Sleepwalk (8 page)

Now he was no longer certain he even had a son.

Greg Moreland walked into the hospital at eight o’clock the next morning and smiled a greeting to the duty nurse, Gloria Hernandez. “What’s going on?” he asked. “Another quiet night?” His smile faded quickly as Gloria looked up at him, her expression haggard.

“I wish it had been,” she said. “But we got a body in about one o’clock this morning. Dr. Banning’s downstairs with it now.”

The last vestige of Moreland’s grin faded away. “A body? What happened?”

“It looks like a suicide,” Gloria told him. “It’s Heather Fredericks.”

Greg nodded perfunctorily, then went into his office, slipped into a white smock, and went downstairs to the morgue beneath the hospital. He found Bob Banning in the single small autopsy room, nodded a greeting, then made himself look at Heather Fredericks.

Her body lay on the metal autopsy table, her abdomen slit open from the groin all the way up to her chest. Her organs, carefully removed from the thoracic cavity,
lay where Banning had placed them, small samples of each cut away for testing by a lab in Santa Fe.

Greg turned away quickly, instinctively avoiding looking at Heather’s face. It was the one thing about being a doctor he hated—he’d never gotten used to seeing corpses, never developed that clinical detachment most doctors managed in the face of death.

For him, a corpse was still a person, and though he knew it was irrational, he sometimes felt that even after death, a person might still be able to experience pain.

He picked up the clipboard that held Bob Banning’s notes, and scanned them quickly From the first gross examination, death appeared to have been instantaneous, and caused by severe trauma.

Nearly every bone in Heather’s body seemed to have been broken in the fall: both arms and legs, her hips, her back and neck, as well as her collarbone. Her cranium was fractured as well, and there were severe lacerations on her back.

After he’d finished reading the notes, numbed by the shock of what had happened to his patient, he finally managed to speak to Banning. “Jesus Christ—how did all this happen?”

Banning shrugged, his eyes never leaving his work. “She fell over a thousand feet, and hit a rock in the river. She’s broken up like a bunch of matchsticks.”

“And it was definitely a suicide?”

Banning nodded. “As far as I can tell. I’ll have to wait for the lab analyses before I can make a final report, but apparently she just walked from her house up to the rim of the canyon—barefoot, and wearing nothing but a pair of pajamas—and jumped off. No sign of a struggle—her mother didn’t hear anything. She just went to bed,
then got up a couple of hours later and went out and killed herself. Unless she was doing drugs—”

Greg Moreland’s brows knit into a deep frown, and he shook his head. “Not Heather,” he said. “I’d been treating her for that accident a week ago, and if she was on drugs, believe me, I’d have spotted it. I saw her yesterday, and she was just fine. Her wounds were healing, and the biggest problem she had was that her mother had grounded her. But you’d hardly think something like that would be enough to make a kid kill herself.”

Banning stretched his aching muscles, and yawned against the fatigue that clouded his mind. “I don’t know,” he said, almost echoing Gloria Hernandez’s words of a few minutes before. “I guess we’ve been pretty lucky around here. This kind of thing seems to happen every day now. Kids who seem fine just suddenly give up. It’s as though the world has become too complicated for them, and anything seems better than having to cope with one more day.” He moved to a sink, and began washing up. “By tomorrow we should know for sure. But if her blood comes up clean, I’m going to call it a suicide.”

Later, back in his office, Greg found himself still thinking about Banning’s words.

And he also thought about Heather Fredericks. He’d liked Heather, even though she had often been a bit manipulative, trying to get her own way about everything. But no one, he was sure, thought she was the kind who would commit suicide.

Perhaps, after all, they would find something indicating that it hadn’t been suicide at all.

Sighing heavily, he picked up the phone and rang the front desk.

“Gloria? When the lab reports on Heather Fredericks come in, make sure I get a copy, will you?”

“Of course, Doctor,” Gloria replied. “I’d have done it anyway. She was your patient, wasn’t she?”

“Yes, she was,” Greg agreed, then hung up.

But all that day, and into the next, he kept thinking about Heather, and wondering what, if anything, the lab would find.

The funeral for Heather Fredericks took place three days later, on the kind of perfect summer day when the New Mexican skies are deep blue and cloudless, and even the heat of the desert is made bearable by the dryness of the air. But as Judith Sheffield stood with Max and Rita Moreland in the cemetery next door to the old Methodist church she herself had attended as a child, it seemed to her the atmosphere was wrong. Though cloudy skies would have been a cliché, she still thought they would have been more appropriate.

Ted and Reenie Fredericks stood gazing blankly at the coffin that contained the remains of their only child, as if they hadn’t yet quite grasped what had happened. But as the minister uttered the final words of the service, and the coffin was slowly lowered into the ground, an anguished wail of grief suddenly welled up out of Reenie’s throat, and she hurled herself into her husband’s arms, burying her face in his chest. Judith, embarrassed to witness Reenie’s unbearable pain, averted her eyes, letting them run over the crowd.

She was surprised by how many of the mourners she recognized, many of them people she’d grown up with. Now, as she identified them ten years later, she found herself unaccountably bewildered that they were no longer the teenagers she remembered. Most of them had children, ranging in age from ten downward, and as she watched them she couldn’t help wondering what they were thinking. Were they, like her, wondering which of the other teenagers in the crowd might be considering following the course Heather had taken? Were they wondering if, in a few more years, or tomorrow, it might be their own child in that casket? Every face she studied wore an expression of shock—shock mixed with apprehension.

Heather’s friends seemed to have clustered together of their own accord, taking up a position close to the casket but separated from Heather’s parents by the casket itself.

Amazingly, Judith found she even recognized some of the dead girl’s classmates, though they had been only five or six years old the last time she’d seen them.

Randy Sparks and Jeff Hankins were there—apparently still the inseparable friends they had been since they were little boys. But something about both of them had changed. Judith watched their faces—Randy’s narrow and vaguely hollowed, in contrast to Jeff’s tendency to chubbiness, which gave him a slightly baby-faced look—and realized, sadly, that their eyes, indeed their whole appearance, had lost any semblance of innocence. They stood together, their posture slouched as if to send a signal to whomever might be watching that even here, at the funeral of one of their friends, they were still cool, still somehow detached from it all. With them were two girls, one of whom Judith was certain
was Gina Alvarez. Still as pretty as she had been as a child, Gina’s dark eyes seemed to sparkle with life, and her chestnut-colored hair framed a face that already had matured beyond the prettiness of a little girl and into the beauty of a young woman.

Next to Gina stood a boy Judith recognized at once. Indeed, she would have recognized Jed Arnold by his eyes alone—those incredibly bright, almost turquoise-blue eyes, made even more remarkable by the crisp planes of his face and the bronze skin he had inherited from his mother.

Those eyes were his father’s. Judith scanned the crowd, searching for Frank Arnold himself. A moment later she saw him, standing alone, staring at the coffin almost as if he weren’t entirely certain he should have been at the funeral at all. Was he remembering another funeral, when it had been his wife whose remains were being consigned to the ground?

She was about to look away when Frank abruptly glanced up, as if he’d felt her eyes on him. His expression seemed puzzled for a moment, but then his eyes met hers and he shifted his weight slightly, straightening up to his full height. He offered her a small nod of recognition, and Judith felt herself flush, all her childhood memories of him flooding back to her.

She turned away, falling in with Rita and Max Moreland as they made their way toward the Frederickses. As they came to the head of the receiving line, Judith extended her hand to Reenie Fredericks.

“I’m so sorry,” she said. “You might not remember me, but—”

“Of course I remember you,” Reenie said, taking her hand firmly. “You used to be Judy Sheffield!”

“I still am,” Judith replied. “Except it’s Judith now. I never did really like ‘Judy.’ ”

“I know,” Reenie said, her faint smile fading as her eyes wandered to her daughter’s grave. “Heather hated nicknames too. She even wanted me to start making everyone call me Renée.” For a moment she seemed about to dissolve into tears once more, but then took her emotions under control. “Well, I’ll remember to call you Judith. I can certainly do that for Heather, can’t I?” Her voice trembled, but then the person behind Judith spoke, and Reenie turned away, once more forcing herself to smile, determined not to break down again.

Judith let herself drift away, moving through the crowd, stopping to talk briefly to some people, nodding to others. In a way, it was almost as if she’d never left Borrego at all. The same people were still there, doing the same things they’d been doing a decade ago.

No surprises.

An incredible feeling of familiarity.

And then she came face to face with Frank Arnold.

He was still standing by himself, but she hadn’t seen him approach until he put out a hand and turned her around. “I suppose everyone’s telling you you haven’t changed a bit, but I’m not going to,” he said.

Judith felt her heartbeat speed up slightly, and prayed it didn’t show. “You mean you didn’t recognize me?” she asked, then wished she hadn’t. She’d never thought of herself as a flirt, and didn’t intend to turn into one now. “That was a stupid thing to say,” she went on without pausing, “since you nodded to me earlier.”

“Oh, I recognized you all right,” Frank replied. “But you’ve grown up. What are you now? Twenty-five?”

“Twenty-six,” Judith told him.

Frank’s brows rose slightly in a dismissive gesture.
“Same difference,” he said. “It’s not like when we were kids, and a couple of years’ difference in age put us into different worlds.” His eyes darkened slightly. “Have you seen Jed?”

Judith nodded, but there was something in his tone that told her the question was more than just casual conversation. “I haven’t talked to him, but he’s certainly just as handsome as ever. With your eyes and Alice’s features and skin, he ought to be in the movies.”

Frank smiled, but it seemed forced, and when he spoke, there was an edge to his voice. “Maybe you ought to suggest that to him.”

Judith stepped back, abashed. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean—”

“Hey,” Frank said quickly, “don’t you be sorry. It’s just that I’m having a rough time with Jed right now.” He managed a crooked grin. “They don’t give you a book of instructions when they give you the kid, and right now I guess I’m feeling a little inadequate. But I shouldn’t take it out on you. I apologize.”

Judith let herself relax a little, but when Frank reached out to squeeze her arm reassuringly, she felt something very like an electrical shock run through her. “It’s all right,” she assured him. Then she thought she understood what Frank had been talking about. “It was Jed who found Heather, wasn’t it?”

Frank nodded. “It was pretty bad for him, but that’s not really the problem.” He seemed about to say more, then apparently changed his mind. “And I sure don’t have any call to bother you with my troubles, do I? I hardly know you.”

A twinge of unexplainable panic ran through Judith as Frank started to turn away. This time it was she who grabbed his arm. “Not so fast, Frank,” she said, doing
her best to keep her tone bantering. “You’ve known me all my life, and Jed was my favorite kid when I was a baby-sitter. Also, I happen to be a high school teacher, which is supposed to make me some kind of an expert on teenagers. Tell me what the problem is.”

Frank eyed her appraisingly for a moment, then finally came to a decision. “All right,” he said, matching her bantering tone on the surface, but making no attempt to cover the deep worry beneath. “He says he’s going to quit school and get a job so he can get out of here. He thinks no one here likes him because he’s half Indian, and he thinks his mother killed herself because she was an Indian and didn’t think anyone here liked her either.”

Almost to her own surprise, Judith’s eyes met Frank’s squarely, and she asked the first question that came into her mind. “Is he right?”

Words of denial immediately sprang to Frank’s lips, but when he spoke, the words that came out were not the ones he had intended. “I don’t know,” he said softly, his pain clear not only in his voice, but in his eyes as well. “Maybe he is.”

Judith said nothing for a moment, having to fight an urge to put her arms around Frank’s broad-shouldered body and comfort him. “I-If there’s anything I can do …” she began, then let the sentence hang, feeling suddenly awkward.

Now it was Frank who was silent for a moment. Then he grinned at her almost shyly. “Maybe you could come over for dinner some night,” he suggested. He hesitated, and reddened slightly. “Jed always liked you.”

Again their eyes met, and this time the look held for several seconds.

“Tonight?” Judith heard herself ask.

Plainly flustered, Frank managed a nod.

Max Moreland peered up at Judith over the rims of his half glasses, an almost comical expression of surprise giving him the look of an old Norman Rockwell
Saturday Evening Post
cover. “Frank Arnold invited you to dinner?”