Broken (7 page)

“Sara!” Cathy called. “Julie is on the phone for you.”

Eddie patted her arm. “Go.”

She walked down the hall and into the kitchen, which was so beautiful that she froze mid-stride. “Holy crap.”

Tessa said, “Wait till you see the pool.”

Sara ran her hand along the new center island. “This is marble.” Previously, the Linton décor had favored Brady Bunch orange tiles and knotty pine cabinetry. She turned around and saw the new refrigerator. “Is that Sub-Zero?”

“Sara.” Cathy held out the phone, the only thing in the kitchen that had not been updated.

She exchanged an outraged look with Tessa as she put the phone to her ear. “Hello?”

“Dr. Linton?”

“Speaking.” She opened the door on the cherry wall cabinet, marveling at the antique glass panels. There was no answer on the phone. She said, “Hello? This is Dr. Linton.”

“Ma’am? I’m sorry. This is Julie Smith. Can you hear me okay?”

The connection was bad, obviously a cell phone. It didn’t help matters that the girl was speaking barely above a whisper. Sara didn’t recognize the name, though she guessed from the twangy accent that Julie had grown up in one of the poorer areas of town. “What can I do for you?”

“I’m sorry. I’m calling from work and I gotta be quiet.”

Sara felt her brow furrow. “I can hear you fine. What do you need?”

“I know you don’t know me, and I’m sorry to be calling you like this, but you have a patient named Tommy Braham. You know Tommy, don’t you?”

Sara ran through all the Tommys she could think of, then came up not with a face, but with a disposition. He was just another young boy who’d had myriad office visits for the sorts of things you would expect: a bead shoved up his nose. A watermelon seed in his ear. Unspecified belly aches on important school days. He stuck out mostly because his father, not his mother, had always brought him to the clinic, an unusual occurrence in Sara’s experience.

Sara told the girl, “I remember Tommy. How’s he doing?”

“That’s the thing.” She went quiet, and Sara could hear water
running in the background. She waited it out until the girl continued, “Sorry. Like I was saying, he’s in trouble. I wouldn’t have called, but he told me to. He texted me from prison.”

“Prison?” Sara felt her heart sink. She hated to hear when one of her kids turned out bad, even if she couldn’t quite recall what he looked like. “What did he do?”

“He didn’t do anything, ma’am. That’s the point.”

“Okay.” Sara rephrased the question. “What was he convicted of?”

“Nothing as far as I know. He doesn’t even know if he’s arrested or what.”

Sara assumed the girl had confused prison with jail. “He’s at the police station on Main Street?” Tessa shot her a look and Sara shrugged, helpless to explain.

Julie told her, “Yes, ma’am. They got him downtown.”

“Okay, what do they think he did?”

“I guess they think he killed Allison, but there ain’t no way he—”

“Murder.” Sara did not let her finish the sentence. “I’m not sure what he wants me to do.” She felt compelled to add, “For this sort of situation, he needs a lawyer, not a doctor.”

“Yes, ma’am, I know the difference between a doctor and a lawyer.” Julie didn’t sound insulted by Sara’s clarification. “It’s just that he said he really needed someone who would listen to him, because they don’t believe that he was with Pippy all night, and he said that you were the only one who ever listened to him, and that one cop, she’s been really hard on him. She keeps staring at him like—”

Sara put her hand to her throat. “What cop?”

“I’m not sure. Some lady.”

That narrowed things down enough. Sara tried not to sound cold. “I really can’t get involved in this, Julie. If Tommy has been arrested, then by law, they have to provide him with a lawyer. Tell him to ask for Buddy Conford. He’s very good at helping people in these sorts of situations. All right?”

“Yes, ma’am.” She sounded disappointed, but not surprised. “Okay, then. I told him I’d try.”

“Well …” Sara did not know what else to say. “Good luck. To both of you.”

“Thank you, ma’am, and like I said, I’m sorry to bother you’uns over the holiday.”

“It’s all right.” Sara waited for the girl to respond, but there was only the sound of a flushing toilet, then a dead line.

Tessa asked, “What was that about?”

Sara hung up the phone and sat down at the table. “One of my old patients is in jail. They think he killed somebody. Not Brad—someone named Allison.”

Tessa asked, “Which patient was she calling about? I bet it’s the boy who stabbed Brad.”

Cathy slammed the refrigerator door to express her disapproval.

Still, Tessa pressed, “What’s his name?”

Sara studiously avoided her mother’s disapproving gaze. “Tommy Braham.”

“That’s the one. Mama, didn’t he used to cut our grass?”

Cathy gave a clipped “Yes,” not adding anything else to the conversation.

Sara said, “For the life of me, I can’t remember what he looks like. Not too bright. I think his father is an electrician. Why can’t I remember his face?”

Cathy tsked her tongue as she spread Duke’s mayonnaise onto slices of white bread. “Age will do that to you.”

Tessa smiled smugly. “You should know.”

Cathy made a biting retort, but Sara tuned out the exchange. She strained to remember more details about Tommy Braham, trying to place him. His father stuck out more than the son; a gruff, muscled man who was uncomfortable being at the clinic, as if he found the public act of caring for his son to be emasculating. The wife had run off—Sara remembered that at least. There had been quite a scandal around her departure, mostly because she had left in the middle of the night with the youth minister of the Primitive Baptist church.

Tommy must have been around eight or nine when Sara first saw
him as a patient. All boys looked the same at that age: bowl hair cuts, T-shirts, blue jeans that looked impossibly small and bunched up over bright white tennis shoes. Had he had a crush on her? She couldn’t remember. What stuck out the most was that he had been silly and a bit slow. She imagined if he’d committed murder, it was because someone else had put him up to it.

She asked, “Who is Tommy supposed to have killed?”

Tessa answered, “A student from the college. They pulled her out of the lake at the crack of dawn. At first they thought it was a suicide, then they didn’t, so they went to her house, which happens to be that crappy garage Gordon Braham rents out to students. You know the one?”

Sara nodded. She had once helped her father pump the septic tank outside the Braham house while she was on a holiday break from college, an event that had spurred her to work doubly hard to get into medical school.

Tessa supplied, “So, Tommy was there in the garage with a knife. He attacked Frank and ran out into the street. Brad chased after him and he stabbed Brad, too.”

Sara shook her head. She had been thinking something small—a convenience store holdup, an accidental discharge of a gun. “That doesn’t sound like Tommy.”

“Half the neighborhood saw it,” Tessa told her. “Brad was chasing him down the street and Tommy turned around and stabbed him in the gut.”

Sara thought it through to the next step. Tommy hadn’t stabbed a civilian. He had stabbed a cop. There were different rules when a police officer was involved. Assault turned into attempted murder. Manslaughter turned into murder in the first.

Tessa mumbled, “I hear Frank got a little rough with him.”

Cathy voiced her disapproval as she took plates down from the cabinets. “It’s very disappointing when people you respect behave badly.”

Sara tried to imagine the scene: Brad running after Tommy,
Frank bringing up the rear. But it wouldn’t have just been Frank. He wouldn’t waste his time pounding on a suspect while Brad was bleeding out. Someone else would have been there. Someone who had probably caused the whole takedown to go bad in the first place.

Sara felt anger spread like fire inside her chest. “Where was Lena during all of this?”

Cathy dropped a plate on the floor. It shattered at her feet, but she did not bend to pick up the pieces. Her lips went into a thin line and her nostrils flared. Sara could tell she was struggling to speak. “Don’t you dare say that hateful woman’s name in my house ever again. Do you hear me?”

“Yes, ma’am.” Sara looked down at her hands. Lena Adams. Jeffrey’s star detective. The woman who was supposed to have Jeffrey’s back at all times. The woman whose cowardice and fear had gotten Jeffrey murdered.

Tessa struggled to kneel down and help her mother clean up the broken dish. Sara stayed where she was, frozen in place.

The darkness was back, a suffocating cloud of misery that made her want to curl into a ball. This kitchen had been filled with laughter all of Sara’s life—the good-natured bickering between her mother and sister, the bad puns and practical jokes from her father. Sara did not belong here anymore. She should find an excuse to leave. She should go back to Atlanta and let her family enjoy their holiday in peace rather than dredging up the collective sorrow of the last four years.

No one spoke until the phone rang again. Tessa was closest. She picked up the receiver. “Linton residence.” She didn’t make small talk. She handed the phone to Sara.

“Hello?”

“I’m sorry to be bothering you, Sara.”

Frank Wallace always seemed to be making an effort when he said Sara’s name. He had played poker with Eddie Linton since Sara was in diapers, and had called her “Sweetpea” until he realized that it was inappropriate to address his boss’s wife with such familiarity.

Sara managed a “Hi” as she opened the French door leading onto the back deck. She hadn’t realized how hot her face was until the cold hit her. “Is Brad all right?”

“You heard about that?”

“Of course I heard.” Half the town probably knew about Brad before the ambulance had arrived on the scene. “Is he still in surgery?”

“Got out an hour ago. Surgeons say he’s got a shot if he makes it through the next twenty-four hours.” Frank said more, but Sara couldn’t concentrate on his words, which were meaningless anyway. The twenty-four-hour mark was the gold standard for surgeons, the difference between explaining a death at the weekly morbidity and mortality meeting or passing off an iffy patient to another doctor to manage their care.

She leaned against the house, cold brick pressing into her back, as she waited for Frank to get to the point. “Do you remember a patient named Tommy Braham?”

“Vaguely.”

“I hate to pull you into this, but he’s been asking for you.”

Sara listened with half an ear, her mind whirring with possible excuses to answer the question she knew that he was going to ask. She was so caught up in the task that she hadn’t realized Frank had stopped talking until he said her name. “Sara? You still there?”

“I’m here.”

“It’s just that he won’t stop crying.”

“Crying?” Again, she had the sensation of missing an important part of the conversation.

“Yeah, crying,” Frank confirmed. “I mean, a lot of them cry. Hell, it’s jail. But he’s seriously not right. I think he needs a sedative or something to calm him down. We got three drunks and a wife beater in here gonna break through the walls and strangle him if he don’t shut up.”

She repeated his words in her head, still not sure she’d heard right.
Sara had been married to a cop for many years, and she could count on one hand the number of times Jeffrey had worried about a criminal in his cells—and never a murderer, especially a murderer who had harmed a fellow officer. “Isn’t there a doctor on call?”

“Honey, there’s barely a cop on call. The mayor’s cut half our budget. I’m surprised every time I flip a switch that the lights still come on.”

She asked, “What about Elliot Felteau?” Elliot had bought Sara’s practice when she left town. The children’s clinic was right across the street from the station.

“He’s on vacation. The nearest doc is sixty miles away.”

She gave a heavy sigh, annoyed with Elliot for taking a week off, as if children would wait until after the holiday to get sick. She was also annoyed with Frank for trying to drag her into this mess. But mostly, she was annoyed with herself that she had even taken the call. “Can’t you just tell him that Brad’s going to be okay?”

“It’s not that. There was this girl we pulled out of the lake this morning.”

“I heard.”

“Tommy confessed to killing her. Took him a while, but we broke him. He was in love with the girl. She didn’t want to give him the time of day. You know the kind of thing.”

“Then it’s just remorse,” she said, though she found the behavior strange. In Sara’s experience, the first thing most criminals did after they confessed was fall into a deep sleep. Their bodies had been so shot through with adrenaline for so long that they collapsed in exhaustion when they finally got the weight off their chests. “Give him some time.”

“It’s more than that,” Frank insisted. He sounded exasperated and slightly desperate. “I swear to God, Sara, I really hate asking you this, but something’s gotta help him get through. It’s like his heart’s gonna break if he doesn’t see you.”

“I barely remember him.”

“He remembers you.”

Sara chewed her lip. “Where’s his daddy?”

“In Florida. We can’t get hold of him. Tommy’s all alone, and he knows it.”

“Why is he asking for me?” There were certainly patients she had bonded with over the years, but, to her recollection, Tommy Braham had not been one of them. Why couldn’t she remember his face?

Frank said, “He says you’ll listen to him.”

“You didn’t tell him I’d come, did you?”

“Course not. I didn’t even want to ask, but he’s just bad off, Sara. I think he needs to see a doctor. Not just you, but a doctor.”

“It’s not because—” She stopped, not knowing how to finish the question. She decided to be blunt. “I heard you took him down hard.”

Frank couched his language. “He fell down a lot while I was trying to arrest him.”

Sara was familiar with the euphemism, code for the nastier side of law enforcement. Abuse of prisoners in custody was a subject she never broached with Jeffrey, mostly because she did not want to know the answer. “Is anything broken?”