Gray Widow Trilogy 1: Gray Widow's Walk

by Dan Jolley

  Neither of them moved or spoke. They both just stared at him.

  He had his hand on the door when Nathan Pittman made a sound. Both his parents flinched away from him. He made the sound again, slightly louder this time.

  Feygen went to his side immediately. Nathan’s eyes opened, just a tiny bit, and focused on him. Feygen said, “Nathan? Can you hear me?”

  In a weak whisper Nathan said, “I hear you...detective.”

  Feygen glanced up at the Pittmans, neither of whom made any move to come closer to Nathan’s bed. He looked back down to Nathan. “I know this is a lousy time for it, but I need to ask you a question or two.”

  Nathan nodded faintly.

  “I need to know what kind of contact you had with the vigilante known as the Gray Widow. Before you got shot.”

  Nathan stared at him, and rolled his eyes. “Never met her,” he whispered, before grimacing in pain. “Only read about her, heard about her.” He glanced down at himself as best he could without moving his head. “I really screwed up, didn’t I?”

  His eyes slid closed, and his breathing evened out. Feygen figured he’d passed out again, but the boy’s eyelids cracked back open. “Hey,” he whispered, a little more energetically. “Hey. Did they catch her?”

  “The Gray Widow? No. She’s still out there.”

  Nathan smiled a little. “Good.” He swallowed, stayed quiet for a few moments, then whispered, “C’mere a second.”

  Feygen bent close to him, turned his ear to the boy’s lips. So softly Feygen was sure only he heard the words, Nathan breathed, “Get these two ghouls out of my room, will you?”

  Nathan’s eyes shut again, and he slept.

  “What was that?” Mrs. Pittman barked. After the quiet of Nathan’s exhausted voice, his mother sounded like an air-raid siren. “What did he say to you?”

  Feygen glanced at Mr. Pittman, back to Nathan’s mother, and said, “Don’t know. Couldn’t make it out.” He nodded to both of them and excused himself, and he could feel them staring at him as he headed for the door.

  Feygen had the door halfway open when someone else pushed on it from outside. He backpedaled as a very tall, very thin young man in a pinstripe suit entered the room. He carried a briefcase, and smiled quickly at Feygen, but focused his attention on the Pittmans.

  “Mr. and Mrs. Pittman?” the man asked in a smooth, practiced voice. Nathan’s parents switched their stares to the newcomer, to Feygen’s relief. “My name is Krach, and I represent the law firm of Kurth & Serrano. Mr. Pittman, Mrs. Pittman, could I talk to you about the potential legal aspect of your son’s condition?”

  Feygen moved out into the corridor. The door closed slowly behind him and cut off the lawyer’s words. On another day he might have gone back in and forcibly ejected young Mr. Krach, on grounds of terminally inappropriate behavior if nothing else. Today...he was too distracted, both by Nathan Pittman’s sub-human parents and by Nathan himself. Did they catch her?

  No. She’s still out there.

  Good.

  Those words played on a loop in Feygen’s mind as he left the hospital.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  Janey and Tim stayed there in the room for about half an hour. They helped Adam put together several jigsaw puzzles and listened to him sing. Tim didn’t say a word the entire time.

  With a small sigh, Adam’s energy drained away. He said, “Lie down,” to the nurse. The nurse and Janey helped him to the bed and pulled a blanket over him, and he fell asleep immediately.

  After a few moments, as Adam breathed deeply and slowly, Janey said, “No change.” It wasn’t a question, and she didn’t look at the nurse as she said it.

  “No,” the nurse replied. “He’ll probably sleep for several hours.”

  Janey nodded, spent a few more seconds watching Adam, and led Tim out of the room.

  Before they left, Tim shrugged out of his raincoat and handed it to Janey. She started to protest, but he said, “I wore it in. No point in getting soaked twice.” Janey nodded a silent thanks to him as she slipped the coat on, and Tim made a soft snorting sound. “It looks better on you than on me.”

  They made their way to the car.

  Headed back to the city through the rain, after half a dozen false starts Janey said, “Adam and I are still legally married so he can stay on my insurance. He had no family of his own. Neither of us did.” She paused. “We lacked a few weeks getting to our first anniversary.”

  “And...he doesn’t...”

  “He doesn’t know me. According to the tests, his mental capacity is right on par with a three-year-old.” She blinked a few times. “When he woke up, the nurses had to introduce me to him. He has no recall of his former life. He only knows me as a friend who comes to visit.”

  “Janey, I’m so sorry.” He put a comforting hand on her leg.

  She looked sharply at him, as though she might snap at him. Instead she glanced down at his hand, ran one finger lightly across the back of it, picked it up and placed it gently back in his lap.

  “Thank you. Tim...I’d like to tell you. The rest of it. Everything. I think I need to.”

  “Of course. ...Anything.”

  The words came haltingly to begin with, but soon they poured out of her as if draining from a wound.

  * * *

  Janey first saw Adam Kendrick on a Wednesday afternoon, in the art supply store where he worked. Adam was trying to help three different customers at once, was clearly stressed, and Janey accidentally made that stress much worse when she reached for a Scharff brush display just as Adam walked by. Janey’s hand knocked the half-gallon jug of yellow acrylic paint he was carrying out of his grip, and it landed in just the right way for the lid to crack and fly off, spraying yellow across the concrete floor.

  “I’m so sorry!” Janey looked around for something that might help mop up that much paint. “That was totally my fault, I’m so sorry, let me help you!”

  Adam declined her offer of help, and stiffly—yet still politely—suggested that Janey just let him clean it up on his own. Mortified and humiliated, Janey fled the store.

  That night she went home and painted a picture of him.

  It was the first of her paintings that took on the unearthly quality for which she would eventually become known. She used watercolor, on a nine-by-twelve sheet, and framed it herself. She was up the whole night doing it, and took it to the art supply store the next day.

  Janey found Adam straightening some crow quill pens, took a deep breath, and said, “Um, hi. I made a huge mess in here yesterday, and I’m really sorry, and I felt terrible, and this is a peace offering.”

  Frowning, Adam took the painting and stared at it silently.

  “My name is Janey. Janey Sinclair.”

  After an excruciating fifteen seconds, Adam dragged his eyes up from the watercolor and really looked at Janey for the first time. “You painted this last night. From memory.”

  “Uh...well, yeah.”

  The painting captured Adam perfectly, just as she’d seen him the day before, in jeans and T-shirt and his employee’s smock, but she had no idea if he’d like it or not. For that matter, she didn’t know if he’d think she was crazy or not. Finally he lowered it and, to her relief, held out his hand. “I’m Adam.”

  She shook it. “It’s nice to meet you, Adam.”

  “I, uh, I’m gonna be done here at 6:00. There’s a coffee shop down on the next corner—would you like to meet me there?”

  That evening’s shared pot of coffee marked the first date of many. Ten days after Janey gave Adam the painting, he started saving money for a ring. Four months later he asked her to marry him.

  At the age of twenty-four, Janey Sinclair carried more than her fair share of demons. Her father’s death and her own injury, all the time spent in psychiatric care, and now the presence of—she could on
ly think of it as a power, a power she knew she couldn’t let anyone else know about—lent her a gravity, a deep-rooted sadness, and a great deal of forced maturity.

  It also left her with an unshakable feeling of isolation.

  Her life was well-organized, much more so than those of many other women her age. She had a steady job as an assistant instructor at a dojo, she painted in the evenings in her apartment, and—since she hardly ever went anywhere or did anything that cost much money—she was well on her way to saving up enough for a down payment on a house.

  And she felt more alone than she would have thought possible, and didn’t know what to do about it.

  She had no shortage of dates. Tall, lean, graceful, with her startling blue-gray eyes and resplendent mass of hair, Janey could get attention if she wanted it. But the shallow young men she met, the handful of flings—she couldn’t think of them as relationships—did nothing for her loneliness.

  All of that changed with Adam.

  A little taller than she was, and not quite bony, he had a natural athleticism Janey appreciated. His personality was a mass of contradictions and surprises: painfully shy in public, when they were alone together Adam revealed a razor-sharp sense of humor and a surprising capacity for silliness.

  He followed a firmly defined moral code, and had a very strong sense of what he considered proper. He was by far the most dignified man she’d ever spent time with. Yet his sexuality could have been described with the kind of clichéd words found in bad romance novels: “unbridled,” or perhaps “volcanic.”

  In Janey’s mind, the day she first saw Adam marked a new beginning in her life. A fresh start, not bogged down by the weight of all the grief and horror that had for so long occupied such a large part of her. When she started seeing Adam, the nightmares which had come to her at least two nights out of every seven stopped cold.

  After their wedding, they got a small but comfortable two-bedroom apartment together, and with their combined incomes Adam enrolled in night classes at Georgia Tech. He said he wanted to be an architect, and Janey supported his decision.

  What began so beautifully ended in a rush of pain.

  It was the night of the judo test at the dojo, and Janey had to work late, letting students flip her onto the mat over and over. Adam went without her to a Wednesday night church supper. At a little past seven o’clock one of the elderly women there complained of a headache, and Adam went out to his car to get some Advil from the glove box. He kept it there right next to his .38 caliber revolver, for which he had a concealed carry permit.

  Whoever attacked him was never caught. The assailant, or assailants, took Adam’s wallet, which police found later in a public trash can, and made off with the seventeen dollars he’d had in it. What the police were able to determine, following a ballistics test, was that the gunshot to Adam’s head had come from his own gun.

  Janey got the call just as she arrived home from work. She was at the hospital five minutes later...far too late for Adam, far too late to make any difference. Her husband was deep in a coma by the time he reached the ER.

  A doctor met her in the hall outside the room where Adam lay. Her face drained of blood and her heart kicking, Janey almost shoved the man out of the way and burst into the room, but the doctor said, “Mrs. Kendrick, please wait, I need to talk to you,” and something in the tone of the man’s voice stopped her. When Janey realized what the doctor must have to say, her insides went numb.

  “It’s Sinclair,” Janey mumbled.

  “I’m sorry, what?”

  “My…I kept my…my last name.” Something was dying inside her, withering away the longer she stood there. She couldn’t feel her lips. “It’s Sinclair.”

  “Mrs. Sinclair, your husband suffered a gunshot wound to the head. He’s receiving the best care we can give him, but he’s lapsed into a coma. I’m...afraid there’s been brain damage.”

  Janey’s vision grew hazy and ragged around the edges.

  “The damage is extensive. It is likely that your husband won’t survive. I’m sorry.”

  Janey stayed there, at Adam’s side, for four days straight. She didn’t sleep, or eat. She hardly moved. Each day the doctors told her Adam’s condition was growing worse. They showed her charts, gave her literature to read, explained it all in their technical ways—and they gave her husband another few weeks, at the very most. Finally they convinced her to go home and get some rest.

  Janey spent the time after Adam’s attack on something like autopilot, a cardboard-cutout woman. She went to work, taught her classes. Came home. Visited Adam. Went back home, stared at the canvas, painted nothing. Went to sleep. The cycle repeated, and Janey felt nothing. People from their church tried to see her, but she had nothing to say to them. She had nothing to say to anyone.

  The one-month limit the doctors had given Adam came and went, and he lay in the hospital bed and kept breathing.

  Another month passed. And another.

  Janey took books to the hospital, and read to him for hours every evening.

  She softly touched his face, and told him how much she loved him. He didn’t open his eyes for her. Didn’t talk. Didn’t move.

  Then one evening she received a call from the duty nurse. “Mrs. Sinclair? Janey Sinclair? I have...I have some news for you.”

  Janey bolted up from where she’d been lying on the couch. “What? What?”

  “Mrs. Sinclair...your husband has emerged from his coma.”

  “What? He’s conscious?” A hydrogen bomb detonated inside her.

  “Yes, he is, but there are—”

  “I’m on my way!” Janey shouted, and ended the call. In her near-delirium she completely missed the tone of the nurse’s last sentence. Not for an instant did she consider that Adam’s recovery might have been less than total. With a hope in her heart hotter than the sun, Janey stepped out her back door into darkness and flickered away to the hospital.

  In a miracle recovery that defied all of known medical science, Adam Kendrick was awake and alert, and less than ten minutes after she got the call Janey burst into his room, crying like a little girl, and rushed to his side and put her arms around him.

  Adam screamed and burst into tears and fought her and kicked her away.

  * * *

  “It was worse than if he’d just died.”

  A sudden burst of rain hammered down, shrouding them. For an instant they were trapped in the car, alone in a gray soulless void.

  “That was two years ago. Tim... I can only imagine what you’re thinking. But this is what happened, and it’s what’s caused me to do what I’ve been doing. I never told him, what I could do, I never shared that with him. But after Adam woke up, I...”

  She trailed away.

  Tim said, “You got pissed off.”

  Janey stared at him, amazed, and slowly nodded. “I got pissed off. I got pissed off at Sammy Kyle, and all his goons, and I got pissed off at the cowardly piece of shit who did that to my husband, and I got pissed off at everybody else in the world. Most of all…and the counselors have told me this is normal, but it doesn’t make me feel any less terrible about…I got pissed off at Adam, because if he hadn’t had that God-forsaken gun in his car, they wouldn’t have taken it away from him, and he wouldn’t have gotten shot.”

  Tim nodded solemnly.

  “So I trained and trained and trained. I mean, I was already pretty damn good, and the…the teleporting…it made me a little stronger, too. Physically. I went way beyond what I thought I could, and I stole a suit of prototype body armor from a military research lab. And I decided to go out and find some of the same assholes that fucked up my life, and make it so they wouldn’t, or couldn’t screw up anybody else’s.”

  “And the Gray Widow was born.”

  “Yeah. …But I didn’t come up with that name. That was somebody else.”

 
Tim watched the rain. “This is so much, Janey. I don’t even know what I think about all this.”

  She flicked the windshield wipers a notch higher. “I don’t blame you.”

  “Wait, you got stronger? Are you saying you’re like…Spider-Man strong?” When Janey gave him a truly frosty look, Tim held up his hands. “You’re right, you’re right, sorry, that’s not important right now.”

  Janey sighed. “No, I’m not Spider-Man strong. But you probably don’t want to arm-wrestle me.”

  They fell silent. After a few long minutes, Tim said, “Do you…has this helped you any? Talking, getting it all out like this? Has the anger gone down any?”

  Janey wrinkled her forehead and drummed her fingers on the wheel. “Not really.”

  * * *

  Simon Grove parked Brenda Jorden’s brown Ford in the parking lot of the shiny new high-rise next to the LaCroix, and settled in to wait.

  The rain on the car’s roof lulled him. Made him sleepy. Drew him back...

  After Prom night with Michelle,—after she and her friends had humiliated him so thoroughly he thought his heart might collapse in his chest—he’d been convinced that every last person he knew despised him. So when he got back to his house and changed out of those ridiculous formal clothes, Simon Grove left his Louisiana home and went for a walk.

  Temperatures were down in the forties, and Simon decided to wear his favorite fleece-lined denim jacket. He knew his mother wouldn’t have wanted him out this late alone, but he felt restless and went anyway. He couldn’t really talk to her anymore. Not that they ever shared secrets with each other...but over the last few years he’d found that he could hardly talk to her about anything.

  Since his teeth got straighter. He thought that was when she stopped wanting to talk to him. They’d been crooked, and she told him maybe they’d straighten out as he got older, but they didn’t. The canines punched forward, and the upper incisors turned at odd angles. “We’ll have to get you some braces,” she said.