Jaguar (38 page)

He knew right away that the dreamways were lost to him forever.

Eddie woke up to a ripping pain that seared his shoulder. He gasped, too pained to cry out, and opened his eyes to a young, blonde nurse saying, “I’m sorry. God, I’m sorry I didn’t mean to bump you.”

She steadied a chain-link apparatus that held his arm up in the air and Eddie caught his breath in gulps and gasps.

“Slow, deep breaths,” she said. She fumbled with the chainwork of the traction device and blew her blonde bangs out of her eyes. Her breath smelled of coffee and fear, her cheeks blanched. “Oh, I’m so sorry. Are you awake, now?”

Eddie managed a grunt. The red flashes in his head and the pain in his shoulder ebbed back to wherever it was that pain came from.

“Good,” she said. “Dr. White is here, and your friend. I’ll get them. I’m so sorry about the bump.”

Pain was something he never quite understood, like the gray sky filling the window behind her. Eddie tried to say, “It’s ok,” but what came out was another grunt.

. . .
with the last sun or in the first rain
we will gather the fruits of hope.

—Daisy Zamora, “Letter to a Sister Who Lives in a Distant Country”

One week from Thanksgiving they buried Mel Thompkins with military honors in a plot that was only a few paces from the markers for Eddie’s mother and grandparents. One of those gray, high-ceiling days crawled by with the occasional shot of blue through the clouds. A hundred paces from the cemetery gate Mark White waited on 2-West at Valley Hospital to see Eddie through his third surgery, a scalp repair. Compared to the skull and neck fractures, this was mere cosmetics.

“Y’know that she’s covering up for her old man,” the sheriff said. He’d surprised Mark by meeting him in the waiting room after the funeral. “I suppose it doesn’t matter much, except it does. Unfinished business bothers me, doesn’t it bother you? Never mind—you’re a shrink, I don’t want to know what that says about me.”

The sheriff rubbed his nearly-bald head, then stopped that, too, self-conscious.

“It says you like things tidy, orderly and complete,” Mark told him with a chuckle. “Excellent qualities in a peace officer. And, yes, unfinished business bothers me.”

“‘Peace officer,’“ the sheriff chuckled. “I suppose that’s true. I’ve always been more interested in keeping the peace than enforcing the law. What bothers me about this unfinished business is the motive. Why would Mel go after that kid like he did?”

“Lots of fathers can’t handle the boys their daughters date.”

“But most of them can, doctor. And most of those who can’t don’t go after them with baseball bats and rifles, am I right?”

“Yes, but . . . look, he’s got a long history of abuse connected with drinking. . . .”

“Never been a complaint until the incident at the river,” the sheriff said. “I can’t do anything about that. After the first incident, he was remanded to counseling. Only made things worse. . . .”

“Who did he see?” Mark asked.

The sheriff shrugged.

“Somebody at the Soldiers’ Home. Only showed up the once but nobody notified us. He didn’t want to go to you or anybody in town; he claimed you were all on the kids’ side. . . .”

“
Somebody
had to be,” Mark said. “Look at them. . . .”

“No,” the sheriff interrupted, “
you
look at them. Look at the trouble that’s always been around them. Kids in their class flip out, their teachers have nervous breakdowns, two neighbors hang themselves, a teacher walks into the river with rocks in his pockets. . . .”

“You’re just falling for neighborhood talk. . . .”

“Bullshit, doctor. My job, like yours, depends on knowing when people are being straight with me and when they’re not. You’re not.”

“What makes you think
that
?”

“The Soldiers’ Home,” the sheriff said. He tapped the thick sheaf of records with Eddie’s name on them. “Colonel Hightower claims you’re conducting some unauthorized research that threatens a confidential project of his. He’s sending some federal people down to talk with you.”

“And if I told you that I suspect that the Colonel’s own research is responsible for all this . . . ?”

The sheriff shrugged.

“Well, I like you, Doc, but the sheriff in me only believes hard evidence. Got any?”

“Maybe.”

“There’s no ‘maybe’ about hard evidence, Doc, just maybe you’ll show me, maybe you won’t. Right? When you’ve got it, bring it by. I can help you with these feds, but I need cooperation, too. Are you still seeing the girl every day?”

Mark nodded.

“She still singing the same song?”

“Yes. It was an accident. He had the rifle because he owned a gun shop and he always had a rifle.”

“When . . .
if
. . . she changes that story, you’ll let me know, won’t you?”

“She will,” Mark said. “Thompkins and his wife abused her, the stepbrother terrorized her sexually, her father tried to kill her and her best friend . . . it’ll take her awhile to believe that she’s safe. Seeing him buried will help.”

The sheriff’s expression softened.

“You’re right,” he said. “No hurry.”

“Do you really think that these kids killed Mel Thompkins?”

The sheriff shrugged again, dusted his hat on his pants leg and stood holding the doorknob.

“I’ve seen everything,” he told Mark. “Call me.”

You haven’t seen anything, yet,
Mark thought.

He listened to the receding
thuck thuck
of the sheriff’s bootheels down the hallway.

The consciousness that Eddie regained was severely impaired but, for the first time since Mark had met him, he seemed happy. Mark wondered how Eddie would handle the memories as they came back to him,
if
they came back, and how he would be received by the people of the valley.

Maryellen stepped through the doorway and Mark manufactured a smile for her. She looked terrible in her eyes and slouch, but she looked refreshed with clean hair and Sara’s red jacket.

Maryellen had been witness to some terrible things, what she had left of her youth would not be easy to salvage.

“Hello, Dr. Mark,” she said. Her voice was low and husky, her eyes red and red-rimmed from crying. “Is Eddie out, yet? Can we see him?”

“They’re just now moving him from recovery to his room,” he said.

She hugged Mark, and didn’t let him go.

When Maryellen spoke she had her face pressed to his chest.

“I’ve been on the other side,” she said. “The Jaguar’s finished, like Eddie said, but it’s not like he thinks. The Jaguar burned up. He burned alive from the inside. . . .”

She gripped his arms and cried silently into his jacket. Mark held her quietly.

“After his mother . . . ,” she sniffed, “ . . . after
that
, what will this do to him?”

The cocky surgical nurse whom Mark had learned to like, Billie Merritt, waved to him from down the hall and indicated that Eddie was settled in his room. She waved an envelope at him.

“Let’s go see Eddie,” he said. “He’ll be fine. Maybe it’s a mistake. Maybe your dream was speaking symbolically.”

“These dreams don’t do that.” Her voice was flat, disappointed.

Mark led Maryellen to the recovery room and seated her beside Eddie. Billie handed him a blank envelope.

“It’s from your wife,” she said. “She came by about a half hour ago and said you
had
to see it. She didn’t leave you, did she?”

Mark didn’t answer. He had already opened the envelope. He unfolded the memo from Sara’s news service just as it had come across the wire: “An Orting volunteer firefighter was treated for burns received Thanksgiving weekend while trying to extinguish a fire on a patient in the security wing of the nearby Veteran’s Hospital. Fire Department refused comment on the mutual-aid response, dispatched as ‘ . . . a man burst into flames at the Veteran’s home . . . ’ which adjoins their district. Identity of the patient is unknown, and the Department of Defense ordered personnel at the scene to remain silent until their debriefing ends, presumably early this week. . . .”

Eddie may ask sooner than later.

Mark took in a long, slow breath and let it out, equally slowly. He did it again. Sometimes it paid to follow the advice he gave his patients. He finished the memo, and heard a groan from Eddie’s gurney, then a cough.

Maryellen sat right next to Eddie’s head. She wore a red jacket and carried a bouquet of blue irises. She wanted Eddie to see her first thing. She sniffed a bracing whiff of the flowers, took a deep breath and flashed a smile at Mark.

“You look great,” he said, and slid the privacy curtain into place for them.

Mark couldn’t tell how much of Eddie’s thick speech was due to the drugs and how much to the head injury.

“Booful,” Eddie managed, “you booful.”

“You look good, too,” she said. “You look happy. Are you happy?”

“Feel good,” he said. Eddie scooted his head over to a patch of sunlight on his pillow, and winced. “Hurt. Yeah, hurt. Buh feel good.”

“Everything’s fine,” she told him. “Everything worked out. You did the right thing.”

He looked puzzled, trying to remember.

“On the other side, they’re going to be ok, too.”

“Good.”

She took his hand and kissed it.

“I love you.”

“I luth you, too.”

“You ‘luth’ me?” she joked. “That’s better yet.”

When Mark White got home that evening he burned the last piece of hard evidence—an aberrant EEG from Brenda Colfelt’s office that demonstrated the mystery blips. He was sure that the Colonel had done the same with the set he’d glimpsed nearly a decade ago at the Soldiers’ Home.

Sara watched him burn the records, and listened to him piece through the puzzle out loud.

“Either their imaginations go physical, or physical changes are causing the imagination to slip into conjugate fantasies—
then
the hormones,
then
the neurovascular changes to. . . .”

Sara shushed him.

“Do you believe . . . ?” she asked. Her gaze was dead serious. “Eddie said this comatose patient is his father? And that his father is this Jaguar who mind-controls people . . . ?”

Mark sighed. “I’m a believer. And this
incident
at the Soldiers’ Home ties it all up. That stone in the valley boneyard with his father’s name, rank and serial number on it . . . his military records corroborate the mother’s story that he was hit and killed by a jeep on his way home from the war. But I’ll bet the linen there’s no body in that grave or, if there is, it doesn’t belong to Lieutenant Marco Reyes.”

“Are you going to dig him up to find out?”

“That’s my ace in the hole with the feds,” Mark said. “If they come nosing around, I’ll give them something to nose. Whether the hole’s empty, or filled with a stand-in, we win.”

“This is a
great
story,” Sara said. “Why . . . ?”

Mark put up a hand to slow her down.

“We don’t want it told, either,” he said.

“Why not?” she asked. “God, Mark, this is bigger than us, the kids. This kind of government experimentation, using people for guinea pigs . . . Mark, they might have
others
. . . .”

Mark dusted his knees off on the hearth and sat beside her on the sofa. The paperwork had started a perfect fire.

“If Eddie’s right, that’s all over,” Mark mused. “Maryellen is probably the only one who could find out for sure.”

“Eddie . . . defused . . . the Jaguar, you’re sure about that?”

“I’m sure.”

“I felt something once . . . something huge barreling down on my dreams one night,” Sara said. “I used that nightmare trick you taught me and woke up when I saw it coming. Do you suppose that was the Jaguar?”

“I’ve experienced something like what you describe,” he said. “I suspected the same myself.”

“You don’t think it was the kids . . . ?”

“No,” he said, “I don’t. They’re good, bright kids. We’ve practically grown up together, I feel good around them. That feeling of impending doom does not feel good.”

Sara nuzzled his neck and tried to sound flip.

“So, doctor, you admit to gut feelings?”

“Always have,” Mark whispered. He fell back on the couch and Sara fell with him.

Eddie defused the Jaguar, all right; Mark was sure that the butterfly kiss killed him. And Eddie saved the “other side.” Mark wanted to deny that he believed those things. If he didn’t believe them, then Eddie would be just another casualty of hallucination. Mark kissed Sara’s forehead, a little cool with worry, then her cheek and neck.

“Can you tell me how things are going to be for the kids?”

“Eddie’s the easy one,” he said. “His dream-meddling mechanism fizzled out on him. It’s a blessing, I think, though who knows what we’ve lost. At least what’s left of his mind will be his own.”

“That leaves Maryellen.”

“Right,” Mark said. “And they don’t know about her. We want to leave it that way.”

“But will
she
leave it that way?”

Eddie had wrestled the words out to ask Mark the same thing. Mark worried at it himself. He still had no answer.

After his chilly reception at the Soldiers’ Home, Mark executed the first records purge of his career. He wiped every reference to Eddie that he could find, but he left a fistful of standard EEGs and a pile of normal labs. Enough, he thought, to brush off the VA. Attention focused on Eddie and now whether they tested him or not didn’t matter—for Eddie, the “phenomenon” was over.

We have to keep them thinking it’s Eddie.

Mark had regretted not fighting for an EEG on Maryellen, but now he was grateful for the lapse. Diverting the Colonel from the kids hadn’t turned out to be easy, but nothing about these kids was easy. But Mark felt good admitting that he’d always liked them.

The mystery patient that Mark had wanted to study no longer existed. The Soldiers’ Home showed him the room—fresh paint, empty—and allowed him free access to the files, gone. So was Colonel Hightower, the two guards, the ward secretary. This special security wing housed only one patient.

Who won?
Mark wondered.

And that other thought, the nagging one that Sara put in his mind wouldn’t leave him alone—