The Cartoonist (21 page)

Klara resumed breathing. A sigh at first, then deep, hissing lungfuls as a bright disbelieving hysteria overswept her. At the phone by the well-used liquor cabinet in her living room at home, her mouth began to move, but only unintelligible grunts came out.

“Klara,” Scott said, “I need your help on this. I can’t go through this alone.”

Klara remained mute, but in the background Scott heard Joe’s voice, asking what the trouble was.

“Give me the phone,” Joe said, sounding closer now, and it struck Scott (oddly considering the circumstances) that this was the first time he’d heard Joe Harper assert himself with his wife. Then Joe was on the line, his voice anxious and high. “Who is this?”

“It’s Scott, Joe. Listen...”

Then he said the words again, and this time they came even more easily and sounded even more meaningless. Joe’s shock was genuine, but more controlled than Klara’s had been, and Scott was able to relate the essentials without having to bear the burden of another griever. Joe assured him that he would take care of informing their mother-in-law in Sandy Point, and asked Scott if he wouldn’t mind chipping in on airfare for the old gal so she could attend Krista’s funeral. Scott said that would be fine. To Scott’s relief, Joe offered to arrange the business of Krista’s transport from Danvers to a funeral home in Ottawa.

Finally, already past simple exhaustion, Scott called Dr. Bateman at the Health Sciences Centre in Ottawa.

“God, Scott, that’s terrible,” Bateman said, unable to give the sentiment anything more than a professional tone. “I’ll inform everyone here. We won’t expect you until we see you, so don’t worry about a thing.”

“Thanks, Vince,” Scott said. “Good-bye.”

“Scott,” Bateman said before the connection was broken. “Was it like in the drawings?”

Too weary to show his annoyance—had he thought about it before calling, Scott would have expected Bateman’s academic interest to supersede his tact—he said: “Yes, Vince. Right down to the time and place.”

“What about the cause?”

Yes
, Scott wondered bleakly,
what about the cause
?

“Good-bye, Vince,” he said, and hung up.

THE BALANCE OF THAT LONG and featureless day passed without incident
...
until darkfall, at least, when the horror flared briefly once more.

After speaking with Bateman, Scott stepped outside for some air. He found Caroline wandering the grounds and he joined her for a while. Neither of them spoke very much. Later, he returned alone to Kath’s room in ICU. Kath slept soundly until a neurologist named Dr. Franklin came in to examine her at three that afternoon.

“Curious,” the balding physician said to Scott after rousing Kath, shining a penlight into her eyes and tapping her tendons. “The oddest course of concussion I’ve ever seen—if, in fact, a concussion is what it was.” Franklin’s diagnosis was clearly at odds with Dr. Cunningham’s, the intern who admitted her. “Judging from her initial status, I would have anticipated a much more prolonged convalescence.” Franklin said, this last with what Scott recognized as professional embarrassment. “But your daughter seems completely recovered. In fact, I see no reason to keep her in the unit much past tomorrow. A few more days in a nice quiet room on the Telemetry Ward, and—”

“Actually,” Scott said, “I was hoping I could get her out of here and home. I appreciate everything you people have done, but we’re pretty far from home, and...I’ve got a funeral to attend to.”

The neurologist averted his eyes. “I see. Yes, you’re quite right, of course.” He glanced at Kath, who met his gaze expressionlessly. “Will you be flying back home?”

“Yes,” Scott said. “As soon as we can.”

“Then perhaps that would be best. I’ll arrange for your daughter’s discharge and medications. I’ll be leaving her on anticonvulsants to prevent any further seizuring...but of course,” Franklin said,“you’re a physician yourself. Nothing to worry about, then.” And with a nod he was gone.

An awkward silence ensued in Kath’s undersized room. Scott was unable to think of anything to say to his daughter, only chatter and weak platitudes coming to mind. It was a foreign and dreadfully helpless feeling, and soon his gut twisted itself into anguished knots. Kath lay with her arm around Jinnie, fussing with the doll’s dress, whispering softly into its cauliflower ear. Scott recognized the symptoms of regression in his daughter, but was undisturbed by them. It was a means of coping, one he thought be might employ himself before this nightmare faded into healing time.

It was Kath who broke the silence, sitting abruptly erect and fixing Scott with an expression of sheer bewilderment.

“Daddy,” she murmured. “What are we going to do?”

Scott was quiet a moment, thoughtful. Then he said: “Go on, pet. We’re going to go on.”

“But I miss her. I don’t know what to do now, Daddy. What can I do?”

Scott leaned over and picked Kath up, dully surprised by her apparent weightlessness. Clutching Jinnie under one arm, Kath guided her IV tubing along with her. They sat together in the fold-out chair and Scott rocked his little girl as he had done when she was still in diapers. They stayed that way until Caroline returned about an hour later and a nurse came in with dinner trays.

* * *

All three ate ravenously. Caroline and Scott hadn’t had a bite in twenty-four hours, and for Kath it had been even longer. Unlike typical hospital fare, the meal was quite good—a healthy slice of roast beef with gravy, mashed potatoes, a helping of broccoli and for dessert, the inevitable yellow Jell-O.

After they’d eaten, Scott led Caroline back to the family room.

“Sleep,” he said, and kissed her forehead, which felt feverish against his lips. Caroline was taking it hard, bottling it all up, making herself ill. Scott hoped he could help her soon. “We’ve got to get together on this,” he said in a whisper. “Help each other through.”

Caroline nodded, lay down in bed, and was asleep, just like that.

Night fell, transforming shape into shadow.

Kath lay on her side facing her dad, who sat slouched in a chair by the bed. Kath’s blue eyes were cloudy with approaching sleep.

“Thanks for bringing Jinnie,” she said, stroking the doll’s bloated cheek. Scott smiled a little. “But when I woke up in the car and she wasn’t there, I didn’t really mind.” She hugged Jinnie to her chest. “I’m glad she’s here now, though. Really glad.”

Scott rubbed the old scar on his chin. For some reason it had begun to bother him, a dull sort of burning sensation.

“Can you remember the accident?” he said, the words out before he’d considered their potential consequences. “Can you remember what happened?”

Kath’s body jerked as if struck and Scott knew immediately that he’d made a serious blunder. What little color she’d had drained from her face and her mouth turned down at the corners. Her eyes, frightened and round, seemed to stare through Scott’s chest, at some mental replay, perhaps, and her fingers gouged into Jinnie’s torso, making Scott recall vividly the illusion he’d experienced at home during the storm—the doll on the counter in front of him, grinning in a lightning flash, its stuffing protruding in ugly gray wads.

“Try to remember,” he heard himself saying when he knew he should drop it forever. “Try to think, hon. It’s important.”

Kath squeezed her eyes shut, forcing out a single glistening tear. “I can’t,” she said almost inaudibly. “I can’t remember.”

There was a dry popping sound, and Scott saw that Kath’s clawed  fingers had poked through the fabric of her doll’s dress.

Let it go, damn you!

“Try.”

“We were driving...” Kath said in a baby voice, “and singing...

“
Great green gobs of greasy grimy gopher guts
,” she sang in a voice both wistful and otherworldly, a voice that got inside Scott like something dead. Then her eyes rolled back and her hands curled into fists, and he wanted to stop her, but he wanted her to go on, too, to tell him what she’d seen. He reached for Kath’s hand but she jerked it away.

“We were driving and singing, singing and driving, and...oh, so sorry, Mister Groundhog, you’re dead..and...and then...we hit him...he was dead and we hit him...”

“Who was dead? The groundhog?”

“I can’t remember!” Kath shrieked.

Then her mouth drew down into that terrified bow, and her face began to twitch, and the twitch spread, becoming a coarse trembling that curled through her body like a wave.

Oh, Jesus she’s going to seizure again!

But he held her, clutched her, and the crisis passed. A few moments later, when her face relaxed and then frowned with tears, the nurse who’d rushed into the room at the sound of Kath’s screams left Scott alone to comfort her.

“I can’t remember, Daddy,” Kath said. “I can’t remember.”

And Scott rocked her and held her and told her it was all right, it didn’t matter. Sometime later he lay her back in bed and she slept, one arm wrapped lovingly around Jinnie.

PART THREE

29

––––––––

SCOTT PULLED THE RENTED Pinto to a stop at the mouth of the farmer’s long gravel drive and gazed at the sagging gray clapboard that had once been white. Flanking the house on either side, weather-blackened outbuildings stood peacefully rotting. Beneath a huge old oak in an adjoining pasture, cattle clustered in groups against the drizzle that was falling.

The farm had been easy enough to find. Holley’s directions had been clear, and the name on the mailbox, handpainted in large black letters, had been legible from a hundred yards away. The question was—and it struck Scott now, as he tried to imagine what he was going to say to Clayton Barr, the man whose timely intervention had saved Kath’s life: What was he doing here in the first place?

The truth was, he had no idea. He hadn’t a clue what he meant to say to Mr. Barr, apart from offering his thanks, and he didn’t know what he expected to find later, when he planned to drive out to the scene of the accident. He knew only that he was here, that he had needed to get away from the hospital, from Holley and his forms that needed signing, and from the unseen presence of a corpse that belonged to Krista. He told Holley he wanted the farmer’s address so he could take a run out here and thank the man before leaving for Canada, and of course he was being sincere....

Come on
, an inner voice urged.
You know why you’re here
.

Scott removed the drawings from the pocket of his shirt, the same shirt he’d been living and sleeping in for the past two days, and carefully unfolded them.

Yes, he supposed he did know why he was here and not back at the hospital, Making the Necessary Arrangements. It was these damned drawings, and the nagging questions their existence posed.

He glanced at the drawings and felt deeply cold.

Something struck the Volvo’s windshield, that much was certain. It was the only explanation for the glass inside the car. It might have been something as simple as a flying rock or the jutting branch of a tree, but Scott had found no evidence of either in the car. The same was true of a large animal, another cow, maybe—no evidence. No hoof-scrapes on the hood, no tufts of fur hooked on to the jagged edges of the windshield, no dark gouts of animal blood.

But it was the cartoon tombstone that ate at Scott’s mind like an ulcer. When he’d first seen the drawings in Ottawa, he’d discounted all but the obviously pertinent details: the car that was clearly a Volvo and the woman and child inside. In the first few hours after speaking with Holley, he recalled only dimly the uncomprehending shock he’d  felt when the coroner told him the Volvo had struck a fence surrounding a cemetery. Then, in the coroner’s ill-lit office, the knowledge struck him like a rabbit punch, but one dealt to a man already senseless and bleeding on the mat. Only later, sitting in Holley’s Mercedes in front of the Texaco station, did the knowledge really begin to work on him, but even then the thought process was suspended by Kath’s abrupt recovery.

But last night, sitting awake in ICU, the whole thing began a sluggish distillation through his mind. That the Volvo had in reality struck a fence surrounding a cemetery brought up the blackly fascinating possibility that the cemetery in the drawing was the one at Hampton Meadow, the same one against whose boundary Krista met her death. And that dragged Scott’s attention almost obsessively to the tombstone, to the inscription which was indecipherable save for three or four enticingly legible letters.

Was there one like it at Hampton Meadow? And if so, then... what? And how had the accident happened? Why were no answers forthcoming? Holley’s proffered explanations—that Krista had fallen asleep at the wheel or that she had simply lost control of the car while speeding—were patently inadequate in view of the fragments of glass inside the car. Scott knew Krista liked to drive fast, but he couldn’t believe she’d been negligent, not with Kath in the car. And the possibility of any significant mechanical malfunction had been dispelled by the police mechanics.

Now, even more than the crippling fact of Krista’s death, not knowing how it happened rattled with a vexing insistence in his mind. Was there a clue hidden in the drawings? As far as Scott was concerned, the Cartoonist’s credibility was not to be doubted. The old man’s grotesquely recorded predictions had been right on the money so far. And as long as there was a chance the drawings could tell him more, Scott felt compelled to follow it up.

By dawn this morning, following another sleepless night, he had known exactly what he must do. He woke Kath briefly, just to be sure he could, then made his way out to the lobby. After a little persuading, the switchboard operator loaned him a long-range beeper, and made a note of his instruction that he be notified of even the slightest change in his daughter’s condition. He took a cab to a downtown Hertz outlet, rented the Pinto...and now he was here.

Scott replaced the drawings in his pocket, dropped the car into gear and started up the puddled gravel drive.

The trip out here from the hospital had possessed a dreamy sort of quality. For a while as he drove Scott found himself grinning and imagining—no, actually believing—that he was twenty-five again, heading for Krista’s place in Sandy Point, to pick her up and take her down to the beach, to their private spot, where he would hold her and kiss her and stroke her pregnant belly, and beg her to give him another chance. The past several hours seemed muddy, the product of some weird psychedelic drug. Yeah. Maybe that was it. A bad trip. Somebody, maybe the stew on the Montreal-Boston flight, had slipped a tab of acid into his drink.