Vesta was awake.
33
“You came.” Vesta swiped a hand over her hair, grimacing slightly as she touched a darkening bruise on her forehead. “I’m so . . . relieved.”
Why? Why had she called him here? Jack stepped close to the bed rail. “You had an accident, I heard.”
“I was trying to get to the police.” Vesta nodded. “But now I think it’s better that I talk to you first.”
The police?
Jack glanced at the IV pump. No meds that would affect her thinking. Maybe a concussion was causing her confusion.
“I was there,” she continued, her eyes suddenly riveted to his. “I saw those men that night.”
His brows bunched. “I don’t know what you mean.”
Vesta took a breath, her hand moving to her throat. “I saw the car on fire. I saw the men. I didn’t know the girl was inside until the next day.”
“Wha . . .” Jack struggled to breathe, gut-punched by her words. It couldn’t be. Could it?
Abby?
He gripped the bed rail, his legs weakening.
“And I saw you,” Vesta whispered. “Staggering down the highway. You tried to wave me down.”
“The . . . Toyota,” he choked out, mind cartwheeling. “It was you?”
“My Camry,” she said, tears beginning to stream down her face. “I’m sorry. . . . I’m so sorry. I should have called the police. But I was scared—they saw me. And then I got phone calls. Hang ups, at night. And—” a sob broke loose—“someone . . . poisoned my dog.”
“I’m trying to understand.” Jack dragged a chair close, sank into it. He was shaking.
An eyewitness. Someone knows I’m innocent.
The relief felt almost like pain. “If you didn’t come forward all these years because you believe you’re in danger, why are you telling me this now?”
“Because being afraid was stealing my life . . . and my faith . . . everything good. Then I met you at the hospital and I started to think about how I’d hurt you by not coming forward. And tonight . . .” Vesta took a shuddering breath. “I was trying to go to the police because one of those men I saw that night . . . is
here
. I saw him.”
Jack’s stomach lurched. “Where—when?”
“I saw him walking down San Antonio Street once. And then tonight I saw him again. On that TV broadcast, that meeting in the library. You know—you were there too.”
Jack’s senses were still reeling when he got back to the clinic around 1 a.m. Even in the darkness, he could see the charring. The stench of smoke and sodden wood made his stomach shudder. He’d wanted to be there when Rob talked with Vesta, to find out if she’d been mistaken about the man’s identity. But he’d promised Bandy he’d check on Hobo. He stayed clear of the fire inspector’s barricade, shone his flashlight toward Bandy’s truck, and—Jack grinned at the sight of the terrier’s little eyes blinking in the beam of the flashlight. “Hobo!”
He hurried forward and knelt down, laughing as the dog whined and licked at his hands. “Good boy, good boy.” Hobo was trembling but seemed okay except for . . . one lost wheel. Jack shone the light, saw the cart tilted sideways and the dog’s tail thumping like crazy. “Scary night, buddy, but everything’s going to be all right. Everything will be just—”
Jack’s phone buzzed in his pocket and he pulled it out. Noted that there was a text message he hadn’t checked. And that the incoming call was from Alamo Grace.
“Jack Travis,” he said, keeping one hand on Hobo.
“Jack, Adam Bonner here.” Bandy’s doctor.
“Adam, hey. What’s my pal doing, trying to sign himself out?”
“No.” There was a pause. “I’m afraid I have bad news.”
Jack froze. “What’s wrong?”
“Bandy went into cardiac arrest. No warning. His admitting cardiogram looked okay, considering his past disease, but—”
No. No. No . . .
Jack sat down in the gravel, barely able to hear.
“Asystole. Refractory after all the drugs . . . I even tried a pacemaker. We did CPR for an hour. But we couldn’t get him back. I’m sorry. I know you were close.”
You can’t . . . begin . . . to know.
Adam cleared his throat. “We have some phone numbers for a . . . son, I think.”
“Uh . . . right,” Jack confirmed, barely above a whisper.
And a grandbaby. A second on the way. . . . They all went to SeaWorld a few days ago. . . . How can this be happening?
“I’m so sorry, Jack.”
34
Riley jerked awake. Her neck hurt, she was all scrunched up, and . . .
Where am I?
The couch. And her cell phone was ringing. She glanced at the clock: 1:30 a.m. She grabbed for the phone, pulse quickening. She’d left that text message for Jack. But it was . . .
“Kate?”
“Yes. I’m sorry. I know it’s late, but . . .” Kate’s voice cracked.
Riley sat up. “Are you crying? What’s wrong?”
She heard a low groan. “Everything. I don’t know where to start.”
“The beginning?”
“No.” A pained laugh. “Trust me, you don’t want that.”
“What I want is to help you.”
There was a prolonged silence. Tears, no question about it.
“Kate?”
“You’re offering me help after what I did to you? I know how much you want to be back in the ER. I’m really sorry.”
“It’s okay,” Riley assured her. “Some things have happened . . . I’m good with it. But right now I need to know what’s going on with you. Please tell me.”
“The police just left my place.”
Riley gasped. “Why?”
“A man I’ve been seeing . . . he’s being questioned in connection with an old, unsolved crime. Then he tried to use me as an alibi for something that happened last night. And—” Kate moaned—“that’s not even the worst part.”
“Who is this man?”
“I never told you I was seeing him; I should have. . . . Griff Payton. That ER patient.”
“And he needed an alibi because . . . ?”
“They say he set a fire. And—” A sob swallowed Kate’s voice.
“It’s okay. You can tell me.” Riley held her breath.
“It was Jack’s clinic that burned. Bandy’s dead.”
* * *
Jack shifted his cramped leg on the truck seat, careful not to disturb Hobo, who was sleeping on a tattered songbook. Gospel music. He thought of Bandy tapping his fingers over his heart. Saying the last words Jack would ever hear from him.
“Good thing I have the songs right in here.”
The ache in Jack’s throat threatened suffocation.
He glanced at his watch. He’d been sitting here for nearly four hours; dawn wasn’t far away. It would bring an onslaught of people—insurance and fire investigators, police, reporters looking for a story, and other people simply . . . looking. Curious. Eager to offer an opinion. Pass judgment. Much the same as when homeless Gilbert DeSoto caught himself on fire in the parking lot and a pregnant teenage runaway fought for her life on the porch. But this time it was different because . . .
it’s you, my friend.
Jack peered through the windshield at the darkened rubble of the clinic’s kitchen. And this time . . . there wouldn’t be another time.
The clinic is gone.
Jack should go. Get out of here, clean up, grab some sleep before he had to be back to answer questions. They would be endless and intrusive. About the fire and about Jack’s past, too, if Vesta’s story panned out. A cold case solved? Jack shook his head, still not quite believing it. There could even be a sort of final vindication. He had wanted that for fifteen years.
But right now all Jack wanted was to sit in Bandy’s truck. He liked knowing that its camper bed was filled with boxes of clothes, sleeping bags, an old saddle . . . and the circus-striped sack that held his blue wig and clown noses, puppets, and a rubber scorpion. Enough junk to start an avalanche. Jack glanced around the cab, remembering how he’d teased Bandy that he could host a garage sale of Bible bric-a-brac. It was true: gospel songbooks, Sunday school workbooks, and a tin of Fish Mints, peppermints shaped like those little Christian fish symbols you saw on car bumpers. There was a wooden cross hanging from the rearview mirror and, on the front seat, beside Hobo’s one-wheeled cart . . .
his Bible?
Jack reached over the sleeping dog, lifted the well-worn leather volume, and set it in his lap. It really was Bandy’s Bible. He was surprised to see it out here. Bandy always read it at night, kept it by his bedside, and then returned it to the truck in the morning. He’d take the Bible out and bring Hobo in—sort of a trade. But last night Bandy had done his reading out here in the truck because . . .
I was talking to Riley in the office.
Jack’s fingers brushed the cover. It would have burned except that Bandy had wanted to give them privacy. Because he thought it was important that Jack talk with Riley. Bandy had been insistent about that from the beginning.
Jack smiled in the darkness, remembering the day he’d asked Bandy to show Riley around the clinic. Even from that first day Bandy had been sure that Riley’s being there fit some kind of heavenly plan. He felt that way about everything—good and bad. Always glancing up at the ceiling with that knowing look like God had everything covered. Even last night, at the hospital.
“If I’m not afraid to die, then don’t you be afraid to
live
, Doc.”
Afraid. Me?
For some reason, Jack remembered what Riley said last night in the office when she’d been so angry. And hurt. She said that he’d made the clinic about him, not the patients. That he had some “insatiable need to be an invincible warrior.” And that because of it, things were chaotic and unstable and she couldn’t be part of that.
So she locked me out.
He waited for the familiar anger to come—about Riley’s accusation and rejection and the very real possibility that someone had torched his clinic. An unspeakable day that had ended in ashes. It killed Bandy and robbed Jack of everything he’d wanted. Blistering anger was never more justified—and it was his usual MO. Ask anyone. But right now Jack only wanted peace. He wanted what Bandy had. He needed to feel that the responsibility to make things right wasn’t all on his shoulders. He wanted that relief.
But more than anything, Jack needed to believe that even after everything he’d done and hadn’t done—all his mistakes—that . . .
“You’re a good man, son.”
He tried to swallow past the ache, felt tears slide down his face. He glanced at the cross hanging from the mirror and felt the solid weight of the book in his hands. Then, through the blur of his tears, Jack looked up at the ceiling of Bandy’s truck and took a halting breath. “Are you there, Lord? I need you.”
35
“I didn’t sleep much either.” Riley switched the phone to her other hand and opened the shade on the front window. Dawn was painting the sky an amazing rosy gold, almost the color of . . .
peaches.
Riley took a slow breath and let the memory go. She had to. Today was about moving forward, not looking back. Last night she’d prayed that morning would bring peace and hope. From the sound of Kate’s voice, she could use a merciful dose of both.
“You’re at the hospital, then?” Riley asked, padding barefoot to the couch.
“Yeah. Pathetic, right? When the world spins off course, the ER is the place that feels most normal to me. Hospital coffee. Sirens. Cold pizza. Even that confetti-sprinkled drunk singing Fiesta songs.” Kate sighed. “You know, the usual aftermath of a Saturday night.”
If only that were true.
“And because I was here,” Kate continued, her voice softening, “I wandered down to the NICU. The Paulson baby’s fever is gone. The nurses said she’s chowing down on the donated mother’s milk. And . . .” Kate’s voice cracked. “Her grandparents gave her a name.”
Riley waited, throat tightening.
“Nadia,” Kate whispered. “It was her great-grandmother’s name . . . and it means ‘hope.’ I think I like it.”
“Me too.”
There was a pause and a distant garbled sound of singing before Kate said, “I tried to call Jack. He didn’t answer.”
Riley nodded mutely. She’d left three messages.
“He was scheduled to work in the ER today,” Kate continued, “but he got one of the docs to cover his shift. Someone said he probably went to Santa Fe; Jack has family there. I can only imagine how hard he’s taking this.”
Santa Fe.
Riley hugged her arms around herself.
He’s gone.
Kate’s voice was achy soft. “I feel like I keep making all the wrong choices, Riley. I can’t get it right. I didn’t trust you for the ER position—you, the best person I know. But without so much as a blink, I was willing to trust a man who could be an arsonist, a murderer even! How can I be such a complete—”
“Don’t do that to yourself, Kate. Come here. I’ll fix breakfast. I’m pretty sure I have some eggs, maybe bagels. If not, we’ll go out. Come, please.”