“To make up for the accident?”
The being of light hadn’t said. “Maybe.” She waded through the haze in search of other possibilities. “Or to make up for my mother. Or my father. But my life’s good. So maybe it’s just because.” She closed her eyes. With an effort, she opened them again. “This part’s harder to believe than the rest”
“Why?”
It took a minute of pushing her thoughts past the morphine before she recalled. “Wishes lie ahead. The rest, the bright light and all, is past.”
“So there’s no way to prove whether the bright light was real, but there is a way to prove whether the wishes are or not.”
“Exactly.”
“Do you want them to be?”
She frowned. “I guess.” She wasn’t sure. But she didn’t know why.
“Only guess? Aren’t there things you’d wish for?”
“Yes.” Something nagged at the back of her mind.
“So?”
Then she remembered. “Three wishes before I die again.” Was that the message she had received, or were the drugs confusing her? She looked at Tom. “I guess I’m a little worried about what happens after the third wish.” She watched his face for understanding. When nothing came, she continued. “It’s like this. It seems like I’ve come back to use the wishes, but if that’s true, does it also mean that once I’ve used the third one, my time will be up? Will I have to go back?”
His eyes widened and his chin came up. “Ah. I see what you mean.”
That chin was slightly square, slightly stubbled. She stared at it until Tom waved a hand before her eyes. Then she blinked, took a sleepy breath. “It’s okay.” Her voice was distant. “They’re probably not real anyway.” Seeing something after the fact, she frowned and lifted the hand he had waved. His palm was covered with barely scabbed cuts.
When she looked questioningly at him, he said, “Getting out of the Jeep.”
She looked at his cheek. “That’ll leave a scar.”
“It’ll add character. I can use that.”
Her eyelids were growing heavy. “Maybe I’ll wish for no scar for you.”
“Don’t you dare.”
“Then no scars for me.”
“You wouldn’t waste a wish on that, would you?”
“Maybe not.” Her lids drifted shut. Whether it was the thinking of the being of light, or being with Tom, or floating on a morphine high, she felt peaceful. “Maybe I can use only two. Save the third up. Know what I mean?”
“That’s a thought.”
Smiling, she gave herself over to whatever it was that felt so good.
Bree was sleeping when Tom left. The morning nurses had just arrived, the sun was newly up, and he was desperate to ease his own aches with a long, hot bath and a long, firm bed. First, though, he needed information.
He drove home in the car he had rented the day before. Snow still lay on the roadside, but two days of melt under sun and mild air had thinned it considerably. Limbs that had fallen under the weight of the snow had been moved aside. Fall foliage had reemerged. The roads themselves were wet but clear, the spatter under the tires a steady shushhhh through his open window.
West Elm was off Pine Street, two miles up from the town green. The houses here were farther apart than the ones in the center of town, and hidden from each other behind evergreen shields. That was the first thing Tom had liked about the bungalow. The second was the modesty of it, the third its difference from his earlier homes.
He turned into the driveway along ruts widened by melt and climbed out in time to hail the newsboy, who was pedaling his mountain bike through the slush on the road. The paper he carried wasn’t a local. Panama wasn’t big enough for that. This one was out of Burlington and had local news at the back.
Tom fished a dollar from his pocket.
The boy stopped, straddling the bike. “They told me you’re s’posed to subscribe.”
“I swore off newspapers when I left New York.”
“So why do you keep flagging me down?”
“I just need a fix now and then.” Specifically, he wanted to see if there was mention of the accident and, if so, his identity. He tucked the dollar in the boy’s pocket. “The Johnsons are on vacation. This is for theirs.”
Folding the paper under his arm, he slogged back to the car and drove on to the carport. Entering the kitchen, he kicked off his sneakers, dropped the paper on the table in passing, and took the stairs two at a time. There were three bedrooms on the second floor of the house. The only room whose door was open was the one with his king-size bed. He opened the door at the end of the hall and went in.
This was the room he had designated as his office when he had moved to Panama seven months before. He could count on both hands the number of times he had been in it since then, and it showed. Unopened cartons stood exactly where the movers had placed them. Walls and windows were bare. The only color to speak of came from a pair of overstuffed briefcases that lay on the handsome mahogany desk behind which he had once practiced law.
He unzipped one of the briefcases, removed a laptop computer, plugged it in, and booted it up. While it hummed on its own through obligatory openers, he rubbed his aching side. He bent over the desk, realized that his body wouldn’t take that for long, dragged over the chair, and adjusted the angle of the laptop. The first thing he saw was that he had mail.
No surprise there. Weekly messages came from his agent like clockwork.
He debated passing it by; but there was always the chance that someone else wondered how he was.
Clicking into his mailbox, he found one, two, three messages from Nathan Gunn, sent in, yes, each of the last three weeks. He didn’t have to read them to know that Nathan wanted another book. The plea was always the same.
At least Nathan cared enough to keep contact. No one else did, for which Tom had no one to blame but himself. Friends who had once E-mailed him regularly had deleted his name from their address books months before.
That bothered him, but the self-pity that usually followed the thought didn’t come. Closing the file, he logged on to the Internet, typed in near-death experiences at the blank, and clicked on Search.
Chapter
4
Tom read dozens of personal recountings of near-death experiences. He read excerpts from books, comments from researchers, transcripts of interviews. He read until he was bleary-eyed and too tired even for the hot bath his bruised body craved. Leaving his clothes in a heap, he crawled into bed and fell into a dead sleep until noon, and the only thing that brought him awake then was the pain of inadvertently turning onto his left side.
He took the bath and a painkiller, fell back into bed, and slept until early evening. Then it was hunger that woke him. He hadn’t eaten since he had woken at roughly the same hour the day before, scarfed down several slices of leftover pizza, and driven to the hospital.
Leftover pizza wouldn’t do it this time. After a hot shower, he headed for the diner.
The roads were clear and dry. The only evidence of the storm that had hit three days before was the lingering sogginess of the earth and the occasional patch of unmelted snow. The air was warm, the foliage vivid even in twilight. It was the kind of sweet October night Tom had dreamed of when he moved north, the kind of night when he might have walked through his yard to the brook and followed it upstream, sat on a moonlit bench, and done the kind of connecting with himself that he needed to do. It was the kind of quiet night when he would have been able to hear his innermost thoughts, had he not been preoccupied with Bree.
The diner was doing a brisk Sunday business. Every booth was taken, with two parties of four waiting and only one empty place at the counter. Tom preferred the privacy of a booth, but he was too hungry to wait, too anxious to be on his way to the hospital. He eased through the eight standing just inside the door and was halfway to the empty stool when the hum of conversation dimmed. In its place, loud without it, were the slap of burgers on the grill, the cl
ink of dishes in the kitchen, and Vince Gill sounding lonely and sad.
Tom wasn’t a novice at being in the spotlight. He had been a star quarterback in high school and college, the stroke of his crew boat in law school, an articulate champion of the poor working out of the public defender’s office, an equally articulate, often flamboyant savior of the rich as a private practitioner of increasingly national prominence. As a writer, he had been followed by the spotlight from his very first sale, which had made Time, Newsweek, and People magazines, to the very last, when an argument that had taken place at Lutèce between him and his publisher, coincidentally his lady of the moment, was reported in some detail on Inside Edition.
At the time, believing that even bad publicity was good, he hadn’t been bothered. But this was different. This spotlight invaded the space that he was trying to put between himself and the past.
He didn’t know these people well. They were the kind of small towners for whom he had carelessly signed books at malls, the kind who wrote him letters care of his publisher and received form letters from his publisher in return. The old Tom would have seen them as nothing more than a vehicle for his own adulation. That Tom would have looked around the diner with a grin, hitched his chin in recognition of the attention, held up a falsely modest hand, and said, My thanks, folks, but please, go ahead and eat.
The new Tom, the one who didn’t know whether the sudden silence reflected his past fame or the fact that his car had been the one to hit a woman these people loved, kept his eyes straight and walked forward. He was nowhere near as confident as he looked when he slipped onto the stool. With brief, unreturned glances at Frank Wright on his left and Martin Sprague on his right, he studied the menu on his mat, then looked up at the chalkboard’s specials.
Flash entered his line of vision. He was wiping his hands on a towel, but his eyes quickly went past Tom to the booths behind. His voice followed, loud with meaning. “You folks waiting for something?”
There were several grunts and an inarticulate word or two. Anything more was lost when the surrounding conversation resumed.
Flash gave Tom a dry look. “Walk in here with a shiner like that, and that’s what you get. How’re you feeling?”
“Arthritic,” Tom said. Then, because Flash seemed Bree’s closest friend, and because she was Tom’s major concern, he asked, “Have you seen Bree today?”
“A little while ago. She’s hangin’ in there. She said you spent the night. Said you were a help. That was good of you.”
“It was the least I could do.”
“How did she seem to you?”
“She was uncomfortable.”
“I mean mentally,” Flash said, more hesitant now. “Did she seem confused?”
“Not terribly.”
“Did she say anything much?”
Tom knew what he was getting at. What he didn’t know was whether anyone other than Flash knew Bree’s thoughts. With Frank at his left elbow and Martin at his right, both ignoring his presence and surely listening to his every word, he chose those words with care. “She mentioned what she had been through. I thought she was coherent.”
“You did?”
Tom nodded and, when Flash looked relieved, asked, “How’s the veal?”
“Tender and light.”
“I’ll try it. With a tall ice water.”
Flash seemed to want to say more. After a look down the counter, though, he wiped his hands again and disappeared into the kitchen.
The grillman called out an order for LeeAnn, who passed Tom without a glance. Frank finished his blueberry crisp, dug money out of his pocket, and studied the check. Martin forked up American chop suey to a steady beat.
Tom studied the diner’s reflection in the stainless steel over the grill. He picked out faces he knew—Curtis Lamb and John Dillard, a boothful of local truckers, Sandy and Jack Swartz with little Tyler, the trio of Earl, Eliot, and Emma. People were looking at him, no doubt about that. He guessed they were talking about him, too. Once, he had craved the attention, so he deserved the discomfort it brought now. Be careful what you wish for, his mother had always said. She was right about that, too.
Frank put a handful of money on the counter and left. Jillie delivered a pizza to the man two stools over and breezed back past Tom to the kitchen. LeeAnn strode by with an armload of dirty plates and not a word.
Tom was feeling like a pariah by the time Flash set down a glass of water and said, “I hear your Jeep was totaled.”
“The axle’s gone.”
“Are you getting another?”
“Jeep? No. I want something heavier.”
“Self-protection?”
For sure, Tom thought, and said as much with a look.
Flash moved on. In the stainless steel, Tom watched the occupants of one of the booths slide out and head for the door. LeeAnn had barely reset the table when a new four-some slid in.
Martin Sprague ran a napkin across his mouth. “Hear you’re a lawyer,” he said, without looking at Tom.
Tom would have denied it, had there been any point. “I was.”
“Not much need for lawyers in Panama.”
“I didn’t come here to practice.”
“That’s good. I do what has to be done.”
Tom imagined that he did. Panama was hardly infested with crime. Since he had come, the only offense he had heard about was the case of a four-year-old child stealing a handful of artificial flies from the tackle shop. Martin Sprague might be getting along in years, but Tom guessed that the legal needs in a town like this were tame enough for him to handle. “Are you the only lawyer here?”
“Not enough work for any others.”
“What type of things do you do?”
“Nothing you’d be interested in,” Martin said, and raised a sharp voice. “LeeAnn, where’s my check?”
Tom took a drink of water, set down the glass, ran his fingers up and down its sides. The cuts on his palms were beginning to scab. The cool felt good.
Martin moved away the instant LeeAnn gave him his check, and waited for his change by the cash register at the end of the counter.
Eliot Bonner slid onto the stool on Tom’s left.
Tom shot him a look. “You’re brave. Everyone else hurried off when I came. Is it the writing that did it, or the accident?”
“Both, I’d guess. No one thought twice about you when you didn’t make noise. Now you stand out. Panama’s like a boat. You up and rocked it.”
“Yeah, well, I didn’t do it on my own. I have a totaled Jeep and a battered body to prove it.” And then there was Bree. “Any luck tracing that truck?”
“Nope. I talked with local departments. Talked with the state police. I was hoping one or the other would have caught someone driving stupid that night. There were a couple of other accidents and an arrest or two, but nothing involving a pickup. Hard to believe, what with so many trucks around here. Lucky, maybe.” He smirked. “Bree says it was blue, you say black, your Jeep says maroon.”
“Trust the Jeep,” Tom advised and might have made a remark about physical evidence holding up in court, if his veal hadn’t come just then. He began to salivate instantly. It looked and smelled as good as anything he had had in New York. Of course, he might have salivated over stale meat loaf, he was so hungry.
“There are a dozen people in town with maroon pickups,” Bonner said. “Every one of them’s got alibis. None’s got dents consistent with what happened.”
Tom decided that Flash hadn’t been bragging without cause. The veal was tender and light, the Madeira sauce pleasantly mild. He chased a second mouthful with helpings of new potatoes and grilled asparagus.
“What about maroon pickups in neighboring towns?” he asked as he ate.
“We’re working on it. Bree said not to bother. Said she’s alive and that’s all that matters.”
Tom put his fork down. “It is, assuming whoever was driving that pickup got enough of a scare to change his ways, but that’s a b
ig assumption. He probably didn’t even know I hit Bree, probably thought he’d just hit another car. He’s probably out there telling himself, No sweat, car’s insured, no one’s the worse for the wear.” Tom realized how angry he was. “Who’s to say the next time he careens around in the snow he won’t hit a bunch of kids and kill one or more outright?”
“Told her that myself.”
“He must have been stoned or drunk. How else could a human being do what he did and then just drive away? Hell, she nearly died.”
Bonner squinted up at the stainless steel. “I heard she did. Heard she died on the table. Heard she made it to heaven, before someone sent her back. She tell you about it?”
Tom wanted to say that what Bree told him was privileged information, only they weren’t lawyer and client. He wasn’t quite sure what they were—friends, maybe—but whatever, he wasn’t betraying her. “Heaven?” he echoed. “Did she tell you that?”
“Nah. My cousin works with Paul Sealy. Bree told Paul.”
Bree had told Paul, who told his coworker, who told Eliot, who would tell Earl and Emma. Emma would tell Dotty, who would tell anyone else in town who cared to listen.
Tom was angry on Bree’s behalf. “Did Bree tell Paul in confidence?”
“Who knows. Look, it’s no big thing. She won’t sue Paul, any more’n she’ll press charges against whoever was driving that truck. If you ask me, it’s a lot of hokum, this near-death business, but I don’t blame Bree. She had a scare. She earned the right to hallucinate. I just don’t want someone having a real-death experience because I didn’t catch the bastard the first time around.” He pushed himself off the stool, straightened the belt under his belly, cleared his throat. “So. I hear you’ve been on Larry King.”
Tom stared at him, then beyond. Conversation was abruptly down again. Half the diner was looking their way.
With a thanks-for-nothing look at the chief, he returned to his veal.
“More than once,” Bonner went on. “He musta liked you.”
“He liked what I did,” Tom muttered, jabbing at his food with his fork. “I wrote about incendiary cases. It made for an easy show.”
Three Wishes Page 6
