She Wore Mourning

by P. D. Workman

  Kenzie put her hand under Zachary’s arm, trying to coax him to his feet. “I don’t think we’re going to be able to get him anywhere. Maybe I should get an ambulance.”

  “If you just wait, it will pass. An ambulance and admitting him to the hospital will just rack up the bills.”

  “He’s turning blue.”

  “It will pass,” Bridget repeated. “It’s self-limiting. He’ll either pass out or it will start abating on its own.”

  It helped Zachary to hear Bridget’s calm voice repeating what the doctors had always said. She’d seen him have panic attacks before. She didn’t see anything to be concerned about.

  “What if it’s not a panic attack?” Kenzie asked. “What if it’s a heart attack? Or a stroke?”

  “It’s not.”

  They both watched Zachary. Gradually, his gasping started to slow, and the world began to come back into focus. Kenzie attended to him, rubbing his shoulder comfortingly and repeating soothing words and phrases.

  “Better?” Kenzie asked. “Are you okay?”

  Zachary cleared his throat. His chest was still hurting, and his throat felt raw from breathing so hard. He still felt dizzy and a little nauseated. “Yeah. I’m okay.”

  “You should see a doctor,” Bridget snapped. “You know you have a problem, so why don’t you do something about it?”

  “They can’t always control it.”

  “You haven’t even tried.”

  Zachary started to sit up, taking his time. He stopped and put his head in his hands, closing his eyes.

  “I have tried.”

  “Can you get up?” Kenzie asked.

  Zachary let her help him to his feet. He leaned on her, trying not to put too much of his weight on her.

  “I think it’s time for you to go,” Kenzie told Bridget.

  “I’ll help you get him up to his apartment.”

  “I don’t think so! You’ve done enough damage.”

  Bridget stood there for a moment, her mouth partway open, looking for something to say. Finally, she raised her hands in a melodramatic shrug. “Fine. He’s all yours. I don’t want him in my life.”

  “Good. Then go.”

  Bridget turned halfway around. “He has a few Xanax in his medicine cabinet. He’ll probably want one of them. Then he’ll sleep.”

  “We’ll sort it out.”

  “Fine.” Bridget looked at Zachary. “No more trackers on my car. No following or surveilling me. Not personally, not with electronics, and not by hiring someone else. Got it? Just stay away from me.”

  “Take your own advice,” Kenzie snapped.

  “If I were you, I’d have your car checked for trackers too,” Bridget told her.

  Kenzie looked at Zachary. He tried not to give anything away with his expression. He shifted, easing his weight off of her, trying to get his legs working.

  “Okay,” Kenzie said. “Let’s get you upstairs.”

  They moved together, awkward and slow. Zachary’s heart was still beating too fast, and he was reeling with Bridget’s words. It was his fault that she got cancer because he was too needy, too much of a strain on the relationship. No wonder she hated him.

  At the door, he couldn’t get his key out and fitted into the lock properly, so Kenzie took it from him, unlocked the door, and ushered him in.

  “Do you want a pill?”

  Zachary looked around the apartment, not sure what to do. Entertain her? Sit down in front of the TV? Head to bed? What was Kenzie expecting? What was the protocol when a date ended with the appearance of a raging ex-wife and emotional collapse?

  “Zachary? Do you want me to get you a pill?”

  Zachary settled on the couch in the living room. There he could sleep, watch TV, or talk with Kenzie. He dug his flip phone and his wallet out of his pockets and put them on the side table.

  “No… I don’t think I can.”

  “You can’t?” Kenzie frowned and shook her head.

  “Because I had a couple of drinks. The doctor said I couldn’t mix them.”

  She went into his bathroom and opened the medicine cabinet. It was nearly bare after Bridget’s Christmas Day visit. She picked up the Xanax prescription, with a few white pills kicking around the bottom. She looked at the bright orange warning stickers affixed to it.

  “Yeah, you’re right,” she agreed. “Is there something else? Anything else that would help?” She looked at a couple of other bottles. Zachary shifted uncomfortably in his seat. He didn’t like her snooping through his prescriptions.

  “No. I’ll be fine,” he told her. “Don’t worry about it.”

  After pawing through the cabinet for another minute, she closed it and returned to the living room, sitting down on the couch next to him.

  “That was scary,” she said. “I thought it was a heart attack. I can’t believe Bridget could stay so calm about it.”

  “She’s seen a few anxiety attacks… maybe not that bad, but…”

  “It must be scary for you, too.”

  “Yeah. Sort of.”

  She took his hand and sat with him for a few minutes in silence. “Do you think Bridget had something to do with the car brakes?”

  “No,” Zachary answered immediately. “She couldn’t ever do something like that. Besides, I checked the tracker. She wasn’t anywhere near the inn. She had no way of knowing that’s where I was.”

  “What if someone had a tracker on your car? I don’t see how anyone could have known you were there, otherwise. Did you tell anyone?”

  Zachary’s brain was still in a soup of stress neurotransmitters; he couldn’t sort through the question calmly and logically, and wouldn’t be able to until he had crashed and recovered. “I don’t know.”

  “You wouldn’t have told any of your clients. Any of those cases that you’ve been working on. Would you?”

  “No… I don’t think so. I don’t remember.”

  “Someone would have had to have recognized it. Or followed you. Or tracked you.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Zachary.”

  His brain was going fuzzy.

  “Zachary.”

  “Yeah?”

  “I’ll leave you to go to sleep, should I?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Okay.” She got up off the couch and stooped to kiss him on the forehead like a mother might kiss her child. “I’ll talk to you tomorrow.”

  Chapter Nineteen

  His dreams were always disrupted after a panic attack. Like his brain couldn’t stop repeating the attack over and over. That was one of the reasons he would normally have taken a Xanax even though the attack had already subsided. He wanted to forget it and sleep, to stop the endless loop of crazy images in his head.

  Bridget was a prominent feature in his dreams. So were the images from his distant past. His parents, the fire, some of the subsequent homes that he preferred to forget when he was lucid. Because Kenzie had been present, she was in his dreams too, iterating and reiterating all night.

  “He said he’d drop it,” Kenzie said, talking on an old-style desk phone with a rotary dial and tightly twisting handset cord. “You don’t need to do anything else. He said he’s done now.”

  Zachary couldn’t tell who was on the other end of the call. Perhaps his mother, if the twang in the voice was any clue. He couldn’t make out the words, just the angry, insistent tone, like Bridget’s voice.

  “It’s over,” Kenzie repeated. “I told you that. Just leave him alone now.”

  Who was she talking to? And why? Who was she reporting back to while he slept?

  “He’s not going to figure it out. I’ve told you everything. He doesn’t suspect a thing.”

  Zachary puzzled over her words, trying to unwind the clues. In all the time he’d been investigating the Bond case, he’d never suspected Kenzie of being complicit. She didn’t have any connection with Isabella. He’d discussed the case with her openly. All the evidence and his ideas. She’d told him the blood levels were al
l normal, making no mention of the cough medicine until pressed for an explanation. She had repeatedly suggested he drop the case and not make any waves.

  What did she know that he didn’t suspect?

  “I’ll give him something to make him sleep,” Kenzie said on the phone. “He won’t know anything.”

  Zachary tried to raise his voice to tell her again that he couldn’t take anything. Not after being out drinking. Like in many dreams, especially those anxiety-triggered ones, he had no voice. He was as helpless as a child. Completely at her mercy.

  The voice on the other end of the phone continued to squawk. Zachary saw his mother in his mind’s eye. It had been so long since he’d seen her that it was only a vague, shadowy memory. He saw long, dark hair like Isabella’s. But she was not The Happy Artist. Had he ever seen her smile? Their home had not been a happy one. He knew from the time he was small that they were unwanted. All the children. They were vermin, like rats, always in the way, eating the meager supplies of food. They kept her from true happiness and fulfillment.

  He tried to compose a speech to his mother in his addled head. To explain to her that he didn’t mean to be a drain on her. He was trying to be helpful. Trying to make her love him. Parents were supposed to love their children. That was what everyone said. A mother’s love. Like it was the most precious thing in the world.

  “He’ll sleep right through it,” Kenzie promised. “He won’t feel a thing.”

  Zachary started to choke as the smell of acrid smoke curled into his nostrils. He coughed. After that Christmas Eve so many years ago, he was terrified of fire. Just the faintest wisp of smoke would bring it all back. The room was growing warm and then hot around him. He could hear the screams of his family. The blaring sirens and horns, and the shouts of the firefighters. His throat constricted as he tried to breathe, the combination of smoke and heated air scorching his throat.

  He tried to scream, but he couldn’t.

  He couldn’t wake up from the dream.

  A bright light pierced the thick smoke. Zachary remembered that light from before. The relief of the firefighters finding their way through all the smoke and fire to find him. The relief of rescue from the burning hell he was in.

  “Over here!”

  Another figure joined the first, spraying down the area around Zachary. The first hefted him up, lifting him out of his seat and carrying him through the thick, burning clouds of smoke. Down a couple of flights of stairs. Out into clear air that was so cold that it caught in his chest and throat making him cough again. There were red, strobing lights everywhere, dark figures hurrying back and forth, shouted orders and discussions and radio chatter.

  The fireman put him down on a gurney.

  “This one was in the affected apartment. Get a mask on him right away. Keep checking his airway.”

  An oxygen mask was pressed over Zachary’s face before he could say anything. He tried to talk through it but couldn’t get out anything coherent.

  “Just relax, sir. Lay back, and we’ll take care of you.”

  A blanket was thrown over him. His skin was already cold from the night air.

  “Just breathe the oxygen and don’t try to talk right now. We’ll talk in a little while.”

  Zachary lay there for a long time, breathing the oxygen and gradually coming to understand that it wasn’t a dream. There really had been a fire, not just a memory from the past. He was at his apartment. Outside, in the cold, just like when he was ten. It wasn’t Christmas Day this time, but a few weeks later.

  “How are you doing there, sir?” A paramedic bent over him, ruffling his hair like he was a little boy. Like they had ruffled his hair all those years ago. “You had a close call. How’s your throat?”

  Zachary pulled the oxygen mask away from his face experimentally. He was again assaulted by the frigid outside air but managed to avoid coughing.

  “It’s sore,” he admitted, voice strained.

  “You might have some inflammation from the smoke and fire. How about the rest of your body? Are you burned anywhere?”

  Zachary tried to tune in to his body. He’d been so caught up in his nightmare that he had no idea what else his body was feeling. He had been burned in the first fire, but he didn’t know if he’d been burned again. The paramedic was checking him over, not waiting for a response, examining his arms and legs, pulling up his shirt, looking for any burns.

  “You’re red like you got a sunburn,” the man said. “But I don’t see anything serious. They’ll check you out at the hospital. Unless there’s something you’re aware of…?”

  Zachary shook his head. “No. What happened?”

  “You’ll have to talk to the firefighters. I don’t know. A few people got smoke inhalation, but you’re the only one who was in the apartment that caught fire first.”

  He was glad that no one else had been hurt, but he was confused by the fire. It had started in his apartment? He felt like his dreams had engendered it. That somehow, by dreaming about fire, he had brought it into being. He knew it didn’t make any sense, but he didn’t understand what had happened.

  Eventually, a firefighter came over to talk to him, taking off a blackened helmet and leaning over Zachary’s gurney to talk to him.

  “Are you able to talk, sir?”

  “Yes.” Zachary’s voice was rough, and his throat hurt, but he wanted to know what had happened. “What happened?”

  “You’re the one who was in 3C?”

  “Yes. I’m 3C.”

  “Looks like maybe you had been burning some candles earlier this evening and fell asleep. One of the candles burned down, and some papers caught on fire.”

  Zachary shook his head. “I wasn’t burning anything.”

  “Some candles. Christmas candles.”

  “No.”

  The man raised an eyebrow at Zachary, like he was a stubborn child and just needed to admit what he had done. “We understand that it was unintentional. Sometimes things happen. Fires are tricky things. People don’t realize how dangerous candles can be. You can never go to sleep while they’re burning.”

  Zachary tried to sit up. “I wasn’t burning candles. I would never do that.”

  “It’s nothing to be embarrassed about. People start fires cooking Christmas dinner, smoking in bed, throwing a scarf over a lamp for a romantic atmosphere. Burning candles is just one of those things. It happens.”

  “I was in a fire as a child,” Zachary said, catching the fireman by the front of his uniform and holding on to him tightly, afraid he was going to leave before Zachary could explain. “I can’t light a candle. They’re terrifying.”

  The firefighter stared at him, his head wrinkling in puzzlement.

  “You’re 3C.”

  “Yes.”

  “That’s where the fire started. It started with candles.”

  “That’s impossible. I don’t have candles. If I did, they would just be for decoration. I would never light them.”

  “Well, there were, and somebody did. There were apparently no batteries in the smoke detectors.”

  Zachary’s jaw dropped. “There were! I replace them every two months.” He could see that the fireman didn’t believe him. “I was in a fire,” he repeated desperately. “I am very careful. I make sure! I replace the batteries every two months and test the smoke detectors every Sunday.”

  “Let me talk to my chief. You just stay here.” The man sought out a paramedic close by. “You won’t take him to the hospital yet, will you? We need to talk to him for a few more minutes.”

  “Okay.”

  “Keep an eye on him. Don’t let him go anywhere or talk to anyone else.”

  Zachary was again left alone, sitting on the gurney with his head whirling, trying to understand what had happened. How could a fire start in his apartment? With candles he’d never owned? And no batteries in the smoke detectors?

  Another fireman came over to him, this one not drenched in smoke like the first. There was a policeman with him
.

  “Can I get your name, sir?”

  “Zachary Goldman.”

  The policeman looked startled but didn’t say anything, letting the fire chief proceed with his questions.

  “And do you want to tell me what happened tonight? What did you do today, before going to bed?”

  Zachary tried to sit up straighter. He wanted to look calm and self-possessed. He needed them to believe him and what he had to say.

  “I went out for drinks with a friend in the evening.”

  “You’ve been drinking?”

  “I had a few drinks. Yes.”

  “And you came back here. Alone?”

  “She drove me home and walked me up to my apartment. She didn’t stay.”

  “How long was she here? I’m going to need her name.”

  Zachary filled in the details the best he could.

  “And you didn’t light candles for a romantic atmosphere with your girlfriend?”

  “No. I was telling the other fireman. I was in a fire when I was a boy. I don’t have any candles. I can’t stand having them around, and I’d never light one.”

  “This fire was obviously started with candles. There is plenty of evidence of them in the apartment.”

  “But I didn’t have any candles. He said there were no batteries in the smoke detectors. I always have fresh batteries in my smoke detectors, and I test them every week.”

  “How much did you have to drink tonight?”

  “Two, three drinks. Over a couple of hours. I wasn’t drunk.”

  “Did you take anything before bed?”

  “No. I couldn’t. Because I’d been drinking.”

  The police chief looked at Zachary and looked at the policeman. “Does that mean that you normally would have taken something?”

  “Sometimes I do… a sleeping pill to help me get to sleep. Or a Xanax… because I’d had a panic attack. I didn’t take either one because I’d had alcohol and I knew you’re not supposed to mix them.”

  “But even so, you didn’t wake up when your apartment started to fill with smoke.”