.

  “He invited us to be his guests at the restaurant. Introduced us to some very nice folks. Really took us under his wing.”

  “Sounds like Charlie,” Hudson said.

  Faraday’s face fell suddenly as he looked toward the bed. “Why?”

  “Well…” Camilla began.

  “No, no, sorry. That was rhetorical. I know you’ve been living with this for days now. Don’t repeat it for me. I think I know the basic outline.” He looked at the long brown suede oxford at the end of his long crossed leg. “Sick bastard.”

  Hudson said, “There are official and unofficial theories.”

  “Was he acting alone?”

  “That’s the official theory.”

  “But it’s never completely true, is it?” Faraday spoke with a soft intensity. He seemed to be making an effort to keep his resonant bass voice carefully leashed but it rushed ahead of his intention like a fierce rumble. “There are always people behind them aren’t there? They take all that ignorance and fear and twist it into hatred. And then when some poor idiot goes off, they’re nowhere in sight.”

  Hudson nodded. “They’re safe behind their vitriolic patriotism and their pulpits and their radio stations and their websites and their well-stocked bunkers.”

  “People like this are pawns.”

  At this, Hudson froze. He seemed so lost to the conversation for a moment that Camilla looked at him as
if he had physically left the room. When he reconcentrated his focus on them, Faraday was saying “…and he was there when my partner had a serious car accident later in that first year. It was a long recuperation and Charlie was a regular, driving all the way over here, always bringing food. He knew I’d just begun my job. Knew what my schedule was like. Knew that we didn’t have an extensive network of friends.…”

  “I’m sorry,” said Hudson. “What you just said about pawns. It made me realize something. There’s a lot we don’t know about this.” He nodded toward Charlie. “But in just the past day or two, some of us have begun to put some things together…and…”

  “Do the authorities have other leads?”

  “Well, no. We don’t think so.”

  Faraday sat his lanky frame straight up and brushed the hair from his brow. His eyes glimmered in their round glasses with a sort of adventurous intelligence. “But you do, don’t you?”

  Hudson and Camilla looked at one another without speaking.

  “Is there something I can do?”

  Neither of them quite knew what to say.

  “Sam and I have always felt that we’ll never be able to repay Charlie. In our lives he has defined the word ‘friend.’ We haven’t seen enough of him lately, and that’s our fault. Couples get in their own ruts. But I want to have the opportunity to correct that. I want him up and out of here. He’s one of the finest men I know. I respect him and I love him.”

  He eyed them both.

  “Short of breaking the law, I will do absolutely anything to help him—and you. Tell me there is something. I’ll do it.”

  Hudson spoke slowly and softly, continuing to find his way as he went.

  “Actually, yes. Yes, Tim. I think there is.”

  ***

  When Libby arrived at five-forty-five they brought her up to date.

  And an hour later, Faraday had rearranged schedules in order to double-shift two nurses whom he knew particularly well and trusted implicitly. He swore them to secrecy and promised them he would fill them in as soon as he could.

  Libby would keep the door open as much as possible.

  The woman in the room across the hall from Charlie’s had improved sufficiently to be moved off the intensive care floor at noon.

  The new admission, a surprisingly healthy-looking man of forty, would lie as quietly as he could during the early evening, passing the hours watching television, and then, through the long early morning, he would simply rest in the darkness with half-opened lids. An older man who might be the patient’s father would be in evidence throughout the night, his chair facing the open door, working crossword puzzles, stretching from time to time in the hall. Never more than a matter of feet from the door to Charlie’s room.

  They were Faraday’s best security people.

  Chapter 39

  As evening closed around the cottage, Hudson and Camilla grew silent, exhausted from talking, from thinking, from feeling. Camilla had stopped at her house in Seagrove on their way back and picked up some things, and walked now down the long hall toward the great room in loose cotton pants and shirt, drying her hair. Hudson stood at the butcher block table, tossing a salad.

  “I just can’t believe it,” she said. “They can get back in the house day after tomorrow?”

  “Saturday. That’s what Fentry said he’d heard when I talked with him just now.”

  He had called to let Fentry and Victor know that he would be going back at six in the morning. Perhaps they’d like to skip a shift and get some more sleep. Both declined.

  “Apparently they plan to have finished doing all those forensic, fingerprinting, whatever things they do.”

  “It’s been four days,” Camilla murmured. “It seems like it could be four hours, or maybe even four years. But, somehow, not four days.”

  “No.”

  “I hate it. Their going into that house.”

  “Yeah, I know, although I also hate having them here.”

  They drank a little wine. In near silence, they poked at the salad and the tenderloin that one of the 26-A waiters had dropped off on his way home.

  ***

  At eight-forty-five, they decided to call Rogers, their burly, jocular ATF contact and coordinator with the local investigators. He arrived in less than an hour with South Walton County homicide detective Fields, a slim, muscular, very beautiful African-American woman.

  “How’s Mr. Brompton?” Rogers asked. Since he’d first shown up at the house, Hudson had admired Rogers’ ability to juggle punctilious shrewdness and down-home warmth.

  “We think we have more reason for hope.”

  Thirty minutes later, they had laid out their concerns, and waited watchfully as Rogers sipped his coffee and then balanced it in the saucer on his very solid thigh with the exacting care of a large and muscular man who does sometimes risky work that calls for delicacy. As if in keeping with the relentless torrent of unlikely events, Olive lay draped over one of his shoes. “Oh, yeah, they see me coming. We have two at home.” It was a picture, Hudson thought, of grace under pressure.

  “Interesting. Very, very. Anything we can call evidence? Something we can see, touch, taste, smell?” He interrupted himself, “…not that this doesn’t smell.”

  “Nothing,” said Hudson.

  “That’s one of the reasons we debated whether to call you,” said Camilla.

  “And the other?” asked Fields.

  “We think they’ll make their move on their shift tomorrow night,” said Hudson. “Charlie’s improving by the hour. If they can’t finish the job tomorrow night they may never have a feasible chance. And we, we have…”

  He couldn’t believe he was saying this. How would they? “We have a plan. And we’re afraid that if you were to call them in for questioning, we’d never get proof.”

  Rogers reared back, putting his coffee aside on the table, and clasped his hands together almost in glee. He rocked on the edge of the chair, looking as though Hudson had just shared a good joke, and let out a little snort of a laugh. “You two are pretty resourceful.”

  He looked over at Fields. “This is good, you know?”

  Fields tried to sustain a note of cool professionalism. “Do you think your friend, Ms. Lee, is in any danger tonight? Or Mr. Brompton himself?”

  “No,” said Hudson. “They may be desperate to finish the job but these people are very far from uncontrollably crazy.”

  “We’ve made a point of letting them think that they’ll be alone with him tomorrow night,” said Camilla. “That Hudson and Libby and I all have conflicts we can’t do anything about.”

  “Tonight,” said Hudson, “we have someone else keeping a discreet eye on Libby and on the room.”

  Rogers stood, gingerly lifting Olive to the sofa. She looked at him with disgruntlement but surprisingly little outrage. He walked over toward the door, his hand rubbing the back of his football player’s neck. He came back and sat on the ottoman, his huge knees bulging in his khakis.

  “Boy, oh boy! This is something. I don’t know, I just don’t know….” He shook his head slowly, looking at the floor.

  “Well, neither do we, but we feel we know enough to trust our instincts.”

  Rogers looked at his colleague. “Officer Fields, what do you think about all this?”

  “I think we’re both going to have to pass this information on, of course. But I also think that, as of this moment, we have absolutely nothing concrete to work with, nothing but supposition, and no evident tie to Lukerson or any other party or parties.” She sipped her coffee, looking at Hudson and Camilla. She turned to Rogers.

  “And I also see two smart people here who want a friend who may have been lucky once not be put to the test twice. Let’s hear this plan.”

  ***

  Rogers and Fields left just before eleven.

  Hudson and Camilla sat facing one another in the chairs by the hearth. Moon lay not nearby but sprawled in front of the door in a well-mannered indication that he ho
ped no more strangers would come and go, at least for awhile.

  “I guess we can trust them?” she asked.

  “Yeah. They want to see what happens tomorrow night as much as we do. I believe they’ll do what they said. File a cursory report on our conversation tonight but not do anything about interviewing them again until day after tomorrow. Even if we’re wrong and nothing happens tomorrow night, they’re not going to jump to conclusions or show their hand. They’re not suppressing information, much less evidence.”

  The phone rang. It was Libby calling to report that Charlie had regained consciousness for about thirty seconds around eight o’clock and for nearly a minute two hours later.

  Chaz got on the phone briefly to second the good news and then gave it back to Libby.

  ***

  “He sounds excited,” said Hudson.

  “Oh, yes.”

  “But there’s a very fine line between sounding excited and sounding scared.”

  “I think so, too.” He could see Libby smiling at Chaz and Sydney. “Yes, he seems to be…more and more.”

  “Are you okay? Are the guys there across the hall?”

  “They sure are. Chaz just went down to get a bite to eat, and Sydney’s watching Nightline and I just gave Charlie a shave and think I’ll do some more reading. We’re all just fine. How about you?”

  “You’ll be there ’til they leave around five-thirty?”

  “Sure will.”

  “Then if we don’t hear otherwise from you we’ll be there at six. I’m meeting Tim Faraday in his office. I tried to talk Victor and Fentry out of their shifts but they want to be there. Camilla’s going to let them in on what’s going on.”

  “Sounds great. Good night, Hudson.”

  ***

  Hudson poured some wine and asked, “How about a little quiet music?”

  “Please. I think there’s nothing else we can really do right now. And my brain is shutting down.”

  “Mine’s trying to. But part of it’s there, you know? With Charlie.”

  She nodded. “That’s something I’ve had to work on. For years. And every time I think I’m making progress something comes along to cause me to wonder.”

  “A divided mind?”