Shades of Simon Gray (25 page)

She sat all night in the cramped waiting room, while her father paced the halls of the hospital and the surrounding grounds, stopping in the cafeteria for an occasional cup of coffee. She made notes in a pocket notebook she took with her to the hospital each day. She had taken to asking the nurses all kinds of questions: about the equipment, the med station, about comas. She’d about worn out her welcome in the intensive care unit. She could tell by the looks on the nurses’ faces each time she came through those double metal doors. But she didn’t much care. If something happened to Simon, if he died in this place as their mother had, Courtney had notes, a log. She had information. Maybe evidence. They weren’t going to get away with this twice.

Courtney took a long toke from her joint and looked out beyond the field. The sycamore in the cemetery was black with crows. A streak of sunlight appeared on the dark horizon, bathing the headstones in orange light. She couldn’t help thinking how Simon had almost ended up there, in a plot right next to their mother. He still might. It had taken the doctors two hours to finally stabilize him.

They had gotten this news a few minutes after Liz Shapiro had come storming into the waiting room. Courtney had been so upset about Simon, it never occurred to her how odd it was for Liz to be there at four in the morning. And not once did Liz offer an explanation, tell her why she’d suddenly appeared out of nowhere.

Even worse, she’d totally lost it. She’d let Liz put her
arm around her, had soaked Liz’s T-shirt with her tears. But when Liz asked about Simon, about what had happened, Courtney had stiffened and sat upright.

“Why don’t you ask him yourself?” she snapped. “You’re the one he seems to be communicating with. Maybe he can spell it all out for you with his finger. You know, draw letters in your hand or something.” The hurt on Liz’s face had only made it worse. Courtney had to look away. She had no idea why she was being such a jerk.

She took another toke of her joint and stared out over the cemetery. The crows lifted out of the sycamore, hundreds of them, and flew toward her. When they reached her backyard, they formed a swirling circle overhead, like an upside-down funnel cloud. If Courtney didn’t know better, she might have thought she was looking down into a whirlpool instead of up at the sky. She had the eerie feeling of being sucked up into the air. That was the exact moment she squashed the joint into the dirt and headed for the back door.

I
T WAS ALMOST DAWN
. A
HEAVY MIST HOVERED ABOVE
the ground. A few yards away, four men surrounded Jessup Wildemere beneath the Liberty Tree. One of the men pulled Jessup’s hands behind him and tied his wrists with leather thongs. Simon stood nearby, unable to move or speak.

He was just beginning to understand that there had been no trial. Jessup had not been kept in the jail overnight. He had not been tried in the local tavern. Simon knew this because the blood soaking Jessup’s clothes was still wet. The men had found him waiting here for Hannah and were going to execute him with their own hands. And Simon was sure the reason they had come
here in such short order was because Hannah Dobbler had told them exactly where to find Jessup.

He forced his body to take a step forward, out of the mist. Jessup looked over at him, his expression distant. Simon realized that the other men, who all wore clothes similar to Jessup’s, had no idea he was there.

One of the men asked Jessup if he wanted to pray. Jessup stared straight at him, saying nothing. Another man bound Jessup’s ankles with thongs. Jessup turned his gaze back to Simon. When their eyes met, Simon felt the surface of his skin buzz and the fine hair on his arms stand straight up as if he were surrounded by an electrical current. He wanted to look away, but Jessup held him with his eyes.

Simon could not stop what had already taken place more than two hundred years earlier. His stomach lurched as one of the men put the rope around Jessup’s neck and tossed it over a low branch; another tied the end to his saddle. There would be no drop, only the backward step of the horse pulling Jessup a few inches from the ground.

It was a messy affair. The sight of Jessup’s jerking, twisting body, his face swelling, black with congestion, eyes bulging, brought Simon to his knees. He could barely breathe, himself. He squeezed his eyes shut.

The spasmodic strangling sounds stopped, and when Simon looked up, the four men had vanished. Only he and Jessup remained in the gray dawn.

The wind began to blow so fiercely Jessup Wildemere’s body swayed back and forth like a pendulum.
Simon sat on the ground and leaned back against the oak, eye level with Jessup’s boots, for what seemed like an eternity. The gray dawn finally gave way to the glare of mid-morning, a sharp intense light that made his eyes ache.

He wanted to let himself off the hook. He knew there was nothing he could have done to stop the hanging. Still, his stomach continued to churn so badly he was sure he was going to be sick. But it was the tears that truly caught him off guard. They dripped off his chin and left splotches on his hospital gown. He cried for Jessup, for what couldn’t be undone, and most of all, for the injustice. An innocent man had died. His only crime had been to fall in love with the wrong woman.

Simon, his back against the tar-coated wound, thought of all the things Jessup could have done differently, not the least of which would have been to leave town before the men came to arrest him. But all he’d cared about was Hannah.

He stared up at the body that had once housed Jessup Wildemere, at the open mouth, the swollen tongue, the bulging eyes, the engorged plum-colored face. He knew Jessup believed himself to be a partner in the murder of Cornelius Dobbler, although he’d had no way of knowing Hannah would kill her own father. Nor had he ever held the knife in his own hands. Still, if they had not fallen in love, none of this would have happened. From the look on Jessup’s face, right before the men hanged him, Simon could tell Jessup had accepted his fate, maybe even believed himself guilty. But he also knew, when Jessup had held him with his gaze in those last few seconds, that he
wanted something from Simon. The men who took Jessup’s life had broken the law. There had been no trial, no jury, no judge. Jessup had been hanged without benefit of counsel and without mercy. What Jessup wanted, what anyone in his position would want, as Simon saw it, was justice.

But how was he going to right a two-hundred-year-old wrong? The men who had hanged Jessup were nothing but moldering dust.

A deep anger welled up in Simon. He was furious at Jessup for being so stupid. “This was your
life
,” he shouted to the empty shell overhead. He raised his fist in the air, punched at it in a rage. “You blew it, man. You really
blew
it!”

He leaned sideways, turning away from the sight hanging a few feet away, and pressed one palm against the gash in the tree. He felt the jagged edge of the scar as he got to his feet. Suddenly the memory of that night—the night of the accident—came crashing into his mind. Simon thought his heart might stop beating. For in that moment he knew his foot hadn’t come down on the gas pedal by mistake. He knew he could have slammed on the brakes as soon as he realized what was happening, could have lessened the impact. But in that split second, with the tree looming ahead of him, he had seen his chance, his way out, and gone for it.

Liz was in the hospital cafeteria. She was on her third cup of coffee since she’d arrived early that morning. A plate of
cold, half-eaten scrambled eggs and toast sat in front of her.

Courtney and her father had gone home to get a few hours of sleep and would be back later. But Liz couldn’t bring herself to leave. All her instincts told her Simon wasn’t out of the woods yet. The doctors might have stabilized him, but that didn’t mean he couldn’t slip away from them again.

She wished she had brought something with her to read; even Lucinda Alderman’s daily account of her boring, backbreaking life would have been better than nothing. Liz was sorry she didn’t have her notebook with her. She could have been working on her oral report, which was scheduled for Tuesday.

She would have to give one fantastic, knock-their-socks-off presentation on Jessup Wildemere if she was going to save her grade in history. The paper she’d dashed off in the wee hours of Friday morning might net her a C if Mrs. Rosen was in a generous mood. But more than likely Liz thought she would end up with a C minus. She didn’t doubt for a minute she deserved it. It was her own fault for not reading Lucinda’s diary as soon as she’d brought it home. The journal had ended up having far more information than she could have ever processed in those few hours before she had to turn in her paper.

Liz felt in her pocket for a pen. Nothing. She wondered if there was one in the glove compartment out in the car, then decided to see if the woman behind the counter had one. The woman, whose eyes were ringed with dark liner,
rummaged around beneath the counter and found an extra pencil. Liz grabbed a handful of paper napkins from the dispenser and returned to her table. She planned to use this waiting time to make notes on how she wanted to present her findings to the class on Tuesday.

She hoped Mrs. Rosen would be as blown away as she had been when she discovered how Lucinda Alderman had suspected Jessup was falling in love with Hannah Dobbler. Hannah Dobbler, Cornelius’s daughter, had been engaged to their neighbor, Elias Belcher. Lucinda had worried about what Hannah’s father or Elias Belcher would do if they found out. But Lucinda had been afraid to say anything to Jessup. She didn’t want him to know she suspected anything.

Liz had actually leaped off her bed and danced around the room when she finally came upon a passage about Jessup’s hanging.

Liz had sat on her bed, the journal open on her lap. She shook her head in wonder. Somewhere nestled within the roots of the Hanging Tree, perhaps beneath the asphalt or under the sidewalk, rested the remains of Jessup Wildemere, undisturbed for more than two hundred years. Like everyone else in Bellehaven, she might well have walked over his bones hundreds of times, maybe thousands, considering she passed by the tree every day on her way to school. As if this wasn’t unsettling enough, the journal entry that followed, written two days later, was even more disturbing.