Ben did. If Cree was with him, she might make him see reason. I would offer to pay for the gas. Knowing Ben, he’d take me up on it.
I found the ICU but, as expected, I couldn’t get in. The nurses’ station was right there guarding it. All the individual patient rooms branched off like flower petals and they all had big windows. The two nurses could keep a watch on everything, including me. I didn’t try to get any closer.
That meant I could only look through the window, but I thought I found Hank. The one with the bandaged head.
“Oh, Hank,” I whispered. We had just been talking about comas. Now he was there himself, exactly what he’d wanted to write about. Could he have had some sort of premonition? Or was it just a horrible coincidence?
Right then, I made up my mind. What could be more fitting than to go ahead with his idea for the newspaper? If no one else wanted to carry on, I’d do it myself. And probably get shot.
I really wanted to get in and talk to him. Hank himself had said a lot of coma patients were vaguely aware of what goes on around them. It might really help if he knew we were still working on his idea.
The nurses kept a close eye on me. I must have looked suspicious, lurking the way I did. I asked one of them, “Do they ever get out of ICU? I mean, if they’re in a long-term coma?”
“It depends,” she said. “Sometimes they’re moved to a different facility.”
That brought up another question, but I didn’t want to ask. Who pays for all that? It could go on for years. I was sure his family didn’t have that kind of money, nor did most people. The “different facility” must be a dump.
I hurried back to the lobby. Falco was already there, talking with the volunteer, who pointed me out.
“Sorry,” I said. “I didn’t mean to keep you waiting.”
“No problem. I just got here myself.” He led me out to his car.
“When do you think I can get mine back?” I asked.
“Any day now, but you’re still going to need a new windshield.”
“Yes, officer, I’m aware of that. But it might be hard to get one on a weekend.”
“Let’s skip the officer. Call me Rick.”
“As in Richard?”
“That’s right, but only my grandmother calls me that. What about you?”
“Nobody calls me Richard.”
I thought it was cute, him having a grandmother. It made him seem like a little boy.
Then I got serious. “I have to tell you, I disobeyed your orders and went upstairs. I didn’t get in, but I saw him. It seems like such a...I mean, it’s not living. That was his point exactly with the series, but he was trying to be even-handed. So why did they have to shoot him?”
“We don’t know that’s what it was about.”
“He was just a nice guy. Not the type who would be into something like—drug-dealing, or stealing somebody’s—”
I stopped right there. Evan might have thought Hank was stealing me, and Evan was of the opinion that he owned me.
Falco gave me a quick look. He, too, must have remembered Evan.
“I know Evan Steffers is a lunatic,” I said. “But I can’t see him going so far as to kill. Except me, maybe. Anyhow, my friend Glynis at Lakeside told me he’s in New Hampshire now.”
Falco opened the passenger door and held it for me. “What’s he doing in New Hampshire?”
“Getting an education, I assume. I know he got kicked off the Lakeside football team. They might have kicked him all the way out of school. Or he decided it himself if he couldn’t be a football hero.”
Falco got in and resumed his questioning. “Where in New Hampshire?”
“Something Academy. I forget the name. He’s out of my life so I don’t care anymore.”
Riding with Falco almost made me not miss having my own car. I watched the highway go by with its mix of houses and businesses. A cemetery. A big estate that was now a museum. I could just imagine trying to walk it and that was only to Southbridge. Never mind getting through the village, over the bridge, and up the steep hill.
Falco knew the way by now and zeroed in on my house. My parents weren’t home yet. Nor was Ben. I tried asking him in for coffee, but he had to get back to police work. I thanked him again for the ride.
“My pleasure.”
I was afraid he’d say, “Just doing my job.” But, “My pleasure” was nicer.
He stayed while I unlocked the door and made sure the dogs were okay and not excited about some hidden intruder.
Neither of us could miss the vase on the dining room table. Pink roses. My favorite color. Falco’s eyes popped.
“That must be for my mother,” I said. “It’s her birthday next week.”
“Very nice.” He bent to sniff the flowers even though they weren’t fully open yet.
The dogs followed him as he toured the house. They’d met him last night and weren’t suspicious, only curious.
Falco insisted that I lock myself in. He waited until he heard the lock turn, then called goodbye through the door and drove off.
That time, as I passed the dining room, I noticed an envelope on the roses. I picked it up, not planning to open and read it.
But it wasn’t Rhoda’s name on the envelope. It was mine, Madelyn Canfield.
That couldn’t be right. Who would send me flowers? Someone must have made a mistake.
But Southbridge had only one florist, Flowers by Maxine. How would they even know my name to mix it up? I opened the envelope.
A blank white card.
I gave the florists the benefit of the doubt. They were busy and just forgot. That was what I wanted to think, but something made me skeptical. Starting with them having my name.
I thought of calling Rick. He had given me both the station’s number and his cell phone. He wouldn’t have gotten to the station yet. I imagined his cell ringing while he was on that steep hill going down to the bridge, with a sharp drop into the Vanorden Kill. Common sense prevailed. It wasn’t worth the risk, even though he’d probably have enough sense not to answer.
I called Flowers by Maxine.
“Do you keep records?” I asked. “Like orders and where they go?”
“Certainly. What are you looking for?”
“It came today. Pink roses for Madelyn Canfield on Lake Road.”
“Hang on a minute.” I heard voices softly discussing. Then they put me on hold.
I figured the flowers must have come while someone was home. Before ten, when Rhoda left. Or else Ben came home, found them on the doorstep, and put them in a vase before he went out again. That didn’t seem like Ben. Maybe they came already in a vase. But I couldn’t believe the delivery person would leave them outside in the cold.
“Ma’am?” She was back. “Is there a problem? They should have been delivered by now.”
“They were.” I thought I told her that. “But the card has nothing on it. I’d like to know who sent them.”
“Sometimes the person doesn’t want to leave a name.”
“There’s no message or anything. The card’s just blank. Only my name on the envelope.”
“That must be what the sender wanted.”
I was undoubtedly being a pest, but I had to know. “Did the order come by phone?”
“Most of them do, or by Internet.”
“Then they’d have to use a credit card. Or they have an account. There must be a record somewhere.”
“I didn’t take the call, ma’am.”
“No, I’m talking about a record of that transaction.”
“Those records are in another place. We’re a little busy right now. If a person wants to send flowers anonymously, then that’s what we have to do.”
In other words, this was as far as I would get. Was it worth bothering Rick? A court order could pry open their records. But that had to go through a judge, and what judge was going to take it seriously? Even Rick probably wouldn’t. I could think of no one except Evan who would do such a thing, but I want
ed to be sure.
As soon as I disconnected, the phone rang. Its ID said “unknown caller.” I waited till the answering machine picked it up. Nobody left a message. It only beeped and shut off.
Moments later it rang again. Still there was no message. I turned off the machine to see what would happen.
Nothing. It kept ringing. Seven. Eight. Nine. They say ten rings was a full minute and that was plenty of time for anybody to answer, if they were going to.
This person didn’t seem to know that. It got up to twenty. I wished there were some way I could find out if the call was coming from New Hampshire.
Or it could be the person who shot Hank. They were now after me. If they were watching, they’d know I was home, but didn’t they notice the policeman with me earlier?
Likewise, they’d have seen him leave.
If it was that person, why would they send me flowers?
More likely there was no connection. I felt sick. I wished Ben would come home.
I called his BlackBerry and got sent to voicemail. Rick had had me lock the front door but I checked it again.
I had the two dogs for protection. As long as they didn’t get shot. Hank’s enemy was such a maniac, who knew what he might do? Or she.
The phone went on ringing. What if it was my family? I picked it up but didn’t speak.
Nor did the caller.
Instead I heard music. “Somewhere Over the Rainbow.”
I loved that song. When I was a kid, I watched The Wizard of Oz over and over.
I hung up. It wouldn’t be my family. And the person who shot Hank couldn’t know about me and The Wizard of Oz.
Unless it was someone I knew. Someone who knew me when I was younger.
I’d always gone to Lakeside, until a month ago. No one at Southbridge High knew me before that. No one except Ben, who had transferred about the same time I did, for a different reason. I couldn’t imagine Ben doing anything this childish.
The phone rang again. Now it might be my family. My hand hovered, but I couldn’t bring myself to pick it up. Finally I did.
And just listened. They were still doing “Over the Rainbow.” I listened for possible background noises.
There was nothing. Not even breathing.
The song ended and began again. The lunatic was waiting me out, just as I was doing to him. When it finished the second time, they hung up. I won that round.
I thought of leaving the phone open. If my family did call, and they got a busy signal for hours on end, they might decide to come and investigate.
Actually, it wouldn’t be hours. Rhoda should be home soon, and then Daddy. Maybe even Ben. Usually I liked having the place to myself for a while. Today it seemed horribly empty, except for the dogs. And now it really was dark outside.
One thing I did was turn the answering machine back on. It was set to pick up after five rings.
It did. It recorded “Over the Rainbow.”
Chapter Four
I muted everything and went upstairs to my computer, where I looked up “coma”.
It listed reams of material. Before starting on that, I checked the phone book for Dalbeck. Hank’s name. There were three of them in Southbridge. They must all have been related. I wrote down the numbers and addresses. What if he had a long-distance girlfriend that I didn’t know about?
Finally I buckled down to keep my promise of finishing Hank’s project. I’d taken notes when he talked about the other cases. Now I checked each of them, going as far back as Karen Ann Quinlan, who’d lived and died before I was born. At age 21 she collapsed from a combination of alcohol and Valium. Just like Paula Welbourne, the girl from Lakeside, although Paula was only 16. Karen was hospitalized and kept alive by artificial breathing. After several months with no improvement, her parents asked the hospital to remove her from the ventilator and allow her die. The hospital refused. That led to a legal battle, which the New Jersey Supreme Court settled by ruling for the parents. In 1976 she was taken off the ventilator. She never woke up but lived another ten years breathing on her own. In 1985 she died of pneumonia.
Paula Welbourne was almost an exact parallel, except for the timing. She spent three years on the machine and lived five more years breathing on her own. She, too, died of pneumonia. It was not hard to catch an infection in a hospital. With all those sick people, infections were everywhere.
I read about Sunny von Bulow, whose husband was accused and acquitted of trying to kill her with insulin. Instead all it did was put her in a vegetative state. And Terri Schiavo of Florida, whose case was a real hornets’ nest, with her parents on one side and her husband on the other. It all seemed to hinge on how disabled she was. Everybody got in the act. There were doctors, lawyers, and lies all over the place.
That was almost the same as Maisie Halloran, the Georgia case that had caught Hank’s interest. Maisie’s husband claimed she wouldn’t have wanted to be kept alive by artificial means. Her mother accused him of wanting her gone so he could marry his pregnant girlfriend. People all over the country, maybe even the world, took sides, the crux of the issue being the right to life versus the right to die. To me it seemed an individual matter, case by case. Who knew what the person wanted, unless they’d made it clear ahead of time with some sort of living will. Or advance directive, as Hank called it. It was something most people didn’t want to think about.
But it had started Hank thinking. He was so brilliant. How could that mind be locked away forever?
He was the one who brought up the subject at our meeting. I wondered if he himself had an advance directive. Who would ever have thought he’d need it? Especially so soon.
To keep my promise, I would have to go around to each Tiger’s Roar staff person and tell him or her there would be a meeting next week. What if they didn’t want me taking over? I was new at Southbridge High. They might resent me.
I could only hope Hank would wake up by then.
“Hank,” I said to the empty air. “Why did it have to be you?”
I had just started to look up hypoxic brain injury, or brain damage due to a cut-off of oxygen, a situation that can lead to coma, when the dogs starting barking. Someone wrestled with the front door.
I went cold all over. I’d locked the dead bolt, which mostly we didn’t do, so I had to go downstairs and look through the peephole. Thank God, it was my mother.
After getting over the shock and relief of having her home, I asked about the flowers. She told me they had been delivered just as she was leaving for work. “Who are they from?” she asked.
“Nobody,” I said. “The card is blank. I called them and they told me the sender must have wanted to be anonymous.”
“It might have something to do with what happened yesterday.”
I thought that over. “What for? It wasn’t me who got shot.”
“Wasn’t I. But you certainly were affected by it.”
“Wasn’t I! Rhoda, nobody talks that way. Anyhow, the only person I know at Southbridge is Cree and I see her all the time. She wouldn’t send me anything anonymously. It’s not like I have a secret admirer.”
“It’s not as if.” Rhoda stopped and I stopped and we looked at each other over the flowers.
“I hate to say it,” she began, and didn’t say it. She was lugging a couple of grocery bags and went to the kitchen to set them down.
I followed her. “If you’re thinking of Evan,” I said, “he’s in New Hampshire. I know there are telephones and Internet there, but he can’t do anything long-distance.”
“He can order flowers.” She started on the groceries, lining up cans of salmon. “Is there any more word on your friend who was shot?”
“He’s still in a coma.” I reached into the bag. Lentils. Now I could see what we’d be eating the next few days. Lentils and salmon. I hoped not mixed.
“I don’t like this,” Rhoda said. “I don’t like that that bullet was so close to you.”
“Do you think I like it? It was close to me but i
t was Hank who got it.”
“How can you be sure it was meant for him?” She was still thinking of Evan.
“Because of what we talked about at the newspaper meeting. It was controversial, that’s why he wanted to do it. Who’d have guessed it was that controversial? You of all people should know there are a lot of crazies around.”
Rhoda was a clinical psychologist in private practice. Her clients weren’t crazy in the psychotic sense. Mostly just neurotic and unhappy. But that was enough crazy for me.
The phone rang. I rushed to pick it up but Rhoda got there first.
She scowled at it. “Who is this?”
I could tell from her silence that it was the same caller as before. And her speaking gave the dirt bag just what they wanted, a reaction. I gestured for her to hang up.
She finally did, after she’d asked two more times. Then she looked at me. “Do you know anything about this?”
“It’s been doing it since I got home,” I said. “They’re just trying to hassle us—mostly me, I guess, so I didn’t talk to them. You shouldn’t either.”
She put the phone back on its base. “You’re saying it was meant for you?”
“It could be. I defended Hank and his idea. I’m not blaming him. He knew it was a hot-button issue, but how did he know anybody would be that psycho?”
As soon as I said it, I wondered if it could be one of Rhoda’s crazy—er, unhappy clients.
The thought ended right there. She would never in the wide world have given out her home number. So it must have had to do with what we talked about at the meeting. But we all left at pretty much the same time. How could anybody get armed and in place so fast? How could they have known Hank would be getting into my car?
She didn’t say any more as we both got dinner ready for the rest of the family.
I used to wonder why Ben didn’t have to help in the kitchen. The truth was, he often did, but mostly his household duties ran to cutting grass, shoveling snow, and fixing cars. Better him than me.
I was setting the table when the phone rang again. I let the machine answer it that time. They were still playing music but it wasn’t “Over the Rainbow.” The dirt bag had gone on to some bouncy, goofy thing with a chorus of voices. I didn’t recognize it.
The Long Sleep Page 3
