The Sense of Reckoning (2 page)

“What were you trying to do, juggle them?” Helen asked, nodding toward the makeshift bandage on Ann’s other hand.

“Unrelated incidents,” Ann grumbled.

“Holy cow!” exclaimed Helen as she drew away the towel. “Practically took the nail right off!”

Nausea swept over Ann and she lay down again.

“We should get you to the hospital. Or at least a doctor’s office.”

“It doesn’t really seem like an emergency room situation. And it stopped bleeding.”

“True, but you can’t function with the nail like that, and I’m sure not going to take it off for you.”

“Helen, stop, you’re going to make me throw up,” said Ann plaintively. “What are you doing here, anyway?”

“Brought you some strawberry jam,” said Helen, gesturing toward the kitchen. “Good thing too, I think.” She reached down and picked up a half-empty bottle of Macallan.

Ann took the bottle and examined the contents. “Some must have spilled out. It was practically full, and I didn’t drink that much.”

Helen raised her eyebrows. “If you say so. Let’s see if we can’t get you to Dr. Phipps’s office before he closes.”

Helen called Dr. Phipps to tell him they were coming. She must have snuck in a call to her husband Walt as well, because he was standing outside the door to the doctor’s office as they pulled up in Helen’s car. Walt was a pilot and, with Mike booking Ann into engagements up and down the East Coast and sometimes beyond, Ann often made use of Walt’s charter services in his four-seat Piper Arrow. Walt and Helen were also the closest thing Ann had to parents, her own mother and father having been killed in a car accident when she was in college.

“He won’t go in,” Helen whispered to Ann, even though they were still in the car and Walt couldn’t possibly hear them. “Not crazy about doctors.”

Walt opened the passenger door to let Ann out, carefully averting his eyes from the bloodstained towel that Helen had rewrapped around Ann’s hand.
 

“I’ll just wait here,” he said, hurrying ahead of them to open the office door.
 

Helen shepherded Ann through the empty waiting room and called to Dr. Phipps, who emerged from his office and waved them into an exam room.

Dr. Phipps earned Ann’s eternal gratitude by not only giving her a shot of something that numbed her finger but also by rigging up a little screen to keep her from seeing what he was doing.

“I could just look away,” said Ann, embarrassed at the trouble he was taking.

“Patients say they’ll look away but at some point curiosity always gets the better of them and they take a look,” he said, working busily behind the screen. “My nurse left for the day so I can’t take a risk of you fainting.” He covered the wound with a tidy bandage and replaced the gauze and tape on Ann’s other hand with a Band-Aid.
 

Walt greeted them when they emerged from the building. “That wasn’t too bad, was it?”

“Walt, you have no idea whether it was bad or not,” Helen scolded.

Walt shrugged good-naturedly. “Want to go get ice cream?”

“She’s a grown woman, she doesn’t want ice cream for being a good sport for the doctor.”

“Actually I’d trade ice cream for a burger, my treat. I’m starving,” said Ann.

They compromised by having dinner at the Federmans’ where, Helen promised, she could provide a burger that would be much better than anything they could get in a restaurant—and ice cream, too, if Ann liked.

*****

Walt and Helen dropped Ann off at the cabin after dinner. The call from her brother came so quickly after their departure that Helen must have been dialing his number before Walt even had his truck turned around in the gravel driveway.

“Hey, I heard you hurt your hand,” said Mike.

“Jeez, can’t a person get any privacy around here?” said Ann, getting a bottle of Viognier out of the refrigerator.

“Helen said you were passed out on the couch.”

“I wasn’t ‘passed out,’ I lay down because my hand hurt and I fell asleep.”

“For the whole day? With a half-empty bottle of Scotch next to you?”

Ann returned the bottle of Viognier, unopened, to the refrigerator. “Mike, I only had two glasses, my hand was killing me. You should take anything Helen says with a grain of salt, she’s a worrier.”

Mike sighed. “Well, she said the bandage was pretty big—sorry, bandages, I understand you injured both hands—so you should come down to West Chester a little early and let me and Scott take care of you.”

“Damn, I forgot that was this weekend.” Ann had been working on a painting for Joe Booth, the Philadelphia detective who had investigated the Biden Firth case: a portrait of his niece and nephew based on a photograph he had given her. “I won’t be able to finish the painting in time—the big bandage is on my painting hand.”

“I thought you were done with it?”

“I need to fix some things. There’s a reason I’ve never done people before, they look more creepy than cute at the moment.”

“I’m sure he’ll understand about the delay, it was a wound suffered in the line of housekeeping duty. You come down here tomorrow and we’ll still have dinner with him on Friday like we planned. I’ll make him something nice as a consolation prize.”

Ann thought back to that morning—that unpleasant feeling of being at loose ends, the absent dog whose presence would have made being alone enjoyable, the general sense of unease she had felt since returning to her cabin after Biden’s attack.

“You know, that does sound good. I’ll find out when Walt can bring me down.”

Chapter 4

Walt was free the following day and he and Ann made a midmorning departure from the Adirondack Regional Airport into cloudless blue skies. As they flew, the giant’s shoulders of the Adirondacks lowered into the spine-like ridges of the northern Pennsylvania mountains and then the flanks of the rolling hills of Chester County. The foliage in the Adirondacks was in full fall glory but as they flew south the colors settled into the verdant green of the Indian summer that Pennsylvania was enjoying.
 

Ann had brought a book with her to pass the time but, with the thrum of the engine filtering through her headset and the world slipping by beneath them, she fell into a reverie. Specks of cars glided along the narrow ribbons of road; the anonymous expanses of shopping mall and warehouse roofs clustered around highway intersections; small airports appeared, marked with the tiny white crosses of parked aircraft. It was hard to imagine this as anything other than a meticulously constructed model, free of all the complications and messiness of real life.

Walt’s Arrow made the trip from the Adirondack Regional Airport to the Brandywine Airport in about two hours. His radio calls as he flew the pattern into Brandywine roused Ann from her daydream and she spotted Mike’s Audi in the small parking lot next to the terminal. While Walt got the plane settled after they had landed, Mike and his partner, Scott Pate, strolled out to meet them, Scott waving enthusiastically. Mike was a shade shorter than medium height, stocky, with dark hair and eyes. Scott was taller and thinner, with clipped blond hair and pale eyes behind chunky Ray Bans. Hugs for Ann and handshakes for Walt were exchanged.

“How about lunch before you head back?” Mike asked Walt. “Your choice.”

“Wouldn’t say no to a slice or two of pizza,” said Walt.

Mike drove them to Caruso’s Pizza, Scott ceding the front seat to Walt.

When they finished their slices and Ann excused herself to use the restroom, Mike leaned across the table to Walt.

“So, how do you think she’s doing?”

Walt fiddled with the straw in his soda. “I don’t know. Helen says she seems unhappy.”

“I don’t know why she stays in that cabin,” said Scott. “Such terrible memories.” He shuddered.

“We keep telling her she should move back to West Chester,” said Mike. “Or upgrade the studio.” Ann had built a studio on a mountaintop a few miles from her cabin to provide her with the light she needed for her painting. “If she did that, she could stay there in the summers, if she still wants a place in the Adirondacks. She should sell the cabin.”

“Although it might be hard to sell, considering ...” said Scott.

“Or easy to sell, depending on the buyer,” said Mike. “Some people like that kind of thing.”

Scott pushed away his plate, empty save for two crusts. “I can see why she would be unhappy. Of course it would be difficult for her to live in the place where Biden Firth attacked her, but I hope it’s not more than that.”

“What do you mean?” asked Walt.

“I hope she doesn’t feel guilty about what happened. She didn’t have any choice—if she hadn’t shot him, he certainly would have killed her.”

Mike shook his head. “I guess there’s no logic about a thing like that. I’m sure she never thought of herself as a killer—”

“Hi there!” said Walt in an uncharacteristically hearty greeting. Mike and Scott turned to see Ann approaching the table.

“That was fast,” said Mike.

“There was a line, I can wait.” She looked at the three of them suspiciously. “What’s up?”

“Talking airplanes,” said Scott breezily. “Did you know that planes fly because the air pressure sucks the wings up? Speaking of which, shouldn’t we be getting back to the airport?”

Back at Brandywine, Mike discreetly slipped Walt his payment for the flight, then Mike, Scott, and Ann lingered in the small terminal watching two- and four-seater planes arrive and depart, listening to the radio calls on the PA system. When the Arrow had taken off and shrunk to a pinprick in the autumn-blue sky, Mike turned to Ann.

“What now? In the mood to do anything special?”

Ann shrugged. “Nothing in particular. Did you guys have anything planned before I showed up?”

Mike wrinkled his nose. “Just stuff around the house. Scott was going to plant some spinach in the pots on the patio.”

“The weather has been so warm I thought I might be able to get one more crop in,” said Scott. “But I don’t think gardening is going to work out so well with a bandage on your hand. You could sunbathe.”

“I’d fry, even in October,” said Ann.

“We’ll put the umbrella up and you can read.”

When they got to Mike and Scott’s townhouse, Mike went grumblingly upstairs to do battle with a leaking faucet while Scott got the patio umbrella set up for Ann, then collected his gardening equipment. Ann discovered a stack of
Philadelphia Magazine
s in the living room and brought them out onto the patio.

Scott glanced over at what she had. “There’s an article about the Firth case in one of those. Just so it doesn’t take you by surprise.”

“Really?” said Ann, looking at the stack of magazines with distaste. “Which one?”

“It had a sports person on the cover.”

“What did it say?” Ann glanced down at the magazine she was holding. The cover was a photo of one of the Flyers and his wife. “Never mind, I’ll read it later. I’m not in the mood.” She picked up another magazine from the stack—it featured a well-known actress, originally from Ardmore, holding a cheerful-looking pit bull. Ann got herself comfortable in the shade of the umbrella and began paging through the magazine.

Pretty soon Mike showed up looking grumpy. “Plumbing sucks,” he said, flopping into one of the other patio chairs. “Is it five o’clock yet? I need a beer.”

“You couldn’t have been working on it more than about ten minutes,” said Ann, looking at her watch.

“You should just call the plumber to begin with. Trying to do it yourself just puts you in a bad mood,” said Scott, emptying a bag of potting soil into a ceramic planter.

“Yeah, you’re probably right,” said Mike. He moved his chair so he could look over Ann’s shoulder. “Whatcha got there?”

“Article about pit bulls.”

“Dog article, eh?”

“Uh huh,” said Ann. “This actress is having a sort of PR campaign for the breed.”

Mike and Scott exchanged a glance.

“Pit bulls seem like good dogs,” said Mike.

“Yeah, seems like it,” said Ann without looking up.

“Do you think you might get another dog?” Mike asked cautiously.

Ann turned a page. “I don’t know.”

“If you’re going to stay in the cabin, I’d feel better if you had a dog.”

Ann sighed and flipped a few pages forward to a review of Waterman’s restaurant. “I don’t need a dog. I’ll get some pepper spray.”

“A dog wouldn’t be good just for protection,” Mike pressed on. “He’d be good company, too.”

Ann tossed the magazine onto the patio table. “Mike, I don’t want a dog right now. Maybe later. I’m going to take a nap.” And she went inside, leaving Mike and Scott on the patio.

Scott shook his head. “Poor Annie.”

“Yeah,” said Mike, “I hope we can snap her out of it.”

Chapter 5

As he had done all their lives, Mike sprang to Ann’s defense—this time in response to the cloud of depression that still clung to her. As a distraction, he set a goal for them of sampling the mushroom soup of every southern Chester County restaurant that advertised it as a specialty.