A String of Beads

by Thomas Perry

  The image of the old man and the young woman in the studio returned. “Now we go live to Amy Norris at Buffalo General Hospital for more,” said Don as Kimberly looked serious beside him.

  This time the scene was outside a rear entrance of the big brick hospital building. Amy Norris was a tall, thin black woman who looked like a fashion model. “I’m outside the hospital where the state police officer has been taken. Hospital spokesmen have stated he’s in stable condition. He sustained a bullet wound in his right thigh, but they predict he will make a full recovery. He has been identified as Sergeant Isaac Lloyd, age forty-one. The state police headquarters revealed today that he is an eighteen-year veteran with the force, with citations for outstanding merit and valor. The state police spokesman declined to comment on the incident, or on the case Sergeant Lloyd had been assigned to. Amy Norris, Western New York News.”

  Jane watched the image change to Don and Kimberly in the studio again. Don said, “An illegal U-turn over a set of railroad tracks has ended in tragedy today.” Jane turned off the television set.

  She left the hotel and drove to the store where Carey’s nurses often bought their work gear. She went inside, selected a package that contained two sets of light blue scrubs, a package of surgical masks, a box of thin latex gloves, and a cap like the ones surgeons wore. She found a bag with a shoulder strap, took all her selections to the counter, and paid for them in cash.

  IKE LLOYD LAY IN HIS hospital bed, his right leg throbbing. All day there had been a little nurse who had been very gentle, very solicitous of his well-being and comfort. All she had really been able to do for him was come in every three hours or so and give him another shot of painkiller, but she had smiled and spoken softly. Each time she left he fell asleep again, a strange dreamy sleep, very colorful and vivid.

  Whenever Lloyd awoke, he fought to bring his dreams back. Most of them started well—running the marathon in New York City last year, or walking through the woods around Salamanca, or sitting in an Adirondack guide boat fishing on Tupper Lake. In one dream he had actually been having sex with Molly. He had hated to let that one go, and had struggled to stay asleep until the pain in his leg had grown too sharp. That one had probably been triggered by her visit to his hospital room, and then missing her after she’d gone home. He had called her to tell her about it, and she had laughed and told him he was still too weak to have that kind of dream.

  All the other dreams but that one seemed to shade off into a second part. It got dark. Men had shot him, but in the dream their pistols had thrown flames. Next he would feel the stab of pain as the fire tore through the muscle of his leg. He supposed that these sensations were triggered when his medicine wore off and the pain woke him.

  The leg was worse than painful; it was damaged. He had always been a runner. He loved running, and had been a habitual runner for over thirty years. If last night had left him permanently crippled, it would turn that pleasure into agony and sorrow. When he’d been a kid he’d hated school until he discovered that his running didn’t have to be just a way to forget the fact that other kids had friends, money, and nice clothes. He got to run on the cross-country team in the fall and the track team in the spring. Running had given him an identity and acceptance.

  Ike had been a farm boy whose family lived on somebody else’s farm and worked for next week’s groceries while they tried to make this week’s last. They were lucky if there was enough money left over to put gas in his father’s old Ford pickup. The Lloyds were backwoods people who had come up from Pennsylvania when Ike was about ten. Through his childhood he and his father had hunted. The Lloyds had been meat hunters, and they’d weighed the cost of each shot against the value it could bring the family.

  One of the memories that reappeared in his sleep tonight was a day when his father had wounded a deer. His father walked with a limp because of something that had happened in the army, so Ike had been the one to run after the deer. His concern had been to keep the deer from running all day in pain and then coming to rest in a secluded copse somewhere deep in the woods to bleed out, so its death and suffering would be completely wasted. Ike had run through the forest tracking the buck until he caught up with it, shot it through the head, hung the carcass, dressed it, and brought it home. Ike’s father had cut the meat, then preserved it in the farm freezer. Ike remembered his mother defrosting pieces of the venison all the next winter, and each time they had it, his father would repeat the story of Ike running it down to prevent the sin of wasting a life.

  Ike was beginning to feel fully awake again when the night nurse came in. This one was much taller—maybe five nine or ten, and thin, with olive skin but bright blue eyes. She wore a cap on her head that covered her hair and a white surgical mask over her nose and mouth.

  At first he’d thought she must be one of the surgeons who had taken care of his bullet wound, but she was a nurse all right, because she fussed with things—moving the rolling stand so his call button was about seven feet from him and he couldn’t even reach the damned thing, opening a drawer on the other side and putting his stuff—wallet, watch, phone—into a plastic bag in the bottom drawer of the built-in dresser in his open closet. He didn’t exactly mind that part. He had thought Molly would take all that with her when she’d left tonight to go put the kids to sleep. And he didn’t really care where the nurses put things. They’d sort it all out another day when he was released.

  “Did the other girl go home?”

  “You mean the nurse?” the new one said.

  “Yes. I guess I shouldn’t have said ‘girl.’ I’m not a jerk. I’m just kind of lazy headed right now. Drugs and all that.”

  The new nurse said, “It’s okay. Everybody knows you’re the good guy, Ike. I guess her shift ended. But you’ll probably see her again tomorrow.”

  “Did you come to give me another shot?”

  “No. I came to talk to you a little. But I’ll leave soon, and when I do we can ring for the next one.”

  He said, “Are you afraid of getting me sick?”

  “You mean the mask? No, it’s not to protect you from my germs. It’s to protect me.”

  “Oh,” he said. “You called me Ike. Who are you?”

  “You don’t recognize my voice? I’m the woman who borrowed your shotgun last night.”

  “What?”

  “I shot the man who was coming around the RV to get you in a crossfire. I hit him in the chest. I think I hit one of the others too, but not very seriously. I didn’t go after him or his friend because it seemed more important to call for help to get you taken to a hospital.”

  He rolled and lunged for the call button, but it was out of his reach.

  “Don’t do that,” she said. “You’ll only hurt yourself.”

  “What do you want?”

  “Information. I watched the local news this evening, and they told the story of what happened, sort of. A couple of things were missing.”

  “What were they?”

  “One was me.”

  “You want publicity?”

  “No. If keeping me out of the story was your idea, thank you. The other thing that was missing was the man I shot.”

  “You must know that the local news isn’t going to know everything, or get everything they hear straight.”

  “No, Ike. Too much time has passed for them not to have noticed a dead or wounded man. The police have had control of the scene for almost twenty-four hours.”

  “Have I been here that long?”

  “Approximately. But so far the news people haven’t mentioned a man or a body. That struck me as odd.”

  “Maybe he got away.”

  “I hit him in the center of his chest from closer than forty feet. When I last saw him he was lying on his back with his arms splayed out. Your ammo is number four buckshot, right?” />
  “Why do you care? If he’s alive he can’t find you.”

  “I want to know who he is and what those men were doing at Slawicky’s.”

  “I don’t know, and I don’t know why he’s missing,” said Lloyd. “I saw him go down, and I’m pretty sure I saw blood after he was lying there. But from that moment on, I was only worrying about the other two, and I think shock was setting in. If you hadn’t reminded me to use my belt, I might have bled out.”

  “You’re welcome. I have some things to tell you too.”

  He sighed. “You must know that I’m not on the case anymore.”

  “You’re the only one that I can tell. Nick Bauermeister was a thief—a burglar, to be precise. I found his break-in kit, mask, and a loaded gun in a toolbox under the workbench in his basement. He was storing bags of salt for winter, and the ones in the center of the pile all have jewelry in them. His girlfriend, Chelsea Schnell, is having an affair with his boss, Daniel Crane. And Walter Slawicky never sold a rifle to Jimmy Sanders. He lied to the police about that. I think somebody paid him.”

  Lloyd said, “I saw the new Porsche in his garage, and of course it was hard to miss the motor home. He doesn’t seem to have a job.”

  “That’s what I thought,” she said. “I’ve got to go now. Sorry I had to move your phone and call button.”

  “What has this got to do with you? Who are you?”

  “Why do you care? Do you want to send me a thank-you note?”

  “I’m officially ordering you to tell me your name.”

  “Thanks, Ike. Get well. When I’m gone, if you want the nurse, just pull the blood pressure clip off your finger. It sets off an alarm at the desk, and they’ll come to reset it.” She opened the door and stepped out into the hallway.

  The beep-beep tone went off at the nurse’s station and when the nurse got up and hurried toward Ike Lloyd’s room, she didn’t see the woman in scrubs who strode past her station behind her and kept going to the elevator.

  Jane descended to the ground floor and walked outside through the door where the garbage was taken from the cafeteria kitchen to the dumpsters. She went past the enclosure where the big air-conditioning condensers and heating plant were. She didn’t remove her mask and cap until she was far from the hospital’s security cameras and enveloped in darkness once again.

  20

  Jane changed her clothes in her car. It was still dark when she drove to Avon and along Telephone Road. As she passed the long driveway to Chelsea Schnell’s, she took time to study the house. There were no signs that anything had changed. Sometime soon, she hoped, Ike Lloyd would repeat what she’d told him to the police officers who had taken over Jimmy’s case. They would obtain a search warrant for the little house, and find the gun, tools, and stolen jewelry. He could be calling them now. How long would it take to obtain a warrant?

  Jane looked at her watch. It was 5:00 AM. She parked her Passat in the row of cars at the gas station down the road and walked back along the deserted stretch of Telephone Road to the house. If she was going to take another look, this had to be it.

  This time she walked into the field by the house to the back where the stand of maple trees and the high thickets would hide her if the police came earlier than she had anticipated.

  She walked to the rear of the house, climbed up onto the back porch, went to the kitchen window, and studied the room in the light thrown by the fluorescent above the stove. There were no dishes out, and the coffee pot was disassembled on the counter. She moved to the garage and saw through the side door that Chelsea’s car was parked there, went to the bedroom window and moved her eye to the corner, then pulled back.

  The bed was smooth, the bedspread pulled straight and tight, and the pillows arranged neatly in a double row—bright decorative ones in front, and white pillows behind. Nobody was home and nobody had slept here.

  Jane moved to the sloped cellar door, unscrewed and removed the hasp and its padlock, and went down the steps. She had not expected to enter the house, but she still had the small LED flashlight she’d brought with her to the hospital. She picked up a rag to open Nick Bauermeister’s toolbox and checked to be sure that the tools, mask, and gun were still there, then touched the middle bags of salt to verify that the jewelry was still there too. Finally she climbed the wooden steps to the kitchen.

  Something had changed. The small kitchen was still neat and orderly, but it was stuffy. The air had stayed in the same place for too long because the doors and windows had been closed. She stepped to the refrigerator and tugged it open. A sour smell hit her, and seemed to be coming from the open milk carton on the top shelf. She peered through the glass tops of two drawers at the bottom and saw one full of lettuce with faint brownish streaks and leaves with curling edges. There were tomatoes with skin that had begun to pucker slightly. She closed the refrigerator and moved to the living room.

  There were plants in pots lined up on a windowsill. They looked limp. Jane touched the soil in a couple of them, and they were dry. Chelsea had not been home in a while. Jane pulled her hand back into her sleeve and picked up the telephone. There was still a dial tone.

  She went to Chelsea’s bedroom and checked the closet and dresser. She thought there were a few articles of clothing missing since her last visit, but most of them were still there. She moved the chair to the closet, stood on it, opened the small attic access door, and used her flashlight to look, but all she saw was a layer of pink insulation that had been installed long after the house was built.

  She closed it carefully and went through the house again, looking under pieces of furniture and in the usual hiding places—the freezer, inside pots and pans, taped to the undersides of drawers, behind the plates of switches that didn’t seem to operate anything, and behind heating grates. As she searched, part of her was listening for the sound of police cars, and as long as she heard nothing, she kept searching. At last, she ran out of places to look.

  Jane went down to the basement, up to the cellar door, and out. The sun was bright and glaring. She replaced the hasp and padlock and went across the field to the gas station and retrieved her car. As she drove along the road, there was a steady stream of cars going in both directions, people taking their kids to school or going to work, but no police cars. She looked at her watch. It was nearly eight already. Daniel Crane would be leaving for work.

  DANIEL CRANE DROVE TOWARD HIS storage business, but he didn’t feel right about leaving home. Maybe he didn’t really have to go in today. He took out his phone and called the office.

  Thompson picked up. “Storage.”

  “Box Farm Personal Storage,” Crane said. “I’ve told you guys about eighty times.”

  “Sorry Dan. I was on my way downstairs, and Harriman was on the phone at my desk so I had to run over here to get it, and I was afraid the caller would give up.”

  “Okay,” said Crane. “Four words. Box Farm Personal Storage. I don’t know how I can build the business if you guys don’t sound professional.”

  “Sorry. I’ll be more careful.”

  “What I called for was to see if Mr. Salamone let anybody know when he’s coming today.”

  “I haven’t heard. Let me check.” Crane could hear the rubbing sound of a hand covering the phone, and a faint voice calling across the room. “Nope. He hasn’t called or anything. Nobody’s called and asked for you yet, either.”

  “Okay,” said Crane. “I’ll see you in a little while.” He hung up, then pressed the phone number of the office again.

  “Box Farm Personal Storage.”

  “Very good,” Crane said. “That wasn’t so hard, was it?” He hung up again and slid the phone into his jacket pocket.

  He had hoped Salamone might have called to tell him when he was coming, or even better, that he wasn’t coming. Salamone had already missed
making his usual rounds yesterday, and of course, he hadn’t called. Why should he? Making people wait and not showing up was a way of keeping them off balance. They had to think about you on that day, and each day after that until you finally appeared.

  Crane had wanted to stay home with Chelsea this morning. He’d had trouble with her last night, and he really wanted to see what her state of mind was going to be today.

  They had gone out to dinner and a play in downtown Buffalo, and he had expected that afterward she would be bright and cheerful and talkative. The play had been a revival of O’Neill’s The Emperor Jones. To him it had been a little stagey and dull, but Chelsea had watched it intently, so he had assumed she’d liked it. She had been quiet on the drive home, but not sullen or withdrawn.

  After he pulled the Range Rover into the garage and got out, she had just sat there for a minute. At first he thought she was being a grand lady and waiting for him to walk around the car and open her door for her. That would have been okay—was okay in his mind when he’d come to her door. To him it had been a sign that she was feeling comfortable with him, relishing the fact that he loved her—happy that he was attentive enough to sense what she wanted.

  That hadn’t been it. When he had swung her door open she simply sat there looking straight ahead.

  “Honey?” he’d said. “Chelsea?”

  She had reacted only after he said her name, and then it was as though he’d nudged her from a reverie. She’d looked at him and then got out. As he followed her to the front door he said, “Are you all right?”

  She had not answered at first, but then she said, “Yes.” But she had sounded too firm, too assertive.

  When he opened the door she went in ahead of him and kept walking, never stopping on her way across the living room and through the gallery toward his bedroom—their bedroom. When he finished locking the door and turning up the lights he looked again and his last sight before she disappeared through the arch to the gallery was her reaching up to grasp the zipper at the back of her dress. When she did that the dress was pulled tighter across her bottom and waist. Her thin, graceful fingers tugged down the zipper a few inches and he saw the bare white skin below her neck for an instant.