The Long Sleep (4 page)

Riding with Falco almost made me not miss
having my own car. I watched the highway go by with its mix of
houses and businesses. A cemetery. A big estate that was now a
museum. I could just imagine trying to walk it and that was only to
Southbridge. Never mind getting through the village, over the
bridge, and up the steep hill.

Falco knew the way by now and zeroed in on my
house. My parents weren’t home yet. Nor was Ben. I tried asking him
in for coffee, but he had to get back to police work. I thanked him
again for the ride.

“My pleasure.”

I was afraid he’d say, “Just doing my job.”
But, “My pleasure” was nicer.

He stayed while I unlocked the door and made
sure the dogs were okay and not excited about some hidden
intruder.

Neither of us could miss the vase on the
dining room table. Pink roses. My favorite color. Falco’s eyes
popped.

“That must be for my mother,” I said. “It’s
her birthday next week.”

“Very nice.” He bent to sniff the flowers
even though they weren’t fully open yet.

The dogs followed him as he toured the house.
They’d met him last night and weren’t suspicious, only curious.

Falco insisted that I lock myself in. He
waited until he heard the lock turn, then called goodbye through
the door and drove off.

That time, as I passed the dining room, I
noticed an envelope on the roses. I picked it up, not planning to
open and read it.

But it wasn’t Rhoda’s name on the envelope.
It was mine, Madelyn Canfield.

That couldn’t be right. Who would send me
flowers? Someone must have made a mistake.

But Southbridge had only one florist, Flowers
by Maxine. How would they even know my name to mix it up? I opened
the envelope.

A blank white card.

I gave the florists the benefit of the doubt.
They were busy and just forgot. That was what I wanted to think,
but something made me skeptical. Starting with them having my
name.

I thought of calling Rick. He had given me
both the station’s number and his cell phone. He wouldn’t have
gotten to the station yet. I imagined his cell ringing while he was
on that steep hill going down to the bridge, with a sharp drop into
the Vanorden Kill. Common sense prevailed. It wasn’t worth the
risk, even though he’d probably have enough sense not to
answer.

I called Flowers by Maxine.

“Do you keep records?” I asked. “Like orders
and where they go?”

“Certainly. What are you looking for?”

“It came today. Pink roses for Madelyn
Canfield on Lake Road.”

“Hang on a minute.” I heard voices softly
discussing. Then they put me on hold.

I figured the flowers must have come while
someone was home. Before ten, when Rhoda left. Or else Ben came
home, found them on the doorstep, and put them in a vase before he
went out again. That didn’t seem like Ben. Maybe they came already
in a vase. But I couldn’t believe the delivery person would leave
them outside in the cold.

“Ma’am?” She was back. “Is there a problem?
They should have been delivered by now.”

“They were.” I thought I told her that. “But
the card has nothing on it. I’d like to know who sent them.”

“Sometimes the person doesn’t want to leave a
name.”

“There’s no message or anything. The card’s
just blank. Only my name on the envelope.”

“That must be what the sender wanted.”

I was undoubtedly being a pest, but I had to
know. “Did the order come by phone?”

“Most of them do, or by Internet.”

“Then they’d have to use a credit card. Or
they have an account. There must be a record somewhere.”

“I didn’t take the call, ma’am.”

“No, I’m talking about a record of that
transaction.”

“Those records are in another place. We’re a
little busy right now. If a person wants to send flowers
anonymously, then that’s what we have to do.”

In other words, this was as far as I would
get. Was it worth bothering Rick? A court order could pry open
their records. But that had to go through a judge, and what judge
was going to take it seriously? Even Rick probably wouldn’t. I
could think of no one except Evan who would do such a thing, but I
wanted to be sure.

As soon as I disconnected, the phone rang.
Its ID said “unknown caller.” I waited till the answering machine
picked it up. Nobody left a message. It only beeped and shut
off.

Moments later it rang again. Still there was
no message. I turned off the machine to see what would happen.

Nothing. It kept ringing. Seven. Eight. Nine.
They say ten rings was a full minute and that was plenty of time
for anybody to answer, if they were going to.

This person didn’t seem to know that. It got
up to twenty. I wished there were some way I could find out if the
call was coming from New Hampshire.

Or it could be the person who shot Hank. They
were now after me. If they were watching, they’d know I was home,
but didn’t they notice the policeman with me earlier?

Likewise, they’d have seen him leave.

If it was that person, why would they send me
flowers?

More likely there was no connection. I felt
sick. I wished Ben would come home.

I called his BlackBerry and got sent to
voicemail. Rick had had me lock the front door but I checked it
again.

I had the two dogs for protection. As long as
they didn’t get shot. Hank’s enemy was such a maniac, who knew what
he might do? Or she.

The phone went on ringing. What if it was my
family? I picked it up but didn’t speak.

Nor did the caller.

Instead I heard music. “Somewhere Over the
Rainbow.”

I loved that song. When I was a kid, I
watched
The Wizard of Oz
over and over.

I hung up. It wouldn’t be my family. And the
person who shot Hank couldn’t know about me and
The Wizard of
Oz.

Unless it was someone I knew. Someone who
knew me when I was younger.

I’d always gone to Lakeside, until a month
ago. No one at Southbridge High knew me before that. No one except
Ben, who had transferred about the same time I did, for a different
reason. I couldn’t imagine Ben doing anything this childish.

The phone rang again.
Now
it might be
my family. My hand hovered, but I couldn’t bring myself to pick it
up. Finally I did.

And just listened. They were still doing
“Over the Rainbow.” I listened for possible background noises.

There was nothing. Not even breathing.

The song ended and began again. The lunatic
was waiting me out, just as I was doing to him. When it finished
the second time, they hung up. I won that round.

I thought of leaving the phone open. If my
family did call, and they got a busy signal for hours on end, they
might decide to come and investigate.

Actually, it wouldn’t be hours. Rhoda should
be home soon, and then Daddy. Maybe even Ben. Usually I liked
having the place to myself for a while. Today it seemed horribly
empty, except for the dogs. And now it really was dark outside.

One thing I did was turn the answering
machine back on. It was set to pick up after five rings.

It did. It recorded “Over the Rainbow.”

Chapter Four

I muted everything
and went upstairs to my computer, where I looked up
“coma”.

It listed reams of material. Before starting
on that, I checked the phone book for Dalbeck. Hank’s name. There
were three of them in Southbridge. They must all have been related.
I wrote down the numbers and addresses. What if he had a
long-distance girlfriend that I didn’t know about?

Finally I buckled down to keep my promise of
finishing Hank’s project. I’d taken notes when he talked about the
other cases. Now I checked each of them, going as far back as Karen
Ann Quinlan, who’d lived and died before I was born. At age 21 she
collapsed from a combination of alcohol and Valium. Just like Paula
Welbourne, the girl from Lakeside, although Paula was only 16.
Karen was hospitalized and kept alive by artificial breathing.
After several months with no improvement, her parents asked the
hospital to remove her from the ventilator and allow her die. The
hospital refused. That led to a legal battle, which the New Jersey
Supreme Court settled by ruling for the parents. In 1976 she was
taken off the ventilator. She never woke up but lived another ten
years breathing on her own. In 1985 she died of pneumonia.

Paula Welbourne was almost an exact parallel,
except for the timing. She spent three years on the machine and
lived five more years breathing on her own. She, too, died of
pneumonia. It was not hard to catch an infection in a hospital.
With all those sick people, infections were everywhere.

I read about Sunny von Bulow, whose husband
was accused and acquitted of trying to kill her with insulin.
Instead all it did was put her in a vegetative state. And Terri
Schiavo of Florida, whose case was a real hornets’ nest, with her
parents on one side and her husband on the other. It all seemed to
hinge on how disabled she was. Everybody got in the act. There were
doctors, lawyers, and lies all over the place.

That was almost the same as Maisie Halloran,
the Georgia case that had caught Hank’s interest. Maisie’s husband
claimed she wouldn’t have wanted to be kept alive by artificial
means. Her mother accused him of wanting her gone so he could marry
his pregnant girlfriend. People all over the country, maybe even
the world, took sides, the crux of the issue being the right to
life versus the right to die. To me it seemed an individual matter,
case by case. Who knew what the person wanted, unless they’d made
it clear ahead of time with some sort of living will. Or advance
directive, as Hank called it. It was something most people didn’t
want to think about.

But it had started Hank thinking. He was so
brilliant. How could that mind be locked away forever?

He was the one who brought up the subject at
our meeting. I wondered if he himself had an advance directive. Who
would ever have thought he’d need it? Especially so soon.

To keep my promise, I would have to go around
to each
Tiger’s Roar
staff person and tell him or her there
would be a meeting next week. What if they didn’t want me taking
over? I was new at Southbridge High. They might resent me.

I could only hope Hank would wake up by
then.

“Hank,” I said to the empty air. “Why did it
have to be you?”

I had just started to look up
hypoxic
brain injury,
or brain damage due to a cut-off of oxygen, a
situation that can lead to coma, when the dogs starting barking.
Someone wrestled with the front door.

I went cold all over. I’d locked the dead
bolt, which mostly we didn’t do, so I had to go downstairs and look
through the peephole. Thank God, it was my mother.

After getting over the shock and relief of
having her home, I asked about the flowers. She told me they had
been delivered just as she was leaving for work. “Who are they
from?” she asked.

“Nobody,” I said. “The card is blank. I
called them and they told me the sender must have wanted to be
anonymous.”

“It might have something to do with what
happened yesterday.”

I thought that over. “What for? It wasn’t me
who got shot.”

“Wasn’t
I.
But you certainly were
affected by it.”

“Wasn’t
I!
Rhoda, nobody talks that
way. Anyhow, the only person I know at Southbridge is Cree and I
see her all the time. She wouldn’t send me anything anonymously.
It’s not like I have a secret admirer.”

“It’s not
as if.
” Rhoda stopped and I
stopped and we looked at each other over the flowers.

“I hate to say it,” she began, and didn’t say
it. She was lugging a couple of grocery bags and went to the
kitchen to set them down.

I followed her. “If you’re thinking of Evan,”
I said, “he’s in New Hampshire. I know there are telephones and
Internet there, but he can’t
do
anything long-distance.”

“He can order flowers.” She started on the
groceries, lining up cans of salmon. “Is there any more word on
your friend who was shot?”

“He’s still in a coma.” I reached into the
bag. Lentils. Now I could see what we’d be eating the next few
days. Lentils and salmon. I hoped not mixed.

“I don’t like this,” Rhoda said. “I don’t
like that that bullet was so close to you.”

“Do you think
I
like it? It was close
to me but it was Hank who got it.”

“How can you be sure it was meant for him?”
She was still thinking of Evan.

“Because of what we talked about at the
newspaper meeting. It was controversial, that’s why he wanted to do
it. Who’d have guessed it was
that
controversial? You of all
people should know there are a lot of crazies around.”

Rhoda was a clinical psychologist in private
practice. Her clients weren’t crazy in the psychotic sense. Mostly
just neurotic and unhappy. But that was enough crazy for me.

The phone rang. I rushed to pick it up but
Rhoda got there first.

She scowled at it. “Who is this?”

I could tell from her silence that it was the
same caller as before. And her speaking gave the dirt bag just what
they wanted, a reaction. I gestured for her to hang up.

She finally did, after she’d asked two more
times. Then she looked at me. “Do you know anything about
this?”

“It’s been doing it since I got home,” I
said. “They’re just trying to hassle us—mostly me, I guess, so I
didn’t talk to them. You shouldn’t either.”

She put the phone back on its base. “You’re
saying it was meant for you?”

“It could be. I defended Hank and his idea.
I’m not blaming him. He knew it was a hot-button issue, but how did
he know anybody would be that psycho?”