Faithful Unto Death (27 page)

Fallon’s dark profile was turned up to mine. I couldn’t see his expression, but there was pleading in his voice.

“I used his golf club to help me stand up,” Fallon said. “Sitting out there in the damp, I’d gotten stiff, and I said, I said, ‘Then, Graham, we agree and you won’t see Mai anymore, I’ll let her know, you don’t need to . . .’ and there he was, shaking his head no, and he said, ‘Dr. Fallon, I’m sorry, but I can’t do that. You don’t understand, it’s too late for that, what you’re asking is impossible.’ So then I hit him.”

Fallon sounded stunned; he still couldn’t believe he had done what he was telling me.

“I didn’t mean to.” His voice broke. “It happened. I had the club in my hand and I hit him and he fell down.”

I said, “You left him there.”

“He was dead!”

“No, he wasn’t,” I said. “He didn’t die for some time. I don’t know if he could have been saved if you had called for help, but I know you didn’t make that call.”

“He was dead!” Fallon roared.

“Dr. Fallon,” I said, “you are a medical doctor. You had wartime experience. You knew very well that Graham Garcia was not dead, yet you left him to die. Hitting him might have been an accident, but you
chose
to walk away.”

There was silence from the form hunched behind the desk.

I said, “I’m going to turn on the light.”

He said, “No!” and I heard a click and I absolutely knew, and could not believe, what that click meant.

I said, “Dr. Fallon, if you shoot me, is that going to be an accident?”

There was a banging of the knocker on the front door, and I felt my knees go weak with relief. Wanderley to the rescue. Someone to the rescue. I took a step back.

Fallon said, “Don’t you dare move. You came to my house, looking to violate a woman you had made helpless with alcohol—”

I yelled, “No!”

The front door opened and I was expecting to hear an authoritative voice say, “Freeze!” but instead I heard the worst thing on earth:

“Daddy?” The voice was thin and frightened, and quavered up a scale on the one word spoken.

And it was Jo’s.

I heard Baby Bear’s deep rumble.

Jo said, “Hush, Baby.”

Baby Bear’s tags rattled as if Jo’s grip on his collar was unsteady.

I said, making my voice as firm as I could, “Josephine, sweetheart, I want you to turn around and go out of this house right this second. I’m busy, Jo; this is private. It’s church business. Go home, sweetie. Obey me, Jo.”

Praying she would, just this once, obey me. Please, God, please, God, please, God.

Baby Bear growled and his toenails scrabbled on the marble floor. I heard Jo’s tentative steps toward the study.

“Daddy?” Jo’s voice trembled.

I said, “Jo. Please.” And it was a prayer.

From upstairs Mai’s sleepy voice called, “Dad? Daddy?”

I saw Fallon’s face tilt up in the dark, and I threw myself across the desk at him. There was a shot and I heard Jo screaming as I had never heard my baby, my baby, my baby girl screaming and screaming and screaming and screaming.

Thirty-three

G
raham Garcia was teeing off at the ninth hole, and I was explaining to him that he couldn’t see Jo anymore, it wasn’t right, she was too young, and he shook his head sadly and said, “I’m sorry, Bear, but it’s too late. I promised.”

Jo sat next to me in Alex Garcia’s bedroom, her hair a dark tent around her. She was holding a book upside down and reading to me backward and I said, “I don’t understand, Jo, read it again.” She said, “If you’d only try,” and she slammed the book shut. Then Jo looked down at her hands and they were filled with blood and she screamed and screamed.

I was walking down the hospital hall on my way to see Miss Lily. I was humming,
“Can you count the stars of evening . . .”
Wanderley walked next to me, holding my hand, saying, “Well, Father Brown, do you have anything to tell me? Do you have anything to tell me?”

When I awoke, Annie Laurie sat next to my bed with
Sing Them Home
on her lap, her reading glasses askew on the end of her elegant nose. She was asleep, her head back against one of those awful vinyl upholstered hospital chairs. In back of her were banks of flowers. Banks of them. Balloons, too. Nearly blocked the window; I couldn’t see a thing out of it.

What a waste of money. Annie Laurie should have told everyone to donate to the Fort Bend Women’s Shelter or the church’s food pantry. Or something.

I felt like hell. I can say that. A law officer gave me permission.

There was a tube down my throat and it hurt. I was thirsty. I wanted Jo. I wanted to cry. I never cry.

It was morning or afternoon. I don’t know. Merrie sat in the corner, working a sudoku. In ink. The sun was shining over her fair hair and through all those flowers. It was kind of nice having people think of you, send you flowers. They were pretty. They smelled good. Wait. No, they didn’t smell that good. One of those vases needed a water change.

The tube was gone. Annie Laurie was bending over me. I could see the tender round tops of her breasts. Her breath smelled like coffee and mints. Her skin smelled like Annie. A good smell.

Annie Laurie said, “Bear?”

I asked, “Jo?”

It didn’t sound like me. I sounded like an old beach ball, deflated and crusty with salt and sand. I sounded like a geriatric.

Annie smiled. It was the best smile. It was a warm, safe, happy smile; it touched her whole face. Annie’s smile.

Annie said, “Hon, your baby girl saved your life, you know that?”

I felt myself seal over in coldness and stubbornness.

“No, she didn’t,” I croaked. “What she did was nearly get herself killed.”

My heart tightened at the words.

“Because she wouldn’t obey me,” I said. “I told her to leave, Annie Laurie, I told her to take Baby Bear and get out of that damn house, and I couldn’t make her go. She wouldn’t—”

I couldn’t speak. I didn’t dare try to say another word.

“Oh, Bear.” Annie stroked the hair behind my ears with her cool, smooth fingertips. “Would you have left? Other way around, would you have left Jo in there by herself?”

I held it for a while, trying to hold my place. But I couldn’t. I shook my head, “No,” and the cold flooded out of me.

“She’s her daddy’s girl, Bear,” Annie said, her lips inches from my ear. “She’s your girl, all over.”

There was a tickle on my ear. I jerked my head away. The tickle came again. I opened my eyes and Jo was standing over me, a twist of her dark, fragrant hair brushing my ear. She smelled like fruity shampoo and salt.

I said, “Jo,” and I tried to hug her but I couldn’t. My arms were taped to the railings of the bed and to tubes and bells and whistles, and when I tried to move, my arm hair got yanked. Jo put her silky arms around me and I cried for a long time, Jo saying, “Daddy, don’t, Daddy, don’t.”

I woke up and Detective James Wanderley was standing at the foot of my bed.

Wanderley said, “‘Lucy, you got some ’splaining to do.’”

I said, “Could you get me a drink?”

Wanderley patted his jacket pockets.

“I got nothing, Bear; I haven’t reached that stage yet.”

“Water, Wanderley, would be fine.”

“Oh! Right.”

Wanderley fumbled about till he found a tan plastic pitcher encased in Styrofoam and filled with ice water. He held a glass with a straw to my lips and I drank cold, stale hospital water and it was mango-cherry—Heaven’s own nectar. It was delicious.

Wanderley was wearing one of his good forty-year-old tweed blazers. I couldn’t see his feet, so I don’t know whether he had on those cool boots.

I said, “How does your grandmother feel about you wearing your dead grandfather’s clothes?”

Wanderley smiled and took a purple guitar pick out of his mouth.

“She can’t decide if it’s sweet or disturbing,” he said.

“What about your dad? What does he think, seeing you dressed in his dad’s clothes?”

Wanderley’s smile broadened. “It pisses him off good and proper, preacher.”

I thought that answered lots of questions.

I said, “Am I in trouble?”

“You are with me,” Wanderley said. “Everybody else thinks you’re a cross between Lassie and the Coast Guard. I can’t decide whether you saved Jo’s life or nearly got her killed.”

“What happened?” I said.

Wanderley said, “We got a call about a possible gunshot.”

“I called you,” I interrupted.

Wanderley rubbed the base of his nose vigorously. “Yeah. Sorry. I didn’t get that call. Molly dropped my phone in the toilet.”

Okay, I could see that. I’ve wanted to drown mine a time or two.

“So, anyway, some neighbor calls about a possible gunshot. Then we got a nearly incoherent call from a frantic and slightly drugged Mai Dinh saying there was a dead man and a crazy girl and a wild dog in her house.

“When the officers arrived, just ahead of the fire engine and the ambulance, they found a small Asian woman trying to pull a teenage girl off a recumbent old white man who was in the process of having his ankle worried off by a giant, black hellhound. The old man had a gun in his hand, which cooled the officers’ sympathies precipitately. Good thing or they would have shot your dog. You were in a back room trying to bleed to death. You nearly succeeded. That’s what happens when amateurs play pro.”

“About that, Wanderley, see, I had promised—”

Wanderley shook his head. “No, Bear. Don’t give me that promise crap.” He made quote marks with his fingers when he said “promise.” “It won’t do,” he said. “You didn’t have any right to make that promise and you sure as hell didn’t have the right to keep it.”

I opened my mouth to explain but Wanderley shook his head.

“Don’t worry. I’m not going to ask you to tell it to me now. Mainly because I think I’ve put it together from what Annie Laurie told me and what I got out of Mai Dinh. And also because Annie Laurie made me swear on my grandfather’s grave that I wouldn’t bring it up with you until you were out of here. You make sure she knows you brought it up, not me, okay? You live with some fierce women, Bear, you know that?”

Ah, yes, I did know that. Fierce women. I really liked that. Fierce women.

“You ready for the rest of the story?”

I nodded and crunched ice.

Wanderley glanced around and found the chair hidden under a couple of flower arrangements. He moved the flowers to the floor and took a second to look over all the flowers and balloons and cards.

He said, “Jeez, what a waste,” sotto voce, and dragged the chair closer to my bed and planted himself.

“When I got there,” he said, “I found a hysterical Jo in the front yard being constrained by an officer who was anxious not to have any charges of sexual harassment or undue violence placed on his record, which made constraining your Jo quite a task indeed. Fortunately for all of us, Jo recognized me as the detective who had been with her dad Tuesday night and I was able to get her to calm down. I had her call your wife. Then I had her tell me her story.

“Seems she was walking home from a friend’s house, a . . .” He shifted his butt and pulled a notepad out of his back pocket, flipped through some pages.

I said, “Cara Phelps.”

Wanderley found the name and nodded. “Cara Phelps, and she sees your car, Jo, I mean, Jo sees your car, dash light on, parked in front of an unfamiliar house and your car windows are down. But Baby Bear—did you name that dog after yourself, Bear? Because that’s seriously bent if you did—isn’t in the car as she would expect him to be, he’s standing on the front porch and he’s growling and pawing the door.