Death at Charity's Point (25 page)

I felt hands on my body. The thunder of surf below me seemed to fill my brain. Someone held me under my arms. As my body was lifted, I heard a scream. It was my own. I was being dragged. I knew in a moment I would tumble over the edge of the cliff to my death, and my pain and fear paralyzed me. I felt the sharp edges of the ledge under my back scraping me.

“Leave him.” It was Rina’s voice.

“We can’t.” A man, a voice I had never heard.

“Just leave him. He can’t hurt us. Let’s get the hell out of here. Come on.”

Then he let me go. I opened my eyes. Rina was standing over me, straddling me. She smiled. I tried to speak, but a dart of pain shot through my face. I let my eyes close.

“You’ll be all right here,” I heard her say, before I spiraled down a drain of dark unconsciousness.

Sometime later the blackness shifted to gray. I opened my eyes to see the moon straight over my head staring down sympathetically. I tried to lift my head. White-hot spikes stabbed through my eyes. I let my head fall back, welcoming the dark, numbing blanket that fell over me.

I lapsed in and out of consciousness. I vaguely marked the passage of time by the movement of the moon. Once I managed to rise on one elbow, and my stomach flopped over and I retched miserably, each spasm bringing with it a hammer of pain to the back of my head. When I tried to open my mouth to spit out the acid bile, I realized my tongue had swollen horribly and my jaw was rigid. I began to gag on my vomit, but I was able to let it ooze out of the holes where I used to have teeth.

Again, later, I climbed up through my pain to see an apparition hovering over me. “It’s God,” I thought, and the thought did not sadden me.

“What happened to you, man?” said God.

I heard a low moan, the sound of a man bellyshot dying slowly on the barbed wire.

God knelt beside me and stared into my face. “Man, you drunk? Some bad spill, there, man. You just let me take a look here.” I was aware of his moving my body, although it seemed to be detached from the focus of pain in my head. Then he stood, holding something in his hand. I lay helpless, watching him through narrow eyes. The sky over his head shone pearl gray.

“I’ll get some help for you, old friend,” he said. “This here’ll pay me for my troubles. Don’t you move, now.” He cackled and was gone with my wallet.

Later I felt the sun pounding down on me. I tried to swallow and couldn’t. I welcomed sleep. Then there were gentle hands on me, and voices far away, lifting, and then a softer bed under me, and I swayed and rocked as they carried me, and a new pain rose up through my body from my knee. I began to gag. Someone helped me hold my head over the side of the stretcher. My stomach pumped convulsively, but nothing came. I sank back.

“I think he’s coming around,” said a voice. “You better come on over here.”

I focused on the shape hovering over me. A kindly face with dark eyes and a bushy red beard frowned down at me.

“I’m Dr. Frye,” he said. “You’re going to be all right. We’re going to have to wire your jaw, and you’ll be staying with us for a while. Do you think you can talk?”

I tried to say yes. What came out was a groan.

“Okay, never mind. Take it easy. You don’t have to. I’ll tell you what’s wrong with you and what we’re going to do, and then Captain Shanley here would like to try to get some information. I think you can answer him by saying, ‘Uh-huh’ for ‘Yes’ and ‘Uh-uh’ for ‘No.’ Think you can do that, Mr. Coyne?”

“Uh-huh,” I grunted.

“Good. Okay, then. Let’s start where it probably hurts the most. Your jaw has been broken. Badly. Shattered, I should say. But not to worry. We’ll be able to set it for you. Like I said, we’ll have to wire it up. You’ll be on liquids for a month. Give you a chance to lose some weight, though you don’t look like you need to. You’ve lost five teeth. Convenient, actually, since you’ll be drinking through a straw. Saves us the trouble of taking one out. Couple others have been loosened, but I think those can be saved. Your tongue needs a few stitches. Lucky you didn’t bite it off. You’ve had a severe concussion. I was afraid there’d be a skull fracture, and there’s still the possibility of clots, so we’ll be watching you closely.”

I squeezed my eyes shut as a flame of agony shot through my head, from temple to temple and back again. Dr. Frye was smiling when I looked back up at him.

“Bad, huh? We’ll get you onto pain-killers soon enough. The police are anxious to talk with you first.” He paused, and then said something over his shoulder. I heard another voice, and the doctor said, “In a minute, I told you. The man’s in pain, can’t you see?”

Then he spoke again to me. “The other thing is your knee, Mr. Coyne, and frankly, I haven’t looked too closely at it yet. It’s your head that’s our first concern. The orthopedist will be in later to take a good look at that joint of yours, though, so don’t you worry about it.” He patted my arm. “You’re going to be just fine.”

The bulky frame of Kevin Shanley took the doctor’s place. “Remember me?” he said, grinning.

“Uh-huh,” I said. I tried to return his smile. It brought tears to my eyes.

“I’d like to ask you some questions, Mr. Coyne. I’ll be as quick as I can. Do your best for me. Okay, now, first, we found no money, no wallet, or anything in your clothes. Did a mugger do this to you?”

“Uh-uh.”

“No, eh? Hmm. What were you doing up there on Charity’s Point last night, anyway? No, sorry, let me rephrase that. Did you go up there alone?”

“Uh-uh.”

“With somebody, then. That the person who did this to you?

“Uh-uh.” I wanted to tell him it was more complicated than that.

“And not the one who took your money?”

“Uh-uh.”

Shanley frowned. “So you went up there with one person, a second person beat you up, and a third one robbed you. These three people were together in some way, then.”

I shut my eyes and sighed.

“For Christ’s sake, Mr. Coyne. These are not difficult questions.” Shanley paused, took a breath, and spoke again in a quieter voice. “Okay. Let’s talk about the first guy you were with, the guy who…”

I interrupted him, grunting “Uh-uh” as loudly as I could.

“What? Oh. You mean it wasn’t a guy?”

“Uh-uh.”

“A woman? You went up there with a woman, then.”

“Uh-huh.”

“A woman didn’t do this to you, Mr. Coyne. The second guy, then…”

I tried to shrug, to explain. It hurt. I moaned. I closed my eyes.

The doctor’s voice said, “That’ll have to be enough, Captain. I really am concerned.”

I welcomed the warm womb of sleep.

I
DREAMED THROUGH THE
next several days on a pink cloud of Demerol, interspersed with moments of fuzzy, painful consciousness. There were flowers. Faces hovered over me. Julie came with her Edward, and when she left she kissed me sweetly on my swollen lips. There were doctors and nurses shining lights into my eyes, invading me with thermometers, bathing my body, rolling me gently onto clean sheets, jabbing my butt with needles.

Clear liquids dripped through tubes into my veins. I sucked chocolate shakes through straws. They tried vanilla first, but I grunted “Uh-
uh
,” until they brought chocolate. I had no coffee, no Winstons, no Old Grand-Dad. I thought, in a moment of lucidity, that the drugs weren’t bad. I had no desire for the others.

Then one morning I woke up and cautiously opened my eyes and—
mirabile dictu
!—my head was clear, the pain only a dull, aching memory. A nurse materialized, a hefty, gray-haired matronly sort, all bluster and gentleness.

“Well, now, Brady, are we feeling better today?”

I tried to answer her. “Mff,” I said.

“You still can’t speak. My kind of patient. No complaining. We’re going to get along just fine. You’ll be happy to know that you’re out of Intensive Care. You’ve had some lovely brain scans, and your jaw is set beautifully. You’ll be as handsome as ever. Of course,” she smiled, “you’re nothing to take home to Mother quite yet. Why don’t we just sit you up a little and see if you won’t try some nice buttermilk.”

“
Uh-uh
!”

“Don’t care for buttermilk; eh?” Her eyes crinkled. “Between us, Brady, I can’t stand it, either. Vile stuff. Let’s try some hot soup.”

I found I was able to nod my head and smile with my eyes.

Later in the day they brought me books and newspapers. In the afternoon Kevin Shanley returned. He gave me a package of yellow legal pads and a fistful of ballpoint pens.

“I thought you’d like to try telling us what happened, as well as you can,” he said. “I have a strong suspicion that this assault had something to do with the Willard case.”

I nodded.

“Also,” he continued, “I got a call from the headmaster at the school, Elliott, reporting that one of his teachers has been missing for five days. Seems like more than coincidence. Miss Prescott. She the one who was with you that night?”

“Uh-huh.”

“Okay, then. If you’re up to it, write it all down for me. I’ll come back tomorrow. Meanwhile we’ve got an APB out on Sabrina Prescott. We’ll get her, don’t worry. It would help a lot, you know, if you could identify the other two who were with you that night.”

I closed my eyes and opened them again. Shanley shrugged and turned to leave. I grunted as loudly as I could. He stopped and turned back.

“What is it?”

I reached for the package of pads and tore the cellophane wrapper from it. Then I took a pen and printed on one of the sheets the words: CARLA STEINHOLTZ. I tore it off and handed it to Shanley.

“Who’s this?” He handed the paper back to me.

I wrote: SABRINA PRESCOTT.

Shanley looked at the name, frowned, and then began to nod his head. “They’re the same person, right?”

It was very tiring. I nodded. I wrote: “Call Charlie McDevitt. Justice Department. Boston.” Then I dropped the pen and the pad and sank back onto my pillow.

The next day a squad of green-frocked nurses wheeled me into an operating room so that the orthopedic surgeon, Dr. Connolly, could peer at the damage in my left knee through his arthroscope. Later he told me, “You were lucky, Mr. Coyne. Your legs are strong. You received a hell of a blow on the outside of the joint. Could have ripped you up beyond repair. As it is, a couple of ligaments are torn, and the others are stretched, but the cartilage seems intact. You’ll always have a bum knee, I’m afraid, but if you are faithful to your therapy you should eventually be able to resume all your activities.”

“Jogging?” I wrote.

“No jogging for a while, I’m afraid,” he said.

“Good!” I wrote. “Hate jogging.”

After two weeks they sent me home, my mouth still wired shut, the skin hanging from my bones. I could swing myself along on crutches for short distances, but I found myself exhausted most of the time. Nurses watched over me twenty-four hours a day, bringing me broth and frappes and each noon a vile mixture which they insisted was very good for me. Extract of malt, wheat germ, desiccated liver, cod liver oil, and various vitamins. “It’ll build up your strength,” the nurses said, and they stood watching me so that I wouldn’t dump it out onto the floor.

To my dismay they tidied up the place until I scarcely recognized it. I lay in my bed or on the sofa steeling my mind to resist the impulse to grow accustomed to the new appearance of my living quarters. I vowed never to like it neat.

Billy and Joey surprised me with a visit one afternoon. Julie had called Gloria. I was disappointed that Gloria hadn’t come, and then I was surprised at my disappointment. Billy brought a bottle of Jack Daniels. Joey gave me a first-edition volume of Edmund Ware Smith fishing stories. Typical of both of them. The boys seemed ill at ease. Their conversation was awkward, the more so because I could only write them notes, and they seemed relieved when I wrote, “Real tired. Thanks for gifts. Great to see you. Hi to Mom.”

Julie phoned me each day, assuring me that all was well at Brady L. Coyne, Attorney-at-law. The nurses insisted on answering the phone. They’d say, “Mr. Coyne’s residence. Who is calling, please?” And when the person on the other end replied, they’d say, “Mr. Coyne is tired. You may talk to him, but he will be unable to speak to you. Please be brief.”

It didn’t matter how tired I felt, or who it was calling me, or what their business was. And it felt strange to listen to a familiar voice on the other end of the line without being able to respond.

Three or four times late at night the telephone rang, and when the nurse answered, she’d frown and slowly replace the receiver on the hook. “Hung up on me,” she’d shrug. “Wrong number, I suppose.”

After two weeks at home, I was driven back to the hospital to have the wires removed from my jaw. I found I could barely open my mouth at first, but I worked at it, flexing and straining to move it.

The nurses stayed with me another week. By then my strength had returned. I was able to maneuver my way around my rooms with the aid of a cane. I ate soft foods. I spent a great deal of time out on my balcony, watching the sailboats and thinking.

“I’m going to work tomorrow,” I announced one day, bracing myself for the argument.

“Good!” said Helen, my day nurse.

“What do you mean, ‘good’?” I said.

“I mean,” she said, “that we’ve got plenty of sick people to take care of.”

On the third night after the nurses had been gone, the telephone jarred me from my sleep.

“Yeah?” I muttered.

“Prithee, m’lord.”

“Rina.” I felt no surprise that she had called.

“You must wear your rue with a difference. Pray you, love, remember.”

“Where are you? They’re looking for you.”

“I’m safe.” She paused. “Are you?”

“I’m alive.”

“I tried to call you. Many times. There was no answer for the longest time. I thought you were dead. He never will come home again, I thought. Fennel for you, and columbines. Then a woman answered.”

“A nurse. I had nurses.”

“Ah! Nurses. I thought…”

“No, I had to have nurses. They
were
nurses.”

“I called to tell you that you were wrong.”