The Color of the Season (10 page)

“I’ll try.” Then she tapped a finger on her arm. “But if I don’t make it tomorrow and you get discharged, at least I’m tattooed with your phone number.”

“But I don’t have yours,” I quickly replied with a flash of worry because I didn’t want to lose touch with her again.

She must have recognized my concern, because she lowered the chart to her side and approached the foot of the bed. “You know where I live, don’t you? The big red Victorian on Russell Street? I had to move back in with my parents recently. You should come by, Josh. No need to call first. My mom loves visitors and I know she’d be thrilled to see you.”

Relaxing somewhat, I sat back and committed her address to my memory.

“I will,” I said. “But maybe I’ll try to come by when your father’s not at home. Does he work days or nights?”

She chuckled. “That’s not necessary. With Riley gone, no one is pushing his buttons anymore. I’m sure he’d love to see you.”

“All right then.”

She seemed in a hurry to leave suddenly.

As she backed away, I felt a strong urge to reach out and hold on to her. Yet something in me feared she would slip through my grasp if I tried. That she’d disappear like a fine cool mist. Just like all the other women in my life.

“Come by soon, all right?” she said. “As soon as you’re discharged. Promise?”

“I will.”

Appearing satisfied, she turned and left the room.

I immediately grabbed the pen on the bedside table and scribbled the address on the back of a magazine.

Russell Street. Big red Victorian
.

Chapter Twenty-three

Two days later I was discharged with instructions to return to the hospital for regular physiotherapy appointments over the next four weeks. I was not permitted to return to work for at least six weeks.

That didn’t stop me from calling Scott, however, to ask him to do me a favor and dig up information on Riley James. I told him that Riley’s last known whereabouts were somewhere on the west coast, but he could be anywhere by now—possibly back in Boston or back in prison again in some other part of the country.

Meanwhile, my sister Marie and my mom came by my apartment often with home cooked meals in plastic containers. My mother begged me repeatedly to come stay with her because she couldn’t imagine how I could get up and down the steep stairs of my apartment without assistance.

I assured her that climbing stairs was good for me, but I promised to take it slow.

A full week went by. Leah didn’t call.

The following week, however, my cell phone rang while I was in the shower. Normally, I would have let it go to voice mail, but I decided to step out and towel off to answer it.

I’m very glad I did.

o0o

There could be no doubt about it. The information I gleaned from that phone call provided a legitimate excuse for me to visit Leah. It was certainly better than just sitting around, waiting for her to call. Knowing that she often worked nights at the hospital, I decided to pop by in the afternoon.

A light rain was falling as I left my apartment, got into my car and started up the engine. The wipers beat steadily across the windshield as I pulled away from the curb and headed across town. As I drove, I pondered how I was going to deliver the information I’d just received about Riley.

Part of me felt torn. It had been twenty-five years since I’d had any contact with this family, so maybe they’d consider me a stranger and ask why I was poking my nose into their personal affairs. They might not even recognize me at the door. Maybe Leah was right. Maybe they didn’t even
want
to know about Riley. That prospect had occurred to me more than once, because surely if Dr. and Mrs. James wanted to know what had become of their son, they could have found a way. At the very least, they could have hired a private investigator.

Maybe they had. Maybe they already knew the truth but chose not to share it with Leah. Maybe they didn’t want to open old wounds.

In the end, as I turned up Russell Street in search of their Victorian mansion, all that mattered to me was what Leah wanted. Based on our conversation at the hospital, I sensed in her a desire to bring me into this. It’s why she told me everything she did, and why she had given me her address.

Chapter Twenty-four

The house was perched far back on a grassy rise overlooking the street, and the driveway was large enough to accommodate at least six cars.

I pulled up next to the stone walkway, shut off the engine, and leaned forward over the steering wheel to look up at the front of the house.

It boasted a large, covered veranda with ornamental spindles, a massive front door with a half-moon shaped transom, and bay windows beneath decorative, white cornices.

After dropping my keys into my pocket, I opened the car door and got out. The rain was coming down harder by then, but I knew I couldn’t make a run for it on account of my leg, so I drew up the hood of my jacket and limped up the freshly painted blue steps.

Once I made it to the covered veranda, I lowered my hood, shook off the raindrops, and rang the bell. It chimed like an old grandfather clock.

I waited and waited, but no one answered, so I rang the bell a second time and continued to wait.

Just when I was about to turn away, the heavy oak door creaked open. Suddenly I found myself staring through the screen at a somber-looking young woman with golden hair and blue eyes set wide apart.

“Yes?” She looked as if she’d just woken from a nap.

I’m not sure if I was tongue-tied because I’d expected Leah to answer the door, or if I was knocked off kilter because there was something jarringly familiar about this woman and it sent my stomach into a spin.

Was this Holly? The tiny newborn baby I’d held in my arms twenty-five years ago? If so, she was still very petite. She couldn’t have been more than five foot two.

“I’m looking for Leah James,” I explained. “I’m Josh. Josh Wallace.”

The young woman frowned at me. For some reason, I felt a strange compulsion to apologize for my presence.

“Do I have the right house?” I asked.

She blinked a few times. “How do you know Leah?”

I raised my shoulders against the damp chill of the rainstorm and buried my hands in my pockets. “We lived on the same street when we were kids. I was best friends with her brother, Riley. Are you Holly?”

She regarded me with what appeared to be a hint of displeasure, then pushed the screen door wide open. “You should come in.”

Stepping inside, I glanced around the wide, cherry-wood panelled entranceway and spacious parlors to the left and right. Every piece of furniture was an antique and the fireplaces were enormous. “You have a beautiful home,” I said.

“Thank you.” She shut the door and folded her arms to close the long grey sweater she wore.

“So…you must be Holly?” I asked a second time.

“Yes.”

An uncomfortable silence ensued and I wondered if I should have made other arrangements to see Leah, because I did not feel the least bit welcome here.

“Actually,” I said, gazing down at her in a friendly attempt to turn things around, “you wouldn’t remember this, but we met once before. I came to the hospital to visit you on the day you were born. It was Christmas Day.”

Holly inclined her head. “That’s right. My birthday is December 25th.”

“I was only ten,” I added, “but I rocked you in a chair. You were the first baby I ever held.” I chuckled. “I was afraid I’d drop you on your head or something.”

Holly didn’t break a smile. She merely gathered her woolly sweater tighter around herself. “Have you kept in touch with Leah all this time? She never mentioned you.”

“No,” I explained. “Your family moved out of our neighborhood just before you were born. That’s when your father bought this house.” I glanced toward the stairs. “Is your mom here? I’d love to say hello to her.”

I wasn’t hopeful, because the house seemed eerily quiet.

Holly spoke in a low, monotone voice. “She and Dad went to the cottage for the weekend.”

“What about Leah?” I asked. “Is she around? I was hoping to talk to her about something.”

Holly frowned again. “No.”

“Do you know when she’ll be back?”

Pushing her hair back off her forehead, Holly took a deep breath as if to brace herself for something. “She’s not coming back. I’m sorry Josh. You obviously don’t know.”

I shook my head. “Know what?”

A chill, black tension moved across the floor and swirled around me like a snake.

“Leah died two weeks ago,” she said. “The funeral was last Tuesday.”

The grandfather clock in the front room began to chime, and I could do nothing but stare at Holly in disbelief.

Chapter Twenty-five

“That can’t be right,” I said with a rancor that sharpened my voice. “I spoke to her a week ago. In the hospital.”

“What hospital?” Holly asked with a shake of her head.

“Mass General,” I replied. “I was taken there after I was shot. I’m a police officer.”

My words seemed to freeze in Holly’s brain, then slowly, she began to nod. “Oh yes, I recognize you. You were on the news. It was a carjacking, wasn’t it?”

“That’s right. I had to have two bullets removed in surgery and I was in a coma for five days. When I woke up, Leah was there. She was assigned to my case.”

I didn’t mention that I’d required a psychiatric consult because it wasn’t exactly something I wanted to broadcast to the world with a megaphone.

“That can’t be,” Holly said, “because Leah’s gone and she was sick for a long time before that.”

By now my heart was pounding like a sledgehammer. “What do you mean…
sick
…?”

Holly closed her eyes briefly, then opened them. “Let me take your coat.”

She reached out her hands. I immediately shrugged out of my rain jacket and handed it to her, then followed her to a back corridor with hooks on the wall.

“Would you like something to drink?” she asked. “A cup of coffee or a glass of water? I think we have some ginger ale.”

“I’m fine.”

“No, you can’t be,” she asserted. “You can’t be fine, because
I’m
not fine. Not after what you just said to me.”

Still not completely believing that Leah was gone, I followed Holly to a large modern kitchen at the back of the house with white cabinets and shiny granite countertops. She opened the stainless steel fridge and pulled out two bottles of beer.

“Would you like a glass?” she asked.

“The bottle’s fine.”

While she used her sweater under the palm of her hand to twist off both caps and hand the beer to me, I felt like I was awake in some sort of strange dream.

“There has to be a mix up,” Holly said, leaning her hip against the center island. “Maybe you dreamed it. Were you medicated?”

“At first, yes,” I replied, “but I didn’t dream it. She was real.”

But how could this be? Leah couldn’t possibly be dead. She absolutely couldn’t.

“Tell me about her being sick,” I said.

Holly took a swig of her beer. “Leah had ALS. She was diagnosed a few years ago when she first started her psychiatry residency.”

“ALS,” I repeated. “That’s Lou Gehrig’s Disease?”

She nodded. “It affects the nerve cells in the brain and the spinal cord, and then the brain loses the ability to control muscle movement. Eventually the patient can become totally paralyzed, which is what happened to Leah. She was at home with us for the last few months, but we had to send her to the hospital because of complications when she got pneumonia.”

“That’s when she died?” I asked, finding it difficult to say the word.

Holly nodded.

“Did she work at Mass General as well?” I asked, still feeling confused by all this.

“No. She was doing her residency at a hospital up in Chicago but she had to quit over a year ago when the disease began to progress. She’d been home with us ever since.”

I set down my beer, shut my eyes and cupped my forehead in a hand. “God, I’m so sorry. I’m in shock. I swear I talked to her the day before I was discharged, or maybe I did dream it. I was pretty out of it when I woke up.”

I began to feel slightly nauseous as the news settled in.

Leah… Gone…

Neither of us said anything for a moment until I opened my eyes.

“But it couldn’t have been a dream,” I insisted, “because she told me things—like the fact that she was doing a psychiatry residency. I wouldn’t have known that. She said she was in third year. She also told me about your brother, Riley.”

Holly stared at me with bewilderment. “What exactly did she tell you?”

“That he went to prison for five years. I swear I didn’t know that either, and I know it’s true because I had my partner look him up and everything Leah told me checked out.”

Holly studied my face for a moment, then cleared her throat and turned away. She moved to the other side of the kitchen, as if to put the center island between us. “Are you sure you didn’t talk to her…like a year ago? Maybe you’re confused because of what happened to you. You were in a coma, weren’t you?”