In the Air Tonight (2 page)

Wayne shifted suddenly so he faced her, and before she could move away he had her by the throat, his fingers wrapped tight around her neck, closing her windpipe. Her only recourse was to grab at his wrist
with both hands, but he was remarkably strong—and dead inside. That’s all she saw, anger and death—no hope, no love.

Nothing.

She was light-headed, opened her mouth but no words came out. Wayne pointed his gun at Cindy as he slowly took away Paige’s entire supply of air.

“Leave her alone, you pathetic asshole.” Cindy’s voice had gone from near hysteria to calm, and Paige recognized that tone. Cindy had decided she had nothing to lose.

She would egg her husband on until he killed her.

He keeps getting out on technicalities. His dad’s a cop—they always let him go
, she’d whispered in response to Paige’s earlier question about pressing charges.

“You don’t tell me what to do. If you’d listen to me, the way you’re supposed to, this never would’ve happened.” Wayne’s voice was furious, full of guilt and blame—all things Paige recognized.

“You can’t get it up, and I can’t wait to tell everyone about your limp dick.” Cindy’s words were as deliberate and malicious as her husband’s fists had been to her face.

They did the job, because Wayne released Paige by slamming her body against the nearest wall. She hit her head hard against it and fell to the floor. From there, she saw Wayne lunge forward to squeeze his wife’s throat, tighter, until Paige saw Cindy’s eyes bulge and her face turn reddish purple. One of the officers who’d slammed through the door earlier, when Wayne had crashed the bed he’d been holding Cindy
down on to the floor, wouldn’t let Paige up, no matter how hard she fought.

Then, a doctor came in, armed with a syringe. With the help of the officer trying to subdue Wayne, the doctor jammed the needle directly into Wayne’s neck.

Finally, the drug worked its magic, shattering the insanity and everything went mercifully quiet. Wayne’s big body slumped down on top of his wife’s prone one, but it didn’t matter anymore. Cindy was gone; Wayne would go to prison for murder, and Paige was back in that awful time in her life when everything had suddenly turned from good to bad.

The entire situation had taken an hour.

“Ma’am, it’s over.” One of the police officers was attempting to help her up from the floor. She wanted to stay there, on the cold linoleum, to curl up and sob, but her pride wouldn’t let her. At least not in front of strangers.

She stood and allowed herself be led through the crowd. Her breath came in harsh gasps, part fear and partly because Wayne had held her neck so tightly. She would have bruises there by morning, as well as along her side where she’d landed when he’d tossed her. Her body ached, her head throbbed and her nerves were worn down to the nub.

In the hallway, she was vaguely aware she’d passed by doctors, nurses and orderlies, heard their murmurs of concern. She didn’t want any of it.

Finally, the officer escorted her behind a curtain where Carole Ann, a woman she’d known since she first started working here, was waiting for her. She was the charge nurse in the ER and dealt with the stress of the job easily. She didn’t play favorites and
she was excellent at her job. She was also the one person Paige had given her personal information to, although she would hesitate to call Carole Ann a good friend. Paige had shared her cell phone number and a few meals with the woman—the barest slice of her life. And yet, it was far more than she’d let anyone in for a long time.

“I’m fine,” Paige insisted to Carole Ann now, but her barely there voice said otherwise.

“Yeah, I’ll let you know when you’re fine,” Carole Ann said with a smile—an old joke of theirs, as those were Paige’s first words to her when they worked together. She sat patiently as Carole Ann examined her. She knew the bruises on her throat were already showing, no doubt a deep purplish red. “I failed her,” she said finally. Quietly.

Carole Ann crossed her arms and shook her head. “Paige, you were almost killed by that guy—he was out of control. There was nothing you could’ve done.”

Nothing you could’ve done, honey, no way for you to know what your brother was capable of doing
.

They all said that at first, until their pain hardened to anger and the town began pointing fingers at Paige’s parents, at Paige.

No one would ever be friends with her if they remained in that town. As it was, no one wanted to be her friend later, either, once they found out who she was. Except for her stepbrother, Gray—her fiercest protector. Her best friend.

Her heart surged with loneliness, because Gray was gone. This time he wasn’t coming back the way he
had all the other times he’d gone off on a mission for Delta Force.

He’d died three months earlier—she hadn’t been informed until two weeks ago, when his body had finally been released with no explanation as to why it had taken so long to be told of the tragedy.

Gray’s body had been sent to her stepfather, Joseph—Gray’s father—out in Arizona and she’d flown out for the burial, stayed in his one-bedroom townhouse. God, that had been depressing. Joseph was in a wheelchair, attached twenty-four seven to an oxygen tank because of advanced emphysema.

Everyone close to her was either dead or dying.

“She started drinking again,” Joseph had said about her mother, who’d died a year earlier. They’d visited her grave after Gray’s service. “It was so hard on her. You understand that, right?”

She did, although it always bothered her that her mother didn’t seem to think it was hard on Paige. But all of their lives had changed that sunny May afternoon; and now, her older brother, Jeffrey, was in a maximum security institution for life.

“Maybe you should take the time you’ve got coming,” Carole Ann suggested as she wrote Paige a prescription for pain pills and gave her a shot of a steroid to shrink the swelling in her throat. “Take a vacation. They’re going to force the issue anyway, make you visit the shrink.”

She knew that Carole Ann was probably right. Getting away from here and taking some of her accrued vacation time would be a nice way out for the hospital administration and would disperse the reporters who, like vultures, had no doubt been outside in the
parking lot for the duration of the incident. “I don’t know where I’d go.”

“Someplace not as heavy. Which is any damned place but this hellhole.”

Paige couldn’t explain that she needed to be here, to feel the heaviness. Instead, she stared down at the tattooed stars on her inner wrists and wondered if they protected her from anything at all. “Thanks, Carole Ann—I’ll think about it.”

“Good. Go home and rest. I don’t want to see you back here for at least forty-eight hours, and I’d prefer a week.” Carole Ann used her best nurse’s-orders tone, then stepped away from Paige and headed back to work. Business as usual.

The dizziness had stopped. Her throat still ached—the hoarseness would take days to go away—but she hated being treated like a victim. She wasn’t in this case—Cindy Wallace was. And so she slid off the exam table and headed out to the main part of the ER.

It was quiet—too much so—and tension bowed the air as she walked toward the main information desk. It was usually bustling, no one staying in place for very long, but they’d stopped taking patients and now all she saw were people’s backs as their faces remained glued to the television mounted on the wall above the station.

She saw the front of the hospital and pictures of the Wallaces flashed on the screen. Next was the picture from her ID badge, looking humorless and sallow. She grimaced a little, but if that was her worst problem …

It wasn’t.

Her face was still on the TV screen, but now it was a younger version—that file photo of her at fourteen that the press had used over and over again when the school shooting first happened.

She knew the one they would show next—the one of her wearing a bloodied shirt, being escorted out of the school … and then her kneeling on the pavement.

There had been a recent school shooting. Whenever that happened, it was inevitable that Jeffrey’s name would come up—as sure as it was that they’d mention Columbine. This time there was even more interest because of Jeffrey’s transfer to the mental health section of the prison. They claimed it was just as secure as the main prison itself, but she’d worked with her share of psych patients and, in her opinion, they could be far more devious than regular criminals, without being obvious about it. Often underestimated, they would appear catatonic and still steal your keys to the ward.

It’s prison, it’s different
, she repeated to herself.

Her brother and what he’d done had been her secret since before she’d moved here to this large New York hospital. She was twenty-six and she still looked slightly haunted, some might say, and anonymity was something she craved, something she needed as much as air.

Even though she used her stepfather’s last name, it would be easy enough to tie her to the horrible tragedy that had occurred. It was so far in the past for most people that she’d thought that by now it was safe. But she of all people should have known better. She would never be safe from any of it.

Still, the news report signaled the first time anyone
had found her since she’d gone off to college. She’d kept her identity hidden, cut her hair short and dyed it darker, wore glasses even though she didn’t need them and made up a fictional background that basically left her an orphan.

Now she wore her hair long and back to its natural blond. She had also ditched the glasses because she was old enough not to be recognized as the girl she’d once been. But as of today, her security was gone.

The entire staff was glued to the television—one by one, they’d turn surreptitiously to look at her, to try to see the resemblance between her and that young girl in shock. She could see the questions in their eyes, and she understood.

Everyone wanted to know what it was like to live with evil. She would do anything in her power if she could only forget.

C
arole Ann snuck her out of the hospital, but a few members of the press followed her home.

“Paige, do you have any comment about your brother’s transfer?”

“Paige, are you going to allow yourself to be interviewed for the new book on your brother’s crimes?”

“Paige, after all these years, are you ready to talk about what happened?”

She shut the front door without a word to them and locked herself in her apartment. The press continued to knock on the door, until her landlady threatened to call the police on them.

Paige didn’t bother to open her door to thank her,
didn’t want to face Mrs. Morris’s questioning eyes. No doubt she already knew.

Exhaustion covered her in a sudden, debilitating wave. She felt as if she’d been on the move since the murders.

In the beginning, before Jeffrey went on trial, it had taken exactly fifteen minutes before the first news crews camped out and seven days before the first hate mail showed up. There were news articles and magazine covers and books, which all tried to make sense of what had happened—all asking,
How could the parents not have known?

Anonymous death threats and accusations followed, resulting in six moves in that first year, until the trial was over and many people felt as though justice was served. Then some of the parents of the murdered teens had wanted to bring Paige’s parents up on criminal charges, but that hadn’t happened. Still, there were civil suits, and even though there was never a judgement found against her family, the trials had still drained them physically, emotionally and bled them financially.

The saddest part of the entire ordeal was that neither Paige nor her parents blamed any of the victims’ families for anything they did. Their own guilt was too deeply imbedded in them to do so.

Now that guilt became so all-pervasive that she didn’t leave her apartment—she wrapped herself in her quilt and stayed in bed. But nearly forty-eight hours after she’d left the ER, once the press had finally left her alone, she got a phone call from a man whose name she recognized from the recent newspaper articles.

“I’m writing a book about your brother and I’d love to interview you,” he said, after introducing himself as Arthur Somberg and her skin began to crawl.

“Don’t you ever contact me again,” she whispered, her voice raw, as if she’d been screaming for days. But really that had only been inside of her head.

“Don’t you want your side of the story told?” he asked. “I’m interviewing the victims’ families and friends and I think your point of view would be invaluable.”

She hung up on him and unplugged the landline. Mind made up, she packed as much as she could into two suitcases and figured the rest she could call a wash. She’d miss the landlady, a widow who often gave her homemade cake and cookies, especially around the holidays.

Yesterday had been Thanksgiving—she had the half-eaten pumpkin pie and a plate of ham and mashed potatoes to prove it. Mrs. Morris had been kind enough to simply knock and leave them outside her door, as if she knew Paige still couldn’t face her.

She’d lived there two years, a tidy, furnished, one-bedroom apartment in the borough of Queens, close enough to Manhattan to get back and forth to work easily, without the ridiculous rent. In all that time, she’d bought herself only a new mattress, a small TV stand and some kitchen utensils, preferring takeout to cooking and extra shifts at the hospital to spending time at home.

The most valuable things—the photo albums and Gray’s medals and letters—those she packed up and dragged down to the car with her, but not without
checking first to make sure that no one was hanging around. It was dark and she appeared to be alone in the small driveway.

She hoped her old car could make this trip to the Catskills. Sometimes it barely made it cross-town.

She wore the thickest sweater she owned and still wasn’t warm enough. She suspected she never would be, jacked the heat up as high as the small car would allow and ignored her racing pulse and the butterflies in her stomach. Two hours of highway driving left her on the two-laned road that would lead her to the small town named after a cow, and she realized that her head felt clearer up here.