Guilt (32 page)

“Drugs?”

Annie's blinked once. He took it for a
yes
.

“That's him!” shouted a man's voice. Peter felt himself being seized by the shoulders and pulled back.

“That's her boyfriend,” a nurse said, pointing an accusatory finger at Peter.

A doctor was beside Annie now. He pressed his fingers against her wrist. “She's got a pulse.” He pushed open one eyelid.

“She's been drugged,” Peter said.

“I can see that.” He turned to Peter. “What did you give her?”

“It wasn't me. It was—” He stopped. Why was he wasting time defending himself? Here were caregivers who had the power to help Annie. He remembered, Annie had said Klevinski was a former heroin addict.

“I think it's heroin,” he said.

“You think?”

“Well, I told you I didn't … Yeah. Heroin.” Peter prayed that he was right. Annie's symptoms jibed with a heroin overdose.

“Narcan. Two milligrams. IV. Now,” the doctor said. A nurse rushed off.

Peter stood there feeling helpless. His back was coated with a cold sweat. He barely felt the security guard tighten his lock on him.

When he'd found Kate in her ceramics studio, her throat slit, no amount of CPR or drug antidote could have brought her back. Annie was still there, inert but breathing. Why the hell wasn't the nurse back? Annie seemed to be going whiter by the second, her lips tinged with blue.
Please, don't scare me like this
.

Finally there were running footsteps in the hall. The nurse returned with a cart and handed the doctor an IV bag. Peter winced as the doctor probed the already raw skin inside Annie's arm. He held his breath as the doctor found a vein, inserted the needle, and hooked up the IV.

The second hand on the clock jerked, then jerked again. Peter couldn't remember the last time he'd prayed for anything, but he was praying now. Still nothing. He knew Narcan was used to treat overdoses of narcotics like heroin. That meant it worked for morphine, Demerol. But what if he hadn't given her heroin. What if this was going to make her sicker? What if …

Annie took a sharp inhalation of breath and tried to sit up. She swatted the doctor away and gasped.

Peter felt his knees go as relief surged through him. The security guard started to pull him away.

“Annie, tell them it wasn't me.”

But Annie was retching off the side of the bed.

The security guard propelled him out of the room. “Tell your story to the police,” he said.

There, charging up the hall, were two uniformed police officers and MacRae. For once, Peter was glad to see him.

33

A
NNIE TRUDGED
up the stairs to her office, cradling her plaster-covered broken arm in front of her. It ached with each step. In fact, her whole body hurt—hips, back, and shoulders—and her ribs complained each time she tried to fill her lungs with air. It was a potent reminder of the bruises she wore all over in shades of gray, black, blue, and magenta, reminiscent of her old parochial school uniform.

They'd made her stay in the hospital for three more days after the morphine overdose, then sent her home with orders to rest. By then Luke was up and around; he'd be going home in a few days, too.

She'd been so relieved when the police arrested Joe Klevinski. They'd stopped him at a border crossing into Canada, the Chevy wagon packed with suitcases. Sophie and Jackie were in the car with him. Now he was in jail awaiting indictment, and MacRae had promised Annie that finding Brenda and Joey Klevinski would become a police priority. Annie hadn't talked to Jackie—she felt awkward calling her, and Jackie hadn't been in touch.

At home, Annie had managed to stay in bed for one day, flipping TV channels and going nuts. Pearl brought over a potted chicken. Annie's mother brought a tuna casserole and Annie's favorite barbecue potato chips. She'd scarfed down the entire bag in one sitting.

The next day she'd paced, wondering if the police were finding Brenda and Joey alive and well in Michigan, or if their skeletal remains were being excavated from the basement of the North Cambridge apartment building where they'd once lived.

Sleep brought her vivid nightmares of explosions and suffocation. When she finally wrenched awake, she'd be gasping for air, drenched in sweat, the smell of creosote and burnt rubber in her head.

That morning, she'd woken up exhausted, determined to go into her office and see for herself. The nightmare images her brain was conjuring couldn't be worse than the real thing.

All she'd done was take a shower, get dressed, put some makeup over the bruises that showed worst, and driven over. But her legs felt like sandbags as she climbed the steps, and by the time she reached their office she had to drop her leather bag to the floor and lean against the wall to catch her breath. There was a piece of plywood nailed over the space in the door where the pebble glass pane had been blown out.
Things can be replaced, people can't,
her mother's voice reminded her. That was right before she'd said,
Give yourself time to recover
.

Annie fumbled with the key and opened the lock. When she pushed the door open, darkness greeted her. It was cold inside, and the windows were boarded over. She gagged on the smell, pine cleaner over layers of smoke. She remembered. Chip told her that cleaners had come to do what they could, and a building engineer had proclaimed the overall structure fit.

She put her hand over her mouth and nose and felt for the light switch. Click. No lights came on. Damn. She fished a penlight from her bag and swept the interior with the beam.

The outer office had been emptied of most of the furniture. File cabinets, buckled and twisted like modern sculptures, were pushed against the wall. Wires dangled from the ceiling where there had been light fixtures. On the floor were two neat mounds of debris, and three orange traffic cones marked the perimeter of a soot-rimmed hole in the floor, about three feet in diameter.

Annie approached the crater, feeling ahead with her foot to be sure the boards were solid. Gingerly, she lowered herself into a crouch. As she reached out to touch the edge of splintered wood, she felt her face convulse, her stomach seize up. That hole was meant to be all that was left of her. But it wasn't herself she was thinking of. It was Mary Alice Boudreaux. She'd been
holding
the bomb, for god's sake. Annie steadied herself. She rummaged in her bag for a tissue.
Get a grip
.

How bad was her office? she wondered. She stumbled to her feet and made her way there. A few shards of wood attached to the hinges were all that was left of the office door. She shone the light around the interior. The windows were boarded over here, too, but otherwise it wasn't nearly as bad. Most of her furniture was still there, except for the lamp that had been her mother's. Its porcelain base would have shattered. A brass reading light had survived.

She sat in her desk chair and leaned back. The cushion smelled slightly of smoke. The file cabinets were still intact, and so was her desk. The computer was gone. Maybe the data on it could be rescued. Or maybe not. She was surprised at how little it bothered her. They'd figure out how to cope. If nothing else, something like this gave you a little healthy perspective on what was important.

She sat there in the silence, the echoes of the explosion still palpable. It was so quiet. No phones ringing, no hum of fluorescent lights and computers. Then she heard a door close. It hadn't occurred to her to notice whether their downstairs neighbors, a realty office, had been damaged or not. Maybe they were open for business.

There were footsteps on the stairs. Annie jerked to attention, sending a spasm of pain through her arm. She felt the adrenaline burst, her heart pounding, though she knew it was ridiculous. Joe Klevinski was in jail. It was probably just Chip or one of the cleaning crew.

Still, she turned off the flashlight and rolled her chair well back into the shadows to where she could see through to the reception area and into the hall. She heard footsteps cross the upstairs hall. A tall, thin figure stood silhouetted against the hall light. Annie breathed a sigh of relief.

“Jackie?” Annie called.

Jackie gave a little scream as Annie flashed the light on her. Jackie held one hand to her chest and the other shading her face.

“Annie? You scared the bejesus out of me.”

“That makes two of us.”

“It's too friggin' dark in here,” Jackie said. “I was hoping I could see if any of my things were salvageable.”

“Hang on, maybe I can jury-rig some light in here.” Annie said. The hall light worked; maybe the wall outlets out there did, too.

Annie got the brass reading lamp from her office and plugged it into the extension cord that had been hooked to her computer. She snaked the cord out into the hall and plugged it in. She turned the switch, and
voilà
.

“Let there be light,” Jackie said. They both started to laugh, but the laughter cut off as they looked at one another.

Jackie's face was bruised, and a cut had been stitched across her cheekbone. Annie knew from the way Jackie was looking at her that the makeup she'd put on wasn't doing such a hot job of covering her own bruises.

Jackie looked away. She went over to one of the debris piles and began to pick through it.

“I'm sorry,” Annie said to Jackie's back, not sure exactly what she was apologizing for. Maybe for being right.

Jackie flashed her an angry look. “I asked you to back off. I begged you. But no, you had to back him into a corner. You humiliated him.” She stood and kicked at the pile of charred remains. “Looks like everything I care about got blasted all to hell.”

She turned and walked out of the office. Annie felt empty listening to Jackie's footsteps receding down the stairs. The front door opened and slammed shut. She knew Jackie wouldn't be coming back.

*   *   *

Leaves swirled through the air as Annie stared down at the grave. Her arm was still in a cast, and her wrist ached in the cold, though the bruises on her body had turned to shadowy splotches. Peter put his arm around her shoulders and pulled her close.

“I wonder where they're going to bury Brenda and Joey Klevinski,” she said. The police had found their remains buried in the community garden across the street from their old apartment, in the plot Brenda had gardened. Klevinski had signed up for it every year since her disappearance. Annie shuddered at the thought: Brenda had literally dug her own grave.

Brenda's sister had come forward to claim the bodies. Annie hoped their graves would be less bleak and anonymous than these, lined up like so many rectangles in an accountant's ledger. Only the small headstone lying on the ground, a stone pillow, identified this space as Constance Florence's grave.
Constance
. Annie hadn't known that was her friend Charlotte's mother's first name. She'd been thirty-seven years old when she died, just three years older than Annie.

“I wish I could have helped her.”

“Annie, you were just a kid.”

“Yeah, but I knew what was happening.” Beyond the wind she could hear trucks rumbling down a neighboring street. “Maybe now at least I've evened the score.”

“You could've been killed.”

“Jackie and Sophie could've been killed.”

“Why didn't you at least tell me what you were up to?”

“You'd have had a fit. I knew you didn't approve of my getting involved in Jackie's personal life.”

She felt Peter stiffen. “Since when do I get to approve or disapprove of what you do?”

“So you wouldn't have told me to back off?”

“Well…”

“Peter, I've been doing my own thing without checking in with anyone since I was twelve.”

“And I don't
want
you to check in. But next time you decide to bearbait a murderer, would you give me a heads-up? Could you just get used to the idea that I'm going to worry about you?”

“I'll try.” Annie rested her head on Peter's shoulder. “Jackie quit. She blames me for what happened. She says I backed Joe into a corner.” If she could turn back time, Annie wondered, would she really do anything different? “I pushed him, didn't I?”

“You must have scared him good. Who knows, maybe he was back on drugs.”

“Uncontrollable rage. You think that'll be his defense?”

“Could be a mitigating factor. I'm glad it's not up to me to sell it to a jury.”

Abby could be blaming Annie, too, for getting Luke nearly killed. But she wasn't.

“Did you see, they indicted Blankstein?” Peter asked. “He's pleading guilty. Refused an attorney.”

“That'll save the taxpayers a whole lot of money. He's insane, isn't he?”

Peter nodded. A light rain started to fall. They headed back toward his car.

“Looks like they won't have to postpone the wedding,” Annie said as Peter started the engine. “Luke will be on crutches. I'll have my arm in a sling.”

“You never told me about the dress. Puff sleeves?”

“Not a one. It's gorgeous. Well, it was, anyway. Abby's got a new one on order.”

Peter drove along the road in the cemetery, from one flat, featureless stretch of lawn to the next.

“I'd much rather be cremated,” Annie said.

“Me, too, actually,” Peter said. His hand crept over to hers. “But not until we're both old and gray and have grandchildren.”

Annie felt herself flush with pleasure and squeezed his hand back.

 

 

ALSO BY G. H. EPHRON

Obsessed

Delusion

Addiction

Amnesia

GUILT.
Copyright © 2005 by G. H. Ephron. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews. For information, address St. Martin's Press, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010.