The Truth Hurts

by Nancy Pickard

  She lets me walk up to the wreck with her, and when we reach it, she looks at me squarely. “Was he suicidal?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  Even considering his miserable life—and without even knowing if it has improved all that much—I’m pretty sure Steve didn’t want to kill himself. At least, not today. He was just in a hurry to catch my criminally scatterbrained cousin whom disaster follows as night the day. Agents die, girlfriends leave him, bodyguards get wrecked.

  Florence touches my arm, with a modicum of sympathy. “If you’ll wait, I’ll drive you to the hospital if you want to.”

  31

  Marie

  Hours later, after nightfall, I am back at the inn, wearily climbing the stairs to my suite. There’s nobody around to greet me, and I’m glad of that. If the Hostel members had their meeting, I missed it, and I’m glad. They can do what they want to, I don’t care. I don’t want to see anybody, I don’t want to have to talk to anybody.

  I just want to get onto my computer and flame-throw a scorching E-mail at Paulie Barnes. Maybe he’s a brother and sister, or maybe he’s not, but I still think of him as one man, one evil entity. It’s the only way I can picture him in my mind, and right now I know how I want to see him look when he reads what I have to say. I want his eyebrows to singe when he reads it. I want his fingers to blister when he touches his keyboard to open it. I want his eyes to fry in his head when he sees what I say to him. And if what I have to say doesn’t set him on fire, I want spontaneous combustion.

  If he weren’t playing his games, if he hadn’t forced me to hire Steve, if he hadn’t brought me here, if he hadn’t lured Nathan here, if the whole thing hadn’t unnerved Nate to the point that he fled, then Steve Orbach wouldn’t be lying in intensive care in Birmingham, Alabama, right now.

  “Damn you” is too mild a curse .

  Maybe the police won’t be able to find him. But I’ll go after him, to the end of my days, if I have to. I may have chickened out long ago when it came to pursuing the truth about my parents, but I won’t give up on this one.

  Steve is alive, but with grievous internal injuries, broken bones, and a head injury for which the standing procedure is to induce a coma until and if the swelling in his brain recedes. He has never regained consciousness.

  I open the door to my suite and nearly faint to find a man in it.

  “Surprise!” says my cousin, who is sprawled on the couch with his feet up on the coffee table. He grins at me, as if nothing has ever been wrong between us. “I lost my damned wallet, can you believe that, and they wouldn’t let me on the airplane. I was so pissed, I wanted to tell them to take their empty seat and shove it. I’ll get home some other way. What’s the matter with you? You look like you lost your best friend.”

  I just stare at him. I can’t even tell him. My mouth won’t work.

  “Oh, hell. What? You still mad at me for leaving?”

  Without a single word, I walk past him and go into the other bedroom and slam and lock the door to it. From the other room, I hear my cousin calling in a plaintive, annoyed voice, “Marie!”

  I know I have to tell him. I just can’t do it until I am sure that I won’t direct that flamethrower at him.

  I open my E-mail, ready to do battle with Paulie Barnes.

  But he has beat me to the scene of carnage.

  What I see, what I read, fills me with horror.

  Dear Marie,

  Did you think I didn’t mean it?

  You misjudged me, didn’t you? You decided that because I hadn’t really hurt anyone up until now that I never would do anything like that. It’s too bad—for your “bodyguard”—that you didn’t believe me. His injuriesare entirely your fault. You must blame yourself, you and your foolish cousin. I don’t recall granting him permission to leave. Perhaps now both of you will take me more seriously?

  So that large young man was your protection, was he?

  How safe do you feel now, my dear?

  Yours truly,

  Paulie Barnes

  I jump out of the chair as if the E-mail were a snake.

  Steve warned me of this. He told me so. When I first hired him, he predicted that eventually Paulie Barnes would try to separate me from everyone, including him, and that’s when he would strike at me. He has done it. He has managed to separate me from Franklin, from my hometown cops who know me and would take a personal interest in my welfare, from the professionals who normally assist me, and now from my bodyguard. And if Nathan hadn’t come back, I’d even be separated from—

  I run across the room and fling open the door to the other bedroom.

  “Nathan, what’s the real reason you wanted to leave today?”

  He’s reading in the bay window, and now he glances up, looking like he used to look when I would catch him doing something he wasn’t supposed to do, like eating my Popsicle.

  “What do you mean? I just wanted to go home.”

  “You don’t look like it now. You look perfectly happy to sit there reading forever. How come you just had to go home this morning, but you don’t just have to go home tonight?”

  Unless I’m mistaken, the “caught” look on his face is turning to serious fear.

  I hurry over to him, kneel down beside him, take his hands and beg.

  “Please. Please tell me. It’s really important to tell me the truth.”

  Nathan looks around, almost as if he thinks somebody else might be in the room with us. He lowers his mouth to my left ear and he whispers into it, “I got an E-mail last night, Marie. From him. He said I had to leave you this morning, or he’d hurt you. He said I had to pretend to go back to L.A. and he said that I couldn’t tell you why. He even told me to drop the wallet, to give me an excuse not to get on the airplane. He said it was okay for me to come back here tonight.”

  “Why did you do it?”

  “So he wouldn’t hurt you!”

  “But what did you think he was up to?”

  He shrugs, looking unhappy. “I just thought it was some kind of crazy test, you know? Like he was testing to see if he had me under control the way he has you. And I don’t think I’m smart enough to mess with that. I didn’t dare tell anybody. I would have told Bruto, but how do I know that he’s not Paulie Barnes himself, just jerking you around for his own pleasure? I didn’t know what to do except to do just what he said. That’s what you’ve been doing. If even you follow his instructions, I figured that’s what I’d better do, too.”

  Now it’s his turn to plead with me.

  “What’s going on, Marie?”

  Before I answer him, I get to my feet and walk over to the side of the drapes and pull the cords to close them. Then I ease down onto the bay window cushions with him.

  “He’s not Paulie Barnes,” I tell him gently. He’s going to feel terrible about this, and I can’t prevent it. “Steve took the Lexus. He was going to try to catch up with you at the airport and give you your wallet. On the way, he had a terrible accident. He hit an overpass. He had to be life-flighted into Birmingham, and he’s in a hospital now in critical condition.”

  I watch his tan fade, as if I had pulled a plug that drained him of color.

  “I thought it was an accident, Nathan,” I continue. “A cop even asked me if it could have been a suicide attempt. But I just now read a new E-mail from Paulie Barnes. He’s taking credit—if you want to call it that—for causing Steve’s accident.”

  As I expected, he looks completely stricken, horrified.

  The first words that come out of his mouth are the right ones.

  “Is Steve going to be okay?”

  He didn’t think of himself first, he thought of someone else.

  “I don’t know, sweetie.”

  And then he says the next best thing he could say.

  “What can I do?”

  This is more like the Nathan I love.

  “You can go with me to the local sheriff’s department and help me tell them that we believe that Steve was e
ither forced off the road, or was a hit-and-run.” I take hold of one of his hands again. “I was a jerk this morning. I’m really sorry.”

  But he only smiles sadly, and this time it is Nate who gets to forgive me.

  “What were you supposed to think? I did it on purpose so you wouldn’t ask many questions. I knew it would piss you off.” He grins just a tiny bit, though it disappears quickly. “I’m sorry I left you thinking that I had deserted you. But I hope you know I wouldn’t really do that?”

  “Not even if I was up a tree?”

  “What?”

  He was too young, he doesn’t even remember.

  “Nothing. Thank you. If I wasn’t sure of it before, I am now. Come on, let’s go.”

  “This is my fault. What happened to Steve is my fault.”

  “No! If there was ever anything in this lifetime that was not your fault, Nathan Montgomery, this is it. It’s Paulie Barnes’s fault. You were trying to help. He was trying to kill.”

  Deputy Sachem is off duty, but within twenty minutes she comes in to hear this story of ours. In civilian clothes, she still looks like a cop, just like Robyn does when she puts on a pair of blue jeans and a Florida Marlins T-shirt over bare feet. I’ve had Robyn and Paul out in my little boat and I’ll swear they looked like detectives even in their swimsuits.

  When we’re finished talking, Florence looks at me strangely.

  “What?” I ask her.

  “How could this Paulie Barnes know your friend would be alone in the car?”

  I blink, unable to answer that. It hadn’t occurred to me.

  “Common sense,” she continues, “would say that you’d be there, too, wouldn’t it? Would you have been driving?”

  “No, I’d have been in the passenger’s—”

  I don’t even finish the phrase. Nathan hasn’t seen the car. Florence and I have. We stare at each other now in the shared knowledge of exactly what happened to the passenger’s side of the Lexus. The good news, I think at that moment, is that if he was trying to kill me, that must mean he’s finished with me.

  But the bad news, from his point of view, is that I’m not dead yet.

  “Who was the tow truck driver?” I ask her.

  That pisses her off. “It was Hubert Templeton. So what? It’s Hubert at least one-fifth of the time we get calls, because he owns one-fifth of the tow trucks in Sebastion. This happened to be his time up. What? You think Hubert made himself a little business? Got there early and forced your friend off the road so he could tow the car?”

  “We wouldn’t know his motive,” Nate says, coolly.

  “Well, I would know his motive for just about everything,” the deputy snaps back at us. “It’s goodness, that’s what it is.”

  “If you say so,” Nate says.

  She picks up a pen from her desk and rams its point into a pad of paper at her elbow. “I do damn well say so.” But at the back of her eyes, do I see the beginnings of doubt? Is she wondering about the coincidence of the only black man who didn’t get arrested, who didn’t pay any penalty for his Hostel membership, just happening to show up at the scene of a near-fatal accident that could easily have included me in its body count?

  Is Hubert Templeton “Paulie Barnes”?

  “I don’t understand,” I say, talking out loud, “why a black man would betray Hostel and then turn my parents over to be murdered by the Klan.”

  “You can’t understand it,” the deputy says, more calmly now. Calmly enough to sound convincing. “Because it didn’t happen. Couldn’t happen. Would never happen in a million years, or even for a million dollars. Trust me on this.”

  Nate and I glance at each other. I can tell what he’s thinking: If you say so.

  32

  Marie

  Nate wants us to drive into Birmingham tonight to sit by Steve’s bedside, but speaking of motives, I know guilt when I hear it, and so I plead complete exhaustion. I figure that only by piling on another kind of guilt can I hope to dissuade him; merely telling him that we can’t do anything for Steve won’t work. I agree with him, though. I wish we were there. I wish somebody could sit by his bedside.

  “Does he have any family?” Nate asks me on the way back to the inn. “Do you have to call his mother—oh.”

  When we enter the inn, we smell cigarettes.

  There’s a light coming out from under the door of a room I think might be Mo Goodwin’s bedroom.

  “I sure hope she’s awake,” I whisper to my cousin, “if she’s smoking in there.”

  Nate purposely stumbles against a table leg, making a small racket.

  “That ought to do it,” he says, with a small grin for me.

  And sure enough, as we’re going up the stairs we hear the television change channels in her room. If Maureen wasn’t awake before we got home, she is now.

  • • •

  I take my shower first, and then turn it over to Nate.

  By the time he’s finished and calling good night to me from the front bedroom, I’m deep into some reading. “ ’Night,” I offer, absently. It’s my goal to carefully reread and rethink everything I have about my parents and their friends. As I do so, I can detect my own skepticism about them, my own bitterness that I felt when I originally wrote some of this stuff. I never believed that my father felt so desperately sad when he left me. My account of what my mother and father are alleged to have said that night reads like sarcasm.

  I want a chance to rewrite it.

  Now I do want to write a book about them, about the modern-day Underground Railroad they started here in Sebastion, and about their courageous friends of both races.

  Now, at least, I’ve got a real story to tell, and it’s my story, too.

  There are only a few things missing now.

  Maybe I’ll dream of the solutions while I’m sleeping tonight.

  I lay the papers down on the floor by the bed, turn out the lamp, lie back on the pillow, and close my eyes. But not to sleep. Scenarios and unanswered questions float through my mind, a couple of which I haven’t had time to think about any earlier today. Why did Clayton Fisher take the account of my parents’ murders to the sheriff’s office this morning instead of waiting, as I thought he had promised, for the agreement of the other members of Hostel ? What was their reaction when he told them he did that ? Did he tell them ? Why did he jump the gun like that, rushing to accuse Hubert and Rachel Templeton ? A couple of other, apparently unrelated things pop into my mind, seeking connection and explanation. Why didn’t Mo Goodwin join her parents and their friends—and my little group—at the Fishers’ party ? She told us she was invited to it. When we got home from it, she was here. So why didn’t she go ? Is she just too much of an introvert to face that much socializing ? She’s surely known these people all of her life; she even worked for Clayton for a time at the bank, she said. You’d think there could hardly be a more comfortable social occasion than that, among old friends of herfamily, one of them her former employer and his wife. I suppose, however, that for a truly shy person, there’s really no such thing as a comfortable social event. I wouldn’t know from shy, myself, but I think it must be a horribly crippling condition. I’m a recluse, myself, at times, but that’s just the result of being a full-time writer. I can’t say that I “enjoy” it, exactly; it’s just how the job gets done. Nobody remarked upon Mo Goodwin’s absence, at least not in my hearing, not even her parents. Wouldn’t you think, I ask myself as I lie there not sleeping, that somebody would have thought to ask, “Where’s Mo ?” But as far as that’s concerned, why was she the only one of the next generation who was invited ? Probably only because she used to work for Clayton, I decide, and because she knows us a little bit from being our innkeeper here.

  Suddenly, I just have to know the answer to something.

  “How late is it?” I mutter, and look over at the bedside clock.

  Eleven. Too late to call Florence Sachem at her home? In my mind’s ear, I can hear Robyn Anschutz chiding me, “Marie. It’
s never too late to call a detective with an important question or observation about a case.” When Sachem gave me her card today I weaseled out of her a home phone number and wrote it on the back of the card. I fling myself out of bed and rummage through my purse until I locate it, and then carry it over to the telephone on the desk.

  That’s odd. I’d swear I left my laptop on the right side of this desk and not on the left where it is now. Maybe Nathan moved it? Or, more likely, Mo was up here cleaning, although after dinner seems rather late to be doing that. Then I recall seeing Rachel Templeton on the stairway. She was working late. That must be it.

  Only then, as I’m sitting down there, do I notice two small, pale pink notes that have been left on the desk for me. The top one says, “Ms. Lightfoot. Please call the intensive care unit at Birmingham Medical Center and ask for Jean.” It’s signed, “Mo,” and she has written down a number for me. I drop the deputy’s card. Without even pausing to read the second note underneath, I make the call. “This is Marie Lightfoot,” I tell the female voice who answers. “I got a message to call Jean?”

  “This is Jean,” she says, and her voice goes so soft and kind that I could scream. “I’m so sorry, Ms. Lightfoot. I’m afraid I have to tell you that Steven Orbach passed away three hours ago.”