Undone (2 page)

Soon was not coming soon enough, however, and now that they’d reached the ages of seven and nine, Judith was starting to lose faith that one day, her grandchildren would turn into polite and loving young adults who did not feel the urge to constantly interrupt adult conversation and run around the house screaming at such high decibels that animals two counties over started howling. Judith’s only consolation was that Tom took them to church every Sunday. She of course wanted her grandchildren exposed to a life in Christ, but more importantly, she wanted them to learn the lessons taught in Sunday School.
Honor thy mother and father. Do unto others as you would have them do unto you. Don’t think you ‘re going to waste your life, drop out of school and move in with Grandma and Grandpa any time soon
.

“Hey!” Henry barked as a car in the oncoming lane shot past them so close that the Buick actually shook on its tires. “Kids,” he grumbled, gripping the wheel tightly in his hands.

The closer he got to seventy, the more Henry seemed to embrace the role of cranky old man. Sometimes, this was endearing. Other times, Judith wondered how long it would be before he started shaking his fist in the air, blaming all the ills of the world on “kids.” The age of these kids seemed to range anywhere from four to forty, and his irritation ticked up exponentially when he caught them doing something that he used to do himself, but now could no longer enjoy. Judith dreaded the day they took away his pilot’s license, something that might come sooner rather than later, considering that his last checkup at the cardiologist had shown some irregularities. It was one of the reasons they had decided to retire to Arizona, where there was no snow to shovel or lawn to maintain.

She said, “Looks like rain.”

Henry craned up his neck to see the clouds.

“Good night to start my book.”

His lips curled up in a smile. Henry had given her a thick historical romance for their anniversary. Judith had given him a new cooler to take to the golf course.

She squinted her eyes at the road ahead, deciding she should have her vision checked again. She was not so far from seventy herself, and her eyes seemed to be getting worse every year. Dusk was a particularly bad time for her, and her vision tended to blur on objects that were at a distance. So it was that she blinked several times before she was sure of what she was seeing, and only opened her mouth to warn Henry when the animal was right in front of them.

“Jude!” Henry yelled, one arm shooting out in front of Judith’s chest as he wrenched the steering wheel to the left, trying to avoid the poor creature. Judith thought, oddly, about how the movies were right. Everything slowed down, time inching by so that each second seemed to take an eternity. She felt Henry’s strong arm bolt across her breasts, the seatbelt biting into her hip bones. Her head jerked, slamming into the door as the car swerved. The windshield cracked as the animal bounced against the glass, then hit the roof of the car, then the trunk. It wasn’t until the car shuddered to a stop, spinning a full 180 degrees on the road, that the sounds caught up with Judith: the
crack, thunk, thunk
, all overlaid with a high-pitched screaming that she realized was coming from her own mouth. She must have been in shock, because Henry had to yell at her several times, “Judith! Judith!” before she stopped screaming.

Henry’s hand was tight on her arm, sending pain up her shoulder. She rubbed the back of his hand, saying, “I’m all right. I’m all right.” Her glasses were askew, her vision off-kilter. She put her fingers to the side of her head, feeling a sticky wetness. When she took away her hand, she saw blood.

“It must’ve been a deer or…” Henry put his hand to his mouth, stopping his words. He looked calm but for the telltale up and down of his chest as he tried to catch his breath. The air bag had deployed. A fine, white powder covered his face.

Her breath caught as she looked ahead. Blood had spattered the windshield like a sudden, violent rain.

Henry pushed open the door but did not get out. Judith took off her glasses to wipe her eyes. The lenses were both broken, the bottom part of her bifocal on the right side missing. She saw that the glasses were shaking, and realized that the tremor came from her own hands. Henry got out of the car, and she made herself put on her glasses and follow him.

The creature was on the road, legs moving. Judith’s head ached where it had smacked into the door. Blood was in her eyes. That was the only explanation she had for the fact that the animal — surely a deer — appeared to have the shapely white legs of a woman.

“Oh, dear God,” Henry whispered. “It’s — Judith — it’s—”

Judith heard a car behind her. Wheels screeched against asphalt. Doors opened and closed. Two men joined them on the road, one running toward the animal.

He screamed, “Call 9-1-1!” kneeling down beside the body. Judith stepped closer, then closer yet. The legs moved again — the perfect legs of a woman. She was completely nude. Bruises blackened her inner thighs — dark bruises. Old bruises. Dried blood caked around her legs. A burgundy film seemed to cover her torso, a rip at her side showing white bone. Judith glanced at her face. The nose was askew. The eyes were swollen, lips chapped and split. Blood matted the woman’s dark hair and pooled around her head as if in a halo.

Judith stepped closer, unable to stop herself — suddenly a voyeur, after a lifetime of politely looking away. Glass crunched beneath her feet, and the woman’s eyes shot open in panic. She stared somewhere past Judith, a dull lifelessness to her gaze. Just as suddenly, her eyelids fluttered closed, but Judith could not suppress the shudder that went through her body. It was as if someone had walked over her grave.

“Dear Lord,” Henry mumbled, almost in prayer. Judith turned to find her husband gripping his hand to his chest. His knuckles were white. He stared at the woman, looking as if he might be ill. “How did this happen?” he whispered, horror twisting his face. “How in God’s name did this happen?”

SARA LINTON LEANED BACK IN HER CHAIR, MUMBLING A SOFT “Yes, Mama” into her cell phone. She wondered briefly if there would ever come a point in time when this felt normal again, when a phone call with her mother brought her happiness the way it used to instead of feeling like it was dragging a piece of her heart out of her chest.

“Baby,” Cathy soothed. “It’s all right. You’re taking care of yourself, and that’s all Daddy and I need to know.”

Sara felt tears sting her eyes. This would hardly be the first time she had cried in the doctor’s lounge at Grady Hospital, but she was sick of crying — sick of feeling, really. Wasn’t that the reason that, two years ago, she had left her family, left her life, in rural Georgia, and moved to Atlanta — so that she would no longer have the constant reminder of what had come before?

“Promise me you’ll try to go to church next week.”

Sara mumbled something that might sound like a promise. Her mother was no fool, and they both knew that the possibility of Sara ending up on a pew this Easter Sunday was highly unlikely, but Cathy didn’t press.

Sara looked at the stack of charts in front of her. She was at the end of her shift and needed to call in her dictation. “Mama, I’m sorry, but I need to go.”

Cathy exacted a promise of another phone call next week, then rang off. Sara kept her cell phone in her hand for a few minutes, looking at the faded numbers, her thumb tracing the seven and five, dialing out a familiar number but not sending through the call. She dropped the phone into her pocket and felt the letter brush against the back of her hand.

The Letter. She thought of it as its own entity.

Sara normally checked her mail after work so she didn’t have to drag it around with her, but one morning, for some unknown reason, she had checked her mail as she was heading out. A cold sweat had come over her as she recognized the return address on the plain white envelope. She had tucked the unopened envelope into the pocket of her lab coat as she left for work, thinking she would read it at lunch. Lunch had come and gone, and the letter had remained unopened, traveling back home, then out to work again the next day. Months passed, and the letter went everywhere with Sara, sometimes in her coat, sometimes in her purse to the grocery store or on errands. It became a talisman, and often, she would reach her hand in her pocket and touch it, just to remind herself that it was there.

Over time, the corners of the sealed envelope had become dog-eared and the Grant County postmark had started to fade. Every day pushed Sara further away from opening it and discovering what the woman who had killed her husband could possibly have to say.

“Dr. Linton?” Mary Schroder, one of the nurses, knocked on the door. She spoke in the practiced code of the ER. “We’ve got a P-O-P-T-A female, thirty-three, weak and thready.”

Sara glanced at the charts, then her watch. A thirty-three-year-old woman who had passed out prior to admission was a puzzle that would take time to solve. It was almost seven o’clock. Sara’s shift was over in ten minutes. “Can Krakauer take her?”

“Krakauer
did
take her,” Mary countered. “He ordered a CMP, then went to get coffee with the new bimbo.” She was obviously perturbed by this, and added, “The patient’s a cop.”

Mary was married to a cop; hardly shocking considering she had worked in the emergency room at Grady Hospital for almost twenty years. Even without that, it was understood at every hospital in the world that anyone in law enforcement got the best and quickest treatment. Apparently, Otto Krakauer hadn’t gotten the memo.

Sara relented. “How long did she lose consciousness?”

“She says about a minute.” Mary shook her head, because patients were hardly the most honest reporters when it came to their health. “She doesn’t look right.”

That last part was what got Sara out of her chair. Grady was the only Level One trauma center in the region, as well as one of the few remaining public hospitals in Georgia. The nurses at Grady saw car wrecks, shootings, stabbings, overdoses, and any number of crimes against humanity on an almost daily basis. They had a practiced eye for spotting serious problems. And, of course, cops usually didn’t admit themselves to the hospital unless they were at death’s door.

Sara skimmed the woman’s chart as she walked through the emergency department. Otto Krakauer hadn’t done more than take a medical history and order the usual bloodwork, which told Sara there was no obvious diagnosis. Faith Mitchell was an otherwise healthy thirty-three-year-old woman with no previous conditions and no recent trauma. Her test results would hopefully give them a better idea about what was going on.

Sara mumbled an apology as she bumped into a gurney in the hallway. As usual, the rooms were overflowing and patients were stacked in the halls, some in beds, some sitting in wheelchairs, all looking more miserable than they probably had when they’d first arrived for treatment. Most of them had probably come here right after work because they couldn’t afford to miss a day’s wages. They saw Sara’s white coat and called to her, but she ignored them as she read through the chart.

Mary said, “I’ll catch up with you. She’s in three,” before letting herself get pulled away by an elderly woman on a stretcher.

Sara knocked on the open door of exam room 3 — privacy: another perk afforded cops. A petite blonde woman was sitting on the edge of the bed, fully dressed and clearly irritated. Mary was good at her job, but a blind person could see that Faith Mitchell was unwell. She was as pale as the sheet on the bed; even from a distance, her skin looked clammy.

Her husband did not seem to be helping matters as he paced the room. He was an attractive man, well over six feet, with sandy blond hair cut close to his head. A jagged scar ran down the side of his face, probably from a childhood accident where his jaw slid across the asphalt under his bicycle or along the hard-packed dirt to home plate. He was thin and lean, probably a runner, and his three-piece suit showed the broad chest and shoulders of someone who spent a lot of time in the gym.

He stopped pacing, his gaze going from Sara to his wife and back again. “Where’s the other doctor?”

“He got called away on an emergency.” She walked to the sink and washed her hands, saying, “I’m Dr. Linton. Can you catch me up to speed here? What happened?”

“She passed out,” the man said, nervously twisting his wedding ring around his finger. He seemed to realize he was coming off as a bit frantic, and moderated his tone. “She’s never passed out before.”

Faith Mitchell seemed aggravated by his concern. “I’m fine,” she insisted, then told Sara, “It’s the same thing I said to the other doctor. I feel like I’ve been coming down with a cold. That’s all.”

Sara pressed her fingers to Faith’s wrist, checking her pulse. “How are you feeling now?”

She glanced at her husband. “Annoyed.”

Sara smiled, shining her penlight into Faith’s eyes, checking her throat, running through the usual physical exam and finding nothing alarming. She agreed with Krakauer’s initial evaluation: Faith was probably a little dehydrated. Her heart sounded good, though, and it didn’t seem like she’d suffered from a seizure. “Did you hit your head when you fell?”

She started to answer, but the man interjected, “It was in the parking lot. Her head hit the pavement.”

Sara asked the woman, “Any other problems?”

Faith answered, “Just a few headaches.” She seemed to be holding something back, even as she revealed, “I haven’t really eaten today. I was feeling a little sick to my stomach this morning. And yesterday morning.”

Sara opened one of the drawers for a neuro-hammer to check reflexes, only to find nothing there. “Have you had any recent weight loss or gain?”

Faith said “No” just as her husband said “Yes.”

The man looked contrite, but tried, “I think it looks good on you.”

Faith took a deep breath and let it out slowly. Sara studied the man again, thinking he was probably an accountant or lawyer. His head was turned toward his wife, and Sara noticed another, lighter scar lining his upper lip — obviously not a surgical incision. The skin had been sewn together crookedly, so that the scar running vertically between his lip and nose was slightly uneven. He had probably boxed in college, or maybe just been hit in the head one too many times, because he obviously didn’t seem to know that the only way out of a hole was to stop digging. “Faith, I think the extra weight looks great on you. You could stand to gain—”