All the Blue-Eyed Angels (22 page)

“Are you still alive in there?”

I managed to revive myself enough to get out, towel myself dry, and put on semi-clean pajamas. Einstein had crashed out on his dog bed. He didn’t even stir at the promise of tea and crumpets. I left the bedroom door open in case he changed his mind, and went to face my mother.

A cup of steaming chamomile tea was waiting for me, along with a toasted English muffin that I pushed aside without a thought. The tea was more bitter than I’d expected, but it was hot and the smell of chamomile was a nice alternative to the smoke that still lingered in my nostrils. I drank half of it without waiting for it to cool.

“You’ve lost weight—and not in a good way. You should eat something.”

“I’m not hungry. Tell me about Noel, Kat.”

“Why don’t
you
tell me about Noel? You got pretty chummy with him toward the end.”

The turnabout wasn’t unexpected, but it still annoyed me. “You slept with him to keep him quiet after he saw you destroy evidence out on the island the day of the fire. You lied to police, blackmailed a detective…”

She looked bored. “It sounds like you have it all figured out. Is there some kind of confession you’d like me to sign?”

“I want you to tell me the truth for once in your life!” I heard Einstein stir at my tone, his toenails clacking on the hardwood floor before he appeared at the kitchen door. Actually, two dogs appeared at the kitchen door. Neither of them were in focus. I closed my eyes.

“Why did you lie?” I asked. My voice sounded small, that of a child instead of a thirty-three-year-old woman with degrees and awards and a recent divorce under her belt. My eyes were still closed, my head spinning.

“I think you should get some rest. You don’t look well,” she said.

I shook my head in an effort to clear it. Opened my eyes. My mother was closer now, peering interestedly at me.

“Shit. You…” My voice faded. “You drugged me.”

“You’re so dramatic. I’m a doctor, Erin—I medicate people, I don’t drug them. You need to sleep. This should help.”

She pulled me to my feet and led me down the hall. I’d already told her she could take my room, and I’d take Juarez’s for the night. His bed was a mattress on the floor that seemed much lower than I suspected it would have if my mom hadn’t slipped some kind of elephant tranquilizer in my tea. I crashed onto it like a tree felled in the forest. Kat pulled the blankets up around me. I couldn’t remember her ever tucking me in like this as a child.

“Where’s Dad?” I asked.

She looked sorry for just a moment—a flicker of regret that touched her pretty green eyes for an instant before it vanished.

“Your father’s dead,” she said. There was no emotion in her voice. “Go to sleep, Erin. We’ll talk in the morning.”

I was dimly aware of her leaving my side. Einstein’s cold nose nuzzled my neck before he settled down beside me, his body warm against mine. The bed smelled like Juarez. It wasn’t familiar per se, but it wasn’t unpleasant, either. I closed my eyes.

And slept.

I woke up an indeterminate number of hours later to blinding sunlight streaming into windows devoid of drapes or dressings. It took a few seconds to reorient myself to my surroundings: strange bed, cardboard boxes sealed with duct tape against one wall, a table lamp and a dog-eared copy of
One Hundred Years of Solitude
on the floor by my head.

Juarez’s room.

Einstein was nowhere to be found. My cell phone was on the kitchen table and the house was spotless, dishes washed and stacked neatly in the strainer. There was no sign of Diggs, Juarez, or my mother. I dialed her cell while waiting for my coffee to brew, disoriented and pissed off. The clock on Diggs’ microwave read 1:20.

Kat answered on the fourth ring, her voice clipped and professional.

“Where the hell are you?” I interrupted, before she could finish her greeting. “And please tell me you have my dog.”

“He’s spreading a little cheer—I thought he could use an outing, and you clearly weren’t getting up anytime soon.”

“Because you drugged me, you psychopath.”

“And again with the drama. I’m at the clinic—I figured since I was in town, I should make some time to check the place out, make sure they’re still doing my name justice. I’ll just be another hour or so. You can meet me here if you’d like.”

I suppressed the urge to reach through the phone and strangle her. “No, that’s all right. Just come by the
Trib
when you’re done. An hour, right?”

I hung up and drank my coffee, no doubt in my mind that I wouldn’t see Kat before four o’clock.

At the
Trib
, Diggs was still weeding through conflicting reports from the cops about Hammond’s death. I retired to my office to sort through my own evidence, in a vain attempt to make sense of the latest bizarre developments in the case. My wall looked like one of those creepy serial killer shrines they have on all the primetime cop shows: charred bodies, medical reports and newspaper clippings, a sketchy timeline written in washable marker on the wall below.

As expected, there was still no sign of my mother when four o’clock rolled around. Diggs came in with coffee and a sandwich, and took his customary seat on the edge of my desk.

“So, what have we got here?”

I broke off a corner of his sandwich and popped it in my mouth, then grimaced when I realized it was some kind of that tofurkey crap he was always eating.

“That’ll teach you to steal my food.”

“Probably not.” I considered his original question. “I think whoever attacked me had to be the one who killed Hammond.”

“Makes sense. Any idea who that could be, though?”

I went through the list of suspects. Matt Perkins was missing now, but as far as I knew he had been safely tucked away in a hospital bed during my attack. Joe Ashmont, on the other hand...

“You’re sure it wasn’t Ashmont who jumped you?” Diggs asked, reading my mind.

“I think so. I can’t really explain why, but I just don’t think it was him.”

“’Cause he’s too sweet?”

I laughed. He took a sip of my coffee without asking, and pushed the rest of his sandwich toward me. I picked at a scrap of crust.

“No, I just—I would have known if it was him. I saw him at Hammond’s last night after the fire, and I just…” I stopped, trying to figure out how to verbalize what so far was nothing more than a gut feeling. “I feel like he wants to tell me something, but he can’t. As much shit as he’s given me, I’m not sure he’d actually hurt me.”

Diggs didn’t look convinced, but he didn’t argue.

“What about you?” I asked. “What’s the word so far on Hammond and the fire?”

“Officially?Undetermined. Unofficially—arson, and Noel was killed before the fire. It seems we have a killer with a conscience, though.”

I looked at him curiously.

“The cats,” he explained. “Whoever blew up the house took the time to get them out first—a neighbor found them prowling around the wreckage this morning.”

“So, a killer who doesn’t mind beating the crap out of girls or murdering an ex-cop with tow-headed grandbabies, but gets squeamish about torching the family feline. Bizarre.”

“Very,” agreed Diggs. “What did Kat have to say on the subject?”

“You mean before or after she slipped me a mickey and stole my dog? Precious little. She doesn’t actually deny any of it, but she’s definitely reticent about sharing her motives. As soon as she gets here, we’re gonna have a conversation.”

Since he had no response for this, I took the time to study my graffiti timeline. It was beginning to shape up in terms of names and dates, the ink still wet on the latest addition:
July, 1990—Rebecca Ashmont joins Payson Church.

“I still think it goes back to Becca Ashmont,” I said. “Which means Matt Perkins and my buddy Joe have to be in on this, one way or another.”

Diggs was quiet for a second or two. “And my father? You think he has something to do with this, too?”

I thought of the conversation I’d had with the Reverend yesterday afternoon—something I still hadn’t shared with Diggs. I’d known the question would come up eventually, of course. I just wished I had a better answer for him.

“There’s a chance he was involved.”

“With the fire, or with Rebecca Ashmont?”

I didn’t say anything for a second too long. I’m not a bad liar in general, but I’ve never been able to pull one over on Diggs.

“So… Daddy Diggs was a philanderer in his day,” he said. There was no real bitterness in his tone, but I knew better than to think that meant he was okay with the news. “The old man’s full of surprises. And you think he might have had something to do with the fire?”

Now that the big secret was out, it was pointless to hold anything else back. I began, relieved that I could finally paint the whole picture for someone else, in the hopes that he might see something I hadn’t. I told him about the call my father had received the night before the fire, and the subsequent call Adam had placed to Reverend Diggins before he dropped out of sight. I finished with my theory that the Reverend and Joe Ashmont had been headed out to the island to take Rebecca and her son away from the Paysons.

“And you think that kind of thing could have unsettled Payson enough that he might have lost it and killed the whole congregation? You knew this man, Sol—you honestly think he would have done that?”

I thought about it, flashing back to my own memories of Isaac Payson: a revival that ran late, with me stretched out on a homemade pew, my chin propped in my hands as I watched a woman writhe on the floor in the aisle, her skirt hiked high, tears streaming down reddened cheeks. Isaac’s hands on my shoulders, pushing me under frigid ocean water with my father looking on, waiting until I came back up.

“You are baptized in the holy spirit, washed in the blood of the lamb,” Isaac says to me. “Let it be known that him who goes against you goes against God, and he shall perish in the flames.”

I hadn’t been afraid.

But should I have been?

“I don’t know,” I finally said. I shook my head, the images coming back more quickly now. A man on his knees at the front of the church, his back bared; a woman with a cruel-looking switch in her hands, both of them crying. My father taking my hand.

“Come on, baby—let’s go back to the house. This isn’t for us.” Isaac standing in the background with his hands in the air, his eyes cast to the ceiling. Isaac’s voice, for us alone—“Stay.” An order. “She needs to see what happens to Satan when he dares walk among us.”

“Erin?” Diggs had gotten up. He stood in front of me, clearly concerned. “You still with me?”

I managed a nod. “I have to go. I need to talk to Kat.”

When I was a kid, the clinic was where I hung my hat more often than not. It was housed in a modular unit with a wheelchair ramp out front and limited off-street parking, just a few buildings down from the Diggins church. I wasn’t ready for the sense of familiarity it sparked when I walked through the front doors. More than the island, more than the
Tribune,
more than anything else I’d encountered since crossing the Littlehope town line, this felt like home.

I hung my coat on a wooden peg just inside the door, then took in the lobby. A pregnant girl no more than fifteen years old sat in an orange plastic chair, thumbing through a back issue of
Cosmo
. The woman behind the counter looked vaguely familiar, but only because Littlehope is a small town—a limited gene pool means just about everyone looks vaguely familiar. She was in her early twenties at the most, way too young for me to have known her when Kat was running the place.

“Can you tell me if Dr. Everett is here?” I asked.

At the sound of my voice, Einstein came barreling out of one of the back rooms. The receptionist did not look amused.

“She’s back there,” she said flatly.

Kat was reorganizing the old storage room—which, to her credit, did actually look like it could use some reorganization. Or a blowtorch.

“Can you believe this shit?” she asked. She didn’t even look up when I came in the room. “I obviously need to come back here more often—have you met the teenager at the front desk? And the so-called doctors here are a joke. I know it’s a full load, but there’s no excuse for this kind of laziness.”

I leaned against the doorsill, my arms crossed over my chest. Once it dawned on her that I wasn’t speaking, she stopped working and looked at me.

“I know—I’m late,” she said.

“Two hours late, actually, but who’s counting?”

“Just let me finish up here, and I’ll be right out. Another twenty minutes and I should have things wrapped up.”

Rather than starting another pointless argument, I dove into the fray with her. I started at a wall a few feet from where my mother was working, stacked floor to ceiling with shelves of unlabeled supplies.

“You have a marker?” I asked.

She smiled—a genuine Kat smile, almost impossible to find in nature. I felt that little thrill of triumph I used to get when I’d made her happy, which only succeeded in pissing me off further. I took the black Sharpie she handed me and got to work.

“I want you to tell me about Noel Hammond—your relationship with him. What happened the day of the fire,” I began, after we’d been working a while.

“It seems like you have it all figured out—that’s what Noel said, anyway.”

“You spoke with him?”

She met my eye. I tried to read her—to find a trace of remorse, some regret over the death of someone who, at the very least, had shared a bed with her once upon a time. True to form, she gave nothing away.

“He called me a few days ago to tell me I should call you and explain some things.”

“Why didn’t you?”

“I didn’t see you burning up the phone lines to get to me, either. I knew you’d call once you ran out of alternatives.”

If the comment was meant to make me feel guilty, it didn’t succeed. I pulled down another box, this one filled with sterile dressings, and counted, repacked, and labeled the contents.