The Dead Room (20 page)

That’s when he heard the car start forward.

He turned and squinted at the approaching lights. At first he watched in disbelief, even confusion. Then his heart started pounding and it suddenly occurred to him that what was happening was real. His eyes jerked down to the heavy wheels moving toward him. He heard the squeaky packing sound rubber tires make when they press down snow. He tried to scream but couldn’t. Digging through the snow with his fingers, he pushed at the ice, clawed at it. When the oversized wheels rolled over his legs and his own blood splashed him in the face, he peered up from beneath the car and saw someone running from the house. It was Sally. Waving her hands in the air and screaming as he looked back at his crushed legs. His arteries must have been severed. Blood was shooting onto the snow as if from a garden hose. He tried to keep his eye on it, reaching down to cover the wounds, but everything went black.

TWENTY-FIVE

Teddy ran down the hallway at Bryn Mawr Hospital, trying not to think about the woman he’d left behind because he knew he couldn’t right now.

It was after midnight. He found Sally Barnett huddled in a chair in the waiting room all alone. When she saw him enter, she stood up and rushed toward him, laying her head against his chest. She was sobbing, and he could feel her body shaking in his arms.

“How is he?” Teddy asked.

She gazed up at him with tears streaming down her cheeks and shook her head.

Sally was ten to fifteen years younger than Barnett. Teddy had liked her the moment they first met. She was easy to talk to and had a cheery spirit. She was one of those kind of people who could calm any situation down by her mere presence. When Teddy joined the firm, Barnett invited him over to the house for dinner. Sally gave him the tour, showing him photographs of the restoration. She’d documented the entire process, and he realized they shared an interest in architecture.

“They’re trying to save his legs,” she said. “But it doesn’t look good.”

“Is he still in the operating room?”

“No,” she said, pointing to the critical care unit. “It lasted three hours. He’s in there now.”

Teddy glanced at the doors and turned back. “Is he conscious? Can we see him?”

She nodded slowly, the agony in her face clear. “He’s lost a lot of blood though. He’s very weak.”

Teddy pressed the button on the wall and the doors swung open. As they entered the unit, Sally led the way down the hall to the nurse’s station. Although the lighting was subdued, he spotted Barnett in the first alcove and moved toward him hesitantly. He was lying on the bed, his entire body trembling. His eyes were pointed at the ceiling and fluttering. Teddy looked at his legs wrapped in bandages and held in place by a series of metal pins and hardware. IVs couldn’t handle the drug load. Four bags of medication hung from two racks over the bed, feeding his system through the ports of a central line injected into his neck.

Teddy had picked up the call less than hour ago. He’d been in Carolyn Powell’s bed—in her arms—when his cell phone rang. All Sally could manage to say was that Barnett had run himself over with his own car. He threw on his clothes, the drive to the hospital manic. Even though the snow had stopped, the roads were a mess.

“How could this happen?” he said.

“He was working on something at the office and got home late. When he opened the garage, he slipped on the ice. I saw it happening from the window. I couldn’t get there in time.”

Barnett grabbed Teddy’s arm. He looked at Barnett and saw the man’s face turned toward him, his eyes still blinking uncontrollably. He could feel Barnett pulling him closer. In spite of the tube in his mouth, the man was trying to speak. Teddy leaned closer, concentrating on the sounds but the words were unintelligible. The sight of Barnett twisting on the mattress and straining to be heard was harrowing. Whatever he was trying to say appeared more than important.

A nurse hurried over from the counter, pulling Barnett’s hand away and checking his vital signs on the monitor.

“This patient is in critical condition,” she said in a harsh voice. “His heart rate’s up. You can’t do this. I’m sorry, but you’ll have to wait outside.”

Teddy looked back at Barnett. The man’s eyes were tacked to the ceiling again. As he walked Sally into the waiting room, he noticed she didn’t have a coat or even her purse.

“Where are your things?” he asked.

She looked back at him helplessly, shaking her head and unable to speak.

“Tell me what you need,” he said. “I’ll drive over and bring them back.”

TWENTY-SIX

Teddy skidded to a stop at the curb, thinking he’d better do something about his tires and still trying to decipher what Barnett had been struggling to say with a half-inch hose stuffed down his throat and a central line piercing the artery in his neck.

He climbed out of the car, looking at Barnett’s house and the lighted windows through the trees. Given the hour, every other house on the street was dark. As he walked down the driveway, he spotted the Grand Cherokee smashed into the side of the garage at an odd angle. Moving closer, he saw Barnett’s blood splashed all over the white snow. The deep red stain covered a fifteen-foot square of ground, and Teddy wondered how the man had survived long enough to make it to the hospital.

Sally had ridden in the ambulance with Barnett, and not wasted time running back into the house for her things. She’d asked Teddy to bring her a coat and sweater. In the den he’d find her purse and knitting bag. Keeping her hands busy would calm her down, she’d said.

The snow was almost a foot deep. Ignoring it, he stepped around the blood and kept to the shoulder of the drive. As he reached the Grand Cherokee, he moved to the front and examined the hood. The car had rolled over Barnett’s legs and turned slightly until it crashed into the wall beside the open garage door. The entire front end on the left side was crinkled like an accordion. He looked back at the driveway, noting the rise in elevation. He could see Barnett’s footprints in the snow and followed them with his eyes until he found the spot where Barnett parked to get out of the car.

Teddy opened the driver’s-side door, checking the automatic shift and finding it set in DRIVE. Piecing it together, he realized Barnett got out to open the garage with the car still in gear. Grand Cherokees were built like tanks. The heavy car must have picked up speed as it rolled down the hill.

He shook his head, picturing Barnett on the ground trying to get out of the way and knowing he wasn’t going to make it. For some reason, he thought about the tires that needed to be replaced on his Corolla again.

Teddy spotted Barnett’s keys still in the ignition. Pocketing them, he swung the door closed and moved back down the drive along the shoulder.
People make mistakes
, he thought.
Accidents happen every day
. But Barnett had just driven home in a storm. Teddy couldn’t believe that the man wouldn’t have been more cautious, particularly with the car that had just brought him home.

He turned and took another look at the blood in the snow. When he noticed the footprints leading across the yard into the trees, he became very still.

They shouldn’t have been there. There was no reason for them to be there.

He lit a cigarette, staring at the tracks in the snow and considering the possibility that he was imagining things. He wasn’t, he decided. The tracks came and went from the exact spot Teddy calculated Barnett had parked when he first got out of his car.

He looked back at the driveway, trying to account for all the different sets of prints in the snow. There weren’t that many, the snow fresh, and his mind was clear. He saw the Grand Cherokee’s tracks intermingled with a double set of tire tracks that could have only been made when the ambulance arrived. That covered the vehicles, and he stepped back to take in the different sets of footprints. He saw Sally’s moving from the house to the bloodstained area where the car ran over Barnett’s legs. Turning back to the spot where the ambulance had stopped, he noted two sets of different prints left behind by the medics. The space between the footprints were spread out, and Teddy could tell the medics had been running.

But the set of footprints leading into the trees were spread out as well. As he moved closer, he realized that whoever left them behind had also been running. What happened to Barnett hadn’t been an accident. Someone had shifted the car into DRIVE, goosed the accelerator and fled.

He felt a sudden burst of fear rise between his shoulders and touch the back of his neck. There was a light breeze moving through the yard, the leafless branches knocking into one another and rattling all around him. As he turned and checked his back, he gazed at the dark houses lining the street and couldn’t help being struck by the eeriness. A neighborhood dog started barking from somewhere in the distance.

He took a last drag and flicked his cigarette into the snow. As he picked up the tracks and started following them out of the yard, he examined each footprint with great care before moving on to the next. Although the impressions had been made on the run and weren’t perfect, he knew he was looking at a man’s hiking shoe. Measuring them against his own size-twelve dress shoe, he estimated they were a size or two smaller.

The tracks moved off the yard, and he found himself standing behind a tree. The snow was well packed, and it looked as if the man had spent some time here. He noticed a row of pine trees blocking his view of the street, and realized the man could’ve waited for Barnett without being caught in the stray headlights from a passing car. When he turned back to the house, the view of the driveway was striking and only twenty-five yards away.

Teddy stepped out from beneath the tree, following the tracks further away from the house. They seemed to move from tree to tree in the shape of an arc. As he looked ahead, the footprints cut back to the street before an empty lot.

He could feel the blood coursing through his body. It hadn’t been an accident. He knew it now.

Something in the snow caught his eye and he stopped. Something shiny.

He knelt down, brushing the snow away from the spot until he found what looked like a small shot glass. Pulling the scarf away from his neck, he picked it up careful not to touch it with his own fingers. It was a small shot glass made of Sterling silver. He held it to his nose, thinking the man had brought a flask to keep warm as he waited for Barnett to come home. Maybe he even needed a drink for courage. But as he took a whiff, he found the shot glass odorless and picked up the scent of Carolyn Powell’s sex still on his fingers. He drew in a deep breath, her image flashing through him and dissipating. For one night, they’d broken the rules and it had been wonderful. When he’d taken Sally’s call and had to leave, they’d scheduled a breakfast meeting before work tomorrow. The thought of being with Powell in any setting stirred the night up all over again. It had been worth it. Even if it would have to remain secret.

Teddy got to his feet, gazing at the silver shot glass as it glistened in the reflected light of the snow. He noticed three rivets in the side, holding the seam together. It looked old and valuable, the design, ornate. There were pictures etched into the precious metal, and he turned it in the scarf noting the depictions of tall ships and whales. The man who ran over Barnett had left something behind that told a story. A piece of evidence that looked as if it led somewhere.

Teddy heard a sudden whooshing sound from behind his back and turned. Something cracked over his head. He was stunned at first, the blow crushing him. He took a half step forward, but knew his rubbery legs were giving way. As he tumbled forward and hit the snow, he thought he saw the shape of a man standing in the darkness with his arms raised. The figure held something in his hands, ready to swing it down again. But it was only a glimpse made in a split second. A glimpse at something before the world started spinning and the lights went out.

TWENTY-SEVEN

Through the haze he could see his father picking him up out of the snow and carrying him away in his arms. His teeth were chattering from the cold, his bones shaking like sticks rubbing together in search of heat, fire. As Teddy considered the image, he thought maybe he’d punched his ticket out, and this was the view from the slow train ridden by the dead.

His father lowered him onto his bed, touched the wound on his forehead and left the room. Time was rushing back and forth, and Teddy found himself caught in the wind. He was twenty-seven, then twenty. When he jumped off the bed and ran to the window, he could see the cops taking his father away and knew that he was fourteen again.

They never found the money.

The accountant had murdered his father’s business partner when he was caught embezzling huge sums of money from the company. After Teddy’s father was arrested for the murder and later died in prison, the accountant finally came forward overcome with guilt. Still, he never told anyone what he did with the money. Facing a guilty verdict for murder and a life behind bars, he knew he didn’t have to.