by Jamie Mason
Bayard knelt to the business of it all, trying his cell phone and peering at Ford. Jason cast around in hopes of finding help or inspiration.
Only Leah wrapped her arms around the injured man. All that would come was a sobbing whisper: “Mr. Watts?”
She cleared her throat and forced down a fuller breath. “Mr. Watts?”
“Mr. Watts? Are—are you okay?” she whispered. She knew full well it was a ridiculous question but had nothing else in her head to offer him. She laid her hand against his chest, feeling for breath and heartbeat, but too afraid to press with any force. Her trembling canceled out anything she might have felt anyway. He didn’t make a sound that Leah could hear over her own chattering teeth. “Please be okay. Oh, please, God, be okay . . .”
A warm spot knocked against her back, patting out of rhythm with her quaking. Ford was comforting her, stroking her shoulder blade with one weak hand.
Relief pulled her downward, and all of Leah’s plan slid away. She tried to catch Jason’s eye as she slipped into the smoky swoon that rushed up to cradle her. Jason knelt at her side and she whispered to him, “Don’t say anything wrong. Let that son of a bitch take it all.”
• • •
A keening wail reminded her of screaming, but it wasn’t her. She wasn’t frightened anymore. Just so tired. Ford was perfectly still next to her. The crying wore on, rising and falling, louder and more annoying. She wanted it to stop, but an electric No! snatched away her gauzy doze. It was sirens.
She beat on Ford’s chest without thinking. “They’re here! Mr. Watts, they’re here!” She dashed bravely through the trees and into the growing light, right through the pounding in her head, toward the sound.
• • •
The pursuit of the girl in the park had become a black hole that Maggie kept tossing men and dogs into. Ford was hurt and Maggie could do nothing but wait. Tim hadn’t called in forever. So she paced. She put on her shoes and set out her bag and keys on the table by the door. Then she moved them to the car, to be extra ready. She doubled back to leave the key poised in the ignition. Once she returned to the house, she realized she could save ten seconds by having the garage door already opened, and the round-trip took another half minute off the clock, leaving her stranded in the middle of the kitchen again.
“Margaret, you’re going to make yourself sick,” she said aloud.
She sat on her hands on the sofa until she felt pins and needles sparking in her palms. She took up dialing Ford’s number again just to hear his voice, to feel close, as if she were sending her intent over the airwaves. It gave her fingers something to do. Maggie wanted a cigarette, a craving she hadn’t jousted with in twenty years.
The last time had been when the final pregnancy test had failed to yield that hateful, damned second pink line. The at-home tests had cost a fortune back then. She and Ford had spent hundreds of dollars they didn’t have over the course of a few years, buying a test at a time, then sometimes one more, just in case it had been wrong that month. Joking, but not really, they’d issued a challenge to that last one—this was it, or else. She’d washed her hands and straightened the towels, forcing herself not to hold her breath. She wouldn’t risk the jinx of looking for the pink parallel lines before the full two minutes had passed. She gave it an extra minute because her watch was digital and therefore not entirely trustworthy, since you could never know how much of that first minute you’d missed.
It turned out that a threat to a bit of plastic and chemical-laced padding is an empty one indeed. Maggie didn’t cry that time, but, oh, how she’d ached for the taste of smoke sliding over her tongue and the golden nicotine zing rushing into her fingertips and filling her head like light. She’d quit for the baby. And she had honored that commitment in memoriam for the baby that never happened.
She and Ford had decided not to test for the reasons behind their childlessness. They both had a way of shrugging off what they could not change. They’d found it noble and resilient to accept things with dignity and to soldier on. They’d advised other people so often to do the same—to let it go, not to lather up over what you had no control over. She wondered now if that had been the right thing, to simply sigh in submission when the enemy was invisible, and seemingly impassable. She couldn’t help but fear that the devil had upped the stakes to earn his due for all the times they’d denied him their fight in the past.
She dialed the phone again, but before the call could go through, the call waiting sounded in her ear. It didn’t have to pulse twice.
• • •
In the ambulance bay, Maggie was out of her car faster than the EMTs could unload their patient. She would have climbed in if they hadn’t physically blocked her at the bumper. The sheet-covered feet were simply too big to belong to anyone else.
“Ford!”
“Ma’am, please step back.”
“No! Ford! Oh my God.”
She chased along beside the gurney. If the medics attempted to dissuade her, she didn’t notice. She fumbled to untangle his hand from the cover before the whole party whisked up the ramp to the emergency suite.
“Ford,” she called. “Don’t you do this. Don’t you go in there without looking at me.”
A wince worked all his smile lines deeper into his pale face, and his eyelids slid open just enough to show a crescent of blue.
“Say something,” Maggie demanded, but she stroked his face.
Ford’s voice rasped through barely parted lips.
She leaned in just as a nurse gently pulled her back. “What?”
Ford swallowed and tried again, whispering, “I promise, Miss Margaret, it wasn’t the chip dip.”
The paramedics rushed him through the double doors, and the nurse guided Maggie away as they rolled Ford into the trauma room, but she didn’t struggle. She played back his words, only slightly worried that they were brain-damaged nonsense, because she was almost positive it hadn’t been a trick of the ugly sodium lights competing with the sunrise. Ford had winked at her.
• • •
The waiting-room chairs blanched under the too bright lights, and Maggie resented the vampires who apparently thought that bloodred upholstery was appropriate in an emergency room lounge. She tried to talk herself into some ease, but for once she couldn’t find a voice in her throat or one in her head to keep her company. She reached for any sense of what might happen, not because she believed in it, but because that’s just what she always did. But her mind felt as unfamiliar to her as this room, and strangely akin to it in theme, barren with only lurid splashes of alarm for decoration.
Through the window in the security doors, she watched doctors, nurses, and the occasional patient glide across her limited view. Then, between a pair of white-coated doctors, she saw Tim walk past to stand at a nurses’-station counter.
The lock on the doors clacked free and the pneumatic hinge whooshed them open. A young man in scrubs hustled out, intent over his clipboard, and Maggie took his distraction as opportunity. She sailed right in as the doors swept up behind her. Another man in one of the curtained alcoves looked up as she passed. An electric tingle brushed her scalp and disappeared into her braid. Maggie had never seen eyes so tired.
She didn’t hear the young man in her head the way she heard her own voice; his glance didn’t ring like Sister Patricia Ignatius’s either, and Maggie didn’t really know what exchange she had received in the passing glance until she stood at Tim’s side.
“Did he tell you what happened to Tessa?” she asked.
She’d caught Tim off guard, as he’d been drifting away, far into a long-range stare. “Huh? Who? What happened to Tessa? What do you mean?”
Maggie opened, then shut, her mouth. “I just thought—I don’t actually know.” A nervous laugh slipped out before she could swallow it back. “Don’t mind me. But, Tim, where is Tessa?”
He sighed. “She ran off into the woods, but I’m sure she’s fine. I’ll send someone out there to find her, okay?”
/> “Did you ask him?” Maggie tried to point discreetely at the man in the treatment bay, but he was already watching them. She dropped her hand quickly and pretended she’d been about to search her pocket. All that was in there was fuzz.
“Do you know Jason?” Tim asked.
“I don’t think so.” Maggie slid her eyes to take another quick look. “But he came in with you, right? He looks at least like he’s been out in the woods all night.”
Tim shook his head at her, an expression of disbelief wiped over the smile on his face. “Well, when Tessa ran off, it was after that very guy.” They both looked back at Jason, who suddenly found the backs of his hands terribly interesting. “See? That’s why Ford follows your nose,” Tim said. “I’ll be right back.”
Maggie watched them, Tim’s back eclipsing all but the subordinate slump of the other man. His hands twitched forceless gestures in his lap, while Tim raked his fingers through his hair. His mouth was set in a straight, grim line and he patted Maggie’s arm as he went by her.
Bayard called to the firemen standing off to the side, waiting for their next orders. “You guys, can you get some climbing gear together and some rope and come with me?”
31
There are a few things that don’t seem to make all that much sense.” Tim Bayard sipped at the ice water Leah had poured for him.
“I can imagine,” she said.
“Our forensics guy isn’t too keen on the age of that corpse. It was pounded all to hell and the plastic sort of messes with things—getting the timeline pinned down and all—but it could very well have been put there after Montgomery moved out of that house.”
“I do wonder about the story behind that one.” She took a drink from her own glass and sighed. All the lies that she’d kept to herself had been so easy, sitting as smooth and cool as river rocks below her thoughts. It had always been that way. But wrestling to get a load of half-truths out was like talking around a mouthful of dice. “It’s so strange.”
“It’s all pretty strange,” he agreed mildly.
“But at least I know what happened to Reid, now.” She nodded almost but not quite in time to agree with herself, so she stopped offbeat. “That’s all I wanted. So, something good came out of this whole mess, anyway.” Leah huffed a little self-scorn through her nose. “I always have to know, don’t I? That’s why I went out there in the first place, even though Detective Watts didn’t want me to. That’ll teach me, huh?”
Leah watched Bayard fold his paper napkin into a precise triangle, and the feeling that he knew very well that she was watching prickled at the back of her neck. But she wasn’t quite sure that she was taking on the lesson he’d hoped to broadcast. She already knew that he was fussy and smartly creased. The thought made her pull back on a smile.
“Hmmmm. Yep,” he said. “All Ford can tell us is that he ran inside because you were screaming a blue streak through the house and then Boyd Montgomery tried to shish-kebab him. Next thing he knows, Montgomery’s trying to fling him out of the back of his own truck, driving around like a maniac.”
“That sounds about right. Lots of screaming. Lots of driving around like maniacs.” She went ahead and smiled at him this time, then down at the tabletop.
It was the first solidly hot day they’d had. The still, gray morning had burned off into something brighter, but just as heavy. She heard a bee in the azaleas on the other side of the porch railing and marveled at how tactically quiet the detective could be in the middle of a conversation. It was his secret weapon.
Hers was that she was all done.
Bayard finally cleared his throat and sprang the follow-up he’d called to arrange. “Why didn’t you guys call for help in the car?”
That one was easy, and true. Well, mostly true. Leah smiled. “I would have tried to make a call. But my phone hadn’t been charged for days. It was a weird week, if you remember. I used up all the rest of the battery trying to get ahold of you earlier in the day.”
“And Mr. Getty’s?”
“He forgot, if you can believe it. I could have killed him.” No dissembling there, and the break from dodge ’em words felt like a vacation. “He was an utter wreck.” She remembered Jason, crushed and contrite, pleading with her over the hood of her car. “But he didn’t leave me. As scared as he was, he probably saved my life three times that night.” She left out that he’d almost taken it once, too.
Bayard didn’t look particularly agitated, but the questions came faster, to see if she could juggle. But she wasn’t even catching.
“How did Montgomery get there?”
“I don’t know.”
“What was he going to do with that body?”
“I don’t know.”
“Why did he bother to stow the lanterns?”
“I don’t know. We didn’t see him do any of that.”
“How in the heck was he planning on getting away after digging up Phil in Mr. Getty’s yard?”
“I don’t know.”
The rhythm that he’d worked up faltered, but very much on purpose, so that Leah leaned into the gap he’d left before she could help herself, another I don’t know poised obviously on the tip of her tongue.
Bayard raised his eyebrows in mock surprise.
A small, impressed smile lit her eyes more than her lips and she waited, a study in patience, for him to continue.
Bayard leaned in, elbows on knees. “Why wouldn’t Boyd Montgomery have written that crime into his staged confession?”
Leah matched his pose and met his eyes. “I don’t know.”
Bayard looked her through for an intense three count. “That’s mostly Mr. Getty’s best effort, too.”
“Well, it was only the back of a telephone bill, right? That’s not a lot of room.”
Bayard laughed and nodded, then finished it off with a small shrug. He settled back against the chair and took another sip of his water.
Leah thought he looked okay for a tenacious investigator sitting on a pile of pointy nothings. It was the one thing she wished she could ask him. Why, with his doubts, wasn’t he furious? How could he stand it?
“Look,” she said. “It was a horrible night. Nothing was sane. And the little I’ve seen of Mr. Getty”—she made a quick sound that could have been a sad laugh or a sneer—“I have no problem believing he hasn’t got a clue.”
It sounded cruel, which was useful, but she winced to hurt him, even if he’d never know. She’d gotten a gift, unsigned, but clearly from the one person who knew she could now handle a night in the woods. A gold-foiled lion bared its teeth on the front of the card. Sealed inside it, she’d found a reservation to a night excursion hosted in the jungle exhibit of a major zoo—Snore n’ Roar Overnights—paid in full. She’d laughed until she cried, but to keep Mr. Anonymous anonymous, she hadn’t been able to say thank you.
“Doesn’t it bother you not to know the truth?” Bayard asked.
It seemed a little too close to telepathy that he’d lobbed her unspoken question back at her, but Bayard had inadvertently released her into another opportunity to speak plainly.
“No. Not really.”
“Really?”
Leah laughed. “I’ve come to realize that no matter what I think I may know, it’s always half a lie, Detective. There’s just too much margin of error in every story. Even if you think you know both sides.” She clicked her tongue from the wry roof of her mouth. “Especially if you know both sides.” She looked out over the porch railing. “I think I’m about done with the truth.”
Whatever else she might say, the interview was essentially over. Bayard said that they were still looking into things, but if he’d had more, he would have pressed harder. When he didn’t, she offered the truce of an authentic smile, and the whole exercise trailed into formalities and then finally into pleasantries.
If he was looking back on his walk out, she made sure he’d find her staring off into the middle distance, certainly somewhere he could not follow.
• • •
The veterinarian’s bill had been remarkable. Ford would not allow anyone to call it outrageous. Thousands of dollars didn’t raise an eyebrow for a child’s treatment, and it wasn’t every day that a child saved a parent’s life. But her recovery was full with the exception of a slightly stiff gait, and everyone who knew her called it a miracle. It seemed Tessa was often hung with superlatives. As far as she knew, she was just a dog.
Tim had taken her from the firefighter who had rappelled down to get her. She’d been stopped, at the expense of a pair of broken legs and other assorted injuries, on a shallow shelf more than halfway down the ravine. He’d carried her out of the clearing, tears streaming without shame, in a circle of his colleagues. He’d been a regular fixture at the Wattses’ home for weeks after that day, bearing more excuses of news and paperwork than he’d needed to bother with. While Tessa and Ford recuperated, life and crime in Stillwater returned to normal and eventually pulled Tim back to his old routine. And his old habits.
A Tuesday in December brought voice mails from Ford on Bayard’s cell phone, his desk phone’s voice mail, and a return number blinking on the caller-ID box that had been scooted out of easy view on Bayard’s kitchen counter. It was an invitation to swing by when he could.
“Got something to show you.” Ford led Tim to a new room built onto the Wattses’ kitchen. A baby gate barred the doorway, and on the floor, Tessa wrangled with a German shepherd, barely out of puppyhood. Another one dozed on her paws on a plush mat in the corner.
Since his retirement, Ford had taken up the cause to get a K9 officer included on Mid-County’s payroll, volunteering as a liaison for the program and boarding some of the recruits during their training.
“You remember Giles Myers over in West?” Ford asked.
“Yep. He’s a prick.”
“Nah, he’s okay. He sent these two rejects back over to me. They both failed the selection. She gets carsick.” Ford pointed at the dog in the corner and she flicked her eyes at them. “And this one? I swear to Goshen, I think he failed the test on purpose. ’Bout the smartest doggone thing I’ve ever seen, but he doesn’t want to work. He just wants to play.”
