by Melissa Tagg
But whatever had caused Lenora’s hospitalization, it must be serious. If she’d been missing for five weeks when Marshall had wound up on the scene then this would mark week eight. Two months in the hospital—two months in which she hadn’t reached out to Mara.
He felt compelled to warn Mara somehow, to try to soften the blow before it came. He knew what it was like to walk into a patient’s room and feel his heart splinter at the sight awaiting him. He knew what it was like to try to paste on a smile of strength and encouragement when all he wanted to do was escape into the hallway—or better yet a hollow stairwell—and let his trapped sorrow have its way.
Even now he could feel it. Suffocating and blistering. And, of course, a headache.
He pitched to his feet, feeling the ache of muscles all through his body that had been stuffed in a car for too long.
“Marshall?”
Why did Mara’s voice sound so distant? He blinked. Hard. Rubbed his scratchy cheeks then his eyes. Turned. “Yeah?”
“Are you okay?”
Just thirty minutes ago he’d have been able to answer that question so easily. Never mind the lack of sleep, the long hours of work at the Everwood in recent days, the formerly unsolved mystery of Lenora’s whereabouts. Before they’d walked into the hospital, he’d have said that yes, he was okay.
More than okay. He’d have said that he’d loved working at Mara’s side. So much so that every day this past week, he’d entertained the thought of staying. Had even considered asking Sam about a job with the local department. I want to stay. What was keeping him from it?
Maybe this. The grief that always managed to find its way back in. Today it was a hospital waiting room. On another day, it might be a memory. An anniversary. Laney’s birthday.
“Marshall, please sit down. You look ragged. Are you getting another migraine?” Mara had come to stand in front of him, and she was the one with her hands on his cheeks now. “Maybe you should go out to the truck and try to sleep for a little bit. All we’re doing is waiting anyway.”
“I’m fine.” The lie slipped off his tongue too easily. Like all those times he’d lied to Captain Wagner and Alex, assuring them he was up to whatever job the day demanded. Like all the times he’d lied to Beth and his parents during the funeral, after the funeral, and later when the divorce became a reality.
And perhaps like he’d been lying to himself in these past weeks. Maybe this hospital waiting room with its stark white walls and fake plants and muted TV was the harsh reminder he’d needed to pop the bubble he’d been living in.
Before he yanked Mara too deeply into the mess that he was.
But the compassion in her eyes was so tempting.
“Seriously, Marsh, why don’t you rest for awhile? You could even check into one of the hotels around the hospital, get some actual sleep. I’ll be okay here on my own.”
The thought of that vehicle with the pale blue headlights flashed. He shook his head—overactive cop brain again.
Mara took the motion as a refusal to rest. “Well, at least sit down and drink some coffee. Eat some of the M&Ms.” She led him to the chairs they’d vacated and held out the family-sized M&M bag he’d grabbed at a gas station hours ago. “Actually, what we really should do is find a cafeteria and get some real food. Who knows how long they’ll leave us sitting here before anybody tells us anything? I still don’t think it’s too much to ask that someone at least give us a general idea of Lenora’s condition.”
“It’s certainly not.” The voice came from behind them.
Both Marshall and Mara shot to their feet.
The man was tall and slender, slightly bent at the shoulders, leaning on a cane. Could this be—
“I’m Davis Saddler,” he said. “Come with me.”
Davis Saddler had to be approaching ninety years old. Yet it was Mara whose limbs wobbled and hands trembled as she followed him down a hospital corridor that smelled of bleach. The recently mopped floor shined beneath their feet.
“I’m sorry the hospital personnel wouldn’t give you any information when you first arrived.” There was a slight croak to his voice. “The truth is, even if the hospital didn’t have confidentiality procedures, I have my own reasons for being concerned with privacy.”
“Is she okay? Is she conscious? What happened?” And what had he meant by his own privacy concerns?
The web of lines on his face deepened with what might have been a grin if not for the guarded mask that tempered it. “I’ll answer as many of your questions as possible, Miss Bristol. But surely you want to see your friend first.”
“How do you know her name?” Marshall barked the question.
“Same way I know yours, Mr. Hawkins.” The man stopped outside a room. “Research.” He grasped the door handle. “I need to warn you—she hasn’t woken up. Not fully. But we’ve had some hopeful signs.”
Marshall gripped Mara’s hand. Without his anchoring, her impatience might have sent her careening through the door. Instead, she walked slowly into the room, only the sound of a machine’s beeping and the tap of Davis Saddler’s cane filling the hushed silence. The subtle scent of flowers floated on the air—carnations from a vase near Lenora’s bed.
Lenora. Her thin frame was covered by a pale blue blanket, her silver hair splayed on the pillow behind her. If not for the IV stand, the tangle of wires and patches taped to her hand, she might look as if she were only sleeping.
The tapping of the cane stilled behind her. “It was a massive stroke.” Davis Saddler spoke in low tones. “She woke up for just a few minutes in the ambulance before suffering a series of smaller strokes.”
Mara heard shuffling and shifting, probably the man taking a seat behind her. But she couldn’t make herself turn from Lenora’s face—the peaceful curve of her lips, the utter stillness. Her skin didn’t appear as ashen as Mara might have expected.
“At first the medical team kept her in a coma on purpose. Dr. Nichols will be able to explain it all to you. But for the past weeks, they’ve weaned her off every stabilizing medication and have tried to bring her out of the coma.” The man paused. “Things are progressing. She’s twitched her thumb, moved her toes. Yesterday I could swear I saw her eyelids flutter.”
Marshall squeezed her hand. “What’s her prognosis?” she asked softly.
“Unfortunately, that’s uncertain at this point. Her organs are functioning on their own. She’s not on life support. But it will be hard to know how the strokes affected her cognitive abilities or mental faculties until she wakes up.”
Mara turned in time to see him sink back against his chair. “Which I pray she does,” he finished.
He looked so . . . tired. As if whatever Lenora faced had been a battle for him too. And he looked like he cared . . . intensely.
But there was so much that didn’t make sense. If he knew who Mara was, why hadn’t he contacted her? She let go of Marshall’s hand and placed herself in front of Davis Saddler. “I need an explanation.”
“I know. Sit down.”
She sat and Marshall’s hand landed on her shoulder. He stood behind her as she fastened Davis with her stare.
With a sigh, he folded his hands in his lap. “Can I assume since you managed to find Eleanor, you’ve put together who I am?”
“Eleanor?” Mara and Marshall asked together.
“Forgive me. You know her as Lenora. I suppose I’ve let myself think of her as Eleanor because there have been so many times over the past decades when I wished to hear my real name spoken again . . .” A strand of wistfulness entered his gaze. “But then I don’t know that Eleanor’s her real name any more than Lenora is.”
“Mr. Saddler,” Marshall cut in, an edgy bite to his voice. “We drove six and a half hours overnight.”
“Right.” Davis straightened, cleared his throat. “I wasn’t expecting Eleanor’s—Lenora’s—visit. I don’t know how she identified me or located me or why she didn’t call before showing up at my house. I never got to ask
her. She had her first stroke on her way to my front door. I called 9-1-1 immediately and told the dispatcher I didn’t know who she was, which was true enough at first. But when I got a good look at her face . . . she looks so much like Jeane.”
He unclasped his hands, gripping armrests on either side of his chair. “Of course, I looked at her driver’s license. Saw that her name was Lenora. But when she woke up in the ambulance, a paramedic asked her if she knew her name. Eleanor, she said. Over and over. And if I hadn’t been sure before, I was then. The one time I met my niece, her parents called her Eleanor.”
Mara glanced at the bed again, at Lenora’s tranquil face. What secrets did you harbor, Lenora?
Or maybe she hadn’t harbored them at all. Had she been hungry for answers about her own identity?
But why didn’t you tell me? I could’ve gone with you. We could’ve searched together.
“Eleanor or Lenora—whatever her name, I was sure she was my niece. I was overjoyed and apprehensive at the same time.” He looked to the bed and back again. “Jeane escaped, you see. She and Arnie got away. I don’t know how they did it, but they managed to elude my father and his entire network of underlings and start over with new identities. But he never stopped looking for her. He talked about trying to find his greatest treasure up until the day he died, so doggedly that I was convinced he’d have cronies still looking even after his death.”
His greatest treasure. “But . . . the painting? I thought . . .”
Davis shook his head as if reading the direction of her thoughts. “All those ads and newspaper articles talking about his lost painting, his lost treasure—his people, a whole criminal underground world spread across the country, knew it was code, a plea for information about his daughter.”
“But Jeane and Arnold did have the painting.”
One side of the man’s mouth lifted. “Ingenious little plan of theirs. It was a two-piece painting. They sold one half to fund their initial getaway. That was easy enough to piece together when it turned up later.”
And it’d led to the buyer’s death, so that art professor had explained.
Davis ran his wrinkled hands up and down his armrests. “Jeane did what I couldn’t. She figured out how to leave my father’s world. Whereas I . . . in many ways, I’m still living in his shadow.” He was looking down now, thoughtful, maybe remorseful. “Hard as I once tried to break free, new name and all, I’m still Argo Spinelli’s son. All these decades later, my father’s old connections—descendants, members of other crime families—still manage to find me now and then. I no longer try that hard to hide from them. Instead, I give any information I come by to state and federal authorities. But when my niece found me, all my old fears resurfaced. Was somebody still looking for Jeane? For the painting?”
He lifted his gaze and met Mara’s eyes. “So, yes, I checked her in as a Jane Doe. I told hospital staff I would work with local law enforcement to identify her. I’m paying for her stay and all her care, so they haven’t questioned it.”
Mara stood and walked to the window, trying to digest everything the man had said. The sun’s warmth reached through the glass. Exhaustion dragged through her even as her mind raced. There was still one thing that didn’t add up. “But you know who I am . . . and Marshall too. How?”
The man’s wrinkles deepened again. “At first I was too overwhelmed by the seriousness of Eleanor’s condition to think about where she’d come from. I spent day after day at her bedside. I was hopeful eventually she’d wake up and explain everything for herself. But when that didn’t happen, I got to work. Her license plate alone narrowed my research down to the span of a county. Once I’d connected her to the old house Jeane and Arnie used to own”—he leaned forward in his chair—“that’s when I enlisted the help of a friend. I believe you had a visit from an S.B. Jenkins a few weeks ago.”
Mara gasped. “The author looking for a place to stay and finish her book?”
Davis released a laugh. “Is that what she told you? I knew Sally would come up with a good enough story, but I wouldn’t have guessed that.” At Mara’s continued look of shock, he went on. “She’s a private investigator. Probably should’ve retired five years ago but I’m glad she didn’t because she provided the information I needed.”
Mara looked to Marshall. She’d almost forgotten about him, how haggard he’d looked out in the waiting room. What did he think of all this?
But he wasn’t looking at her. He was looking at the bed, concentration in his gaze. She’d come to recognize that look—his detective expression. Were there more threads to the story she hadn’t thought of yet?
“I hope you can forgive an old man for being too cautious to contact you,” Davis said.
“Hey, Mara?” Marshall’s voice was a whisper.
But it was Davis’s kind blue eyes that drew her. “You must care deeply for Eleanor to go to such lengths to look for her. I’ve been praying every day for wisdom on how to handle this situation. Even more so, I’ve been praying that she’d wake up and—”
“Mara, look,” Marshall’s tone lifted. He pointed.
Her attention flew to the bed. Hadn’t Lenora’s right hand been at her side before? It was on her chest now. And were her eyelids fluttering?
Mara’s breathing hitched.
Suddenly, a machine’s shrill beeping clamored in and before Mara could so much as move, the hospital door flung open. One nurse then another. A doctor.
Mara found herself budged out of the way, heard the rapid patter of Davis’s cane, and someone’s commanding voice. “Hospital staff only. Everyone else out. Please.”
Was it just being in a hospital again that had all of Marshall’s hackles raised? The incredulity of Davis Saddler’s story?
Or something else?
They’d been shoved out of Lenora’s room twenty minutes ago and Mara was still pacing the hallway, refusing to return to the waiting room. A nurse had found a chair for Davis, who sat hunched over his knees, his cane propped next to him.
Marshall merely stood with his back rigid, no matter the drowsiness threatening to overtake him. He shouldn’t feel this limp. He’d gone through many a sleepless stretch longer than this. But at least the tiredness made sense.
His skittish nerves didn’t. Despite Davis Saddler’s explanation, something still felt off.
Or his senses were simply in disarray—too many thoughts of Laney jumbling his instincts. Memories of hospital stays, waits out in hallways just like this.
Except not like this. It seemed Lenora was on her way to waking up. There’d been no such happy ending for Laney.
He felt a hand on his back. Mara had halted her pacing, coming to stand beside him, slipping her arm around him. “You look like you could fall asleep standing up.”
He kissed the top of her head. “I really hate hospitals.”
“You must’ve spent a lot of time in them . . . with Laney.”
He only nodded.
“I’d love to hear about her sometime.”
His heart constricted.
“Did she have dimples like you?”
“I don’t have dimples.”
“You do. I didn’t think so at first. I told myself they were just smile lines. Because it really wouldn’t be fair for a man with such handsome features already to have dimples too. But they are definitely dimples.” She squeezed in closer. “Did she look like you, Marsh?”
He pulled away so abruptly it had to have stunned her, but he didn’t look behind to see. “We should text the others. Jen, Sam, Lucas . . . They’ll be wondering.”
“Marshall—”
“Good news for you folks.”
Stark relief flooded in as the doctor emerged from Lenora’s room.
“Is she awake?” Mara asked.
“She’s awake and apparently she heard your voice before opening her eyes. That is, assuming you’re Mara?”
She nodded.
“Good. Because she’s asking for you. Give us a few minutes more
and we’ll have her ready for a visit—a brief one. Just one or two of you at a time.” The doctor gave Mara a friendly pat on the shoulder. “It seems you were what we needed all along to coax her into fully awakening.”
The second he slipped back into the room, Mara launched herself at Marshall. “I can’t believe it!” She kissed his cheek and buried her face in his neck.
He allowed himself the luxury of holding her for a moment. She fit so perfectly in his arms, like she was made for a space that had been empty for so long. And he was happy for her. He was.
And he was happy for the older man he could see over her shoulder, clearly overcome. There were tears glistening in Davis Saddler’s eyes.
If only he could shake his own melancholy. His unsettled intuition. And the flair of pain pinching at the backs of his eyes.
“Hey,” he said softly into Mara’s hair. “I’ve got a bit of a headache. I think I’ll look for some aspirin. Maybe grab a bottle of water from a vending machine.”
She leaned back. “Don’t you want to come in?”
“He said only one or two visitors at a time. It should be you and Davis.”
She nodded, stepping back and running her fingers through her hair. He leaned down to peck her cheek, gave Davis a nod and started down the hallway.
“Marshall?”
He looked back.
“You’ll be here waiting afterward, right?”
“Right outside the door.”
19
Lenora
The tiniest sip of water is startling, trickling down my parched throat. I’m not sure I could move a single limb if I tried.
But there is light.
And there is more. A tone once distant is drawing nearer and as my cracked voice tries to say her name, her face comes into blurry view.
