“Why did you let her in here? She’s a crazy girl, eh? As for Rosalina, she’s a liar. And a whore.”
He smiled tightly. “I’m done here.” And then, nodding at me: “Be careful.”
A threat? Or a warning? I couldn’t tell.
He moved away from the bars and fell back on the cot, turning up the volume loud enough for me to hear the strains of a sonata. He flicked his hand toward me like I was a bug in his face. Dismissed. I wondered how many lives besides Alyssa’s he had ended as casually.
“I’m sorry,” Rafael said, genuinely feeling bad for me, drawing me away.
The music hummed.
I could place it now.
Marchetti was listening to the third movement of Sonata in C Major, K. 309, which Mozart improvised in a performance more than two hundred years ago.
I knew this arcane detail because Mama played it on Sunday nights before Sadie and I went to bed.
Anthony Marchetti was toying with me, pulling me along his dark highway.
Sending a message.
We had reached the exit door at the end of the row, Rafael already sliding his keycard, when Marchetti’s voice traveled down the cellblock.
“Tommie.”
So commanding that I stopped and turned back.
“No time left.” Rafael’s hand was on my shoulder.
All I could see of Anthony Marchetti were his fingers wrapped around the bars of the cage.
But in the stillness of the empty concrete chamber, I could hear.
“Tell your mother hello,” he said softly.
CHAPTER 13
Tell your mother hello.
You twisted bastard. Playing that sonata from my childhood.
Tell me, Etta, was the picture of a dead little girl in a pool of blood not enough for the day?
Now I was talking to dead people. Why not? The live ones weren’t helping much. So far, Etta Place wasn’t talking back. A good thing. No bossy voice in my head but mine.
The green light on my cell phone blinked insistently as I walked to the truck, the sun rising over the top of the eight-story city jail, already promising another blistering ten hours. I looked at the list of missed calls. Seven of them. Four from Sadie and three from Mama’s nursing home. I glanced at my watch: 6:22. I immediately hit the “send” button on the last call. Sadie answered before I heard the first ring.
“Tommie, something’s going on with Mama. They had to sedate her about an hour ago. She was tearing up her room, like she was looking for something. Her blood pressure is off the charts and her heart is… I think they called it tachycardia. The night nurse said she started acting strangely after a man visited her last night, but didn’t flip out until this morning. Wait a minute…”
Sadie came back on the phone a few seconds later. “I’ve got to go. The ambulance is here; they’re about to take her to Harris in Fort Worth, Tommie… she’s so pale.”
“I’m about fifteen minutes… Sadie?”
She was gone. My whole body started to shake.
The skyscrapers, the red Toyota parked in front of me, the blue sky, the orange sunlight-all swirled together like a kaleidoscope, breaking the windshield into prisms of color. The keys clunked to the floor.
I wondered whether I was dying. This seemed way beyond a panic attack. Four years ago, after the first attack, too embarrassed to tell anyone, I found a list of tips on the internet in case it happened again.
A voice in my head sounding very much like Dr. Phil, my profession’s leading hypocrite, was now reading it off.
“No. 1: Relax and change your breathing pattern,” he boomed in his Oklahoman twang.
To what? Trying not to breathe?
“No. 2. Take a ‘mental vacation,’ ” he continued cheerfully, and I imagined his $16,500,000 mansion and Ferrari 360 Spider.
Desperate to quell Dr. Phil, I squinted my eyes shut and imagined myself with Maddie, down by the pond, tying the Woolly Fur-Bugger, a new fishing fly we’d discovered last week on Killroys’ website. I painstakingly tied the fly in my mind, step by step. My breathing eased slightly, and I moved on to the Pull Back Nymph. By the time I’d finished tying an Embellished Lefty’s, it was all over, my shirt soaked in sweat, my breathing shallow but regular.
The attack lasted thirteen minutes.
I peeled out of the lot and hit the highway to the hospital.
“God, Tommie, you look as bad as Mama.”
Sadie glanced up as I entered the packed waiting room, stepping over two kids playing Pick Up Sticks. “They’re getting her settled. She’s barely conscious, speaking gibberish, but hopefully that’s just the drug.”
I held back from reminding Sadie that Mama was rarely lucid, even without chemicals.
She pulled me by my elbow into a corner and spoke in an urgent whisper.
“That reporter showed up.”
“What?” I followed the direction of her eyes.
Jack Smith, crammed against the wall between an elderly woman nodding off and a manically texting teenager, tossed me a friendly wave.
I strode over, furious, thinking that anger was a good emotion for me to hang on to. It cleared my head of all the crazy crap.
“What are you doing here?” I demanded with enough venom that the old woman’s head popped up. The teenager’s thumbs never stopped moving.
“Sorry, ma’am,” Jack said to the woman, standing.
“In the hall,” I raged. “Now.”
Most of the waiting room, a crowd bleary with exhaustion and worry, stared at our little trio as we stalked our way through. We were probably a welcome distraction-Jack in today’s orange Polo; me, a sweaty, disheveled mess; Sadie, who seemed unaware she still wore the large paint-spattered goggles that she used for blowtorching.
I sagged against the wall, rubbing my forehead. Sadie, arms crossed over her rubber-band-taut body, glared at both Jack and me.
“I waited to talk to you two at the same time,” Jack said. “I just happened to be at the nursing home when the ambulance arrived. Don’t look at me like that, Tommie. You can’t expect a reporter not to try to get information from a primary source.”
“Did you see the guy who scared our mother?” I was thinking, Hell, you probably are the guy.
“No. I wasn’t there last night. I never spoke to your mother. Everything was chaos by the time I got there today.”
“I’d like to talk privately with my sister.”
“Sure.” Jack moved about ten feet away and pulled out his phone.
“Sadie,” I said quietly, “I need you and Maddie to move into the Worthington for a while. I don’t like the idea of you out there in the middle of nowhere. Not until we figure this out.”
“Why don’t we just move into the house with you?”
“Because I think… I’m more of a target. There’s Maddie to think about.”
And you, Sadie. I’d willingly go down in a blaze of glory for my sister. The problem was, she’d do the same for me. And she wasn’t quite as good a shot.
“I’m worried about you.” Sadie gazed at me steadily. “The lavender you smelled. I read up on… olfactory hallucinations.”
“Phantosmia,” I said. “Probably a one-time thing, possibly connected to some migraines I’ve been having since Daddy died.” I forced a smile. “Besides, Hudson says he’ll help me.”
I didn’t say when. Or how.
That sealed it. She broke into a huge, relieved smile.
“OK.” She nodded. “As long as Hudson’s with you. I’m going to head back to Mama’s room and let you deal with him.” She jerked her thumb in Jack’s direction.
“I’ll be there in just a second.”
I turned to Jack, enunciating each word.
“I’m. Sick. Of. Your. Games.”
Two nurses walking by turned their heads and slowed.
“A little quieter, please,” he said. He smiled at the nurses. “Everything’s fine, ladies. She’s just stressed out.”