An Educated Death (30 page)

And then there was Laney. She might have been difficult and dishonest and manipulative but she had also been a confused, needy, vulnerable kid. Someone had used her—even if she'd been the initiator or seducer, she was sixteen, and adults are still responsible for protecting kids—used her and thrown her away. Somebody had to stand up for her.

"Please, Thea," he said. "Please do this for me. Look, in case this is why you think you have to stick with it, Laney's not Carrie. You don't have to be the champion of every lost soul in the world just because you couldn't save your sister."

"This isn't about Carrie. It's about me."

"You didn't even know the girl."

"You don't know your victims. Does that mean you don't care?"

"It's different. I'm a cop. It's my job. Finding out who killed Delaney Taggert isn't your job." He was yelling at me now.

"Someone tried to kill me because I'm getting too close."

"My point exactly. That's why I'm asking you to give this up!"

My mother says I've always been too stubborn for my own good. That I make things unnecessarily hard on myself because of a misguided sense of right and wrong. She spent years trying to instill by example, coercion, and sometimes physical force, a docile, ladylike nature in me. It didn't work. I'm still stubborn, pigheaded, determined, and absolutely convinced that I have to do what I believe is right, even if it has the effect of cutting off my nose to spite my face. Knowing what I knew and feeling what I felt, I couldn't fold my tent and slink away, not even for love.

"I can't quit," I said. "Please don't ask me to."

"I already did," he said. "I guess that's no, isn't it? I was being too romantic, wasn't I, thinking you might choose what I wanted instead your almighty principles? You'd risk your life for some dead girl you never even knew but you won't do anything for me. Okay. I get the message. I understand. You've got to do what you've got to do. No one is going to get their hooks into you, tell you what to do or tie you down, are they?"

"It would be different if I was a cop, right?" I interrupted. "Then if I said I just had to do this you'd understand? Then it would be okay for me to have to do something even if it was dangerous? Then it would be all right for me to be mad that someone had considered me expendable!"

He snatched up his small gym bag from the floor at the foot of my bed. "Maybe the late, sainted David Kozak was lucky. He died before he had a chance to find out who you really are. Or maybe you would have done this for him?" His angry gaze swept from me to Rocky and Dorrie, uncomfortable witnesses to the scene. "If something happens to her, please don't call me, okay? I don't want to know. You don't even have to bother to drive to Maine, Thea. I'll pack your stuff and ship it. You really weren't living there anyway."

He left. I went after him, unable to let him leave like that. I followed him down the corridor, using the wall for support. "Andre, wait...." He turned, a hopeful look on his face. "Can't we talk about this? I'll be very careful. I won't take any chances...."

I watched him close down again. "I was hoping you were going to say you'd changed your mind. There's nothing else to talk about." He turned and walked away.

I leaned against the wall, watching his broad back moving away from me. My fingers had danced along that rigid spine, knew every inch of that skin. I wished I could rush after him and give him what he wanted.
Please,
I thought,
please turn around and look back at me.
The doors closed behind him and he was gone.

 

 

 

Chapter 15

 

 

It's not anatomically correct to describe the heart as breaking. That's fiction. What was real was the incredible pain I felt, watching him walk away, like being slowly gutted with a dull knife, my spirit screaming for him to change his mind and come back. As the poet said, "I could not love thee, dear, so much, Loved I not honor more." It was small consolation right now.

I found the nearest bathroom, threw up, and dragged myself back to my room. Dorrie and Rocky were standing there, looking like guilty children. "I'm sorry, Thea," Dorrie said. "I had no idea... I never would have suggested it if I knew it would cause this much trouble for you. Has he gone?"

"He's gone." My words reverberated through my body like echoes in an empty room, confirming what had just happened. If I lived that long, I was going to be sitting alone on Christmas Day with two baseball gloves and no one to play with. By choice. Because a woman's gotta do what a woman's gotta do. Wearily, I got back into bed. I would have pulled the covers over my head and shrieked, but I wasn't alone.

"Look," Rocky said, "you don't have to do this. You don't wanna ruin your life just because of some consulting job. That's a good man you've got there—"

"I know that."

"Not worth losing over some dead teenager—"

"Oh, shut up. Both of you. You've got what you wanted. I'll come out there, like I said. I'll work with you and we'll keep on plugging until we've licked this thing, but right now I need to be alone for a while. Please." The tears behind my eyes were pressing and I was holding on to control so hard it hurt. They just stood and stared at me helplessly. Infuriatingly stupid and kind, though neither of them was stupid and Rocky wasn't normally kind. "Go away! Go find me some clothes. Some food. Shampoo." I buried my face in my pillow, refusing to look at them. I'd stood my ground. Gotten my own way. I was just terribly sad.

"Come on, Rocky, out!" Dorrie ordered. At the door she paused. "Suzanne called. She's coming over with some clothes. We'll go find you some breakfast."

"Real food," I said. "Not hospital stuff." At last they went away and left me in peace.

I lay in my bed and rested, eyes closed, the picture of the docile patient, but my mind was racing on to the job ahead. That was my nature. When David died, I took refuge in work. I could always do it again. I wrapped some emotional strings around my shattered spirit and took stock of the physical plant. I still felt absolutely awful. There were occasional flutters of yesterday's anxiety and my entire digestive system was wrecked, but being able to breathe without feeling as if I was drowning was such a miracle all the rest paled in comparison. The idea that my own body could try to drown me, the memory of strangling when I was surrounded by breathable air, still terrified me.

The fancy medical term for it was pulmonary edema—fluids leaking back through the alveoli and pooling in the lungs. It had felt to me like a rising tide and I'd been helpless before it. Breathing, struggling, gasping for air, the tide kept on coming in. I don't like being helpless and last night I'd been helpless because of the workings of my own body. Like Laney, I'd been drowning. The experience had left me connected to Laney Taggert in a way I hadn't been before.

The flash of recognition I'd had in Rocky's office stayed with me. I'd seen Laney drowning in that murky pond as clearly as if I'd been there. That was part of why I couldn't just walk away from this thing. I'd spent a week getting to know Laney. Talking about her, thinking about her, reading about her, and then her killer had given me the final push—trying to make me die like her. Inadvertently, instead of killing me or scaring me off, the killer had bonded me with Laney. And left me furious. No one was going to kill us and get away with it.

Meanwhile, I was hungry and dirty and tired enough to go back to sleep. And cold. Cold from the shock of knowing that someone on the Bucksport campus was a killer who would kill again and again to avoid discovery. Chilled at the thought of the pleasant, normal, caring woman Carol Frank had been, now dead because she'd been Laney Taggert's counselor. And I had no doubt that she was dead. Why had the killer waited so long? What had I said or done, and to whom, that had triggered the attack on me and Carol's disappearance?

I went back through yesterday's itinerary. What had I done? Gotten the list from Lori. Made some phone calls. Talked with Russ Hamlin. An enigmatic character. If this were a novel and not real life, he'd be my prime suspect. He was too confiding and too provocative. Or Bill Donahue, so closed and defensive, so righteous and judgmental. What did he have to hide? Carol had been a welcome relief after the two of them. I tried to recall who had brought me the sandwich but I couldn't remember. Carol and I had been talking and then Lori had interrupted us to tell Carol there was an emergency. Had she handed me the sandwich then?

Why had the killer waited a week to go after Carol? And why go after her at all? How could the killer have known Carol was coming to talk to me? Had he not known about Laney's visits to Carol Frank? Assumed that the records were confidential? That made me wonder who knew that Carol Frank had consulted with the school's attorneys about confidentiality and whether it was relevant. More questions for Dorrie.

At that point Suzanne finally arrived with my clothes, looking perfectly pulled together and disgustingly healthy. She made me feel more tired and hungrier and dirtier than ever. "If you weren't my partner," she announced, "I'd fire you. I cannot keep finding you in hospitals like this. You know I hate hospitals."

"While I love them, right?"

"Paul sends his love," she said. "He wants to know if you need blood?"

"Not this time."

She marched up to the bed and bent to kiss me. "Whew!" she said, straightening up. "You are a mess. I think this is the first time in months I haven't been jealous of you. Sorry I took so long but just as I was leaving, Junior blew his breakfast all over me. I've been up since five. The kid is definitely a morning person. I've already read
Pat the Bunny
and
Goodnight Moon
five times each. You really want a socially useful job, write some new children's books. Most of them are awful."

She started pulling things out of the bag and put them on the bed. "Here's a robe, some underwear, toiletries. I brought a nightgown in case they wouldn't let you go but I guess you don't need that. I'll put them in the bathroom. You've got to take a shower." She hurried off to arrange things, still not letting me get a word in. She was almost as hard to live with as I was. Stubborn, used to having her own way, and a confirmed workaholic. That's why we made such good partners.

"Guess I'll take that shower now."

But Suzanne wasn't quite ready to let me go. "Where's Andre?" she asked.

"He was here," I said, "but he got into a fit of male protectiveness. We had a disagreement and he left."

"Meaning," my partner said, "that he told you to leave the whole Bucksport fiasco to the proper authorities and you said no one was going to try and kill you and get away with it, right?"

"That was a big part of it."

She held the back of her hand to her forehead and closed her eyes. "Don't tell me," she said. "Let me guess. You also said you had a job to do and it wasn't finished."

"You know me too well."

"I was afraid that might happen."

"What? That I'd be stubborn or he'd walk out?"

"Yes," she said.

I shrugged, elaborately casual, only awakening the pain-carrying nerves in about a third of my body. "Anyway, thanks for calling him. Until he stalked out in high dudgeon it was nice to have him around."

"He'll stalk back in," she said. "I'm sure he will."

"I'm not so sure," I said. "I think he gets enough violence and death at work. He doesn't need it in his personal life. This time he'll probably go find one of those nice, docile, stay-at-home women most of his friends have married. The kind he always says he doesn't want and always wishes I was. Or a nice tough female cop who is allowed to get into trouble." I remembered Andre at the hotel in San Francisco. Thought of the solemn boys and the wayward girls running around on our mountaintop. Took a deep breath and packed all those feelings away for another time. It hurt too much. I wasn't ready to contemplate what I'd given up.

I glided with leviathan grace across the room and into the bathroom. Alone in the sterile, sanitized cubicle, I struggled out of the johnnies, dropped the detestable things onto the floor, and gave my sore, miserable body up to the mercies of hot water and soap. I managed to get myself reasonably clean and wash my hair but there was no way I could hold my arms up long enough to comb out the tangles.

I leaned against the sink, staring at my underwear. Putting it on seemed an almost insurmountable obstacle in my feeble state. Someone knocked on the door.

"Need any help?" Suzanne asked.

"In a minute." I put on the underwear and robe and then sat on the toilet seat while she combed out my hair. Suzanne was much gentler than my mother. Not once did she complain that she was going to cut it all off if I didn't hold still. But what it reminded me of was not my mother. It was a night at the Florios, when Rosie had combed my hair. When I'd talked with Andre on the phone and woken the next morning to find him in terrible danger. Other people's lives were never like this. Suzanne dressed me while I obediently stooped and turned and bent to order.

"You're more fun than a Barbie doll," she said. I didn't know how to respond to that. A few minutes later, I emerged from the bathroom a whole new woman. Elegant in slim black pants, a long red-and-black tunic sweater, and shiny black tooled leather cowboy boots that Suzanne just knew I needed. Every man's dream girl, as long as I didn't open my mouth. As long as I was, as my great-grandmother used to say, "biddable." It meant docile and willing to take direction.