Death by Devil's Breath (17 page)

I glanced at his phone where it lay next to my right hip. “Yeah. Sure. Go ahead and call.”

Nick nudged the phone aside. “There’s plenty of time for that. For now—”

The curtains Nick had just pulled shut were whisked aside and a heavyset African-American nurse scurried in and introduced herself as Yolanda. “Dr. Wu is on her way to stitch up the wound,” she assured me. “How you feeling?”

I told her I was fine.

Fists on hips and her lips pursed, she looked me over before her gaze traveled to Nick.

“You care if this guy’s here?” she asked, and before I could answer, she added, “Because I’ll tell you what, one look at him and my heart is already pumping hard. I’m afraid if that’s what’s going on with you, you’re going to lose more blood.”

“It’s not like that between us,” I assured her and reminded myself. “We’re not—”

“Uh-huh.” She rummaged around in a drawer for saline and cotton balls and such. “You want him to stay?” she asked.

I was about to tell her I didn’t when Nick laid his right hand over mine.

The nurse glanced over before she got to work. “Smart man. ’Cause this might hurt a little, and you’re going to want someone to hang on to.”

“I won’t,” I vowed at the same time some crazy reflex action took hold, and I turned my hand over in Nick’s.

Reflex action again. It had to be. He wound his fingers through mine.

When the nurse took off the bandage the paramedics had applied back at the chapel, I tensed and sucked in a breath. It’s not like blood bothers me all that much. At least it doesn’t when it’s not mine.

The wound was surrounded by dried blood the color of rust, and even as I watched, fresh blood welled up from inside the cut, which was maybe three inches long and as neat and thin as if I’d been sliced by an experienced sous chef. This blood was a brighter shade of red, and it smelled sweet and hideous. My stomach flipped and my vision blurred. Still, it was impossible for me to look away.

“Tell me what happened,” Nick said, and when I kept right on staring at the cut and the blood and the way Yolanda’s hands were poised over it all, ready to get to work, he said it again. “Maxie . . .” He crooked a finger under my chin and turned my head. “Tell me what happened.”

My voice was breathless. “The sign came down.”

“Just as you stepped outside.”

When Yolanda wiped down my arm with liquid, I flinched. When she poked around inside the wound looking for bits of glass, I squeezed my eyes shut. She wiped again, and it wasn’t until she was done that I realized I was holding on to Nick so tight, I’d probably cut off circulation in his fingers.

I loosened my hold. “Sorry,” I said.

He closed his hand over mine. “You were telling me . . . about walking outside . . .”

“Lucky thing I have good reflexes. Because I looked up and all I could see was that big red heart coming closer and closer. The next thing I knew . . . kerblam!” I was a little too enthusiastic about my description, and I jerked my left arm and got a stern look from Yolanda.

“Sorry,” I told her, too, before I turned back to Nick. “You know where this is going, don’t you? A sign falling right at the moment I was under it? No way that was an accident. It had to be Bernadette.”

“The woman with the altar.”

“The crazy woman with the altar. With flowers and candles and pictures of my missing father on it,” I added with emphasis for Yolanda’s sake. Her gaze never left her work, but her eyebrows did a slow slide up her forehead. “Bernadette hates me, Nick. This proves it. She tried to hurt me with the slippery stuff on my shoes, and then she painted the graffiti on the Chick. Then she followed me over to the Love Chapel, and she must have cut the cables that kept that sign above the door. She tried to kill me. You believe me, don’t you?”

“I believe you believe it.”

It was one of those comments that would have gotten him skewered if I wasn’t a little busy biting my bottom lip when Yolanda wiped down my arm again, this time with some sickening yellow stuff that burned.

“Anesthetic,” she told me and gave me a pat on the shoulder. “When the doctor does the stitching, you won’t feel a thing.”

I was grateful. Especially when the doc arrived and started her work.

“Maxie.” I was staring again, at the doc’s neat, economic movements and the glint of the needle and the long thread she worked up and down into my skin. Nick’s voice made me turn to him. “It’s not like I don’t believe you, but—”

“But you don’t believe me.”

“I just don’t see why some woman you knew fifteen years ago—”

I guess the way I sighed told him I was ready to fess up.

“If I was Bernadette . . .” I’d never spoken the words. Not out loud. Not to anyone. Not even to Jack, and he was the one who needed to hear them the most. I forced myself to look Nick in the eye. “If I was Bernadette, I’d hate me, too.”

He sat back but he didn’t let go of my hand, and I pictured him as he must have been back in his cop days. Oh yeah, that gleam in his eye told me he knew he was about to hear something both interesting and relevant. If he was still a cop, no doubt he would have pulled out a notebook and started writing down every last word I said so he could use it as evidence against me. “Tell me about it.”

“Like you said, it was fifteen years ago. And that’s a long time.”

“Tell me anyway.”

This time when my stomach clutched, it had nothing to do with Dr. Wu and her shipshape stitches. I thought back and filtered through what I knew was the truth and the excuses I’d piled on top of it to smother it in the years since.

“Every year after school let out,” I told Nick, “Jack would show up in Chicago to get me so I could spend the summer with him at the Showdown. That summer . . .” I did some quick mental math. “I was fourteen, and just like every year, I couldn’t wait to get on the road with him. The first Showdown that summer was in Saint Louis, and I remember he borrowed a car to pick me up at home. He said it was because a car got better gas mileage than the RV, but when we got to the fairgrounds in Saint Louis—”

“Sylvia was there.”

I shook my head. “Sylvia had her wisdom teeth out that summer. We didn’t go to Seattle to get her until after the Fourth of July. No, it was just going to be me and Jack for a whole month, and I can’t tell you how thrilled I was.” Thinking back, I grinned. “He’s really something, Nick. You’re going to love him. I mean, when you meet him. When he comes back. Everybody loves Jack.”

“Did Bernadette?”

My smile disappeared in a wave of memory. “We got to the Showdown, me and Jack, and that’s when I met her. She’d been working as the Chili Chick for a few months, and she and Jack . . . well, it’s not like he’s some kind of crazy womanizer, but—”

“I’ve heard the stories.” Nick didn’t judge, he just reported the facts, and I was grateful.

“She was there, Nick. She was in the RV when I got there.” Maybe he didn’t see the importance of this little fact. Maybe that’s why I had to raise my voice to make sure he heard me loud and clear. “I thought I was going to have part of the summer all alone with my dad and—”

“And you had to share him with Bernadette.”

Dr. Wu finished her work, gave me a short lecture on wound management, and left the cubicle. Yolanda patted my arm. “You wait until I get you some written information to take home with you,” she said, and her gaze traveled to Nick. “You two just sit and talk for a while.”

When she left, she closed the curtains behind her.

“How did you feel about that, Maxie?” Nick asked.

I knew he wouldn’t think it was funny, but I tried anyway. “About getting stitches?”

Nick’s lips thinned.

I got the message.

“About sharing Jack. Okay. All right. I know that’s what we’re talking about.” I made a face at him, the better to hide the fact that, even all these years later, I felt like there was a fist in my stomach. “I was hurt,” I admitted. “I felt betrayed. That very first day I decided right then and there that I hated Bernadette with the passion of a thousand burning suns. I hated her as only a fourteen-year-old can hate. More than I’d ever hated anyone or anything in the whole world.”

“And she hated you right back.”

I glanced away. “That’s the crazy thing. I don’t think she did. Not at first anyway. She tried to be nice.”

“And you—”

“Oh, I took my mission very seriously, and the way I saw it, that was to make her life a living hell!” It wasn’t funny, but I laughed anyway. “I talked back and I broke curfew and I got into fights and I created all the trouble I could that summer. I guess I was trying my best to make sure Jack didn’t forget that I was around.”

“And you needed to make sure he’d turn his back on Bernadette and come running to you when you needed him.”

I’d never thought about it like that, but Nick was right. Rather than admit it, I continued on with my story. “When it was time for Jack and Bernadette to disappear into their bedroom at night, I’d pretend to be sick so Jack would have to sit up with me. It might come as something of a surprise, but I can be a pretty good little actress when I put my mind to it.”

Apparently, this did not come as something of a surprise. Nick simply nodded.

I kept talking. “When Bernadette brought home little presents for Jack—a special kind of chili spice she’d bought from one of the other vendors or his favorite candy or a book or something—I got to them first and threw them away. When she brought me a cute little top she’d picked up at one of the local stores, I pretended it didn’t fit. When she gave me a magazine, I said I’d already read it. Once I stole her shoes so she couldn’t dance as the Chick, and once—”

My mouth fell open: I’d forgotten all about it!

“I wrote on the Chick costume. In yellow marker.
Bitch
.”

“Well, that explains that.” I could practically see Nick ticking off the solution to the mystery of the vandalized costume on his mental clipboard before he asked, “And Jack?”

I raised my chin. “He loved me more than he loved Bernadette.”

“Which means he stuck up for you. Like most fathers would. Except I have a feeling most fathers wouldn’t have put up with your shenanigans as long as he did. Am I right?”

Who uses a word like
shenanigans
in actual conversation?

I considered this while I looked down at the white cotton blanket that covered me, counting the crossed threads at the same time I examined my conscience. “I didn’t deserve Jack’s loyalty,” I finally admitted. “Not with the way I was acting.”

“But like you said, he was a good dad, and he loved you. I don’t doubt that he knew exactly what was going on.”

I wiped a hand over my suddenly wet cheeks. “Something in my eye,” I told Nick, who didn’t believe it any more than I did and proved it by changing the subject just enough to allow me time to recover my cool.

“After Fourth of July,” he said, “when Sylvia got there, what did she think of Bernadette? How did they treat each other?”

I swallowed hard. “By the time Sylvia got there, Bernadette was already gone. She couldn’t take it anymore, and I . . . I was so happy.” For just a moment, the old feelings flooded me, and I pictured myself as I had been the day I’d won the war for Jack’s heart and driven Bernadette away. I spent the day grinning like a fool and completely oblivious to what I’d only come to realize later was the look of complete and utter desolation on Jack’s face.

The thought sobered me. “That day she left, I put on the Chick costume and danced around the Showdown all day long.” I shrugged. “At the time, I thought it was the happiest day of my life. I guess deep down inside all I knew was that she was gone, and that was all that mattered to me. It took me years to admit to myself that I drove Jack and Bernadette apart.”

Nick squeezed my hand. “Hey, you were a kid. You didn’t know any better.”

“I should have.”

“Maybe, but it doesn’t matter anymore.”

“But don’t you get it?” I turned in bed, the better to give Nick a careful look, and winced when I moved my arm. “It matters plenty to Bernadette. She still loves Jack. That weird altar of hers proves it. And Jack . . . well, he’s had plenty of girlfriends since Bernadette, but never one he moved into the RV, at least not during the summer when Sylvia and I were around. What if . . .” I coughed away the sudden tightness in my throat. “What if Bernadette was the one woman who could have made Jack happy? Who would have settled him down? What if things turned out different and she was the one who could have kept him from disappearing?”

“You don’t know that.”

“But, Nick. What if—”

“No.” He refused to listen and it didn’t matter anyway, since Yolanda picked that moment to walk back in. She gave me a prescription for painkillers that I knew I wouldn’t fill and written instructions about how to take care of the wound, and when she was all done, she said I could go.

Since he wasn’t listening to me anyway, we were all the way back to the RV parked near Creosote Cal’s before Nick and I spoke again.

He tossed his car keys down on the table. “No wonder Bernadette hates you.”

I dropped my denim hobo back on one of the vinyl-covered benches next to the built-in table and rummaged around in the cupboard—one-handed since my left arm throbbed—for the box of chocolate cupcakes I knew I’d stashed there, and when I found it, I ripped into it and sat back down.

“Better than pain pills,” I told Nick.

He glanced over the ingredients listed on the side of the package. “I’m not so sure about that.”

“Well, at least I can’t get addicted.” I finished one cupcake and reached for another.

“I’m not so sure about that, either.” With one finger, Nick pointed my way. “You have . . .”

White gooey frosting. I could feel it on my chin. I swiped a hand over my face.

Nick shook his head.

I swiped again.

“You’re missing it by a mile.” He leaned across the table and brushed his hand over my chin. “Better,” he assured me.

I wasn’t so sure. Because suddenly, the spot where his fingers rested felt as if it were on fire.

I am usually cool, calm, and collected when it comes to guys, but all of a sudden, I was at a loss for words. “Cupcake?” I squeaked.