Johnston - Heartbeat (17 page)

Because of the shadowy light, the coolness of the place, and the stunted walls of dirt and straw that surrounded him, Jack had the sensation of being buried alive. He glanced over his shoulder at the long stairway that led back up to the outside world. Some of these lost souls would make it out of here. Some would not.

Jack located Maggie and watched her as the young man on a slightly elevated platform at the front of the room told the story of how he’d become an alcoholic, what had turned him around, how long he’d been sober—“two months and eleven days”—and what his life was like now—“Not too good, you know? Because my wife won’t take me back, you know? Because she says I won’t stay sober. And I’ll hit her again.” A pause and then, “I really miss my kid, you know?”

Jack hardened his heart against Hector’s story. He saw himself in the victim’s role, and he hadn’t much sympathy for the alcoholic. Chances were, Hector
would
fall off the wagon. His wife was right to keep her distance from him. It was too bad about the kid, but based on his own experience, Hector’s kid was better off without an alcoholic parent around.

That might seem heartless, but it was the way he felt.

When Jack saw Maggie head for the front of the room, he slid down to his tailbone behind the woman in front of him. He hadn’t really expected Maggie to get up and talk, and he didn’t want his presence to keep her from saying whatever it was she planned to say. It was obvious she knew the routine.

“Hello. My name is Maggie, and I’m an alcoholic.”

“Hey, Maggie,” the crowd responded.

She spoke so softly, he could barely hear her at the back of the room. He sat up and hunkered forward on his chair, listening closely.

Jack wondered why Maggie had come all the way over here to attend an AA meeting when he was sure there was a smokeless meeting held right in her own neighborhood. As Maggie began to speak, the reason she wasn’t telling her story anywhere near anyone who might know her as Margaret Wainwright, attorney and daughter-in-law of the late Richard Woodson Wainwright, became painfully apparent.

Maggie seldom looked up at her fellow alcoholics. Her eyes stayed locked on her hands, which were twined and knotted in front of her. “I first started drinking when my sons drowned and my husband died all in the same week.”

She cut off the sympathetic sounds from the crowd by saying, “I blame myself for their deaths. I know it doesn’t make sense to think I could have caused what happened to them to happen. But I can’t help thinking that if I hadn’t. . . . ”

She took a hitching breath, and then another. Her chin wobbled. When she looked up, her eyes were pooled with tears.

Jack waited with bated breath for the rest of her confession. The room was absolutely silent. Had they all heard this before? Did they know what was coming? What had Maggie done? How was she responsible? Why did she accept blame for her family’s deaths but not take liability for her father-in-law’s demise?

Jack swore under his breath when he realized, as Maggie began speaking again, that she wasn’t going to answer any of his questions. She had completely changed the subject. Jack blew out a frustrated breath as he followed her speech.

“You cannot imagine what it was like to hear that my beautiful sons, Stanley and Brian, had both drowned, and that my husband, Woody, was not expected to survive more than a few more hours,” she said in a voice raw with pain. “I was beside myself, completely hysterical. I couldn’t live with the guilt of knowing what I’d done. I wanted to die, to be with them.”

Jack was confused. Although one of the boys had survived, Maggie was making it sound like they had both died.

She lowered her eyes again, and the lawman in him wished he could see into them to search for the truth.
What really happened, Maggie? You aren’t telling us the whole story. What are you hiding?

He was shocked by her next revelation.

“I . . . I tried to kill myself with an overdose of sedatives the hospital gave me,” she said. “My husband’s uncle found me in the hospital chapel before the pills could do their work. I was kept in a psychiatric hospital for quite a while, because I made the mistake of admitting I would kill myself the instant they let me out.”

Jack heard the return of the sympathetic responses from the audience that kept Maggie talking through her pain. He was intrigued—and discomfited—by what he was hearing. Maggie suicidal? Maggie hospitalized for mental instability?

“By the time the hospital released me, I realized that while I still felt remorseful, without the powerful emotions that I had felt when I first learned what I’d wrought, I no longer had the courage to kill myself.”

She took a deep breath and let it out. “I hated myself for being a coward. And I blamed myself totally for what had happened to my family. I had to escape somehow, and I found that escape in a bottle.”

What did Porter say that turned you around?
Jack wondered. He got his answer immediately.

“Nine months later my husband’s uncle sought me out. He wanted to know why I was ignoring my one remaining son in favor of a bottle of alcohol.” She shook her head slightly and frowned, as though she were remembering the moment. “At first I was confused . . . because I was drunk and because what he was saying was both impossible and what I had so often dreamed of hearing.

“I told him, ‘My sons are dead.’ But he said, ‘Brian is very much alive. He’s come out of the coma, and he needs his mother.’”

Maggie’s face became an image of wonder and joy. Her voice was unsteady as she finished, “That was the beginning of my struggle to stay sober. I haven’t taken a drink since that day, nine years, eight months, and twenty-nine days ago.”

The audience whistled and clapped and shouted enthusiastically.

Jack wanted to know who the hell had neglected to tell Maggie one of her sons was still alive. He waited to hear what had happened when she got sober and finally saw her son again. But she skipped past everything that had happened over the past nine years and focused on the present.

“My son lives in a home now, and I see him as often as I can. I have a steady job, and I’m happy. And sober.”

The audience applauded again, and Maggie headed back to her seat.

Jack’s mind was whirling.
Why had she thought Brian was dead in the first place? Why hadn’t someone told her something sooner about her son being in a coma? Where had the child been all that time? What had made Porter Cobb come looking for her so much later? And why didn’t Victoria Wainwright know where her grandson was living now?

Jack wasn’t sure how long Maggie planned to stay at the meeting, now that she’d testified, and he figured he’d better leave before he got caught. He didn’t want Maggie thinking he was following her, and he’d be hard-pressed to come up with an explanation for being in this part of town. He waited until she had settled into her chair, then rose and headed for the door.

A priest stepped in front of him and said, “I hope you find the peace you seek, my son.”

The words froze Jack in place, taking on a far greater meaning than he knew the priest could have intended. He’d had no peace since . . . since he’d watched the light die in a little girl’s eyes.

When he could move again, he hurried past the priest and took the short, narrow stairs three at a time to reach the top and freedom. He heaved a lungful of fresh night air as soon as his feet hit the asphalt parking lot and stood waiting for the muscles in his throat to unclench so he could swallow.

The priest’s offer of peace had not provided a balm for his soul. It had only reminded him of a little girl with brown eyes and pigtails he’d been trying hard to forget.

Jack’s eyes burned, and his nose stung. Maggie wasn’t the only one with secrets. Jack had terrible secrets of his own.

He clambered into his pickup, gunned the engine, and bumped in and out of a deep pot-hole as he backed out of the parking lot. He wasn’t going far, just up the street where there wasn’t any light, so he could watch Maggie’s car to make sure it didn’t get stolen, then follow her home to make sure she got there safely.

The neighborhood was surprisingly quiet, and there wasn’t any traffic. Jack turned the radio dial to KASE, one of Austin’s popular country music stations, but the sad wail of the violins and the even sadder tale being told in Clint Walker’s nasal twang only made him feel worse.

Jack shut off the radio, but in the dark, in the silence, he had too much time to think. Too much time to remember.

Where are you, Maggie? Let’s move it. Let’s get out of here.

A little girl’s face appeared before him. Her trusting smile was so painful to see that Jack closed his eyes to make her go away. Since she wasn’t really there except in his mind, that accomplished nothing.

Jack’s body tensed as the memory grabbed hold. He was in a motel room that reeked of gin. The smell of gin—his mother’s drink—made his stomach knot. A nearly empty bottle of Beefeater sat on the Formica bedside table, while the woman who had drunk it sat in the center of a messed-up, sagging motel bed. She was half covered by an olive-green tufted spread, her legs curled under her, the pillows stuffed behind her. A child of four snuggled securely against her side.

The woman held a snub-nosed .38 pressed to the little girl’s heart. “Tina b’longs with me,” the woman sobbed drunkenly.

Her mascara-streaked eyes were unfocused from alcohol, but her agony was apparent. She had lost custody of her daughter in a hard-fought courtroom battle with her wealthy husband. Instead of turning the child over to the father, the mother had run with her. She had told the father over the phone that she would kill herself and the child if he came after them.

Because it was a kidnapping and the woman had fled through several jurisdictions, the Texas Rangers had gotten involved, and Jack had been assigned to the case. He had finally run down Lilly Mott in a seedy hotel in New Braunfels, a charming Victorian town off 1-35 between San Antonio and Austin best known for its killer flash floods in the spring and its German Wurstfest, featuring sausages and beer, in the fall.

His job was simple. All he had to do was save the little girl’s life and bring the mother in for psychiatric evaluation. Jack had called for backup, then, posing as the manager, talked Mrs. Mott into opening the motel room door. But nosy onlookers gave away the game before help could arrive.

Mrs. Mott had lurched away and produced a gun that she aimed at her daughter, forcing Jack to draw his weapon.

She had stumbled backward to the bed and climbed up onto it, keeping her daughter close. “Stay away or I’ll kill her and shoot myself!” she cried.

Jack had closed the door behind him to make sure she didn’t throw him out and started talking as fast as he could. “Don’t shoot,” he said. “I’ll put down my gun. Just don’t shoot.”

He’d laid his Colt carefully on the floor in front of his feet. He knew any minute the local SWAT team would arrive and put pressure on Mrs. Mott to give up her daughter. He was equally certain that if they did, Lilly Mott would kill the little girl.

Her despair convinced him she meant business. With nothing more to lose, it wouldn’t matter to her whether she lived or died and took her daughter with her. But whatever courage had brought her this far seemed to have abandoned her. She moaned and writhed hopelessly on the sagging mattress, like a worm trapped in a bed of ants that were consuming it alive.

“Would you mind if I speak to Christina?” Jack said.

“Why you wanta do that?” Lilly said in a slurred voice.

“You have a very beautiful daughter, Mrs. Mott.” The little girl had brown eyes shaped like a cat’s. Her dark brown hair had a fringe of bangs and tiny pigtails held up by rubber bands with little red balls on them. “I just want to meet Christina, if that’s all right.”

“Okay.”

Jack extended his hand toward the little girl as an excuse to move closer to the bed. Christina hid her face against her mother’s breast and clutched at her mother’s soiled dress. He paused within a foot of the bed. Close, but not close enough yet to try grabbing for the gun.

He let his hand drop to his side and said, “Hello, Christina. My name is Jack. That’s a very pretty dress you have on.”

Christina peeked out at him, then picked up the hem of her navy and white pinafore to show it to him. “My mommy got this dress for me.”

Jack made eye contact with Mrs. Mott and said, “I’m sure your mommy loves you bunches and bunches.”

The little girl looked up at her mother, her smile revealing the gap between her two front baby teeth. “Mommy loves me bunches and bunches.”

Mrs. Mott stared down at her daughter’s trusting face, her tired features strained in an agony of indecision. She looked up at Jack. In a way common to drunks, one he knew well, she spoke slowly, exaggerating each word to make herself understood.

“I—am—not—an—un—fit—mo—ther.”

“Of course not,” Jack agreed. “I know Christina’s welfare is the most important thing in the world to you. Don’t you think you should—”

“We have you surrounded, Mrs. Mott!”

Jack cursed as the amplified sound shattered the rapport he had been building with Lilly Mott.

“Stay away!” she screamed at Jack, and then to those outside, “Leave me alooooone!”

Jack heard the child cry out sharply as her mother jabbed the nose of the gun in her side. He backed up, his hands held wide to show they were empty, and said, “Easy, Mrs. Mott. I’m not going to touch you. I’m not going to get any closer.”

Her drunken words were garbled as she rattled off a stream of obscenities, but he could see the panic in her eyes. The little girl started to whimper, and Mrs. Mott put an arm around her and kissed her forehead and soothed her fears.

“It’s all right, baby. Everything will be fine. Don’t cry,” she mumbled drunkenly.

“I’ll tell them to keep their distance,” Jack reassured Mrs. Mott. He shouted, “This is Texas Ranger Sergeant Jack Kittrick. Give us some peace and quiet in here to talk!”

“You’ve got ten minutes.”

Jack swore under his breath, wondering what idiot had set a time limit on getting Mrs. Mott out of the motel, thereby increasing the pressure on the unstable woman.