Fragile (33 page)

And there she was. For a second he thought he was looking at another corpse, someone broken and left for dead. She was still and pale, bound at the wrists and ankles, her head tilted to the side. A piece of
gray electrical tape covered her mouth. He felt that terrible sense of loss that he’d felt in the park that night, that familiar helpless rage at a thing that could not be changed. But then she opened her eyes and saw him there. He’d expected her to writhe and scream at the sight of him. But instead she just closed her eyes again and started to cry.

He moved to her quickly, unbound her ankles, and took the tape off her mouth. When he got to her wrists, she wrapped her arms around his neck and sobbed. He found himself sobbing, too. Not just for Charlene, or for the pain in his chest that was threatening to shut him down, but finally for Sarah and for the part of himself that had died with her.

“Marshall, tell me what happened.” Maggie knelt beside the boy.

She took off her coat and wrapped it around him. He was pale and shivering. She kept glancing back at the trees into which she’d watched Henry disappear to follow the sound of Jones’s voice.

“Crosby,” she’d heard him boom. But she didn’t hear the rest.

Marshall grabbed her hand and held on tight. She fought the urge to pull away. Something about his desperate grasp, the crazed look in his eyes, frightened and drained her, as though he could suck the very life from her. She tried to draw back a little, but his grip on her arm was too strong.

“He was right,” Marshall said. He pulled her closer. “He was right about everything.”

The way he said it, a growl through gritted teeth, made her shiver.

“Who?”

“My father.”

“Marshall, no.”

But in the next moment, Henry was carrying Charlene from the trees, a slim, bruised, and filthy rag doll in his arms, and Jones was trailing behind them. Maggie could see the unnatural gray-white to Jones’s skin. She used all her strength to break from Marshall’s grasp and got up and ran to her husband.

“I’m sorry,” he said when she reached him. In her arms, he lost the last bit of physical fight he had in him, and his weight brought them both to the ground, hard.

“I’m so sorry,” he said, again.

Then, dreamlike, the Crosby woods were filled with light and people she knew, people she’d known forever, all in the various costumes of their adulthood—paramedics and police officers—like some kind of somber masquerade party.

“Is she alive?” she asked Henry, who handed Charlene to a paramedic and stood looking stunned.

“Yes. Thank God. Yes,” said Henry, coming to his knees beside them. “You saved her, Jones.”

Jones shook his head in protest. “No. I got lucky.”

In the ambulance, Maggie sat beside her husband, holding his hand. He had an oxygen mask on his face; the front of his shirt was soaked with blood. Every breath seemed hard-won. Over and over, she heard her own voice saying, “It’s okay. It’s okay. It’s okay.” She kept a comforting smile frozen on her face. She didn’t want Jones to look at her and see what she was feeling—stone-cold fear.

Out of the back of the ambulance, she watched as the police took Marshall away, his hands cuffed behind him.

“He’s still out here,” she heard Chuck say. “We’ll need more men to find him on this property. We’ve got acres and acres to cover.”

“Did they get Crosby?” Jones asked under the mask.

“Travis? No,” said Maggie.

“The old man is dead,” said Jones.

“We’ll talk about it later. Chuck can handle it for now.”

She braced herself to push Jones back onto the gurney. But he never tried to get up as she’d anticipated, he just nodded and closed his eyes.

“I love you, Jones,” she said. But he didn’t seem to hear her.

By the time they arrived at the hospital, it was already a carnival of news vans and parked police vehicles with lights silently flashing. Maggie watched from the back window of the ambulance as Charlene was lifted out of another vehicle and rushed inside. A comet’s tail of reporters and flashing cameras trailed behind her. She looked impossibly small on the gurney, like the child she really was. Charlene’s eyes swept past Maggie,
seeing nothing. The sight filled Maggie with horror for Charlene, for everything she’d been through, for everything ahead of her—not the least of which was the media circus bound to follow one of the most terrible and sensational things to have happened in The Hollows. Maggie watched as Melody ran in from somewhere out of view and took Charlene’s hand. She was surprised to see that Melody was not hysterical, not making a drama in front of the cameras. She was stone-faced and strong. Police officers held back reporters at the doors to the emergency room. And the next thing Maggie knew, she and Jones were in the center of the storm—Jones being pushed into the hospital, she rushing behind, trying to ignore the shouting and the cameras.

What happened? Can you tell us what happened to Charlene Murray? Is she going to be okay? Who are you? What is your relationship to the victim?

Maggie wanted to cover her ears; instead she just kept her eyes on her husband, felt weak with relief when they passed the police line that had formed, and all the chaos and noise faded behind the closed doors.

How did they find out about all of this so fast?
she wondered. It was as if they were waiting on the periphery, monitoring police frequencies.
Of course. Of course that’s what they were doing
.

“You have to wait here. You can’t go any farther.” A young girl—how could anyone that
young
work in a hospital?—stood in front of her, placed a strong hand on Maggie’s arm.

“That’s my husband,” Maggie said.

“You have to wait here, ma’am. I’m sorry. Someone will come and talk to you.”

And then they were wheeling Jones away, taking him down a long white hallway until he disappeared behind another set of doors. Maggie felt like her knees were going to buckle beneath her. Was this really happening? It
couldn’t
be happening.

“Mom? What’s going on? Was that—was that
Dad?”

Maggie turned to see her son, looking pale and afraid. She didn’t even think to ask how he came to be there, she just grabbed him and held on tight. She wanted to tell him that everyone was okay now, that everything was going to be all right. But she didn’t know that, she didn’t know that at all.

25

M
aggie gathered her mother’s things from the dresser. Three nightgowns, several pairs of panties, and some bras—all newish things for which Maggie had recently taken her shopping. She took five of the knit shirts her mother favored, each with its own little wisecrack—
IF IT’S NOT ONE THING, IT’S YOUR MOTHER; IF YOU CAN READ THIS, YOU’RE STANDING TOO CLOSE TO ME; NO DRAMA MAMA
—and packed them into the waiting suitcase. The day Elizabeth had sworn would never come was finally here; she was moving in, at least for a while, with her daughter, son-in-law, and tattooed grandson.

Maggie knew she should be dreading having two patients in the house, neither of them easy even when well, but all she could muster was gratitude. She was sure a few days of playing nursemaid would put an end to that. But at the moment, still shaken by the idea that she could have lost two of the most important people in her life in one night, she was glad everyone would be under one roof for a while.

The lightest scratching of a tree branch against her mother’s bedroom window sent Maggie jumping out of her skin. She understood finally, in a small way, the concept of shell shock, of being so inundated by noise and chaos and stress that the brain shut down, refusing to process any additional stimuli. She felt like a twitching mess. Hollows General Hospital was a hive of reporters from all over the country, camping out in the parking lot. Law enforcement from the state and federal levels swarmed the cafeteria. There was a manhunt for Travis Crosby, who was still missing. And Maggie, like most everyone, still couldn’t quite believe what had happened.

She could hear Ricky downstairs; he was gathering Elizabeth’s books, her knitting, and a few of her photo albums—all things her mother had requested. Maggie had asked him to clean out the refrigerator, too. And he, also unnaturally quiet, altered in a way by everything that had happened, complied without complaint. They hadn’t talked much about his feelings or how he was dealing with the knowledge of what had happened to Charlene. He’d tried to see her, but Melody hadn’t allowed it, said Charlene wasn’t ready to face her friends. Maggie’s questions about how he was handling things were met with slow shrugs and monosyllables.

Maggie picked up her mother’s watch from the silver tray on her dresser. Elizabeth had worn that watch, a wedding gift from Maggie’s father, every day for as long as Maggie could remember. A thin strand of diamonds and gold, a small mother-of-pearl face with roman numerals, it looked fragile, felt light in her hand. As a child, she had coveted it, wanted to wear it when she played dress up. And even though her mother cherished it, she’d always let Maggie wear it for a little while.

“Someday it will be yours anyway,” she’d say.

“When?” Maggie remembered asking. She’d felt a tingle of excitement, laced with dread, though she couldn’t have said why. She was far too young to know what her mother meant.

“Someday.”

But not today. Elizabeth, laid up at Hollows General Hospital with a fractured hip—likely broken days before her fall from the ladder—was out of sorts and embarrassed, making herself impossible to everyone trying to minister to her. Yet somehow she remained popular with the nurses and especially the doctor, who had once been a star pupil at Hollows High. Elizabeth wanted her watch. Maggie put it on her own wrist to carry it safely to her mother but shivered when she closed the clasp. She took it off and put it in the pocket of her pants.

Jones was equally unhappy, recovering from a flesh wound. The bullet delivered by Travis Crosby had lodged in the flesh of his abdomen and was removed in surgery.

“It’s a good thing you’re so fat, Jones,” his doctor said in recovery. It was a bit insensitive, Maggie thought.

“I thought the same thing,” Jones said to him. “If I’d dropped that twenty-five you’ve been bitching about, I’d be dead right now. Some doctor.”

But she could see his fear in cheeks that had no color, in eyes that lacked their shine. Jones told her that he had been certain he was having the heart attack he’d been dreading for a decade.
I thought I was going to die out there, Mags
. But his heart and arteries were strong and healthy. The chest pains, the shortness of breath? Panic attacks, his doctor told him, could be as painful and frightening as any cardiac episode.

Looking at herself in the mirror, Maggie felt the urge she’d been quashing swell to the point of bursting. Her hair was wild; there was still blood on her jacket. The skin on her face looked pasty and soft. A heaving sob sat in her center, waiting—waiting for Elizabeth and Jones to be okay, waiting for Rick to be strong enough to deal with what had happened to Charlene. It would wait until she was alone. The sounds from downstairs reminded her that she couldn’t afford to break down now. Rick was stoic, but the depths were volcanic; she feared the eruption wasn’t far off.

“I demand that you go home and get some rest right now,” Elizabeth had said. “You look like a woman on the verge. You’ve been up all night. You need to take care of yourself, too, Maggie. You never did learn that.”

Maggie had left, more out of annoyance with her mother than anything else. But Elizabeth was right about her. Jones, too. They both saw something in her that frightened them. And they were right to be afraid. She didn’t know how to, didn’t always want to, stop at the edge when others were going over. She’d keep just enough weight on solid ground to pull herself back before it was too late. One day, she might misjudge and tumble over; that’s what Jones and Elizabeth feared. Looking into Marshall’s eyes last night, that unsettling green, she thought someone could drown there, in that pit of need and despair. She understood why Marshall’s aunt Leila had pulled back from him and taken her family with her. And why she had to do the same.

“How do you know if you’re a good person or a bad person?”

Marshall was stuck on this point, had been since she and Henry
found him in the woods surrounding the Crosby house. Was still stuck when she stopped by to see him before she left the hospital. She couldn’t get him to move on from the mental loop. It was not a straightforward question under the circumstances. There were so many different ways to answer.

Charlene was going home to her mother today, after being in the hospital overnight for a battery of tests, for evidence collection, and to replenish her fluids. She was badly dehydrated, which was the most dangerous of her physical conditions. She had a concussion, lacerations, and bruises. She’d been repeatedly raped, not by Marshall, according to reports, but by Travis Crosby. The physical injuries would heal. What concerned Maggie were the less obvious injuries. Charlene’s most significant wounds were psychic. In a few weeks, she’d been physically well. But the trauma to her spirit, to her psyche, would take much, much longer to heal. According to what Maggie had heard, Charlene claimed not to remember what had happened at home to precipitate her running away. She remembered only that she’d contacted Marshall for a ride to New York, that he’d brought her to the Crosby boathouse and kept her there against her will. Melody wouldn’t let anyone near her, and the details Maggie was picking up about Charlene’s captivity through reports given to Jones were grim.

On her way out of the hospital, Maggie found Melody in the smoking lounge. The stink of the room was almost unbearable to Maggie, but she pushed inside.

“Melody?”

“Maggie,” she said, startled from her thoughts.

“How is she?”

Melody shook her head. “Broken. Maggie, she’s broken.” The other woman started to weep then, and Maggie came to sit beside her, took the cigarette from her hand and extinguished it. Melody leaned against her, and Maggie rocked her slowly.