Time to Live: Part Five (9 page)

Chapter Eleven

I
t was one of those springs when the grass never got a chance to dry. Despite the brilliant blue sky, the sod was so waterlogged it felt freshly planted. The time was long gone when Carter worried about the wetness seeping through the stitching of his Italian loafers. There were a lot of things he didn’t worry about anymore. So much had changed.

Cemeteries, for example. Until a couple of years ago, he’d thought of these vast gardens of the dead as grisly, awful places. Now, he took a certain solace in visiting them.

He’d purposely parked a good distance away from the row he was looking for. He’d discovered that the walk gave him time to prepare himself for the meeting, and to decompress afterward. As always, he dressed as if the funeral were today.

On this April day, Carter marveled at the paradox of so much life teeming in a place set aside for the dead. Birds had rediscovered their voices after the long, bleak winter, and the flowers seemed somehow more vibrant here. The beauty of the place made it all the more comforting.

It was a beautiful gravesite, nestled into the shadow of a stout oak, and just a few feet away from a thicket of honeysuckle that filled the air with the perfume that for Carter defined the arrival of spring. He was pleased to see that the scar of the new grave had largely grown over, and delighted that someone had recently filled the little flower pot with freshly cut tulips, Nicki’s favorite flower.

As he stooped to brush grass clippings away from the nameplate, a wave of emotion sneaked up on him and he had to clench his jaw to fight it away.

“Don’t you miss headstones?” a lady’s voice asked.

Carter jerked his head up to see Gisela Hines sitting on a concrete bench, watching. She wore a flower-print dress that screamed springtime. “Mrs. Hines,” Carter said, rising to his feet. “I didn’t see you there.”

Her expression betrayed neither cheer nor sadness. “A graveyard looks too much like a golf course without the stones,” she said.

Carter had never thought of that. “I don’t know. Without the headstones, it’s a more peaceful place to visit. Less intimidating.”

“I just wish we could have written a final message to him,” Gisela said. She looked and sounded like a woman who had wept until there were no tears left. “I could have told him one more time that we loved him.”

Carter resisted the urge to offer up a platitude. Instead, he went back to the task of sweeping the grass clippings off of Jeremy Hines’s marker. Silence was probably best now anyway. Words did not exist that could console her loss.

As Carter dug a blade of grass out of the carved dates on the plaque, he prayed that Jeremy’s young soul had found the peace he’d sought in taking his own life. The deputies swore that they’d left him alone for only a couple of minutes, but it was all he’d needed to hang himself in his cell.

“How are you holding up?” Carter asked. He eyed the spot on the bench next to Gisela, and she moved to make room for him.

“I’m lonely,” she said. “It’s sweet of you to visit.”

Carter blushed. He didn’t know how to respond.

“Do you ever wonder how you could have made things different?” Gisela asked. “I lay awake some nights—every night, really—wondering if things would have been different if I’d left Frank before Jeremy became so angry. I wonder if there weren’t signs that I could have read, or if maybe there were signs I did read but chose to ignore. Do you do that?”

“I try not to,” he said. “I think that’s a road to insanity. The clock only spins forward, you know? If you don’t move on when a chapter closes, I think you’re doomed.”

Gisela weighed that. It wasn’t anything she hadn’t thought of on her own. “It’s hard to do.”

“There’s nothing harder in the world.”

Gisela said softly, “How is Nicolette?”

Carter’s expression softened. “She’s doing okay,” he said. “The antirejection drugs seem to be working well, and there’s no sign that the disease has returned.” He turned to look at Gisela and waited for their gazes to meet. “Jeremy’s heart and lungs are strong.” His voice caught and he cleared his throat. “I can’t tell you how grateful—”

Gisela placed her hand on Carter’s leg and squeezed. “You already have,” she said. “Many, many times over. He simply didn’t need them anymore, and under the circumstances, well . . .” She drilled a look straight through Carter. “They’re not Jeremy’s anymore. They belong to Nicolette, and please don’t ever refer to them that way again.”

Carter’s eyes reddened as the wave of emotion sucker punched him again. He dared not attempt to speak.

 

A quarter mile away as the crow flies, Nicki stood in the shade of a dogwood looking at the marker her father had bought as a peace offering. At her request, it read,

“You hate it, don’t you?” she said. “It’s way too corny and it would have pissed you off.” She sniffed and cleared her throat. “Well, tough. I’m making the decisions now.”

In another month, it would be a year since their trip together into hell, yet this was the first chance she’d had to visit and see his grave. It was as pretty as a place like this could be, peaceful and spooky all at the same time. Having spoken to Brad daily in her head, she felt silly speaking aloud to a patch of grass.

He knew all about her long stay in the hospital after the fire, and he knew that she’d sold him out by signing papers laying all of the blame for the carjacking and kidnapping at his feet. By doing so, and with the help of testimony from Scotty and his grandmother, all the charges against her had been dropped. That would have made Brad happy.

Then came the transplants, out of the blue. She’d just recovered from her fire-related injuries when word came that she was being leapfrogged up the recipient list. She didn’t understand all the details, but she got the sense that her dad knew who the donor was. He wouldn’t tell, of course, and even if he would, she didn’t think she wanted to hear. The procedure went flawlessly. The difference to her health was immeasurable. She felt young again. She still had drugs to take—they would be a part of her life forever—but the frequency of visits to the hospital was decreasing, and for the first time since she could remember, the doctors were smiling and delivering good news.

Secretly, Nicki suspected that Brad had pulled some strings in Heaven to make it all happen. If anyone in the world could charm the likes of Saint Peter, it would be him.

“I brought you a present,” she said to Brad. Stooping low and balancing herself to keep from kneeling in the wet grass, she pulled the little vase from the marker and set it upright. “No, they’re not flowers. Sorry about that, but you never were much of a flower type. I brought you something to read instead.”

She reached into her jacket pocket and pulled out a carefully folded page from the
Michigan City News
.

“I can’t take any credit for this,” she explained. “This one is all Daddy. The journal you told Mrs. Parker about was still there. He won’t let me read it, but he said that he had you pegged wrong. Those were his words: pegged wrong. That’s the equivalent of God admitting that gnats were a mistake.

“Whatever you wrote pissed off the right people. Daddy leaned on the prosecutor out there to file charges for what happened to you. They didn’t want to at first because you weren’t there to testify, and they were worried that prisoners would be too scared to testify against each other. Then Daddy suggested that they forget about the inmates, and go after that one guard, Lucas somebody.” She looked at the article, trying to find the name.

“Lucas Georgen,” said her father’s voice from behind.

She jumped and put her hand on her heart, a gesture that first startled him and then made him smile. “What are you doing, Daddy?”

“Sorry. I haven’t been listening, I promise. Just that last part. Lucas Georgen, rapist scumbag. We had no trouble at all getting people to spill their guts about him.”

Nicki was shocked to see that he was talking to the grave, too. “Anyway,” she said, “he got twenty years.”

Carter paid silent respects to Brad, then he turned his gaze to Nicki. “How are you holding up?”

Nicki took a deep breath and blew it out with a dramatic flair. “Everything’s working fine.”

“That’s not really what I meant,” he said. He nodded toward the grave. “How are you
holding up
?”

That answer took some thought. “Okay, I think. I only cried once.” Nicki spindled the newspaper article and tapped it into the vase. “I try to tell myself that this is the only time he’s ever really been happy.”

“I tell myself that about you, sometimes,” Carter mused.

Nicki didn’t reply. What was there to say?

“Well, I didn’t mean to intrude,” Carter said, stepping back. “Take your time. I’ll be—”

“It was the sweetest thing,” Nicki said, interrupting. She saw his look of confusion. “What you did. The marker, the stuff with the prosecution in Michigan, all of it. It was sweet.”

Her words disarmed him. He looked at the ground. “I thought I’d try being a good father for a change,” he mumbled.

“It’s hard to do when you’ve got a crappy kid to deal with,” she said.

Overhead, a cloud passed in front of the sun, blurring the edges of shadows. Carter cleared his throat again. “Well, I’ll give you some time alone with Brad.”

“I don’t need it,” she said, standing and brushing her pants legs straight. “He’s not here. Not really.” She tapped her chest with her finger. “He’s here.”

Carter cocked his head. “You sure? It’s likely to be a long time before we come back this way.”

“This is all the past,” Nicki said. “I’m tired of the past. Now that I’ve got a future, I thought I’d try living for it.”

As Nicki reached out to hold her father’s hand, the sun emerged in a breathtaking starburst of light. The entire universe seemed to be smiling.

Bonus for fans of John Gilstrap’s
Jonathan Grave thrillers!
Keep reading to enjoy a preview excerpt from

Coming from Kensington Publishing Corp. in July 2016.

* * *

In part four,
Time to Die
, the fourth chapter of
Friendly Fire
was previewed. As a special treat for readers of the
Nick of Time
series, the preview that follows picks up where that excerpt ended . . .