Last Whisper

by Carlene Thompson

  The older man gave Vincent a hard look, then grudgingly clambered to his feet and managed to steady himself. Vincent watched his father teeter to the house, then picked up Brooke Yeager in his strong, steady arms.

  two

  1

  Brooke lay perfectly still. She’d awakened a couple of minutes ago but still pretended to be unconscious. She could tell she wasn’t outside on the lawn anymore. Maybe the two men had brought her into the house. What she lay on was comfortable—probably a couch—and something soft and warm covered her. A blanket. She was scared, but the men were treating her kindly and one of them seemed to know her. And she knew him. The half-formed memory hovered on the edge of clarity. He’d called her Cinnamon Girl; somehow she knew he’d known her mother; she remembered him and his wife giving her brownies and Kool-Aid and telling her everything would be all right. . . .

  “Did you call that emergency number?” she heard the older man ask.

  “Yeah, I called nine-one-one. An ambulance is on the way.”

  Brooke opened her right eye slightly to see the older man leaning over her, his forehead deeply creased, a troubled look in his blue eyes.

  “Vincent, she’s awake!” Vincent? I don’t know a Vincent, Brooke thought. The older man leaned closer to her. “Honey, tell us your name. I’m sorry I can’t remember. I’ve got this disease that affects my memory, but you’re safe here. Everything’s going to be all right.”

  Everything’s going to be all right. She remembered the voice, the words, the protective expression in the eyes. “Detective Lockhart!” she burst out. “Sam Lockhart!”

  The man looked shocked, then smiled. “That’s right. I’m a homicide detective—”

  “It’s me, Detective. Brooke Yeager. My mother Anne was killed. Murdered by my stepfather. You were in charge of the case—” She couldn’t seem to stop babbling and tried to rise up on the couch. “Later, I came here. You talked to me. Please, I need you now. He’s out there. He killed Mia. . . .”

  “Good God,” Sam Lockhart breathed. “Brooke. Yes. I remember now. I haven’t seen you for years. I lost touch. I’m sorry.”

  “Dad,” the younger man said sharply, “she said someone’s out there. Someone tried to kill Mina?”

  “Mia.” She glared at him. “Who are you?”

  “Vincent Lockhart, Detective Lockhart’s son. I thought you knew him,” he seemed to accuse.

  “I do. He talked about you, but I forgot your name.” Although Sam tried to push her back down on the couch, she sat bolt upright. “Someone shot at Mia and me at that gray house on Sutton Street. He killed Mia!”

  “Who killed Mia?” Vincent demanded.

  “I don’t know, dammit! He had a shotgun or a rifle. I didn’t see him. And I’m tired of talking to you. Where’s your mother? Where’s Laura?”

  Vincent looked at her unflinchingly for a moment. Finally, he said, “She died of cancer three years ago.”

  “Died? She’s dead, too?”

  Vincent nodded. “It was very peaceful. . . .”

  “Peaceful? Is that supposed to make me feel better?” Brooke cried, suddenly feeling as if she couldn’t stand knowing that she’d lost one more person she’d loved. She swallowed convulsively, then in a flash of wild misery, threw back the blanket. She had to get out of here, away from Vincent’s suspicious eyes and cold attitude, away from images of death and being surrounded by strangers. She swung her legs off the couch before a wave of dizziness hit her again and she half-crumpled, fighting to hold on to consciousness. Vincent caught her and laid her back on the couch, his green gaze so piercing it seemed to hurt. She averted her own eyes and muttered in defeat, “I need help. I just can’t fight anymore.”

  “Calm down, Cinnamon Girl. Help is on the way,” Sam said, his own voice abruptly strong and sure. “Vincent, get her some water. She’s passing out again.”

  Gunshots. White roses. Blood. Her mother bleeding into Brooke’s arms. Then her mother changed to Mia. She knew the difference, even though their faces were gone. Gone . . .

  Brooke’s eyes snapped open. She struggled to sit up, but she didn’t have the strength. Trying to relax slightly, she took shallow breaths and heard muttering coming from nearby. Sam and Vincent. In another room? No, close by, but not hovering over her.

  In an effort to force the images of her mother and Mia from her mind, Brooke lay still and did a quick scan of her surroundings. She was in a living room with carpet the color of desert sand and a huge hearth with what looked like real logs in it. She remembered that hearth so well. She saw two chairs, both burgundy, and marble-topped end tables, one sporting a Tiffany lamp. It was real—a family heirloom. She recalled Sam’s wife, Laura, telling her so. In one corner sat a curio cabinet filled with delicate pieces of glassware. Brooke had stood in front of that cabinet many years ago, admiring the pieces, but never touching them. She had been so afraid of doing anything to alter the sanctity of this house. The sanctity? She almost smiled at the word. She hadn’t thought of it at age eleven. She’d only thought of the house as her ultimate safe haven.

  Suddenly, Vincent leaned over her holding a glass of water. She resisted, but he put a hand under her head and lifted it up. She took a couple of sips before Vincent pulled away the glass.

  “I know you want more, but your head is hurt. At the hospital, they may want to give you an anesthetic, which they can’t do if you’ve drunk a lot of water,” Vincent said. His voice was deep and smooth, not rough like his father’s, but it wasn’t friendly, either.

  Brooke answered defiantly, “I don’t want more anyway.”

  “Sure you do, but you’re too stubborn to say so.”

  “Oh, Vincent, pull in your horns,” Sam snapped. Then he, too, leaned over her. “At least your lips don’t look so dry, honey. Vincent, take a look at her head.”

  Vincent sighed, clearly not happy with playing caregiver to this stranger, but he lifted a piece of cloth Brooke thought they must have applied when she was unconscious. “Looks like the bleeding has stopped,” he said.

  She gazed into his green eyes. She thought they were the prettiest green eyes she’d ever seen, if only they were smiling, too, not looking back at her with near hostility. He didn’t want her to be here, she thought. He didn’t want her here even though she was in danger. Creep, she thought furiously. How could he possibly be Sam Lockhart’s son? But he was and even though she wanted to escape his suspicious gaze and wary attitude, she knew she was physically incapable of making it out of the door.

  Especially when a killer might be waiting for her.

  2

  Vincent saw Brooke jerk under the blanket as paramedics pushed her into the hospital emergency entrance, slamming open the doors with the gurney. He gritted his teeth in annoyance. This rush and shouting as they entered seemed like theatrics. They’d briefly examined her at home and knew she apparently had suffered only a bad bump on the head and some scratches. She wasn’t hanging on to life, making every minute crucial. All they were doing was scaring her.

  “Where am I?” she asked groggily, the noise of their arrival having awakened her.

  “You’re at the hospital,” a paramedic snapped.

  Vincent could see fright streak through her. “I don’t want to be in a hospital!”

  At first, no one paid any attention to her. Finally, after shouting out her condition to a nurse not ten feet away, a paramedic asked her, “Back at the house this guy”—he jerked his head at Vincent—“said he doesn’t really know you. Is there anyone you want him to call?”

  Brooke looked up at Vincent. “There’s Robert, my boyfriend,” she said vaguely. “Robert.” She frowned, suddenly looking almost panicky. “No, we . . . broke up. Not him! There’s my grandmother, but she’s in a nursing home and I don’t want her to know what happened to me tonight. I have no other relatives.” Brooke’s eyes grew almost wild. “I can’t be left in this place alone, though. He might come after me!” She paused. “I have a friend! She lives in my apart
ment building. Stacy . . . Corrigan. I can’t remember her phone number. But her husband’s name is Jay!” She glanced imploringly at Vincent. “Please call her. Please.”

  “All right.” Vincent noticed that one of the paramedics shot him a doubtful glance. No wonder, Vincent thought. Brooke acted almost afraid of him. “You don’t have to sound so desperate. I wasn’t going to leave you here by yourself anyway, but I’ll look up the number in the phone book and call your friend. Satisfied?”

  She nodded, tears in her eyes. Good God, Vincent mused. The paramedic probably thinks I’m a tyrant.

  Vincent was stopped at the nurses’ station. Once they learned he wasn’t a family member, they brusquely dismissed him and sent him to the waiting room. Standard procedure, he knew. Besides, he didn’t want to accompany Brooke Yeager in for a full examination. He didn’t even know the woman.

  But Brooke had looked so vulnerable and battered that in spite of himself, Vincent felt a slight protectiveness toward her that baffled him, because he didn’t believe anyone had been shooting at her and had killed her friend. Her story was ludicrous. She must have been in a car wreck.

  Either that, or she was suffering from some kind of domestic abuse. She’d mentioned a boyfriend named Robert with whom she’d “broken up.” The thought pulled Vincent up short. Had Robert refused to let her go? Had she ended things by stabbing him? Or, more likely, had he moved on to another woman whom Brooke had stabbed to death? Was it the blood of Robert’s new girlfriend all over Brooke’s clothes? Was that why she’d said with such fear, “He might come after me”? Was she referring to Robert?

  Sighing, Vincent took a seat in the waiting room, hoping this incident wouldn’t end up with his father learning that his dear “Cinnamon Girl” was using him to set up some kind of cover story for a murder she had committed.

  3

  Brooke lay rigidly beneath a thin blanket, sniffing the room full of unpleasant antiseptic smells. She hated hospitals. She hated the clattering sounds crashing all around her, intensifying her headache. And most of all, she hated feeling helpless.

  Why couldn’t she remember everything that had happened this evening? She’d asked herself the question at least fifty times. She, who had been officially declared to have a photographic memory when she was seven, now recalled only flashes and feelings. Jumbles. Hodgepodges. Was there even such a word?

  An elderly nurse leaned over her. “What was that, dear?”

  “I just wondered if ‘hodgepodge’ was an actual word.”

  A professional smile appeared. “Why, I’m sure it is if you want it to be!”

  “And if I wish hard enough, Tinker Bell in Peter Pan will live.”

  A nice-looking young doctor leaned over Brooke. “What’s this about Tinker Bell?”

  “She’s rambling, Doctor,” the nurse said darkly.

  “I’m joking,” Brooke replied.

  “She’s joking when I didn’t say anything funny,” the nurse whispered portentously to the doctor.

  He smiled at Brooke. “Soooo, we have a case of unprovoked joking. They’re very rare. Don’t think I’ve seen one since 1912.” They smiled at each other while the nurse glowered, certain they were making fun of her. She’d decided at least half the people in this hospital made fun of her and she intended to do something about it one day. “Are you going to tell me your head hurts?” the doctor asked Brooke.

  “It really hurts.”

  “No wonder. Looks like it took a severe thump. How did that happen?”

  We were caught in a hail of bullets and my friend’s body crashed onto me, banging my head on the console, Brooke thought. Of course, she couldn’t say that. Not now. It was too fresh, too raw. “I was in a wreck,” she said simply, her eyes beginning to fill with tears.

  “Shook you up pretty bad, didn’t it?” he asked kindly. “They always do, even if you’re not seriously hurt.”

  “I’m not seriously hurt physically,” Brooke declared. “But there’s something wrong with my memory. Gaps. I couldn’t remember my ex-boyfriend’s name or my best friend’s phone number. What if I stay like this, with only half a memory?”

  “You have more than half a memory, but you’ll retrieve those gaps you talk about soon. They’re caused by shock,” the doctor said firmly. “Psychogenic or partial memory loss is common after an upsetting experience. Just stay as calm as possible, Miss Yeager. Don’t try to remember things. That makes the condition worse because you get agitated when you can’t immediately recall something. Think pleasant thoughts—wish Tinker Bell alive or something—and we’ll check you over for other injuries.” The doctor smiled down at her and touched her lightly on the chin.

  “Doctor, let’s not forget the rules about inappropriate touching,” the nurse reminded him tartly.

  He rolled his eyes and purposely touched Brooke’s chin again. The nurse glared and her face seemed to swell with anger as Brooke burst into nervous, uncontrollable giggles.

  4

  Vincent’s vigil in the waiting room seemed interminable, especially for a restless man. A guy sitting beside him made a point of continually turning his head to cough directly onto Vincent, mouth wide and uncovered, then mutter an insincere, “Sorry.”

  After fifteen minutes of this, Vincent moved, sitting down beside a woman with a black eye and a split lip who immediately launched into a diatribe about her jerk of a husband. Loudly she listed all of his misdeeds, which seemed endless. But she’d never leave him, she declared to Vincent, because she’d stood in front of a preacher and vowed to God to stay with him until death do them part and a vow to God meant everything to her. Besides, if she left the jerk, he’d immediately set up housekeeping with the slut he’d been seeing on the sly. Then she’d have to kill him. Kill him dead. That was a promise. Maybe she’d kill the slut, too. She’d have to think on that one. She might not have the stomach for two murders in one night.

  Vincent kept nodding at her in pretend sympathy until he felt like one of those bobble-headed dolls. Finally, he excused himself and went to the soft drink machine for a Coke he didn’t really want.

  His cell phone went off and he eagerly grabbed for it. Leaning against the drink machine in the relative quiet of the hall, he spoke to his father. “What’s up?”

  “That’s my question. How’s Brooke?”

  “I don’t know yet. She’s still in an examination room and no one feels obligated to give me any information because I’m not her family.”

  “You should have said you were her brother,” Sam reprimanded. “That would have been the smart thing to do.”

  “Dad, they wanted her address, insurance information, prior medical history, on and on. There’s no way I could have bluffed them into thinking I was her brother.” Vincent took a sip of his Coke, telling himself he must be patient with his father. An extremely short temper seemed to be accompanying the Alzheimer’s. “Dad, why don’t you tell me who this woman really is and how you know her?”

  “This woman is Brooke Yeager,” Sam said sharply. “You already know that.”

  “But who is Brooke Yeager? What’s she to you?”

  “Good grief, boy, weren’t you listening when she was here?”

  “She was babbling—”

  “A little, but you’ve heard her name. It was a long time ago, but I’m the one with the bad memory, not you.” Vincent remained silent, not wanting to upset his father any more than he had already. “When she was a child, her mother was shot to death by her stepfather. He shot her mother right in the face. The girl walked in on the scene. He would have killed her, too, if a neighbor hadn’t burst into the house just in time to save her. I was the lead investigator in that case. She was so traumatized that for two days, all she’d say is, ‘I’m Cinnamon Girl.’ It wasn’t until the third or fourth day that she started talking. She remembered every detail of what had happened.” Sam finished with a note of triumph that almost completely assured Vincent that everything his father had just told him was accurate.
r />   “Okay, she was involved in a murder case. But you act like you really know her, Dad.”

  “I do. And you would have, too, if you hadn’t been away at that university.”

  “Berkeley. In California.”

  “I know where you went to school,” Sam said irritably. “Anyway, afterward, the state put her in a foster home right here in South Hills because her grandmother had had a heart attack over the murder. Brooke found out where I lived and came here a few times to talk over the case. That’s what she’d always say. ‘Let’s talk over the case, Detective Lockhart,’ like a little adult. Your mother and I’d call the foster parents and tell them we’d bring her home within the hour. Usually they’d never noticed she was gone. Not much of an excuse for a foster family, if you ask me. Your mother absolutely loved her. We talked about adopting her. Good God, Son, we sent you a letter about her and I think a picture.”

  Slowly, memory washed over Vincent. “I remember Mom writing to me about a girl you were thinking of adopting, although she didn’t go into much about her background. I don’t think I even remembered her name was Brooke,” Vincent said. “Mom asked me if I’d like to have a little sister. I think I said, ‘Sure, whatever you want,’ and didn’t give her another thought.” Vincent sighed. “I was pretty into myself back in those days.”

  “Yeah, well, most teenagers are,” Sam said grudgingly. “And maybe it’s better you didn’t make a big deal out of it, because when Brooke’s grandmother recovered, she was sent to live with her. I suppose that was best. People should be with family. But it nearly broke Laura’s heart.”

  “And she didn’t say a word to me about it.” Vincent suddenly felt ashamed of himself. His mother had been aching with the loss of a child she’d almost had, and she didn’t feel she could bother him with her hurt and disappointment. It had all happened a long time ago, though, and his regret couldn’t help his mother now. But maybe he could help his father. “Listen, Dad, I know as a child Brooke Yeager was close to you, but you haven’t talked to her for years. You don’t know anything about how she’s turned out, and more important, you don’t really know what really happened to her tonight.”