A Man to Die for (10 page)

The cats were once again lined up in the front yard, serenading like a class of second-grade Suzuki students, but Poppi didn’t seem to notice.

“I brought some pretty good shit,” Poppi offered quietly from where she leaned against her car door, her long, flowered skirt shifting in the sultry wind. For a minute Casey could almost imagine it was 1975 again, and that Poppi had shown up to dissect dates and the latest concert down at the River Festival.

“No, thanks,” Casey waved her off. “That dims the outrage, and I want mine nice and shiny tonight. Besides,” she added with a nod to the lights, “the convent frowns on that kind of thing. Don’t step on any of the cats. I don’t think they’re here to dance.”

Without further greeting the two walked back along the driveway to the kitchen door. The front door was for guests, for Girl Scouts selling cookies and the Jehovah’s Witnesses selling salvation. The only time Casey walked in or out the front door was to sit in the glider on the wide wooden porch. If she could get past her mother, tonight would be one of those nights.

“Oh, Catherine,” her mother greeted her even before the back door was fully opened. The little woman had been sitting at the kitchen table sipping at coffee and picking at her fingernails. The bandanna was firmly in place, even with her robe and slippers on. “Come sit down. Come talk.”

Trapped again, pulled between her mother’s suffocating concern and Hunsacker’s smooth remonstrances, Casey fought down the almost physical urge to yank herself away.

“I’ve been praying,” Helen said with a quick little nod of her head, as if this would settle it all. “Praying for poor Evelyn’s soul in purgatory. But the virgin promises me that Evelyn will be in heaven soon, don’t you worry. With your father.”

Evelyn doesn’t want to be with my father, Casey thought, still not answering, walking to the refrigerator instead and pulling out two beers. She wants to be with her husband. Besides, there wasn’t any guarantee that Casey’s father was in heaven. Flipping a can to Poppi, Casey leaned back against the cool, sterile white of the wall.

“I know, Mom,” she said, desperate to be away from those pleading eyes. “I’m sure your prayers helped.”

Helen smiled, her posture still anxious, like a small dog seeking to please. Casey didn’t know what else to say. Rage and frustration were not emotions you brought into Helen McDonough’s house, but that was all she could manage right now.

She wanted so badly to tell Poppi about her confrontation with Hunsacker. She desperately wished for the words that could convey the sense of menace Hunsacker had projected, the stale taste of avariciousness he left behind. She wanted Poppi to be able to see the unseen.

“It was Hunsacker’s fault,” was all she could end up saying as she took a sip of beer. “Evelyn only went to Sauget because she had to stay late to stabilize one of Hunsacker’s mistakes. It’s his fault she’s dead.”

Poppi tilted her head just a little, her voice carefully passive. “She might have wanted to go there anyway.”

“He got her so worked up she couldn’t go home, and it was too late by the time she got out to go anyplace close. That son of a bitch killed her as sure as if he pulled the gun himself.”

“It was a senseless crime,” Poppi countered. “She was at the wrong place at the wrong time. Do you really think blaming Hunsacker for Ev’s bad sense of direction is going to help?”

Casey glared at her friend, wishing she could explain away the guilt and frustration and fear Evelyn’s death left behind. Wishing Hunsacker didn’t unnerve her so much that she felt it necessary to blame him for what amounted to no more than a random tragedy.

Casey was an emergency-room nurse. She knew all about random tragedies. She was the world’s leading expert, after caring for tornado victims and fire victims and drive-by shooting victims. Shit happens, and she saw it every day.

But for some reason, this felt different. This act of random violence stuck in her craw when she’d long since learned to shrug all the others off. She wanted retribution for it, balance. And she had nobody but Hunsacker available to make payment.

“I saw him tonight, Poppi. And I’ll tell you something. I had the most unnerving feeling that he was actually glad Ev was dead. Like she was paying some kind of cosmic price for bucking him. Like he still won in the end, and that was all that mattered.”

“Casey—”

“There has to be something I can do, damn it. Some way to prove that Ev was right.”

Casey didn’t even hear her mother get to her feet. She didn’t hear the sly whisper of slippers on the Formica floor or see her mother’s quick scuttle. Suddenly there was another hand on her arm, the fingers urgent and impassioned. Looking up, Casey realized that she’d walked right into a sermon.

“When your father died,” Helen said, her voice breathy and trembling, “what did I say?”

Casey knew her role by heart. It wouldn’t do any good to try and avoid it. “Why.”

Helen nodded. “I said why, why my dear husband, why Mick McDonough, the finest man who walked the earth. I demanded answers. But I couldn’t find them, could I?”

“No, Mom. You couldn’t.” For a Catholic, her mother would have made a great revival tent preacher. Instead of fire and brimstone, Helen’s favorite topic was death. How to ignore it, how to deny it, how to wash away the guilt of it in fantasy and ritual so it couldn’t chase you in the night. Helen felt strongly about death.

Another nod, another point made. “And how did I finally find peace?”

Peace? Casey wanted to demand. You call this peace, creeping around this mausoleum like an uncomfortable ghost, spending the last twenty years beating your breast and muttering mea culpas?

“How?” Helen insisted, digging her fingers in for emphasis.

“You offered your pain to God,” she answered, the rote more ingrained than the Baltimore Catechism. “You surrendered to Him and let Him make your decisions for you.” You became the ultimate passive-aggressive.

Helen usually smiled at this point. Tonight that must have seemed frivolous. “And for the first time in my life, I was content. I surrendered myself to God and let Him take charge. It’s the only way we can manage, Catherine. God had a plan for Evelyn. He had a reason for taking her home, just as He did your father. And only He knows what that was. Our asking is presumptuous. We must simply have faith. Faith and submission. Only then will we have peace in our hearts.”

Evidently, that was what Helen had been waiting up to say, because at the end of her speech, she simply nodded one final time and turned away for bed. She pushed open the swinging door just in time to hear a particularly plaintive cry from the direction of her room.

“Listen to my pussy sing,” she said, smiling. “How Our Lord must love her music.”

Casey didn’t acknowledge the choking noises behind her as Helen walked on through into the dining room.

“I don’t think it’s God she’s trying to raise,” Poppi finally managed.

But Casey didn’t leave Evelyn to God. Casey hadn’t left anything to God since she’d been eight. Three nights later at Evelyn’s wake, Casey made it a point to approach some of the postpartum nurse’s co-workers from Izzy’s.

She had to know. Once and for all, she needed proof that Evelyn hadn’t been at fault that night, that Hunsacker had fabricated his story and shirked his own guilt. She needed to lay Evelyn to rest in her own way.

“I hear it was an AK47,” Betty Fernandez was saying to Marianne Wade with a sad shake of the head. “Damn, when is somebody going to do something about the weapons out on the street?”

Casey sidled up and exchanged greetings. “Do they have anything else?” she asked.

Betty and Marianne both shook their heads, one tall and thin, the other almost as round as Evelyn.

“I was the one who invited her over to Sauget,” Betty admitted, tears glittering in her soft gray eyes. “I waited and waited…I just figured she decided not to come. I should have figured she’d get lost.”

It had obviously been said before. Marianne settled a plump hand on Betty’s arm and Betty shook her head.

“She was a big girl,” Casey said, understanding. “You can’t be responsible for her, Betty.”

It wouldn’t really help; the three of them nodded anyway.

“I was talking to her that night,” Casey offered, praying she didn’t betray her anxiety. “Before you guys left. She said she still had to send that patient of Hunsacker’s to OR.”

“Oh, that.” Betty’s expression was indecipherable. “God, to have a night like that be your last.”

Casey came close to holding her breath. “Did you hear any of her phone calls to him?”

Betty glanced over at the casket, as if afraid she’d be overheard. “What do you mean?”

Casey dipped her own eyes, doing her best to still her suddenly nervous hands. “I saw Hunsacker the day after. He almost reported Evelyn for not telling him how bad Mrs. Baldwin was.”

She was answered with stricken silence. Betty looked at Marianne who took her own look over at the casket where Evelyn’s husband stood at lone attention.

“No,” Betty admitted, frustrated. “I know she called him. She was so worried, and she couldn’t get him to answer or listen to her…at least, that’s what she said. I kept saying that wasn’t like Dr. Hunsacker, but Evelyn seemed so upset.”

“And you guys left after Mrs. Baldwin went to surgery?”

Betty shook her head. “We left after she got out. Ev wanted to make sure she was all right.”

Casey’s hands went still. Her heart stumbled. “After she was out? Did Ev talk to Hunsacker again?”

Both women consulted. It was Betty who shrugged a qualified yes.

“Not around us. I think she might have run into him down by the parking lot. I heard one of the other nurses say later that she heard the two of them really having it out. But I don’t know what they said.”

Casey could just imagine. It didn’t take much to resurrect that whisper, that deadly glare that accompanied his best threats. She wondered whether he’d warned her against reporting him, whether he’d told her that he could make life miserable for her.

She wondered what Evelyn would have said back. Evelyn who cared more passionately for her patients than any other nurse Casey knew. Evelyn who would offer up her free time, her boundless compassion, her own money, if necessary.

If the argument had been anything like Casey’s, Evelyn would have been shaking when she got into her car. She would have been upset and distracted. She wouldn’t have been paying attention as she drove off the lot or onto the highway until she found herself in unfamiliar streets surrounded by boarded-up buildings.

And Hunsacker had shown up the next day smiling.

“Well,” Marianne allowed in a soft voice; “at least Ron has some finality. He can bury her and get on with his life. Buddy’s still waiting.”

Casey’s head snapped up. “Buddy?”

Marianne nodded, her expression folded into concern. “Not a word from Wanda. The police still say she’s run off, but I don’t know. I think something happened to her.”

Casey couldn’t quite get a breath. Wanda. God, oh, God, she’d forgotten.

As quickly as the suspicion rose, she shoved it away. It was too ridiculous, too outlandish. But if Wanda hadn’t just disappeared, would she have paid a cosmic price for arguing with Hunsacker, too?

“I heard she was having trouble with Hunsacker, too,” Casey ventured gently, wondering why she asked. Wondering what she wanted to hear.

“God, yes,” Marianne said. “If it hadn’t been for the fact that I don’t think she’d just leave Buddy like that, I would have said she quit because of Hunsacker.”

“Why?”

She sighed. “Because of the fight they had the last day she worked.”

Casey could do no more than wait. She didn’t want to find a pattern. She didn’t want to hear what she already knew was coming.

“I wouldn’t have known about it except that I wandered into the lounge at the wrong time. He was standing really close to her, his voice so low I could hardly hear it. But Wanda was as red as a beet, and told him he could…well, it was anatomically improbable. She was furious, but she never said anything else about it. She just left.”

Casey knew. And she didn’t have to imagine what Hunsacker had said. She’d imagined it already. She’d heard it.

It was absurd. It was nothing more than a terrible coincidence. Anything more would be intolerable.

Still, she had to know. No matter what she wanted to do, she was going to end up picking at this like a sore, needing to prove that Hunsacker wasn’t the golden boy everybody thought he was. He was a control freak, a smooth, manipulative, amoral narcissist who couldn’t abide not having his way. At best, he was gloating over the impotence of women who had challenged him, and he’d damn well do it again to Casey. At worst…Casey couldn’t even think the worst. She wouldn’t. She’d just find out a little more in order to clip his wings a little and get her own control back.

Because that, she realized, was her Achilles’ heel. She couldn’t offer control to anyone else, not God, not Hunsacker, not anybody. It had been why she’d ended up with Ed, and why she’d consigned herself after that to living alone. It was why she had to work ER, because nurses had the most independence there, and why she chafed so badly beneath the weight of frivolous administration and arbitrary physicians.

It was why when she looked to her future, she felt such desperation. She didn’t know how to offer herself to anybody anymore, and because of that, she was going to end up just like Billie Evans, with no one to claim her and no one to mourn her.

Casey never had the chance to lay Evelyn to rest. She wasn’t even allowed to forget Wanda, because suddenly Hunsacker decided that the Mother Mary ER was his second home, and Casey his best friend.

She never heard another threat from him. He didn’t so much as mention the fact that he’d shown up at Evelyn’s graveside for no reason at all, hugging Ev’s husband as the nurses had looked on aghast. But he talked to Casey. He talked about how quiet things were over at Izzy’s without Wanda’s loud mouth. How he missed Evelyn’s voice on the phone six or seven times a night.

Nobody else heard him say these things; only Casey. Nobody else thought they caught the glitter of silent challenge in his eyes. Casey was beginning to feel paranoid, as if Hunsacker were a figment of her overburdened imagination. Every sentence carried subtext, every look or smile a secret challenge, and she didn’t know why.