Brass Ring (3 page)

“It was an accident in my case, too,” Jon said. “My family and I were in a plane crash.” He wouldn’t tell him that it was his family’s private plane. He didn’t want this man to focus on wealth. “I was sixteen. My parents and sister were killed, and I was in a coma for a few months. When I woke up, they told me I’d never walk again.”

The detective’s eyes were wide. “Shit,” he said.

“And your nephew?”

“Motorcycle. They say he’s a T-four. Do you know what that means?”

“Yeah.” Jon touched his own chest at the level of the boy’s spinal cord injury. This kid was not going to have an easy time of it. “I’m an incomplete L-three,” he said, although he doubted that would have much meaning to the detective.

He questioned the man about the rehab program his nephew was in and offered to make a call to the program director—a woman he’d known well for many years—to check on the boy.

Detective Patrick wrote his nephew’s name on a business card and handed it to Jon. “I feel better talking to you,” he said. “I mean, it seemed like it was the end of the world for the kid, you know? But now I look at you”—he gestured toward Jon—”and you get around okay and you’ve got a pretty wife and all. And you must have met her after you were…” The officer pointed to Jon’s wheelchair.

“Yes. We met in high school.”

“Aha.” The man smiled. “High school sweethearts, huh?”

Jon smiled himself, remembering. “Not of the usual variety.” He had moved in with an aunt in Falls Church after his six-month stay in a rehab program, transferring into Claire’s public high school after a decade of being pampered by private schools. He could still, if he let the memories in, taste the bitterness of that year after the accident. He had lost everything. But then Claire drew him under her protective wing. They began dating. Neither of them ever dated anyone else again.

“And you have a kid?” The detective nodded toward the phone, his voice tentative, and Jon laughed. He knew exactly what the man was thinking.

“Yes, she’s mine,” he said. For years, he and Claire had counseled couples where one of the partners was disabled, and they had learned that sharing personal experience was sometimes more helpful than anything else they might say. He could talk about Susan’s parentage without an ounce of discomfort, but Detective Patrick colored.

Jon worried he had given the man false hope. “I was very lucky,” he added. “It’s rare for a man with a spinal cord injury to be able to father a child, and we weren’t able to have other children.”

The older man shifted in his seat. “Well, that’s great you got the one.” He poked at a stack of papers on his desk. “Do you think my nephew stands a chance in that department?”

Jon drew in a breath. “I wouldn’t want to guess. Everybody’s different.” He saw the pain in the man’s eyes. “He’ll do okay,” he said. “He’s in a fine program. They’ll take good care of him.”

Claire had walked back into the room as he was speaking, and he was struck by her pallor. She was still beautiful, though. She was one of those women who was far more striking at forty than she had been at eighteen. Her sharp features had softened. Even the vivid green of her eyes seemed to have mellowed over time.

Struggling to smile at him, she sat down again and took the hand he offered. Her fingers were cold and damp.

A female officer appeared in the doorway to let them know they had a room at a nearby bed and breakfast, one that was ramped for a wheelchair. Claire stood up, folding the blanket, and faced the detective.

“When you find out who she is,” she said, “will you call and let me know?”

“Sure will,” he said.

Outside, the snow had nearly stopped, but the air was still blustery and cold. Claire was quiet on their cautious drive to the bed and breakfast, and she was merely polite to the owners of the small inn, when her usual style was to make instant friends of anyone she met. Jon was scared by her silence. It wasn’t until they were lying under the thick comforter in the canopy bed that she began to talk.

“I should have held on to her,” she said.

He pulled her close to him. “You did as much as anyone could have done.”

“Maybe if I’d held on, she wouldn’t have jumped. And then if she did jump, I could have simply let go of her at the last minute.” She was quiet a moment. “It’s like I gave her permission to do it, Jon. I let go, and said, fine, go ahead, end your life. I was the last person to have a chance with her and I failed. Maybe if we hadn’t called the police. That’s when she freaked out.”

“Are you aware that you’re talking nonsense?”

She shivered. “I can’t get warm.” She’d worn nothing to bed, and her skin felt chilled against his chest.

“Do you want one of my T-shirts?”

“No. Just keep holding me, please.”

He rubbed her arm. “Shall we try the carousel?”

“Mmm.” She snuggled closer to him. “Yes.”

He closed his eyes, pressing his cheek against her hair. “Once upon a time, on a big and beautiful farm in Jeremy, Pennsylvania, there was an enormous red barn.”

Claire cocked her head against his shoulder. “Do you think it really was enormous, or do you think I just remember it that way because I was so small?”

“Does it matter?”

She nearly giggled. “No.”

“It looked like an ordinary barn, although certainly a very well-cared-for barn, because the farmer who owned it was the type to take very good care of the things and the people he loved.”

“Yes.”

“This farmer had two little granddaughters who loved going into the ordinary-looking barn, because inside there was an extraordinary carousel. There were many beautiful horses on the carousel, and some empty spaces where more horses would go when the farmer had finished carving them out of the big blocks of musky-smelling wood he kept in his workroom.”

“At the side of the barn.”

“Yes. The workroom at the side of the barn. One of the little granddaughters had a favorite horse—a white horse with a wild golden mane—named Titan. And she liked to—”

“And he was a jumper,” Claire added.

“Yes. He was one of the jumpers on the carousel. That’s why his mane was so wild. And Claire liked to climb on his back and pretend she was a cowgirl.”

“And try to grab the ring.”

“Right. She’d try to grab the brass ring so her grandfather would let her go around again.”

“It’s working,” Claire mumbled against his chest. “You’re so good at this.”

He knew it was working. Her body was growing warm next to him. The tension was gone.

“The organ played ‘By the Light of the Silvery Moon,’ and the little granddaughter would gallop around the barn on her beautiful horse, and she’d feel the most extraordinary sense of joy and peace, there on her grandfather’s carousel.”

“Mmm. I love you so much, Jon.”

“Love you, too.”

Within minutes she was asleep. Her body was warm and heavy next to him, her breathing almost too soft to hear. The air in the room was dark and still; if there was any light outside the windows, the heavy shades didn’t let it in. He lay awake, staring at the black ceiling, wishing he could fall asleep and escape the sense of powerlessness that had been haunting him all evening.

He had long ago come to grips with his limitations, but the helplessness he’d felt tonight as he watched Claire struggle with the woman on the edge of the bridge had been different. It had felt like an enemy, a taunting foe he could never defeat. He had watched that scene unfold in terror, thinking that both women would slip on the icy platform, both women would plunge to their deaths. For a long dark moment, he’d thought he would lose his wife, and although he had been no more than a few yards from her, he’d been powerless to save her. He couldn’t recall another time in his adult life when he had felt so utterly helpless.

The image of the woman and Claire seemed etched on the ceiling of this room. He closed his eyes, but the scene sprang to life on the backs of his eyelids. No matter how hard he tried to wipe the memory from his mind, it slipped back in, again and again, and he wished he had a carousel of his own to carry him through the night.

VIENNA, VIRGINIA

THE PHONE RANG ON
Claire’s office desk. She was about to ignore it, but then remembered that Jill, her secretary, was not in today to pick it up. Most of the foundation’s employees were still digging out from the storm.

Claire lifted the receiver to her ear.

“Harte-Mathias Foundation.”

“I’d like to speak with Mrs…uh, Harte-Mathias, please?” The raspy male voice sounded vaguely familiar.

“This is she.”

“Uh, hello. This is Detective Patrick in Harpers Ferry. You wanted to know when we identified that suicide.”

“Yes.” Claire sat up straight. “Did you find out who she is?”

“Her name was Margot St. Pierre, and she—”

“Margot, with a ‘t’?”

“Yes.”

Claire jotted the name on a notepad.

“They finally found her late last night. The body’d gotten caught in the rocks about a quarter mile from the bridge. She fit the description of a woman who’d been reported missing from Avery Hospital in Martinsburg. That’s a mental—uh, a psychiatric hospital.”

“How far is Martinsburg from Harpers Ferry?”

“Twenty-five, thirty miles. She’d just walked out of the hospital Sunday morning, according to the staff there. No one realized she was missing until that evening. They didn’t have her in a locked ward, because she’d never given any indication of being a danger to herself or anyone else in the three years she’d been there.”

“Three years?” Claire looked out her office window at the leafless, ice-coated trees.

“Yeah. Don’t know why she was in that long. So, anyway, a fella picked her up outside Martinsburg. She had her thumb out and said she wanted to go to the bridge in Harpers Ferry. The guy called us late last night. Said he’d read about a woman jumping off the bridge and thought he’d better report what he knew. He said he refused to drop her off at the bridge, what with the snow and all, so she told him to take her to a certain house nearby, which he did. He didn’t see her go in, though. We checked at the house. No one there knew of her, and she never went inside. Trying to throw the guy off her trail, I suspect.”

Claire tapped her pen on the top of her desk. “Is there any family?” she asked. “Someone who cares about her, who should know what happened to her?”

“I don’t have that data right in front of me, ma’am. Sorry.”

They talked for another moment or two, but it was obvious that Detective Patrick had little other information to offer.

Claire hung up the phone, her eyes on the name she’d written on her notepad. Margot St. Pierre. A beautiful name. If she’d heard it spoken by a stranger on the street, the name would have stayed in her mind for days. The fact that it belonged to the woman on the bridge meant she would never be able to forget it. No matter how much she wanted to.

It was nearly noon. Claire’s morning had been long and full, despite the quiet, abandoned climate of the foundation offices. She had called the rehabilitation therapists she usually supervised on Tuesdays to cancel their meeting because of the weather, but Kelley Fielding, one of the graduate students doing her internship at the foundation, had broken into tears at that news. Needless to say, Claire had invited her to come in.

She’d listened to Kelley berate herself over her inability to work effectively with the angry, belligerent young men who made up the bulk of the foundation’s rehab patients. They scared her, she said. She was useless with them.

Claire tried to get the young intern to see that her patients’ hostility was only a mask for their fear. “Imagine waking up one day and having your life completely changed,” she said. “Changed for good. Forever. The plans you had for yourself are gone. The goals you’d set for yourself are out of your reach. You can’t work at your former job. You can’t even go to the bathroom the way you used to. And you certainly can’t make love the way you used to. These guys were macho and independent at one time. Now they wonder if they’ll ever be able to do anything for themselves again. They’re terrified men trying to cope the only way they know how.”

“I just wish they could be a little less combative,” Kelley had said.

“They have
fight
in them.” Claire pounded a fist on her desk. “That’s terrific. It gives you so much to work with.”

Kelley had looked relieved and relaxed by the end of their meeting. She told Claire that she’d applied to do her internship at the foundation primarily to be able to work under her supervision. “I’ve never known anyone who could turn a negative into a positive the way you do,” she said. “And you always manage to get me to see things through my patients’ eyes.”

It was easy for Claire to understand what Kelley’s patients were going through. She was married to someone who’d been there.

Now, with the long morning behind her, Claire dialed the number for Jon’s office on the other side of the building.

“Are you ready for a break?” she asked.

“Sure am.”

She ran a fingertip over Margot’s name on her notepad. “I just heard from the Harpers Ferry police.”

“What did they say?”

“I’ll tell you when I get there.”

She got off the phone and stood up, and the room whirled around her for a second before coming to a standstill. That dizziness—that sudden vertigo—had seized her several times over the last two days. Twice last night, she’d awakened with a start, thinking she was still suspended on the slippery edge of the bridge.

She walked toward the door, knees trembling. There was a stiffness in her shoulders and back. She’d spent the afternoon before shoveling snow from the walks around their house while Jon rode the snowblower in the long driveway that stretched through the woods to the main road.

Leaving her boots in her office, she padded through the maze of gray-carpeted hallways in her socks. The glassy, three-story foundation building was set high above a small pond in a wooded section of Vienna. Jon’s office was in what they referred to as the “financial side” of the foundation while her office was in the “service side.” Jon was head of the financial side, determining what rehab-oriented programs would receive foundation funds, while she supervised the therapists working with the foundation’s outpatient program. There was a great deal of overlap in their work. They were a team. They planned the foundation’s annual Spinal Cord Injury Retreat together. They never spoke at a conference or led a workshop or counseled a couple without one another. People expected to see them together, and they had learned to play off each other’s cues very well.