by J. A. Jance
“How’s the weather up there?” Bishop Gillespie asked when Sister Anselm stepped outside the board room to answer.
“It’s snowing here more than it was when I drove up from Jerome this morning,” she said, “but it’s not that bad. Why?”
“Because my office has just been notified that a UDA was transported to the ICU at Physicians Medical in Tucson yesterday evening. She’s in bad shape, and there’s no one with her. How soon would you be able to go?”
In the old days, it might have taken time to arrange for transportation, but that was before Sister Anselm was able to drive herself. Although past retirement age, with encouragement and lessons from her friend Ali Reynolds, and with permission from Bishop Gillespie, Sister Anselm had gotten a driver’s license for the first time. After years of being driven to and fro, she now tooled around the state in her own all-wheel-drive red-and-white four-door Mini Cooper. Donated to the diocese by a generous parishioner, her Mini Countryman sported a whimsical bumper sticker that said, ACTUAL SIZE.
Sister Anselm glanced at her watch. Wherever she went, there was always a fully packed suitcase tucked into the Mini’s “boot” for just this kind of contingency, so there would be no need for her to go home before leaving for Tucson. The trip would take the better part of four and a half hours, depending on traffic and road conditions.
“If I leave right now, I could probably be at PMC by five.”
“Do you have chains?” Bishop Gillespie asked.
“And all-wheel drive,” Sister Anselm answered. “And I know how to use both.” She and Bishop Gillespie had become good friends, but she tended to get her back up when he fussed about her too much.
“All right, then,” Bishop Gillespie said. “Travel safely. I took the liberty of calling All Saints to let them know to expect you.”
The hospital now known as Physicians Medical Center had started out in the early twentieth century as a TB sanitarium under the auspices of the Sisters of Providence. For almost a hundred years, the nuns of All Saints Convent had been in charge. In recent years, the facility had been purchased by a group of physicians and transformed into a full-scale hospital.
Although PMC was no longer an officially designated Catholic hospital, many of the All Saints nuns, most of them trained nurses, continued to work there. And when Sister Anselm’s work took her to hospitals in and around Tucson, she preferred the structure and discipline of staying with her fellow nuns to staying at a hotel.
But having the bishop call to let them know she was coming counted as more unwarranted fussing. “I’ll call there again myself,” Sister Anselm said. “That way, if they’ve changed the gate or door codes, I won’t need to awaken someone if I arrive after lights out.”
Once off the phone with Bishop Gillespie, Sister Anselm sent an e-mail to Ali, offering her regrets about missing dinner. Her next call was to the convent in Jerome to let them know that she wouldn’t be coming home until further notice. The call after that was to Sister Genevieve, the current reverend mother at All Saints. The call went straight through to the mother superior’s cell phone.
“Good to hear from you,” Sister Genevieve said. “Bishop Gillespie said you might be coming.”
“Am I cleared for a late-night check-in if needed?” Sister Anselm asked.
Sister Genevieve’s answering laugh was hearty and welcoming. “Absolutely,” she said. “Your favorite guest room is ready and waiting.”
“If you want to give me the entry codes, I can let myself in. That way no one will have to wait up for me.”
“We haven’t changed the entry codes,” Sister Genevieve said. “But don’t worry about showing up late. You know me, I’m a night owl. I hardly ever go to sleep before midnight. Whenever you get here, I’ll most likely be on hand, ready and waiting to greet you and activate the gate.”
“All right, then,” Sister Anselm said. “I’m on my way.”
Having anticipated cassoulet for dinner, Sister Anselm had skipped lunch in Flagstaff. By the time she hit Cordes Junction, she was out of the worst of the weather, but she and her “ride” were running on empty. Eating a fast-food burger was a very poor substitute for one of Leland Brooks’s outstanding dinners, but fuel was fuel.
While in line at McDonald’s, she reached into the pocket of her jacket to locate her change purse, encountering the recently acquired Taser C2 that she kept there. She suspected that the other customers in the restaurant would have been surprised to know that the nice older lady, the one wearing gold-framed glasses and a conservative pin-striped pantsuit, was not only a nun but also armed and dangerous.
When she’d had a driver to get from place to place, Sister Anselm had gone on her rounds armed with nothing but her rosary beads and prayers. Things had changed. For one thing, several years earlier she had been kidnapped from a hospital setting in Phoenix. After that unsettling event, Ali had talked with her about making sure she could defend herself. She had resisted strongly.
St. Bernadette’s Convent in Jerome was a home for troubled nuns. Sister Anselm had spent the last three months dealing with an elderly nun-older than Sister Anselm anyway-who was recovering from hip replacement surgery as well as suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder. Sister Louise had been walking home from a pharmacy to her convent in Dallas when she was attacked by a carload of young thugs. They had thrown her to the ground and wrenched her purse and shopping bag out of her hands. No doubt hoping to find money and/or powerful painkillers, the thieves had gotten away with a little over six dollars in change, Sister Louise’s three-month prescription for Boniva, and a box of Depends. Passersby had found her a few minutes later and summoned an ambulance. She had been taken to Parkland Memorial Hospital, where an orthopedic surgeon successfully replaced her damaged hip. What the Parkland physicians had not been able to fix was her sense of well-being.
That was Sister Anselm’s job, and she had been working on it. But dealing with Sister Louise’s troubles had brought home to Sister Anselm-more so than even her own kidnapping-that there were evil people in the world who were more than happy to target someone they thought to be helpless.
So now, when Sister Anselm drove from one end of the state to another, going about her business normally, there was one major difference. She had a weapon discreetly stowed in the pocket of her blazer. Her nonlethal protection was a gift from Ali, who’d warned that it should be carried on one’s person and not in a handbag. In Sister Louise’s mugging case, her purse had been taken out of play almost immediately.
Just because Sister Anselm was out in the world doing God’s work, there was no reason to be a victim, not if she could help it. If anyone tried to take her out, they’d be in for a big surprise.
12
12:00 P.M., Saturday, April 10
Patagonia, Arizona
That Saturday morning, it took Phil Tewksbury longer than usual to run his mail delivery route. Everyone he met along the way wanted to talk about the Santa Cruz deputy who had been shot while on duty the night before. Phil knew the guy’s name, Jose Reyes, and where he lived, because he was on Phil’s delivery route, but that was all he knew. Details about the shooting itself were pretty scarce, although when they were available, Phil figured that the Patagonia post office would be information central.
Once his mail truck was back in its spot inside the fenced lot behind the post office, Phil hurried home and settled in to spend the rest of the weekend painting the weathered outside trim on his house and garage.
Considering the problems inside the house, including several thorny issues he was not yet ready to tackle, the paint and the new double-paned windows were like putting lipstick on a pig, but for the first time in years, he was working on the house with a sense of purpose rather than a sense of despair. To his amazement, he found himself whistling while he worked. That hadn’t happened in a very long time.
Not that anything had happened. It hadn’t. Not yet. But there was the possibility that something would happen. He had a hope th
at something might happen, and that made all the difference.
Finished with the trim on the dining room window, he moved on to the ones in the living room. That was when the whistling stopped. For years, the broken seal in the old windows had left a film of fog between the living room and the outside world. Through the blur, no one could see in or out. Now it was all there and clearly visible-Christine, or at least the shabby wreckage of Christine and the dilapidated fifteen-year-old Christmas tree with its burden of dusty ornaments and strings of mostly nonworking lights.
He had told Christine years ago that once the last of the lights burned out, the tree was gone. No matter what she said, he was taking it down then. Recently, he had come to suspect that she must have a secret stash of lights hidden somewhere and was using the spares to replace one or two dead bulbs at a time. It reminded him of that lady in one of the old Greek legends he had read back in high school. Her husband had gone away on a trip and was supposedly lost at sea. Someone wanted to marry her, and she said yes, but she told her would-be suitor that she had to finish weaving a rug first. So every day she wove like crazy, and every night, when no one was looking, she tore up that day’s work.
If that was what was happening, Christine was a lot cagier about it than Phil had given her credit for being. On the other hand, maybe some of those old lights, made back in the day when Christmas lights came from the U.S. instead of China, were just that much better than the ones you could buy today. Better or worse, depending on your point of view.
Christine sat there now, in her chair next to the tree, watching him, but not with any kind of curiosity or connection or interest. He might have been a living color image performing on a television screen; not that she watched TV, either. She mostly stared at the tree, day after day, year after year.
Phil stopped painting and studied her. Trying to remember the old Christine, which wasn’t anything like the old Christine who had been on television a year or two ago. His wife’s hair had been reddish brown back then. She had worn it short and curly. He hadn’t realized until much later that the curl came from the beauty shop and probably most of the color, too. Now it hung past her waist in long gray strands that were lank and greasy.
That was something Phil knew he’d have to deal with tonight-bath night. Once a week, on Saturdays, they waged the bath night war, and it was hell. Once a week, whether Christine wanted to or not, he insisted that she get up out of her chair and strip off that week’s shapeless muumuu and grubby undergarments. After what was often a physical struggle, he’d maneuver her into the shower and turn on the water. He remembered seeing clips on America’s Funniest Home Videos when people tried to bathe their cats. It usually ended badly, with the cats yowling and scratching, and this was the same thing.
Eventually, he would wear her down. She’d give up. She’d go ahead and soap her body and shampoo her hair, but it never happened without a fight. It made him glad that his grandfather had built his little house in the middle of five acres. Otherwise the neighbors, hearing the racket they made each week, might have assumed he was trying to kill her.
Which he wasn’t. All on his own, Phil was doing what he could to care for Christine, or at least what was left of Christine, and doing it to the very best of his ability. He owed it to her. Because what had happened to her was his fault-all his fault.
Things were so different now, it was hard to remember how happy they’d been once. He and Christine had moved back home to Patagonia after Phil finished putting in his twenty years in the military. They had moved into the house his grandfather had built and which Phil had inherited when his grandmother died. He’d gotten the job working in the post office, and life was good.
By then it had seemed clear that he and Christine weren’t going to have any kids, ever. They’d tried. It hadn’t worked. End of story. At least that’s what they thought. But then, much to their astonishment and right after Christine turned forty, she also turned up pregnant.
Christine was ecstatic when Cassidy was born. So was Phil. Life was wonderful for a time, right up to Christmas Eve fifteen years ago, the night everything changed. Phil and Cassidy had been on their way home from a last-minute Christmas-shopping trip to Tucson. Between Patagonia and Sonoita, a drunk driver came across the double line into their lane. Somehow Phil managed to avoid being hit, but he lost control of the car. It rolled. Cassidy died.
The original accident wasn’t Phil’s fault, but Cassidy’s death was. Her mother always made sure Cass was properly belted in. Insisted on it. That day when they started home, Cassidy, who was seven, said she was tired. She wanted to lie down in the backseat to sleep, and Phil let her. When the car rolled, Cassidy was ejected, and the car landed on top of her. She died instantly. Sometimes Phil wished he had died then, too.
When he gave Christine the news, she didn’t say a word. She didn’t have to. Instead, she leveled an accusatory look that shriveled his heart. He had known right then that she would never forgive him, and she had not.
Cassidy’s funeral was two days after Christmas. When they came home from the funeral, the decorated Christmas tree and all the wrapped presents were there in the living room, taunting them and showing them how much they had lost. Phil’s first instinct had been to take it down and get rid of it, but Christine had stopped him. She told him that if he touched even so much as one decoration on the tree, she’d kill him, and he had believed her. The tree stayed up. Later, when they were still speaking occasionally, he’d managed to extract the agreement that the tree would stay up until the last light burned out. Fifteen years later, it was still there, and a few of the bedraggled lights continued to burn.
But that Christmas and Cassidy’s death had been the beginning of Christine’s long retreat into herself. She stopped going out. For anything. She wouldn’t go to the grocery store or to the gas station or to the doctor or dentist. Friends tried stopping by to see her or calling on the phone. She wouldn’t open the door. She wouldn’t answer the phone. She stayed in the house day after day, year after year. If it hadn’t been for Phil’s job delivering mail, he suspected he would have gone nuts, too.
Phil and Christine lived in the same house, but they slept in different bedrooms and existed on different timetables. When Phil left for work, Christine was usually asleep. Sometimes she prowled the house late at night, when he heard her pacing back and forth in her room. During the day, as far as he could tell, she spent most of her time sitting in the living room, watching the tree. He didn’t know what she thought about all that time. She didn’t seem to watch TV, had zero interest in current events. As far as he knew, she didn’t read books.
With the house quiet and, except for the tree, mostly dark, he worried early on that someone might mistakenly think the house was empty and break in with her sitting right there in her chair. When he mentioned his concern to Christine, she gave him one of her scathing looks. Then she stood up, walked over to the Christmas tree, and picked up one of Cassidy’s wrapped presents.
“I’ll use this,” she said, tearing the wrapping paper off the softball bat, a present Cassidy had never opened.
For months after that, Christine sat with the bat either in her lap or next to her chair. One day, though, for reasons Christine never explained, she stuck the bat in the trash. Rather than ask her about it, Phil rescued the bat, took it out to the garage, and left it there. By then he was at the point of wishing someone would break into the house. Maybe whoever it was would fix Phil’s life for him. Give him back his freedom. After all, hadn’t he earned it?
That, of course, was a pipe dream. Obviously, since he had brought this tragedy down on them both, Phil had no choice but to stand by his wife. He was resigned to that. He would take care of her until the day she died or until he did, but that was what made this new bit of brilliance in his life so miraculous. And who could blame him? After years of living with Christine’s stony silence, no one would have thought twice about him having an outside interest-a side dish, as it were-a discreet side
dish.
On the one hand, it was amazing after all this time to have someone who was actually interested in him, someone who laughed at his lame jokes and seemed to enjoy his company for those few minutes a day when it was possible for them to be together-on the side of the road, parked next to a bank of mailboxes, with cars going past, but together. She was often waiting for him when he stopped to deliver the mail. Sometimes she brought him treats-a plate of freshly baked cookies; a cup of coffee; a ham sandwich. No matter what she brought him, Phil was always pleasantly surprised and grateful. Their brief conversations were carried on in a kind of verbal shorthand that can happen only through shared experience, and they were a balm to Phil Tewksbury’s wounded soul.
That was the most amazing part of all. In Ollie, Phil had found a soul mate, someone who understood exactly what he was going through. He didn’t have to explain to her that he could never leave Christine to fend for herself, because she was dealing with the same situation. Not entirely the same, but close enough.
Having a husband wandering off into the world of early-onset Alzheimer’s was slightly different from Christine’s self-imposed and willful silence, but in other respects, Ollie’s situation was very similar to Phil’s-the isolation, the hopelessness, and the loneliness of being married to someone who was no longer there. Like Phil, Ollie wouldn’t leave her husband, but she refused to betray him. In thought, maybe, but not in deed. What Phil and Ollie had together was a friendship-a circumspect friendship, one without phoning or texting, which would have felt more like cheating. They exchanged little notes from time to time, and Phil saved them all, reading them over and over sometimes in the privacy of his truck.
Rereading them gave Phil comfort. He could see that their connection had grown out of shared experience and came with the promise that someday, far in the future, when they were both free, there might be so much more.
