Authors: Laurie R. King
Tags: #Fiction, #Mystery & Detective, #Women Sleuths, #Thrillers, #Suspense
With Child (10 page)
Lee, reading the map, discovered a town with the unlikely name of Drain. She then began to search for further oddities, coming up with Hoquaim, Enumclaw, Pe Ell, and finally let out a cry of triumph.
"My God, Kate, there's a town in Washington called -are you ready? - Sappho."
Kate took her eyes off the road. "No, I won't believe that. You're making it up."
"I swear it! Look," she said, thrusting the map under Kate's nose.
"It has to be a misprint."
"I must go to Sappho," Lee declared.
Kate grinned, picked up Lee's left hand and kissed the ring she wore there, and managed to convince herself that everything was all right.
And on one level, it was. They drove through Oregon's lush Willamette Valley, two women in a foreign and well-watered land, where massive sprinklers hurled sparkling jets of water hundreds of feet through the air. They found two lakes to swim in, one noisy and crowded, the other newly opened and pristine. They stopped at two Pioneer Days museums to look over the rusty plows and make the requisite comment that women must have been tiny in those days, or else the leather of those shoes must have shrunk considerably in a century.
Kate, desperate to believe that all was well, saw only the sunshine, heard only Lee's laughter in the water and her shriek when the tiny fish nibbled her leg. She did not see that Lee's smiles were occasionally just a bit forced, she closed her ears to the long silences, put a succession of tapes in the Ford's player, talked a lot to herself.
She did not take conscious notice of the fact that Lee had not touched the wheelchair since they had left San Francisco. When Lee had Kate stop at a drug store so she could go in and buy some aspirin, the fact that Lee was chewing the things like peanuts was miraculously hidden behind the surface irritation that Lee had not asked Kate to go in for her. Bit by bit, as the miles passed, Lee became less and less willing to acknowledge her disabilities. They spent more than an hour every day at rest stops, Kate walking up and down the cement paths between the summer-worn lawns and the crowded parking strips while Lee hobbled, sweating and determined, to the toilets, refusing the wheelchair, ignoring the wide-doored handicapped stalls, feeling the eyes on her like so many burning coals, ready to snarl at Kate should she dare offer help or to stab a stranger's hand with icy politeness: Thank you, I can manage.
Outside the yellow rest rooms, cars came and went, truckers parked and used the toilets and rolled away, picnics were packed away and others spread out, and finally Lee emerged, one aluminum prop after the other, and made her way, three inches at a step, to the car. She would not allow Kate to park in the handicapped slots, would coldly rage and spit and wound if Kate tried to save her some steps, made it easier, acknowledged Lee's limitations. It was painful to stand by helplessly as Lee drove her legs to take one step, then another, excruciating to witness the effort Lee went through that Kate could so easily save her, agony to stand and watch as Lee battled furiously to compel her body to obey her will.
A six-month-old golden retriever flew past Lee, trailing its leash and its indignant, laughing owner. Lee teetered, leaned into the arm braces, stayed upright, and Kate began to breathe again. A fall, every fall, meant either long minutes of wracking effort or an assistance from Kate, followed by hours of bitter silence and (until recently, when Lee had renounced them) a surreptitious pain pill at night. No fall this time, not even descending the Everest of the four-inch curb. She had not even noticed that Kate had moved the car one space closer, six precious feet, or at any rate, she said nothing. Perhaps this will be a good day after all, Kate thought, starting the engine and putting the car into reverse.
The next day, they reached Puget Sound, and the following morning set out for the ferry to Aunt Agatha's island. Through the foggy, low-lying pastureland, around the northern end of Fidalgo Island to Anacortes, Kate followed the signs, finally steering down into a huge parking lot next to the water, where they were directed into a loading lane. She cut the engine and opened her door to go and buy their tickets, but she stopped at the touch of Lee's hand on her arm and Lee's first word since they had left the motel.
"No."
"I was just going to buy the tickets. I'll be back in a minute."
"No, don't."
"I think we have to buy them before they let us on."
"Not now," Lee ordered sharply, and Kate stared at her profile, feeling uneasy now. Lee was getting terribly worked up about something. Kate knew that Lee had a lot of unresolved and probably unresolvable feelings toward the father she had never known, but Kate had had no indication before this that she was transferring those feelings to the man's sister. This is not good, she thought unhappily, but she pulled her door shut, and felt Lee relax a shade beside her.
Long minutes passed. A ferry appeared through the thinning fog. It docked, then began to spew forth a stream of speeding cars and trucks, like a shark spawning, with a smaller but no less determined string of pedestrians appearing along the other side of the waiting area. She'll be one of those, thought Kate, there's no point in paying to drive a car across if the people you're meeting have one. An older woman came into sight - no, too young. There was another, looking more likely. Kate leaned over the seat and began to pull the bits and pieces over to one side, and suddenly Lee made a noise in the back of her throat, flinging open her door to heave her clumsy legs laboriously out onto the pavement and begin hauling herself upright against the car.
Kate stopped her clearing activities and opened her own door. She stood out on the asphalt, looking toward the off-loading pedestrians for a straggling senior citizen, and then she realized that Lee was looking in the other direction, the direction they had come from. Kate looked, but she saw only the latecomers being directed into their lines - cars, campers, and a flashy red motorcycle weaving between the others. Lee waved her hand wildly, and Kate looked more closely. Could it be - yes, it was the motorcycle that had attracted Lee's interest. A messenger from Aunt Agatha? But how could Lee know? Suspicion began to blossom in Kate's mind, and she looked at Lee over the top of the car until, reluctantly, Lee answered the pressure of Kate's gaze and looked back, and Kate, seeing the same wrenching mixture of excitement and guilt and fear and defiance that she had seen there the day Aunt Agatha's letter arrived, only ten times stronger, knew instantly what it meant, knew why Lee had been silent and why she'd stopped Kate from buying the tickets. The truth was so devastating, so utterly appalling, she could feel nothing else, not even the anger that Lee was obviously expecting from her. She just stared, at Lee and then at the motorcyclist, who was somehow now standing in front of Lee.
The small figure in the bright red leathers with a zigzag of purple down each arm bent over in a deep bow, pulled off the purple helmet, and straightened up, shaking out a head of pure white curls. She held out a hand to Lee.
"You're Lee," she stated. "You look like your father."
"Aunt Agatha," Lee answered, with an uneasy sidelong glance at Kate. The woman followed her glance, then stretched her hand over the roof of the car to Kate.
"And you must be Kate."
Kate looked at the small brown hand, the wrinkled little face, sallow beneath a deep tan, the sparkling blue eyes that looked like Lee's, but she did not see them, saw only, clear before her, the evidence that Lee had made a great number of plans that patently did not include her. There had been nothing at all vague about this arrangement, how she intended to meet Aunt Agatha. Kate looked away from the older woman, back to her beloved.
"What has happened to you, Lee?" she whispered hoarsely. "This is... it's foul. Deceitful. You never intended me to go to the island, did you?"
"Oh dear," said Aunt Agatha with a sigh, and stood back.
"Kate, I never meant --"
"Oh Christ, Lee, don't make it worse." Kate found herself shouting, and she did not care. "You manipulated me to get you up here and now you want me to leave you alone. It's a shitty thing to do, and I'd never have believed it of you. You may not love me, but I thought at least you had some self-respect. Obviously I don't know you, not at all, not anymore. Well, fine, you're here, your aunt's here, and you don't need me." She yanked the back door open and began to heave Lee's possessions out onto the blacktop, beginning with the wheelchair. Lee, babbling incoherently and with tears on her face, began to inch her way around the car, leaning her full weight on the dusty hood. Her aunt followed - making no move to interfere, just shadowing this unknown crippled niece of hers. Kate finished in the backseat and turned to the trunk. She dropped a carton to the ground, sending books spilling out under the front of the car behind them, which for some reason had its engine running. A number of cars had started up, she noticed. The ferry was boarding, and the car was now empty of Lee's things except - Kate slammed the trunk shut and continued around to the passenger side, where she leaned in, pulled out Lee's arm braces and the waist pack she used as a purse, plucked a pair of sunglasses from the dashboard and a paperback from the door pocket and threw them onto the ground, slammed the door (Lee had reached the trunk by this time), and walked forward again around the front of the car and back to the driver's door. Lee, too, was back where she had started from, looking across the Ford's roof at Kate, protesting, crying, reaching, and cars were driving past, the passengers staring with greedy curiosity at the scene. A horn sounded. Kate opened her door, pausing before getting in.
"Do you want me out of the house when you get back?"
"NO! Oh God, Kate, if you'd just listen, you don't understand --"
"No, I don't. I don't understand anything. Let me know when you're coming home," she said. She got into the car, turned the key, put it into gear, and drove away, leaving Lee staggering at the sudden loss of support. She would have fallen but for Agatha. Kate drove between the white lines that led down the loading area toward the ferry, then cut back in the opposite direction to the empty off-loading lane. As she passed the two figures with their piles of luggage and the gaudy motorcycle, she heard Agatha Cooper's penetrating voice asking, "Can you ride on the back of a motorcycle, Lee?" She could not help looking back in the rearview mirror. Her last view of Lee for many months was of Lee watching her, but also of Lee beginning to straighten up and formulate the answer, a determined "Yes."
Kate had not even stayed to watch the ferry depart, had not even hoped that Lee might change her mind at the last moment. Instead, she drove up the hill, away from the sea and around the corner from the ferry terminal, where she pulled over into a wide spot, put her arms on the top of the steering wheel, and began to weep.
When she was empty and exhausted from the effort of tears and her eyes and head ached and throbbed, she drove on, somehow missing the way back to Seattle and ending up instead on the next island, where a cluster of motels and bars had sprung up around a military base. She checked into a motel, walked to the next-door bar for a drink, and woke up two days later, sick and wretched and wishing she were as dead as she felt.
She did not die, instead, she drove her hungover body out to the shore and sat watching the waters ebb out of the Sound, toward the sea, and then turn and push their way back in. The next morning, she checked out of the cigarette-permeated motel room and drove to Reedsport, where her car was still not ready. She walked far up and down the hard wet sand of the Oregon beaches all the following day, until finally, barely twenty-four hours before she was due back at work, the car was running. She drove back to the City, fueled by coffee and kept awake by food, to arrive home at five in the morning. And four hours after that, she was awakened by Jules, leaning on her doorbell.
The memories faded; Kate's body quieted, and then she slept.
Was it still August? There was a man in the bar, she remembered, a small man in a shiny suit; that was why she'd bought herself a bottle to take back to the hotel room, to get away from him.
No, it was December now, although inexplicably August's hangover was still with her - a head so fragile that if her queasy stomach did what it wanted to, her skull was sure to split right down the middle. Someone groaned, she thought, and grinned like a skull.
"Kate?" said an unfamiliar voice. "Katarina Martinelli? Are you awake?"
She worked her throat a bit, swallowed, cleared it gingerly. Her head didn't split, although she thought it might be a good idea to keep her eyes shut.
"Somebody had a headache," she muttered.
"What did she say?" said the voice.
"She seems to be disassociating herself from her experience," said another woman. Something familiar about this second voice. "How interesting."
"Not," began Kate, and then thought, The hell with it. Let them be interested.
"Not what, Kate?" said the second voice, the one with the mild accent, and when Kate didn't answer, she continued, "Do you know where you are?"
"Hospital," Kate answered immediately. She knew these smells and noises even with her eyes shut and a hangover thudding through her. She'd know them even if she lay here dead.
"Do you know how you got here?"
Kate had no immediate answer for that one.
"Who had a headache?" voice two persisted.
"Joke," said Kate to shut her up, but the word set off an echo and bits of memory began to flake off and fall down where Kate could gather them up. Joke
(joke/buckets from the morgue catching scraps - no, drops, drops of rain/macabre cop humor, sorry, Grace/ is he with you?/ you're looking for a boy called
--)
"Dio," she croaked, and opened her eyes into those of Rosa Hidalgo. "Dio. Is he alive?"
"The boy? The doctors say he's responding well, he'll be fine. You know how you got here, then?"
"I was in the squat, with, um. Rawlins. Rawlings," she corrected herself. "Did I get shot?"
"You were hit, with a piece of pipe. You were lucky, it seems, that God has blessed you with a thick skull."
"Thank you, God. How long was I out?" Kate was aware that the other woman was fussing with vital signs, her hand on Kate's wrist, but she ignored her.
"You were hit the day before yesterday, so it is about forty-three hours. And if you are wondering why I am here, I am acting as Jules's representative. Hospital policy does not allow children in the I.C.U.," she added with amusement, "and Jani has a lecture this afternoon."
"I can imagine Jules had words about hospital policy," Kate said, and closed her eyes.
When she next woke, Hawkin was there, and a different nurse. Before she could speak, the nurse shoved a thermometer into her mouth, and everything waited until pulse and blood pressure had been taken and the high-tech thermometer beeped.
"How's the boy?" Kate asked as soon as her mouth was clear.
"He'll do. He's still on a drip but his fever's down. I talked with him just before I came here."
"Has anyone come for him yet?"
"He won't give us his last name, where he's from, anything."
"You might ask Grace Kokumah to come and talk with him. You know her?"
"Of course. I'll do that, when he's better. How are you doing?"
"I feel like hell, but everything seems to be in the right place. I haven't seen a doctor yet, not to talk to."
"I'll try and find one for you. You owe Rawlings, by the way. He managed to be in the way when they were moving you into the ambulance, so the papers didn't have any pictures of you this time. They had to make do with Reynolds."
"Who's Reynolds?"
"Sorry. Weldon Reynolds, the guy you shot. He has a record, but only small things, creating a disturbance, selling grass and mushrooms, resisting arrest. Not a sexual offender, as far as we can find out, and none of the other boys in the squat accused him. Looks like he had a fantasy of creating a society of outcasts, petty thievery and selling joints, with the profits coming to him, of course."
"Dickens," Kate commented.
"Fagin," agreed Hawkin. "He'll be okay, by the way. Your bullet caught him at a funny angle, probably bounced off one of the struts in that elevator, traveled up through a couple of ribs and collapsed a lung, but it didn't reach the heart. You were lucky."
"Yes," Kate said with feeling. A shooting, even justified, was always a serious thing; killing a perpetrator could haunt, or end, a cop's career. To say nothing of the cop.
"Are you okay about it?"
"I don't know. I haven't thought about it. I guess so."
"You remember shooting him?"
"Oh yes. I remember shooting, anyway. I never saw him, just the gun flashes, and I aimed at them, and then the gun fell. I never saw him," she repeated. "Am I on suspension?"
"Administrative leave," Hawkin confirmed. "There'll be a hearing when you're on your feet again, but you won't have any problems. You were entirely justified.
He
was shooting at
you
, for Christ sake."
"I didn't have a warrant."
"He had no right to be there, either. I talked to the owner of the building. It'll be all right, Kate. Don't worry about it, just get better. Do you want me to call Lee?"
"No!"
Hawkin stood beside her bed and looked down at her for a long time, but in the end he did not comment, merely nodded and said good-bye. Kate was tired, but her throbbing skull kept sleep at bay for a long time - the throbbing, but also the tangled memories of Dio's sweaty face, the gun kicking in her hand, and the strangled cough of the man when her bullet hit him.
One of the things Kate hated most about being in the hospital was that people were forever coming in on her while she was asleep. Not so much the hospital personnel - she was resigned to them; after all, they were body technicians, and having them wandering around the room while she was out like a light was much the same as having a doctor doing a yearly exam, prodding and looking into areas of her body that even Lee hadn't seen much of.
It was the others who were given free rein to come in and stare at her who drove her mad. Over the next few days, especially when she was moved from the I.C.U., there was a constant stream: The man from Internal Affairs, the police psychologist, the social workers and investigators and everyone connected with the squat and its boys and the criminality of its leader - all had come in at one time or another, and most of them had caught her sleeping.
And now, yet again, five days into her stay, she was struggling up into alertness, knowing someone was standing beside her bed. Two someones, she saw, Al and a boy who was either extremely short or else sitting down, a boy with a Mayan face and long hair as black as Jules's, a boy who looked embarrassed and shy and determined.
"Kate, this is Dio," Al said.
She tried to lift herself upright, then remembered the switch and raised the head of the bed. The boy was sitting, in a wheelchair, though by the looks of him it was more due to hospital policy than need.
"Well, you're certainly looking better than when I last saw you," Kate told him, and put out her hand. He shook it with the awkwardness of someone who is more familiar with the theory of a handshake than with its practice. That seemed true of dealing with the adult world in general, as well; when he had his hand back, he didn't seem to know what to do with it, and his gaze flitted about the room, landing only briefly on Kate's face and veering away from the thick bandages around her head.
"I, um, I wanted to say thank you," he said. "They're discharging me, and I wanted to see you before I left. To say thanks."
"You're welcome," she replied, swallowing a smile. "I'm just glad I found you. You should thank Jules, and Grace Kokumah."
"Um, I - I did. I also wanted to thank you for getting the library book back to Jules."
"Library book?" She looked to Al for explanation, but he only shook his head in incomprehension.
"Yeah, the one I had in the tent. I was really worried about it," he said in a rush. "It's been bugging me ever since I left, 'cause I know how careful Jules is with books, especially library books, and I knew the tent would leak as soon as it rained."
"I see. Why didn't you give it back to her before you left?" And, she thought, why didn't you take your bits of jewelry with you?
He looked down intently at his fingers, which were plucking at a worn spot on the arm of the wheelchair. Al moved casually away to examine a wilting flower arrangement.
"I was gonna go back. I only came up here for the day, you know? There was this other kid in the park - he wanted to come up and he had a ride, so I came with him. Then we met Weldon, and it got late, so we stayed with him, and then, well, we just got busy, you know?" He looked up, and read the expression on her face as disapproval. "He always had things for us to do. And I was afraid that if I went back down, I might have problems getting up again, like if the cops - the police'd found my stuff and thought I stole it, so I just kept putting it off. But I felt really bad about that library book."
The smile tugged itself out of the corners of Kate's mouth. "You're something else, you know that, Dio?"
His head came up, looking for ridicule but looking relieved, and when he realized she meant it as a compliment, his brown skin blushed copper.
"You just stayed on in the squat because it was better than living out in the open, with winter coming on?"
"Yeah. It was an okay place. It was dry, and we had lots of blankets, and some of the other kids were cool. Weldon was a little weird sometimes, but he was good at getting food and stuff, and he knew some great stories. He used to tell us things at night. Called it 'sitting around the campfire.' " A crooked smile softened the boy's face for a minute, and then it was gone.
"How was he weird, Dio?" she asked, and when he didn't answer, she said, "I think I deserve to know. He nearly killed me, for Christ sake."
"That was Gene that hit you."
"I mean with the gun. Or didn't you know that Weldon tried to shoot me?"
"I heard, yeah." He shifted uncomfortably. "I don't know. Weldon was kind of paranoid. He used to tell us how he'd protect us against people - cops and CPS and people who'd want to break us up. He used to call us his family. He even tried to get us to call him Dad, but only a couple of the littler kids ever did." He sounded regretful, as if he had failed a friend.
"Why didn't you let Jules know you were okay? She was terribly worried."
"I know. I did write. Twice."
"What happened?"
"I gave them to Weldon to mail," he said flatly.
"And he never did."
Dio shrugged.
"What are you going to do now?" she asked.
"I'm gonna live with a family for a while. The Steiners."
"I know them. They're good people."
"I guess."
"Well, good luck to you, Dio. Stay in touch, and look, if things get rough, give me a call, okay? I might be able to help."
His eyes went to her wrapped head, and he winced, but his parting handshake was more assured than the first one had been.
Al took the chair's handles and began to push it toward the doorway, but Kate had remembered something else. "Dio - who was the woman in the picture? The snapshot I found in your tent?"
Al turned the chair around, but the boy's face was closed up and he said nothing.
"Anyway, did Jules give it back to you?" After a moment, he ducked his head. "Yeah."
"That's good. Well, take care, man. See you later, Al."
Their voices faded down the noisy hallway, and Kate lay back to await the next interruption.
She was in the hospital for a week, refused release because of occasional spikes in her temperature and a cycle of blinding headaches that entertained a series of doctors and worried the nurses. Finally, however, her fevers left, and with the possibility of an infection inside her brain out of the way, she was discharged. Even then she had to lie to the head nurse, saying that there would be someone to care for her at home, but eventually, her shaven scalp cold around the smaller bandage, she eased herself from wheelchair to Hawkin's car, and he drove her home.
She let him take the bag of accumulated possessions into the house - things he or Rosa Hidalgo or Rosalyn Hall had fetched for her - and walked cautiously through to the living room sofa. Hawkin brought her the alpaca throw blanket, turned up the heat, made her a cup of hot milk, and carried her bag upstairs. He came back with her gun in its holster.
"Where do you want this?" he asked.
"The top drawer in that table with the phone on it, thanks."
He stepped back into the hallway and she heard the squeak of the drawer.
"Can I get you anything to eat?"
"No thanks. They fed me lunch." The doctor whose approval was required before Kate could leave had been in surgery, delayed by an automobile accident and leaving Kate to sit in her room, waiting and picking at a tray of hospital food, until he swept in, still wearing his surgical booties, looked in her eyes, asked her two or three questions, and left. "What I'd really like is to be alone, if that's not too rude."
"I understand. I'll stop by on my way home, but call if you need anything. Where's the -I saw it in the kitchen." He went out again and returned with the portable telephone, checking that the batteries were charged before he put it on the table in reach of Kate's hand. "You remember my beeper number?"
"Al, I had a concussion, not a lobotomy. Go do some work. Solve a crime or something, and let me sit and be quiet."
And it was quiet, once the door had closed behind him. A light, steady rain was falling, soaking the shrubs and pots and the bricks of the patio, where the moss in the cracks rose up to drink it in. Streaks ran down the windows and the French doors, a mild gurgle came from the downspouts, an occasional seagull floated across the gray sky, and Kate slept.
It was dark outside when she woke, although a light from the kitchen gave outlines to her surroundings. She woke bit by bit, dozing warmly inside the cocoon of the soft blanket, grateful for the familiar room and the sounds of home. Hospitals were cold, clanking death traps, and she was aware, for the first time since August, of the innate goodness of life.
