With Every Breath (46 page)

dies?"

Leslie drank some of her own coffee without answering. To her credit, she didn’t give her empty assurances that he wouldn’t.

"Well, let me give you an update of what I
know," she said finally, "and maybe you can fill in the cracks." She hesitated. "Gina Gallen tore a hole in the deck rail of Harry’s poor ferry." She watched Maddie’s expression. "She’s dead. Drowned. She drove Cassie’s car right through the rail into the water. Rumor has it that she spent a fair bit of time at the Sandbar first. She was probably drunk as a lord."

Maddie blinked, not quite able to believe it. Then she felt as though someone had punched her. "She killed herself? She really did it this time?"

"I don’t think we’ll ever know whether she meant to do it or not."

"Good," she gasped finally, fiercely. "Good."

"You won’t mean that later."

"Oh, I will. I will if Joe doesn’t come out of there alive."

Even as she said it, a doctor came through the swinging doors. Maddie lunged to her feet, but he went to talk to another party. She sat again slowly, carefully, feeling so very fragile.

"She shot him," she whispered. "Gina shot Joe, Leslie. Angus told me. Angus must have seen it. Somehow she got out of the hospital early."

"She walked out."

"What?"

Leslie grimaced. "It was a psych ward, Maddie, not a jail. She just walked out when no one was paying attention." Leslie shook her head. "As for Angus, I certainly missed something there."

"Everybody did. I did."

"Ah, but I’m trained to know better."

"How often did you ever see him?" Maddie countered. "Not often," Leslie allowed. "I rarely go up onto The Wick."

"Well, there you have it."

They were quiet for a little while. And then Maddie told her everything that had happened.

She would not keep Harry’s secret, not even for her mother. This had to end, she thought, and there was only one way to end it. Let it out, and let the air in.

"I guess Joe didn’t hear me scream because he was tied up with Gina, protecting Josh down there on the beach," she finished shakily, her throat threatening to close again. "And when Angus hid me in the dunes, Harry was probably off looking for Dierdre. She’d either

left the porch by then, or she was around the other side. I didn’t see her when I came out."

Leslie looked dazed. "I always thought," she said slowly, "that Harry killed both your parents, and I could never figure out why. But then, I guess, Candle does manage to keep a few secrets. And he was always so morose, so quiet, I couldn’t get a read on him to figure out otherwise."

"Well, you saw him," Maddie managed. "You saw him there at my house that day. So what you thought certainly made sense, except for the doors. Harry said he didn't lock the doors."

Leslie nodded thoughtfully, and Maddie knew she was still coming to terms with having kept her own secret all these years only to find out that she had been wrong.

"But there are still some things that don’t make sense," Maddie went on hoarsely. "Harry lured Rick here. So why did I get that sales circular? Was that Rick, or did Harry send it to scare me, too?"

"I honestly think that it was just as I said then, some red-tape glitch with your social security number."

Maddie shrugged lifelessly, suddenly too tired to care. It had all been so tangled, she thought. So treacherous, danger pressing in from so many different corners. And in the end, none of those little things mattered because Rick was really, finally gone. He would not go to jail to be released later. He would never hurt them, threaten them, again.

"There’s one other thing I don’t think you know," Leslie said suddenly.

Maddie looked over at her.

"Josh spoke."

The room tilted. "He talked?" Maddie looked over at him wildly.

"He used the Pathfinder radio to get Sheila’s attention. Then he hid and waited for help to come. That was why Angus never found him. He was under the porch. But he saw where Angus took Joe. He waited for the cops and told them."

"Told them," Maddie whispered.

Leslie nodded. "When Sheila found him, he said, ‘Joe’s down.’"

And with no more warning than that, Maddie’s tears spilled over.

"I think he’ll be okay now, Maddie. I really do. He’s probably seen more of guns than the average person sees in his lifetime. But this time he was able to do something. He saved the day. He was able to fight back and triumph. And that, I think, is what’s going to pull him the rest of the way out of his silence. He’ll no longer feel impotent, but strong. And a strong person doesn’t need to hide. You’ve found that out yourself." Leslie thought that maybe even Joe had.

It was more than three hours before any of the medical personnel brought word of Joe. Maddie went to the desk every half hour to ask about him, but they only said he was in surgery.

So long. Something inside her quailed.

The waiting was unbearable, and time was a blur. At some point, during one of her trips to the desk, a nurse took a good look at her and demanded to know if she had been involved in the same altercation that had wounded the police chief.

"Yes," Maddie answered, surprised. "Well, sort of."

The nurse brought out a small penlight and peered into her eyes. Leslie rushed to her side.

"You do look like hell," Leslie murmured.

The nurse dragged her unwillingly to an exam room to have her checked for a possible concussion. When she returned to the waiting room, pushing through the doors at the end of the hall again, she stopped dead.

Easily a hundred people from the island were crowded into the chairs and against the back wall. Harry was there. He wasn’t saying much, was standing off by himself, and he wouldn’t meet Maddie’s gaze more than once. But she thought something changed in his eyes when he did look at her and found her healthy and whole.

He had brought anybody who wanted to come over with him on the poor, dilapidated ferry that he had sacrificed so much for, she realized.

There was a surge of voices when the doctor finally pushed through the doors behind her. Maddie whipped around, too. He looked vaguely surprised to see so many people waiting, and he cleared his throat to silence them.

"The bullet lodged in the upper portion of Mr. Gallen’s right lung." The voices moaned. Maddie realized that she was holding Leslie’s hand in a death grip. Josh got up out of his chair, and he stared at the doctor, too.

"The bullet missed everything else, all other organs," the doctor went on, "and that’s why he’s still alive." There was a surge of voices. Maddie swayed with the wave of them.

"He was able to hang on because the bullet didn’t exit the other side. That stopped some of the bleeding. If it had exited, he wouldn’t have made the trip here. The bleeding would have been worse. We’ve removed the bullet and repaired most of the damage to his lung, but I’m afraid he’s still lost a dangerous amount of blood. He’s currently out of surgery, in recovery, but we’ve depleted our blood bank for his type. We’ve got a call in to Bangor, and they’re checking their supply over there, but Mr. Gallen has a very rare type of blood. If he receives some, I’d give him an eighty-twenty chance of survival, the twenty being dependent entirely upon whether or not infection sets in. But without blood, his chances lessen dramatically."

"What blood type does he need?" someone called out. And Maddie knew that they would comb the island until they found someone with the same kind.

"B-Negative," the doctor answered. "As I said, it’s very rare."

Maddie groaned. She would be ready to give blood for Joe in a second, but he couldn’t take AB-Negative. She still didn’t remember all that much about her past, and she had never seen her own birth certificate, but she was aware of her blood type. She’d needed some when Josh was born.

"We should hear from Bangor very shortly," the doctor went on. "If they can’t come through for us, then we can use a local donor who had O-Negative. Unfortunately most folks on the Wick are Positive. It’s hereditary, you know."

"Will he make it long enough for blood to come in from Bangor?" someone asked, panicked.

"Let’s pray so," said the doctor.

"It’s not necessary."

Maddie spun around again to look through the crowd. Harry Reiter still didn’t glance in her direction. He looked at no one but the doctor.

"I have AB-Negative blood also, and I would be more than glad to give Joe Gallen whatever he needs."

Chapter 38

Joe was in the hospital for ten days. By the fifth, he’d already gone through two nurses. His temper was foul, even for him.

Maddie sat slouched in the chair at the foot of his bed and watched as he ran off yet another one. She was a little annoyed, but she was more amused.

"What is
your problem?" she asked when the poor girl was gone. "You’re alive. That ought to have you feeling great."

He shifted his weight against the pillows, grimacing exaggeratedly. "My knee, and now this," he grumbled. "I’m a goddamn cripple."

"Watch your language," she said automatically, then she blinked in surprise. "Is that what’s making you so mean?" "Yeah. I can’t run, and now I’ll be lucky if I can breathe. They took out half my lung."

"Less than one-eighth." She’d read the chart at the foot of his bed the other day while he’d slept. "And it looks to me like you’re breathing just fine. At least they took that tube out of your throat."

"Yeah." His voice was a growl, partly from the ventilator, partly from his mood.

"Did that football team call you and beg you to come back or something? Is that it? Were you planning on playing again before Gina shot you?"

He glared at her. "What’s your point?"

"That you’re not a jock anymore. So you limp a little. So maybe you’ll be short of breath once in a while if you exert yourself. So what?"

That earned her another fierce glare.

"And from what I’ve noticed, your knee never held you back any," she went on. "And I guess I’d be in a position to know."

She’d been thinking about all the running around he’d done on her behalf. His slow, appraising smile made her realize that he wasn’t thinking the same thing. Then he wiggled his brows and made her laugh.

It felt so good to laugh.

"Anyway," she went a little breathlessly, "something tells me that lung won’t have much effect on your ... you either." Then she sobered, thinking it wouldn’t matter to her in the least if it did.

Was that wholesome? Or obsessive?

"You were right about all your love theories, you know," she said finally. "Or, at least, love in all its many forms has been alive and well on Candle Island."

"Nothing much else to do there," he pointed out, grumpy again.

"It shows." She thought about it. "Dierdre Reiter just... went off the edge, like you said. Into obsession. She was willing to do anything to keep Harry for her own, not so much because she loved him, but for herself."

"Yeah." He’d thought about that in the days that had passed since she’d caught him up on everything that had happened.

"And Beacher was more or less the same way," she went on. "Obsessed."

"Only he couldn’t
possess your mother, and that infuriated him."

Maddie nodded. "Harry was your typical Get-Married-To-Ms.-Almost-Right scenario. "

"Until Annabel came along. Until he met his real love too late."

"And then he became one of those poor souls who did what you said. He lived bitterly with his mistake." "Only on the surface," Joe pointed out. "He never could control his heart. He never could give that back to Dierdre."

"No." She leaned back in the chair again and put her feet up on the edge of the bed, thinking. "Rick fit into two categories. What he felt for me tilted over into obsession. And he was my Almost-Right at a time when I thought I needed to get married." She hesitated. "What about Gina?"

"Yeah, that was my real thing-almost right theory, too," he said shortly.

"It was?" Her heart thumped.

"Yeah. It was time to get married, so I took someone I thought was almost right instead of waiting around for the real thing."

She could live with that, she decided.

"And then there was Angus," she went on. She shuddered unconsciously.

"Actually, I think Angus’s was the purest love of all," Joe said suddenly. "Christ, he’s not evil.
He never was, and that was why nobody ever picked up on what he had done. He just didn’t have the intelligence to properly handle what he was feeling for you. Beacher hurt you, Angus thought he killed your mother, so he acted on his rage."

They were quiet for a moment.

"Kenny called," Joe went on finally. "Angus just babbled when they took him in. It tied up a few things, though, from what little sense Kenny could make of what he said."

"Like what?" she asked warily.

"The kitten, for starters."

"Angus killed the kitten," she said hollowly.

"Yeah. And those were his prints on the window. He went in and strangled it, then he just dropped it on your porch."

"Why?
Why would he do that to Josh? I thought he liked Josh."

"Josh had nothing to do with it. He told Kenny he was afraid the kitten was going to hurt you. He had a thing about cats. I guess he got scratched once or something. Come to think of it, there’s a zero cat population up on The Wick, and you’d think those dunes would be crawling with the critters."

Maddie closed her eyes, feeling sick. "Stop it, Joe."

He almost grinned. "Anyway, they found the keys in his shack. Your father’s—Beacher’s—keys. They were in a slit in his mattress."

"Didn’t they look in his shack for the keys back then? Didn’t they talk to him?"

"Sure they did. But nobody actually physically searched him. He wasn’t a suspect. Christ, he could even have been carrying them around in his pants pockets or something. Dave Bramnick interviewed him I don’t know how many times. It’s all in the file."

"Angus is hard to get information out of."

Joe snorted. "Yeah. His own deficiency was his best defense. But he was smart enough to get rid of your parents’ bodies and to move the truck, although I think in his mind he was probably just cleaning everything up