19
...From time to time, young men would try to get through the hedge of thorns, but none succeeded...

 

HIS

 

It took a few days before Fish found the information and set up an interview with the nurse, Lucille Johnson. He met her in the private home that Blanche mentioned. Nurse Johnson seemed a little agitated, bouncing her foot while she talked to him.

“It’s rather odd that your sister-in-law was doing a research paper on comatose patients, and now she’s in a coma herself,” she commented.

“Yes, that’s what we’ve all thought too,” Fish agreed.

“You say that she fell off a loft in a barn and cracked her head?

“Yes,” said Fish.

“How did that happen?” asked the nurse.

“Well, it seems that she was looking for the notes of some interviews that her dad had done years ago—”

“Yes, I remember she said something about that,” Lucille cut in. “She said he had done some kind of investigation on the hospital years ago for abusing patients or something like that and she was trying to find his notes in some old barn.”

“She told you that?” asked Fish.

“Yeah. I was a little offended by it actually. I had a good experience working at the hospital for thirteen years and I can tell you there is nothing like that going on there. That stuff about patient abuse is just nasty rumors. That’s why I was a little offended that your sister-in-law would be wasting her time on something like that. But my old supervisor at the hospital said that kind of stuff just comes with the territory.”

A flash went through Fish’s mind. “Your old supervisor? You mean Dr. Prosser?”

“No she’s the director of the hospital.  My supervisor was Dr. Schaffer.  Do you know Dr. Prosser?”

“Actually, I do. We had dinner together at a restaurant a few months back. Dr. Schaffer was in the party as well.”

“Really?” asked Lucille, impressed.

“Yeah. It was a dinner party with other doctors and professors from the University where I work,” Fish explained. No need to tell her that I didn’t exactly hit it off with them. “So you told your supervisor about your interview with Rose?”

Seeming to feel more at ease with this knowledge of Fish’s apparent familiarity with Dr. Prosser and Dr. Schaffer, Lucille continued, “Yes. The next time my patient had to have some tests done at the hospital, I saw Dr. Schaffer at lunchtime and I told her all about the interview.  She thought the part about looking around in a barn for the old notes of a dead reporter alleging patient abuse at the hospital was actually kind of funny. ‘What a way to do research for a college term paper!’ she laughed. She said she’d have to tell that one to Dr. Prosser so they could both have a good laugh.” Lucille chuckled. Apparently remembering Rose’s current condition, she concluded in a subdued tone, “It’s a shame it ended so tragically.”

“Yes,” Fish said, a little stiffly. “You wouldn’t happen to remember what day you had lunch with Dr. Schaffer, would you?”

“Oh, I think it was about a week after my interview with your sister-in-law, so that would be November 16^th I guess.”

The date Rose had fallen from the hayloft in her family’s barn. There it was: the connection that Kateri and the nuns had predicted would surface. It was almost eerie.

After his conversation with Lucille Johnson, Fish drove to Mercy College and looked for Kateri, but was unable to locate her. Giving up temporarily, he walked through the melting snow to Sacra Cor dorm.

Paul was getting out of his bright blue car, dressed in green medical scrubs. “Hey there!” he called cheerfully, swinging his backpack onto his shoulders. “What’s up?”

“Where were you?” Fish asked, taking in the full hospital outfit, mask and all.

“Doing paramedic stuff,” Paul said. “It’s really great. I go to a hospital in Pittsburgh and help out in the emergency room. It’s a side job for me. Lots of fun stuff, but it’s a long drive.” He stretched his hands. “Now I can really admire you for visiting Rose as much as you do,” he said. “It’s quite a trip there and back.”

“It’s worth it,” was all Fish could think to say. “I’m looking around for Kateri. Have you seen her?”

“No. But I rarely see her except when she’s with you.”  Paul looked at him again. “You found something out, didn’t you?”

“Yes,” Fish said, exhaling. “I did.”

“Come on inside and tell me, if you have time,” Paul said.

Fish followed him to his room, and they found Alex lying on the floor, his feet up against the wall, engrossed in reading a textbook.

“Oh. Hi,” he said when they came in.

“Ben has got some news for us,” Paul said.

“Really?” And Alex swung into an upright position and crossed his legs. “What?”

“Found the impossible connection,” Fish said. And told them what he had learned from Nurse Lucille Johnson.

Alex whistled. “That’s really, really bizarre,” he said and cracked his neck. “So this might supply a motive for why the mysterious stranger was in the barn. I feel like we’re closing in on something.”

“It looks fairly positive,” Fish said.

“Do you think it was Dr. Prosser?” Paul asked.

“Possibly. Kateri would say, quite probably. It could be anyone who was involved in the illegal activity that Dan Brier was researching.”

“But we tend to think it’s Dr. Prosser, because she’s the big wig at the hospital, and if she wouldn’t go to the barn herself, she could have sent a goon out there,” Alex said. “Veddy good. It would be interesting to find out where Dr. Prosser was on the day Rose fell. But I don’t know how you’d find that out.”

Fish shrugged. “I suppose a computer hacker could get into the hospital computer and access her day planner to find out.” He glanced around. “Are any of you hackers?”

Alex scratched his chin and said, “My dad actually knows quite a bit about that sort of thing. I could ask him. Plus, there are a couple of guys at the college who are good with computers—A.J., maybe—but I don’t know if they’re that good. Then again, if you are that good with computers, I don’t suppose it’s something you brag about. And it’s really rather dubiously moral.”

“True. Well, we’ll have to look for a way to find that out.” Fish rapped his knuckles on the wall, thinking. “I’m going to go find Kateri.”

Fish decided to make a trip to the chapel, and on his way there, met Kateri. He took her aside and told her what he had found out.

When Kateri heard his report, she was thrilled, as Fish had suspected. “I hope we can prove this,” she said, tossing her hair, which today was tied back in a huge ponytail. “I’m sorry, but that woman is a public menace.”

“Don’t get too eager,” Fish warned her. “All we have is a tentative connection, and not a very definite one. Dr. Schaffer might not have gotten around to telling Dr. Prosser.  Or if she did, it may not have been before Rose’s fall in the barn. And if she did find out before Rose was in the barn, we haven’t proved—and probably will find it difficult to prove—that she did anything about it.”

 “I’ll keep praying that the truth comes out,” Kateri said. She punched his arm. “Thanks, Fish. You’ve been doing a lot of hard work on this. You keeping up with your own classes okay?”

“Now that you mention it, barely,” he said ruefully. “I’m just doing what I can to get by. But I figured I was probably going to have a rough semester anyhow, so I took fewer courses than I usually do.”

“Well, take care of yourself. You don’t always look like you’ve slept well.”

“I rarely do.”

“That’s what I thought,” she said, her eyes darting over him. “Have you seen a doctor?”

“Yes. And I keep refusing to take medications he offers to put me on,” Fish said. “I keep hoping the problem will correct itself. Besides, I’ve always been suspicious of strong drugs.”

“That’s not an entirely irrational suspicion. But I hope things get better for you.”

“Hope so too, though it doesn’t seem likely to happen soon,” he said.

He said goodbye, and went into the chapel. After genuflecting, he noticed a familiar blue habit in the front pew, and felt his usual wariness return. He knelt in prayer, but was not too surprised when several minutes later, there was a gentle touch on his shoulder.

“Hello Sister,” he whispered courteously.

“How are you, Fish?” she asked.

He nodded. “And you?”

“We are all well. Is there any news?”

He couldn’t suppress a sigh. “There is.” He rose, genuflected with a silent prayer, and went outside to tell her.

But the nun didn’t seem quite as exhilarated as he had predicted. Instead, her forehead creased. “It’s promising, but it’s not quite proof,” she said. “Is it?”

He was a bit pleased that she could see that. “No, it’s not. But I wanted to tell you, all the same.”

“We will keep praying,” she said, touching his shoulder again. “More will come out, in God’s time.”

 

Alex called his dad that evening, and handed the phone to Fish. Fish and Mr. O’Donnell talked for a while about computer hacking and the issues involved, including the moral ones. Mr. O’Donnell said he would look into the possibility. Fish went back to the University of Pitt, mulling over the problem and trying to figure out if there was any other way of finding out what Dr. Prosser had been doing on November 16^th.

“Have you seen Dr. Prosser since that dinner party you took me to at the French restaurant?” he found himself asking Dr. Anschlung the next day he was at work—a Thursday. He had just finished copying grades onto the computer database from Dr. Anschlung’s written transcripts.

The blond woman paused at her desk, putting her head to one side. “Prosser? Oh, I remember. That terribly unpleasant hospital director. The one who hated men.”  She made a face that Fish found very funny.

He couldn’t help smiling. “Yes, that would be her.”

 “The last time I saw her was before Christmas at a Shakespeare conference with Professor Brock. And they were tête-à-tête the whole time, quite intense. I was sitting next to them during the talks and found it quite rude. It was a shame, because the lectures themselves were really fascinating, but the doctor and Brock simply sat there whispering like two flustered schoolgirls the entire time. I couldn’t help wishing they could have brought their personal business somewhere else.”

Fish had a strange feeling. “Dr. Anschlung, you don’t happen to remember when that conference was, do you?”

“I have it on my calendar somewhere. Feel free to look if you want,” Dr. Anschlung said. “Why do you ask?”

“Just wondering.”

After she had departed for the day, Fish flipped back through her desk calendar from the previous year, scanning the blocks of dates. At last he found it: November 16^th: Colloquium on Shakespeare, 9-5 pm. Dinner with Storck and Brock. It was even in his handwriting.

And it was on the day that Rose had fallen from the barn.

 

“She couldn’t have done it,” Fish said flatly to Rose’s friends.

They were sitting in the lounge of the girls’ dormitory: Fish, Alex, Paul, Leroy, James, and Kateri. Donna, who as usual had been with Kateri, was sitting in a corner of the couch, where she was attempting to study and not listen.

“There would have been no time for her to do anything about it, even if she knew. Lucille Johnson would have been at the hospital talking to Dr. Schaffer some time between noon and one o’clock. Rose fell in the barn around 3 o’clock, if we can take what Donna says as evidence. Realistically, that’s only about two and half hours at the most.” They all looked at the blond girl.

Donna nodded from her place where she was sitting with her homework. “I was there around two forty-five,” she said quietly, flushing. “I had to work that out for the police.”

“And according to my boss, Dr. Prosser was sitting right next to her until five at this Shakespeare thing, and then they went out to dinner. She didn’t even take any phone calls that Dr. Anschlung could tell.” Fish rubbed his forehead, where he could feel a headache beginning. “So we have to give up on her as a suspect.”

“I don’t see why she should be excluded entirely,” Kateri said angrily. “After all, she does have a motive.”

“But no opportunity,” Alex said. “And, hate to say it, that counts for something.”

“Well, I’m not going to stop suspecting her,” Kateri said, rather unreasonably, getting up from the couch. “Come on, Donna. Let’s get to dinner. I have a night class.”

Fish rose as the two girls got up. He could tell that Kateri was upset, and just wanted to leave. As he was feeling frustrated himself, he couldn’t think of any consolation to give her.

Kateri stormed from the lounge with Donna following her.

“She just needs time to cool down,” Alex predicted. “It’s hard to let go of a theory you’ve committed yourself to.”

 “I know,” Fish said with a groan. “But the other thing I thought of that makes it even more difficult to pin this on Dr. Prosser is this: What are the chances she’d know where the barn was anyway? Put that together with her time and location the day Rose fell, and I just don’t see any possible way she could have been the person in the barn—or have sent anyone else there in her stead—even if she had known about Rose’s activities via Dr. Schaffer.” He picked up his coat. “I’ve got to get something to eat myself.”

“Hey, let’s go out,” Paul said suddenly. “I’m sick of the caf. What do you guys say we go to Mulligan’s?”

Leroy shook his head. “I’m broke and I have to study.”

“I’ll go,” Alex said. “Come with us, Ben?”

“Sure,” Fish said, pressing his temples.

“Good Irish pub,” Paul said, “and their food is pretty decent too.”

“Sounds great.”

Mulligan’s wasn’t crowded on the weeknight, and the beer was excellent.  The three of them commiserated over their drinks while they waited in a private booth for their meal.

“So here we are, set back again,” Fish said, rather non-humorously, emptying his glass. “And once again, I find myself wondering if this is even worth spending time on.” 

“I wouldn’t say that,” Alex said. “We’ve just lost our prime suspect. That’s all.”

“Well, where are we going to find another candidate for the unknown person in the barn?” Fish asked.

“Maybe it was Nurse Lucille Johnson herself,” Alex said. “She might be deeper in this than she seems. Maybe she tried to throw suspicion onto the hospital to throw you off.”

 “Hardly seems likely,” Fish said dubiously. “If she was the assailant, she’d probably have told me a different kind of story. Unless she’s really dense. I’m inclined to give up on her for now. Which leaves us with a paucity of suspects.”

“I’ve thought of another suspect,” Paul said quietly.

“Who?” Alex asked, sipping his beer.

“Me,” Paul said, emptying his drink. Fish and Alex looked up at him in surprise simultaneously. Paul’s expression was joking, but his eyes were pained.

There was silence. Fish found that his hands were tensed into fists.

“Why do you say that?” he said at last.

“Well, because I knew where Rose was going on the day she fell. I knew how to get to the old barn, because I drove her there the first time. I even knew about what time she would be there. Heck, I even encouraged her to go. I told her she should take some time to go and look around again, and she said she would. Then I was alone for the rest of the day. Theoretically, I was in my room in my nearly-deserted dorm doing a paper. But in reality, I was playing Zorkmaster most of the time. But you know, I could have been doing something else. Like, borrowing a car, going to the barn, hiding out, and waiting for Rose.”

There was silence. Then Alex said, “Whose car?”

“I could have borrowed someone’s—or even taken a bus and walked,” Paul said. “But you see my point.”

“Well, what would your motive be for doing this?” Fish asked, still not relaxing.

Paul looked down at his hands. “Jealousy,” he said at last. “Maybe.”

“Regarding Rose?”

Paul nodded. “Because I could see I was losing the girl I’d been pursuing all semester to another guy.”

Fish’s face reddened, but he kept his expression cool. “You mean me, I assume?”

Still looking down, Paul nodded. Alex looked uncomfortable. Fish guessed he knew about this situation already.

“Well,” Fish leaned back in his seat and ruminated. “If that was the case, Paul—if you were in a murderous jealous rage, why would you go after Rose? Why not go after me? Rose could have easily told you how to get to me. You’d be a lot better off all around if you managed to bump me off. You could do me in pretty easily with your aikido, especially if you caught me alone at the National Park, which is where I was when Rose fell. Then I would be out of the way and you could have another shot at winning Rose. Wouldn’t you have thought of that?”

“I guess I might have,” Paul admitted, flushing.

“The only reason you would have gone after Rose is if it were more important to you to hurt her than to get her back. You know, ‘I can’t have her, so no one gets her.’ That sort of thing. I don’t know, Paul. That doesn’t seem like your character. You might have had the opportunity, but you don’t seem to have a particularly compelling motive.”

 “I just thought I ought to bring that up,” Paul confessed, playing with his napkin. “Just to be fair. I didn’t think either of you were really suspecting me. But maybe you should have been.”

Alex laughed out loud. “Burrito, I know you so well. I live with you, for Pete’s sake. If you were a psychopath, it would have shown up before this. If you wanted to kill or maim anyone, you probably would have experimented on me first. Plus you have more against me than against Ben. All those times I beat you at Zorkmaster. And the Heather Kohlman affair…”

“Actually, that’s true,” Paul admitted.

“All right then,” Fish said, looking up as the server approached with their food. “Let’s write this off.”

As they left the bar a while later, Fish turned to Paul and offered him his hand. “Thanks.”

Paul shook it, a bit perplexed. “For what?”

Fish said, “For having the guts to tell me. I should return the favor—I confess I was pretty jealous of you, too.”

Paul shuffled his feet. “I didn’t want to be in competition with anyone. Sorry if I let it show.”

“You didn’t,” Fish said. “But I’m sure I have, on occasion. I have a jealous temperament, and it gets the better of me at times. I’m sorry.”

“Hey, it’s no problem. I just stepped into a situation without realizing it,” Paul said.

“What situation?”

“You know, you and Rose. She really liked you best, Ben. I’m sorry I interfered.”

 “You weren’t interfering. I had told her I wasn’t interested in her, and I wasn’t making any moves,” Fish said, turning towards his car. Paul fell into step beside him.

“I know. But she was waiting for you. I could tell,” Paul paused and looked at him. “I bet she still is.”

Fish drove out to see Rose after dinner, but when he reached Graceton Hall, he was stopped at the door by Dr. Murray, who was talking with a thin blond doctor. After an instant, Fish recognized her as Dr. Schaffer.

“I’m sorry, Mr. Denniston—we ended visiting hours early today,” Dr. Murray told him briskly. “No visits this evening.”

“Oh,” he paused, his keys in his hand. Having driven out so far, he was unwilling to turn around and leave immediately.

“Do you mind if I take a walk around the grounds before I go?” he asked. Since the college students had gotten the staff so cross before, he thought it was prudent to be careful.

Dr. Schaffer seemed about to object, but Dr. Murray said, “That’s fine.” 

“I just want to stretch my legs,” he assured her, “See you tomorrow.”

“See you tomorrow,” she smiled. “I’ll tell Rose you said hello.”

He walked into the woods, alone, solitary. Now he didn’t even have Rose’s presence, which he had been looking forward to, to assuage him.

Tramping through the dead and rotted leaves and occasional heaps of still-melting snow, he looked up, from time to time, at the windows of Graceton Hall. The structure itself was lovely, if a bit Gothic, and Bear had remarked on the quality of its stonework. Dr. Murray had told him it had once been a mansion, donated to a medical foundation and developed into the existing facility. On the medical wings, the rows of windows looked down at him like many half-shut eyes, dimmed with shades.

He made a huge circle around the building, trying to locate the window to Rose’s room. At last he made it out, a golden square looking down over the woods behind the hall. He stood in the black strip of the shadow of a tall tree, looking up.

 

Beside the portal doors,

Buttress'd from moonlight, stands he, and implores

All saints to give him sight...

But for one moment in the tedious hours,

That he might gaze and worship all unseen;

Perchance speak, kneel, touch, kiss—

in sooth such things have been.

 

That passage from Keats was about the knight in the poem daring death to steal one glimpse of his love... He could picture Rose, asleep in her bed, oblivious to the activities of the medical personnel around her. What was she thinking? Was she aware on some level of what went on around her, as some people in comas were said to do? Or was she walking in a dream world, conversing with minotaurs and fairies, and all the people of her archetypal reality?

A blank loneliness came over him, comfortless, and he turned away.

As he tramped through the woods, he saw two staff standing outside on the flagstone porch in the back, smoking, the back door propped open with a stone.

He thought about going back to his car, but he was still feeling internal turbulence. I should let it just come and pass over me, he told himself. If I keep on repressing it, I’ll only get another nightmare, or another headache.

As he passed through the woods as quietly as he could, he caught sight of a security guard taking a furtive swig from a bottle. The night breeze wafted the scent towards him, and his memory opened, relentlessly.

In the cellar, there had been a smell of mustiness, and alcohol.

Freet had been sitting in front of him, sloshing brandy from a bottle into an ornate golden chalice. His own hands were tied in front and suspended above him, around a hook on the far side of a wooden pillar, so that his arms hugged its angular sides and his head was pulled up against the wood. His teeth gritted on the tight band of cloth that gagged him. He was kneeling, his ankles tied together, and he had been in that position for hours.

Now Freet raised the sacred vessel to his thin lips and drank it, watching him the entire time over the rim with sardonic eyes.

You still haven’t told me yet, Benedict.

Finishing his drink, Freet ran his tongue around the edge of his mouth, licked the golden rim of the cup, then deliberately spat into it. He tossed it away with a blasphemous phrase. It clanged on the cement floor, and rolled against Fish’s bare knee.

You can’t hold out on me forever. You haven’t the strength. You know that. We’re equally matched, but I’ve got the better of you now.

Now Fish kicked at the bits of branches in the parking lot as he walked. Equally matched. Freet had always made a big deal about that. They were the same height, the same physique. Partners, Freet used to say tauntingly. But Fish had resisted any partnership, turning it inevitably into a contest between predator and prey.

Tell me now, or we’re going to do this again.

He heard Freet’s voice whispering in his ear as his face was pressed into the splintering wood, his own teeth clenched so tightly against the pain that he cut his cheeks, and the blood ran into his mouth.

Now you tell me.

And he had shaken his head violently, the only resistance he was still capable of making.

Then this will happen again. You know you can’t win. You’re just like me, though you don’t want to face that fact. It’s pitiful to see you denying it. Struggle will only prolong your agony. But perhaps you enjoy self-torture? Many Catholics do.

Fish paced savagely around his car, tired but almost afraid to stop moving. Freet had said someday he would beg for it. And at times it seemed to Fish that all his defiance had been useless, as useless as his first interrupted escape from the ropes, which had ended with his recapture and being beaten senseless. The hunger, thirst, and loneliness that Freet had cursed him with still dogged his heels, even now.

You’re different from him, though. Rose’s voice came back to him. Your eyes are different. You have a different kind of soul.

He looked up at the row of windows in the patients’ wing, but they were all dark now. The nighttime routine had ended. All was still in the palace of sleep, but he was outside, cut off from the peace of her presence by a hedge of thorns, alone. And the thorns wouldn’t part for him. If he dared them, he would only be torn to shreds.

Only the pure of heart shall see God.

Rose, he didn’t doubt, could see God. But right now, he couldn’t even see her.

 

Hers

 

She lay beside the palace window, looking out at the eternal night of the realm of sleep, waiting for him.

Was he staying away because somehow he knew she hadn’t been able to keep his secret? She prayed that if he ever found out, he would forgive her. Now she thought about him constantly in the night world as she lay pinned in her bed, looking at the moon tapestry, waiting for the execution that she knew would come eventually. Sometimes in her deeper sleep, she saw Fish as she had found him in the cellar, tied to that pillar by more ropes than she would have thought anyone would have needed to keep him down. But he was wrestling against them with all the strength that was in him. That, she remembered, was when Freet had been trying to kill her, in front of him.

She remembered thinking at the time, I mustn’t die. Because the only reason Freet is killing me is because he knows it will hurt Fish. So if I don’t die, I can stop him from hurting Fish.

But she hadn’t been able to save Fish from all the harm that had been done to him before.

What are you thinking about? The serpent had slid inside and was fondling her arm before she quite realized it. Since she had no feeling in her limbs, she only noticed the serpent once it appeared in her line of vision.

Him.

He’s not coming, you know. He’ll never come.

She could feel the tears sliding onto her lashes.

I’m sorry to have to destroy your hopes… There’s no way you can escape from the coma. And even if it were possible, this man can’t save you. Why, if he’s been violated the way you told me, that’s a debilitating psychological condition. And his other problems. He won’t come for you. He can’t. He’s an emotional wreck, too caught up in his own hurts to be a hero. Men like him are perennial victims, not knights in shining armor. I hate to see you waiting for him.

The shadow was behind her, at her shoulder, whispering in her sleep-clouded ears.

Trust me. I’ve met men like him before. They’re unpredictable, and sometimes unstable. They’re victims, and they use their victimization as an excuse to be selfish. And to victimize others.

So he’s excluded from normal life forever?

You could say that, yes. His future is the psychopathology ward. Or the jail cell. Some scars never heal. And he sounds like he has a lot of them.

But Christ had scars too, even on His risen Body. Wounds in this life become glory in the next.

Have you ever considered that you might have an unhealthy fascination with sickness and pain? No man like that is going to be able to save you. He can’t even save himself.

She lifted her head, closing her eyes against further tears and resolving. I believe in him. He always comes for me when I’m in trouble. And I know he will come again.

She turned half-towards the shadow. You hate men, don’t you, serpent? Perhaps you’ve never met a truly good man. But I know that a good man, particularly one who has suffered, can change the world.

You’re in the realm of fairy tales again.

Or in the land that is really real.

Or just mired in the irrational hopes of the feminine imagination.

Rose had to smile. Yes, perhaps some of those too.