Trace of Innocence (16 page)

Jack grabbed me and pulled me to the surface. I gasped for air and shrieked.

“Pull off some of your clothes.”

“I c-c-c-an’t.” My teeth chattered so much I felt as if I was actually breaking my molars.

I was weighted down with the bulletproof vest, with my heavy boots and winter clothes.

Jack grabbed me, and we were face-to-face, both shivering.

“I’m not going to prison,” he said, holding on to me. My brain hurt, my temples throbbed.

“Jack…we need to…get…back in the boat.”

I tried to stretch an arm toward it, but I couldn’t.

From the helicopter, someone dropped a life ring. It fell to the water a few feet from me.

I looked at Jack. His face was white, completely pale. I assumed I looked the same. Everything hurt, and I felt us both sinking a bit.

“Jack,” I whispered desperately.

“I’m going to Katie,” he said.

“Don’t. Don’t.” I tried to crane my neck. Three men looked poised to dive into the lake. Motorboats were coming toward us.

“Let her go,” someone shouted.

Jack stared at me, his eyes resolute.

“Where’s Daddy? Don’t do this to me. You…know what I’ve…gone through…my mom.”

“Stone table,” he said, then slipped under the surface of the water.

I felt myself sinking with him, his arms still wrapped around me. He was giving up, intentionally allowing the water to carry us to the depths. I tried to kick my feet, but found I couldn’t. I took my hands and pried his fingers from me. He sank down farther until I couldn’t see him. I tried to move toward the surface, but couldn’t reach it.

Miraculously, I felt someone pulling me up. Pulling me up toward the light. Then, the world went black.

I
woke up in an ambulance, wrapped in tons of blankets. I was also, I thought, naked.

“Yes. I got to see your ass.”

The voice was Lewis’s. I turned my head. “What?”

“They took your wet clothes off and I got to see you naked. I could spend the rest of my life happily living off that specific memory.”

“Fuck off,” I said.

He leaned down over the stretcher and kissed the top of my wet head. “If anything had happened to you, I’d never have gotten over it. I’ll send your brother in.”

Lewis got out of the ambulance and Mikey came in. “Hey…little sis. How are you?”

“Cold.”

“They got these warmers on you. Gonna take you to the hospital.”

“Not until we find Daddy.”

“We heard what he said, over the wire, but Jack was out of his mind with hypothermia, honey. We don’t know where Dad is. The FBI have raided all the clubs, but basically, seems like Jack took Dad on his own. He wanted insurance that he wouldn’t get the rap for the murder.”

“No.” I tried to sit up and felt as though my muscles had turned to spaghetti. I had never ached so much in my entire life.

“Baby…they’re in Jack’s apartment now. They’re trying to find Daddy.” Mikey put his lips on my forehead. “Man, your skin is like icicles.”

“Get me out of here. Get me something to wear.”

“No…Billie, baby, come on. I can’t tell you how scared I was for you.”

“Jack knew I lost Mom. He lost Katie. He wouldn’t do that. He wouldn’t let Daddy die. He told me someplace real. Stone table. Is that a bar, a restaurant? He’s somewhere, Mikey.”

I groaned and sat up. “I’m not going to the hospital, so you might as well find me clothes.”

“Shit. Someone’s gotta talk some sense into that stubborn Quinn head of yours.”

He ducked out of the ambulance, but he returned a couple of minutes later with an FBI jacket and a pair of sweats.

“Sweats are from Lewis. Were in his trunk. Jacket’s from an agent. Got a pair of socks here from Lewis’s workout bag, too. Don’t know if they’re
clean.
”

“You think I care? Give them to me.”

Still shaking, I tried to dress myself but found my fingers didn’t listen to my brain. “What’s up with my hands?”

“You were in a freezing lake for five minutes loaded down with a vest and everything else. You’re lucky you didn’t drown like Jack.”

“Help me,” I pleaded with Mikey. He came over to me and buttoned my jacket.

“Stand up. Put your hands on my shoulder.”

He’s my brother, so I didn’t feel embarrassed. He got me dressed, then pulled all the blankets from the stretcher around me. He opened the doors to the ambulance and motioned for Tommy Two Trees to come over.

“She ain’t listening to me, buddy.”

Tommy took one look at me and started saying, “Oh, no…oh, no…you get back on that stretcher.”

I shook my head. “Not until we find my dad. So you either help me or I’m walking away with my brother. And if I die or get sick or whatever, it’s on your conscience.”

“Listen, I’ll just arrest you, Billie. Doesn’t matter to me how I keep you safe and get you medical help.”

“Fine. I’ll go to the media with
that.
”

He sighed. “Look, we’re going to find your dad.”

“Punch in stone table on a search engine.”

“Did. Nothing. No bar, no restaurant for a five-hundred-mile radius with that name.”

My eyes hurt. My eyelashes hurt. Everything hurt, but I tried to focus. I felt as if I had a migraine.

“Wait!”

“What?” Tommy asked.

“Jack…Jack knew this island because he hunted and fished. That was why it was our place. Shit…wait. Put in ‘stone table’ and all the various state parks around here. I have a hunch.”

Tommy nodded and disappeared. I huddled next to the heat.

Ten minutes later, Tommy came back.

“We have a match. A stone formation at the top of a mountain. That fucker might have been tell
ing the truth after all. We’re taking the helicopters.”

“We’re coming,” I said.

“Now, listen, you two, I don’t know what we’re going to find and you’re supposed to be on your way to the hospital, not going up in a copter on a wild-goose chase.”

“It’s not going to be a wild-goose chase. I know Jack was telling me the truth. Please, Tommy.”

Tommy spun around and cursed into the wind, then turned back. “All right, damn. Damn, damn, damn. You can come. But you’re staying in the helicopter.”

He spoke into a gadget of some sort. We were in a parking lot, with FBI cars, cop cars and flashing lights. Two copters appeared in the sky and landed in the lot.

I looked at Mikey. “My legs aren’t working and I don’t have shoes. Can you carry me?”

Mikey nodded and scooped me up. The two of us and Two Trees darted across the parking lot. Lewis came up to us.

“She needs to go to the hospital!”

“Look, Lewis,” Tommy said. “This is easier than dealing with her.”

“Let’s go, guys,” I urged.

We left Lewis and maneuvered over to the
helicopters, their blades whirring. Mikey ducked, carrying me, and whispered in my ear, “Whatever happens, I got your back.”

I nodded. He settled me into a corner of the helicopter. Tommy climbed on, along with a few extra agents, and then we took off, my stomach feeling as though it lifted and then sank. I was nauseous.

Mikey kept an arm around me, and I continued to shiver. The two copters flew through the night. I looked out the window into the darkness wondering what we would find at the stone table.

“How cold is it out?” I asked.

Tommy looked out the window, too, not looking me in the eyes.

“With the wind chill it’s twenty below.”

“Figures he picks some of the coldest weather all winter for this shit.” I fought back tears. I thought of Jack’s pale face disappearing into the depths of the lake.

“Dad’s a fighter,” Mikey said.

I nodded. But I also knew my father was a city guy—his idea of taking us camping was heading down to Atlantic City for the weekend and letting us play in the sand while he hit the casinos. He wasn’t a fisherman or a hunter. I didn’t even know if he owned warm enough clothes for a night as cold as tonight.

We hovered over the top of the mountain.

“Where are we going to land?” I asked Tommy.

“We’re not. Agents are going to rappel down. It’s our only choice.”

“Let me go,” I begged.

“Not a chance. For one thing, you’re not strong enough right now. Let the agents go.”

I watched as FBI agents opened the helicopter door and prepared to climb out and down ropes. I was terrified. All I could do was hope that Mikey and I wouldn’t lose our only parent to a murderer—we’d been the victim of one killer before, and I couldn’t bear the thought of our family being victim to a second one.

Lights beamed down on the mountaintop. I looked out the helicopter window as agents swarmed the stone formation. It did look like a table. One rock leaned on another. It was smooth, like a tabletop. Agents scurried, dressed in black, reminding me of ants invading a picnic.

Tommy came over to me. “I’m going down. Seems to me a friend should be there to find your father. Okay if I leave the two of you alone in here with the pilots?”

We nodded.

I watched as Tommy, dressed in black pants
and a jacket with FBI emblazoned on the back, disappeared out the helicopter.

Mikey held me close and talked to me over the noise of whirring helicopter blades.

“Whatever happens, me and you are going to be okay, Billie.”

I nodded. “I’m sorry, Mikey.”

“Why? What do you have to be sorry for?”

“For one thing, I was involved with Jack.”

“He fooled us all. Billie, he was on the edge, but we all thought it was the booze. Not this shit.”

“And the Justice Foundation. If Lewis and I hadn’t gotten involved, none of this would have happened.”

I squeezed my eyes shut, willing away tears.

“Hey…you’re the smart one in the family. I’m proud of you.”

He tousled my hair, and we sat in the helicopter and waited. I prayed. I could hear Mikey saying “please, please, please” under his breath.

I could hear someone talking to the pilot over the radio. The copilot looked back and said, “We got him. He’s alive.”

I hugged my brother as hard as I could. “You hear that?”

“See? The Quinns are tough, baby. The Quinns are tough.”

“Would be nice if we didn’t have to be.”

“Come on…it’s who we are.”

I thought about being in that lake with Jack. I thought about
why
I was there. To do the right thing. Because I could. Because even though I had fears, I believed in something bigger than myself. I was a Quinn. I was tough. It was who I was.

I
n my hospital bed, dehydrated, being treated for exposure and some frostbite, I thought of my mother. And as I looked at all the flowers that filled my room, I had a long-forgotten memory of her.

She used to have a garden in our backyard. Every spring, she would go out to the beds and mulch and turn the earth. I remember watching her in the crisp spring air. She’d tuck a stray hair behind her ear, and breathe in deep.

“Smell the spring, Billie, can you smell it?”

I nodded, but I wasn’t sure I really could. I watched as she planted flowers into holes she dug with her hand trowel. Gladiolas and tulips.

When it got a little warmer, she would plant Shasta daisies, sunflowers, pansies and peonies, and our kitchen would be transformed into a miniature nursery. Tomato plants and green pepper plants, cucumber plants and little lettuce plants would be nurtured in tiny little pots and starter kits, waiting to be transplanted out in the big garden. All summer, then, we’d have fresh vegetables.

After my mother was murdered, we never planted the garden again. My father didn’t know a thing about plants, and Mikey and I were too young. But even today, when I visit Dad in springtime, old plants, gone wild over time, still push up out of the beds. They’re straggly and untidy; they wouldn’t win a ribbon at a flower show, but they were part of her.

I climbed out of my bed and pulled on my robe over the arm that didn’t have an IV in it. Twenty-four hours later and I was just starting to feel warm, really warm, inside. I still felt stiff and achy, but I was looking forward to going home.

I walked over to the windowsill, dragging
my IV pole. All the floral arrangements sat in the window, filling the room with a beautiful aroma. Joe, of course, king of the grand gesture, had sent an enormous arrangement that had to have cost a couple of hundred dollars. Large lilies and roses and delicate lilies of the valley spilled out of a crystal vase. I read the card:

Lewis, in his usual sick-humor way, sent me a funeral arrangement. A standing arrangement like the ones mourners would see in a funeral home stood in one corner. I shook my head and read the card:

Mikey had sent me a dozen red roses. Tommy Two Trees sent me a basket of wildflowers, with a card that read:

And David had sent an arrangement. It was small, delicate, a single orchid. His card was simply signed:

I slid my feet into my slippers and opened the door and poked my head out. I didn’t see any nurses—they wanted me to stay in bed—and so I slipped across the hall.

Daddy was sleeping.

They had found him in a cave, tied up. His lamp had gone through its batteries, and he’d been left with no food or water. Jack had marched him up that mountain during the day, at gunpoint. If Jack hadn’t told me “stone table,” my father would have died, something that still made my insides queasy.

He had suffered in the cave. Frostbite, hypothermia, and his heart rate got very erratic.

Sleeping, my dad looked peaceful. He had gotten older, sort of without my realizing it, in the same way I think it still stunned him that I nearly had my doctorate and I lived my own life.

I sat on the edge of his bed, and brushed my hand across his forehead. His eyelids fluttered.

“Billie.” He smiled at me.

“Hey, Daddy.” I smiled back at him.

“You saved my life, you know.”

“Not really. It was me who got you in that mess to begin with.”

“But you went out onto that lake. You got Jack to tell you where I was.”

I shrugged. “I was so scared, Dad.”

He didn’t say anything, just grabbed my hand. “You know, Billie, I didn’t think I’d ever see you again. When the batteries started going on the lantern, and then it got pitch-black, I started talking to your mother.”

I swallowed hard.

“I haven’t been a saint. You know that. Your brother and I…we’re one sort of person. And you…you’re a different sort. And I told your mother that I wouldn’t have wanted to die without you knowing I’m proud of you. This wasn’t your fault. You got an innocent man out of prison. And…I wouldn’t want you to stop because of what happened.”

“I don’t know, Dad.”

In truth, as I lay in my hospital bed, I had wondered what to do. Did I have the stomach to keep doing work for the Justice Foundation? Was it in me?

“You do know.”

I nodded.

“And one of these days, I really think you’re going to solve your mother’s murder. And then she can rest in peace. Real peace.”

“I love you, Daddy.”

“Love you, too.”

I hugged him and then went back across the hallway to my room. Lewis was waiting.

“What about staying in bed do you not understand, Billie?”

“I was just visiting my dad. Thanks for the flower arrangement, by the way. I can’t tell you the looks I’ve received from the nurses.”

“Don’t mention it.”

I climbed back into bed and snuggled down under the four blankets they had on my bed.

“I can’t get the picture of Jack in that lake out of my mind.”

“It’s better he go to wherever it is we all go than face prison as a cop.”

“You know, that sounded faintly agnostic, or even a touch spiritual, instead of your usual atheist viewpoint. C.C. is rubbing off on you.”

“Billie, she’s gone.”

“What do you mean, she’s gone?”

“She asked me to give you this.” He handed me a letter.

“What do you mean, she’s gone?” I asked again.

“She’s left for a spiritual retreat. She has some soul-searching to do. Open the letter.”

I opened the envelope and unfolded the letter inside. It was written in a delicate script.

I looked up at Lewis. “She wants me to visit prisoners.”

“I know,” he said.

“Lewis…do you think we should go on with this stuff?”

He nodded. “She’s right. It’s bigger than all of us. It’s a calling of its own sort.”

“You okay? I mean, with her going away?”

“Just gives me another reason to be my usual melancholy self.”

“This was hard, Lewis.”

“Yeah…but you’re a Quinn. You know they’re planning a big party when you and your father get out of here.”

“We Quinns don’t need much of a reason for a party. Did I tell you about the time we had one because my uncle beat a speeding ticket?”

He smiled. “Didn’t this whole adventure start with a Quinn party?”

“Yeah. And a bar fight.”

“Well, it wouldn’t be a Quinn party without one.”

My father and I were released a day apart from each other, and that weekend we had a blowout bash to celebrate.

Tommy Two Trees came up to me in the
midst of the chaos. “Your father just took me for forty bucks at the pool table.”

“He’s milking all that sympathy.”

“Lewis tells me you two are sticking with the Foundation.”

I nodded, looking across the room at David as he sat with Mikey, laughing and playing cards. He’d still be in prison if it weren’t for C.C. and Joe taking his case.

“Do me a favor then, keep my card handy. Something tells me you and Lewis are a magnet for trouble. Never know when you’ll need me.”

“Thanks. For everything, Tommy.”

He clasped his hands together and bowed. “You’re quite a warrior.”

I bowed back.

Then I walked across the room to David. He leaned back a bit and I sat on his lap and planted a kiss on his cheek.

“Hey, beautiful,” he breathed in my ear, sending a shiver through me. He slid one hand across my back and then laid down four jacks.

“Four of a kind, gentlemen. I believe the pot is mine.”

“Shit!” Mikey said and threw his cards down. “Let me go get more beer. At least if I’m going to lose, I’m going to get good and drunk doing it.”

I laughed. Suddenly, I heard a commotion by the door. I rolled my eyes. “The Murphy brothers just arrived.”

Next thing I knew, chairs were flying. David and I ducked under the table. He grabbed my face and kissed me.

“I’d like to tell you never to scare me again like you did, Billie, but somehow I don’t think that’s possible.”

I looked at him. “I’m still going to work with Joe and C.C.”

“I know.”

“And someday I’m going to solve my mother’s murder.”

“I believe you.”

I peered out from under the table. The Quinns were winning. “And now I’m going to go break up this fight.”

I crawled out from under the table, just as I saw Lewis get hit by a good right hook from one of the Murphys.

Just another Friday night.