Die Job (7 page)

I slid onto the booth seat next to Althea, across from Mom and Stella. “Sorry I’m late,” I said, smiling gratefully at the server who immediately filled my coffee cup. I took a long swallow. Ah, caffeine. “You wouldn’t believe what happened at the ghost hunt last night.”

I filled them in on the preceding night’s events and they interjected, “Oh, no!” and, “I can’t believe it!” as I shared my story. I paused my recital to order scrambled eggs, biscuits, and grits, then told them about finding Braden and the trip to the hospital. I left out the bit about Hank putting the moves on me; I didn’t want to listen to another refrain of “What did you ever see in him?” He was sweet and he loved me and he got to be a habit . . . what can I say?

Althea shook her head, setting the double wooden hoops in her lobes clacking.

“My, my,” she said. “I knew nothing good would come of that ghost hunt. What was that school thinking?”

Stella leaned forward, tucking a strand of red hair behind her ear. Usually accepting of people and situations as she
found them, she had a disgusted look on her gentle face. “Education has become nothing more than entertainment,” she said. “Teachers have to compete with kids texting and only wanting to play video games or check Facebook. I’m not surprised they go out on a limb with something like a ghost hunt to try and get their students’ attention.” At forty-one, Stella had a daughter in middle school.

“Is Rachel holding up okay?” Mom asked, cutting into the stack of blueberry pancakes on her plate.

“I haven’t talked to her this morning,” I said. “She was pretty upset last night. She thinks it’s her fault because she went to the bathroom and left Braden alone.”

“Well, my goodness,” Althea said. “The boy must be eighteen years old. It’s not like she needs to babysit him.”

“No,” Stella put in, “but I can understand how she feels. You can’t help but feel responsible when people you care about are troubled or hurt.”

“Amen,” Mom said with a decisive nod.

“Anyway, Hank says the police are calling it an accident, although no one knows why Braden went up on the landing,” I said. I spread homemade strawberry-rhubarb preserves on my biscuit and took a big bite. Heaven.

“Maybe he saw the ghost and went up to check it out,” Stella suggested.

Althea stopped eating and looked at her. “Are you saying you believe in ghosts?” she asked.

“I don’t
not
believe in them,” Stella said after a moment’s thought. “There are just too many things that happen in this world that science can’t explain. And whether you think of them as ghosts or spirits or ‘presences,’ you’ve got to admit there’s more going on around us than we can understand.”

“I
suppose next you’ll be saying you believe in zombies and werewolves,” Althea said.

Stella’s pale skin flushed red. “I didn’t say that.”

Althea thrust her chin up a hair, defensively, but then lowered it. “Sorry, Stel. I know it’s not the same. And it’s not as if I haven’t thought I felt my William nearby a time or two over the years. I guess I’m just fed up with the way everyone these days seems obsessed with the supernatural. That series all the teen girls are gaga over—the one with the vampire and the high school girl. I took my niece Kendra to the mall last Saturday and all she could talk about was how romantic it was. Fah! And there’s that series about the woman who sees the future or the past or some such rot, and that Spirit Whisperer woman, Ava something, who has that talk show where she chats with ghosts—excuse me, ‘spirits.’ Don’t get me started.”

“Too late,” Mom observed dryly.

We all laughed as Althea stabbed a fork into a sausage patty. “All I’m saying is that keeping up with the people we can see and touch in the here and now ought to be more than enough for anybody.”

A woman seated near the window got up to leave and I recognized Lucy Mortimer. She saw me at the same time and veered toward us, tucking the book she’d been reading into her purse. Wearing a shirtwaist dress in a forgettable blue and tan print, and with her slightly frizzy hair loose around her face, she looked very different than she had last night.

“Grace!” she said, stopping beside our table, oblivious to the server trying to slide past her with a loaded tray.

“Good morning, Lucy,” Mom said.

“Hello,” Lucy said absently, so caught up in whatever she wanted to say that she barely acknowledged Mom and Althea
and Stella. She twisted an opal ring around her pinkie. “Did you hear? They’re accusing Cyril of trying to kill that high school boy!” Her voice rose and people at a nearby table looked over.

“Who is, Lucy? The police told me it was an accident.”

“A reporter. She called me this morning and said she’d heard Cyril Rothmere’s ghost tried to kill someone. She wanted me to give her a quote and let her come out to the mansion to take photos.” Lucy fairly quivered with emotion. “As if Cyril would do such a thing!”

“I thought you didn’t believe in ghosts,” I said.

“I don’t—not really—but some people do, and they are going to tarnish Cyril’s reputation. I won’t stand for it.” The tip of Lucy’s nose turned pink with indignation.

“Braden McCullers is in a coma,” I said pointedly. “He may not recover.”

“Who?” Lucy looked confused but then her face cleared. “Oh, the boy who got hurt. Well, it’s a terrible thing that he’s so badly injured. I certainly hope he gets better soon.”

“That’s nice of you, Lucy,” I said, feeling more kindly toward her. I’d thought her reaction to the incident last night was a bit unfeeling. Maybe she’d just been shocked by it all.

“Of course. When he’s able to talk again, he can tell everyone it wasn’t Cyril who pushed him!”

After breakfast, I called Rachel to see how she was doing. She was at the hospital, she said, and there was no change in Braden’s condition. She sounded woebegone, so I decided to drive up to Brunswick and sit with her for a while. My laundry and real estate listings could wait. State Road 42 led me out of St. Elizabeth to the west where
I hooked up with I-95. The trip to Brunswick was painless on a Sunday afternoon and I easily found a parking spot in the hospital lot. High cirrus clouds, the hurricane’s advance guard, obscured the sky and seemed lower than when I left St. Elizabeth. I made a mental note to listen to a weather report on my way back. Passing the gift shop on my way through the lobby, I veered in to pick up a small plant for Braden. Maybe some greenery would speed his recovery. The clerk, wearing cat ears on her head and with whiskers drawn across her cheeks, said, “Happy Halloween,” when I paid.

The ICU waiting room was depressingly full of people. An Asian family clustered together at one end of the room, adults talking quietly while four children watched cartoons on the television with the volume turned low. Braden’s family and friends gathered around a table at the other end of the room, takeout containers emitting the scent of fried chicken cluttering the surface. Rachel sat off to the side by herself, her arms pulling her knees close to her chest, her head bowed. She didn’t see me come in.

Braden’s mother, a plump woman with her son’s wheat blond hair, accepted the plant with thanks. “They don’t allow flowers and such in the ICU,” she told me, “but I’m sure Braden will enjoy this when he’s moved to a regular room. The doctors say they’ll move him this afternoon. That must mean he’s doing better, that he’ll wake up soon, right?” She looked to her husband for confirmation.

He reached over to squeeze her hand. A lanky man with slightly stooped shoulders, he had light brown hair graying at the temples and might have looked distinguished if worry hadn’t been dragging down his face, accentuating the grooves in his forehead and the brackets around his thin lips. “That’s right, Darla. Thank you for being so thoughtful,
Miss Terhune. I’m sorry . . . how did you say you know Braden again?”

“Rachel Whitley introduced me last summer,” I said. “And I was a chaperone for the field trip last night.”

Darla McCullers’s mouth fell open a half inch and tears began streaming down her face. Without a word, she turned away and went to sit with two women I knew from their similar profiles had to be her sisters.

Guilt flayed me, like a thousand paper cuts slicing my skin.

“We know you didn’t mean for this to happen,” Mr. McCullers said, pinching the bridge of his nose and squeezing his eyes shut for a moment. “It’s not anyone’s fault. Accidents happen. We can’t protect our kids from everything, can we? From less and less as they get older.” He smiled sadly. “Do you have children, Miss Terhune?”

“No,” I choked out. Darla’s tears and his attempt to absolve me of blame made me feel awful.

“They are life’s greatest joy,” he said, and drifted over to join his wife.

I stood still for a moment, stricken by their grief and the sense that it was my fault. I could tell myself there was no way I could’ve kept an eye on all of the students last night, but that didn’t make me feel better. Neither did reminding myself that there were three other adults present. We’d all allowed ourselves to be distracted by the fireworks, and Braden might die because of our lack of attentiveness. I took two deep breaths and forced myself to move toward Rachel, where she was huddled on the plastic chair. I sat. She raised her head a fraction when my weight rocked the connected chairs.

“Oh. Hi. You didn’t have to come.”

“Yes, I did. C’mon. Let’s get out of here for a bit. I’ll buy you a milk shake at that diner down the block.”

Her gaze slanted toward Braden’s parents. I forestalled her objection. “You can’t camp out here until Braden comes out of the coma. It could be hours or days.” Or weeks or never. I was no expert, but I knew enough to realize that moving Braden to a regular room only meant that he wasn’t in imminent danger of dying, not that he’d necessarily come out of the coma any time soon.

Unfolding her arms and legs, she stood. The dark circles under her eyes had nothing to do with makeup because her face was scrubbed clean. She looked younger without the heavy eyeliner and mascara. “Okay. But I need to be back here in, like, half an hour.”

I was going to try to persuade her to go home and call a friend or get ready for the school week, but I said, “Fine.”

A thin cardboard skeleton leered from the diner door and swung loose-jointedly when we walked in. The diner smelled of fried onions and was too warm, so we ordered our shakes to go. This part of Brunswick didn’t seem to have a park, so we strolled down the sidewalk heading away from the hospital. Gusty winds tossed discarded plastic bags high in the air and scooted an abandoned comics page from the Sunday newspaper along the sidewalk in front of us. A homeless man, drunk or asleep, leaned against the rough concrete wall of a closed video store. I hoped there was a nearby shelter he could take refuge in if the hurricane hit.

I spooned up a slushy mouthful of chocolate shake and looked over at Rachel. She was working so hard to suck her strawberry shake through a straw that her cheeks were concave with effort. She gave up and started using the straw like a chopstick to scoop shake into her mouth.

“What have the doctors said about Braden?” I asked.

“He’s got a lot of brain swelling,” she said, concentrating
on swirling her straw through the thick ice cream mixture. “And the broken leg. But it’s the brain injury that’s worrying them. I overheard the main doc tell Braden’s folks that with brain injuries, there’s just no way of, like, knowing exactly what’s going on inside their heads or how long they might be in a coma or if there’ll be any permanent damage when the person wakes up. Doctors are just useless!” She yelled the last words, startling a small flock of pigeons pecking hopefully around a trash can. They flapped into the air in a flurry of gray, white, and tan feathers, settling to the ground just feet away to fight over a limp French fry.

I didn’t try to argue with her about the utility of doctors. “I’m sure they’re doing all they can. And Braden’s young—resilient.”

“Like I haven’t heard that thirty times this morning,” she said sullenly. Kicking at a pebble, she watched as it skipped over the curb and clattered down a storm drain.

Her anger and moodiness seemed out of proportion. I’d expected her to be worried about Braden, but her reaction seemed a bit off. I eyed her profile, noting the way she gripped her lips together and tugged at a lock of hair behind her ear.

“What’s wrong, Rach?” I asked.

“My best friend is, like, sucked into a black hole in his brain, and you ask me what’s wrong?” She hurled the remains of her shake at a metal trash can, but missed, splattering strawberry goo across the sidewalk and into the street. Drawing in a quick breath, she started to run, arms pumping hard, black hair flopping against her shoulders.

Depositing my cup in the trash, I jogged after her, not trying to catch up with her, but wanting to keep her in sight. She didn’t run long. After only two blocks, she wrapped an arm
around a light pole and spun around it, sinking to the ground. As I stopped a few feet away, I asked myself, What would Mom do?

I, of course, had been a delightful teen, helpful, courteous, and happy all the time. I never obsessed over acne or feeling fat. I never sobbed my heart out when Hank flirted with another girl or my best friend, Vonda, deserted me for a whole week to hang with Stephanie Matejka. I never overreacted to a bad grade or imagined slight. Hah! I remembered Mom’s technique for kicking a little sense into me and Alice Rose when we let our moods or hormones get the better of us.

“Enough, Rachel,” I said in as unsympathetic a voice as I could muster. “Stand up, blow your nose, and tell me what the heck is eating at you.”

She looked up, surprised at my tone. Sniffing, she dug in her jeans pocket for a tissue and scrubbed at her tear-stained face. I held out a hand, and when she took it, I hauled her up.

“Let’s sit.” I pointed to a bus stop and we settled on the bench with its back advertising a local Realtor. The red metal bench had a woven look to it, with holes for water to drain through. “Talk to me.”

She fixed her eyes on mine and bit her lip. Finally, she said, “I’m not sure Braden’s fall was, like, an accident.”