Listen to the Shadows

by Joan Hall Hovey

  And yet they’d seemed so real—so horribly, vividly real. But she must have imagined them, mustn’t she? What other explanation could there be?

  “Your flowers are beautiful,” the nurse said, sniffing them. Agreeing that they were, Katie had to smile at the subtle change of subject. To herself, she thought Drake’s declaration of eternal love a bit premature, if not downright presumptuous.

  Still, his thoughtfulness touched her, while at the same time she couldn’t ignore the slight unease the note had stirred within her.

  With Nurse Ring looking on like a watchful schoolmarm, Katie tentatively spooned the warm, salty broth into her mouth. It tasted strongly of bullion cubes. She broke off a small piece of dinner roll and ate it unbuttered. Apparently satisfied, the nurse left the room, and after a couple more spoonfuls of the broth, Katie abandoned it in favor of the tea, which, although weak, was at least hot. As she raised the cup to her lips, the dead eyes rushed unbidden to the front of her mind like a close-up on a movie screen. The tea shivered in her cup, some of it spilling onto the faded peach bedspread. The cup rattled in its saucer as she returned both to the tray.

  She had seen the eyes. She had. Wide, ice-blue, staring. The squeal of brakes, the explosion of glass, all of it echoed now in her memory.

  Katie rolled the table from her, pushing it all the way to the foot of the bed, rattling the dishes on her tray. The headache was threatening to return full force. Automatically, her hands rose to her head, and for the first time, her fingers felt the thick wad of bandage above her right eye. She brought her hand away.

  Don’t think about the accident anymore, she told herself. You were lucky to come away with your life. Answers, she supposed, would come eventually. She turned her attention to the window on her left, framed with beige drapes that stirred lightly in the breeze. Up so high, she could see the top part of the radio tower, and a hawk in the distance, so far away it seemed no more than a scrap of charred paper floating against the blue sky.

  Lying there, Katie found herself thinking about the last time she was in the hospital. She was just six years old, and she’d come in to have her tonsils removed. That was when her mother and father were still together, and they were all living in Lennoxville, just outside of Portland. But the fighting that kept her awake nights, that made her pull the covers up over her head to keep out the ugly, scary sounds, had already begun. How abandoned she’d felt lying in that hospital bed, her throat raw and sore, the room dim and shadowy, so very much like this one. The metal sides of the bed had been drawn up around her, trapping her there like a small, frightened animal.

  As she was afraid now. Afraid, forced to acknowledge how often in the weeks before the accident she’d felt the unnerving sensation of someone watching her. Especially at night after work as she made her way across the darkened parking lot to her car, spurred on by the lone sound of her own hurried footsteps on the pavement. And then, later, amidst the shadow-steeped trees surrounding her house at Black Lake—whispers, movement—causing her to race up the steps, not daring to look over her shoulder. Frantically fitting the key into the lock and letting herself inside, out of breath with fear and running. Later, she would laugh at herself. There hadn’t really been a menacing whisper in the soughing of the trees, in the soft lapping of the lake against the shore. No. Of course there hadn’t. She was being silly, paranoid, letting her imagination get the better of her, reacting to the darkness as if she were still that little girl of six.

  You’ve had a serious accident, she told herself firmly. You survived. Let that be the end of it.

  She wanted to. More than anything she wanted to let that be the end of it. But deep down, where wisdom is greatest, she knew it wasn’t. You could only credit so much to imagination.

  Sighing, Katie reached above her head to turn out the light.

  ***

  Down below, in the crowded parking lot, a man stood in the gathering dusk peering up at the windows on the sixth floor. He knew her room number. He also knew she’d come out of the coma and was recovering nicely. They’d told him that when he phoned. “May I tell her who called,” the woman asked. “Just a concerned friend,” he had answered, and hung up. He could have told her his name. It wouldn’t have mattered. She would be his, just as he’d planned. He wasn’t going to be deprived, after all. Oh, you’ll like it, Katie. You will. For a while. His lips stretched slowly over his teeth in a death mask grin.

  ***

  The elevator doors slid soundlessly open and Dr. Jonathan Shea stepped out, strode purposefully down the wide, polished corridor, oblivious to the interested glances of the two nurses on station. He had a patient to see—one of Jim Miller’s. He strongly suspected Jim was just trying to take his mind off Jodie Williams. When Jim had walked in on him on Monday he’d been standing at the window, staring out at nothing, had been for an hour, ever since Jeannie had left his office to type up his resignation. Evans refused to accept it, insisted Jonathan take a sabbatical instead—a year if he needed it. Well, resignation or sabbatical—it didn’t really matter a damn to him.

  Jodie would be buried tomorrow. At the thought, the blackness he carried within him deepened sharply. He should be there, offer his condolences to her parents, pay his respects. He knew he should. He also knew he wouldn’t be there.

  “You did what you could, Jon,” Jim had told him, standing at the window with him, hand on his shoulder. “It happens sometimes. You know that. My God, you know that. You lose one. You go on. You have to.”

  Why? he thought fiercely, approaching room 623. Why in hell do you have to go on? What’s the point? As he tentatively pushed open the door, a pale, feminine arm reaching for the light switch above her head paused in midair as the patient turned to look at him.

  Standing there in the doorway, he suddenly felt ridiculous. A fraud.

  “Miss Summers,” he heard himself say. “Miss Katherine Summers?”

  “Yes, I’m Katie Summers,” she said, dropping her hand, eyeing him with mild curiosity.

  “You were just about to turn off the light, weren’t you? I’m sorry. I’ll drop by later.” Or perhaps not at all, he thought bitterly. Let someone else pick up the pieces of shattered psyches. He, like all the king’s horses and all the king’s men, was obviously not all that good at it. His thoughts reeked of self-pity. He knew it and didn’t care.

  “No, it’s all right,” Katie said to the man filling her doorway, a fierce expression on his face. “Come in, please.”

  He did so reluctantly. “Dr. Miller asked me to look in on you, Miss Summers. I’m Dr. Shea.” He crossed the room to her bedside and pulled up a chair. For such a tall man, he moved with fluid grace, his wide shoulders straining against the soft camel wool of his blazer. His cheekbones were sharply defined, and Katie guessed him to be of American Indian ancestry. Donning dark-rimmed glasses, he scanned the chart in his hand. His eyes were not brown at all, as Katie would have imagined, but blue, a deep, astonishing blue.

  “So, how are you feeling after your ordeal?” he asked, not looking up from the chart.

  “Confused,” she said, the word coming out automatically.

  He looked up at her, nodded, his face unreadable.

  Why was he here? she wondered. Surely a concussion was a relatively normal case for a neurologist, which was Dr. Miller’s field. Admittedly, she’d been in a four-day coma, but she was fine now. Wasn’t she? And then she knew.

  “You’re a psychiatrist,” she said flatly.

  He laughed, as if she had said something hilarious, a rich, vibrant laugh, but Katie didn’t miss the trace of bitterness. Strange man, she thought, both puzzled and annoyed, as she watched him run a hand through his longish black hair.

  “Perhaps you’ll share the joke,” she said coolly.

  “I’m sorry. It’s just that that sounded suspiciously like an accusation—as if I’d just confessed to being a witch doctor.”

  Katie colored. “Then it’s I who should apologize. I certainly didn’t me
an to suggest—”

  “No, it’s okay,” he said, raising a hand to shush her. “And probably closer to the truth than either of us realizes. Now that I think of it, practicing psychiatry isn’t all that far removed from witch doctoring. And maybe not as effective.” Anger flashed in his eyes, then flickered out so quickly there was no time for Katie to discern if it was directed at her, at himself, or if she had merely imagined it. Unexpectedly, he placed his hand on her face, and an electric warmth flooded her.

  “Not too scientific, but I’m afraid I didn’t bring my thermometer,” he said by way of explanation. “And I can’t very well feel for fever through all that bandage, can I?”

  Amusement came into his eyes. “It’s all right. I practiced legitimate medicine before I went into witch doctoring.”

  “I wasn’t questioning your qualifications, Doctor. But I’m quite sure my temperature is recorded on that chart in your lap.”

  “Your color isn’t good,” he said, as though she hadn’t spoken. When he removed his hand from her cheek, her skin felt oddly naked where he had touched it. “Are you having any discomfort?”

  How they did rely on that word ‘discomfort’ . “Just a headache,” she answered, feeling more than a little flustered at her physical reaction to his touch, but satisfied he hadn’t noticed.

  “I can order you something. I see Dr. Miller has it okayed here.”

  “Thanks. But I’d like to try and do without pain killers if I can.”

  “Sensible. But there’s a fine line between courage and martyrdom. You don’t want that line I see etched between those lovely eyes to become permanent.”

  His smile seemed to mock her, and Katie decided right there and then that she didn’t much care for Dr. Shea. She didn’t like his arrogance, his condescending manner, or his weirdness. “I’ve been ill, Doctor. It’s why I’m here. This is a hospital, in case you haven’t noticed. It doesn’t trouble me in the least if I’ve gained a few lines on my face.” A lie, of course, but she’d be damned if she’d admit it to him.

  “A woman without vanity. Remarkable.”

  What was his problem? Why was he goading her? Before Katie could respond to the uncalled-for remark, he changed direction. “Dr. Miller tells me you’re called Katie, but that your true name is Katherine. A lovely old Irish name, Katherine. My father was Irish.”

  Was this some new form of bedside manner? If so, it very definitely wasn’t working with her. Irish? His father was Irish?

  “My mother, however,” he said, breaking into a grin at Katie’s puzzled expression, “was a full-blood Indian. Navajo.”

  Katie would not be drawn into this foolishness further. “Why are you here, Dr. Shea? Is it, by any chance, because of what Dr. Miller said about my accident? About what I said—caused it?”

  He removed his glasses, slipped them into his breast pocket. “Yes, actually it is.” Leaning back in the chair, arms across his broad chest, he reminded Katie in that instant of Indian chiefs she’d seen in numerous old Westerns when she was a kid. “If indeed you saw what you say you did,” he said, “then the hospital has a legal obligation to report it to the police.”

  Alarm flared in her. “The police?”

  “Of course. If, on the other hand—well, it won’t do much to speed your recovery if you’re hounded by the press—interrogated by the police. They might ask questions like: if there really was a body, what was it doing in your car? Did you kill the man and, on your way to dispose of the body, have an accident?”

  She stared at him. “You’re crazy.”

  “That possibility, I can assure you, has occurred to me on more than one occasion.” A smile played about the corners of his mouth. “But we were talking about you, Miss Summers.”

  A surprising, perverse fascination took hold of Katie at the bizarre twist of conversation, as if she were caught up in some macabre parlor game of who-done-it.

  “Then what happened to the body? A minor detail you seem to have overlooked in your gruesome theory is that I was unconscious.”

  “I haven’t overlooked it. But then, you could have had an accomplice following in another car, and he managed to get to you before the ambulance and the police arrived on the scene.”

  “And removed the body.”

  “Exactly. Mind you, this is all theoretical.”

  “Well, thank you for that much, at least.” Why was she allowing herself to be a willing, yes, even eager player in this ridiculous game? Why?

  “If you knew me at all, Doctor,” she said, “you would know I’m not capable of such a violent act.”

  “We’re all capable of violence, Miss Summers—of murder,” he said calmly. “Given the right set of circumstances.”

  The theory was not unfamiliar to Katie. She’d heard it spouted on more than one occasion. And she didn’t buy it, not for a minute. “Could it be, Doctor,” she said with saccharine sweetness laced with steel, “that because you so often deal with madness in your line of work, your perception has become narrowed?”

  He gave her just the hint of a smile. “We’re all a bit mad, Miss Summers. It’s all a matter of degree.”

  He leaned forward in the chair, his cobalt blue eyes penetrating, challenging her. “Another question that might be raised during an interrogation is why you didn’t see the corpse propped up in the back seat of your car when you got in.”

  Just the word “corpse” raised gooseflesh on Katie’s arms beneath the hospital shirt. “There was a downpour and it was dark,” she said, beginning to lose patience. “And I was running to keep from getting thoroughly soaked.” Anger erupted in her. “You’re the one conducting the interrogation, Doctor. If this is an example of how you help patients, I’d be surprised if any of your patients get well.”

  He reacted visibly to her words, actually blinking, as if she’d slapped him, and Katie at once regretted them, even though she did feel partly justified. He rose quickly to his feet, the chair legs scraping the tile floor. Standing there, he seemed to Katie suddenly vulnerable, lost. There was clearly something at work here she didn’t understand.

  He started for the door. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I just thought you should know what you might be in for if the police are called in.”

  “Since it’s obvious neither you nor Dr. Miller believe a word I’ve said,” she answered quietly to his retreating back, “I don’t think it’s likely they will. Although I can’t imagine why you think I would lie about it. What would I have to gain?”

  He turned in the doorway, thrusting one hand in his pocket. The chart dangled from the other. He shrugged lightly. “It’s not entirely unheard of for a lonely woman to fabricate such a story—perhaps to gain attention. Maybe she’s been doing it since childhood. It works. I have to admit, though, this particular story is not without a certain—flare.”

  Barely trusting herself to speak, her face burning, Katie finally managed through tight lips, “I’m not lonely, and I don’t need attention that badly.”

  “No,” he said, his gaze shifting to the bouquet of roses on her night table. “I don’t suppose you do. I’m sorry if I offended you, but you did ask. Could it possibly have been the trick of the car lights reflected in the rain?” he offered. “Or perhaps an animal on the road? Some freak illusion?”

  “Anything’s possible, I suppose,” Katie conceded, weary of all the questions, the speculations, the ridiculous verbal ping-pong with this very strange and disturbing man.

  She looked away from him, concentrated instead on the hairline crack snaking out from the light fixture in the ceiling, and waited for him to leave. She’d often heard that some psychiatrists were far crazier than their patients.

  “Do you mind if I ask…?”

  “The roses are from a friend,” she snapped. “His name is Drake Devlin, and he’s a lawyer. In fact, he just recently passed his bar exams, which is a good thing since it seems I might be in need of a lawyer. Anything else, Doctor?”

  “Not about your social life. Unless
there’s something you wish to tell me. And I had no intention of asking you who the sender of the flowers was, I assure you.”

  “Oh.” Katie found herself blushing again. “Then what?”

  “It says on your chart that you live at Black Lake. I’m familiar with that area. I was just thinking that it seems a rather isolated spot for a woman alone, that’s all.”

  “I can take care of myself.”

  He studied her for a long moment as if trying to decide something about her. Then he said, “Yes, I’m sure you can. Oh, by the way, we did do a bit of checking. Just a couple of discreet phone calls. The morgue, missing persons, that sort of thing.

  “But no bodies unaccounted for.”

  “Not a one, I’m afraid.”

  Both heads turned toward the middle-aged, heavy-set nurse who stopped in the doorway and beamed a million dollar smile at Dr. Shea, yellow curls bobbing beneath her cap.

  “It’s all right, nurse,” he said, quickly stepping to one side. “I was just leaving.” To Katie, he said, “I’m afraid a hospital isn’t always the best place to find rest. We’ll talk again. Perhaps when your test results come back. We’ll know more then.”

  Psychoanalysis time, Katie thought wearily. Well, why not if I would help her get at the truth?

  “Won’t take but a minute, dear,” the nurse said, seeing Katie eye the blood pressure apparatus in her hand.

  “Well, what do you think of him?” she whispered conspiratorially, wrapping Katie’s arm snugly with the wide rubber band. “Dr. Shea is the resident heart-throb around here, you know,” she went on, pumping air that hissed from the little ball until Katie’s fingers began to tingle. “You just wouldn’t believe how otherwise mature and competent nurses can turn into giddy teenagers when he’s around.” She made a little sniffing sound. “It’s positively disgusting.

  Katie grinned.

  Chapter 6

  The tantalizing aroma of coffee wafted from the corridor, where breakfasts were being wheeled and distributed to the rooms on either side. Since Katie was going for tests, there would be no tray for her this morning. Feeling mildly deprived, she turned away from the hallway to look out the window. She was consoled to see that another perfect day dawned, the sky a bright enamel blue, broken only occasionally by a wispy cloud or two.