Evil. She was already searching the people around her, thinking of the evil that had brought her here. She didn’t even know if the person behind the mask was man or woman, how old, or more importantly, the reason behind two attempted murders. She had been a target hundreds of miles away in Boston. The distance hadn’t been enough to keep her out of harm’s way. Now she was here, where surely the evil originated. Where she could trust no one.
The buzzer jarred her out of her fearful misery, signaling the arrival of their bags. After grabbing her luggage, she registered for her rental car and walked outside to the curb where a bus took her and thirty others to their waiting cars. Dusk cloaked the town in a blanket of darkening gray. Even the city’s lights didn’t lift the ominous sense of bleakness. The chill in the air didn’t have the bite that Boston’s had, and there weren’t clumps of dirty snow pushed to the corners of parking lots. Still, it felt colder, chilling her through her heavy wool coat.
Lighten up, girl. The only thing evil around here is this map. While the car heated up, she unfolded it and tried to find her location in the dim interior light. She hated maps. She considered that she was simply inept at reading them but settled on the map being evil scenario. A few minutes later, she navigated through traffic and hoped she’d read the darn thing right.
She found herself turning on the radio, something she rarely did. She usually went over that day’s patient list during her commute. The deejay warned listeners about parking in parade zones and certain areas of the French Quarter. Don’t grab doubloons, he warned, lest the grabber get his or her fingers crushed beneath someone’s shoe. Don’t carry a lot of cash. “It’s going to get crazier, folks. The madness has only just begun.”
During the drive to the hospital, she encountered signs of the celebration: windows decorated in gold, green and purple flagging, beads hanging from rear-view mirrors. The buildings looked like old matrons trying desperately to hold onto their former beauty with patched-up cracks and scaffolding armor.
The hospital had a gothic air about it, with old, elaborate cornerstones and eroding statues braced against the wind. Probably gargoyles, though she didn’t take the time to find out. The woman at the reception desk breathlessly told her where to find Brian LaPorte’s room. Rita had been doing fine until she reached the seventh floor, until she took those first steps off the elevator. Even though everything looked as she’d expected, she felt further and further from reality with every step.
She paused outside the room and took a deep breath, noticing for the first time the smells of urine and disinfectant and the underlying mustiness that went along with old buildings. Would Brian look like the man she’d seen? If he didn’t, then the similarities in Christopher and that man were only a coincidence. Then perhaps she could convince herself that the mask thing was just her imagination, and this trip would simply be a visit to a friend. She hoped so. The other scenario was scaring the hell out of her.
She stepped through the open doorway but halted. Christopher stood by the hospital bed, his back to her. She should announce her presence, but she was rooted to the spot by the memory of facing him. He had unsettled her in her own environment; here, she felt totally disconcerted. Still, she couldn’t back away, especially when he spoke again. His voice was deep and so soft she had to strain to hear it.
“The last time I saw you in a hospital, I put you here. Seems like all of the people in my life end up in the hospital…or worse.” A few long seconds passed as he stared at the one of the monitors. “How does Rita Brooks fit into your life? Every time I say her name, your heart rate jumps.”
Hearing her name felt as though a thousand pound weight had slammed into her. Move, before he turns around and catches you there.
“I know she was holding something back. I’m going to find out what she knows.”
That finally broke the ice that kept her frozen to the spot. She took one step back, then another. Her legs felt shaky. Her hands were clammy where her palms were pressed together. She was nearly outside the room now. Three more steps …
He started to turn. She pivoted, letting her thick hair swing around to hide her face as she walked forward. She heard his footsteps and ducked into the restroom—and right into a nurse fixing her hair in front of the mirror.
“Sorry,” Rita said, slipping into a bathroom stall and waiting until the nurse left. Then she waited fifteen more minutes. She was pretty sure Christopher hadn’t seen enough of her face to recognize her, but her cagey movements could have piqued his interest.
She sat on the commode and dropped her face into her hands. He had put Brian in the hospital before. He knew she was holding back. Well, of course he did. She hadn’t been very good at it. I’m going to find out what she knows. She shivered. Even she didn’t know how she fit into this situation.
She stepped out of her stall and to the sink. The woman staring back from the mirror looked pale. She pulled on her cashmere hat, making sure the shoulder-length waves hid as much of her face as possible. Her hands were shaking as she washed them under the cold stream of water and splashed her face. A few minutes later, she pushed the door open.
Apparently Christopher hadn’t given up so easily. He stood in front of the elevator now, watching the brass dial depict the car’s progress. The doors slid open, and he walked inside just as she stepped back inside the restroom. She waited another few minutes before opening the door again. This time he was gone.
As she walked into Brian’s room, she felt cold inside, cold and alone. She approached the bed, taking in a soft breath at the sight of all the wires and tubes connecting him to machines that probably kept him alive.
A respirator made a whump sound in rhythm to her heartbeat. A tube disappeared into his mouth. She swallowed, forcing her gaze to the man’s face. Or what she could see of it. His eyes were taped shut, the white patches blending into his pale face. Round monitors were taped to his chest, checking his heart rate. Other tubes snaked out from beneath the blankets, either draining fluids or supplying them. One tube came out of his head; a large swath of hair had recently been shaved. They had probably done surgery to eliminate the swelling of his brain.
Her eyes watered. Brian. She swallowed, focusing not on the equipment but the man. There were no similarities to the man she’d seen in the gray place. She wanted to leave it at that. Maybe this is better. Maybe the whole gray place was a concoction of my brain. She may have been able to convince herself of that if she hadn’t noticed the display on a small table. On the white cloth covering the table were an array of cards, an unlit candle with what she thought was one of the Catholic saints embedded in the white wax, and pictures. A blond man laughed at something, his blue eyes sparkling. In another he was about fourteen, wearing a costume and wielding a sword. Her legs went weak, and she had to grab onto the corner of the table. It was him. Oh, yes, it was him.
Somehow she hadn’t expected him to look like this…so helpless and pale, no expression on his face. Had she looked this way when she was under? Had she looked so…lost?
No, she hadn’t been on life support, and she hadn’t been in a coma for long. He had been in his coma for six weeks.
“Brian.” Her voice was a coarse whisper. “Brian, it’s me. Rita.”
The numbers on one of the monitors jumped higher, just as Christopher had said. Brian knew she was there. “I just found out you were here. I’m so sorry.” She looked behind her to make sure no one was listening before turning back to him. “You…you came to me. You really did come find me. But I don’t remember much of what you showed me. Just the person in the mask. I know he pushed you off the roof. He came to Boston and ran me off the road. That’s why I was in a coma, too. I’m going to the police. I’m going to get you protection.”
If only she knew more. Why had this person tried to kill him? More importantly, why had he or she also tried to kill her? Was it a jealous lover? Someone out for revenge? If only she had some idea of the motive, she could begin to figure this out.
> “I need to know more. Some of what you showed me, well, it was too fast for me to see. Blood and a knife and a funeral. A young man with dark hair.” She looked at the picture of young Brian. The boy with him was Christopher, she realized, a darker version of Brian. How was he involved in all this? Too many questions and hardly any answers.
She wondered if touching him would re-establish their connection. She reached for his hand.
“Who are you?”
The sharp, feminine voice startled Rita, who whirled around with her hand on her stampeding heart. “Mawtha a’Gawd, you startled me!”
The woman didn’t return Rita’s flustered smile. She walked in with authority yet wore no uniform. Unless the hospital uniform policy loosened during Mardi Gras to include black pants, an orange blouse that accented angular shoulders, and green beret. The woman was in her mid-thirties, Rita guessed, with a smooth complexion and regular features. Her short, black hair sported strands gelled to her cheeks, spikes pointing forward.
“Who are you?” she asked again, dark lipstick making her lips look harsh and small.
“I’m—my name is Rita. Rita Brooks from Boston,” she felt inclined to add, as though that would lesson the suspicion in the other woman’s eyes. Good American city and all that. “And you are?”
“Tammy Rieux.” She sat on those words for a moment, sizing up Rita with gray-green eyes thickly rimmed in black liner.
“Wait, wait, wait a minute,” Tammy said, moving between Brian’s bed and Rita. “I’ve heard of you. Christopher LaPorte was asking around at the hotel to see if anyone had ever heard of you.” Her voice lowered, and her eyebrow lifted. “We hadn’t. How do you know Brian?”
Of course, after Christopher intercepted her email, he would have asked around. The hotel she referred to was probably the one Brian managed.
“He bought some merchandise from me on eBay.”
Tammy eyed Brian, as though he could refute Rita’s tale. Rita noticed how shiny the woman’s hair was. A wig? Tammy stroked the set of pearl beads hanging around her neck, making the plastic click together. One side of her mouth twitched. “Was it some kind of lurid online thing?”
Rita found herself laughing at the comparison between something tawdry and what they had actually shared. “Nothing like that. We were just friends.” That was the story she was sticking to. It was simpler and required less qualifying.
Rita wondered if Tammy was a lover in past or present terms. Brian had claimed not to be seeing anyone. They had written about their towns, about the house she’d been saving to buy, about her hobby wheeling and dealing. He was old-fashioned about life and love and cried during sad movies. He was a Supernatural fan.. But she didn’t know everything about him, only the parts he wanted her to know.
“How did you know he was here?” Tammy asked.
“Christopher found me. I came to see if there was anything I could do. Are you his girlfriend?”
“He’s my boss.” A non-answer, though Rita could hardly press. “I suppose Christopher brought you here,” Tammy continued. “I passed him in the lobby.”
Tammy wasn’t all that happy about it, Rita could see. “No, he didn’t bring me. He…doesn’t even know I’m in town.”
That clearly piqued Tammy’s interest. “Why not?”
“I just didn’t tell him.”
Tammy’s expression relaxed, though Rita got the impression it was calculated. “He does have a way about him, doesn’t he? Brian ever mention him?” A test question.
“He didn’t talk much about his family, or his past. Are they close?”
She uttered a humorless laugh. “Not by a long, long, long shot.”
“Was there bad blood between them, then?”
“Oh, you could say that.”
This wasn’t getting her anywhere. Maybe a blunt tactic would work. “Could Christopher have pushed Brian off the roof?”
Tammy made a sound of disbelief. “For one thing, Brian and Christopher haven’t even seen or, as far as I know, talked to each other in years. Secondly, he wasn’t in town when Brian…fell. And third, Brian wasn’t pushed. He had no enemies. It wasn’t a break-in. Nothing else makes sense.” Her eyes narrowed. “Why are you here, anyway?”
Rita saw the numbers on one of the monitors change. Brian was there. “I’m a psychologist. He’s a friend. I want to understand what happened.”
“You were friends.” She pressed her knuckles against her mouth. “What did you talk about?”
“TV shows. Knives. Internet auctions. The meaning of life when we were feeling philosophical. Not once did he talk about death and what an escape it would be, or indicated at all that he was depressed. Do you really believe he tried to kill himself?”
Tammy remained silent for so long, Rita would have thought she was being insolent except that her eyes were filled with pain as they focused on Brian. “You probably knew him better than I did. Do you realize how unfair that is when I saw him almost every day for the past sixteen years?” Her expression softened. “We both started at the LaPorte right out of high school.”
“The LaPorte?”
“Yeah, the family hotel in the French Quarter. You must not have known Brian well if you didn’t even know that.” She seemed relieved, so Rita didn’t bother to say she knew he managed a hotel. She just hadn’t realized he owned it.
Tammy said, “Brian’s father opened it back in the seventies. My dad and Mr. L—that’s what I always called Mr. LaPorte—went back years. Brian and I went to school together. We were best buds. His mother was so mad when he didn’t want to go to some fancy college. He took business courses at Tulane and worked at the hotel. He loves that place, just like I do. When his father died, we became a team to keep it going. We were only twenty-two, but we did it. I’m his right hand, that’s what he always said.”
Her mouth stretched into a frown as she stepped away from the bed. “At one time I could have said I knew him better than anyone. We laughed together, went to management seminars, and invented inspirational sayings.” Her eyes darkened. “Then over the last year, he started slowly withdrawing. At first he was just distracted a lot. He was still here, still basically working. But not here, either. He’d say hello but be a million miles away. I asked him what was wrong, tried, tried, tried to reach him, but the more I tried the more he retreated. Do I believe he tried to take his life? Not the Brian I used to know. But nobody knew him anymore.”
“Was he seeing anyone?”
Her eyes flashed. “You.”
“I mean physically.”
She seemed to weigh her answer. “Not that I know of,” she said at last.
Rita couldn’t help but think she knew something, but accusing her of that would get her nowhere.
“What happened between Christopher and Brian?”
Tammy walked back over to him, as though he were a magnet whose force she could not resist. She took Brian’s hand, rubbing each finger. “You were supposed to be king that year.” She said this to Brian, and Rita wasn’t sure if it was an answer to her question.
“King?”
“Yeah, you know. Each krewe selects a king and queen to preside over Mardi Gras.” At Rita’s blank expression, she added, “The krewes are the social clubs that put on the parades.”
“Oh, right. The people who throw stuff from the floats. Bacchus, Rex.” She recalled only that much from hearing others talk about it.
“It’s more than that. It’s a huge honor to those lucky enough to be asked. Once the king has been chosen, the pageantry goes on all year long. The king sponsors a ball. It was all Brian talked about. That’s when it happened.”
“What?” Rita asked after a moment.
“You’ll have to ask either Brian or Christopher. They’re the only ones who know. The day before the parade, Brian had some kind of accident. That’s what they said, anyway. The next time I saw Brian, a few days later, his shoulder was bandaged, but he wouldn’t talk about it. And after that, Christopher became the pariah. N
ot that he’d ever been the favorite son anyway, you could always tell that. He was the one who got into trouble, sneaking into blues bars, hanging out with the wrong crowd. But after the accident, he was on the S-list for sure. He left town when he graduated a few months after that. I didn’t see him again until a year later, at Mr. L’s funeral. I overheard Brian telling him that he didn’t belong there. He didn’t come back for Mrs. LaPorte’s funeral three years later, and hasn’t until now.” She squeezed his hand. “Brian was always the worthy son.”
The prodigal son returns. Too bad no one wants you here. Rita remembered that from the images Brian showed her. Then the regret.
Tammy had been talking to Brian’s hand the whole time. She obviously had feelings for him. Rita couldn’t help wondering how deep those feelings went, and how resentful she would be if she’d known that he’d withdrawn from her and connected with an unknown woman in Boston.
“Where are you staying?” Tammy asked, shaking Rita out of her harrowing thoughts. “Sorry, it’s a habit, habit, habit.”
It took a moment for Rita to refocus her thoughts. “Habit, ha—?” She stopped herself from copying Tammy’s tendency to three-peat words.
“Of working at the LaPorte. Whenever I meet someone from out of town, I always want to know where they’re staying.”
“I’m staying at the Ashbury. It was the only hotel my travel agent could find.”
Tammy’s cell phone went off, a pleasant chiming sound. She eyed the display. “Can’t these people handle anything on their own? No, I must remember what Brian always says: In the middle of difficulty lies opportunity.”
“Actually Albert Einstein said that.”
Tammy waved away the notion. “But you know how Brian was, always quoting expressions like that. Don’t you?”
Rita shook her head. She couldn’t remember him quoting even one.
Tammy answered the phone with, “I’m on my way back,” and hung up. She planted a kiss on Brian’s cheek. “Winners never quit. Quitters never win.” She looked at Rita. “Whatever happened…it’s really not your business. If you weren’t involved with him, that is.”
What She Doesn't Know Page 4
