Stiff Competition

by Annelise Ryan

  “She’s better now that they have her medicated,” I tell him. “She’s badly dehydrated and a little hypothermic. That’s why she has that machine and special blanket blowing on her. She has an open leg fracture that will have to be reduced surgically and will leave her at great risk of infection. But at the moment she’s comfortable and she’s going to be okay. The orthopedic doctor hasn’t arrived yet but they expect him anytime.”

  Hurley walks over and gives me a kiss on the cheek. “What the hell happened?” he asks, straightening up and running a hand through his hair. “Where was she and how did she get there?”

  I fill him in on the story as I know it based on Carly’s confession. “If what Carly said is true, this girl Olivia was the mastermind behind it all,” I conclude. “Once we got Emily here, Richmond headed to Olivia’s house to speak with her and her parents. I’m not sure what the outcome will be. The good news is, Johnny had nothing to do with this. Apparently his only fault is being too darned attractive to too many girls.”

  Hurley walks over to the bed and leans down to kiss Emily on her forehead. Though she was snoring seconds ago, her eyes flutter open and she smiles when she sees Hurley.

  “Hey, kiddo,” Hurley says. “You had us pretty worried.”

  “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean it, not this time.”

  “Don’t worry about that. The important thing is that you’re safe now and we’re going to get that leg taken care of.”

  “It’s pretty bad, isn’t it?” she says, her brows furrowing.

  “Mattie says it will be a long recovery, but eventually we can make you good as new.”

  Emily rolls her head toward me and manages a weak smile. “I thought you were an angel coming to take me away,” she says. “I didn’t recognize you at first because your hair is different.”

  I’m about to apologize for my hair yet again when there is some noise beyond the curtain and Mick Dunn, the orthopedic surgeon, comes into the room. He gives me a curious look and hesitates a second before he greets me—no doubt the hair again. Then he introduces himself to both Hurley and Emily, and examines the injured leg. Once that’s done, he takes several minutes to explain what needs to be done, and the risks associated with it. When he’s done, he asks if there are any questions.

  “Will I have scars?” Emily asks.

  Dr. Dunn nods. “I’m afraid so. It’s hard to tell at this point how bad they will be. A lot depends on how you as an individual heal.”

  I’m concerned that Emily will be upset by this news, but instead she smiles and says, “I’m going to look totally badass.”

  Dr. Dunn pulls Hurley aside and has him sign the consent for surgery. While they’re occupied with that, I walk over to the bed and tell Emily I need to go home to take care of Matthew but that I’ll keep up on how she’s doing through Hurley.

  “Do you think Dad is mad at me?” she asks me, her brow furrowed with worry.

  “Of course not,” I tell her. “He’s just very tired. He’s been really worried about you and I know he’s glad you’re safe. He loves you, Emily.”

  She looks doubtful. “He’s never said that,” she says, looking sad.

  “Yeah, it’s kind of hard for him to say that kind of stuff, I think. It is for a lot of men.”

  “Has he ever told you he loves you?”

  “Once,” I admit with a roll of my eyes. “He said it when Matthew was born. I think he was overcome with emotion and it just blurted out of him.”

  “I bet he loves Matthew.”

  “Of course he does. But I’ve never heard him say it.”

  “Really?”

  “Really. Sometimes people express love through their actions instead of their words.”

  This statement is a moment of enlightenment for me, and judging from the look on Emily’s face, for her, too.

  After a few seconds of silent contemplation Emily says, “You’re right. I can tell he loves you by the way he looks when he’s around you, and the way he talks about you when you’re not there.”

  “That’s exactly how I know he loves you,” I tell her. “He talks about you constantly, and he worries all the time about whether you’re safe and happy, and if you feel like you belong. And he’s always telling everyone how proud he is of you, about the grades you’re getting in school, and how pretty you are, and how strong you’ve been through everything that’s happened. He’s kind of new to all this fathering and emotional stuff, so we need to give him some slack. But believe me, he’s dedicated to being your dad and giving you the best life he knows how.”

  Emily looks over at Hurley with a contemplative expression. After a moment she looks back at me and says, “I’m sorry I gave you such a hard time.”

  “Thank you.”

  She looks surprised.

  “What?” I ask.

  “I expected you to say it was nothing, or not to worry about it, or some other throw-away line like that.”

  I shrug and smile at her. “I’m not going to lie to you, Emily. You’ve been quite a challenge at times. But whether you believe it or not, I understand why you did it. I come from a less than normal family myself, and my father abandoned me when I was a little girl. It messed me up at times. It still does.”

  While investigating the case of the man who tried to kill me while I was pregnant, I learned that my father was not only a criminal, but a cop killer. And not just any cop, but Hurley’s former partner. My mother swears there’s more to the story, but the information the state cops dug up seems pretty straightforward.

  “I didn’t know that,” Emily says. “Did you ever hook up with him again?”

  I shake my head, even though the answer to this question isn’t a simple one. While it’s true that I haven’t met up with my father since he left my mother and me when I was four, I’m almost certain he has not only poked his head back into my life, but was most likely the one who saved it when my potential killer finally caught up to me. But that fact doesn’t mitigate the other truths. “I’ve learned some things about him,” I tell Emily, glancing over at Hurley to make sure he’s still occupied and out of earshot. “Some not-so-good things, in fact.”

  “Like what?”

  “It’s a long story, one we can save for another time. Let’s get you better and get life back to normal—or what passes for normal for us—and maybe someday I’ll tell you all about it. Right now I need to get home to Matthew.”

  “When can you come back?”

  “You’re going to be out of it all night tonight with the surgery, so how about in the morning?”

  She nods, looks thoughtful for a moment, and then says, “Can you bring Matthew with you?”

  “Sure,” I say wondering how much of this newer, kinder Emily is the drugs talking. I want to believe she’s turned a corner, but I’ve been hopeful before only to have those hopes shattered.

  “Mattie?”

  “Yeah?”

  “Thank you for finding me.”

  I smile at her. “You’re welcome.”

  “I thought Olivia and Carly might come looking for me but when they didn’t, I knew I’d been duped. And since nobody but them knew I was out there in those woods, I thought I was going to die there.”

  “I’m so sorry you went through that, Em. Olivia and Carly will be punished for what they did.”

  This makes her frown. After a few seconds she says, “How did you do it? How did you even know where to look, or who to talk to?”

  I bite my lip, hesitant to tell her that I snooped into her most private life. “We looked for clues,” I tell her. “Hurley and I talked to as many people as we knew to talk to, and we looked through your stuff for any hints. Your dad tried to track your cell phone but it was dead, either from being broken in the fall, or because the battery ran out. Maybe both. We even got someone to hack into your laptop and read your e-mails and your Facebook posts.”

  “Someone hacked into my laptop?” she says. I expect her to be mad but she looks more intrigued than anything
.

  “We tried a bunch of different passwords,” I tell her. “Birthdays, names of family members, things like the word password, and some common number sequences. Whatever you picked is a good one.”

  “You didn’t try all the family members,” she says with a hint of a smile.

  I give her a puzzled look. “What do you mean?”

  “I used my baby brother’s name,” she says, and for a split second I’m confused. Then she adds, “My password is Matthew.”

  I’m speechless, a rare event for me.

  “But I don’t think there was anything on my laptop that would have helped you. Everything Olivia and Carly said was face to face.”

  I brace myself, swallow hard, and fess up to the rest, hoping it isn’t going to damage the delicate détente we seem to have at the moment. “I read your diary,” I tell her.

  She looks at me, narrowing her eyes, her brows drawn down either in confusion or anger . . . I can’t tell which. “What diary?”

  “The one in the composition book that Dr. Baldwin gave you. She gave me the same kind of book when I was going to her and she told me to keep a diary.”

  Emily contemplates this a moment. Then she asks, “How?”

  “I found your special pen, which is pretty cool, by the way.”

  Emily turns away and looks as if she is about to burst into tears.

  “What’s the matter? Are you in pain?”

  She shakes her head. “Some of the stuff I wrote in there was just venting and—”

  I stop her before she can confess to anything I don’t need or want to know. “I didn’t read your whole diary,” I say. “I only read the last entry, the one that talked about Olivia and Carly bringing you out to meet in secret with Johnny. I figured that anything relevant in the diary would be near the end so that’s where I started. Anything you wrote before that is still secret.”

  She looks back at me and I see doubt in her eyes. I wonder what entries had her worried. Had she badmouthed me? Had she admitted to some questionable behaviors?

  Hurley comes back into the room and he moves to the side of the stretcher opposite me, taking Emily’s hand. “Are you doing okay?” he asks her.

  Emily nods. “I was so afraid you wouldn’t come looking for me, that you’d think I ran away.”

  “We did think that initially, when the school first called.”

  “What made you change your mind?” Emily asks. “There weren’t any clues to tell you that it was any different from the other times.”

  “Sure there were,” Hurley says. “Your book bag wasn’t at the house, Johnny didn’t know where you were, and there were no messages from you.”

  “It was more about what wasn’t there than what was,” I say. And as soon as I utter those words, a mental light bulb turns on in my head.

  Hurley is staring at me. “What is it?” he asks.

  “I just had a flash of an idea about the Sanderson case,” I tell him. “Something I need to look into. But right now I have to go home and feed Matthew. If you need me tonight, call me. Otherwise I’ll be back in the morning. Actually, we’ll be back. Emily asked me to bring Matthew.”

  Hurley looks hesitantly pleased. He gives Emily’s hand a squeeze and says, “I want to see Mattie out but I’ll be right back, okay?” She nods and I’m encouraged by the fact that she doesn’t look angry. Hurley and I walk out of the room into the hall and head for the waiting room. As soon as we get there, Hurley pulls me to him and gives me a nice big kiss on the lips. “I don’t know how to thank you, Mattie,” he says when he finally lets me go.

  “You can thank me by giving that child the attention she needs. She needs to know you care about her, Hurley.”

  “She knows.”

  “I don’t think she does. Have you told her?”

  “I show her in all kinds of ways,” he says with a frown.

  I shake my head. “We girls need to hear it from time to time, Hurley. All of us.” I give him a kiss on the cheek. “Think about that, okay? In the meantime, I have to run before my chest turns into Niagara Falls.”

  We share one more delicious kiss before I reluctantly leave and head out to my car. Hoover is waiting for me and he greets me with his usual tail wag and happy face. I give him a big kiss on his furry head and tell him, “You’re a good boy, Hoover. And you definitely earned your keep tonight.”

  I start the car and give Richmond a call. It flips over to voice mail and I figure he’s probably embroiled in whatever is going on at the Mason house. So I leave a message, a long one, telling him what’s on my mind. Then I start the car and head home to my boy—with a quick stop at the McDonald’s drive-through to get Hoover a hamburger—feeling more hope for the future than I have in a very long time.

  Chapter 30

  It’s a late night for me after I feed Matthew and fill Dom and Izzy in on all the events of the evening. We celebrate Emily’s safe return with an intoxicating concoction Dom whipped up that he calls a Kahlúa cream cake. It’s a heady mix of Kahlúa, pudding, chocolate, and sour cream that melts in my mouth, tastes like heaven, and leaves me feeling very mellow. I’m afraid to ask Dom how much alcohol is in the cake and figure I’ll just pump and dump for the rest of the night so I don’t get Matthew drunk.

  “It sounds like Emily is finally coming around,” Izzy says after we have all stuffed ourselves on the yummy dessert. “Do you think it will last?”

  “I don’t know,” I admit. “She was scared and in shock when we first found her, and heavily medicated later on, but she seemed sincere. I’m hopeful.”

  “Why don’t you take a personal day tomorrow,” he suggests. “I can get Arnie to help me with the autopsy in the morning.”

  “Are you sure?” I say with a frown. “I’ve just come back to work after being off for eight weeks.”

  “True, but technically you were entitled to twelve weeks, so we have some flex room. And right now, Hurley and Emily need you more than I do.”

  “Thanks, and I’ll take you up on the autopsy part so I can be at the hospital in the morning. But after that I think I’ll be working with Richmond on our current case.” I then fill him in on the thoughts I had earlier.

  “Makes sense,” he says. “It’s certainly worth looking into.”

  By the time I head home it’s after eleven. I fall asleep easily and Matthew wakes me just before three. I get up and grab one of the bottles I have in the fridge and call the hospital while I’m feeding Matthew to see how things went with Emily. The nurse on duty tells me that Hurley is in her room and awake, so I disconnect that call and dial Hurley’s cell.

  “She came through the surgery fine,” he tells me. “She’s pretty doped up right now but she seems comfortable.”

  “She and I had a good talk last night. I think she may finally be coming around.”

  “Let’s hope so,” he says.

  “How are you doing?”

  “I’m tired and this stupid chair is about as comfortable as a bed of nails,” he grumbles. “But I’ll survive.”

  “I plan on being there first thing in the morning, around seven. If you want, I can stay a while so you can go home and get some rest.”

  “Thanks, but I think I’ll stay.”

  “Just don’t tire yourself out too much.”

  “I’ll be okay. Are you feeding Matthew?”

  “I am.”

  “Give him a kiss for me.”

  “I will.”

  “I’ll see you both in the morning.”

  “Call me if you need me to bring anything.”

  “I will. And Mattie?”

  “Yes?”

  “I know I don’t say it much, but I love you and little Matthew.”

  It takes me a moment before I can speak. My throat is tight with emotion. “And we both love you,” I manage finally. “As does that child in the bed, though I’m not sure she knows it. Good night, Hurley.”

  Matthew and I arrive at the hospital bright and early the next morning. Hurley is th
ere in Emily’s room, asleep in a chair, his hair adorably disheveled, a two-day growth of beard on his face, and dark circles under his eyes. Emily is in bed, a cast encasing her lower leg. She, too, is asleep, though her rest is augmented by the hefty pain medication in the pump at her bedside. The sight of hardware protruding from either side of the cast makes me wince. Orthopedics has never been my strong suit.

  A nurse comes into the room, an old-timer named Velma whom I know from my days working at the hospital. Velma is an institution at the hospital. She’s been here for more than thirty years and knows all of the deep dark secrets and where the bodies are buried.

  “Hey, Mattie,” she says. “Long time no see.”

  “It has been a while. How are you doing, Velma?”

  “Can’t complain. Well, I can, but nobody listens, so what’s the point?”

  I laugh and it wakes Hurley. He looks over at me and Matthew, smiles, and stretches.

  “Who’s this little guy?” Velma asks, walking over and taking a peek at Matthew in his carrier. “I’d heard you had a kid. He’s a cutie.”

  “Thanks. I think we’ll keep him. How’s Emily doing?”

  “She had a good night according to the night nurses. Today will probably be a rough one for her and she has a lot of therapy ahead of her before that leg gets back to normal.”

  Hurley gets out of his chair, walks over to us, and wraps me in a big bear hug.

  “Whoa,” I say, pushing him back a ways and waving a hand in front of my face. “You should probably go home and take a shower.”

  “I’m happy to see you, too,” he grumbles. Then he breathes in deeply through his nose and adds, “You smell fabulous.”

  Velma smirks at our repartee and heads over to the bed to check Emily’s vital signs. The movement awakens Emily and when she sees all of us standing by her bedside, she smiles. “My whole family is here,” she slurs.

  Even though I know she’s still under the influence, it’s nice to see that her new, more positive attitude has remained intact. I take Matthew out of his carrier and walk over to the bedside with him. “Say good morning to your big sister,” I tell him. And Matthew, bless his little heart, looks down at Emily, pumps his tiny fists spastically, and gives her a huge smile. She smiles in return, though hers has a stoned, dreamy quality to it.