If She Should Die (16 page)

“It’s
Mrs
. Cimino and I’ll do nothing of the sort. The patient is Christine Ireland. I have her purse with her identification and insurance information—”

“Then take it to the front desk and be good enough to call her brother.”

“Don’t give me orders!” Tess glared at the young nurse,
then looked at Christine. “Don’t worry, Chris; I’ll take care of everything. Do you want me to call Ames?”

“No. Don’t bother him. Call Reynaldo. Tell him to go to the store. Jeremy went in early. He can give Jeremy an excuse about why I’m not coming. And . . .”

She felt herself sliding again, cool oblivion replacing the noise and confusion of the hospital emergency room. It seemed only seconds later when she awakened to face an older man with a red, shiny face and hard little eyes. “You have a concussion,” he said sternly, as if it were her fault.

“I thought so.”

“You’re lucky it wasn’t worse.”

“Will I have any lasting effects?”

“The radiologist didn’t appreciate any signs of brain damage in your CAT scan. Never really know about these things, though. I guess time will tell.”

“That’s comforting. What about my brother?”

“I don’t know anything about your brother. Was he hurt, too?”

“No. I’m just concerned—”

“I don’t know anything about him if he wasn’t hurt. I didn’t treat him. Your family can tell you something.”

“When can I see them?”

“Later. You will, of course, have to spend the night in the hospital.” He looked pointedly at her naked left ring finger. “Unless you live with someone.”

“I could stay with my guardian—”

“Your guardian?”

“Ames Prince. But no, now isn’t the time to be piling in on him.”

“Ames Prince is your guardian?” the doctor repeated, his expression softening. “Ah, Mr. Prince. I caught a glimpse of him in the waiting room. A fine man, Mr. Prince. I didn’t guess that he’d come here about you.”

“I didn’t seem worthy of the fine man’s time?” Christine
asked sourly. Her head hurt badly. The doctor gave her the kind of forbearing look one saves for a badly behaved five-year-old. “May I see Mr. Prince now, Doctor?”

“Briefly. Then the police want to talk to you, Miss . . .”

“Ireland. It’s on my chart.”

The doctor gave her a hard look. “Five minutes with Mr. Prince,” he said curtly. “Then the police.”

Ames entered the room slowly. His face was lined and haggard, and a strange haunted look filled his gray eyes. “Christine, are you all right?”

“I’m holding my own.”

“Thank God.”

“No, thanks to my attacker’s lack of knowledge about my anatomy. He went for the hardest part of my body—my head.” Ames managed a slight smile. “I’m so sorry you had to be dragged out to the hospital today.”

“I’m not an invalid, dear, and I had to see you, to make sure you’re all right. I don’t know what I’d do if something happened to you, too.”

Christine reached out and took his hand. The skin felt paper-thin and cold. “I’m fine, Ames. Don’t worry one more second about me. I’ll be here tonight with doctors and nurses just minutes away if I need anything. And by the way, my doctor seems quite impressed with you.”

“Ah, Dr. Holt.” Ames cast a glance at the empty doorway, then lowered his voice. “I handled a case involving his son. I can’t discuss the details, but I got the boy off with just probation, which I’m not so sure was in the best interests of society.”

“Since the doctor is so grateful, maybe you could talk him into letting me have something delicious for dessert instead of Jell-O.”

“I don’t think my influence goes that far, dear. Besides, isn’t Jell-O good for you?”

“Jell-O is gelatin. Gelatin is made from ground-up horses’ hooves.”

“Good God!” Ames made a face. “I didn’t know that!”

“It’s a deep, dark secret, but true.”

“Well, aren’t you a treasure trove of knowledge? Although I think I’d rather not have known about gelatin. I’ll never eat the wretched stuff again,” he said with a grin and a wink.

Christine suddenly felt self-conscious when Michael Winter entered her room. She hadn’t looked in a mirror, but she knew her face was bruised, her hair matted and discolored with blood. But Winter wasn’t here to admire her appearance, she reminded herself sternly. She was being vain and foolish.

“Hello, Mr. Prince,” he said.

Ames nodded. “Deputy.”

Winter looked at Christine. “I’m sorry about what happened to you,” he said simply. She was struck by the lean, handsome lines of his face, his square-cut jaw, and the almost ebony eyes. Although he didn’t look as worn as he had yesterday at the store, he still appeared tired. “Your doctor told me you’re going to be fine.”

“Right now my head doesn’t feel like it’ll ever be fine again, but I hope he’s correct.”

“Hi! Mind if I come in?” Tess was in the room and standing by Christine’s bed before anyone had time to say a word. Winter looked slightly annoyed. Christine knew he was waiting to question her about the incident. Tess frowned ferociously. “Oh, Chris, you look
awful
!”

Christine laughed. “Tess Cimino, the soul of tact.”

“Hello, Mr. Prince,” Tess said. Christine could see doubt in Tess’s face. She didn’t know whether to mention Dara, but Ames saved her from her quandary.

“Thank you for coming to the hospital with Christine
and for calling me immediately,” he said in his somewhat formal tones.

Christine’s mind suddenly flew to her brother. “Ames, Jeremy went into the store early. He’ll wonder why I don’t show up and I don’t want him to know I’m hurt.”

“Don’t worry about him,” Ames said. “Tess told me he was at the store. I’m closing it for the day and I’ve sent Patricia to pick up Jeremy. She’s to tell him I sent you to Charleston on some important errand for me.”

“I hope Patricia doesn’t slip and say something she shouldn’t to Jeremy about what’s happened to me.”

“Patricia is quite good at keeping secrets when she wants to,” Ames said with a trace of acerbity. A mixture of curiosity and alarm nibbled at Christine’s mind. Was the marriage in trouble? Jeremy said Patricia was gone a lot.

“Rey could have taken Jeremy home,” Tess said. “He was already at the store.”

Ames shook his head. “I’m afraid not. Just before you phoned me from the hospital, I got a call from him saying that he couldn’t reach Christine and he wanted her to know he wasn’t well and wouldn’t be in to work today.”

“Rey left the house at the same time I did,” Tess protested sharply. “He should have been at the store by seven-thirty.”

Ames gave her a placating smile. “He thought we weren’t opening until ten o’clock. Perhaps he ran an errand and found that he didn’t feel well enough to work today.”

“What errand could he run at seven-thirty?” Tess demanded. “Nothing’s open.”

“Convenience stores are,” Christine offered.

“What would he go to a convenience store for?” Tess continued. “He doesn’t buy anything at convenience stores.”

“Gasoline. He probably filled up the car, then went back home.”

“He’s not home,” Tess insisted. “When I couldn’t reach him at the store, I called home twenty minutes ago to tell him what happened to you. Where could he have been?”

Ames looked slightly baffled by the barrage of anxious commentary and questions. Christine was accustomed to Tess jealously keeping tabs on Rey’s whereabouts. She knew Tess was envisioning Rey involved in some early-morning tryst. However, she was also slightly alarmed by the alert look that had sprung into Deputy Winter’s eyes. She guessed he might be speculating about where Rey Cimino was during the attack on her at the gym.

“Tess, I’m sure there’s a good explanation for why Rey wasn’t home when you called,” she said. “Rey probably went to the drugstore for Pepto-Bismol or Alka-Seltzer or cough syrup if he wasn’t feeling well.”

“We have all that stuff at home,” Tess snapped.

Christine felt abrupt deep frustration with Tess for making a scene. Deputy Winter was staring hard at the unduly agitated woman. Ames shuffled, cleared his throat, then said hastily, “Christine, Deputy Winter is waiting to talk to you and you’re looking tired. We should all clear out so he can question you and then you can get some rest.” He turned to Tess and gently but firmly took her arm. “May I walk you out, Mrs. Cimino? It seems like
such
a long time since I’ve seen you. I don’t get to your bookstore nearly often enough. Tell me, have you gotten in that new biography of Churchill by Renson? I plan to give it to Patricia for her birthday.”

Oh, she’ll do cartwheels over that gift, Christine thought dryly. Still, Ames had deftly removed an increasingly annoying Tess from the room. Christine’s headache could not have withstood much more of her loud insecurity.

“Is she always like that?” Winter asked after Ames had closed the door.

“Yes. She’s madly in love with her husband and jealous beyond belief.”

“Does she have reason to be jealous?”

“Not at all,” Christine said adamantly. Too adamantly, she realized when Winter’s gaze flickered again, but she couldn’t think of anything to mitigate the false-sounding intensity of her denial.

“I don’t suppose you’ve caught the guy who did this to me,” she said quickly, hoping to divert his attention.

“I’m afraid not. Unfortunately, it’s a bad morning. Another storm was blowing up and there weren’t any pedestrians in the area. Drivers were concentrating on the road. You were the only guest at the gym.”

“Just my luck.” She paused. “But I guess I
was
lucky. That blow to the head could have killed me.”

“Yes. We’re all very glad it didn’t.” He gave her a slightly weary smile, then flipped open a notebook and poised a pen above a page. “I know you’re in pain and this is the last thing you want to do, but please tell me everything about the attack you can remember.”

Christine recounted the experience slowly, trying not to leave out any details, even the embarrassing ones about the assailant grinding his hips painfully and suggestively against her thighs. “He didn’t say a word,” she added. “He didn’t even grunt or mutter under his breath. I can’t tell you anything about his voice.”

“Most people don’t think about voices,” Michael Winter said approvingly. “Voices can often tell us a lot, if you’ll forgive the pun. It’s a shame this particular jerk didn’t make a sound.” His eyebrows drew together, causing two creases above his nose. Worry lines, her mother used to call them. “What about smell?”

Christine knew smell was the strongest of the five senses, the one most likely to evoke memories, but she hadn’t thought about her attacker’s smell. Until now.
She closed her eyes, forcing her mind back to the scene, the feel of the person grinding into her thighs, the smell of . . . “Dirt,” she said. “Musty dirt. And . . . yeast.”

She opened her eyes. Winter had leaned slightly closer to the bed and she realized she’d spoken softly as she tried to conjure the memory. “What do you mean by
musty
dirt?”

“Dirt that hasn’t been in the sun. Sort of the way the dirt smells in the stand of evergreen trees behind my house. Dirt with moss mixed in. And a slight pine scent.”

Winter nodded. “Great. How about the yeast?”

“Well, it wasn’t a fresh yeast scent like you’d get if someone was baking. It was stale.” She paused. “Maybe like . . . beer. Yes, like he’d had beer, but not immediately before. It was more like the beer was partially digested and being sweated out of the pores.”

“You’re very good at this.”

“Maybe if Ames ever decides to close the jewelry store I can get a job as a police dog.”

Winter actually grinned as he wrote quickly in his notebook.

A thought struck Christine. “Marti at the gym said the buzzer didn’t go off the way it does when someone comes in the front door, and the back doors were locked. Have you figured out how he got in?”

“A back window had been cut open, then unlocked.”

“Cut open?”

“A sharp instrument is used to slice a circular hole in the window and a suction cup is attached to pull out the glass. That way there’s no sound of glass crashing. The person reaches through the hole and unlocks the window.”

“But doesn’t the gym have an alarm system?”

“Mr. Torrance said he turned it off at six
A.M
. when the gym opened.”

“Oh, of course he’d turn off the alarm during the day.”

Michael Winter looked at her intently. “Can you think of anyone who would want to hurt you?”

“No, not really.”

“Not really?”

She hesitated, then guiltily gave him a highly altered version of the finding of Dara’s diary. She told him that she and Jeremy had gone to the creek just to look at the high water and had run into Robert “Streak” Archer, who often jogged that way at night. She went on about the cat running up the tree, Jeremy pursuing, and then finding Dara’s diary in the hollow of the tree.

“That was quite a coincidence. All three of you being out there at night, that is,” Winter said expressionlessly.

“I didn’t know it, but Streak runs by there almost every night,” Christine said, hoping she didn’t appear guilty, careful to look directly into Winter’s eyes. But didn’t too steady a stare always betray that one was lying? She was overthinking and tried to smile guilelessly. “It turned into a bizarre little group, especially with Rhiannon the cat along.”

“And her running up the tree. And Jeremy finding the diary.”

Skepticism was written all over his face, and Christine decided hedging wasn’t wise with this man. He saw, or sensed, too much.

“Yes. The diary. I first considered taking it to Ames, but then I thought there might be something in it the police should see. I suggested to Streak that we read it.”

“Why did you want Streak to read it?”

“Because he’s known Ames most of his life. They’re like brothers. And I didn’t want the entire responsibility of deciding whether the diary should go to the police.”

“Because there might be things in it that would be embarrassing to the family?”

“Yes. Embarrassing but not important to the murder
investigation. In that case, I wouldn’t have given it to the police. But if there was possibly crucial information in the diary, I would never have withheld it. Still, I wanted Streak’s opinion on the contents. I know a lot of people in town think he’s odd, but he’s really a very levelheaded person. I trust his judgment.”