Tangled Ashes (30 page)

“I think she’s gone into shock.”

“What do you mean, she’s in shock?”

“I don’t know how it happened. She seemed fine last time I—”

“When was the last time you examined her?” the older nurse asked as she quickly ascertained the progress of Elise’s labor.

“I don’t know—maybe an hour?”

“It’s been longer,” Marie said, her voice rough with fear. “At least three.”

Frau Heinz didn’t say anything. She speared the younger nurse with a glare that made her step back and look away.

“I got busy,” Nurse Grüber said, her trepidation audible.

Frau Heinz removed her gloves. “You were to tell me if the baby hadn’t turned by the time she was fully dilated!”

“I know, I—”

“Be quiet! We’ll have time for your excuses later. Right now, I need your help.”

Marie stood in the doorway, nausea overwhelming her, her breathing ragged and her mind in a panic. She watched as the two nurses stripped back the sheets and began to apply firm pressure to the sides of Elise’s belly, slowly rotating clockwise, then repeating the same procedure. There was a red stain growing where Elise lay.

“Is she all right?” Though she’d formed the words, no sound had escaped Marie’s lips. She took a deep breath and tried again. “Is she going to be all right?”

This time, the nurses heard her. Frau Heinz glanced over her shoulder to the doorway where Marie had stood since the beginning of the crisis. “I’m not sure,” she said. “If she has relatives—anyone—in Lamorlaye, now would be a good time to summon them.”

“She doesn’t,” Marie said, the nurse’s words knocking the wind out of her. “I mean, she does, but they moved to Brittany several months ago, and—”

“Who’s the father?”

“Karl. He’s downstairs in the meeting.”

Frau Heinz shoved the younger nurse toward the door. “Go down there and get him. And don’t come back unless he’s with you!” she ordered, her attention back on the pale and motionless young girl in the bed in front of her. “This isn’t good,” she said to Marie.

Marie’s composure shattered. Sobs shook her body as she sank to her knees in the doorway, afraid of entering the room and being a witness to her friend’s death. “I told her she wasn’t dying,” she sobbed. “I told her she’d be fine. . . .”

The sound of boots racing up the stairs temporarily distracted her from her anguish. Karl came rushing into the room, still in uniform at nearly one in the morning. He stopped so abruptly when he saw Elise on the bed that he lost his balance and had to grab for the edge of the birthing table that stood in the middle of the room. He said nothing, staring horrified at the pale form in the bed. “Is she . . . ?”

Frau Heinz shook her head. “No—but she’s critical.”

“What happened?” He was as pale as Elise, staring at her with so much shock and disbelief that his face seemed frozen in a contorted rictus of pain. “She was doing fine when I saw her last week. . . .” He motioned toward her and shook his head.

“Her baby is in a transverse position—sideways. We thought it might turn on its own, but . . .”

“Weren’t you watching her?” He turned on Marie, confusion and anger dueling in his eyes. “Weren’t you watching her?” he asked again.

“That young lady never left her friend’s side except to get help,” Frau Heinz said, casting a withering glance at the young man, who hadn’t moved from the center of the room since he’d stormed in. “I’ve almost got your baby rotated,” she said, turning back to Elise and applying so much pressure to the outside of her belly that Karl cringed. “Get over here, Nurse Grüber. This is going to take both of us, and the baby is in too much distress to wait any longer.”

It took them less than a minute to finish rotating the baby. Elise regained some consciousness, moaning from the force being exerted on her body. Once the baby was in position, Frau Heinz ordered Karl out of the room and instructed Marie to sit behind her friend and prop her up. The young mother’s eyes were open but unfocused. “Tell her to push,” the nurse instructed Marie. And she did just that, urging her friend to bear down with any amount of strength she had left, while both nurses used their hands to apply more pressure to the top and sides of Elise’s belly, pushing the baby down and out with enough force that Marie feared the procedure itself would kill her friend.

The baby didn’t make any noise after it was delivered. The younger nurse immediately whisked it away to another room. “What . . . ?” Frau Heinz murmured when a rush of bright-red blood began to pour from Elise’s body. She reached for a towel to try stanching the flow. “Nurse Grüber!” she called. “Nurse Grüber, get in here this minute.”

“What’s happening?” Karl asked, entering the room at the tense sound of Frau Heinz’s voice, his eyes riveted on the frightening quantity of blood spreading into the sheets. “Why is she bleeding so much?”

“Her uterus has torn,” Frau Heinz answered, her voice a combination of anger and defeat. She discarded the soaked towel and reached for another one, applying pressure but looking as if she knew that it wouldn’t be any help. “The labor was too hard, and the delivery . . .” She shook her head. “The pressure was too much.”

“What are you saying?” Marie pleaded. “What are you saying?”

The nurse slowly took her hands from the blood-soaked towel she’d been using to absorb the hemorrhage and wiped the sweat from her forehead with her wrist. “There’s nothing we can do,” she said quietly.

“What?” It was a gut-wrenching cry. Marie covered her mouth with her hand and stared, horrified, at the nurse.

There was a moment of silence before Karl asked, “Is she dying?”

“Young man . . .” In a gesture of uncharacteristic kindness, Frau Heinz left Elise’s side and took Karl by the arm, guiding the unsteady soldier closer to the bed. “We’re not set up for this kind of emergency,” she said. “And even if we were . . .” She glanced down at the pale young mother in the bed. “There is nothing—nothing we can do. A torn uterus is . . . I’m sorry.”

The young woman’s blood had soaked through the thin mattress of the bed and was dripping to the floor beneath it. Karl reached out and touched Elise’s arm with his fingertips, seemingly too frightened to do more than establish that tenuous contact.

Frau Heinz, who had been using a stethoscope to listen to Elise’s heart, straightened and laid a hand on his shoulder. “You need to say your good-byes,” she said, including Marie in the instructions.

Marie swallowed the bile rising in her throat and tried to take a deep-enough breath to fill her lungs. “No,” she breathed, but there was more confusion than conviction in the sound.

Karl took a shuddering breath as his shoulders sagged, and a low moan escaped his lips. “Why can’t you save her?” he asked. “Why can’t you save her?”

“I’m sorry,” Frau Heinz said.

Karl didn’t move as the nurse listened to Elise’s heart again, then took the stethoscope from her ears. “She’s gone.”

B
ECKER SPENT MOST
of the night watching the firemen trying to rescue the stables. All that remained of the building by morning was its shell, the majority of the interior having been reduced to a smoking pile of ashes. The firemen had battled the blaze until nearly dawn, on a couple of occasions thinking they’d tamed it before another hot spot burst into flames.

Fallon hadn’t left the scene. He’d observed the firefighters’ efforts from the sidelines until the police had arrived, then spent an hour or so discussing the circumstances of the fire while the detectives took notes. Becker had been brought into the discussion when they’d covered Jojo’s rescue of Thérèse, but he’d found there were few clear memories in his mind aside from the stark urgency and the opaque smoke. And the expression in Jojo’s eyes when he’d identified himself as Thérèse’s father—Becker remembered that, too.

Fallon headed home around nine on Sunday morning, knowing further investigation of the fire would have to wait at least a few hours for the ashes to cool. The firemen rolled up their hoses and drove their soot-covered trucks out the castle’s gates, and Becker went inside to soothe his tense muscles and warm his fatigued body under the spray of a hot shower. When he exited the bathroom several minutes later, he found a breakfast tray waiting for him on his bed, the croissants and pot of coffee such a welcome sight that they made his knees go weak. The physical and emotional exertion of the night had sapped his strength and left him feeling hollowed out. The sole silver lining of the events was that the fire hadn’t jumped the small space between the stables and the castle.

When Becker went downstairs, Jade was nowhere to be found. There was a pot of stew simmering on the stove and a note next to it that read, “Will come by later. Jade.”

Unwilling to linger in the empty castle with nothing to do to occupy his mind, Becker pulled on a light jacket and headed out the gates. He walked along the fence that framed the château’s property until it ended, then continued into town, past closed boutiques and storefronts.

At the edge of town, Becker passed a small church with a placard outside that read,
Église évangélique de Lamorlaye.
Music reached him through the redbrick walls, the sound of singing voices wafting out in nearly visible threads of something that felt like serenity. It was a small building, not much larger, it seemed, than a two-car garage, and Beck gauged from the volume of the singing that the people inside must have been stacked like cords of wood.

On a whim, he pulled the heavy door open, a wall of thick, warm air pushing past him as he stepped inside. Beck had never been prone to spontaneous acts of party crashing, so the impulse to enter the church took him by surprise. There was little he could do to backtrack, however, when he found himself standing just inside the doors with several pairs of eyes looking over their shoulders at him.

Beck cast a polite smile at a middle-aged woman who nodded in his direction, reaching behind him for the handle of the door in the hope that he could beat a hasty retreat, but just as he was turning to leave, he felt a hand on his sleeve and looked down into familiar brown eyes.

“Don’t go,” Jade said, her expression serene. “There’s a seat by me.”

Beck suddenly thought with fondness of the desolate quiet of the castle, wishing he’d stifled his need to flee. Empty rooms and the lingering smell of smoke now seemed a much more bearable fate than the packed interior of Lamorlaye’s diminutive Protestant church, yet with Jade’s invitation and the attention his presence was drawing from the other people present, there was little Beck could do but concede defeat. He ducked his head and followed reluctantly as Jade led him to two seats in the last row.

It had been nearly two years since Beck had attended a church service. On the previous occasion, he’d found a seat on the sparsely populated floor of the Cathedral of the Holy Cross in Boston, drawing comfort from the ten-story-tall granite pillar that rose from floor to ceiling beside him. Built to seat two thousand, the church had welcomed only a couple hundred visitors that Saturday, though their social rank and political clout had made of the gathering a who’s who of New England’s elite.

Becker had slipped in late, correctly predicting that the bride and groom would be safely facing the high altar when he entered. No one had paid attention to his arrival. He’d flashed his invitation at the door, sent to him, no doubt, out of spite—the same spite that had landed him in court for a protracted divorce trial that had hobbled his career and smeared his reputation. The same spite that had gone after his stakes in T&B and nearly bankrupted the young business. Gary hadn’t wavered in his support—neither during the trial for battery nor during the divorce—but Beck knew he’d spent anxious hours poring over company ledgers as they’d sunk into the red, crippled by the greed of Beck’s trust-fund wife.

There were few clear memories of the Boston wedding in Beck’s mind as he sat in the tight confines of Lamorlaye’s
église évangélique
, listening to a casually dressed man addressing the congregation. He remembered only the startling white of Amanda’s wedding gown in the shadowy vastness, the muffled drone of the archbishop’s voice, and the stifling constriction that gripped his lungs and mind as he witnessed the barely audible exchange of vows between his statuesque ex-wife and her tall and lanky new husband.

Becker was used to the solemnity of liturgical services. He’d found comfort, until two years ago, in the predictable, metronomic flow of organized worship, in the once-removed intimacy of confession and the sanitized conventions of scripted religion. He’d found his uncertainties and worries muted after soft-spoken services in which lofty sermons had settled his emotions.

Sitting in the Lamorlaye church on that Sunday morning, however, something began to tighten in Beck’s chest as the speaker moved from reading the Scriptures into another segment of singing. Beck stood when the rest of the congregation did, but he didn’t join in the choruses. As each song ended, he hoped for a reprieve, for a break in the flow, but there was none. And as voices all around him rose in a joyful, carefree expression of their faith, he felt his own mind shutting down. An impenetrable blanket descended over the fragile edges of his damaged faith and hardened into anger. He would not succumb to the naïveté of mass hypnosis. He would not allow the soothing words and joyful tunes to weaken his resolve. He would not fall for that manipulative drivel again.

When the singing led into a time of prayer, Beck felt a prickle inch down his spine. He was seized by the urgent need to do something—anything—to remove himself from the saccharine sincerity of the duped believers. He wanted to yell at them that they were praying into a void, that they had fallen prey to the oldest scam known to man, and that they wouldn’t realize the depth of the deception until their time of greatest need.

When Jade began praying, Beck had a reaction so visceral that he felt his body start to shake. He saw flashes of red as his muscles constricted and his jaw locked. The physical rebellion was so overwhelming that it was all he could do to keep from flinging his chair across the room and screaming obscenities at the assembled believers. Only Jade’s voice kept him from acting on his impulses.

Frantic to get away from the oppression of the service, Beck rose and strode toward the exit, his legs unsteady and his breathing labored. He flung the door open and rushed out into the sunny morning, the blinding light merging Boston and Lamorlaye in his mind. He didn’t bother to close the door behind him. With a frenzy born of desperation, he tried to put as much distance between him and the small church as he could, launching first into a jog, then into an all-out sprint. It didn’t matter to him that people stared. All he knew was that he needed to outrun it—whatever it was—or be devoured by it.

He’d made it several yards past Marcel’s when his feet slowed, his mind automatically registering the relief that beckoned from the techno-saturated, smoke-encased bar. He retraced his steps, his breathing labored and his muscles weak. Inside the bar there were only two patrons, both of whom he’d seen on previous visits. Neither of them was talkative, which suited him just fine. He pushed the door open and stepped inside.

He wasn’t sure how long he’d been there or how much he’d drunk. All he knew was that he wasn’t completely surprised when a shadow fell across the floor.

“That’s what I call a dramatic exit,” Jade said.

Becker looked up to find her standing beside him, her expression a combination of disappointment and pity.

“Leave me alone,” Beck said, surprising himself with the vehemence of the order. The other patrons glanced over, intrigued by the exchange.

“I just wanted to make sure you’re okay,” she said.

“I’m fine.”

“Well, you broke about four Olympic records making it from the church to Marcel’s, so yes, I’m inclined to agree that you’re physically fine. . . .”

“Good. Now go home.”

Jade shook her head and took a step closer, eyeing the shot glass in front of him. “Why are you doing this?” she asked.

“Go away.”

“No.”

Beck turned on his stool and aimed an icy stare at Jade. “Go—away,” he said again, his tone harder this time. “Find somebody else to fix.”

“Becker . . .”

“Will you make up your mind?” Becker yelled, this time earning himself a warning glare from the bartender. “Will you just decide whether you’re going to shun me or save me? Because this Ice Queen versus Mother Teresa act is really getting old!”

Beck saw the benevolence in Jade’s face fade, replaced by something that looked more like defiance. “You’re an idiot, Mr. Becker.”

“Yes, I am. There. Now can we call this intervention over?”

Jade wasn’t finished. She climbed onto the stool next to him and leaned in, her voice low enough that the other patrons wouldn’t hear her over the music blasting from the speakers. “You’re also a blustering, cursing, ridiculous coward, and the only person you’re hurting is yourself.”

She spun around and stalked away, but Beck was close on her heels, arms wide in disbelief. “Excuse me?” he bellowed.

Jade stopped at the door, her back still to him.

“I’m the coward?” His voice came close to cracking with incredulity. “You prance around here running hot or cold depending on your mood, climbing on your high horse every time things get a little too close to home, and lecturing me about my failures while refusing to acknowledge your own, and I’m the coward?”

Jade turned on him. “What are you implying?”

He speared a finger toward her. “Oh, I’m not implying a thing! How dare you waltz in here and tell me I’m a coward when you’re just as boarded up as I am? At least I have the honesty to admit to it!”

She looked at him with incredulity. “Boarded up? Me?”

“Yes,” Becker exclaimed, arms still wide at his sides. “You!”

“Hey, could you two take this outside?” the bartender asked.

Jade swiveled on her heel and exited the bar, grabbing the bicycle she’d left leaning against the front window as she marched off toward the castle. Becker dropped a bill on the counter and followed her into the deserted street.

“Oh, you do a great job of hiding it, spending time with the twins like you’re all about helping them, but the moment things get a little sticky, you run toward moral superiority like I run toward the bottle.”

Jade stood on the sidewalk, shaking her head. “I’m not like that,” she said, her voice hoarse.

“Then why won’t you let anyone in?”

“Because the ‘anyone’ in question,” she replied, pushing her bicycle with Becker on her heels, “is either drunk or angry or dangerously sober!”

Becker followed in silence for a moment. They passed through the square in the center of town, store shutters drawn and parking spots empty, then moved on toward the château.

“How ’bout others?” he finally asked. “Are there any other people you’ve let in?”

She was livid. “I have plenty of friends!”

“Then why not me?” Beck asked, surprised to hear the rough edges in his voice.

Jade kept moving forward, her eyes on the castle’s gates as they came into view. “I think we’ve already covered that.”