The Laughterhouse (42 page)

“Jesus, Hutton, we get it, okay? You believe in psychics,” Detective Kent says.

“I’m just saying, is all,” he says, and shrugs.

“So what the hell do we do now? It’s already over the news,” Schroder says. “Caleb isn’t coming here. No chance of it.”

He looks at me to agree with him, and I slowly nod. He’s right. And that’s not good for Katy, her father, or for Schroder’s career and future children and victims he could have helped. He’s been caught working a case while suspended, and I’ve been caught lying to Stevens that Schroder wasn’t here. Jonas Jones has fucked us all.

But right now none of that matters.

“I need a car,” I tell him. My car has been driven back to the station, well away from the area since Caleb knew what it looked like.

He hands me his car keys. “It’ll be here in two minutes,” he says, then reaches for his phone to call for it.

Caleb was halfway to the house when it unfolded. It was breaking news. The media and the police had shown up at the house where he had left Octavia. He had pulled over and listened to the report come in, then he had done a U-turn and come back.

In the bedroom now with the TV going, he’s in time to see two cars pull up outside Tabitha’s house. Seven people step out the front door and climb into them. At first he doesn’t realize what has taken them so long, but then he figures out that it’s a replay. All of this happened twenty minutes earlier.

So, the police had lied after all. But he had never thought of the possibility of a trap. Somehow they had found Octavia. They were using her to draw Caleb back to the scene. They were using children to try and get to him, and he understood that because he too was using the kids as tools.

He’s relived that Octavia is fine. And just as equally, he’s concerned. How did the police find her? Is he leaving a trail? If so, will the police come here? Or did Tabitha manage to escape?
Should he move to a new location? Where would he go? What difference would it make?

He stares at the TV, studying the man he recognizes from his earlier fight and from the cemetery last night. There’s another detective he’s seen on the news over the last few days, and then there’s Jonas Jones, the psychic he’s seen on morning breakfast shows, the psychic he’s wanted to see more than any of the others. When he started seeing them, Caleb contacted Jones only to learn the man was backlogged with clients and also charged more than Caleb could afford.

He sits on the edge of the bed with the knife back in his hand. He watches the news as it goes back in time, showing men running out of the house and approaching Jonas Jones. He is fascinated with Jones—is it possible he is looking at a true psychic? There is a confrontation. Jones starts explaining why he’s there.

Caleb tightens his grip on the knife at the sound of his daughter’s name.

Jonas Jones is saying it was Jessica that sent him there!

Why would Jessica do that?

As if to answer his thought, Jonas tells the police and the cameras that Jessica sent him there to protect the girl.

Caleb lowers the knife onto the bed. Would she really do that? He thinks that she would. Jessica was hurt—and the last thing she would want would be for another girl to be hurt too. Jesus, has he slipped so far that even his own daughter doesn’t have any faith in him?

Jones is put into handcuffs and dragged back into the house. The police look angry enough that Caleb spends the next ten seconds waiting for a gunshot and a flash of light, but it doesn’t come. The camera cuts away, and the scene is given a live update. He listens to what the reporter has to say, then switches between channels to get different perspectives on what happened, but the reporters are all saying the same thing—Jonas Jones led them to Octavia Stanton through a vision he had
had where Jessica Cole, the ten-year-old girl who was murdered fifteen years ago, came to him.

Jessica. His daughter is trying to protect a girl from him.

It makes him feel sad at the thought.

And if Jonas is like the other psychics, then it makes him angry if he is using Jessica’s name to gain publicity.

But what if he’s not like the others?

There is no word on Octavia Stanton’s condition. The reporters have not seen her come out of the house, and with the police obviously having wound down the operation, there is doubt that she was ever there. Yet Jonas certainly got something right—just not the timing. On this the reporters also agree.

Caleb isn’t sure if that makes him any less genuine.

“It’s not a science,” one of the reporters says, “it’s a gift.”

Then it goes back to footage of the man he fought with. Theodore Tate. The anchor goes on to tell the country a little bit about Theodore Tate, which includes a drunk-driving conviction for which he spent four months in jail, the apprehension and deaths of two serial killers, and the loss of his own daughter. The man who killed Tate’s daughter fled the country.

Caleb turns off the TV. Exhausted, he strips down to his underwear and climbs into bed. He stares up at the ceiling, exhausted but unable to fall asleep as he thinks about Jonas Jones, Mrs. Whitby, and most of all he thinks about Theodore Tate.

I light up the siren in Schroder’s car on the way to see my wife, my wife who is now awake and more alive than she has been in three years. I speed through the streets of Christchurch with my hands clenching the wheel and the window down with the breeze whipping at my face. There isn’t much in the way of traffic, but there is lots in the way of red traffic lights, which I get to race through. There is a smile on my face that I don’t think is going to disappear for a month. Images of my future are playing out in front of me. I can almost see them against the windshield, as if my imagination is the projector and my eyes the lenses. It will be hard in the beginning. Bridget won’t know our daughter has been dead for three years, that gas costs three times as much, that hip-hop music is taking over the planet. She’ll be waking into a new world but the last yesterday she remembers was three years ago. In her reality she’s a younger woman with a future and a family. There are going to be tough times ahead, but then there are going to be better times. Amazing times. The future we always wanted won’t be the same, but
there will be a future nonetheless. The house won’t be empty anymore. We can get another cat, we can maybe have another child. . . .

Another child.

I’m not even sure where the idea has come from. It’s not something I’ve even thought about. Another child. No, no way. I’ve seen what happen to children in this world. There’s no way I’m going to bring another one into it.

Still . . .

I’m getting ahead of myself. First we have to get through the sorrow. Any thoughts of the future have to be put on hold until I’ve explained the present. Sitting her down and telling her about Emily, holding my wife in my arms as she cries at our loss, the painful days ahead turning into painful weeks and months, taking her to the cemetery to show her our daughter’s grave. I shake my head.

The waitress’s shirt in Froggie’s Diner summed it up perfectly.

Yet the smile is still there, fixed on my face, and I keep my foot on the accelerator and God it feels good, it feels so good to be racing to a destination that isn’t the scene of death and despair.

When I get to the nursing home there is still a police car out front, a leftover from the previous night, an officer inside it on watch. There is an ambulance there too, and a late model BMW next to it. The lights on the ambulance are flashing and I’m not sure why that would be.

I park next to the BMW. Forster is standing by the back of the ambulance. He’s a guy in his mid-fifties with dark brown hair and designer glasses, his tie is loose and his sleeves are rolled up, and he looks like the kind of guy who plays a doctor on TV. The ambulance doors are closed, there’s an internal light going, and still I have the smile on my face.

“What’s the story with that?” I ask, pointing my thumb at it.

“Let’s go inside,” he tells me.

I shake my head. “I’ll go inside and see Bridget in a second,” I say, “but how about you tell me about the ambulance?”

“Theo . . .”

I shake my head. “She’s awake, Doctor. She’s awake and she’s fine.”

“Please, let’s go inside.”

“No. Not until you tell me she’s okay. Not until you tell me the ambulance isn’t here for her,” I say, and the smile, that stupid fucking smile is still on my face. I’m keeping it there, and as long as it stays my wife is going to be okay. The ambulance starts to roll forward.

“Theo . . .”

“Damn it,” I say, and I push past him and put my hand on the handle of the back door.

“Theo, don’t,” he says, reaching for my shoulder, but I do.

I open the ambulance door and that smile is finally gone. Bridget is lying in there with an oxygen mask on her face and two men crouched over her. The driver brings it to a stop.

“What the fuck,” one of them says as I try to step inside. “Get the hell out of here.”

“Theo,” Forster says, this time reaching me and pulling me back.

“What’s going on?”

“Get him out of here,” one of the paramedics says, while the other one is pressing on the bag to provide oxygen to my wife.

“What . . .” I say, and it’s all I can say. Bridget’s eyes roll toward me, her blue eyes wide open, they stare at me and lock onto me for the first time in three years. Her right hand reaches a little toward me. She knows who I am. She can see me and she knows who I am and I reach out toward her, and she looks at me and through me and into me, and she’s in the process of dying and I stand in the back of the ambulance with Forster dragging me back and the driver slowly starting to roll forward again.

“Get out,” the paramedic says, and this time he reaches up and shoves me in the chest. I fall into Forster and we both tip
into the driveway and land heavily against it, Forster breaking most of my fall, but not enough of it to stop the headache waking back up. The ambulance door closes and it pulls away. It races down the driveway out of sight, and when it’s out on the road the sirens start wailing.

“I’m sorry,” Forster says.

“Tell me,” I say, rubbing the side of my head, only the words don’t come out that way. They come out all beaten up and slurred.

“What?”

“I thaid thell me.”

“Are you okay?”

I rub at my head and I squeeze my eyes closed, and in the darkness there are some fading fireworks. I focus on the words. “I’m thine,” I say. Then I try again, focusing on each word. “I’m fine. Tell me about Bridget,” I say as the fireworks start to fade.

“You’re not fine. Did you just knock your head?”

“Goddamn it, Doctor, just tell me!”

“Your wife,” he says, “Bridget, as you know, she came out of her coma forty-five minutes ago. She didn’t say anything,” he says, and his head is moving slowly from side to side, a slow shake of his head, a slow bad-news-is-coming shake. “She came to and she walked into the corridor. The nurse who found her thought it was another one of her walks, but then Bridget grabbed her shoulders and tried to speak but couldn’t make any noise. She was highly agitated.”

“Is she okay?”

“I was called and by the time I got here she had been calmed. She was sitting down drinking water. She was looking around, she didn’t understand what—”

“Just tell me, is she okay?”

“She didn’t know what was happening, but she was alert. We told her who she was and that she had been in an accident, and she began to get upset. We thought we were going to have to sedate her.”

“Goddamn it, Doctor, is she okay?” I ask, and I can feel the bile at the back of my throat, and if he says no, if he says she’s going to die, then he better run, he better run like the devil is after him.

He stands up and brushes off the back of his pants. He reaches down and takes my hand and pulls me up.

“She suffered a seizure,” he says. “Before I could even start to look her over, she started convulsing. We couldn’t get her to stop. We got an ambulance and then she went into cardiac arrest. They’re helping her, and every second . . .” He stops talking. “It’s serious,” he says.

“You were going to say every second counts,” I tell him.

“Theo . . .”

“You’re telling me I just cost my wife twenty seconds.”

“Don’t look at it that way.”

“I should have been here earlier,” I tell him, thinking of Cole, of Jonas, thinking that this city owes me a favor, hell, a hundred favors. “Fucking hell, I should have been here!”

“There was no way of knowing it was going to happen, Theo, and even if you had been here, the same thing would have—”

“And all I managed to do was delay the ambulance.”

“Theo, you can’t have known. . . .”

His words fade out as I race back to my car, each heavy step echoing in my skull. I feel like I’m going to throw up again.

I drive to the hospital hitting speeds I’ve never hit before. People pull out of the way. The headache comes and goes like waves smashing against a cliff, each wave a little less powerful than its predecessor but still damn strong. When I get there I park by the main doors and run into the emergency room. I push my way ahead of two other people at the counter who bitch at me, and I flash my badge at the nurse behind it and I demand that she buzz me through the security doors between the waiting room and the operating rooms. She does. I go through and a doctor approaches me and tells me to calm down, then asks what the problem is. I tell him. He tells me to
follow him, and I do, and he leads me to the same waiting room I was in yesterday with Schroder when we were talking to Mrs. Hayward. This time I’m the only one in there. I pace the room a few times, sit down for half a minute, then pace the room some more. Over the years people have gotten the best news and the worst news in this room. Their lives have changed. After five minutes I head into the corridor. I pace it up and down, looking at other people in different stages of pain. I stare at a young woman on a gurney whose eyes are open and blank, there is vomit down the side of her face and on her neck, a tube hanging out of her mouth that’s been disconnected, a nurse pulling a sheet up over her face.