Mending the Moon (25 page)

Rosemary's heart pounds against her ribcage. Oh, God. Did Veronique snap and kill a student? “Was anyone hurt?”

“Don't think so. Don't really know. Sorry.”

“Thank you.” She still isn't going to let on that she knows Veronique. She wonders if Veronique will be willing to talk to her. One of the sacred laws of chaplaincy is that if the patient tells you to go away, you go; chaplains are the only hospital workers patients can dismiss, and patients need all the power they can get. Strictly speaking, Rosemary isn't even supposed to signal that she recognizes Veronique unless Veronique acknowledges her first, but this is a bit of legalism Rosie's never been able to maintain. When she runs into acquaintances in the hospital, she always says hi; they always say hi back. They always seem glad to see her.

But none of them have been in psych rooms.

She can still hear Veronique's voice, tearful, rising and falling. A nurse is in the room now. “Okay now, sweetheart, try to calm down. Just breathe for me. Can you do that?”

“Another nutcase,” a passing tech mutters under his breath, and Rosemary has to force herself not to dress him down.
That's no nutcase: that's my friend!
Most of the ER staff don't like psych patients, who rarely present clear-cut medical symptoms and all too often offer behavioral challenges. Rosemary sympathizes with the staff's frustration, but she sympathizes more with the patients, who are usually even less happy about the situation than their caregivers are.

Most of the time, she's not so crazy about Vera herself. Here, she's completely on Vera's side. But she can't be Vera's chaplain. You aren't supposed to minister to people with whom you're emotionally entangled.

Should she call Hen? But then Hen would feel compelled to come here. But that's her job, isn't it?

Rosemary pulls her phone out of her pocket. She has voice mail. From Jeremy.

Oh, God. But no: Jeremy's not in Veronique's class this semester. He's not in any classes this semester. He's working at the coffeehouse today, isn't he? He can't even know about this; he must be calling about something else.

A registration clerk's in with Veronique now; Rosemary won't be able to do anything for a few minutes. She ducks out the ER entrance to use her phone, and listens to Jeremy's message. Evidently a friend gave him a blow-by-blow of the classroom crisis. “Aunt Rosie, I don't know where she is now. I hope she's okay. Anyway, I thought you'd want to know. Please call me back if you hear anything.”

She calls him. He answers right away. “Jeremy, I'm at the hospital. She's here. I'm working this afternoon, and two UNR cops just brought her in for psych observation. She doesn't know I'm here yet.”

“Psych observation? Are they going to lock her up?”

“I don't know. I hope not. Listen, do you have any idea what triggered this?”

“Yeah. Amy said she was upset because it's Mom's birthday. She thought we all forgot about it.”

Rosemary's hand goes to her mouth. Later, she'll realize that she's absorbed Walter's gesture, made it her own. Of course she knows it's Melinda's birthday. She decided to work her shift as usual to distract herself. She'd been planning to call Jeremy and Veronique afterward to see how they were doing, but she should have done it this morning. “Of course I didn't forget. I just, I didn't—”

“I know,” Jeremy says. “I didn't forget either, but I decided not to do anything special. I guess that was stupid.”

“You did what you needed to do,” Rosemary says. She's facing the double glass ER doors, and she sees the registration clerk walk past them. “I'm going to try to talk to her now, okay? I'll call you later.”

 

13

The first Cosmos knows of Archipelago is a news item on the radio. He's spooning bananas, once again, into Vanessa's mouth—her appetite has picked up a little, to his immense relief—when he hears something about the death of the Misguided Mayor of Wishful. “Authorities are seeking a person of interest,” the announcer says, and Cosmos puts down his spoon to turn up the volume. He could look this up on Google News later, of course, but it's here now, and anyway, he might forget.

The mess in Wishful has been eating at him. “It's not your fault,” Roger keeps telling him, as they sip their Guinness in the semidarkness of the deserted library. “You did the best you could. You did what you always do.”

“But if I'd stayed longer—”

“C'mon, Cos. You couldn't have stayed longer. Vanessa was wasting away to nothing, and you had to take care of that insurance mess for your dad, remember? What happened in that town is the town's problem and the town's responsibility.”

Cosmos knows Roger's right, but the police state in Wishful still bothers him. That's never happened before, although if he thinks about it, he concedes that it was probably just a matter of time before someplace he'd helped out took a wrong turn after he left. He doesn't know what he could have done to prevent it, anyway.

The radio drones. “Behind the bandstand where the Mayor collapsed, police found a throwing dart with traces of scorpion venom on the point. An extensive sweep of the town's population has discovered that a woman named Archipelago Osprey purchased
The Care and Feeding of Your Pet Scorpion
on Amazon.com five years ago, before she moved to Wishful. She is not in her apartment and neither is the scorpion, although a terrarium suitable for such an animal suggests that the creature is still alive. Police believe she took the scorpion with her when she fled.”

Archipelago Osprey? Cosmos shakes his head. Good lord. With a name like that, how could she not get into some kind of trouble?

He shrugs, glad he's not the one who has to find her. He's tired. He's getting too old for this stuff. If he had a sidekick, he'd be handing over the reins right now. Actually, he has thousands of sidekicks, but they only seem to stay sidekicks for the duration of whatever crisis he's coaching them through.

“Next time,” he tells Vanessa, picking up the spoon again, “I'm naming a successor. Wherever I go next, anybody who's really on the ball's going to get tapped. Tag, you're it.”

Vanessa doesn't answer. She has never answered, never will. She is the job Cosmos cannot put aside or delegate for more than a week or two. But he wouldn't want to. He loves his sister. “Banananananana,” he tells Vanessa, and she opens her mouth, and he believes that inside, wherever it counts, she's smiling.

Archipelago, meanwhile, isn't smiling. Archipelago is hiding in a field behind a drugstore in some other little bumfuck Wyoming town. She's fed Erasmus, who doesn't seem to have reacted to his change of habitat, and she's so hungry herself that she'd seriously consider munching down on his few remaining crickets, if it weren't for the fact that she's not sure where to get more. The crickets are Erasmus's food. He didn't ask for any of this. She has to keep his life as normal as possible.

The crumpled newspaper in the trash, when she smoothed it out, informed her that the murder—
manslaughter
, Archipelago tells herself with rising panic,
manslaughter, it wasn't intentional
—has indeed been pinned on her. Her driver's license mug shot is on the front page. Fortunately, it's such a bad likeness that no one who sees her in person is likely to connect the two, but if she goes into a pet store to buy crickets, she could be in trouble. She needs to hoard her small remaining wad of cash, anyway. She withdrew the daily maximum from the ATM on her way out of Wishful. She doesn't dare use her ATM card again: they'll trace that in two seconds.

Maybe she should turn herself in, explain that it was manslaughter, that she didn't know the Mayor was allergic to scorpions, that she wouldn't have done it if she did. She wasn't trying to kill the guy, much as she loathed him. She just wanted him to have even a fraction as bad a day as he'd visited on her.

If she tells them that—

No. Manslaughter's still a prison sentence, and she can't afford a lawyer and wouldn't want a state-appointed yahoo, and she has a feeling that assault with scorpion venom probably carries some kind of penalty, too. And what would happen to Erasmus if she turned herself in? The authorities would kill him, probably.

All right, then. She has to stay free, both for her own sake and Erasmus's. And she needs to try to find free sources of food for both of them. She could trap crickets for Erasmus, but the fields around here were being sprayed as she walked into town. Erasmus is used to yummy vitamin powder. She doesn't want to risk feeding him insecticide instead.

And she's so hungry that she can't think clearly. She has to think clearly right now. She needs food and a safe place to sleep, and a shower would be nice, too, because she reeks to high heaven.

Food first. Once she's eaten, she can tackle the other problems, beginning with food for Erasmus.

The easiest way to get food is to steal it, although she's going to look suspicious wherever she goes: a scraggly smelly person lugging a backpack. No ordering at a fine restaurant and dodging the bill in this getup. They'd kick her out the second she walked in. So would Burger King, probably.

Pizza.

She once worked in a pizza joint. Pies that were ordered but not picked up got tossed at the end of the night, still in their boxes, often still warm. So: find a pizza place, and then find the nearest Dumpster. She checks her watch. It's ten
P.M
. The pizza parlors should be closing right about now. Every town has a pizza parlor. Even Bumfuck, Wyoming.

The trick's to find it without looking too conspicuous. Scraggly smelly person lugging a backpack, casually strolling around downtown Bumfuck after hours. Right. Eateries are usually in whatever passes for downtown, near banks and city halls and parks. Police stations are there, too. And Bumfuck does not, from the looks of it, exactly have a swinging night life.

If she were by herself, she'd stash her backpack behind a bush and stroll around on foot, which would be marginally less suspicious as long as no one smelled her. But she can't abide the idea of abandoning Erasmus—what would happen if someone stole the backpack and found him?—and the only place she can put him is the backpack.

She should have brought a coat. But it's summer, and aside from the hassle of carrying a coat, it would have made her even more conspicuous, both here and on the way out of Wishful.

Tomorrow, maybe, she can find an army/navy surplus place and buy a—

No, she can't. She's in Bumfuck, Wyoming, which she's pretty sure has no army/navy surplus place—although there may be a thrift store—and she can't spend money on a coat, and she'd stink up any store she walked into, anyway. And she's a fugitive. She doesn't dare call attention to herself. This is craziness, Archipelago. You need to eat. Your brain needs food. Your stomach needs food. Hear it, growling?

Bumfuck doesn't have a swinging night life. So maybe no one will be out and about to be suspicious of her. It doesn't matter; she has to eat, and her mind's fastened onto the possibility of pizza like a piranha onto a tourist's leg. She doesn't let herself think about the toppings she wants. Any toppings will be fine. Any toppings will be wonderful. If the pizza place—this mythical restaurant she isn't even positive exists—discards a jalapeño pepper pizza with anchovies and pepperoni, she'll devour it. It will be the best thing she's ever tasted.

She'll wait until eleven, just to be safe.

She waits until eleven, and then, as casually as possible, strolls in the direction that feels like downtown. In no time, she's in a town-squareish area. Bank. Post Office. Salon. And there—yes, thank you, universe—there, between the insurance office and the medical building, is a pizza parlor.

As heavy as her backpack's become, Archipelago almost skips across the street. She wants to sing.

Here she is, in front of the pizza parlor, and here she is, turning aside to stroll down the alley behind it—imagine! an actual alley in this podunk town!—and here is the Dumpster she knew would have to be here, and here she is, opening the lid of the Dumpster, and here, yes, is a pile of three pizza boxes, delicious aromas wafting up from them along with less delicious aromas from the other contents of the Dumpster, and here is Archipelago, lifting out the three boxes of steaming pizza, her eyes watering with unaccustomed gratitude.

She puts the boxes on the ground and opens them. Extra cheese, this first one. Meatballs on the second. The third is one of those hideous Hawaiian things with ham and pineapple, two items Archipelago believes should never come near one another, much less meet on pizza, but this once, she doesn't care. These are good pizzas, edible pizzas, not a jalapeño or anchovy in sight.

She decides to start with the extra cheese. She sits down with her back against the alley wall, and has just lifted the first slice reverently to her mouth when a figure appears at the mouth of the alley. “Miss? Would you like a Pepsi to go with your pizza?”

What the hell? Archipelago squints at the figure trudging toward her, which resolves itself into an overweight cop solemnly holding out a bottle of pop. “Here. I bought it for lunch and never opened it, and I'm going home now, and pizza tastes better with a drink. I'm sorry it's not beer, though you're probably better off sober out here, and I'm sorry it's warm.”

She gapes up at him, too afraid to move. He smiles. “I think I know who you are, but I don't care and I'm not going to report you. That prick had it coming. My cousin lives in Wishful, and she needs dialysis treatments and they wouldn't let her back into town when she got back late from one of them. She had to go to the Motel 6. Is it true he owned that place?”

It wasn't deliberate,
Archipelago wants to say.
I didn't mean it.
But she can't say that, because it would be an admission. She doesn't trust this guy as far as she could throw him. He's playing the nice cop routine, thinking she'll fall for it because she's tired and hungry and has nowhere to sleep, but she's not stupid and she knows never, ever to trust a cop. Ever. He can't be telling her he's going to blink at a murder charge. He can't. Arresting her is his job. Why isn't he doing it?