The Taker (13 page)

A
ROOSTOOK
C
OUNTY HOSPITAL, PRESENT DAY

S
ounds are heard out in the hall.

Luke looks at his wristwatch: 4
A.M
. The hospital will come to life before long. The mornings are busy with injuries common to farm country—a rib shattered by a kick from a dairy cow, a slip on a patch of ice while lugging a bale of hay—followed at six by the shift change.

The girl looks at him the way a dog might regard an unreliable master. “Will you help me? Or are you going to let that sheriff take me to the police station?”

“What else can I do?”

Her face glows pink. “You can let me go. Close your eyes while I slip out. No one will blame you. You can tell them you went down to the lab, left me alone for just a second, and I was gone by the time you returned.”

Joe says she’s a murderer
, Luke thinks.
Can I let a murderer walk out the door?

Lanny reaches for his hand. “Have you ever been in love with someone so badly that you’d do anything for them? That no matter what you want, you want their happiness more?”

Luke is glad she can’t see into his heart because he has never been that selfless. He’s been dutiful, yes, but he’s never been able to give without a tug of resentment and he doesn’t like how that makes him feel.

“I’m not a threat to anyone. I told you why I … did what I did to Jonathan.”

Luke looks into those ice blue eyes filling with tears and he tingles from his scalp to his gut. The pain from loss overcomes him quickly, as it tends to since his parents’ deaths. He knows she is feeling the same sadness as he, and for a moment they are together in this bottomless grief. And he’s so tired of being imprisoned by grief—the loss of his parents, his marriage, his entire life—that he knows he must do something to break free of it, do it now or he never will. He’s not sure why he’s going to do what he’s about to do, but he knows he can’t think about it in advance or he won’t do it.

“Wait here. I’ll be right back.”

Luke slips down the narrow corridor to the doctors’ locker room. Inside his dented gray locker he finds a pair of scrubs, wadded up and forgotten. He rummages through a couple of other lockers and comes up with a white lab coat, a surgical cap, and, from the pediatrician’s locker, a pair of women’s running shoes so old that they curl at the toes. Luke brings these back to the examination room.

“Here, put these on.”

They take the shortest route to the back of the hospital, pushing through janitors’ passages to the loading dock in the service area. An orderly coming in for the day shift waves as they cross the parking lot, but when Luke waves back his arm feels rusted tight with anxiety. It isn’t until they’re in the parking lot, standing beside his pickup truck, that Luke remembers he’s left his keys in his parka back in the doctors’ lounge.

“Damn it. I have to go back. Don’t have my keys. Hide in the trees. I’ll be right back.”

Lanny says nothing but nods, hunched against the cold in her thin cotton scrubs.

The walk from the parking lot to the ambulance entrance is the longest of his life. Luke hustles because of the cold and his nerves. Judy or Clay may have already noticed he is gone. And if Clay is still asleep on the couch, Luke might wake him when he goes into the lounge to retrieve his keys and then he’d be caught. Each step gets harder and harder, until he feels like a water-skier being dragged under the surface after something has gone horribly wrong with the tow line.

He pushes back the heavy glass door, so on edge that his shoulders are pinched high around his ears. Judy, at the nurses’ station, frowns at her computer, not even looking up when Luke walks by. “Where have you been?”

“Having a smoke.”

Now Judy is paying attention, fixing Luke with the beady eyes of a crow. “When did you start smoking again?”

Luke feels like he smoked two packs last night, so what he’s told Judy doesn’t feel like a lie. He decides to ignore her. “Is Clay up?”

“I haven’t seen him. The door to the lounge is still closed. Maybe you ought to wake him up. He can’t sleep here all day. His wife will be wondering what happened to him.”

Luke freezes; he wants to make a joke, to act as though everything is normal in front of Judy, but then of course, Luke has never joked with Judy in the past and that in itself would seem abnormal. His inability to lie and cover his tracks only makes him more self-conscious. He feels like he’s fallen through the frozen skin of a pond and is drowning, sucking frigid water into every crevice of his lungs, and Judy sees nothing. “I need coffee,” Luke mumbles as he heads off.

The door to the lounge is just a couple of steps away. He sees immediately that it is slightly ajar and dark within. He nudges it open another ten degrees and plainly sees the empty sag on the couch where the policeman should be.

Blood rises to his ears, the glands in his throat swell to four times
their normal size. He can’t breathe. It’s worse than drowning: it feels as if he’s being strangled.

His parka hangs to the right from a hook on the wall, waiting for him to reach into the pocket. The jingle tells him that the keys are right where he expected them to be.

On the way back, his walk is direct and purposeful. Head down, hands pushed deep into the pockets of his lab coat, he decides not to take the service hallway, it’s too indirect, and marches toward the ambulance entrance instead. Judy’s head jerks up as Luke passes the duty station.

“I thought you were getting coffee.”

“Left my wallet in the car,” he tosses over his shoulder. He’s almost at the door.

“Did you wake Clay?”

“He’s already up,” Luke says, backing into the door to push it open. And at the far end of the hall, there is the deputy, seemingly having materialized at the mention of his name. He sees Luke in return and raises his arm the way he’d hail a bus. Clay wants to talk to him and starts jogging down the hall in Luke’s direction, hand waving …
Stop, Luke
. But Luke doesn’t. Throwing all his weight into the hip check, Luke knocks the door back.

Cold slaps his face as he bursts out on the other side, bobbing to the surface of his real life.
What am I doing? This is the hospital where I work. I know every tile and plastic chair and gurney as well as I know my own house. What am I doing, throwing away my life by helping a suspected murderer escape? Have I lost my mind?
But he continues, compelled by a strange itching in his blood, ricocheting through his veins like a pinball, driving him forward. He speed-walks across the parking lot, frantic and off-kilter, like a person trying to remain upright while descending a steep hill, knowing he must look like a lunatic.

Luke squints anxiously at his truck, but the girl is gone, not a speck of the telltale aqua of hospital scrubs to be seen. At first, he panics—how could he have been so stupid, leaving her outside unattended?
But a small kernel of hope expands in his chest as he realizes that if the prisoner is gone, so are his worries.

The next minute she is there, wispy, ethereal, an angel dressed in hospital clothing … And his heart leaps at the sight of her.

Luke fumbles with the ignition while Lanny slouches low, trying not to watch and further the doctor’s nervousness. Finally, the engine turns over and the truck leaps out of the parking lot, launching recklessly onto the road.

The passenger stares directly ahead, as though her concentration alone is keeping them from being discovered. “I’m at Dunratty’s hunting lodge. Do you know where that is?”

Luke is incredulous. “Do you think it’s smart to go there? I’d think the police would have tracked you to your hotel by now. We don’t get many strangers this time of year.”

“Please, just swing by. If it looks suspicious, we’ll keep going, but all my things are there. My passport. Money. Clothing. I bet you don’t have anything that would fit me.”

She is smaller than Tricia but larger than the girls. “You’d win that bet,” he confirms. “Passport?”

“I came over from France, where I live.” She curls on her end of the bench seat like a cat trying to conserve its warmth. Suddenly, Luke’s hands on the steering wheel feel large, outlandishly huge and clumsy. He’s having an out-of-body experience from the stress and has to concentrate not to jerk the wheel and send them hurtling off the road.

“You should see my house in Paris. It’s like a museum, filled with all the things I’ve collected over many, many years. Want to go there?” Her tone is sweet and as warming as liquor, and the invitation is intriguing. He wonders if she’s telling the truth. Who wouldn’t like to go to Paris, stay in a magical house. Luke feels his tension start to melt, his spine and neck begin to relax.

There are hunting lodges like Dunratty’s all over this part of the woods. Luke has never stayed in one but remembers seeing the inside of a couple when he was a kid, for some reason he can’t recall now.
Cheap cabins dating back to the 1950s, nailed together from plywood and filled with thrift shop furniture and mold, cheap linoleum and mouse droppings. The girl directs Luke to the last cottage on Dunratty’s gravel driveway, and the cabin’s windows are dark and empty. She extends a hand to Luke. “Give me one of your credit cards and I’ll see if I can open the lock.”

Once inside, they draw the shades and Lanny snaps on a light. There is a chill on every surface they touch. Personal belongings are strewn about, left out, as though the inhabitants had been forced to flee in the night. There are two beds but only one is unmade, the crumpled sheets and dimpled pillows looking wanton and incriminating. A laptop with a digital camera attached to it via a cord sits on a shaky table that was once part of a kitchenette set. Open bottles of wine litter the side table, two tumblers smudged with fingerprints, lip prints.

Two bags, open, rest on the floor. Lanny crouches next to one, stuffing loose items into it, including the laptop and camera.

Luke jingles his keys, nervous and impatient.

The girl zips the bag shut, stands upright, then turns to the second suitcase. She fishes out an item of men’s clothing and holds it to her nose, breathing in deeply.

“Okay. Let’s go.”

As they go down the drive past the front office (surely closed at this hour of the morning, Dunratty Junior upstairs asleep), Luke thinks he sees the red gingham curtains move, as though someone might have been watching them. He imagines Dunratty, in his bathrobe, coffee cup in hand, hearing the sound of tires on gravel and going to see who’s driving by; would he recognize my truck? Luke wonders. Forget it, it’s nothing, just a cat going by the window, or so Luke tells himself. No sense in looking for trouble.

Luke is a little unnerved as the girl changes clothing while he drives, until he remembers that he’s already seen her naked. She slips on blue jeans and a cashmere sweater more luxurious than anything his wife had ever worn. She drops the scrubs to the car floor.

“Do you have a passport?” she asks Luke.

“At home, sure.”

“Let’s go get it.”

“What—we’re going to fly off to Paris, just like that?”

“Why not? I’ll buy the tickets, pay for everything. Money is not a problem.”

“I think we should get you to Canada, now, before the police put out a bulletin on you. We’re fifteen minutes from the border.”

“Will you need your passport to cross the border? They’ve changed the regulations, haven’t they?” the girl asks, a note of panic in her voice.

Luke tightens his grip again on the wheel. “I don’t know … I haven’t crossed the border in a while … Oh, okay, we’ll go to my house. But only for a minute.”

The farmhouse stands in the middle of an open field, like a child too stupid to know to come in from the cold. His truck climbs and bucks over the churned mud, now frozen into peaks like cake frosting.

They enter through the back door into a sad, shabby kitchen that hasn’t been changed in the past fifty years. Luke flips on the overhead light and notices it makes no appreciable difference in the level of light in the room. Used coffee mugs sit on the dinette table and crumbs crunch underfoot. He is disproportionately embarrassed by the disarray.

“This was my parents’ house. I’ve been living here since they died,” he explains. “I didn’t like the idea of the farm going to a stranger, but I can’t run it like they did. Sold the livestock a few months ago. Have someone lined up to rent the fields, to plant next spring. Seems a waste to let them go fallow.”

Lanny drifts around the kitchen, running a finger over the chipped Formica countertop, the back of a vinyl-cushioned kitchen chair. She stops at a drawing hanging from a magnet on the refrigerator, made by one of his daughters when she was in preschool. A princess on a pony; the pony is recognizable as some type of horselike creature
but the princess is an approximation, with bushy blond hair and blue eyes, wearing a pink gown to go horseback riding. Except for the long gown, it could be Lanny.

“Who drew this? Do you have children at home?”

“Not anymore.”

“Gone, with your wife?” she guesses. “No one taking care of the place for you?”

He shrugs.

“You don’t have any reason to stay,” she says, stating a fact.

“I still have obligations,” he says, because that is how he’s used to thinking about his life. A farm he won’t be able to sell in this economy. He has his practice, mostly elderly as their children and grandchildren move out of town. His caseload shrinks every month.

Luke goes up the stairs and to his bedroom, and finds his passport in the drawer of a bedside table. He moved into his parents’ old bedroom after his wife left him: the bedroom of his childhood had also been his marital bed and he wants no part of that anymore.

He flips the passport open. Never used. He’s never had the time to travel, not since his residency, and even then it was only in the U.S. He’s never been to even one of the faraway places he used to dream about seeing when he was a teenager, spending long hours on the tractor, his daydreaming time. His empty passport makes him feel a little ashamed in front of somebody who has been to all these exotic places. His life was supposed to turn out differently.