Strangers (26 page)

 

26

She was a small, pale figure in the hospital bed, the bandage covering most of her left cheek and a smaller one above the right temple giving her a piteous aspect, like a woman with half a face. Bright fluorescent tubes and shafts of rain-free daylight slanting through open window blinds made the bruise on her forehead seem even more nakedly discolored. Seeing her like this, from the doorway to the otherwise empty three-bed room, I felt sadness and sorrow—but the feelings were impersonal now, the kind of compassion you might have for anyone who has been badly used.

Her eyelids, closed until she heard me enter the room, fluttered open and she turned her head slowly, painfully. The sheet and blanket covering her had been drawn to shoulder level; she pulled them higher, up under her chin, as if to hide as much of herself from sight as possible.

“I knew you'd come,” she said. “But I was hoping you wouldn't.”

“Why?”

“You know why. Sheriff Felix was here earlier. Matt, too, just a few minutes ago. They didn't hold anything back.”

I'd passed Hatcher leaving the hospital parking area as I drove in. He'd seen me, but he hadn't acknowledged my raised hand; just turned his head aside. Another one in Mineral Springs who wanted nothing more to do with me.

“I couldn't just leave without seeing you again,” I said. “I'm not made that way.”

“I know you're not. I wish you were.”

There was a chair beside the bed. I sat down on it, not too close. “How do you feel?”

“Still woozy. Throbbing headache.”

“What do the doctors say? Concussion?”

“Yes. No apparent hemorrhage or blood clots, but they want to run more tests to make sure.” Her gaze seemed clear enough but not quite meeting mine, shifting from point to point slightly to the left, right, above, below. “My cheek … eight stitches to close the cut. Burns like fire.”

“Parfrey will pay for what he did to you.”

“I hope so,” she said, but her tone was lackluster, as if she really didn't care one way or the other. It occurred to me then that she might have intentionally provoked the incident, out of frustration and grief and self-disgust. A desire to be hurt, though not as violently as she had been. Why else would she have called him a fat pig? “The sheriff said you found me.”

“You don't remember?”

“Only vaguely, in fragments.”

“You couldn't tell me what happened. I figured it out later.”

“After you went to see Matt.”

“Yes. At first I thought he'd done it.”

“And he told you about us, about me. Then you went to Sam and he told you the rest of it. And now you know the whole ugly truth about Cheryl Rosmond Hatcher, the town whore.”

“None of it is as bad as you make it seem. You had an affair while you were married—it happens. You have multiple sexual relationships—so do millions of other women. You were desperate for legal help for Cody so you let Parfrey blackmail you into trading sex for his services.”

“No, you don't understand. The affair wasn't Matt's idea, it was mine. I'm the one who initiates most of the one-night stands. Sam didn't talk me into our arrangement, I suggested it. Every crappy thing I've done in my life is my responsibility, nobody else's. That's the kind of person I've become.”

“Just can't stop blaming yourself, can you?”

“When it's justified, no, I can't. Would you like another example? When I first thought about calling and asking for your help, I almost didn't do it because I was afraid of what would happen if you agreed to come. Not that you'd find out about me, but that I'd show you what I am. Sooner or later I would have tried to take you to bed. If I thought it would make you work harder to free Cody. If you'd agreed to stay at my house when I asked you. Whenever I felt the urge strongly enough. I wouldn't have been able to stop myself.”

I had nothing to say to that. But it was not a shocking admission; I'd suspected as much after yesterday's revelations.

“So you see?” she said. “I'll sleep with any man for any reason.”

“Except Matt Hatcher. The one man who loves you.”

“Yes, except for Matt. Not again, not ever. I fooled myself into thinking I loved him once, but that was only because I needed an excuse to sleep with him. I'm not capable of love anymore, real love. Not since that night four years ago when my husband died.”

“Hatcher said you couldn't have saved him if you'd been there.”

“You don't know that, Matt doesn't know it, I don't know it. And it doesn't change the fact that I should have been with Glen instead of naked in his brother's bed.”

“And you've been punishing yourself for it ever since. That's the real reason you do the things you do, isn't it? Self-punishment?”

“I don't know. Sex has nothing to do with it, I know that—I don't even enjoy it anymore. Yes, you're probably right that I'm punishing myself.”

“Don't you care enough about yourself to put an end to it?”

“Even if I did, it's too late. I've made my bed—literally, over and over again.”

“It might not be too late if you got out of this town, went somewhere else, started over.”

“I told you the other night, I have nowhere to go.”

“That's just an excuse.”

“All right, it's an excuse.”

“Bottom line: you don't want to leave, don't want to start over. So you'll stay here, go on like before.”

“As long as I have a job and can afford to keep my house, yes.”

“Among people who treat you like dirt. To keep feeding the need to degrade yourself.”

“I don't care about them, any of them. Can't you understand? I don't care about much of anything anymore.”

“Except your son.”

“Yes, but I won't have him around now, will I.”

“His future may not be as dark as it seems,” I said. “His age mitigates against a maximum prison sentence for his part in the robberies—”

“How long he's in prison doesn't matter. It won't be the same when he comes back, if he comes back. I wish…”

“That I'd been able to clear him of the rape charges without implicating him in the robberies? It wasn't possible, Cheryl—I had no choice.”

“That's not what I was going to say. What I wish is that Cody was as innocent as I believed he was.”

“Innocent of criminal assault. You were right about that.”

“But wrong that he's honest, faithful, decent, good—everything I wanted him to be that I'm not.”

“One mistake doesn't make him a bad person,” I said. “He's only nineteen, there's plenty of time for him to turn his life around.”

“That doesn't change the fact that I raised a thief, a drug-user, a cheat. Like mother like son.”

Punishing herself anew, self-flagellation with a brand new whip. She knew it, too; it was deliberate. And there was nothing I or anybody else could say or do to save her from herself. Matt Hatcher had learned that the hard way. People who don her kind of hair shirt can't or won't ever take it off; it becomes a second skin. And now she had another to add to it, to make the skin even thicker and more permanent—the false perception that she had somehow failed her son as she'd failed her late husband. She would go right on punishing herself, here in this town without pity, for as long as there was breath left in her body.

Cheryl Rosmond Hatcher. One of those poor souls for whom life just kept getting smaller and narrower, meaner, more empty. Who in the process had become small, narrow, mean, empty herself. Wasted. And by a great deal more than loneliness and disillusionment and the death of hope. No, I didn't know her and never had. And I did not ever want to know anything more about her than I knew at this moment.

I couldn't bear to sit here with her any longer. I got to my feet. “There's nothing more to say. I'll be going.”

“Yes. I need to rest.” Not looking my way at all now, staring up at the ceiling. “I won't take charity from you, so don't forget to send me your bill. I'll find a way to pay it even if it's only a few dollars a month.”

“All right.” I went to the door, stopped there long enough to say, “Good-bye, Cheryl. Good luck.”

“Good-bye, Bill.”

One last view of her, diminished in the small white bed, and then I was out of there. And out of Mineral Springs and on my way home to family, friends, and lovers who would never become strangers.

When I reached the highway and turned west, I didn't look back.

I would never look back this way again.

 

“NAMELESS DETECTIVE” MYSTERIES BY BILL PRONZINI

Nemesis

Hellbox

Camouflage

Betrayers

Schemers

Fever

Savages

Mourners

Nightcrawlers

Scenarios
(collection)

Spook

Bleeders

Crazybone

Boobytrap

Illusions

Sentinels

Spadework
(collection)

Hardcase

Demons

Epitaphs

Quarry

Breakdown

Jackpot

Shackles

Deadfall

Bones

Double
(with Marcia Muller)

Nightshades

Quicksilver

Case File
(collection)

Bindlestiff

Dragonfire

Scattershot

Hoodwink

Labyrinth

Twospot
(with Collin Wilcox)

Blowback

Undercurrent

The Vanished

The Snatch

 

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

BILL PRONZINI has been nominated for, or won, every prize offered to crime fiction writers, including the 2008 Grand Master Award from the Mystery Writers of America. It is no wonder, then, that the
Detroit Free Press
said of him: “It's always nice to see masters at work. Pronzini's clear style seamlessly weaves [story lines] together, turning them into a quick, compelling read.” He lives and writes in California with his wife, the crime novelist Marcia Muller.

 

This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously.

STRANGERS: A NAMELESS DETECTIVE NOVEL

Copyright © 2014 by the Pronzini-Muller Family Trust

All rights reserved.

Cover design by Drive Communications, New York

Cover image © 2014 Shutterstock

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The Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available upon request.

ISBN 978-0-7653-3567-8 (hardcover)

ISBN 978-1-4668-2522-2 (e-book)

e-ISBN 9781466825222

First Edition: July 2014