CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

The first voice I recognized was Jason’s. “We have to take her to a hospital.”

“We will, sir. There’s an ambulance outside and they’re bringing in the gurney. But she’s stable now. She’s in no danger.”

“She’s in a coma! And she’s bleeding! She could bleed to death—”

“She’s unconscious, sir, but I don’t believe she’s in a coma. And we’ve got the bleeding under control.”

I heard my brother swear under his breath and move a few paces away, toward the sound of other voices murmuring in the background. “Are you the security guard who’s in love with my sister?” he snapped.

“Yes.” Bram’s voice. Not a second’s hesitation at the outrageous question.

“We’ve got to get her to a hospital.”

“We will. Just a couple things to wrap up here.”

Now Caroline was speaking, as calm and collected as always. “I didn’t mean to hurt her. That was just a moment of panic. I would never hurt Taylor.”

Siracusano next. “But you did mean to kill Duncan Phillips, is that right?”

“I didn’t plan to murder him,” she said coolly, “but I did.”

Several voices spoke at once in response to that little admission. I couldn’t make out what any of them said. I felt myself slipping in and out of the scene, my senses growing sharper, then dimmer, in a strange wavelike succession. I seemed to be lying on the floor and I hurt all over, more sharply in some places than others. I didn’t think it would ever be possible to open my eyes. The paramedic (or so I assumed him to be) had assured my brother that I was in no danger, but I wondered almost idly how badly I’d been hurt. Would I be disfigured? Would I be paralyzed? In movies, injured people were always asked to move their extremities in order to prove their muscles still responded to their wills. I curled and uncurled my toes, clenched and loosened my fingers. Everything seemed functional. The paramedic was probably right.

I was so tired then that if my eyes had been open, I would have shut them.

Suddenly there was a fresh batch of noises across the room. I heard the front door opening, people moving around the space, new voices asking questions.

Then familiar voices spoke almost over my head. “We’re bringing Caroline Summers downtown,” Siracusano said. “You’ll take care of Ms. Kendall?”

“I’ll take care of her,” Jason interjected.

“We’ll handle it,” Bram said tersely.

“I’ll want a statement from her tomorrow.”

“You’ll fucking leave her alone!” Jason swore. “After the things you accused her of—”

I could imagine Siracusano’s heavy, impassive stare traveling from Jason’s face to Bram’s. “We’re off, then,” he said, and I heard the sounds of several bodies making their way through the door.

More footsteps crossed to me; people knelt on either side of my body. “We’re just going to move her to the gurney and then we’ll take her to the Evanston hospital,” the paramedic explained. “Are you going to meet us there?”

“Yes,” Bram and Jason replied in unison.

It was the most immense effort of my life to lift my eyelids and try to focus, first on the fair, furrowed face to my left, and then on the darker, sterner face on my right. Jason and Bram. “I’ll be okay,” I whispered.

“Tay!” Jason cried, bending down to peer at me. “Can you hear me? Are you all right?”

“Well, I’ve been better.”

“Don’t talk,” Bram advised.

“She’ll talk if she wants to,” Jason said fiercely. “Do you hurt? They shot you up with morphine.”

“I would have expected better—of morphine.”

Bram’s arm flashed across my vision as he pushed Jason back from me. “Don’t make her talk,” he said, just as fiercely. “Let’s get her out of here.”

I was too tired to protest. And there was no time to argue, anyway, as the paramedics elbowed their way to my side and began lifting me to the stretcher. In moments, they were carrying me outside and hoisting me into an ambulance with its carnival red-and-white lights. I shut my eyes against the kaleidoscope.

The ride to the hospital was a jumble of unsteady motion and rough bumps and static over the radio, voices raised in indistinguishable calls, sirens flaring in and out of range. It couldn’t have taken more than fifteen minutes to reach our destination, where my eyes were jarred open as I was unloaded from the ambulance. I tried hard to keep them open and take in the events unfolding around me. The medics rolled me in through great glass doors, and I could see both Bram and Jason awaiting me on the other side. I realized they must have teleported over.

I closed my eyes again, let myself drift on a sea of sound and motion. I felt myself wheeled down hallways, then raised from the gurney to a hospital bed. Someone grabbed my arm and wrapped it with an inflatable cuff, and someone else began examining my recent wounds. I could sense the presence of multiple people hovering over me and the great glaring intrusion of a bright overhead light, but I was able to ignore it all until something touched too hard on the gash across my neck.

“Owww!” I cried as my eyes flew open. There were about five people in the room, but my gaze focused on the face closest to me, dark and unearthly beautiful and framed by a flowing mass of black hair.

“It’s an angel,” I whispered. “I’ve died and gone to heaven.”

Domenic laughed. “No chance, sweetheart,” he said. “You’ve sinned and gone to hell.”

“Oh, well,” I said, feeling my eyelids drop again. “As long as you’re here with me.”

I felt his hand rest briefly against my cheek—not, I was sure, a medical assessment. “I won’t leave you for a minute,” he said. “You can close your eyes.”

*

There’s no such thing as sleep in a hospital, though I’ll admit the drugs went a long way toward negating the irritating effects of the constant noise and the hourly interruptions. I still felt like hell when I more or less woke up in the morning, responding to the invasion of a cheery little nurse who looked no older than my freshman students.

“Good morning, Taylor,” she chirped, consulting a computer screen to learn my history and check my vital signs. “How are you feeling?”

“Like I had my throat cut last night,” I said. “How are you?”

The sound of my voice triggered movement in a corner of the room, and Jason uncoiled into my line of sight. “Taylor? You awake?”

He was instantly at the side of the bed, gazing down at me, looking more serious and more adult than I’d ever seen him. Clearly, he had not slept any better than I had, and his cheek bore the corrugated imprint of the fabric from the chair where he must have spent the night. His eyes were gray with exhaustion and his skin was pasty with worry, but the smile that crossed his face was like a splash of sunshine.

“You look terrible,” he said.

“Were you here all night?”

He nodded. “Domenic came in for a while when his shift was over. He just left, in fact.”

The nurse seemed pleased with whatever numbers were registering on the monitors. “Do you want to try to go to the bathroom?” she asked. “I can help you.”

“God, yes. Jason, you just sit here for a moment.”

Five minutes later, I was back in bed, and my brother and I were alone. I took a long sip of water from a bedside cup, then sank against the pillows with a groan. “Have you told Mom?” I demanded.

He scrunched up his nose. “Well, a little bit. I mean, she’d seen your face on the news, no way she didn’t know what was going on. So I told her you were helping the police find the real killer, and you got slightly injured during the apprehension of the suspect—”

“When did you start writing true-crime melodrama?”

“And that you were in the hospital, but you’d be fine. She didn’t really calm down, though, until I told her Domenic was here, and then she said, ‘Oh, Domenic will take care of her,’ and she wasn’t worried any more. But she’s coming over this morning, of course.”

“So what happened?” I demanded. “When did you get to Caroline’s? How did Bram get there? I mean, the last thing I remember is Caroline coming at me like something out of ‘Psycho,’ and the next thing I know the room is full of people, and you and Bram are having a fight.”

“Soon as I got your text message, I headed for the nearest teleport booth. It just seemed wrong to have you out there by yourself, and I decided I should come hang out with you. And I guess your little cop buddy figured that was exactly what I’d do, because he had Mom’s place staked out, and he followed me. I didn’t know he was following me, of course, because I had no idea what he looked like.

“And I arrived at that woman’s place just in time to hear you screaming, and her screaming, and glass crashing all over the place. And I was pounding on the door, trying to break it down, and all of a sudden this guy comes tearing around the corner and just slams into the door. I mean, it practically shattered. Took the two of us another couple minutes to break it open and when we did—”

He stopped and shuddered. I could imagine what a hellish vision that had been, a homicidal maniac wielding an art-glass stiletto as blood spumed up from my sprawled body. I was just as glad not to have witnessed it from their perspective.

“Anyway, he practically broke her neck jerking her away from you, and I was calling the paramedics while he got her under control. Actually, she kind of froze up as soon as he grabbed her. It was like she suddenly realized what she’d done and just—I don’t know—didn’t want any part of it. It was so bizarre. I mean, one minute she was this shrieking lunatic, and the next minute she was sitting there so calm and quiet she could have been in church.”

“That’s the Caroline I know,” I said. “That second one.”

“So who is she, anyway? How did you figure it out? And once you figured it out, how could you be so stupid as to go there and confront her?”

I sighed. “Oh, that’s not how it happened,” I said, and I explained the whole story. He shook his head in disbelief at the end of my recital.

“Strange,” he said. “The whole thing is hardly credible. But at least it’s all over now.”

“She confessed, didn’t she? I heard her say it. That she killed him.”

“I heard her, too. I suppose she could hire some fancy lawyer who tries to prove the cops coerced a confession, but—not our problem anymore. You’re not the chief suspect, and that’s all that matters.”

I said, “And any day that begins with not being a murder suspect has just got to be a good day.”

*

I sent Jason home to sleep, even though he’d planned to wait for our mother’s arrival. “I can handle her on my own,” I assured him, and he was so tired he agreed after only three protests.

After he was gone, the nurse found twenty minutes to peel off my bandages and help me to the shower, though the first experience of looking in the mirror was ghastly. I had small cat-scratch cuts all over my face, a few deep gouges along my neck at points that apparently did not house vital arteries, and three long slices on my left arm, my right shoulder, and my right ribcage. My hands were a mass of criss-crossed gashes. Flakes of dried blood flecked my face like glitter and streaks of it hennaed my hair. I was pale as a corpse and the circles under my eyes looked like actual bruises.

Against all this carnage, the ruby insets on my cheek looked frivolous and out of place.

“I think a quick glance is all I need,” I said, turning from the mirror and stepping into the shower.

Amazing how much better I felt once I came out, bleeding slightly along the deeper wounds but clean and soapy-smelling. The nurse rebandaged all the dangerous cuts, gave me clean scrubs, and helped me back to bed, where I slept for the next two hours.

When I woke up, my mother was there, using actual cards to play gin rummy with Marika. I closed my eyes quickly, but that seemed cowardly, so I opened them again. “Hi, guys,” I said.

They came to their feet so fast that the cards flew everywhere, and in seconds the two of them were hanging over my bed.

“Oh Taylor, oh honey, oh you look so dreadful—”

“Lord, she could have cut your throat.”

“Sweetheart, how are they treating you? Has Domenic been here? I knew you’d be fine as long as they let Domenic take care of you.”

“You wouldn’t believe what the gossip sites are saying about Caroline. Discarded mistress with a mental health problem—they’re digging up old boyfriends and even her therapist to talk about her instability—”

“Have you been eating? When are you going home? You’ll come and stay with me a few days, I’ll fix up your room.”

“I gotta say, Tay, you look like shit.”

I closed my eyes again, but this time I was laughing.

*

They stayed two hours and cheered me immensely. It didn’t even seem too weird when talk turned to Jason and they spoke his name with equal affection. I would get used to it, surely I would get used to it, my brother and my best friend being lovers. I just didn’t want the sorts of details one might normally ask for.

I napped again after they left, but sleep was beginning to seem pretty tame. Which was why I was sitting up on the side of the bed, my feet dangling over the edge, wondering if I had the courage to try to walk down the hall on my own, when Bram came striding in around four in the afternoon.

“I don’t think you’re supposed to be getting up,” were the first words out of his mouth. “Has the doctor been here? Have you asked anyone when you can get out of bed? I think you should lie back down.”

I stared at him with a great deal of resentment and a soupcon of anger. Nearly a full day since my desperate duel with a killer, and this was the first I’d seen or heard from him. “When did you turn into my mother?” I said in a hostile tone of voice. “I’ll get up if I feel like it.”

He didn’t answer that, merely watched me push myself to my feet and stand there shakily for a moment. On my previous visits to the bathroom, nurses had supported me the whole way, and the world hadn’t seemed quite so dizzying. “Okay, well, I don’t really feel like it,” I said, and sat down again.

Bram tried to hide his smile. “But I’m glad to see that you’re showing your usual sass and spunk.”

I felt very cross, though I’d tried hard to be sunny with all my other visitors. “Next you’ll be calling me ‘saucy’ and ‘perky,’” I grumbled. “I can do without the glib descriptions.”

“I think I’m going to step outside,” he said, “and try this all over again from the beginning.”

He turned for the door, but I said, “No, wait. I’m sorry. It’s just been—well, you know—kind of a rough day or two.”

He came close enough to bend over, put a hand under my chin, and tip my face up for a gentle kiss. I immediately felt ten times more cheerful than I had since Friday afternoon.

“May I?” he asked and settled himself next to me on the bed. He wrapped his arm loosely around me, and I leaned into his shoulder. A hundred times better.

“I know,” he said quietly. “It’s been worse for you than for anybody. And there was nothing I could do to shield you.”

“When did Siracusano start considering me the main suspect?” I asked. “Was it just when he found the door codes or—”

“Since Saturday,” he said. “When he found your DNA on the gun. And then with your thumb chip showing up at Olympic—and the door code—I mean, he didn’t seem to be looking anywhere else.”

“Did you believe it?” I asked in a small voice. “Did you think I’d killed him?”

He pulled away so he could put his hands on my shoulders and turn me to face him. “No,” he said, looking down at me so seriously that he seemed to be trying to reinforce his words with his intensity. “I didn’t think you were capable of killing anyone, even Duncan Phillips, and especially not at one in the morning when you’d have had to sneak back in to do it. Siracusano thought there was motive, but it wasn’t enough of a motive. If you were going to kill him, you’d have done it right there in the study Tuesday afternoon.”

“Although I’m glad he’s dead,” I said.

“Oh, yeah. I’m going to be celebrating the anniversary of that day for years to come.”

I settled back against his shoulder and his arm came around me again. “I knew you wanted him dead,” I offered. “I remembered what you’d said at the pool one day. But I didn’t think you’d done it. I didn’t think you’d hurt Quentin that way.”

“Glad to hear it.”

“But who did you suspect?”

He was silent a moment. “Bordeaux.”

“That’s who I figured, too!” I exclaimed. “But what did you think when my door code showed up?”

He glanced down at me. “What I’d always figured. That you’d given it to her and she’d used it. I mean, everybody in the household knew that. But I don’t think anyone would have told Siracusano.”

“She said she was going to.”

“Yeah, and I bet she would have. Tough girl, that one.”

“I adore her.”

He smiled. “Don’t we all.”

I slumped against him, still tired, but determined to stay awake and finish the conversation. “Caroline never crossed my mind,” I said. “I ended up at her place ’cause I thought I’d be safe. Weird.”

He kissed the top of my head, pressing his lips for a long moment against my hair. “God. Not something I want to go through again—seeing that scene—” He lifted his head and shook it. “Cool customer, though, once she calmed down. She went down to the station and made a statement and hasn’t once recanted or altered a single detail. Never once tried to change her story.”

“What will happen to her?”

I felt him shrug. “Go to jail, get bail, get a lawyer, go to court. I imagine it will be the trial of the century.”

I was silent a moment, mulling things over. “I still can’t take it all in,” I said. “I’ll need some time for it to make sense. Meanwhile, I guess, I just try to heal and put some normalcy back in my life.”

“When are they releasing you?”

“I’m hoping it will be tonight.”

“Tonight! I don’t think so!”

I couldn’t help laughing. “You know, I think the only reason they kept me overnight was that they couldn’t get me to wake up. I can’t believe that they always let people stay in the hospital when all they have are a few flesh wounds.”

“I’m going to talk to your doctor before I leave.”

“I want to go home. I want to be with my friends. I want to go see Quentin.”

“Quentin’s in the hospital, too,” he said.

I jerked away from him, wired with a sudden alarm. “What? What happened? Why didn’t you—”

“Shhh, shh,” he hushed me, and drew me back into his arms. “He’s at Northwestern General. Undergoing the first round of tests for the new Kyotenin program.”

I pulled away again, still staring. “What? I thought his father—”

“His father’s dead,” he said callously. “Saturday, Francis and I took Quentin downtown to enroll him in the program, and today he went in full-time. We still have legal medical authority over him—and that won’t change until his aunt arrives, so I guess we’ll have it for a while. So we figured, act now while we can. Once he’s in the program, no matter how she feels about it, it’d be harder to yank him out. We didn’t want to waste any time.”

I thought about this a moment. “An honorable plan of action,” I said a little doubtfully, “but kind of ruthless.”

He shrugged. “At times I can be a ruthless guy.”

I looked up at him, searching his face. “What’s going to happen to Quentin, Bram? Who is this aunt of his? What’s she like? I know it’s only two more years before he’s of legal age, but that could be a long two years.”

He nodded. “I know. I’ve thought about it a lot. I don’t know what her plans are—I don’t know how she feels about Quentin. I do know she hasn’t fought too hard for him since his mother died. I do know that Dennis and Francis and I have done more for him than anybody he ever met—until you came along, and Bordeaux. And I think maybe we should be allowed to keep taking care of him.”

“What do you mean?”

He shrugged. “I want to see if there’s a way I can win legal guardianship. Only if Quentin wants it, of course—and he’s old enough, and of sound enough mind, that I think a court would listen to him and place him with the guardian he chose. We’d appoint a whole board of trustees to take care of his money, so no one would think that was what I was after. And then he could continue to live in the house that he knows, and he could continue to be surrounded by the people who love him and—I don’t know, I just think it would be a better life for him than going off to Australia with someone who’s almost a stranger.”

I was still watching his face. “That’s a big responsibility,” I said quietly. “To take on the care of a dying boy.”

He nodded. “I know. So even if I win custody, it might only be for one or two years, and they could be really bad years. But they might be good years. This new program could maybe give him another decade—longer—no one knows. He might even outlive me.”

I thought of all the shadows lurking in Quentin’s life, the specter of mortality haunting him from the day he was born—and everything this man had done to try to cheat those shadows. “What a gift,” I said. “Not death, but love.”

“What?”

“Nothing. I’m just—you’re an amazing man, Abramo Cortez, and I’m pretty sure I love you.”

He smiled but did not, as I expected after my declaration, kiss me again. “Of course,” he said, focusing his gaze on the wall across the room, “I’d be more likely to win custody of Quentin if I was married. You know. Sometimes people look askance at bachelor guardians.”

Now I wrenched away, violently and completely. “Are you asking me to marry you?” I demanded.

“Well, not yet,” he said, unperturbed by my sharp tone. “We don’t know each other all that well—”

“We’ve only slept together once!”

“Right. We’d have to practice that a little more. And you’ve never met any of my family members, and let me tell you, they might be enough to drive you away right there. And of course, I’ve only ever met your brother, and he struck me as a little volatile, so I’m starting to wonder if maybe there are sides to your personality I haven’t seen yet. I mean, I don’t want to be too hasty—”

I hauled off and smacked him on the arm. Not as much force behind the blow as I would have liked, since wrestling with a crazed murderer the day before had left me weak, but enough of an impact that he would get my drift. “I think you’re lucky you found two women to marry you. I wouldn’t be counting on three .”

He ostentatiously rubbed his arm. “And then there are your violent tendencies, which you’ve managed to conceal until now—”

“Keep talking like this, and you’ll see some violent tendencies—”

“But all in all, I’m thinking, well, here’s a woman I think I don’t want to live without,” he summed up. “So what I want is for us to spend enough time together getting to know each other so that it does make sense when I ask you to marry me. At the moment, that’s all I’m asking.”

Now he turned to look me full in the face. He was smiling, but his expression was still serious. He wore the air of a man who has spoken as directly and honestly as he knows how and now is just waiting to hear how the universe receives his proposition. As for me, I felt trembly and goofy and shy as a high school heezling who just got asked to prom by the captain of the basketball team. Because the birthday of my life/Is come, my love is come to me . . .

“That sounds good,” was all I managed to say, a woefully inadequate reply to such a heartfelt offer. “That’s what I want, too.”

Now his smile grew broader, warmer, even a little teasing. “See?” he said, flicking my nose with his finger. “We think alike. A very good start.”

I lifted my arms and put them around his neck, and he cradled me against him in a tender embrace. “Take me home, Bram,” I whispered in his ear. “And then you’ll see just how good it can be.”

His reply to that was not verbal. Not much of the ensuing hour was, though it isn’t easy to express your affection while perched on a hospital bed, gowned in scrubs, and waiting for the nurses to burst in. But there would be time for that. There would be plenty of time. No reason, now, to fear the oncoming days or encroaching nights or the long, dull strand of years. I kissed him, and the world grew light; I breathed in so much luminous air that I glowed from the inside. Words failed me and thoughts failed me, briefly, but long enough, and I realized that the silent language of love contained a poetry all its own.