Rosebush

  The phone rang. “Hello,” I answered, half in a dream. I glanced at the clock and saw it was ten minutes to ten. “Scott?”

  But it wasn’t Scott’s voice that said, “Good night, Jane.”

  I was awake now. Awake, alert, and sure of what I was hearing. I thought. “Stop calling me. You’re not my friend, you’re a murderer.”

  “I know you are, but what am I?”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “You hurt everyone who cares about you, don’t you, Jane?”

  “No, that’s not true.”

  “With your secrets and your lies. Everyone is just a pawn in your little game.”

  A chill ran through me. This had to be a real phone call. It couldn’t be in my head. Because I didn’t believe that. “I’m not like that. I’m not.” Was I?

  A slide show of faces flashed through my mind. Bonnie. My mother. Kate.

  No!

  I couldn’t take any more of this. “It’s time for this to be over.”

  “I agree. See you tomorrow. Sweet dreams.” The line went dead.

  I was hyperventilating. I clutched Robert Frost to me as my father’s voice intoned, “Oh, I kept the first for another day! Yet knowing how way leads on to way, I doubted if I should ever come back.”

  See you tomorrow.

  Whether the killer was in my head or outside it, this was going to end.

  Monday

  Chapter 29

  The dock jutted over the smooth water of the lake like the tongue of a mouth open to scream, the yellowed trees surrounding it like teeth. Beneath my feet the worn boards were hot and uneven and splinters poked me. My toes tingled.

  “What are you waiting for, Jane?” the pretty camp counselor said, floating in the water three feet in front of me. “Come in, it feels great.”

  I jumped. At first the water felt fantastic, cool and welcoming. The weeds Bonnie warned me about just brushed past like friendly tongues lapping at me, welcoming me. I turned on my side and started to swim toward the float in the middle of the lake.

  The tongues got friskier, less gentle. Now they were lashing me, each stroke harder, more biting. They wrapped around me, engulfing me, and tugged me down toward them. “You’re ours now,” they seemed to say. “You can’t escape us.” I feel like I hear a hundred voices commenting on me, mocking me. “What happened to your bangs? Look at the runs in her tights.”

  Voices all around me, pressing on me, making me lose my resolve. I’m so tired. I want them to stop. Just relax, just give in, you’ll be fine, they tell me.

  Lies. I knew these were lies. I swam with all my strength, fatiguing every muscle, using every breath in my body. Up ahead, through the weeds, I saw a hand. Someone was reaching in to save me.

  But as hard as I swam, I couldn’t get to it. Every stroke took me closer, but not close enough. I felt like my lungs were going to explode, like I couldn’t go on. And in that moment I saw her, through the tangle of weeds. She was staring at me, eyes locked on mine.

  Eyes filled with hate and malice and loathing. Eyes that wanted me dead. Eyes I recognized.

  “You can say that again,” Loretta said, coming into my room.

  “What did I say?” I was just waking up and must have been talking in my sleep. I looked at the clock. It was eight thirty in the morning.

  “It sounded like ‘my eyes.’ Will you look at this thing?”

  I propped myself up and saw that Loretta was carrying a massive floral wreath. “This is about the limit,” she said. “You’d better get well soon and check out of here or we’re going to run out of space.” She handed me the card.

  The wreath was made of red and yellow roses in two entwined hearts and had a white satin bow across it imprinted with WE’LL MISS YOU! in gold.

  “Didn’t they get the message wrong?” Loretta asked.

  I opened the card. Don’t worry, Jane, our destinies are linked. I’ll take care of you anywhere you go. Love, Your Secret Admirer.

  Something must have shown in my face because Loretta shook her head. “Don’t go trying to say this is a threat. It’s hearts. Hearts aren’t a threat. Two interlocking hearts means love.”

  “Of course. You’re right.”

  My mother called to say she and Joe wouldn’t be in until later because Annie was running a slight fever. As I hung up, Dr. Tan, in yet another tan suit, appeared.

  He was jolliness in person. “Good morning, Miss Freeman. I hear they’ve caught the driver of the car that ran you down.”

  “If you believe it.”

  He appeared to work hard to stifle a sigh. “You don’t?”

  “I remembered someone leaning over me while I was trapped in the rosebush and saying, ‘You’re a goner, Jane Freeman.’ The Barney Brothers—the convenience store robbers—didn’t know my name, so it couldn’t have been them.”

  “Or perhaps this is another fictional memory. Another clue in our arsenal.”

  “Why wouldn’t I want it to be the Barney Brothers?”

  “We’re still working on that. Any more delusions? Hallucinations?”

  “The killer called last night and told me I would meet him today.”

  “That’s interesting,” he said. Pretending like he believed me. “When?”

  “He called at ten minutes to ten.”

  “Well, then, we’ll have to keep an especially close eye on you. Ten minutes to ten. Does the number ten have any significance to you?”

  Oh, that was bad. How had I not thought of it? “My birthday is on October 10.”

  He looked at me with surprise for a moment, then went back to his notes. “And how do you feel today? Do you feel like today is momentous in any way?”

  “Apart from meeting my killer? No.”

  “What about the ring? Has it given you any more trouble? Moving from one finger to the other?”

  “No. Because I’m not crazy.” I wasn’t. I wasn’t.

  “Of course not.” He closed the chart and left, promising to come back later.

  Officer Rowley was my next visitor.

  “Have the convenience store robbers confessed yet?” I asked.

  “No. But they’ve changed their story somewhat. They claim they saw your purse and phone lying by the road and that’s why they stopped. According to them, they didn’t even see you. And our forensics team found this in a gutter near the rosebush.” She handed me a photo. “It appears to be a clasp from something. Is it yours?” It was a picture of interlocking jeweled Cs.

  “It’s definitely not mine.”

  “Have you seen it before?” she asked.

  “Yes.”

  “Where?”

  “On a mannequin in the window of the Chanel store in the Short Hills mall,” I supplied helpfully.

  It was true. She hadn’t asked where I’d seen it last. I’d learned that cooperating didn’t help me. And the clasp had triggered an idea.

  Yoo-hoo, Jane.

  An idea that might just solve everything. But I needed to ask some questions first.

  “I’ve been authorized to give you this,” she said, handing me an evidence bag with my phone inside.

  It was weird seeing it like that. For so long I’d felt tethered to my phone, as though I was nothing without it. Now it was just an object.

  But seeing it in the evidence bag gave me another idea. “Do you have a photo of the scene? From when I was still in the rosebush? I’d like to see what it looked like.”

  “Why?”

  “I guess I’m kind of vain,” I said, figuring she’d believe it. “And I’m a photographer.”

  “I’ll see if I can get you a copy.” She stood.

  “Thanks. And could you ask Pete to come help me if you see him?”

  By the time Pete appeared fifteen minutes later, it was after ten and I was almost ready to try getting myself into the wheelchair. “Where have you been? I’ve been waiting.”

  He was squinting at the light from the windows, and if it wasn’t for the unwrinkled
quality of the wood-grain-patterned button-down he was wearing, I would have thought he’d slept in his car. There were dark smudges beneath his eyes and he had a light sprinkling of stubble on his chin and cheeks.

  “I didn’t know we had a date.”

  “Your shirt’s really groovy,” I said.

  He eyed me narrowly. “What’s wrong with you?”

  “Nothing. I’m just looking forward to our time together.”

  “No, you’re not. Neither am I.”

  “Will you take me to see a friend of mine who’s a patient here?”

  “No.”

  “Are you hung over?”

  “No.”

  “Because you seem like you might be. The way your eyes are all tiny and bloodshot. And you’re sort of touchy.”

  “I’m not. My eyes aren’t tiny and bloodshot.”

  “Like a little rabbit. Or maybe it’s a pig. What has really small beady red eyes?” I goaded him.

  “Why are you talking?”

  “I’m just trying to be friendly.” I smiled, which hurt the cuts on my face.

  “Be less friendly.”

  “I will if you take me to see Elsa Blanchard. You never told me where you get your shirts. Do you shop for them in Manhattan?”

  “Is this a bribe? If I do what you want, you’ll be quiet?”

  “Smart boy.”

  “Fine.” He maneuvered me into the wheelchair. “We’ll go see Elsa Blanchard.”

  “You’re getting—”

  “Shhh.”

  “I was just going to give you a compliment,” I whispered.

  “The best compliments are conveyed in the form of silence.”

  He started wheeling me down the hall toward the elevator. The girl with the braids and the coloring book and her grandmother were gone, but the husky man with the Gatorade was back. He was reading the Post, but I had the sensation that he was watching us as we went by.

  “What room is Elsa in?” Pete asked.

  “I don’t know. I thought you could find out.”

  He parked me in the middle of traffic and lumbered over to a computer. When he came back, he turned the chair around and started steering me back to my room.

  “Where are we going?”

  “Your friend is in the psych ward. The locked part.”

  “So? Doesn’t that just make it more exciting?”

  “No. It makes it impossible.”

  “Impossible is just another word for ‘loser who gives up.’”

  He kept pushing me toward my room.

  “Did you really drop out of high school?”

  “Yes.”

  “Why?”

  “To join the pro-Frisbee tour.”

  I burst out laughing. I couldn’t help it, it was just too random. “Don’t make me laugh, it hurts my face.”

  “Believe me, it wasn’t intentional. Hearing you laugh hurts my head.”

  “So what’s the real reason you’re not in school?”

  He came around and bent to get his eyes at my level and with his hands on the arms of my chair said, “Beautiful, are you doing this just to be annoying, this conversational hit man act, or is seeing this person actually important to you?”

  My heart started to pound. Beautiful? Do you really think I’m beautiful? I wanted to ask. Don’t be ridiculous, I told myself. He probably says that to everyone. You’re making a fool of yourself.

  Instead I asked, “What’s a conversational hit man?”

  “You know, hit man protocol?”

  I shook my head.

  “When a hit man is aiming for something behind a window, he needs two bullets. One to drill a hole in the glass and then another to go through the hole and hit the target.”

  “That’s like me how?”

  “You ask easy questions until boom! a hard one sneaks through and gets me where it counts.” He pointed to his forehead. “Which today is right here. So, are you just trying to torment me or does this Elsa matter to you somehow?” He was looking at me so seriously, his blue eyes moving slowly over my face. He smelled like fabric softener and soap and something ineffable that had to be just him. Both his gaze on mine and his effect on my pulse were serious.

  What are you thinking? I demanded of myself. He has no interest in you. You have a date with Scott. And a killer possibly after you. I blinked to clear my mind. “She matters.”

  He took a deep breath, muttered, “I’m going to regret this,” stepped back around the chair, and pushed me back toward the elevator.

  “Then—”

  “Silence.”

  The silence continued up to the eighth floor.

  There was a formidable nurse on duty just in front of the elevator, sitting next to a locked and secured door.

  “My father asked me to bring this patient up so she could see a friend? Elsa Blanchard, room 808?” he said with an ingratiating smile.

  “Miss Blanchard’s protocol is no visitors.”

  “I’m just doing what my father asked. You can call him if you want.” Pete looked at his wrist. “Ten twenty-five. He should be on the eighth hole right now.”

  The nurse pursed her lips, thinking, then made up her mind. “Go ahead, dear.”

  “Thanks.”

  When the door closed behind us, I said, “You’re good.”

  “I told you, women just fall in love with me.”

  “What do you want to be when you grow up?”

  “A lawyer.”

  “My mother says you were caught with drugs and that’s why you’re under house arrest.”

  “I thought you were being silen—ah, here we are. The end of our tour.”

  Elsa’s room was like mine except it had no windows and everything was bolted down, including her, onto the bed. She looked up when Pete pushed me in and I was shocked. I’d never seen Elsa without thick eyeliner and red lipstick on before, but now she was wearing no makeup and it made her look incredibly young and innocent. Her cheeks seemed soft like a baby’s and her eyes were immense. Ignoring the white bandage that secured two electrodes to her forehead, she looked better now than I’d seen her in ages.

  She studied us and finally said, “Are you real or are you a hallucination? They’ve got me on so much stuff, I can’t tell anymore.”

  I almost hugged her.

  “I’m real.”

  She was a little twitchy. “Are you sure? Your face looks nuts.”

  Pete cleared his throat. “I don’t know how long we have before Nurse Nosy out there decides to try my father—”

  “—but you said he was playing golf.”

  “My father loathes golf. He’s in his office. Which is why you might want to cut the meet and greet short and do whatever you came here for.”

  I looked at Elsa. “What happened after the party? How did you get here?”

  Her eyes went to the corner of the room and her head bopped back and forth. In a singsongy voice she said, “What do you call a plant that’s out of place?”

  She wasn’t looking at me, so I didn’t answer. Then her eyes zipped toward me. “What do you call it?” she demanded.

  “I don’t know.”

  “A weed. Same thing with thoughts. Thoughts out of place, they call them crazy.” Her gaze was intense. “But I’m not crazy, Freeman.”

  “I know that.”

  She started nodding to herself. “I’m not crazy. It’s the drugs. They make me a little loco in the coco if you know what I mean.”

  I heard Pete stifle a laugh.

  “I’m not kidding, man.”

  “What happened after the party?” I asked.

  “Party. More like a meeting of the drama club. Everyone yelling and crying. That was crazy. I had to get out of there. Had to ease on down, ease on down the road.” She started humming, her head bopping. “Ease on down—did you know my uncle wrote that song?”

  “No,” I said.

  Pete tapped his wrist where a watch would be.

  “You got in your car,” I prompted.
br />   In one big breath she said, “I got in my car and I drove away and I saw something by the side of the road so I pulled over and went to look.” She inhaled. “It was you, Freeman. In that bush. Freeman freeman freeman,” she repeated. “You weren’t free then, were you?” She started to laugh.

  “And then?”

  “You looked kind of cute snuggled up there all cozy, but I thought you should probably move. So I bent down to try to wake you up.”

  “Did you say, ‘Yoo-hoo, Jane’?”

  “Yes!” She brightened up and her eyes focused for the first time. “I totally did. I remember that.”

  “And, ‘You’re a goner’?”

  “I said that too!” She looked pleased, like a child discovering a new toy. “When I couldn’t wake you up. You were kind of moaning and saying, ‘It hurts, please help,’ so I knew you needed help but not my kind of help, oh no. Big strong help. From manly men.” She looked at Pete. “You wouldn’t have done at all. Not strong enough.”

  “Thanks.”

  “Did you call for help?” I asked.

  “I tried, right? I looked for my cell phone, but I couldn’t find it, so I started driving. And driving. I was looking for something, but it was raining and so hard to see and then—” She focused again. “A pay phone. That’s what I was looking for. But I found a post instead. Ran right into it. Oops, my bad.” She laughed. “But it worked, right? Because then all these manly men came, all these par-a-medics.” She sounded out the word, then stopped. “Does that mean they are paranormal medics? Like vampires?”

  “No,” Pete said.

  She took that in for a moment. “Well, I told the par-a-medics that they should go help you and not me. I kept telling them over and over, ‘Go help my friend, go help my friend.’ But they didn’t understand.” She looked at Pete again. “You’re sure they’re not vampires?”

  “Yes.”

  One of her legs had started to vibrate a little. “Because they didn’t understand at all. They kept saying, ‘There’s no one else in the car with you, ma’am,’ and I said, ‘I know that, silly, it’s my friend who needs help,’ back and forth like that over and over and over.” She lolled her head around in circles as she said the last part. Then it snapped to attention. “They wouldn’t listen, so I slapped one of them.” She wrinkled up her nose. “Not even hard, just a teensy slap. Like you would give a Chihuahua. Hee hee. But he didn’t like that. He was such a bully, he locked me up. I think he also must have taken my pearl necklace.”