“It’s none of my business,” I said as quickly as I could, trying to stop her.
I didn’t stop her. But at least I deflected her.
“Cat was someone I could understand,” she went on. “I can’t figure out why you didn’t like her. She wanted you to be male. She wanted to revel in your maleness. That made her a woman, a real woman. And Lara’s a real woman, in her own way. I don’t know how she manages to see anything male about Mac, but at least she wants Joseph to be himself. She likes him the way he is.”
As an interpretation of Lara, this stunned me. But I didn’t interrupt.
“Even Queenie is a woman.” Maryanne concentrated on the coals as if she thought that she could make them blaze by scowling at them. “She has too many opinions, and she wants everyone to take them seriously. But she doesn’t get in Sam’s way. She knows he’s a man. She wants him to be a man.
“Not Ginny.” Maryanne actually shuddered, a hard quiver of revulsion. “She doesn’t want you to be a man. If you tried, she’d try to prevent you. She wants to make us all afraid.
“Why does she do it? What does she get out of it?”
“I have a better question.” I was full of panic, terrified of my own emotions, and I couldn’t afford to think about Ginny. “Why do you do it?”
Poor woman, she knew exactly what I meant. I’d asked her real question for her, the question that made everything else hurt. She turned a gaze like hate at me, and her bitterness came up from the bottom of her heart.
“What makes you think I have a choice?”
I spread my hands helplessly.
“Look at me,” she demanded. “Do you see anything that makes you think I have a choice? I’m not young. I’ve never been able to get a husband. There aren’t any jobs I know how to do. I guess it isn’t considered a good thing anymore to be a woman, but that’s what I am. That’s all I am. And I’m not beautiful like Cat. I don’t have Lara’s talent for looking mysterious and passionate. I don’t even have breasts like Queenie. Mine sag, and they have stretch marks, and my hips are puffy.” She may have wanted to weep, but her bitterness didn’t allow her anything that direct and simple. “I don’t have a choice.”
“Then,” I said softly, like it was my job to break her heart, “you better go back to Houston.”
She gave me a look of pure black murder—but she didn’t hesitate. Jerking to her feet, she knotted her hands in the front of her blouse and wrenched at it so one of the seams tore and a few of the buttons popped. They clicked to the floor and rolled away, whispering across the wood.
“I’ll tell him you attacked me,” she said in a dead voice that didn’t match her eyes at all. “That’ll get him excited.” But an instant later she thought better of it. “No, he’ll never believe it. He has your number—he knows what you’re capable of. I’ll tell him it was Joseph. He’ll believe that.”
Looking more attacked than any woman I could remember, she turned and strode out of the den. Only the defiant flounce of her skirt showed that she knew she was really her own victim.
So much for clarity and emptiness. Maryanne seemed to sweep all that away in her wake, leaving me frantic. Now my head felt like it was being pumped up with confusion, inflated like a balloon, and emotions I didn’t want to recognize expanded in me.
Am I really like that? Have I got it as bad as she does?
Have I made myself such a cripple with Ginny that I no longer have any choice?
I must’ve been sicker than I realized. I’d lost the center of myself, and I couldn’t contain the fever. Without being entirely aware of it, I slumped forward like I was fainting and thudded to my hands and knees on the floor.
Luckily that jolted me out of my tailspin. The pain was therapeutic. I was too old to abase myself like this, begging the fireplace and the empty den to take pity on me. And I didn’t want to look ridiculous, even to myself. So I took a few deep breaths, then got my legs under me and stood up.
Just to prove that I could do it, I hunched over to the hearth and tossed two or three fresh logs onto the fire. After that, I retreated to the chair and collapsed.
All that exertion made my head explode. Fortunately, it didn’t hurt. I simply lost consciousness with a burst like a popping bubble.
I had no sense of time, so I didn’t know how long I was out. And as far as I could tell I didn’t dream. I didn’t have that excuse for being so disoriented. Nevertheless my confusion went right to the bone.
I felt hands on my shoulder, but I didn’t know what they were. They shook me, shook me so hard that my head lolled around like my neck was broken, but they had no meaning. Then I heard someone coughing—coughing violently enough to bring up their shoes. A voice knotted with strain choked out, “Mr. Axbrewder! Mr. Axbrewder! Wake up!” Male or female, I couldn’t tell.
And I didn’t care about any of it. I didn’t consider it worth waking up for until a spasm took hold of my lungs and ripped me open from the top of my head to the pit of my stomach.
I tried to lurch upright, but I’d begun coughing too hard to get my legs under me. When I opened my eyes I could see smoke. Smoke as thick as acid filled my eyes and chest. Spasms pulled claws through my ruined abdomen.
“Wake up!” the voice wailed thinly, like the small cry of a newborn. Then it frayed into retching.
The lodge was on fire? I couldn’t tell.
Scrubbing at my tears, I cleared my vision enough to see oily gray-white smoke as it erupted from the fireplace in great billows, swelled outward like the end of the world.
The lodge wasn’t on fire. But this was no ordinary smoke. No wood in all the world burned like this, even with fresh logs on the fire and the chimney plugged.
I made another effort to get up.
Amalia Carbone had me by the shoulder. I couldn’t make out details, but I recognized her general shape. She strove to haul me to my feet, save me somehow, but she didn’t have the muscle.
It helped that I wasn’t alone. Old reflexes kicked in. She wanted to rescue me. If I didn’t move, we might both die.
The smoke made me gag as if my lungs were full of blood, but I reached one hand to Ama’s head and pulled her ear down to my mouth so that she could hear me.
“The doors,” I gasped. Despite my desperation, I could scarcely force out a whisper. “Inside. Close them.” So that everyone else doesn’t asphyxiate. “Then get help.”
Then I braced myself on the arms of the chair and climbed upright.
When she saw that I could stand, Ama let go of me and disappeared into the smoke.
My vision swam with tears, and I couldn’t straighten my spine. Coughing clenched my guts. But I didn’t make a sound, that was the odd thing. I couldn’t even hear myself gag. Ama moved in shrouded silence. But then I heard doors slam. One. Two three. The two bedroom wings and the hall to the dining room.
Hunched over nearly to my knees, I blundered toward the front door.
For a while I couldn’t find the knob. And for a while after that I couldn’t get the door open because I was leaning against it, holding it shut. I’d stopped coughing, overtaken by a spasm that locked up all my muscles until my head whirled for air and I felt like I would never breathe again.
Then I wrenched the door past my bulk and stumbled outside.
I couldn’t stop. Trailing an outrush of smoke, still in spasm, I pitched down the steps and fell on my face.
After a minute or two I started spitting blood into the white pure drifted snow.
14
I lay there and retched, bringing up bile and blood. The absence of pain astonished me. Apparently the circuit in my brain which acknowledged pain had gone into overload and shut down. I hadn’t had much air recently, and fire filled my lungs, but I hardly noticed. For the moment, anyway, that stuff had no personal impact.
I didn’t start to think again until sweet clean cold oxygen finally cleared my wits. Then I raised my head and saw the impression my face had made in the snow.
It was red
and dark, as dark as blood from the heart. Not a lot of blood, but enough to get my attention.
I’d torn open some of my sutures.
Someone had just tried to kill me.
From my perspective, lying there in the snow while my body cooled and spasms trembled through me, the evidence seemed irrefutable. I’d been alone in the den. Asleep. God knows how long. And wood didn’t burn like that, not like that. So someone must’ve put something in the hearth, something to produce all that acid smoke. And blocked the chimney so that the smoke wouldn’t escape. The easy way to do it would’ve been from the roof. Drop the stuff down the chimney and then pack it with snow.
Whoever did that must’ve done it because I was alone in the den asleep.
Simple.
Unfortunately, what came next wasn’t simple at all.
It wasn’t Simon Abel who had just tried to kill me. He’d been locked in the wine cellar all night—
And Cat—
For some reason, I remembered a voice.
It said, Get out of there. He wants you. You’re a sitting duck.
Sweet Christ.
At least my mental circuits were still out. Even the implications of that memory didn’t hurt.
But I had to move. Snow was soaking into my clothes. And lives depended on me. This mess revolved around me somehow. I had to prevent as much of it as I could from spilling over onto innocent bystanders.
Which meant that I needed Ginny.
Which meant that I had to move.
Oh, shit. This was going to be such fun.
The temporary stay of pain I’d been granted helped. All I had to deal with was my weakness. God. I felt weak! My entire body hardly contained one useful muscle. Just holding my head up tested me to my limits.
Too bad, Axbrewder. Weakness was just an excuse, another way of trying to evade my responsibilities. Like booze. And self-pity.
So move, already.
Somehow I climbed to my feet.
Around me the lodge and the snow and the dark trees veered unconscionably from side to side, and I couldn’t get anything into focus. But I fought to keep my balance. Eventually I found myself blinking in bright sunlight at the driveway out of the valley.
The wind had erased all sign of Reeson’s departure. As far as I could tell, he’d never left.
When I turned and let my head tilt back, I was able to see the roof of the den. Sure enough, the snow all around the chimney had been trampled down, shoved aside.
And the roof was probably easy to reach from the attic.
That made sense, anyway.
A step at a time, I forced myself up onto the porch.
That close to the front door, however, I realized that I couldn’t go back in through the den. Harsh smoke still poured outward, looking for me. If Ama had gone for help—if she’d made it out of the room all right—the help hadn’t come yet. In fact, there was a good chance that no one knew what had happened. Too many closed doors stood between the bedrooms and the den.
I didn’t mind. I didn’t want to talk to anyone except Ginny.
Shuffling like a cripple, I tottered back down the steps and around the lodge to the nearest door, the outside entrance to one of the bedroom wings.
The wrong one, of course—the wing with my room, not Ginny’s. But I couldn’t afford to let minor frustrations upset me. If I did, I might lie down and never move again.
Creeping down the hall as if I actually wanted to catch people by surprise, I went to Joseph Hardhouse’s door.
That was reasonable, wasn’t it? Ginny had been spending a lot of time in his company. It was more efficient to check every possibility along my way, instead of going to her room and being forced to double back. Wasn’t it?
Apparently I was in no mood to be honest with myself.
But Hardhouse might be taking a nap. If so, I didn’t mean to wake him up. At least that’s what I told myself. For all practical purposes, I looked like a wounded abominable snowman. If I woke him up, he’d ask questions. I didn’t want to deal with that.
So I turned the knob quietly and eased the door open. In near-perfect silence I peeked inside.
Oh, well. People who sneak around deserve what they get. Life has a way of insisting on honesty, whether you have the courage for it or not. Hardhouse lay on the bed. So did Ginny. They were both naked. He thrust his hips between her legs, hard as a ram. She clung to him and made small groaning sounds I hadn’t heard for a long time—sounds I used to love.
She wore her claw.
For some reason that was what hurt—that small detail closed the circuit, restored me to pain. She wore her claw. After everything she’d lost, he made her feel like a woman again. No, more than that. He made her feel so much like a woman that the claw didn’t matter, it couldn’t stifle her desirability.
It was too much. Entirely too much. I closed the door—gently, gently, so that she wouldn’t see me—and did my best to walk away.
I didn’t get far. Doors stretched along the walls, but I couldn’t tell which one was mine. Tears filled my eyes, and I couldn’t see through the blur. Clutching at the nearest doorknob, I turned it and fell like an axed tree into the room.
The rug caught me. I made almost no noise.
Providentially, as you might say, it was the Draytons’ room.
They, too, were in bed together, with their arms around each other, naked. But they heard me come in. When I toppled, they jerked up like I had them on strings.
“Brew!” Queenie gasped.
I hardly saw either of them. Sam seemed to arrive beside me without going through the middle stages of getting out of bed and standing up. With no apparent effort, he rolled me onto my back. Checked my pulse, my skin, my respiration. At the same time, he snapped, “Get my bag.”
Queenie obeyed. She didn’t step back to pull a robe around herself until he had what he needed.
With a pair of scissors he cut my sweater open. Then I heard him say, “Christ, Brew. What have you done to yourself?” But I couldn’t get his face into focus, so I had no idea whether he expected an answer. Maybe he was just making conversation.
More work with the scissors. Somewhere past the pain I felt the pressure on my stomach ease. He must’ve cut off my bandages. After a moment he said, “Well, that’s not too bad.” Then he demanded, “Haven’t you been taking your antibiotics? This is a serious infection.”
Like the last one, that question may’ve been rhetorical. He didn’t wait for an answer. Instead he checked my face, wiped my mouth, stuck a finger in around my teeth. “You’re bringing up blood,” he announced. “That’s bad, but I can’t tell how bad yet. The infection may make your sutures leak. Or you may have torn them open. If you’re just leaking, I can probably help you. If the sutures are torn”—for some reason he sounded angry—“you need emergency surgery.”
“Can you do it here?” Queenie asked.
“I don’t know. I’ll have to think about it. We’ll see how he responds.” Sam wrapped something around my arm and pumped it tight. Slowly he let it loosen. “He’s lost blood, but his pressure is strong. That’s good. He hasn’t been bleeding long. Or he hasn’t bled much.”
On the principle that I should be grateful for small blessings, I tried to smile. But my heart wasn’t in it.
“Get a glass of water,” he instructed crisply. “Maybe we can locate some more good news.”
Apparently I’d stopped crying. Why, I didn’t know. But my vision finally improved. When Queenie came back from the bathroom with a glass, I was able to focus on her.
“Brew,” Sam said firmly, “Queenie will hold your head up for you. Don’t try to help her—keep your abdomen relaxed. But drink as much water as you can.”
I nodded incrementally. He adjusted his stethoscope. Kneeling beside me, Queenie wedged an arm under my neck and tilted my head off the rug. Then she put the glass to my mouth.
When she did that, incandescent memories burned through me.
I was out of bed,
where I had no business being, no business at all, because I’d only been shot a few hours ago, but I needed to catch a killer and maybe rescue Ginny from el Señor, that was my only justification. And the killer handed me a glass of water. Smiling. Axbrewder, you look terrible. What are you doing to yourself? How about a glass of water? Drink this. You can’t last much longer. So I drank it. But it wasn’t water, oh, no, he was a killer, all right, and he knew what he was doing.
He gave me vodka.
I gagged and thrashed against Queenie’s arm, twisted my head away, fought a recollection of pain as hot as a magnesium flare. Alcohol, my favorite stuff on God’s earth, had nearly eviscerated me.
“Brew, relax!” Sam commanded. “Let Queenie hold your head! We’re trying to help you!”
Wildly I looked at him, at her, as if I needed some other kind of help, anything to get me away from that glass of water. But this was a bedroom in Deerskin Lodge, and the other room where I’d swallowed vodka and nearly died was days and miles away, although the snow remained the same. I had no idea who’d killed Cat—and tried to kill me. If I couldn’t trust the Draytons right now, I was a goner anyway.
I didn’t relax very well. But I raised one hand and helped Queenie steer the glass to my mouth.
Sam put his stethoscope on my stomach and listened while I drank. The water tasted like the air outside, sweet, clean, and cold, and once I got started I gulped at it until it was gone.
Sam listened hard for a minute, then looked at me. “Well, I think we can say your bowels haven’t gone into shock. You’re luckier than you deserve. Since I’m the only doctor here and it’s up to me, I’m going to guess you haven’t torn any sutures.” He nodded to Queenie, and she lowered my head to the floor. “I’ll clean you up and apply a clean dressing. But first I’ll give you an injection.”
He returned to his bag. I let him take his time. I had places to go, things to do. But for the life of me I couldn’t imagine how I would bear them.
“This,” he announced when he was ready, “is the thermonuclear device of antibiotics.” He swabbed my arm vigorously with something that smelled like Betadine. “I’ll give you regular injections while my supply lasts.” Then he poked a needle into my skin. “If you go back on your pills right away and take them religiously, you may be able to fight off this infection.”