A Face at the Window (37 page)

And a flat disk of pancake makeup with a sponge applicator. Helen looked up.

"You'll have bruising," said the woman matter-of-factly. "So you might want some cover-up for it. And anyway," she added, "you deserve a little something to make you feel better."

Thank you,
Helen tried to say. "Now," the woman went on as if not noticing Helen's fresh tears. "There's someone who'd like to get a look at you, before your next adventure."

Without asking permission she seized the wheelchair handles and began rolling Helen from the waiting area. "Don't worry, they won't leave without you," she said.

They rolled through the hospital lobby, down a corridor full of beeping EKG machines and empty gurneys, and into a room with a bed in it. Jody was in the bed, lying very still and surrounded by IVs that dripped clear fluids of various pale colors into him, covered to his neck by a white sheet. One arm lay exposed.

His eyes were open. When he caught sight of Helen he smiled weakly and tried to speak. She was halfway out of the chair when the woman caught her.

"Hey, hey, give him a break. He's just waking up from big-time surgery."

He wiggled his fingers at her, unable to speak past the tube still in his throat. "Hi," she whispered, and he nodded faintly.

"We can't stay," the woman said. "He needs to sleep, and you need to travel. But there's something else for you, and he wanted to give it to you, so…"

On Jody's bedside table lay a box with the stylized outline of an apple on it. "Go on. He told your mother that he wants you to open it right away."

So Helen did, while Jody watched her through eyes that kept drifting shut. "Oh," she said when she had the packaging removed.

It was an iPod, exactly the one she'd wanted forever, just to have because it felt special, luxurious and so…well, she'd just wanted it, that was all. But from Jody she'd heard again and again that it was silly, too expensive, too…

Biting her lip, she met his gaze.
Thank you,
she mouthed as well as she could, and felt he understood. But there was more she had to tell him, and on the bedside table also was a small white notepad. She leaned over and grabbed it, and the pen with it.

Music. Good for canoe trips,
she wrote.
Long trips.
She held the pad up; his eyes smiled happily. Proudly.

Then they fell closed once more. Helen turned, frightened.

"It's okay," said the woman. She sounded as if she knew what she was talking about; Helen relaxed. "He's full of anesthesia, still. He'll sleep now, and by the time he really wakes up you'll have had your own surgery, and we can tell him you're fine."

Urgently, Helen wrote again.
His
daughter.
Tell my
dad
that his
daughter
is fine.

The woman smiled. Helen wondered if after this, she would ever see the woman again.

Maybe. Maybe not. "I will. I'll be sure to tell him his daughter wants her father to know she's come through with flying colors. Again," she added lightly.

Content, Helen let herself be wheeled away, not noticing the pair of eyes from one of the other rooms they passed fastening upon her as she went by, narrowing with recognition at the sight of the bright braid piled atop her head.

Recognition, and the beginnings of a plan.

•••

Bad dream
Jake
woke suddenly to the choked, smothering feeling of a hand clamped to her mouth. Hot, sour breath gusted into her face.

"You're not gonna freakin’ testify against me about Marky."

That voice—her eyes snapped open in disbelief.

Anthony Colapietro's bruised, bloody face loomed over her, his expression murderous. "The girl's alive. I didn't kill her. And I didn't kill the guy in the driveway, neither. I was s'posed to, but I—"

His hands closed around her throat. She couldn't
breathe…

"They say three minutes is all it takes, you know? Hey, you were hurt worse than they thought. So you stopped breathing. They should've checked you better, is what they'll think."

It wasn't. They wouldn't. Autopsy evidence would show she'd been strangled, and he'd be the obvious suspect. But he was just a dumb punk who didn't know anything except how to kill.…

She tried throwing him off, tried reaching the call button, knocking the telephone off the bedside table so its crash might summon someone—all useless. And he'd closed the door.

Stars swarmed in her vision, bright pricklings in the encroaching blackness. Suddenly a ripe
thump!
sounded nearby. As Anthony toppled away, she surged up, gasping, sucking in air. When her vision cleared her father stood there, gripping a heavy white plastic molded cast shaped like a foot.

Groaning, Anthony Colapietro shifted and tried to get up. Her father looked down at the bandaged, hospital-gowned form with its orange antiseptic stains and bloody trailing IV tubes.

"Don't you move," Jacob Tiptree told Anthony. He reached out to lean on the wall-mounted emergency button.

"Don't you move, goddamn it, or I swear I'll stand here and bash all the rest of your brains out."

Whereupon Anthony Colapietro, seeming to understand the deep sincerity of this promise, didn't budge.

Three days later,
Jake sat at the oilcloth-covered table in the kitchen of her big old ramshackle house in Eastport, Maine, sipping a cup of tea. At the antique soapstone sink, Bella Diamond filled a bucket with hot water and soapsuds, all ready to begin scrubbing the back porch after the most recent onslaught of visitors and well-wishers.

Too bad she couldn't scrub away the current one. "Jake, I'm so sorry," said Billie Whitson, pushing back her strawlike hair with her red-tipped claws. "This was my fault. If I hadn't shown him around…"

Because that, it turned out, was how Campbell had gotten the lay of the land; he'd found Billie's real estate Web site, come to her and faked interest, and let her drive him around looking at places—including the Jiminy Point house, whose owners she'd talked into listing "just in case there was a great offer."

She'd even rented him a small cabin on her own property on the mainland, at the end of a driveway nearly as long as the one at Jiminy Point. In it, Bob Arnold had found the ruby pendant to the earring Campbell had worn; recognizing what it must be, he'd neither mentioned it nor hesitated before slipping the thing into his own pocket, later handing it over to Jake's father.

"Anyone asks, Campbell gave it to Jake," Bob had said. Bob already had what he called a quiet word with the fellow who was supposed to have been guarding Anthony Colapietro in the hospital, and who instead had been chatting up one of the nurses.

Although Jake suspected it had actually been more than one
word, and that quite a number of them had been profane. Just because Colapietro had appeared to be unconscious…well, Jake didn't envy the guard.

Now Billie Whitson went on apologizing profusely: "If I'd had any idea who he was, I'd never have—"

"It's okay, Billie. You couldn't have known."

Instantly the real estate maven brightened, glancing around greedily; she'd been wanting to get in here for ages. "You know, this room would photograph beautifully as a ‘before’ picture…"

Bella, who had put down her bucket and pulled a broom from the closet, yanked Billie's chair out hard with Billie still in it. Shoving the broom under the table she found Billie's sandal-clad toes while energetically pursuing nonexistent crumbs. Yelping, Billie took the hint and fled, after which Bella went back to preparing her mop bucket.

"Now, that there's a woman who'd sell her dead grandmother right out of her coffin if she thought she could make a buck on it," Bella remarked. "Coffin, too. She'd tell folks it was a studio apartment."

Apahtment—
th
e.
Maine way of saying it. And although Jake couldn't responsibly endorse Bella's methods for getting rid of pestiferous persons, she had to admit the result made her feel as if some henna-haired, bony-faced, super-hygienic cross between a housekeeper and a fairy godmother had granted her dearest wish.

Stepmother, she realized, gazing with gratitude at the dour, ropy-armed woman in the cotton housedress, a bib-style red apron trimmed up with black rickrack tied around her skinny waist and her hair skinned harshly back into a fraying elastic.

Bella's rawboned hand cranked off the hot water faucet. The sudden act rattled every pipe and radiator in the house.

"Anyway, she's the end of all the company for today," Bella
declared, which was a notion Jake absolutely could get behind, as Sam would've put it. She felt hollowed out with exhaustion, like a radiator that had just had all the water drained out of it.

And not just by Billie; already this morning there'd been half a dozen kinds of cops needing to do interviews so they could finish their paperwork. Reporters had found the house, too; it hadn't been as easy as Bob Arnold thought, heading them off. But now that they were gone and Anthony Colapietro had been sent to a jail hospital in New Jersey, Jake hoped to begin feeling normal again soon.

Bella hustled out to the porch just as Jake's dad came in, looking troubled. "Hoped I'd find you here," he said. "Couple of things I wanted to say to you."

"It's okay, Dad," she began, but he sat anyway.

"You did fine, you know," he said, resting his hands on the table. "And… well. It's time for you to have these."

He opened his right hand. Two earrings lay in it. "Sometimes we all need something to hold onto. And Bella's been awfully good about me wearing one, but…"

She let him drop them into her palm, closed her fingers on them. "Thank you," she said. It wasn't all Jacob had come for, however.

"Ozzie could be a fine fellow when he wanted to be," he said. "But he had another side to him, one that I should've paid more attention to."

"Dad. None of it was your fault. I don't—"

"He always had a way of figuring out what to say or do to hurt you," her father went on. "I know because he was my friend, once, and I knew him very well. Just not…"

Not well enough.
"Anyway, I thought maybe he might've said
something ugly to you about your mother and me. It would've been just like him."

Tears filled Jake's throat; she blurted the truth. "He said I made her stay with you, that if it weren't for me she'd have-Dad, was I the reason? Was she in love with him, is that why…?"

"Why he thought she might leave me?" He shook his head. "We both loved her, yes. There wasn't a man alive who wouldn't. But not like…we'd laughed about it, the three of us together. How devoted he was, how at her service."

He paused, remembering. "Sir Galahad, we'd started calling him. Foolish, I guess. But it's hard to explain, now, how happy we were. Like nothing could ever go wrong. We were young, that's all. We just didn't know."

They sat in silence for a moment. "I wanted to straighten it out with him but she said no, she'd talk to him herself. And she did, she sat him down and told him, the day before…"

His voice trailed off; he got control of it again. "She told him that what he wanted would never happen, there wasn't a chance and that even if there were, that she'd never leave you. Or take you from me," he added.

His eyes glistened. "Afterward, she said that he seemed to understand, that she thought it would be okay. But…"

"But he came back," Jake whispered.

He nodded. "The very next day. I was busy in the kitchen. He must've slipped in past me. Other people saw him come in."

The explosion had blown both her father and his visitor out the door, leveled a city block. Later he'd found the earring in the rubble. "I stuck around," he went on, "and kept out of sight until I was sure you were both…"

Dead. In the pandemonium he'd managed to escape notice.
Jake recalled being dug from beneath a warped piece of sheet metal in the yard, hours after the event; recalled the astonished face of the young cop who'd found her.

Recalled being lifted, carried away. "She was so beautiful," Jake said.

"Yes,
she was." He got up and crossed to the window.

In the yard both dogs rested in the shade of a pointed fir tree, happy to be back home where the only thing either one of them ever had to retrieve was a Frisbee. "Your ma would've put the screws to Ozzie just the way you did," he said. "That woman had more guts'n anyone I ever knew."

He turned and met Jake's gaze. "Except maybe her daughter. So, is there anything else you want to ask me?"

"No. I know all I need to now."

He regarded her. "All right. Any questions, though…" He tapped his chest with an index finger. "You know where I'll be."

With that he went out to oversee the backhoe work for the broken sidewalk. After a while Bella came in and went upstairs to turn on the vacuum cleaner, just as another chunk of old gutter crashed past the hall window.

"Big doings out there," Wade observed, descending from his shop. He was cleaning the .22 Marky Larson had hurled into the water off Jiminy Point; that morning at slack tide, Sam had gotten up very early, put on a drysuit, and gone down there and found it.

"Mmm," Jake replied, fingering the earrings once more before closing her hand around them. Wade leaned over and kissed her.

"Life goes on, then, huh?" he murmured before heading back upstairs to work a little longer.

Yes, she thought. If you were lucky and you remembered what people who loved you had taught you, sometimes it did.

She placed the silver stem of one of the earrings into her ear just as another, louder crash sounded from the front of the house, followed by laughter.

Getting up, she paused at the hall mirror to put in the other earring, feeling the pair of them as a sweet, solid weight, the color of heart's blood. Then she turned from her reflection and hurried outside to see what all the commotion was.