When the phone rang upstairs, I literally cried out. I pounded up the stairs and snatched the receiver off the kitchen wall, anticipating Adam’s stern and overbearing voice to shout at me. I answered with a steely determination already seeded in my voice.
“Travis? It’s Earl Parsons.”
I cleared my throat and apologized for my initial abruptness. “I thought you were someone else. Is everything all right?”
“Right as rain,” he said. He sounded like he was eating something. “I found Althea Coulter.”
I felt a measure of triumph rise up through me. “Fantastic. Please tell me she’s still alive.”
“I guess that’s a matter of opinion. She’s got a permanent room in the Frostburg Medical Center’s oncology ward. According to her son, who I spoke with earlier after telling him I was an old friend of his mom’s, she’s coming down to the wire.”
“Cancer,” I said flatly. “Jesus.” Momentary clarity dawned on me. “I can’t go harass a woman dying in a hospital bed.”
“Then don’t harass her,” Earl said peaceably enough. “Go visit her, bring her some flowers, make her feel good. Her son says she’s pretty lonely, even though he tries to see her as much as possible. It might be good for her.”
I took a deep breath and saw Jodie trembling against the washer and dryer again. “I’m being selfish about this, aren’t I?”
“That depends,” said Earl. “Are you doing this for you, or are you doing this for Elijah Dentman?”
“Both,” I said after a very long time.
I jotted down Althea’s room number at the Frostburg Med Center on the palm of my hand then thanked Earl for his help. He asked me to keep him in the loop on any further developments, and I promised I would apprise him of all that I’d learn.
“You really think we may have something here, don’t you?” he said, and even though he inflected the end of the sentence into a question, I knew he felt just as strongly as I did.
Just as I hung up the phone I noticed something on the kitchen table. I went over to it and stared at two sections torn from a newspaper. I did not have to look closely to know the folded bits of newsprint were the articles about Elijah’s alleged drowning that I’d stolen from the public library; they still held the creases where I’d folded them and stuffed them into my pocket. I must have forgotten to take them out of my pants, leaving them there for Jodie to discover when she went through the pockets before dumping my pants in the wash.
Splayed out on the table like evidence in a murder trial, those fragments of newsprint caused something heavy and indescribable to roll over deep down inside me.
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
Fortified against the cold in a heavy, fur-lined parka and a pair of wool gloves, I parked in one of the visitor spaces outside the Frostburg Medical Center’s broad brick façade. Beside me on the passenger seat, a small leafy plant vibrated to the tune of the car’s engine.
From the outside, the building looked like an ancient cathedral, all winding spires and Gothic architecture, the wing safeguarded behind a black cyclone fence crowned with spearheads. There was a long gravel driveway that trickled like an estuary up to the automatic doors beneath a reinforced portico. Its windows were small and barred, insulated with mesh wiring. The brick face was sterile and white, like bone heated in a kiln. A stand of pine trees loomed behind the building, immense and towering and dusted with snow. From where I parked, I could see a large weighted birds’ nest nestled above the mezzanine, all sticks and bony branches. Two large falcons stood guard at either end of the mezzanine.
I climbed out of the car. The air was sharp and scented with winter. Craving a smoke, I produced a pack of Marlboros and popped one into my mouth, then chased the tip of it with my lighter, my hand cupped around it to keep out the wind.
The main thoroughfare of the hospital was shaped like a uterus. The carpeting was an institutional shade of brown orange (that specific brown orange only hospitals seem capable of duplicating), and large sodium lights fizzed above my head.
Following the numbered plaques on the walls, I turned down a long, claustrophobic hallway. There was surprisingly little lighting, and the staff was practically nonexistent. There was no receptionist at the bank of desks at the end of the hall, either. This wasn’t the section of the hospital someone came to for a routine checkup or for any type of surgical procedure. This was where people came for good when they knew they were never going to leave again. There were no checkout procedures here.
Before locating the room number Earl had given me yesterday evening over the phone, I ditched into a men’s restroom and saddled up to the sinks. That morning I’d showered hastily but hadn’t shaved or washed my hair. My face was pallid and sunken at the cheeks, where bristling black hairs like spider’s legs corkscrewed out from the flesh. Purplish crescents hung beneath my eyes, and my eyes themselves appeared bloodshot and shellacked. In brown corduroys, a thermal knit shirt with a flannel vest, and my ski parka, I looked like a vagrant who had shuffled in off the street.
“I could have at least shaved,” I muttered to my reflection. I turned on the water at one of the sinks, washed my face, and matted down my too-long hair as best I could, pulling the knots out with my fingers.
I was startled when someone exited a stall behind me. The man nodded in quiet recognition, then left without washing his hands. He must have heard me talking to myself and figured it was safer risking potential bathroom-borne disease.
Taking a deep breath, I reexamined myself in the mirror. I thought of Jodie saying, I was you, and a burning ember briefly winked into existence at the small of my back.
I was you.
Room 218 was the closed door at the end of the farthest hallway. Carrying the potted plant in both arms, I approached the door, expecting all the while to feel a hand clap me on one shoulder and ask me who I was and what I was doing here. But that never happened.
I summoned a mental picture of Althea Coulter, and what I projected was a weak, elderly woman, her charcoal eyes blazoned with milky cataracts, her lips perpetually twisted into a bitter snarl. Her hands would be like claws—the serrated hooks of a carnivorous bird—and her head would be thick and unmoving and simply there. The room was going to smell of sour breath and medication and the ghostly traces of urine. She would be asleep. And I wouldn’t be able to wake her, to ask her even a single question, and even if she was awake, she would be so far gone into a land of her own that the answers she provided (given that she provided any at all) would be of the fuzzy, make-believe, nonsensical variety. I pictured Althea Coulter as an ancient, mummified manikin, whose skin was scorched cloth and whose brain was a ball of string.
What the hell am I doing here?
Pausing outside the door, uncertain if I should knock or simply allow myself entry, I swallowed a hard lump that seemed to stick in the back of my esophagus.
I am standing on the line between fiction and reality.
I opened the door and stepped inside.
The woman in the bed was perhaps sixty, though with her sunken features, cobwebby wisps of hair, and blighted countenance, she looked like she could have been a hundred-year-old mummy rolled out on display.
I entered the room as silently as I could, careful not to let the door catch the latch too loudly as it shut. The room was dark and musty. There was an amalgam of odors clinging hotly to the air, each of them distinct and clinicaclass="underline" the reek of ammonia; the acrid underlying stench of urine; the insipid redolence of Althea Coulter’s stale, immobile body beneath the paper-thin hospital bedsheets. There was another smell, too—though more like the hint of a smell rather than a smell itself—and I knew without a doubt that it was the smell of impending death.