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“NFP. And it should be.”
“Whether it should be is irrelevant.”
“But if I talk to him, maybe I can get more. A clue that will lead us to better evidence or—”
“Rachel, stay away from this guy.”
He pointed at me with a forefinger, something I didn’t remember him ever doing before. Like he was telling Josh to eat his vegetables. I did not like it. I sent him a look, my eyebrows arching, my gaze on that finger, and he lowered it and shook his head.
“He’s dangerous, Rache.”
The door opened, and Dr. Earl came in. I thought his photo was probably next to the word stately in the dictionary. Tall, lean, silver-white hair so neat it looked plastic, and the face of an aging GQ model. He looked up from the chart in his hands and flashed us a cheerful white smile. “Good morning, you two. You beat me here again, Rachel. I must be slowing down in my old age.”
“Well, you know, I couldn’t have a doughnut until I got here, so I was highly motivated.”
He laughed softly, turned his attention to Mason. “How are you feeling?”
“Like I don’t need to be here. Like I need to be home and back on the job, building a case against the guy who put me here.”
“Well, we just might be able to make that happen today. The home part, not the back on the job part.”
“Today?” Mason’s brows rose, and he looked at me, then back at the doctor. “Where the hell are my clothes?”
“Ah, not so fast now,” said the AARP poster boy. “There are going to be some conditions.”
“Anything, Doc. Anything you say, I promise. Tell me, and I’ll do it. To the letter.”
“You are such a liar,” I muttered, but under my breath, so Dr. Earl could pretend not to hear.
He winked at me, though, so I knew he’d heard just fine. Then he started ticking off conditions on his immaculately manicured fingers. “You need to hire a nurse to come in and change your dressing twice a day to prevent infection. You need to come back if there’s any sign of any problem whatsoever. Any trouble breathing, or if that cough comes back. And you need to take another week at home before returning to work. And then only after I’ve examined and cleared you.”
“Yes. Yes, I agree to all of it. Anything just to get out of here. Rache, my clothes?”
Dr. Earl shook his head. “You know better, Detective. Let’s proceed with your morning exam, and then I’ll get started on the paperwork as soon as I finish my rounds. You should be out of here by—” he looked at the clock “—midday, if all goes well.”
Mason shot me a bug-eyed “my head’s gonna explode” expression, and I had to clap a hand over my mouth to keep the laugh from busting out. I refilled my coffee cup from the box. “I’ll get out of here to give you some privacy, then. Help yourself to coffee, Dr. Earl.”
Then I left the room, shaking my head. Thank God he was okay and heading home today. Thank God. I think it was the first time I really allowed the full brunt of the danger to hit me, and it made my knees a little weak. It was a constant battle to keep my mind from going to what could’ve happened.
And, oh man, was I ever going to have a talk with probable arsonist Mr. Rouse the Louse, whether my detective liked it or not. I just wouldn’t tell him. Not until after the fact, anyway.
For now, though, my main challenge was how I was going to convince him to come home to my house instead of to his own. I paced the hallway, tried to stay out of the way of the rush-hour nurse traffic and wished I knew how Mason was going to react to my suggestion.
* * *
Marie Rivette Brown’s life wasn’t pleasant. The doctors at Riverside Maximum Security Psychiatric Hospital kept her medicated. Heavily medicated. She didn’t hear her husband’s voice anymore. Once in a while he came through, but it was rare and usually only if she was stressed out about something else.
They even let her use the community room. They hadn’t for the first few months, but now they did. It was a big room, with small round tables and plenty of chairs, lots of games like checkers and Trouble, and several decks of cards. A TV set was always playing some happy family movie with no violence or death or ghosts or voices. Nothing that might upset the inmates.
She knew what she’d done. She’d tried to retrieve her dead husband’s donated organs. Eric had been a serial killer. Finding that out had been like a mortar round hitting her world. No one else knew. No one ever would. But she knew. She’d known for more than a year and had done nothing about it, unable to destroy her sons by letting it come out. Then, after his suicide, she’d lost the little baby girl she’d been carrying, and that seemed to make the walls of her sanity come crumbling down completely.
She didn’t feel remorse. She figured the drugs kept her from feeling much of anything, so she couldn’t feel sorry for what she’d done, the lives she’d taken. Without the drugs, though, she knew she wouldn’t feel it, either. Without the drugs, she was convinced that what she had done was completely rational.
She missed her boys, though. That was the one thing she seemed capable of feeling, on her meds or off, completely insane or doped into a state of zombie-like calm. She missed her sons. Jeremy would be graduating from high school soon. A couple of weeks, if that. She so wished she could be there for him.
“Hi, sweetie. How are you doing today?”
Blinking out of her thoughts, Marie looked up from the table where she sat alone, an untouched meal in front of her, at the nurse. She’d seen her around before, a stunningly beautiful blue-eyed blonde with a figure her tight-fitting white dress did nothing to hide. But she wasn’t anyone Marie interacted with very often.
“Fine.” That was always her answer.
“You should let me take you outside. It’s such a beautiful day. Lots of people are out enjoying the yard today.”
Marie shrugged. “Okay.”
The nurse smiled and took her arm, helped her up and held on to her gently as they walked together toward the doors, then she used her keycard to unlock them. Marie didn’t think it made any sense keeping them locked, because they only led out to a fenced-in lawn, with several patches of flowers and quite a few big shade trees. Marie scuffed across the soft grass in her foam slippers toward a pair of lawn chairs underneath a pretty red maple. The nurse was right. The fresh air was nice. It smelled like summer and sunshine, and reminded Marie of picnics at the lake house up north and the kids playing on the tire swing and jumping into the water. Skinny and shirtless in baggy shorts she used to say would fall right off in the lake one of these days.
She sank into a chair, closing her eyes and breathing the air, and trying to grab hold of the joy of the memory. But there wasn’t any. It was just a picture. It elicited no emotion.
Marie wasn’t aware that the nurse had sat down in the other chair until she spoke, breaking into the memory and bringing her back to the miserable present.
“I wanted to show you something. I’m not really allowed, but sometimes I think the rules here are over the top.”
Marie frowned as the nurse pulled a folded newspaper clipping out of her pocket, opened it and held it by two corners as the breeze made it ripple. It was a photo of a man carrying two blankets out of a fire. She looked closer, frowning. “That’s Mason.”
“Your brother-in-law, right?”
Marie nodded, her eyes eagerly skimming the words under the photo. Those weren’t blankets, they were children. Mason had saved them from a terrible fire that had killed their mother. Nodding slowly, she understood. “He’s a good man. He’s always been.”
“I can see that. I was so surprised when I saw this on the news and realized he was part of your family. You must be so proud of him.”
Marie wasn’t proud of him. Not really. After all, she’d had no hand in making him the great person he was. “His mother probably is.”
“Oh? His mother’s still living?”
Marie nodded.
“Close to him, I hope? He lives in...Binghamton, right?”
“Castle Creek,” Marie said, remembering the farmhouse and wondering if her boys were happy there. Probably. They loved their uncle so much. Maybe more than they loved her. Especially after what she’d done. “His mother’s in Whitney Point. Near Rachel.”
“Rachel? Who’s she?”
“His girlfriend, I guess. She’s a writer.” Something buzzed deep in Marie’s mind, a little trill of awareness that told her it was odd for a nurse to be asking about her family. “Why do you want to know?”
The nurse smiled, shrugged, lowered her head, blushed a little. “I don’t know. I guess I’m just impressed with him. To think we have a hero like that around. They don’t make men like that anymore, you know?”
“Oh.”
“What’s he like?”
She’s up to something. Look at her eyes.
Marie blinked. It had been so long since she’d heard her dead husband’s voice in her head. Oh, she knew the doctors kept telling her it wasn’t really his voice. It was her own subconscious, speaking to her in his voice in order to get her attention. And because she had a mental illness, she must not trust the things her subconscious said to her in the voice of her dead husband.
But she furrowed her brows and stared deep into the nurse’s eyes anyway. There was a fire in there. It was deep, but it was there, swirling and sparking, but hidden very well behind a facade that was blank. False. Empty. She’d seen that look before. She’d seen it in Eric’s eyes. It was the plastic mask of a killer.
“He’s nice,” she said softly, cautiously.
“He has your kids, doesn’t he?”
“How do you know that?” Marie asked.
Dangerous. She’s dangerous.
“I looked at your file.”
Marie’s eyes widened. “You stay away from him. You stay away from him and my boys.”
“Me?” The nurse got up from her chair, one hand fluttering to her chest, her eyes pretending to be offended and surprised. But she didn’t feel those things. Marie could tell. She was mimicking real emotions, the way Marie herself tried to do during every session with her shrink, in hopes of someday convincing him that she was well and could go home.
“My goodness, Marie, what are you talking about?”
“Stay away from them,” Marie said again.
The nurse smiled. And for just a moment she let the mask slip. There was evil in that smile. Evil. She was a demon, and the fire in her eyes was a window directly into hell.
Marie reached out and snatched the name tag from the nurse’s chest, tearing her dress in the process. She stared at the name, saying it aloud, over and over and over as the nurse jumped back with a squeak of alarm and then pressed a button in her pocket.
Orderlies came running out the door, crossing the yard toward them.
Marie was up on her feet. “You’re evil. What do you want with my family? You stay away from them. You stay away!”
Then the strong young men in white took her arms, and another nurse, a regular, jabbed her in the ass with a needle. Marie went out with the demon nurse’s name on her lips.
Gretchen Young.
3 (#ulink_ac2957e0-c780-59f1-a14e-2dbfd63cf973)
“So when are you going to tell me what’s wrong?”
Mason sat in the passenger side of Rachel’s hot little yellow T-Bird while she drove him home from his endless stay in the hospital. The top was down, and her hair was whipping like a flag in a hurricane. She drove way above the speed limit, despite the fact that her passenger was a cop. Driving usually had her smiling from ear to ear. Not so today. Today she was all nervous and jerky.
She glanced sideways at him. “You’re almost as good at it as I am, you know.”
“What? Reading people?” He shook his head. “Only criminals and you, babe.”
She crooked one brow at him but kept her focus on the road as she zigged into the fast lane to pass a jacked-out Mustang, then zagged back in front of it again. She didn’t even taunt the driver with a wink or flip him off or give him a cutesy little wave. Something was definitely wrong with her, he thought.
“So what is it?”
“Nothing. I just... Okay, there’s something.” She drew a deep breath, and her shoulders rose with it. He knew that look. She was preparing to blurt it out, whatever it was. He braced himself.
“Why don’t you stay at my place for a while?”
And there it was. He watched her face closely. She didn’t have the same opportunity to watch his, but he didn’t figure she needed to. The stuff she “got” didn’t come from anything she could see with her eyes. In fact, most of the time when she was trying to read people she had to close those gorgeous baby blues.
“You want me to stay with you,” he repeated without inflection.
“Yeah. I mean, why not? The boys are already there, and it really hasn’t been as bad as I expected it to be.” She bit her lip on one side, glanced sideways at him. “I mean, it’s been great.”
“You mean not as bad as you expected.”
“Which is great.”
“I think you need to look up the word great in the dictionary. Aren’t you supposed to be a writer or something?”
She shrugged. “Look, you need to take it easy, and you can’t run a houseful of boys and take it easy at the same time. Come to my place. Just for a couple of weeks, until you get your strength back.”
He tried to weigh his words before speaking them. He did not want to screw things up with her, but her invitation was weak. Or maybe he was just still stinging from that unrequited “I love you” he’d dropped on her a few weeks ago. She hadn’t said it back. And he hadn’t said it again. If she wasn’t ready for serious feelings, she sure as hell wasn’t ready for cohabitation.
“Well?” she asked. “What do you think?”
“I think,” he said, slowly and carefully, “that if we ever decide to...live together, I’d just as soon it not be because I’m too weak to be on my own.”
She looked disappointed. “Oh.”
“Jeremy and Josh will be a ton of help. My mother will probably want to move in. And there will be a home care nurse.”
She nodded. “Yeah. Sure, okay.”
“And you. You’ll be in and out all the time, too.”
“Sure,” she said again.
He was quiet for a long moment. She was upset. Dammit, she’d asked him in a way that was a lot like a person pulling off a Band-Aid. Grit your teeth, close your eyes and get it over with. He didn’t think she’d really been hoping he would say yes.
“I just don’t want to risk messing up—”
“It’s fine, okay? It’s fine.”
It wasn’t though. Crap.
“You hungry?” she asked at length. “We didn’t have lunch before we left, and there’s a Nice N Easy off the next exit. They make the best wraps.”
“There’s a Mickey D’s, too,” he said, having seen the same road sign that she had.
“Yeah, but you need to heal. Junk food isn’t gonna cut it right now. And I’m sure your mother and the nurse would agree with me.”
