back on the job part.”
“Today?” Mason’s brows rose, and he looked at me, then back at the doctor. “Where the hell are my clothes?”
“Ah, not so fast now,” said the AARP poster boy. “There are going to be some conditions.”
“Anything, Doc. Anything you say, I promise. Tell me, and I’ll do it. To the letter.”
“You are such a liar,” I muttered, but under my breath, so Dr. Earl could pretend not to hear.
He winked at me, though, so I knew he’d heard just fine. Then he started ticking off conditions on his immaculately manicured fingers. “You need to hire a nurse to come in and change your dressing twice a day to prevent infection. You need to come back if there’s any sign of any problem whatsoever. Any trouble breathing, or if that cough comes back. And you need to take another week at home before returning to work. And then only after I’ve examined and cleared you.”
“Yes. Yes, I agree to all of it. Anything just to get out of here. Rache, my clothes?”
Dr. Earl shook his head. “You know better, Detective. Let’s proceed with your morning exam, and then I’ll get started on the paperwork as soon as I finish my rounds. You should be out of here by—” he looked at the clock “—midday, if all goes well.”
Mason shot me a bug-eyed “my head’s gonna explode” expression, and I had to clap a hand over my mouth to keep the laugh from busting out. I refilled my coffee cup from the box. “I’ll get out of here to give you some privacy, then. Help yourself to coffee, Dr. Earl.”
Then I left the room, shaking my head. Thank God he was okay and heading home today. Thank God. I think it was the first time I really allowed the full brunt of the danger to hit me, and it made my knees a little weak. It was a constant battle to keep my mind from going to what could’ve happened.
And, oh man, was I ever going to have a talk with probable arsonist Mr. Rouse the Louse, whether my detective liked it or not. I just wouldn’t tell him. Not until after the fact, anyway.
For now, though, my main challenge was how I was going to convince him to come home to my house instead of to his own. I paced the hallway, tried to stay out of the way of the rush-hour nurse traffic and wished I knew how Mason was going to react to my suggestion.
* * *
Marie Rivette Brown’s life wasn’t pleasant. The doctors at Riverside Maximum Security Psychiatric Hospital kept her medicated. Heavily medicated. She didn’t hear her husband’s voice anymore. Once in a while he came through, but it was rare and usually only if she was stressed out about something else.
They even let her use the community room. They hadn’t for the first few months, but now they did. It was a big room, with small round tables and plenty of chairs, lots of games like checkers and Trouble, and several decks of cards. A TV set was always playing some happy family movie with no violence or death or ghosts or voices. Nothing that might upset the inmates.
She knew what she’d done. She’d tried to retrieve her dead husband’s donated organs. Eric had been a serial killer. Finding that out had been like a mortar round hitting her world. No one else knew. No one ever would. But she knew. She’d known for more than a year and had done nothing about it, unable to destroy her sons by letting it come out. Then, after his suicide, she’d lost the little baby girl she’d been carrying, and that seemed to make the walls of her sanity come crumbling down completely.
She didn’t feel remorse. She figured the drugs kept her from feeling much of anything, so she couldn’t feel sorry for what she’d done, the lives she’d taken. Without the drugs, though, she knew she wouldn’t feel it, either. Without the drugs, she was convinced that what she had done was completely rational.
She missed her boys, though. That was the one thing she seemed capable of feeling, on her meds or off, completely insane or doped into a state of zombie-like calm. She missed her sons. Jeremy would be graduating from high school soon. A couple of weeks, if that. She so wished she could be there for him.
“Hi, sweetie. How are you doing today?”
Blinking out of her thoughts, Marie looked up from the table where she sat alone, an untouched meal in front of her, at the nurse. She’d seen her around before, a stunningly beautiful blue-eyed blonde with a figure her tight-fitting white dress did nothing to hide. But she wasn’t anyone Marie interacted with very often.
“Fine.” That was always her answer.
“You should let me take you outside. It’s such a beautiful day. Lots of people are out enjoying the yard today.”
Marie shrugged. “Okay.”
The nurse smiled and took her arm, helped her up and held on to her gently as they walked together toward the doors, then she used her keycard to unlock them. Marie didn’t think it made any sense keeping them locked, because they only led out to a fenced-in lawn, with several patches of flowers and quite a few big shade trees. Marie scuffed across the soft grass in her foam slippers toward a pair of lawn chairs underneath a pretty red maple. The nurse was right. The fresh air was nice. It smelled like summer and sunshine, and reminded Marie of picnics at the lake house up north and the kids playing on the tire swing and jumping into the water. Skinny and shirtless in baggy shorts she used to say would fall right off in the lake one of these days.
She sank into a chair, closing her eyes and breathing the air, and trying to grab hold of the joy of the memory. But there wasn’t any. It was just a picture. It elicited no emotion.
Marie wasn’t aware that the nurse had sat down in the other chair until she spoke, breaking into the memory and bringing her back to the miserable present.
“I wanted to show you something. I’m not really allowed, but sometimes I think the rules here are over the top.”
Marie frowned as the nurse pulled a folded newspaper clipping out of her pocket, opened it and held it by two corners as the breeze made it ripple. It was a photo of a man carrying two blankets out of a fire. She looked closer, frowning. “That’s Mason.”
“Your brother-in-law, right?”
Marie nodded, her eyes eagerly skimming the words under the photo. Those weren’t blankets, they were children. Mason had saved them from a terrible fire that had killed their mother. Nodding slowly, she understood. “He’s a good man. He’s always been.”
“I can see that. I was so surprised when I saw this on the news and realized he was part of your family. You must be so proud of him.”
Marie wasn’t proud of him. Not really. After all, she’d had no hand in making him the great person he was. “His mother probably is.”
“Oh? His mother’s still living?”
Marie nodded.
“Close to him, I hope? He lives in...Binghamton, right?”
“Castle Creek,” Marie said, remembering the farmhouse and wondering if her boys were happy there. Probably. They loved their uncle so much. Maybe more than they loved her. Especially after what she’d done. “His mother’s in Whitney Point. Near Rachel.”
“Rachel? Who’s she?”
“His
