Counterpointe

by Ann Warner

  “It’s not official yet. Rob has to sign the papers, but, well, I-I decided it was time.”

  “Why not stay here, Clare? Where you have friends.”

  “I thought you of all people would understand why I need a fresh start.”

  He stood for a time still holding her hand, then he sighed and let her go. “I guess I do at that.”

  “Cincinnati?” Lynne said.

  A continuing experiment, saying aloud what she was planning.

  “When are you going?”

  “A couple of weeks.”

  “Before Rob gets back?”

  “Yes.”

  “Don’t you think you need to talk to him? Whatever problems you were having. Maybe you can work them out.”

  “He’s better off not seeing me.”

  “So you get to make that decision?” Lynne was angry and making no attempt to hide it.

  “I’m not the one who went away.” And I’m not the one who cut off communication.

  “What do you call leaving Boston?”

  “Getting on with my life.” Clare’s throat tightened. She’d been cruel but Rob was cruel as well. Not a word from him. Not in all these months.

  Lynne sniffled. “He loved you so much.”

  Loved, Lynne said. Not loves. Clare knew that. No reason, then, for her heart to squeeze in pain.

  “Are you okay, Tyrese?” The boy was having trouble sitting still and he kept rubbing his hands up and down his upper arms.

  “Fine. I fine.” He straightened and sat stiffly as he continued to read, but when he walked out, Clare noticed he was limping. When she saw Anthony later, she asked him about Tyrese.

  “He got in a fight,” Anthony said. “That bad-ass, Jamal, jumped him. He hurting a bit.”

  “Jamal?”

  “They been hassling Tyrese.”

  “Who has?”

  “Them Bull Sharks. His old gang.”

  Clare mentioned it to Beck, who sighed. “I’ll speak to the police. Ask them to keep an eye out, and I’ll talk to Tyrese’s mom. See if she’s willing to move to a different neighborhood.”

  The next day, Tyrese walked in, ducking his head when Clare looked up at him. He slid into the seat next to her and pulled a book out of his backpack.

  “What happened to your eye?” And his lip, and dear God, his hand.

  “Fell.”

  Clare shivered with unease. “Only way you end up with a shiner like that, you fell into someone’s fist.”

  “Nope. Just clumsy, ma’am.” Tyrese shifted around in his seat looking guilty as hell.

  She caught his hand and uncurled the fingers. One was swollen twice its normal size and Tyrese jerked away when she touched it.

  “You need ice and an x-ray to see if it’s broken.”

  “No, ma’am. Don’t need no x-ray. I fine.” He opened the book with a definitive thump and she gave up for the moment trying to force him to accept her concern.

  But if Tyrese wouldn’t talk, she knew who would. “Did you see Tyrese today?” she asked Anthony as he walked her out of Hope House.

  Anthony nodded. “Man, he sure be hurting.”

  “Do you know what happened?”

  “Bull Sharks been hassling him.” Anthony did a little shuffle step and pretended to shoot a basket. “They ambushed him, but he getting smart. Mostly manages to avoid them. They ain’t good at hiding theyselves.”

  “Do they know he comes to Hope House?”

  Anthony appeared to consider that. “Don’t know. Tyrese, he tell me he real careful. You don’t need to worry. Pretty soon they find someone else they pick on.”

  Clare did worry, though, especially when shortly after that, Tyrese stopped coming to Hope House.

  After Sam worked on Javier’s leg, the healer had come and examined the wound. He questioned Sam about the sutures before insisting she use the poultice he’d prepared.

  “I worried it would lead to an infection, but it seems to be healing faster than normal,” Sam told Rob and Jolley later.

  That collaboration broke the ice with Soraida, who had previously avoided Sam, and the two began meeting regularly. When it wasn’t raining, they sat in front of Sam’s hut, Soraida talking while Sam took notes, or Sam talking while Soraida listened with an intent look on his face.

  “You getting any good tips?” Jolley asked her one evening.

  “More than tips. Soraida’s giving me an advanced course in psychic healing.”

  “Psychic?” Rob said.

  “He believes most physical illness is a manifestation of spirit sickness.”

  “That’s no different from what physicians in the West say about stress,” Jolley said.

  “You think the chanting and his trances help?” Rob said.

  Sam shrugged. “It doesn’t hurt. If nothing else, it’s proof someone cares about them.”

  Rob went to bed, still thinking about it. How he and Clare were suffering from what could be viewed as spirit sickness.

  Chapter Nineteen

  Assemblé penchée

  A firm step using both feet and ending in a lean

  A month before they were due to leave Peru, Rob suffered a bout of stomach cramps that lasted most of the day. Such upsets weren’t unusual, so he didn’t bother to mention it, just went to bed hoping to sleep it off. But he awoke in the middle of the night with pain so staggering, all he could manage in the first moments was to clutch his abdomen. The only thing that eased the agony even slightly was pulling his right leg up to his chest.

  He didn’t realize he was moaning until Jolley spoke from across the room. “What is it, Rob?”

  He tried to reply, but managed only a gasp. Then Jolley was there, flicking on a flashlight. After he looked at Rob, he left to get Sam. She might have come in a minute or an hour. In the center of the pain, time no longer had any meaning.

  Her cool hand brushed the hair off his brow and her calm voice said, “Now let’s see what we have here.”

  An indefinite time later, Jolley held Rob’s arm while Sam positioned a syringe and asked him to count backwards from ten. Everything faded away.

  When Rob came to, it was to Sam’s voice and the touch of her hand on his wrist. “Hi there. Welcome back.”

  “Where’ve I been?” The words came out mushed together as if he’d been drinking. In fact, his head ached exactly like he imagined it would after a binge.

  “Right to the edge.” Sam spoke lightly, releasing his arm.

  It didn’t make sense, but he was in too much pain to sort it out. “Hurts. What...?” he croaked, unable to get past the cotton in his mouth.

  “Acute appendix. We got it just in time.” Sam lifted his arm, swabbed, and quickly jabbed. “You should start feeling that or, I should say, not feeling that, in a few minutes.”

  He drifted off, and the next hours were a confused mix of light and dark, Jolley and Sam’s voices, and pain. Eventually, things began to clear up.

  “Damn lucky for you, Sam was with us. She wasn’t, you and I wouldn’t be having this conversation.”

  “She operated on me?”

  Jolley grinned. “And you’ve got the zipper to prove it.”

  “But how?”

  “Like one of those movies where they boil water, clean off the kitchen table, and sharpen the best butcher knife. Nicest little piece of dissection I’ve ever had the chance to observe.”

  “Jolley’s exaggerating,” Sam said, stepping into the hut. “Every first-year resident can do that operation with her eyes closed.”

  “Doubt it, Sam. Damn nice work.”

  “And I didn’t use a butcher knife,” she continued, ignoring Jolley. “You’ve been laying around enough already. Time you got up, got moving.”

  “You can see why we don’t use chloroform any longer,” Jolley said.

  “You used chloroform?” Rob shuddered, remembering a graduate school experiment in which they’d used chloroform to knock rats out before surgery. And damn, it had been easy to knock them
all the way to kingdom come.

  “Jolley’s teasing you,” Sam said. “I used something more modern. Now, up you go.” With that, he was on his feet, leaning on the two of them, as limp and useless as one of those rats he’d inadvertently dispatched to the great beyond.

  After a trip to the privy, they lowered him back onto an air mattress since there was no way he could manage the cooler hammock. Sam allowed him to sip tea, then she gave him another pain shot.

  He awoke the next day to find the camp in its usual morning bustle. Jolley showed up with a cup of tea and a bowl of rice and sat next to him while he ate.

  “We need to talk about this.” Jolley gestured at his bandage. “Sam says you should be fine. But if you want us to call in a boat from Boca Manu, we will. You can fly from there to Cuzco.”

  “I’d rather stay.”

  Jolley patted his arm. “Hoped you’d say that. Sam says by the time we leave, you should be good to go. Although you’ll still probably feel like shit.”

  Rob grimaced at the memory of the rough trip from Cuzco and almost changed his mind about flying back.

  During the days that followed his operation, the camp slipped back into its regular routines. The healer played his part in Rob’s recovery, preparing poultices and a tea he said aided digestion and sleep. Since Rob was having no difficulty with either, the tea could have been the reason.

  Two days after the operation, Jolley told him the story of that night as he sat next to Rob while enjoying his evening pipe. Alberto, who had just helped Rob back from the privy, sat nearby.

  “We rigged a double layer of mosquito netting to give Sam an operating field clear of bugs, and Soraida and Alberto held flashlights to give her the light she needed. I assisted. You should have seen us scurrying to get it set. Too damn close, you ask me.”

  “We thought you a goner for sure, Dr. Rob,” Alberto said as Sam walked up to the hut.

  “Thank you for my life.”

  “You have the whole village to thank,” Sam said. “They all pitched in, and they’re feeling pretty good about it.” She bent over and lifted the bandage to check his incision. “Jolley tells me you’ve elected to stay. You need to know that’s not ideal.”

  “What would you do? If it was your appendix?”

  “If all I had were you guys taking care of me, I’d be for Cuzco in a heartbeat, but you seem to be healing and there’s no sign of infection. That was my greatest concern.” She sat back on her heels and pulled a new bandage from her kit. Soraida appeared behind her, holding a fresh poultice. She smiled her thanks and took the poultice and began securing it with the bandage.

  “East meets West,” Jolley murmured.

  “More like South meets North,” Sam said.

  Rob raised a hand in thanks to Soraida.

  She finished replacing the bandage. “How’s the pain?”

  “Bearable.”

  “Good thing you didn’t have any nausea afterwards.”

  The thought made him wince. “That would have been a real topper.”

  “Maybe that healing service really worked,” Jolley said.

  “Healing service?”

  “Soraida went the whole nine yards for you. Smoked his pipe, went into a trance, danced and chanted. Said he saw a woman with short white hair standing on her toes right in the middle of your chest.”

  “You’re joking.”

  “Not at all. Sounded like he was describing a ballerina, although it couldn’t be Clare, not with white hair.”

  One of the men told Clare she was needed in the office. When she arrived, Beck introduced her to a short pudgy man with colorless thinning hair. One Morrie Rabinowitz. A homicide detective with the Boston Police Department.

  “We’re waiting for Appleseed, then we get started,” Beck told Clare as she took a seat next to Vinnie.

  The door opened and John walked in. Rabinowitz straightened from his slouch against the wall. “J.B.?” The detective looked puzzled.

  “Rabbit.” John Apple’s tone was flat. “It’s been awhile.”

  “At least three years, maybe more.”

  “What’s this about?” John asked.

  “We got us a Jamal Hicks. Stabbed to death last night.”

  Rabbit-Rabinowitz looked from Clare to Beck to Vinnie. “Any of you know him?”

  Clare shook her head as did Beck and Vinnie, until with a lurch of her stomach, she realized Jamal was the name of the Bull Shark Anthony said was hassling Tyrese.

  “Why do you think we might know Jamal?” she asked.

  Rabinowitz looked at John before replying. “Gang member. A Bull Shark. I understand an ex–Bull Shark comes here for tutoring. Tyrese Brown. He’s the one I want to talk to.”

  “Why Tyrese?” John said.

  “We have a witness. He claims Tyrese ambushed Jamal. Stabbed him.”

  “Who’s the witness?”

  “Another Bull Shark.”

  “Convenient,” John said.

  “Could be a setup. Could be true. So, about Tyrese?”

  “He hasn’t been here this week,” Clare said.

  Rabinowitz stared at her for a moment, then pushed himself out from the wall. “He wasn’t at home either. Guess we’ll have to figure out where else he might be. Good to see you, J.B.” He nodded at the rest of them.

  Odd how intimidating a man in an ill-fitting suit and indifferent tie could be when he had the power to arrest and incarcerate, even if his nickname was Rabbit.

  “Anthony told me someone named Jamal has been hassling Tyrese,” she said.

  Beck shook his head. “Knew I shoulda got Tyrese and Nellie moved.”

  “Too bad someone decided to play witness,” John said. “Means they’ll have to go ahead and charge Tyrese.”

  “They have to find him first,” Clare said. “Do you think he’s hiding, Beck?” She refused to even consider Tyrese might be missing because he was dead.

  “No way to know, but don’t look good.”

  “Police have been cracking down on gangs,” John said. “Unlikely they’ll give Tyrese the benefit of the doubt.”

  “We can help,” Clare said. “The fact he comes here for tutoring and is doing well in school.”

  “What if the judge asks how you managed to convince Tyrese to come for tutoring?” John said.

  She winced. “We can’t just let them charge him with murder.”

  “Even if he did it?”

  She shook her head. “I don’t believe he did. Tyrese’s smart. He wants to make something of himself. He was trying to avoid the gang. If he did stab Jamal, it had to be self-defense.”

  “I agree with Clare,” Vinnie said. “That boy was working hard, doing good.”

  “We can’t stop the police from charging him,” John said. “All we can do is try to help him when they do.”

  “So how do you know Detective Rabinowitz?” Clare asked, as John walked her over to Huntington Avenue that evening.

  “Paths crossed a few times.”

  “You’ve crossed paths with a homicide detective?”

  “I was a cop.”

  “Oh.” Oh, indeed. Real deal, indeed.

  “Incidentally, not something I’d like bandied about Hope House.”

  “Of course not. So why does he let you call him Rabbit?”

  “I think he enjoys being underestimated.”

  “And you’re J.B., huh? What does the B stand for?”

  “If I tell you, I’ll have to make you disappear.”

  “It couldn’t be any worse than Rabbit.”

  “Yes. It could.”

  “Bertie? Barnie?”

  “Worse.”

  “I can’t think of any other bad B names.”

  “Would you believe Boniface? My mother thought it sounded classy.”

  “Ouch. So were you ever called Bonnie?”