The Proteus Cure (23 page)

Sheila could see Paul’s face redden and concluded that one of his anger triggers had been pulled.

“That’s all, Mister George,” she said. “Thank you so much for your time.” She hoped he noted the sarcasm.

“My time, yes,” he said as Paul and Sheila rose. “My time will cost one hundred dollars.”

Paul scowled. “One hundred—? We were here only five minutes.”

“I bill at two hundred an hour. It took me nearly a half hour to research this and see you.” He looked at his watch. “Twenty-seven minutes exactly. That rounds to half an hour.”

“That’s fine, Mister George.” Sheila pulled out a check. “I’ll pay it. Thank you for the information.”

“Sheila, you can’t pay. This is my problem.”

“I may yet get a paper out of this. Consider it a research expense.”

She slipped the lawyer the check and they left.

“That was quick and painless,” Sheila said. “Now what?”

“Now we go visit Mister Swann and ask him what the hell is going on. I’m happy to see where he’s located.”

“Why is that?”

“There’s this great sub shop near there. It’s not a classy place by any means but you’ve got to try it. After we see Swann, we’ll grab three subs. I’ll bring one home for Coog.”

“I usually try to eat healthy but if it’s such a special place, I suppose I can bend.”

“You won’t be sorry.”

“Do they have eggplant parm subs?”

He grinned. “I should have known you’d ask that. It’s amazing how alike we are. Of course they have eggplant parm. It’s the only one worth getting.”

As they got back into Paul’s Explorer, Sheila looked over at him. He was cute in an L.L. Bean-ad kind of way. Not dashing like Bill. Not
GQ
. But solid. A man with substance.

“Okay,” she said. “Your turn to talk about yourself.” Seeing his hands tighten on the wheel, she added, “I don’t mean the big heart-wrenching events, just some little things. Where you went to school or what you wanted to be when you grew up. That kind of stuff.”

“Okay. That I can do.”

Good. The combination of the sugar, caffeine, and his promise to divulge some of his past stirred up a strange feeling. She felt like a teenage girl who suddenly discovers that she likes her best friend as more than a friend, likes him “that way.”

“I always wanted to be a teacher,” he said. “A high school English teacher. Not a very high aspiration, some might say, but I couldn’t imagine anything more rewarding than talking about books all day, and teaching kids about them. Books can bring the world to your doorstep, you know?”

Sheila nodded tentatively. She’d learned almost everything she knew from textbooks but sensed he meant literature.  

“One story can change someone’s whole life. You see a kid who’s ready to commit suicide and then she reads
The Diary of Anne Frank
, and all of sudden her life isn’t so bad. Saved. Look at
Romeo and Juliet
. Do you have any idea how many times that story has been retold in different ways?”

Sheila nodded. “Perhaps too many.”

He looked at her and smiled. “Yeah. Perhaps. But I’ve always loved books. I guess I wanted to share that. When I was little, books were my best friends. I was a lonely kid but I had my books, my storytellers, each one of the authors reaching out to tell me something about life. That was how I felt.

“My father was in the military. We’d move as soon as I’d hook up with new friends, or at least that’s how it seemed. I have a little brother who had no problem with moving all the time. He thought it was an adventure. I hated it. I was a shy little kid.”

Sheila laughed. “It’s so funny to hear you say that. I would never have pegged you as shy. You seem more a rough-and-tumble type. The way you attacked the guy in the Hummer and punched that car the other day, you strike me more as more of a Heathcliff than a Walter Mitty. And before you give me credit for reading
Wuthering Heights
, I didn’t. I saw the movie.”

“Heathcliff was a sensitive guy too. He simply hid it by being tough.” Paul gave a short, harsh laugh. “Like me. Been there, done that. You talked about your parents making you hold in your emotions. How do you think it was to be raised by a Marine? Anger was acceptable, sadness was not. Weakness too was verboten. The only thing Dad encouraged was fighting. Creep. But I had my books. They were my hidden indulgence and he was none the wiser.”

“He encouraged fighting? Did he hit you?”

“Of course he hit me. He figured if he batted me around enough it would make me tough. Got news for you, if a kid is crying and you hit him, it makes him cry more.”

“Didn’t your mother stop him?”

“She was raised by a Marine herself and married Dear Old Dad when she was young. Went along with everything he did. She was soft with me when he wasn’t around but would never publicly defy him. Bob, my brother, he ate it up. He was just like Dad. Creep junior. He rarely got hit.”

Paul stopped talking and stared in his rearview mirror. It seemed he was recalling a bad memory that he wanted to keep to himself.

“Look in your sideview mirror. Don’t turn around, just look. See that silver Honda a few cars back?”

Sheila looked. “I guess so. I see silver. I can’t tell the make.”

“It’s a Honda Accord. I think it’s following us. It got on the highway when we did. I swear it’s been behind us since Manchester.”

Normally she would have laughed, said he was being paranoid. But now …

She scrunched down in her seat. “Who’s driving it?”

“Can’t tell. Too far away and the windows are shaded. Let’s slow down and see what happens.” Paul slowed to fifty and eased into the right lane. The Honda slowed as well. Finally Paul pulled onto the shoulder.

“What are you doing?” she cried. “Don’t stop! What if he wants to kill us?”

“If he wanted us dead, we’d be dead already. This guy is fishing, trying to see where we’re going, what we’re doing, what we know.”

Sheila and Paul sat and watched the Honda cruise past them. Her stomach churned the maple scone.

“Now what?”

Paul hit the gas and they started moving again.

“Now he’s in front where we can watch him. If he really was following us, and I’m not being paranoid, he’ll stay just in front. He can track us from there.”

“How do we know it’s not someone who’s just going to Boston like half the other people on this road?”

“I’m not taking any chances.”

Paul swerved the wheel and abruptly took the next exit. As they went into the turn Sheila saw the Honda’s brake lights go on. He
was
watching them.

Paul shot her a glance. “Believe me now?”

Sheila nodded. “I wish I didn’t.”

“It’s okay, we’ll go the back roads. He’ll never find us.”

Sheila stuck her fingertip in her mouth and started chewing on the nail. There was a time to kick bad habits and this wasn’t it.

Paul took her hand and eased it away from her mouth.

“You’re not in this alone. I’m here. Don’t worry.”

She looked at him, his image blurred from tears. “Thank you.”

For a few minutes they rode in silence, Sheila focusing all her attention on the rearview. The Honda was nowhere in sight, but that didn’t lessen her fear.

“You okay over there?”

“I think so,” she said, trying to keep the quiver from her voice. “Why don’t you finish your story? That’ll get my mind off things.” She saw Paul stiffen. “You were talking about your childhood.”

He half-grinned. “I’d rather be tailed by a mystery man than talk about that, but for you, I’ll do it.” He sighed. “Where was I? Oh, yeah. By the time I reached high school, I’d been to six different schools and was a ball of repressed emotions. The only one Dad approved of was anger so I focused all my energy there. It was how I had been conditioned. I was ready to explode.”

Paul swallowed hard. Sheila saw his jaw clench. She reached for his hand. Warm and rough, like the rest of his exterior. He gave her hand a squeeze.

“Mom bought me a punching bag and that helped a lot. Then she encouraged me to join the wrestling team. Great outlet. With all my rage, I was damn good at it. Next to going out and killing people for the government, a/k/a soldier, which is what my dad had planned for me, this was the next best way to blow off steam. I won all kinds of trophies and Dad couldn’t have been happier.”

“Were you happy?”

“I was. But I had no intention of joining any branch of the military. I planned to go to college for English and become a teacher. With all the moving around we did, I knew I might not qualify for an academic scholarship, but maybe for wrestling. I couldn’t wait till the day when I could tell Dad that I was going to college to teach a whole new generation of little sissies. That’s what he called me. I knew he’d flip out but there’d be nothing he could do. I even considered joining The Peace Corps just to piss him off.”

Sheila smiled. “I’ve heard lots of people join just for that reason. Spite.”

Paul laughed. “Well, at first it went just like I wanted. I got a full ride at Bridgewater State College right here in Mass. Not Ivy League, but they have a good teaching program. When I told Dad he went nuts. Almost broke my jaw. But it was worth it to say, ‘I’m an adult now, and I’ll do whatever I want.’ ”

She cringed. She had never been hit. Never even spanked. Couldn’t imagine it.

Bastard, she thought.

“Good for you. I don’t know if I would have turned out so well. So you did go to college then? I know you must have.”

“Well, there’s more to it but enough for now. Suffice to say, I did go, but then my life fell apart because of something stupid. And then came Rose, then Coogan. And now here I am—or rather, here we are.”

He was still holding her hand.

He’d said plenty for one day, she thought. More than she’d expected. For someone who’d lived through such abuse, he seemed almost unscathed. Smart and handsome …

“I’m glad you told me this. Now I don’t feel like the only one who got her heart dragged through the mud.”

“Most people get their hearts shredded at some point. It’s all about how they put them back together. Some never do. They just leave them in pieces.”

What a guy, Sheila though. Besides Dek, most of the sensitive guys she’d ever known were gay. This one was not only straight, but sexy. This guy was, in a very real sense, something else. Nothing she would have thought she was looking for, but exactly what she needed. He had opened some long-closed doors in her.

Paul slowed the car.

“What is it?”

“Swann is supposed to be at 160 Milk Street but that says
Mailboxes and More
. This can’t be right.”

“Well, pull over and we’ll ask inside. Maybe suite two-five-seven is upstairs.”

Paul parallel parked the SUV seemingly without effort. Sheila was impressed. With all her achievements, she couldn’t parallel park to save her life.

“Why don’t I talk to the clerk?”

He nodded with a tight smile.

A young girl with pink hair, too much black eye makeup, and piercings through her lips and eyebrows sat at the counter reading Nietzsche's
Beyond Good and Evil
. When she saw them she stuck a black painted fingernail in her page.

“Can I help you?”

She had a sweet smile and a pretty face. Sheila never understood why so many kids felt a need to deface their natural beauty.

“Yes, we were given this address as someone’s office. Does a Lee Swann work here?”

“No, sorry.” She cocked her head.

“Do you have any offices upstairs?”

“Just a hair salon.”

“But we were given this address … suite two-five-seven.”

She laughed. “Lots of people do that—call their mailbox a suite. Makes them seem more important.”

“Yeah,” Paul said in a low voice. “Weird. Why am I not surprised?”

When they were back on the sidewalk, he said, “I can’t believe it. If this was legitimate, why would he give the lawyer a mail drop as an address?”

“I don’t know. I’ll check the Internet later and see what I can find on Mister Lee T. Swann. And I
will
find something.”

He managed a smile and kissed her cheek. “Promise?

She touched the spot, imprinting the memory warmth of his lips on her cheek. She was starting to fall for this guy. And that was not such a bad thing.

“Promise.”

“And now how about a sub at Capone’s?

Sheila was about to say yes when she saw a silver Honda turn at the next corner. She could have sworn the driver was watching them as he passed out of sight.

The same car that had followed them? No way to be sure, but her stomach turned.

“I … I’m not hungry.”

Henry brought in cucumber sandwiches for Abra and a ham and Swiss on rye with a pickle for Bill.

“Drink, sir?”

Bill looked at Abra’s pictures and was struck by one of Robbie and April taken at Christmas last year. They’d grown so much since then, and he’d barely been around to see them. Before long their childhoods would be gone. Elise was right—too much time spent at Tethys. Lately, he felt suffocated. Too many loose ends that he was expected to tie together. Too many fires to put out.

Damn it, he’d given everything, everything to Proteus and to this hospital, but didn’t know how much longer he could keep it up. Right now there was too much at stake, too much that could fall apart; he couldn’t let his guard down for a minute.

But when would it stop? When would he ever be able to relax?

“Drink, sir?” Henry touched his shoulder.

Bill was dying for a dose of Jack but needed to go back to work after lunch. He opted for Henry’s special iced tea. He then turned to his sister.

“So they’re off track then?” Abra said, holding the tiny sandwich in her tiny twisted hand.

“Yes. Sheila found KB-twenty-six on her own. At first I panicked, thinking it would be a disaster, but it’s perfect. If I keep pointing her to it, what can she possibly find? Kaplan can’t tell her anything—it would be self immolation. He may be burned out, but he won’t push himself over the edge.”

“He’s had a difficult time since the failure of his company.”

Good old Abra, Bill thought. Always feeling sorry for people. Even the wrong ones.