At Risk of Being a Fool (26 page)

“I don’t care.” Quinto’s breathing slowed. No one had listened to him when he’d gotten the news. They’d told him he wouldn’t be working at the site, that Mr. Rivera was quitting, to shut up and be grateful, to talk to the police, and for-God’s-sake to watch his step, take off his hat, and say-Sir-when-you-talk-to-me-boy. But no one had listened.

He looked her in the eye for the first time. His fleeting smile was touched with panic and despair. “Ricardo, my brother, he was on at me yesterday, says maybe I should give it up, you know? Go on with the art, learn graphic arts, the computer stuff. He says I’d be real good, go into the store with him, advertising, you know.” He’d shifted back to the first drawing, placing Ricardo’s face on a fifth block. “He says I’d be good, I’d make the big bucks in advertising.”

“He
might
be right, Quinto. You have the most remarkable artistic gift I’ve ever seen in my life.”

“Maybe,” Quinto said doubtfully. “Only, I’d have to go back to
Portland
, ‘cause that’s where them schools are. Ricardo can get me in, he says. He knows somebody.” Mackie Sandoval’s face went on block six.

“You’re so good at drawing faces, Quinto.”

“Yeah, well,” he muttered. Jeanie herself was on block seven. “I don’t know what to do, no more. Maybe Ricky’s right, huh?”

“I must have seen you draw dozens of people,” she said, feeling her way. “But I’ve never seen you draw yourself.”

“Me?”

“Your own face. Can you?”

Quinto’s hand poised in midair. Jeanie turned the tablet to a new page.

“Draw your own face Quinto, when it’s happy. When you’re as happy as you can possibly be.”

Slowly, indefinite lines formed a face, hesitant watery lines. Quinto frowned. “I don’t know. I never done that.”

“But you know what you look like, you know how you feel. Close your eyes, and draw.”

Eyes closed, he sat there utterly still. Suddenly, his hand flew, and splashed his own face across the page, eyes alight with joy. He looked at it wonderingly. “Is that what I look like, for real?”

“Exactly. Every detail.” There’d been a breakthrough of some kind. She wasn’t sure what it was. “I’ve seen you look just that way. Now tell me, what are your hands doing when you look like this?”

“I’m making things,” he said. Around the face went small pictures of houses, cars, and paintings. And then, in large sweeping strokes, he was drawing houses, large and beautiful, people walking up the steps, ready to open a door with dreams alive behind it. “That’s it, Jeanie!” He dropped the pencil, threw his arms around her, and then jumped to his feet. “I’m building houses, and then I’m drawing them. I can do
both
, Jeanie
!
There ain’t nothing in the world says I can’t do
both
.”

His grin nearly split his face in two. He dropped into his seat, grabbed her hand, and shook it. “So you tell Mackie, okay? You’ll tell her. Get me on a job, I’ll work my butt off, I’ll get that math down, and learn all about construction.”

“I’ll tell her.” He needed a little space to himself. Jeanie set about gathering Rita, a matter that took a certain amount of attention. Cats had more tentacles than an octopus when it was time to go in a carrier. She latched the door shut, and found Quinto regarding the picture of Ricardo ruefully.

“He’s gonna be some mad at me, Ricky is. He really wanted me to go into the store with him, but it ain’t right for me. He’ll understand, won’t he?”

“I’m sure he will. He only wants what’s best for you.” Quinto was back to drawing drip marks under the picture of Mackie’s friend. “Why are you putting blood on his face?”

Quinto looked at her, startled. “On account of he’s dead, Jeanie. Mr. Rivera’s friend, Mr. Dunlap? He’s the one what got killed by the bomb.”

“At the construction site?”

“Yeah. What’s up? You knew about that, I know you did.”

“I didn’t realize,” she said numbly, “who he was.” Vic Dunlap, Mackie’s friend at the courthouse, was the security guard who’d triggered the pipe bomb at Danny Rivera’s site. No one had set the courthouse bomb for Judge Hodges. Vic Dunlap was the true target. When it missed, another had awaited him. And that one worked.

CHAPTER
SIXTEEN

“Do you miss Bright Futures?”

Jeanie parked Estelle’s wheelchair in front of the sunroom’s window. The sparse furnishings left ample room for wheelchairs and gurneys. From the presence of a dusty jigsaw puzzle open on the table, Jeanie deduced that it served patients who were sick of their own rooms. No one demurred as Jeanie pushed Estelle into it, and closed the door. There was no way to lock it. With a mental shrug, she opened the cat carrier.

“This is Rita. She’s tired of being in the carrier. I don’t know what she’ll make of your wheelchair.” Rita had never met a wheelchair before. Walkers and canes, yes, but not wheelchairs. Oriole’s Nest only tended people who were ambulatory.

The nurses didn’t seem to have noticed the cat. They didn’t, in fact, seem to have noticed Estelle in quite some time. Jeanie had found Estelle in a wheelchair, parked in front of a blank television in her room. In the past week, Estelle had spared no effort to reject the nurses’ help, intentions, and professional skills. Her hostility spoke through every move, sniff, and cutting remark. Jeanie couldn’t blame the nurses for giving Estelle the privacy she so vehemently defended.

Estelle looked into the silver-gray ruffles of cotton wool that clouded the skies in one of
Oregon
’s more subtle beauties. Wisps of silver played through a break in the clouds. She registered Jeanie’s presence with only the flicker of a dismissing eye. She had not spoken a word in the ten minutes since Jeanie’s arrival.

Rita wandered onto Jeanie’s lap, and considered exploratory moves onto the wheelchair. Jeanie placed her on Estelle’s lap, lifted one of the lifeless hands, and moved it on top. Rita readily settled into a purring ball, content to take a nap. Jeanie drew Estelle’s hand over the bright fur.

“Estelle, you didn’t answer me. Do you miss going to work?”

Estelle’s carved face stirred. Hoarse words emerged from the frozen lips. “Is that all you can find to say, Mrs. McCoy? Is your imagination really so lacking?”

“What would you have me say?” Damn her anyway. Jeanie was so sick of walking on eggs. Estelle wouldn’t want pity, even if she offered it. “Gee, Estelle, I’m sorry they had to cut your leg off below the knee? How are you going to manage with only one foot, and just half of that? Is that blunt enough for you?”

The chin quivered. Estelle was resolutely silent.

“How about this? It could have been worse. You could have been plastered into unrecognizable pieces on the pavement yesterday morning, like Vic Dunlap. His wife adored him. She called him her Pillsbury Doughboy. He was earning extra money to take her to
Hawaii
.” There was no reaction. “It may not matter to you, but it mattered to Debbie, and Mackie Sandoval, and me, and Danny Rivera.”

Estelle’s head jerked. “Danny Rivera? Was he hurt?”

“Not Danny. Vic was the night guard.” Jeanie watched the color come back into Estelle’s face. “Why? Do you know Danny Rivera?”
Everybody
knew Danny Rivera. It was unreal. But then again, they all lived and worked in the same sector of society.

Estelle turned away. “I met him a time or two. In the course of business.”

“A nice man,” said Jeanie.

“He’s twenty years my junior, Mrs. McCoy. Get your mind out of the gutter.”

“Ah, that’s nice. That’s the Estelle I’ve learned to know and love.”

The rigid face twitched and tightened again.

“I asked if you missed going to work. Are you planning a return in the near future? Or,” she added, “in the distant future?”

“They did this to me.” Estelle sat in profile, her face unforgiving.

“All of them?” Jeanie found a perverse pleasure in the rudeness. Talking with Estelle might be as tense as a Cold War, but it was a relief from the rules to which she’d bound herself for her entire life. “All twenty-odd girls hid in collusion, and built a pipe bomb in the Bright Futures’ back shed, and then crept to your apartment across town in the dead of night to booby trap your car. Fluffy thinking, Estelle.”

Estelle turned on her, with wolf-like ferocity. “Absolutely rational thinking, my naïve Mrs. McCoy. Criminals, all of them, not one with a decent background. Whom else would you accuse? The grocery clerk? One of my neighbors at the apartment complex? I don’t even know their names, not one.”

“I’ll bet your neighbors know yours, though.” Jeanie bit her lip on the acid tone.

“Violence is their nature!” Estelle screamed. “They’re evil, disease-ridden drug addicts, thieves, and hookers.”

“Who have no appreciation for the effort you’ve put into their rehabilitation.”

“No!” The shout bounced off the walls, circled Jeanie’s head, and fell.

A timid knock sounded on the door. A young nurse peered inside, hesitation written in every line of her face. “Er—?”

“We’re just fine, thanks,” caroled Jeanie with her most teacherly smile. “Close the door please. We don’t want the cat to get out, now do we?”

“Er, no, of course not.” After a moment, the nurse decided to put herself on the outside of the door instead of the inside.

Estelle pressed the backs of her hands to her cheeks, trying to push back the high color.

“But which one, Estelle? Which one do you think did this? And which twenty didn’t? And why would she bother? She’d know every girl in the place would be suspected.”

Estelle lowered her hands, and wiped them quickly on her gown. Dampness spotted the cloth, telling its own tale. Without thought, she dropped a hand on Rita.

“I don’t know. I’ve been thinking, and thinking, all day, ever since—” She looked at the stump of her leg sticking out in front of her wheelchair, and flinched away. “Ever since they forced me out of bed into this wheelchair. I hadn’t thought it through before then. They all—”

“Justice, Estelle. Remember the justice model. Not all of them. Maybe not any of them.”

“I’ve gone over the infractions I recall. I just don’t know. If I had their files, perhaps. I keep forgetting things.”

“How could any of them find the time, Estelle?”

“Even you’re not that silly, Jeanie. The searches turn up cell phones with a fair regularity,” Estelle said. Her color had returned to normal.

“How often do you actually run a full search?” The danger was past for the moment. Estelle was thinking again.

“Weekly, at least. On different days, different times. I know most of the favorite hiding spots.” She snorted. “I’ve been there longer than any of them, since the place was built.”

“They’re not too happy under Dolores right now.”

“Nonsense. They should be as happy as pigs in a dumpster.”

“They say she’s unpredictable, and the food’s bad.” She shifted into Brynna’s cadence. “‘Torrez was a bitch, but she didn’t pull nothing. It was all there in the fuckin’ rule book, God, she knew it by heart.’”

A shoulder muscle twitched. Estelle’s mouth pulled down on one side as she covered her face with her hands again. After a moment, Rita rose on her hind legs, and nudged one hand impatiently. Estelle let her hand fall into the cat’s fur and Rita subsided. Estelle turned her wheelchair to face Jeanie. Her eyes were wet.

“Which one said that?”

“It could have been any of them.”

“I could take a guess.”

“But you won’t.” There was a moment’s silence. “They didn’t love you, Estelle, but in a backhanded way some of them, at least, appreciated your more positive qualities.”
She’ll never forgive me if she starts crying in earnest
. “At least the few you allowed to show on occasion.”

“Humph.”

“Estelle, I need your help.”

Estelle shot her a disbelieving glance.

“I do, Estelle. They’ve closed my school. Too many coincidences they said, too many connections between the kids and the recent violence.”

“Sensible.”

“They’re my kids, Estelle. I’m fond of them.” She overrode Estelle’s snort. “They need to earn their GEDs. If they lose this chance, some of them will never try again.”

“Corrections has its own GED program.”

“Two of my kids are not in Corrections or transition facilities. Another is a voluntary, and without the program, I don’t think she’ll make it. It’s good for all of them, to learn in a classroom situation, to have to get along with other people. I’ve made home visits to three of them, and left a message for the fourth. But Dolores has cut me off. She won’t let me visit the girls, and she refuses to let them come to class tomorrow. It’s testing day. Brynna has to take the Science test, and Sorrel’s been doing community service, but Dolores won’t let them come.”

“It’s a non-issue. Brynna and Sorrel will join classes with the others. The only reason they’re in your program is for the work experience portion.”

“Blast it, Estelle, quit trying to stab me and open your mind. Sorrel needs this opportunity. She’s growing as a person. We can rehabilitate her. It’s not
justice
, yanking her out of a situation where she’s succeeding.”