Mercy (8 page)

“Sometimes.”

“They don't do you any good in the bottle, you know.”

“I take them when I need them. Don't fuss.”

“Well, fussing. Lord forbid I should fuss. Haley, you gorgeous thing, how's school treating you? Beating those boys off with a stick?”

Haley used to blush and squirm when Maia teased. Now she hung up her jacket and shrugged. “A great big one. With nails in it.”

“I'm getting her karate lessons for her birthday,” Jake added. “That's the only thing that will keep the guys at bay.”

While Maia laughed some more, Haley wandered around the room. She took a mug stained with coffee dregs to the kitchen and rinsed it out. She picked up a book, a fat paperback mystery, lying facedown on the arm of Jake's chair, and dogeared the page, closing it neatly, smoothing the creased spine.

“You have another nosebleed last night?” Maia asked. Haley, glancing up, saw Maia frowning at the rusty brown stains on Jake's pillowcase.

Jake's voice was uninterested. “Apparently.”

A sketchbook was lying on the table. Jake had been drawing something. A crumbling stone wall with a wide arched opening. The shadows inside the arch were thick and black. He'd pressed hard enough on the pencil to dent the paper and scatter little grains of carbon across the page. Haley blew them gently away. In the corner of the page, Jake had scrawled,
Macbeth
.

Haley stacked the sketchbook and the mystery novel on the table, lining up the edges precisely. She collected two pencils and a stick of charcoal and laid them neatly alongside. All this let her keep her head down as Maia checked Jake's blood
pressure. She didn't like to see her cousin's arm as Maia wrapped the cuff around it, to notice how thin it had gotten, the bicep no thicker than his forearm.

Maia let out her breath in a
hmmph
sound as she looked at the numbers on her dial and whipped the cuff off Jake's arm. “Let's get you on a scale, then. Come on, I haven't got all day.”

“Oh, you're the one with the hot date tonight?” Jake got to his feet. Out of the corner of her eye, Haley saw him wobble a little. Maia's hand moved quickly to his elbow to steady him.

The scale creaked a little as Jake stepped onto it. Maia went
hmmph
again.

“You drinking those milkshakes I brought?”

A bright thread glinted on the floor, near a leg of Jake's chair. Haley bent down for it.

“The ones that taste like cardboard? Yes.” Jake's voice sounded as if he'd been running hard rather than walking a few feet.

The thread came up in Haley's fingers. It was actually a chain of small silver links. The clasp on one end was broken.

Slow footsteps, dragging a little, and Sunny's claws clicking on the wooden floor. Jake sank into his chair beside Haley. Sunny laid her head on his lap, and the hand he lifted to stroke her ears trembled very slightly.

Shifting her eyes quickly from his face, Haley held the chain out to Maia, glad for the excuse to talk about something that wasn't Jake's health. “Is this yours?”

“Why would I wear a thing like that?” Maia shook her head a little so that her earrings—dangling confections of jade and ivory and something purple—swung and chimed quietly. “That's something my grandmother would wear.”

“Well, then, whose is it?”

“Maybe it's Elaine's.” Jake glanced briefly at the necklace. “She and your dad were here a couple of days ago. Maybe she dropped it.”

“Elaine doesn't wear jewelry. She says you can have jewelry or a child under three, but not both.”

“Must be somebody else's, then.” Jake leaned his head against the back of the chair.

“Haley, come on in the kitchen,” Maia told her. “I'm going to make myself a cup of tea, since your cousin there's too lazy to act like a host.”

Haley slipped the necklace into her pocket as she followed Maia. The nurse filled a kettle and set it on the stove. “Get down some mugs, will you?” She snorted as she pulled open a cupboard. “I'm going to bring that man some real tea. Nothing here but this pomegranate stuff. It'll have to do, I guess.”

Maia dumped tea bags into Jake's mugs. Earth brown with splashes of green like pine trees, and Haley's father's initials—NJB, for Nathan Joseph Brown—scribbled onto the bottom. Steaming water poured over the tea bags.

“Haley. Honey,” Maia said softly. “You can see it, right?”

Haley picked up her tea, curling her hands around the hot mug. “See what?”

“He's getting worse.”

Haley froze, holding her mug to her lips, looking at Maia through the steam. “But—but, that new medicine—you told him he should take it. Won't that help?”

“That's just to help with the nightmares, baby. So he can get some sleep. It's not going to cure him.”

The thin layer of clay between Haley's hands and the scalding water was growing hotter and hotter. In a minute she'd have to put the cup down.

“But—but there's something, right? That you can do?” She remembered to keep her voice low. “Something more that he can try. Something—”

“He doesn't want to try anything new, Haley.” Pity softened Maia's voice. One corner of her wide mouth tucked in a little, as if to control her own pain. “You know that, honey. You knew it when he came home from the hospital this last time.”

“But not—but not so
soon
!” Hot water sloshed over the edge of Haley's mug and onto her fingers. It hurt. “Six months. He said six months. The doctor said—”

Six months. That was half a year.

“That wasn't a guarantee, honey. It was just a guess.”

Doctors weren't supposed to guess. They were supposed to
know
.

And they'd said six months. Back in August, they'd said six months. Not until winter, they'd said. And it was only November.

Six months was half a year.

The first snow hadn't even fallen yet.

Six months was still a long time away.

And now Mercy's glove was missing.

Haley's report was due tomorrow. She'd finished her display and printed out her notes. Now she was packing up the papers Aunt Brown had given her. She slid the newspaper article and the family tree back in their envelope and laid the package on her bed. But where was the red box with Mercy's glove?

Nothing,
nothing
, stayed where it was supposed to in this house. Haley went back to her desk, picked up books and looked beneath them, checked behind the printer and the
laptop. She got down on her hands and knees to look underneath. Nothing but dust and cables.

This was crazy. Haley had left the box on the desk. She
remembered
. Could her dad have taken it? Or Elaine? Why would they?

“Mine, mine!” Eddie said, delighted. Haley scrambled to her feet and snatched the envelope full of Aunt Brown's papers out of Eddie's hands.

“Mine!” he insisted angrily.

“
Not
yours,” Haley objected. “No, Eddie, leave that alone!” He'd grabbed a fat blue pillow off her bed this time. It had a photo printed on it, Haley at six, grinning a wide, gap-toothed smile, hugged between her parents.

That had been eight years ago. More than half her lifetime. Eight years; that was a long time. Next to eight years, six months looked like—

“Give it back,” Haley told Eddie.

Giggling, thrilled to have her attention, Eddie ran out of the room and thumped into Elaine, a basket of clean laundry balanced on her hip.

“It's not a game!” Haley yelled after him. “Elaine, that's my pillow. Get it away from him. He'll spill something on it.”

“He's not going to hurt it, Haley.” Elaine set the laundry basket down with a tired sigh. But she bribed Eddie to give up the pillow, handing over a pair of rolled-up socks in exchange.

“You don't know what he's going to do,” Haley grumbled. “And Mercy's glove is missing. If he took it—”

“Who? Eddie?” Elaine looked up, startled. “What would he want with an old glove?”

“What does he want with anything? What did he want with my flash drive last week?”

“Well, you shouldn't have left it on the coffee table.”

Of course it had been Haley's own fault that Eddie had dunked Haley's drive in Sunny's water dish. She couldn't even leave something on the coffee table in her own house.

“And we said we'd replace the drive. Honestly, Haley . . . ”

“How are you going to replace an antique glove? A historical one? A, a, an
heirloom
?”
An heirloom you weren't supposed to take
, Haley's conscience whispered, and her stomach squirmed. If she had to tell Aunt Brown that she'd taken the glove and Eddie had ripped it up or chewed on it or fed it to Sunny . . . Her imagination cringed.

“Haley.” Elaine's lips tightened. “Why don't we look for it first? Before we try, convict, and execute Eddie for taking it?”

“
I'll
look for it,” Haley snapped. “Just—can't you keep him out of my room?”

“Not if you leave the door open.” Elaine picked up a folded shirt and three pairs of socks out of the laundry basket and handed them to Haley. “Here. If you want me to wash that stuff on the floor, you know you've got to get it in the laundry basket. And what's that on your bed? Isn't that what you're looking for?”

She heaved the basket back up and followed Eddie down the hall. Haley looked back over her shoulder. The red box was lying on her quilt, open. The fingers of the glove spilled over the edge, pale against Haley's dark blue quilt.

She couldn't have missed seeing it, if it had been there before.

Except she must have. What was she imagining? That the box had moved by itself? That the glove had crawled out while her back was turned?

Now there was a creepy thought. Creepy but stupid. She just hadn't seen the box, somehow. Hadn't seen a red box on a blue quilt.

The glove
did
look a bit as though it had tried to crawl out of the box on its own, though. Haley fought back a shudder at
the thought of those flat white fingers stirring to life, like blind white worms.

She reached out a hand to put the glove back into the box and then stopped.

Eddie
had
done something to it! There were stains all over the ivory leather, rusty splotches, brown tinged with red. Appalled, Haley snatched the glove up. Was it peanut butter? No, the marks were a deeper red than that. And so fresh they glistened, shiny and wet. So fresh they were spreading, getting larger and larger, meeting and merging into one large gory stain the color of blood.

Haley dropped the glove on her bed. Now the stuff—whatever it was—would be all over her quilt. But it was on her hands too—gross! Haley rushed for the bathroom, turned the hot water on hard, and stuck her hands under the stream. Faintly pink water swirled down the drain.

Hands clean again, she came back to her room. What was she going to do? There was no way, just no way, she could tell Aunt Brown. Maybe she could lie. Maybe she could bury the thing in the backyard. Maybe she could clean it somehow.

She picked the glove up gingerly, by one finger. It felt warm against her skin, almost as if it had just been pulled off of a living hand.

And it was clean. Nothing on the pale leather but the yellow tinge of age.

Haley turned the glove over and over, staring at it. It was spotless.

A trick of the light, maybe. Her eyes had fooled her.

But if that was true, what had she just washed off her hands?

Carefully, Haley packed the glove away. She wrapped the yellow cord several times around the box and tied the knot tight.