A Corpse's Nightmare
Page 28
“What?” Lucinda and I said at the same time.
“She’s more than fine, in fact,” Andrews said, not looking at us. He was tugging in his left earlobe, his perennial gesture of preoccupation. “Not only are the bullets out and the damage more or less repaired—”
“Her cancer’s going away!” Stacey interrupted, louder than ever.
“Wait.” Lucinda stared. “No.”
“It appears at the moment,” Andrews said, “that her cancer might be going into remission.”
“How is that—that’s not possible, is it?” I asked.
“That’s what I said,” Andrews answered. “And the doctor told me some story about a guy in Colorado, a basketball coach, who had some sort of leukemia called ‘sleeping tiger’ and he was held up and shot at close range. When they took the bullet out, they discovered that his antibodies and white blood cells and whatever had not only rushed in to heal the wound, but they had begun to eat up the cancer while they were at it. That’s what they think is happening to Melissa.”
“Which doctor told you that?” Lucinda asked suspiciously.
“Franklin,” Stacey said brightly.
“Excuse me.” Lucinda bolted out of the room, clearly befuddled.
“It’s good news,” I managed to say.
“It’s a miracle,” Stacey said sweetly.
“You look better,” Andrews observed.
“What’s all that in your lap?” Stacey asked, coming over to the bed.
“They’re—what would you call them?” I began. “They’re precious keepsakes.”
“Oh,” she responded knowingly.
“Is that the famous tin box?” Andrews asked.
He ambled over to sit in the only chair in the room.
“It’s the box I found in my mother’s room,” I told him, “but the contents include everything—the stuff from this box and the other one, the blue one that used to be on my mantel.”
“How’d you get all that?” he asked slumping down in the chair.
“Our friend the Earl of Huntingdon,” I answered slowly.
Out of nowhere, Skidmore appeared in the doorway. “Well, look who’s better.” He was very delighted.
“You’re heard the news about Melissa,” I assumed.
“Yes indeed,” he shot back. “Don’t know what to make of it. Don’t care, really, as long as everything just stays the way it is right now.”
I started to warn him that the chances of her actually being cancer free were spectacularly unlikely. But it seemed such a mean-spirited bit of factual invasion in the face of his current joy that I thought better of it. Let hope spring eternal, I thought. You never can tell how these things might turn out.
“I see you got your box back,” he said happily.
“It’s not the one—all right, yes, I got my box back.” Details seemed unnecessary at that moment. “I was just telling Andrews that I got it back from the Earl of Huntingdon.”
“Oh.” Skid offered me his best Cheshire grin. “Him.”
“What?” I sat forward. “You know something about him, the old man.”
“Yes I do.” But he wasn’t going to say what it was.
“Come on.” I set the box aside. “You have to tell me who he really is.”
“Well, I’m not supposed to,” Skid said coyly, “but since he’s all done here, I guess it would be all right. They told me all about him, and his strange ways. You’re not supposed to know.”
“Who told you all about him?” I asked.
He lowered his voice. “He’s with the team that’s been investigating that group of idiots over in Fit’s Mill. He’s FBI, the agent that’s been here for a while, like I was telling you about.”
“The—the Earl of Huntingdon is—he’s the FBI guy?” Andrews stammered incredulously. “That weird old man from New Orleans?”
“Sh!” Skid demanded.
“Wait,” Stacey said, turning toward Skid. “You’re talking about Earl Hunt? From New Orleans?”
We all looked at her.
“That’s what Albert called him,” I remembered slowly. “You said you didn’t know him.”
“What?” she asked, confused.
“When Andrews and I asked you about orderlies,” I said, “you told us that none of them—”
“You asked me about orderlies,” she said. “I didn’t really think about Earl. He’s the night janitor on this floor. He started last December, about the same time you came in, Fever. I mean, I never actually talked to him, but he’s in the FBI about as much as I’m—I don’t know: in the CIA.”
“That man you caught us with in Miss Etta’s,” Andrews asked Skidmore, “is in the FBI?”
“That—that was him?” Skid’s face contorted a bit. “I—well that’s a surprise. I never actually met the man. I thought that guy you were with was—”
“Wait,” I snapped, looking back and forth between Skid and Stacey. “Both of you just heard about him, but you never talked with him? Either of you?”
Suddenly Andrews sat up so forcefully that I thought he might launch himself across the room.
“Oh my God!” He shook his head. “I just remembered. I thought it sounded familiar. I—I’m an absolute—I can’t believe he did this to us. You know who the Earl of Huntingdon was, right?”
“What are you talking about?” I asked him.
“Locksley is supposed to have been the Earl of Huntingdon,” he groaned, rubbing his temples.
“Who?” Stacey asked.
“That’s somebody in England?” Skid mumbled.
“Robin of Locksley is the Earl of Huntingdon in most of the stories,” Andrews told them both, as if they were severely undereducated. “He was Robin Hood.”
“Oh for Christ’s sake,” I fell back into the headboard of the bed. “He’s made idiots of us all.”
“That old man was messing with us from the very beginning.” Andrews agreed, laughing. “He must have thought I was the stupidest man alive not to get the joke right away.”
“What with your actually being British, and all,” I agreed.
“Damn.” Andrews shook his head again, still laughing.
“What are you talking about?” Stacey glared at Andrews.
“You mean he’s not—he might not be in the FBI?” Skid had a very foolish look on his face. “But they said…”
“He might not even be the night janitor,” I told him.
Before we could explore the stranger’s wanton peregrinations any further, Lucinda burst back in, her face completely devoid of color.
“Sheriff, could you come see about something right away?” she asked, her voice hollow.
“What is it?” He looked instantly worried again. “Is it Melissa?”
“No, it’s—it’s that boy Albert,” she stammered. “He’s talking out of his head. He says he saw something. It scared him bad. I expect it’s just a dream from the Desflurane I dosed him with, but he says he’s got to tell you—he wants to confess. You’ve got to come now. He’s a big old mess.”
Skidmore and Lucinda both bolted out of my room, Stacey close behind.
Andrews and I looked at each other.
“What could possibly explain that?” I muttered.
Andrews smiled. “He saw the Earl of Huntingdon.”
The awkward absence of talk that followed his sentence went on long enough to make us both uncomfortable, until I realized how some people explained such a silence.
“An angel must be passing by,” I said very softly.
Andrews grimaced and slumped down in his chair. He closed his eyes and seemed to lose himself in thought. Or maybe he was just exhausted and wanted to rest. Who could have blamed him?
“You and Stacey seem to be getting along very well,” I said at last.
“Yes,” he answered absently, “we do seem to be.”
“Good. That’s good.”
“You turned out to be something of an unwitting matchmaker in your comatose state.” He smiled to h
imself.
“All a part of the service,” I told him. “I’m going to set a date with Lucinda this weekend, you know.”
“Uh-huh,” he mumbled.
“I said that I would,” I went on, “and so I’m going to.”
“Why are you talking about this now?” he asked, suddenly a bit louder.
“Asking Lucinda to marry me?”
“No, I mean what exactly is the meaning of this line of conversation? Adventures in the banal?”
“No. I’m—I’m trying to get back to what passes for normal around here,” I stammered.
“Oh.” He slumped down further in his chair. “Well, good luck with that, then.”
“Don’t you want to talk about something—I don’t know—more mundane at the moment? Don’t you think we can be ordinary, just for a while?”
“No.” He didn’t look up. “I don’t.”
He closed his eyes again, and I stopped trying to talk.
I settled back into the pillows and turned to look out the window, staring at clouds. After a while it was nice to have the silence. As my own thoughts unwound, everything sinking in slowly, I finally came to an unusual, comforting conclusion about the clouds. They were clearly the first representatives of spring, not a last white gathering of winter. And after a few more minutes, they were even better than that: they were only clouds—ordinary, fluffy cumulus. They did not form themselves into imaginary, complicated, mythological visions as they had in December—before I was killed. Lying there in bed, a cloud was a cloud was a cloud. That was all.
At least the minotaurs of winters past were gone.
BY PHILLIP DEPOY
THE FEVER DEVILIN SERIES
The Devil’s Hearth
The Witch’s Grave
A Minister’s Ghost
A Widow’s Curse
The Drifter’s Wheel
THE FLAP TUCKER SERIES
Easy
Too Easy
Easy as One-Two-Three
Dancing Made Easy
Dead Easy
ALSO BY PHILLIP DEPOY
The King James Conpsiracy
This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
A CORPSE’S NIGHTMARE. Copyright © 2011 by Phillip DePoy. All rights reserved. For information, address St. Martin’s Press, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010.
www.minotaurbooks.com
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
DePoy, Phillip.
A corpse’s nightmare : a Fever Devilin novel / Phillip Depoy. — 1st ed.
p. cm.
e-ISBN 9781429980319
1. Devilin, Fever (Fictitious character)—Fiction. 2. Attempted murder—Fiction. 3. Coma—Patients—Fiction I. Title.
PS3554.E624C67 2011
813'.54—dc23
2011026226
First Edition: November 2011