Evidence of Mercy

  But the Clinitron bed they laid him in gave him some degree of comfort. For one thing, it reduced the likelihood of bedsores. It felt something like a waterbed, except that air was continually pumping through it, making it conform to his shape and weight. And this room had a television so that he could keep remembering what normal people’s lives were like while he contemplated what he’d do now that his would never be normal again. And he had a phone—a reminder that he had no one to call.

  At least no one in Florida.

  He looked at it, wondering whether anyone in Texas had heard of his accident. He doubted it. As far as they knew, he was living it up, as he’d always done. If they could see him now.

  He picked up the phone and tried to remember the number of someone—anyone—who might care what had happened to him. What about Sheila—red, flowing hair, big green eyes. She’d been in love with him forever and had followed him around like a devoted puppy, even when he’d shunned her. He’d broken her heart, finally, and sent her on her way. But she would never get over him. She would want to know about this accident.

  He dialed her number and waited as it rang, wondering what to say to her. Would she be glad to hear from him? Would she fly to Florida to visit him?

  Quickly, he hung the phone back up. She might. He couldn’t take that chance. He couldn’t let her see him like this. No one could see him like this. Not yet. Not until the bandages came off and he could see how extensive the scarring was. Then he would decide.

  Loneliness filled him like a disease, further darkening the black places in his heart. Jake Stevens wasn’t used to being alone. What he wouldn’t give for someone he could talk to without fearing how that person would see him.

  And then he thought of that little truck stop in Slapout, Texas, where Doris waited tables each day, always naively hopeful that one of the truck drivers who came through would be the one to rescue her from her own loneliness and shame, make an honest woman of her, and provide her with the white picket fence and the little pink house that she had done nothing to earn on her own.

  He wondered if she’d found her dream man yet among the regulars who came and went. He wondered if she’d been able to forgive him for running away from her himself, putting her behind him like forgotten garbage. Maybe she’d realized somewhere along the way that he’d had a life to make for himself and that he’d had to make it without letting her pull him down.

  Maybe she would care that he lay here now, unable to run anymore.

  He reached for the phone, called information, and got the number of the truck stop. With a trembling hand, he punched in the number.

  “May I speak to Doris, please?”

  On hold, he waited long, threatening moments, wanting to hang up. Finally, he heard her familiar voice, though it had grown raspier and deeper from cigarette smoke and booze.

  “Yeah, hello?”

  Jake swallowed, almost hanging up, but finally forced himself to speak.

  “Mama? It’s me. Jake.”

  Silence.

  “Did you hear me, Mama?”

  “I heard you,” she said. “What do you want?”

  If it was possible for his heart to fall further, it did. “I know it’s been a long time. I’ve just been real busy, and—”

  “Busy gettin’ rich,” she said. “I know why you haven’t called. It’s because you were afraid you’d have to let go of a few bucks if you talked to me. What made you call me now?”

  He thought of telling her that he was lying in the hospital, that his charmed world hadn’t been so charmed, that it had all come crashing down, that he didn’t know if things would ever be the same. But something told him it wouldn’t make any difference. He had never been there for her, though he could have been. Why did he expect her to be here for him now?

  “Answer me, Jake. What do you want?”

  “I just wanted to see how you were.”

  “Oh, I’m great,” she rasped. “I just got a secondhand stove put in since mine has been out of commission for ten months. And my trailer is fallin’ apart, but hey, at least it’s a roof over my head. May not be a fancy condo like you’ve got . . . ”

  He didn’t know whether to offer her money or an apology, but that old anger that he’d nursed since childhood began to fill him again, keeping him from offering either.

  “Look, I’m sorry I bothered you. You might as well get back to work.”

  “Yeah, I think I will. I can’t afford to miss any tips. It’s not like I have anybody to take up the slack if I can’t pay my rent, is there?”

  The click in his ear startled him, and for a moment, he held the phone to his ear as the dial tone hummed out its indifference. Then, as his face reddened, he hung up and lay glaring at the ceiling, trying hard to push the stark self-recriminations out of his mind. He’d been good at it before, but that was when he’d had life to keep him busy. There was always a party somewhere. Always a woman. Always a drink that could make him forget.

  Until now.

  He flung the telephone across the room, and it crashed with a final, protesting ring. There would be no parties now and no relief from his despair. But he didn’t need his mother, and he didn’t need his friends. They would all only let him down in the long run.

  Mommy, is this gonna be our house?”

  Paige smiled at her daughter, who sat on the floor playing with some of the blocks a police officer had gotten from their house, along with most of their clothes. “No, sweetheart. We’re just staying here for a while.”

  “Until that lady gets well?”

  She left the spaghetti she was cooking and bent down to her daughter. “Maybe. I don’t know how long we’ll be here. But it’s nice, isn’t it? It’s a lot better than that old motel room.”

  “But why can’t we go home?”

  “Because. . . .” She lowered herself to the floor to put herself at eye level with the child and met her big, innocent eyes. There was so much Brianna didn’t understand, and Paige didn’t know how to explain it to her. How could she tell her that her father was a threat to them, that she feared for her life around him, that she feared for Brianna? “Because it has bugs,” she said finally.

  Brianna’s face twisted. “Bugs? What kind of bugs?”

  “The gross kind,” Paige said. “A man’s spraying so they’ll go away, but it’s gonna take a while.”

  “You mean spiders and stink bugs?”

  Brianna might never want to go back into the house if she made it sound too horrible. “No. Roly-polies and grasshoppers.

  But this man is getting them out.”

  “Oh.” Brianna got quiet, and Paige could almost see the wheels turning as the child imagined her bedroom full of roly-polies and grasshoppers. She hoped it didn’t give her nightmares. She got up and went back to the spaghetti sauce simmering on the stove.

  “Mommy?”

  She looked back at Brianna.

  “Can I keep just some of them? In a jar with holes in the top?”

  She laughed out loud and realized it was the first time in weeks. “Yes, sweetheart. You sure can.”

  Jake, are you up to seeing that insurance guy?” Beth, Jake’s nurse in orthopedics, asked him later that day. “I told him it was your first day in the private room and that you weren’t up to seeing anybody, so if you don’t want to, I’ll nix it right now.”

  Jake looked irritably at her. “What insurance guy?”

  “Something about the plane.”

  Jake had nothing better to do, and he’d grown so tired of being alone that he had actually been lying here wishing Lynda would come by. But after the way he’d treated her yesterday, he didn’t really expect her back.

  “Yeah, all right,” he said. “Tell him to come in.”

  Beth disappeared, and Jake waited until a man in a dark suit came into his room and introduced himself as Rick Malone, investigator for the company that covered Lynda’s plane.

  “I just want to ask you a few questions,” Malone said.

&
nbsp; “About the crash?” Jake asked. “I would think the condition of the plane pretty much tells the whole story.”

  Malone consulted his notes, disregarding the comment. “Mr. Stevens, could you tell me if you or Miss Barrett did a preflight inspection of the plane?”

  “Of course,” Jake said. “I did it myself. I never fly without a preflight.”

  “And everything looked fine?”

  “It looked perfect. And the day before I had really given the plane a once-over. I checked everything. I was thinking of buying it, you know. I wanted to make sure I wasn’t missing anything. It was the best-maintained plane I’d ever seen for its age.”

  Malone plunked down, as if too tired to stand. “Is there anything you could tell me about Miss Barrett’s behavior that day? Did she seem nervous, jumpy?”

  Jake frowned. “What are you getting at?”

  “I just want to know how she acted, Mr. Malone. Did she seem to behave normally?”

  “How do I know if she was normal? It was the first time I’d met her. But yeah, I’d say she was pretty normal. She wasn’t crazy about selling her plane. That was obvious.”

  “Did she suggest you test fly it alone? Or balk at going up with you?”

  Jake thought for a moment. “No. She mentioned something about the crosswind, but I really don’t think she would have let me go up alone.”

  “Did she mention her financial condition?”

  Jake stared incredulously at him. “You don’t think Lynda had anything to do with this.”

  Malone shifted in his seat. “We’ve been on the site since the crash yesterday,” Malone said. “And we’ve found evidence that a hose was partially cut so the hydraulic pressure would pull it completely apart as soon as the landing gear was lowered.”

  Jake sat silently for a moment, trying to make sense of that. “It could have torn-”

  “There’s more. We’ve gone over all of the airport’s security videos, and on the night before the crash, it caught someone tampering with that plane.”

  “Who?”

  “We can’t tell exactly,” Malone said. “All we were able to make out was a penlight around the wheel well and the vague shape of someone under the plane. We can’t rule out that the plane’s owner might have set up the crash to collect the insurance.”

  Jake was getting angry. “Let me get this straight,” he said. “You think she would sabotage her own plane and stage her own crash just to get the money when she could just as easily have sold it to me for full market value?”

  “Maybe she didn’t plan to fly with you,” Malone said. “Or she didn’t anticipate such a dangerous landing. After all, she did survive.”

  Jake gaped at him for a moment, unable to believe what he was hearing. “That is the most ludicrous thing I’ve ever heard. Lynda Barrett had nothing to do with that crash. She was as surprised as I was when the landing gear didn’t go down. And she was scared to death. She could easily have died in that crash. What good would the insurance money have done her then?”

  “All we know is that somebody did it.”

  “Then stop trying to pin this on her and find out who really did it and why.” He struggled to sit up, but dropped down, defeated. “And when you do,” he said through his teeth, “you tell me who they are. If it’s the last thing I do, I’ll make sure they pay.”

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  * * *

  I don’t believe this.” Lynda sat in a vinyl chair that hadn’t been made for comfort, watching the parking lot below through her hospital room window as the insurance investigator cut between the cars. “He thought I had something to do with the crash.”

  “Don’t sweat it,” Mike said from where he sat by Lynda’s bed. “Between Jake and me, we convinced him you didn’t. But the question is, who did?”

  She turned back to Mike, the light from outside casting a shadow on one side of her face. “Why would anybody want to sabotage my plane, Mike? Wouldn’t they know that the next time I flew it—?”

  Mike only looked helplessly at her.

  “That’s it, isn’t it? Someone was trying to kill me.”

  “Maybe. Maybe not. It could have been a random act.”

  “Were any of the other planes tampered with?”

  “No. We’ve inspected all of them and checked back over the videotapes for anything out of the ordinary. It looks like it was just your plane.”

  She leaned back in the chair and looked out the window again. “How could I have made such an enemy and not known it?”

  “I can’t believe you did,” Mike said. “Maybe it was random, Lynda. Random acts of violence happen all the time. People break into houses randomly, shoot at passing cars—”

  “Some world we live in, huh?”

  “You’re right; it’s not a pleasant thought—but it’s better than thinking someone tried to kill you.”

  “What if they’re still trying?” she whispered. She felt fear rising inside. “I mean, they failed, didn’t they? What if they haven’t given up?”

  Mike got up and came to lean against the windowsill. “Think, Lynda. Is there anyone in your life who hates you enough to want to kill you?”

  “Well, I didn’t know there was, but obviously—”

  “Not so obviously. I mean, yes, there’s somebody out there who was trying to get his kicks, but that doesn’t mean he’s after you.”

  “Kicks?” she whispered. “Causing a plane crash gave him his kicks?”

  “There’s a lot of evil around us, Lynda. We don’t have to let it consume us.”

  “What if we don’t have a choice?” she whispered. “They’re probably going to let me go home tomorrow. Am I gonna be a sitting duck? And what about Paige and Brianna? They’re staying in my house.”

  “If he’d wanted you, whoever it is, he could have found you at home before, don’t you think? That’s what makes me think it’s random.”

  Lynda shrugged, unconvinced.

  “Anyway, the two cops who are working on it are planning to come by and talk to you today. If there is someone after you, they can get to the bottom of it.” He leaned over and pressed a gentle kiss on her forehead and wiped a stray tear off her cheek. “It’ll be okay.”

  “I just need some time alone to think about it, I guess.”

  “I’m going,” he said. “But first, I want to tell you that the cops who are investigating this are Tony Danks and Larry Millsaps. Larry’s a buddy of mine from church. I’ve known him for years. You can trust him.”

  She felt some comfort in that. “Thank you, Mike,” she whispered.

  The two people assigned to rehabilitate Jake—Allie Williams, a 120-pound dynamo who approached occupational therapy with a determination that rivaled Jake’s determination to sink into depression, and Buzz Slater, a former paraplegic who’d become a physical therapist after learning to walk again himself—didn’t seem to care that Jake’s head was still on the verge of bursting with pain or that nausea was hiding just below the surface, waiting to assault him at any given moment. Since he awoke from the accident, their hands had been all over him, poking and prodding, flexing and massaging, despite his venomous verbal resistance.

  Nothing he said daunted them, no insult offended them, at least not enough to make them leave him alone. Every two hours they came in and turned him over, massaged him, and bent him this way and that until finally he’d vowed to learn how to turn himself over just to get a little peace.

  “That’s not all you’ll learn to do today,” Allie said brightly as she wheeled a gurney into the room. “Today you’re going to the tilt table in the rehab room. We’re going to get you sitting up, so you can get out of bed.”

  That sounded easy enough, and Jake was almost hopeful as they wheeled him down the hallway, flat on his back to the big room where a dozen or more people like him worked—on mats, in a pool, on parallel bars, with walkers.

  He didn’t object when they transferred him to the flat table, but when they began strapping him down, he
got worried. “What are the straps for?”

  “To keep you from sliding off, Jake,” Buzz said. “You’ve been flat for three days. We have to get you upright gradually. You may have some problems.”

  But Jake couldn’t imagine ever having problems being upright. “Try me,” he said.

  They finished strapping him on then slowly began to tilt him up.

  He felt a cold sweat prickling his skin; his head pounded. Though the table inched upward at a snail’s pace, he grew increasingly dizzy, nauseous, weak. . . .

  “I’m gonna pass out!”

  Instantly, they lowered him flat again.

  “That’s all right, Jake,” Allie said. “You made it to thirteen degrees.”

  Jake looked at her. “That’s all? Why did I react like that?”

  “It’s called orthostatic hypotension. You’ve been lying down for a while, so your circulation is weak. Your blood pressure drops when you’re upright. We just have to keep trying it, getting a little higher each time, until you get through it. Ready to go again?”

  He wanted to scream out that he wasn’t, but instead he said, “No. I’m thirsty.”

  “We can give you some ice chips,” Allie said, “but you won’t be able to keep anything else down.”

  She put an ice chip in Jake’s mouth, then allowed a few seconds for it to melt. “Ready now?”

  Jake cursed as the table tilted again. As the blood drained to pool in his feet, the world threatened to turn black.

  “Just get through this, Jake,” Buzz said when he was flat again. “After this, we’ll start you on traction.”

  Two hours later, they wheeled him back to his room in time for the bland lunch that awaited him, the lunch he couldn’t eat. His skull felt as if it had intercepted the pain from all the places on his body that he couldn’t feel. His stomach was empty but still threatened to turn on him, and the worst part was that for all his work, he’d only made it up to twenty degrees on the tilt table. At this rate, he’d be flat on his back for the rest of his life.