SIXTEEN
STEVE hated hospitals.
Teresa had, too, which
made it even more unfair she had ended her life in one. But at the
end, she was too ill to resist him.
He was sorry for that
now. Now that it was too late.
Compared to the chaos
of Greater Southeast in D.C., the emergency department at Chapel
Hill was almost orderly. The chairs looked more comfortable, too.
But on a Saturday afternoon, the waiting area was full of people
who couldn’t afford doctors or couldn’t wait for one. Phones rang,
stock carts rattled, and babies cried under the invasive hum of the
fluorescent lights. A white-faced teen in shin guards turned his
face into his mother’s shoulder. An elderly man patted the arm of
his mumbling wife, who kept making furtive attempts to stand. The
air was sharp with disinfectant, thick with pain and patience and
despair.
Bailey braced in a
chair, still in the tank top and exercise pants she must have been
wearing when Sherman picked her up this morning. The harsh lighting
revealed the lines of strain around her mouth and the fatigue like
bruises under her eyes.
His instinct was to
take her in his arms and comfort her.
But after her first,
involuntary protest, Bailey had rallied, calling Leann’s cell phone
to break the news to her mother and sister, making arrangements
with a neighbor to stay with her sister’s kids and Gabrielle.
Making herself useful. Going through the motions, as if efficiency
could hold disaster at bay.
She would have made a good soldier, he thought.
Or a cop’s wife.
She glanced up as he
approached from the nurses’ station.
“He’s conscious,” he
reported. “They just let your mother go back to sit with
him.”
“How is
he?”
He gave her the best
answer he could. “The nurse says he looks good. They’re waiting to
see the doctor now.”
“Can I see
him?”
“Maybe later. They
only let one family member back at a time.”
“Leann?”
“As soon as she heard
your father was stable, she went home to be with the kids. We
probably passed her in the parking garage.”
“You should go get
Gabrielle.”
And leave Bailey here
alone?
Steve had worried
Gabrielle might object to being left in an unfamiliar place. But
she heard “hospital” and “father,” and went into Good Child
mode.
“Don’t worry, Dad.
We’ll be fine,” she had said before dragging Bryce upstairs for
more video games.
Making herself useful.
Going through the motions. Just like Bailey.
His heart ached for
them both.
“My mom will be back
from her trip soon. I’ll stick around until the doctor comes out to
talk to you,” he said.
In case the news was
bad.
Bailey frowned. “But
he’s all right, you said.”
“Yeah.”
Probably. The triage
nurse had thrown around a lot of big words and scary phrases like
subdural hematoma and intracranial bleeding. But they didn’t
actually know anything until the X ray results came back. How much
should he prepare her? What did she need to know?
“He’s got a
headache.”
“A headache? Or a
concussion?”
Steve shrugged. “He
was out for a while.”
“What does that
mean?”
“You lose
consciousness, you probably have a concussion.” Probably, his ass.
For sure. “Happens to football players all the time.”
“My father wasn’t
playing football,” she said sharply.
“No,” he
admitted.
“Somebody hit him,” she said, like she was trying to make
sense of it, to make what had happened fit the world she
knew.
He knew how she felt.
He’d felt that way, too.
It was his job to find
answers, but explanations had failed him when he needed them
most.
It was the sheer
ordinariness, the unexpectedness, of tragedy that took your breath
away, the accident on the road you drove every day, the bullet that
shattered a window and killed the child sleeping in her crib, the
cancer discovered during a routine physical appointment, the plane
coming out of the clear September sky.
Random, senseless,
unavoidable loss. You couldn’t stop it. All you could do was sort
through the wreckage, searching for clues to comfort the
survivors.
“We’ll find whoever’s
responsible,” he said.
Her eyes, her
wonderful, expressive eyes, focused on his face. “What happened,
exactly?”
Maybe talking about
the case would take her mind off whatever was going on beyond those
double doors. Or maybe it would only help him.
“Near as we can tell,
somebody walked through the back door while your father was at
work. He left the hardware store about three o’clock. Neighbor
heard her dog kicking up a fuss sometime around then, growling and
barking. She finally looked out a back window, saw a man running
away from the house toward the woods, and called 911. Chief Clegg
was right around the corner, so he stopped by to check things out.
Found your father’s car in the driveway and the back door
unlocked.”
“The back door is
always unlocked,” Bailey said.
“Sugar, in Stokesville
everybody’s back door is always unlocked. Which is probably what
the intruder was counting on. Anyway, when nobody came to the door,
Clegg let himself in. And found your father on the living room
floor.”
“It couldn’t have been
. . . I don’t know.” Her hands rose and fell in her lap. “A stroke?
A fall?”
“Not unless he fell
and hit the back of his head with a bedroom lamp.”
The words lay between
them, heavy and stiff as a corpse.
Bailey exhaled. “Okay,
not a fall. So, what happened?”
“Our best guess is
your father came home and surprised the intruder
upstairs.”
“What was he doing
upstairs?”
“Probably looking for
cash. Jewelry. Anything small he could turn into a quick fix. Your
mother will have to go through the house, see what’s
missing.”
She shook her head.
“This is Stokesville, not D.C. We don’t do junkie
burglaries.”
“The whole county has
a growing meth problem. And you’ve got gangs moving in from Raleigh
and Durham. Of course, it’s possible your father spooked the guy
and he ran off without taking anything.”
“Did Dad see him?
Could he identify him?”
“The chief tried to
get a description when your father came to. But he doesn’t remember
anything. He was watching TV on the couch when he was struck from
behind. He probably didn’t see anything.”
“Not if ESPN was on,”
Bailey said ruefully. “What about the neighbor? What did she
see?”
“Not much from the
back. White male, medium build, wearing jeans and a ball
cap.”
“That narrows it down
to, what? Half the population of Orange County?”
“Maybe a third.”
Frustration stuck in his throat. “We’ll do our best.”
Bailey took his hand
and squeezed. As if this time his best would be good enough. “I
know you will.”
Surprise held him
speechless. She had pretty hands, long fingered, with neat,
unpolished nails. He’d indulged a few private, inappropriate
thoughts about those hands on his body.
But Bailey had never
before initiated any physical contact between them, never touched
him the way a woman does when she wants a man’s attention, never
patted his arm or brushed his shoulder or touched her fingertips to
his chest to make a point.
It felt . . .
nice.
He tightened his hand
on hers.
A baby wailed. A nurse
called the limping teenager back to an exam bay. Patients walked or
were wheeled through the sliding doors. An hour passed, bringing
another nurse. A different baby.
“You must be used to
this,” Bailey said.
“This?” he said
cautiously.
She flapped her free
hand at the shifting population of the chairs. “This. The waiting.
It sucks.”
She’d been up almost
all night. She must be exhausted. “You want something? Water? A
magazine?”
“No, thank you. Was
she sick a long time?”
I
want answers, she’d said. I’ll give you
what you want if you give me what I want.
“Who?” he
asked.
“Your wife. You said
she had cancer.”
He didn’t talk about
it.
“You want a story,
I’ll buy you that magazine. Hell of a lot more
entertaining.”
Her gaze was warm and
level. “I’m sorry. This must be hard for you.”
“I’m
fine.”
“You probably spent a
lot of time in hospitals.”
She was harder to fool
than the grief counselor. Or maybe just harder to
shake.
“Not really. By the
time we knew Teresa was sick, it was already too
late.”
“You didn’t have any .
. . warning?” Her quiet voice pulled at him, plucking at memories
like loose threads in a tapestry.
“She’d gained a little
weight. Lost her appetite. We thought . . . I hoped she might be
pregnant. But she kept saying no. So after the second home
pregnancy test turned up negative, I finally talked her into seeing
a doctor.”
Bailey squeezed his
hand. “And?”
“She had stage-four
epithelial ovarian cancer.” He could say it. He could say the
words. “She had the first surgery, for the diagnosis. But after
that . . . There are treatments. Chemo. Radiation. More surgeries,
to debulk the tumors and clear the blockage of the intestine. But
she wouldn’t . . . She didn’t want . . .”
He stared very hard at
the clock on the opposite wall until the numbers
blurred.
“I’m sorry,” Bailey
said again, softly. “I didn’t know.”
“Palliative treatment,
they call it. Drain the fluids, to relieve the pressure. Pills, for
the pain. We fought about it all the time. I didn’t want her to
suffer. I just . . . Christ, I wanted her to live.”
“Of course you
did.”
“At the end, she
couldn’t make decisions herself anymore. I took her to the
hospital. Hell, I dragged her to the hospital. Only by then . . .”
He drew a harsh breath. “She couldn’t eat. The doctors—they wanted
to feed her through a tube. She could live a little longer that
way, they said.”
“Is that what she
wanted?”
“No.” He rubbed his
hands over his face. “No.”
“What did you
do?”
He dropped his hands.
“I told them no.” He stared again at the opposite wall, not seeing
it, not seeing anything but his wife, begging him with her eyes. “I
let her die.”
He wasn’t asking for
pity. He had no right to her sympathy or her understanding. But
maybe that wouldn’t matter to her.
She blinked those big
brown eyes at him. Intelligent eyes. Compassionate
eyes.
“That’s crap,” she
said.
His jaw slackened. He
clenched it tight. He should never have opened his mouth. “Forget
it.”
But Bailey wasn’t
finished with him. “You’re not responsible for your wife’s illness.
Or her treatment plan. Or her death.”
“I don’t want to talk
about it.”
“Maybe you should.
Maybe then you could deal with this misplaced sense of guilt
instead of brooding about it.”
Something like panic
kindled inside him. He blew it into rage. Anger was cleaner, easier
to handle.
“You don’t know what
the hell you’re talking about.”
She touched him again,
her fingers light on his bare arm, stirring him in ways he thought
he was done with. He wanted her touch.
And he didn’t, because
he was sitting here talking about his wife the way he never talked
about her to anybody, missing his wife, cheating on his wife by
lusting after Bailey.
“So explain it to me,”
she said.
“You wouldn’t
understand. I let Teresa down. I let Gabby down.”
“You did your
best.”
“It wasn’t
enough.”
He had always been
able to protect them. The big, tough cop. The competent male.
My hero, Teresa used to tease, watching
him slide off his shoulder holster before joining her in
bed.
But he hadn’t
protected her, he hadn’t been there for her, when it mattered most.
He lost her.
And he’d lost
himself.
“Miss Wells?” A tall
young man in nurse’s scrubs with a single diamond stud in his ear
claimed her attention. “You can come back now. Only one of you,” he
added when Steve stood with her.
Steve was in no mood
to argue. He flashed his badge instead.
The nurse looked
unimpressed. “Right. Another one. Well, come on. Maybe you can talk
your boss into getting out of my worklane.”
Bailey clasped her
hands in front of her. “Has the doctor seen my father
yet?”
The young man smiled.
“Seen your father and talked to your mama. They’re both going to be
just fine.”
“When can he go
home?”
“Doctor wants to keep
him for observation overnight.” The nurse pushed open the swinging
doors, moving like a sprinter in his white athletic shoes. “But his
films look good.”
Fighting off temper,
Steve followed them. He was here to provide escort and support, he
reminded himself. But he was still stirred up inside. His feelings
churned like water released from ice, threatening the detachment he
had hidden behind so long.
In the lane on the
other side, Walt Clegg made his way down the row of curtained beds
like a politician working a Fourth of July picnic.
Steve stopped.
Shit. The last thing he needed now was
to go another round with his boss.
“You all take care,”
Walt said to a patient. “This heat’s killer . . . Margaret, how’s
that grandbaby of yours?”
He saw Steve with
Bailey, and his expression hardened.
“Miz Wells.” He
nodded. “Sorry about your daddy.”
“Thank you. Is
he—”
“This way,” the nurse
said.
Walt’s gaze cut to
Steve. “Stick around a minute.”
“Later.”
“You go ahead,” Bailey
said. “I’ll be fine.”
Steve didn’t want to
leave her. But she wasn’t asking for his support, was she? On the
contrary.
He let her
go.
“Pretty girl,” Walt
observed as she followed the tall black nurse down the curtained
row. “But damned if she don’t remind me of that L’il Abner
character. You know the one? Little guy in black with the bad luck
cloud following him around.”
“Before my time,”
Steve said tersely.
Walt shook his head.
“Seven years I’ve been chief, and only one homicide. She comes back
to town, and within three weeks I’ve got two dead bodies and a
felony assault on my hands.”
Unease slid through
the temper. “That’s not her fault.”
“Maybe not,” Walt
said. “In fact, she did us a favor last night.”
Steve balanced on the
balls of his feet, waiting for the punch.
“Just got off the
phone with SBI. Their lab boys found traces of the deceased’s blood
in the crack of the base. I’d say we have ourselves a murder
weapon.”
Steve didn’t think
Walt had pulled him aside to tell him he was right all
along.
He struggled to get
his head back in the job.
“Prints?” he
asked.
“Wiped.”
He expected that. Paul
Ellis was too smart to plant the weapon on Bailey without carefully
wiping his prints first.
“So we still can’t
prove Paul Ellis killed his wife,” Steve said.
Or that Bailey didn’t.
Walt rubbed his jaw
with the back of his hand. “Well, now, I talked to Jim in the DA’s
office. We know Ellis had the opportunity. He had the financial
motive, and now we’ve got the means.”
“But it’s all
circumstantial.”
“I’m not saying I
wouldn’t have liked to get Ellis’s confession. But him killing
himself like that . . . it’s damn near the same thing. If Miz Wells
will cooperate, we can make this whole thing go away. I’m asking
Jim in the DA’s office to rule the deaths a
murder/suicide.”
Which would leave
Bailey cleared, both cases closed, and everybody
happy.
Except
Steve.
And Bailey, who was
too damn honest for her own good.
He should let it go.
He had come home to Stokesville to make a better life for his
daughter. He wasn’t here to make news, to make waves, or to make
enemies. But something about this whole setup nagged at him like an
open window in a ground floor apartment.
He jammed his hands
into his pockets. “What else did the lab boys tell
you?”
“About
what?”
“About Paul Ellis.
Sherman did swipes on his hands. Did you get results
yet?”
Walt pulled in his
chin. The corners of his mouth pulled down in displeasure. “I told
you I’m making my recommendation to the DA. I’ll have your case
file on my desk Monday morning.”
He didn’t add, “If you
know what’s good for you.”
He didn’t have
to.
“AND behind curtain
number three . . .” The nurse winked at Bailey and slid back the
striped curtain around Frank Wells’s bed. “Mr. Wells, your
daughter’s here to see you.”
Bailey caught her
breath, her already raw emotions scraped by the sight of her father
under the harsh hospital lights. His bluff red face was all
eyebrows and nose, his skin slack and gray. His big frame seemed
shrunken under the white sheet. Even his hair seemed
thinner.
“Hey, Daddy,” she said
softly.
His mouth curled. One
big hand lifted before it fell again to his lap. “Hey, Bailey
girl.”
Her eyes welled. Her
throat clogged with snot and tears.
They had never had
much to say to one another. Now she was speechless.
Her mother
wasn’t.
“Doesn’t he look good?
You should have seen him before. I thought he’d never stop
bleeding. Dr. Andrews says head injuries do that. And he has
staples, actual metal staples, in his head. Like Frankenstein. Show
her, Frank.”
“Girl doesn’t want to
see my staples, Dotty.”
“Well, but it was very
interesting. I thought they’d use stitches. But Dr. Andrews put in
those staples with me sitting right here. Pop, pop, pop.” Her voice
shook slightly. She twitched the rough white sheet over her
husband’s chest, smoothing it with trembling hands.
“Don’t fuss,” Frank
grumbled. But he patted her hand as he said it.
Dorothy turned her
palm over and clasped his hand compulsively.
Bailey felt as though
she’d caught her parents kissing. She cleared her throat. “Can I
get you anything?”
Her mother blinked
rapidly. “I need a few things from home. Dr. Andrews wants to keep
an eye on your father overnight because he was unconscious for so
long. But I can spend the night with him.”
“Damn fool idea,”
Frank said. “You should go home. Go to bed.”
“I wouldn’t sleep a
wink. I’d be too worried about you.”
Frank harrumphed. “You
won’t sleep here, either. Not in that chair.”
“Do you want me to
stay?” Bailey offered. She was already so tired it was an effort to
stand, let alone think straight. But her mother vibrated on the
edge of exhaustion. “You could go home and change, maybe get
something to eat.”
“They have a cafeteria
here,” Dorothy said. “And a gift shop.”
She sounded pleased.
Bailey looked at her
father.
“You go on. You’ve got
better things to do than stick around here.” He smiled at her
crookedly. “You always did.”
“Oh, Daddy.” The tears
escaped. Dripped.
“Go on,” he repeated.
“We’ll be fine.”
“But bring me my
toothbrush and a sweater,” Dorothy said. “The blue one, in my
middle dresser drawer. And I could use my back
pillow.”
“I’ll take care of it,
Mom.”
“That’s my girl,”
Frank said.
Startled, she met her
father’s gaze. And he smiled.
“YOU don’t need to
wait,” Bailey said to Steve on the porch of her parents’
house.
She could handle this
herself. She could handle anything.
She sighed. Except,
apparently, him.
Ever since she had
trespassed onto his personal emotional territory, he had retreated
into Robocop mode. Professional. Polite.
Dangerous.
Under his mechanical
courtesies, temper radiated. He hadn’t forgiven her for calling him
on his little guilt trip.
Brooding again, she thought, but the sneer didn’t
make her any less miserable.
“I’m just going to
grab a few things and go back to the hospital. I can drive myself,”
she said.
Steve ignored her,
plucking the keys from her hand to unlock the door. “You’re too
tired to see straight. I’m not letting you drive.”
Let her?
“Look, I appreciate
everything you’ve done. The ride home and . . . and everything. But
you can’t chauffeur me around indefinitely like a drunk in the back
of a squad car. You need to get home to your
daughter.”
“My daughter is fine.
My mother picked her up from your sister’s an hour ago. I don’t
need you to lecture me about my obligations.”
Ouch.
“Maybe not.” Bailey
stuck out her chin. “But I don’t have to put up with being treated
like one of them, either.”
His head snapped
around. “You are not an obligation,” he said through his
teeth.
Her heart thundered.
“No? What am I, then?”
“You’re a damn
nuisance.”
Disappointment swelled
her chest and closed her throat. When she could speak again, she
said, “Thank you. Another magnificent nonanswer from the king of
emotional evasion.”
He glowered. “Damn it,
Bailey, what do you want me to say? We’ve known each other less
than a week.”
She was shaken. He was
right.
But she was tired of
investing herself in no-yield relationships, sick of holding back,
of saying nothing, of playing it safe.
“I want you to talk to
me. I need to know what you’re feeling. I don’t want to get into
another relationship knowing from the beginning that it’s not equal
and it’s not going anywhere.”
Not again. Not ever
again.
“I’m not Paul
Ellis.”
“No, you’re not,” she
agreed readily. “You could hurt me more than he ever
did.”
“Shit. All right. All
right.” He didn’t look lover-like. He
looked annoyed. “You want feelings? You make me feel . . .” He
stopped, apparently at a loss for words.
Bailey held her breath
as he tottered on the brink of real disclosure. All it would take
was one word, one push, from her.
And God help her, she
couldn’t do it.
Maybe she didn’t want
to know how he really felt.
Maybe hope and cozy
self-deception were preferable to rejection after all.
“After Teresa died, I
shut down,” Steve said. She watched him with painful attention, as
if she could find her way by the light of his expression. His eyes
were dark as night. “I had a job to do, and a kid to raise. I
figured that was it for me. But you make me feel . . . You. Make.
Me. Feel.” He repeated it slowly, emphatically. “Is that what you
wanted to know? Is that enough for you?”
Bailey moistened her
lips. “I don’t know,” she said honestly. “I haven’t
decided.”
His expression
changed. Excitement shivered along her nerves. He didn’t look like
a frustrated father, a grieving husband, a laid-back Southern
lawman anymore. He looked like the cop he must have been in D.C.,
his eyes sharper, his mouth harder.
“Let me help you make
up your mind,” he said and reached for her.