by Steve Richer
The nurse laughed. “I seen it all before, believe me, sister,” he said. Then he raised his hands in defeat and moved toward the door. “But I’ll give you your privacy, just so long as you get back into that bed.”
When he came back a few minutes later, she was lying under the covers, her eyes closed.
She waited, listening to the sounds he made moving about the room, and then to the silence that followed. When she was sure he’d left, she climbed back out of bed, still fully clothed.
She was fine now. She didn’t need to be here.
And if Tom’s warning was to be believed, here was the worst place for her to remain.
She went out into the hallway. No sign of the nurse. A different nurse rushed past, barely giving her a glance.
Alice straightened, took a deep breath. Unless she bumped into anyone who knew her, she’d be fine. Just another person wandering through the hospital. A visitor, or an off-duty member of staff.
She moved along the hallway, anxious to get away from her room at least, before pausing to try to find her bearings.
She’d been unconscious when they brought her here, but she’d spent enough time in this hospital to have at least a rough idea of the layout. She started to walk again. Found a sign pointing to the main exit and kept on going.
She expected to be stopped at any moment.
She didn’t know what her rights were. Could a person just walk out of hospital? She’d seen TV programs and movies where patients checked themselves out against their doctors’ advice, but did that mean there was some kind of official process to follow?
Then again, what were they going to do, arrest her and charge her with walking out of a public building? Still, the best process she could think of right now was not being spotted.
She came to the hospital’s main reception area and hesitated. Surely, someone would stop her now? She pulled the sleeve of her sweatshirt down, covering up her patient ID wristband.
Then she took a deep breath and walked out boldly from the hallway where she’d been loitering.
A receptionist looked up, and then away. Patients and other visitors sat in the waiting area, even at this hour.
The security guard smiled at her as she passed him.
She entered the rotating door, let it spin a half turn as she followed it around, and finally stepped out into the cold night air.
She moved away from the brightest lighting.
When she took her cellphone from her purse and checked, there was nothing from Tom. He’d known she had her phone on silent, and it was out of reach from her hospital bed. That must be why he’d sent Rusty.
She found him in Favorites and was just about to press dial when she heard voices from inside the reception area.
At first, she thought it was nothing, just some kind of random altercation. A tall black man in jeans and a hoodie was gesturing, shouting at the receptionist, the security guy.
Then she recognized him. Hot nurse, changed out of his scrubs. His shift must have ended and he was on his way home and… he’d spotted Alice, standing outside.
Shit.
She turned away, assessing her options.
Just turning quickly like that was enough to make her dizzy. Maybe she wasn’t as fully recovered as she’d believed.
She couldn’t just run. She wouldn’t stand a chance.
That was when she spotted the taxi stand, saw a cab sitting there, its engine running even though the driver stood outside, his hefty butt resting against the driver-side door, a cigarette hanging from the corner of his mouth.
“You give me a ride?” she said, hurrying over.
“Sure thing, lady. Where you want to go?”
“Anywhere,” she said, already tugging on the door. “Just away from here. Fast.”
Chapter 35
Walter’s research had exposed a part of Tom’s life he’d long since buried away. A time when he’d been unhappy, when he’d struggled with all kinds of things.
This thing with Libbie… it was all his fault.
Was this karma? Karma dressed up in the form of Libbie Cottrill, come to hunt him down and wreak her revenge.
It was all his fault.
But that didn’t make it right.
And that wasn’t going to bring poor Walter Jones back to life again.
He had to put a stop to this. One way or another, this thing was going to end tonight.
As he drove away from the hospital, it all went round and round in his head. How had he not worked it out sooner? How had he failed to recognize her?
That summer when he was twelve. His first summer camp. The first time he’d been away anywhere without his parents, apart from a couple of long weekends with his grandparents.
He remembered watching their car drive away. In his memory, he was a little kid in short pants, standing with a heap of luggage at the roadside, a heavy teardrop making its way down his face. In reality, though, he knew they’d already put his case in the cabin, and it was his mom who was crying as she waved out of the passenger window. Tom had just been impatient to get on with things. He wanted to explore. Wanted to make new friends.
As soon as the car was out of sight, he’d turned and run to the lakeside. He’d never seen such a huge expanse of water and there were kids out there already in kayaks and on a huge raft made from lashed together barrels and planks of wood.
Tony Capaldi, Simon Woodforde, and Andy Krabbe were, by chance, the first kids he’d approached. A couple of years older than Tom, they were sitting at the end of a narrow wooden jetty, their feet dangling over the water. Tank tops, shorts, baseball caps turned backwards, the latest Nikes on the dock behind them, where they’d taken them off.
The three had a roll-up cigarette they were passing between them. They clearly weren’t scared of anything, or anyone. They owned this place.
Tom wanted to be like them. He wanted to be them.
He realized he was loitering, rocking from foot to foot like a toddler who needs to pee. “Yo,” he said. “What’s up?”
Why had he said that? He didn’t talk like that.
The one he later came to know as Tony turned his head slowly, eyed him up.
All of a sudden, Tom had never felt so small.
After a pause long enough to drown in, Tony Capaldi said to his friends, “Hey, guys. Look what we got here. We got ourselves a new bitch to play with.”
They laughed and, after a short hesitation, Tom laughed too. He didn’t know what he was laughing at, just that the cool guys were laughing so he should laugh. And now he wanted to be like them more than anything.
Following the exchange, they ignored him. He went to sit on a different part of the pier, feet dangling. The water was cold. He didn’t know if he should leave or go and join them. It was weird, the need to belong. He’d never felt like that before.
Then Tony called along to him. “Hey, bitch. We need some Cokes.”
He got them Cokes. Paid for it himself, happy to have been noticed, to have been included in some way.
That night, in his bunk, Tom found himself crying for no reason. He didn’t think he was homesick, although he’d woken to the image of his mother leaving in the car, crying. He didn’t understand his feelings.
He’d made new friends, even if they did call him bitch. He had four whole weeks of this ahead of him. So why was he crying?
He didn’t know. Just knew he most certainly was not homesick.
Next day, Tony, Simon and Andy started calling him crybaby instead of bitch. It was not an improvement.
We need sodas, crybaby.
What’re you doing down there, crybaby? And when he asked them down where, one of them would push him hard in the chest so he ended up sprawling in the dirt. Down there.
He couldn’t remember how long it had taken him to work out that they weren’t including him by treating him like this. They were doing anything but including him.
It felt like weeks, but was probably only a matter of days. Long enough
for him to come to understand that he had an entire summer of this to get through. Long enough to realize that they were already escalating, pushing him harder, hitting him harder, and if it was this bad already then what would they be doing to him by the end of summer?
Long enough for him to work out that his only escape was if he could somehow redirect their attention.
Find another target.
Someone more vulnerable than him.
Someone like that chestnut-haired girl who never quite seemed to fit in. The one who stood aloof when everyone else was throwing themselves into the summer camp’s activities. The one who made it perfectly clear she regarded herself as something a whole lot better than everyone else here at Long Valley.
Little snot-nosed Elizabeth Cottrill.
He remembered the exact moment when Tony Capaldi had him by the collar and for once he’d met the bully’s look and said, “Yeah, but at least I don’t shit my pants like Lizzie Cottrill.”
He’d made that up. Just words he’d grabbed out of the thin air, a claim that might at least briefly distract Tony.
He didn’t think they’d leap on it and turn on her like they did. It was Simon Woodforde who was the first to do the chocolate thing. Made Elizabeth sit on a whole block of the stuff until it melted and then they told everyone she’d messed herself, and she ran away into the forest to hide her shame.
Tom felt sick even now when he recalled the flood of relief he’d felt when the three bullies turned their attention on someone else. The sense of belonging he’d felt when they included him in their games, when they made him the one who told her someone had spat in her food. Even now, he didn’t know if they actually spat in her food or just told her they had so she’d never know what she was eating.
In therapy after his breakdown last year, he’d even gone over this, exploring the guilt he’d stored up for all these years.
“Sometimes we have to accept we’re powerless over certain things,” the therapist had told him at the end of one of their sessions. “You were twelve. You were the victim of bullying. You couldn’t have stopped them. All it does now is continue to harm you, unless you can learn how to file it away and move on.”
He’d tried to stop them. Even tried to make them turn on him again, but it hadn’t worked.
They were bullies and they’d found a much softer target. One that kept them entertained that entire summer and even into the next, until Elizabeth had suddenly left camp, never to return. Understandably so.
And now she was here. He couldn’t blame her for hating him. For blaming him. He would, in her position.
Earlier, he’d had every intention of confronting her, telling her the game was up, kicking her out.
Right now, after seeing what Walter had discovered, he just wanted to beg her forgiveness.
His therapist may have been right about the need to file away his guilt, but that didn’t mean the guilt vanished. Ever.
~ ~ ~ ~
If summer camp had given him the worst times of his life, it had also given him some of the best.
The following summer he’d shown up a couple of weeks late, his arm in a sling after a mountain bike accident. One consequence of this was that Tony, Simon, and Andy had already picked their targets for the summer and they barely seemed to even notice he’d arrived.
Another was that he couldn’t take part in most of the activities, so he ended up an outsider, looking on while everyone else had all the fun.
Everyone apart from the golden-haired girl with the sad eyes that lit up and completely transformed her face whenever one of his corny jokes managed to make her smile.
In the beginning, he didn’t understand why she was acting like an outsider too, and he thought maybe she had some kind of mystery illness that meant she couldn’t join in. Later, he found out there had been some kind of boating accident out on the lake at the start of the summer, and she’d been indirectly involved. After that she hadn’t been able to go near the water.
At the time, though, none of that mattered to him. She was a kid his age, she was an outcast like him, and the two developed a bond that got them both through the summer. Even better, he found out that she was from his own hometown, although she attended a different school.
They called themselves the Misfits, although her actual name was Alice.
~ ~ ~ ~
Tom pulled over at the side of the road.
Since leaving the Pierson Newport offices, he’d been driving around, taking an ever-more circuitous route home.
What was he going to say to Libbie? Was he really going to ask her to forgive him?
She was insane. What was it? A sociopath, with an obsessive personality disorder.
She might even somehow be responsible for what had happened to Walter, even if it was some kind of tragic accident.
And he knew now that he was the target of all this.
He wasn’t scared of her, though. He was confident he could handle her.
But… He didn’t want her to hurt any more. She must have obsessed about what had happened at summer camp for years. She needed careful handling, and him wading in alone was not going to help her.
But that’s what she needed. Help. Treatment. Support.
He dug his phone out of a pocket and dialed a number he’d been given earlier.
“Detective Malwitz?” It was raining now, the wind rocking the car as he sat there. He had to raise his voice to be heard. “Yes, Tom Granger here. Listen, I think I’ve worked a few things out. I don’t know what it adds up to, but I think it might help you.”
“I just love it when someone else does my job for me, Mr. Granger. No, no, I wasn’t being glib. I mean it. So what have you worked out?”
He told him about the files on Walter’s computer, about Libbie Burchett, or Elizabeth Cottrill, as she had been then.
He told him about summer camp. About the bullying, and his part in it. He didn’t hold back. In a bizarre way, it felt good to talk about it again, to lay out his guilt to the world.
“And now you think she’s coming after you?”
“I don’t know what she’s doing.” But yes, now that he’d said it all out loud, he knew she was after some kind of revenge.
“Well, that’s all very helpful, Mr. Granger. We’ll definitely take a closer look at Ms. Burchett, or Cottrill, or whatever she’s called. I’m searching the databases for anything we have on her right here on the screen in front of me as we speak.”
“So what happens next?”
“Next, Mr. Granger, is you trying not to get involved, you hear? You’ve done some detective work and that’s great, but you do any more than you have and you’re interfering with an investigation.”
“But…”
“I know that sounds harsh, but we’re the professionals. This is what we do. If she’s dangerous then we’re the guys to deal with it. And if she just needs some kind of medical or psychological help then we’re the ones who will make the right calls. You understand? Just stay away for tonight and leave us to do some investigating.”
“But she lives in the basement apartment of my house. What am I supposed to do tonight?”
“I’d advise you to stay away and not inflame the situation. Is there some place you can go for tonight? Some place safe. Maybe make sure your wife’s safe at the hospital and then find yourself somewhere near there for the night?”
“I’ll work something out.”
He would.
But first he would swing by the house to pick up a few things.
And if Libbie was there? He genuinely didn’t know what he would do. Tell her to pack her things and go. Beg her forgiveness. Or simply let her wreak whatever revenge she was after.
It might be any of those. But somehow, this thing had to come to an end tonight, and it was clear Detective Malwitz was on a different, far slower, timetable.
Chapter 36
When he got home, the place was dark, both upstairs and down in the basement apartment.
That was probably the best thing.
He still didn’t know what he’d have said to Libbie if she’d been here.
He hadn’t even known quite what he expected to find. When he’d come back this afternoon to pick up a few things for Alice, the cops had still been here. They’d taped off the path around the side of the house like a crime scene, which he’d supposed it was. A potential one, at least.
But now there was nothing. No cops. Not even any tape marking off the scene.
Was that an indication of their thinking? No suggestion of foul play, just a tragic freak accident.
Earlier that day, Detective Malwitz had implied as much. His questioning of Tom had been perfunctory and he’d said more than once that they were just following procedure.
Now, he wondered how seriously Malwitz had taken his call about Libbie’s past. The detective said he was searching their databases for anything they had on her, but would his investigations go any further than that?
Thinking about it, he hadn’t really given the detective much to go on. Plenty that pointed to Libbie having some kind of vendetta against him, but nothing that suggested involvement in anything criminal.
Malwitz had been humoring him, no more than that.
He pulled up on the gravel in front of the house.
Climbing out, he pulled his jacket tighter around himself. The rain had eased now, but the wind was cold.
He went to the corner of the building. Odd to think that this was where Walter had met his end. The place would be changed forever. There would not be a single time either he or Alice walked past this spot and didn’t think of Walter.
The basement apartment was in complete darkness.
She might be asleep in there, of course. It was late enough now that someone might reasonably have gone to bed. There was no sign of her Toyota, though.
He turned away, went back around to the porch, and let himself into the house.
Malwitz had said they should stay away from home tonight while he did some digging. Right now, that suited Tom. He didn’t want to be here alone.
He went upstairs and filled an overnight bag. A change of clothes, some toiletries. Some meds for Alice in case the hospital discharged her early tomorrow and they still had to stay away.
