Natchez Burning (75 page)

She knew this was all she could reasonably hope for, yet she couldn’t help pushing the limit. “Penn, with the right information, I might even crack Viola’s murder by tomorrow. I could go a long way toward the solution, anyway. You know that.”

When he answered, she heard a warning note in his voice. “Babe, let’s just leave it where we are tonight. Okay?”

She grimaced and started to snap at him, but Penn sounded seriously stressed, so in the end she just said, “All right. I’ll make do.”

“Get Jamie to follow you home, okay? And make him wait until you get inside.”

“Truthfully, I’m probably going to stay here all night.”

“Even better. Don’t leave the building until daylight, all right?”

“Okay.” She started to say good-bye, but instinct told her something important remained unsaid. “Has something happened?
Is
everything okay? I mean, apart from the obvious?”

“Everything’s fine. We’ll talk face-to-face in the morning. Meanwhile, you don’t leave that newspaper building. I’m going to have Chief Logan put a cop outside.”

“Penn—”

“We’ll talk in the morning,” he said sharply. “I love you.”

And then he was gone.

Caitlin hung up and stared at the telephone. Something was wrong. Or maybe she’d just pushed Penn too hard. She rubbed her eyes to clear the sleep from them. The problem with loving a great guy was that when you needed to bend the rules, he didn’t always have the proper flexibility. Yet Penn
had
stretched his ethics last night, and even more today. She was thinking about driving over to Ferriday to sit in the waiting room on Henry’s floor (hopefully out of Sherry’s sight) when Jamie thrust her door open again.

“Guess what?” he said, his eyes bright with excitement.

“Tell me. I’m desperate here.”

“They just had a fire at the
Concordia Beacon
. We caught it on the police radio.”

“What?”

“It started in a file room. A flash fire took out a bunch of storage boxes and stuff, then spread to the rest of the building. But get this: their computers
melted
.”

Caitlin blinked in confusion. “So? Isn’t that what computers do during a fire?”

“Sometimes.” Jamie smiled strangely. “But when the firemen got to the
Beacon
fire, they could still get inside the building. Yet the computers looked like someone had turned a blowtorch on them.”

This detail raised the hair on the back of her neck. “Oh, man. This is crazy.”

“How do you want to handle it?”

Caitlin looked at the phone on her desk and thought about calling Penn back. Instead, she got up, grabbed her coat off her chair, and waved Jamie out the door.

“What are you doing?” he asked.

“We’re going to Ferriday.”

“You and me?”

“You’re a quick study, aren’t you? Get your fucking coat.”

“
DO YOU HAV
e the security code?” Walt asked, as the Roadtrek nosed along the road bordering Lake St. John. The oxbow lake looked black in December, and the mostly bare trees didn’t offer any sense of warmth or invitation.

“Written on my hand,” Tom replied, scanning the mailboxes that lined the road.

“Which one’s your partner’s?”

“You were here two months ago. You don’t remember?”

“It was dark. Just like now.”

Tom’s eyes were peeled for the tall storage shed that stood beside Drew Elliott’s lake house. The former owner hadn’t built a boathouse, preferring to keep his ski boat (with its wakeboarding tower) in a prefab storage shed. Drew had complained about the shed when he acquired the property, but he hadn’t yet got rid of it. Tom was sure the Roadtrek would fit inside the tall building, so long as they could clear enough floor space.

“This whole damned lake is lined with houses,” Walt grumbled. “How are we going to sneak this thing into a garage?”

“The houses on either side of Drew’s are empty in the winter. And nobody’s moving around this late.”

Walt grunted.

Tom had hated to ask Drew to put himself at risk by offering help, but he’d had no alternative. To his credit, Tom’s young partner had not only offered his lake house as a sanctuary but also insisted on driving over immediately to treat Tom’s wound.

“There!” Tom cried, wincing as he raised his hand to point at a giant shed a couple of hundred yards up the road on the right-hand side.

“I see it.”

Walt eased the Roadtrek back to forty miles per hour, then thirty. The turn was forty yards ahead now. He braked steadily, then swung out to the left so that he could fit the van between the mailbox and a post on the other side of the asphalt drive.

Thirty yards ahead, a gravel offshoot led to the tall storage shed. Walt drove straight up to the overhead door and stopped with a squeal. Tom read the code off his hand, and Walt climbed out and entered it in the keypad on the wall.

The overhead door began to rise, and white light flooded the ground.

Walt scrambled back into the driver’s seat, then pulled into the garage as soon as he had sufficient clearance. Then he jumped out and hit a button on the interior wall. Thirty seconds later, the door rattled down to the ground and they were enveloped in darkness.

“Not bad,” Walt said in a grudging tone. “About the best we could have hoped for. How’s your shoulder?”

“Bad enough. I could use another Lorcet.”

“Should you take it, with your ticker weak as it is?”

“No. But if Drew has some Maker’s Mark in there, I’ll sure drink it.”

“Let’s find out.”

Tom felt dizzy as he sought the van’s running board with his foot.

HALF AN HOUR LATER,
Walt leaned over Tom’s bloody shoulder and studied Drew Elliott’s handiwork by the light of the reading lamp Drew had used to see while suturing the wound.

“You sewed a drain into it,” Walt observed, “just like we used to do in Korea.”

Drew stripped off his gloves as Melba Price sponged the skin around the rubber hose protruding from Tom’s shoulder. “I wouldn’t have used a drain if we were in a hospital. But if Tom insists on staying out here, I want it in there.”

Drew had brought Melba along because Tom’s nurse had demanded that if he heard anything from Tom—especially about needing help—he should call her. Knowing that he couldn’t stay there all night, Drew had done so. Two minutes after crossing the westbound bridge over the Mississippi River—driving in tandem—Melba had noticed a Louisiana State Police cruiser thirty yards behind him, so she’d texted a warning. To test for surveillance, Drew had gone to the Mercy Hospital first to check on Henry Sexton. After that visit, they’d seen no sign of the patrol car, and so had proceeded to the lake house.

“Thanks, Drew,” Tom said, forcing a smile. “It feels a lot better already.”

“That’s just the local, you know that. Once the lidocaine wears off, it’s going to hurt like a son of a bitch. And I don’t want you hitting that Lorcet too hard.”

“Don’t worry about that,” said Walt. “I took his bottle.”

Drew smiled. “Good. Tom’s bad about self-prescribing.” He leaned over his senior partner. “You know, with your heart the way it is, you really should be in the ICU at St. Catherine’s.”

Tom shook his head. “They’d put me in the county jail.”

“Not if they don’t know you’ve skipped,” Walt said.

“And not with your pericardium filling with fluid,” Drew added.

“We’re talking about Shad Johnson and Billy Byrd,” Tom said. “Shad’s going to get my bail revoked as soon as he can.”

Drew looked troubled. “I think Penn is more than enough lawyer to arrange for you to be held in the ICU while he sorts this mess out.”

When Tom shook his head and protested that he’d brought plenty of diuretics with him, Drew raised his hands in surrender. “All right. But if you develop serious complications over here—or God forbid, have a fatal MI—Penn and Peggy will never forgive me. I didn’t save your life two months ago to have you die in my lake house.”

“You didn’t save my life.” Tom winked at his nurse. “Melba did. You just plugged up that defib unit and shocked me back into rhythm. It was Melba barging into my bathroom and finding me on the floor that saved me.”

Drew laughed, and Melba’s eyes shone with pride.

“I don’t guess you want to tell me why you skipped bail,” Drew said with sudden seriousness.

“You’re better off not knowing.”

“I don’t believe you murdered anybody, Tom. So I’m not worried about getting in trouble for helping you.”

“Don’t be naïve.”

“Hell, I’m already aiding and abetting now, right?”

Walt nodded, and Melba looked worried.

“I wish I could tell you more,” Tom said.

“
More?
You haven’t told me anything yet.”

Tom tried to think of a way to make Drew understand the stakes. “Do you remember when you had your back against the wall a few years ago?” Tom asked. “Shad Johnson had locked
your
ass up, and nobody believed a word you said.”

At last his words had penetrated Drew’s good humor. The smile had vanished as though it never existed. “I’ll never forget it.”

“Did you tell anybody
everything
? Even Penn?”

Drew sighed heavily. “No. But I should have. And even though I held back on him, he’s the one who got me out of trouble.”

“Penn can’t get me out of this. You have to trust me on that.”

“I guess I have to. It’s your life, after all.”

“Doc?” Melba said gently. “Are you feeling all right? You look clammy.”

Tom forced a smile. “I don’t think Drew’s going to have a hissy fit if you call me Tom, Melba.”

The nurse gave a self-conscious smile. “Old habits die hard, I guess.”

“Do you two want me and Captain Garrity to give you some privacy?” Drew asked, carrying his bloody instruments to the sink.

“I’ll wash those, Dr. Elliott,” Melba said, quickly moving after him.

“No, you won’t. You keep our patient comfortable.”

Melba came back to Tom’s side.

Drew ran water into the sink and waited for it to get hot. “Did you tell him about Mrs. Nolan?”

“Pithy?” asked Tom, suddenly worried. “Has something happened to her?”

“No,” said Melba. “Penn asked me to go by her house and give her a steroid shot. I got Dr. Elliott to prescribe it.”

Tom knitted his brow. “How the hell did Penn know I missed that house call?”

“He went by there to talk to Pithy,” Melba explained.

“About what?”

The nurse shrugged. “He didn’t tell me. And Miss Pithy didn’t, either. She’s sure worried about you, though.”

Walt looked down at Tom and shook his head. “That’s a big club.”

“I appreciate you coming tonight, Mel,” Tom said. “But you need to get on back to Natchez.”

“I’m not going anywhere. Dr. Elliott, leave those things in the sink and go home. Your family needs you.”

Drew nodded, drying his hands. “Will you be at the office tomorrow?”

“I don’t know. Let’s wait and see how our patient does.”

Drew picked up his black bag in preparation for leaving, then looked at Walt. “If you guys absolutely have to drive somewhere, don’t drag Melba into it. You can ‘steal’ the old truck parked down by my pier. The keys are on top of the bathroom medicine cabinet.”

Tom saluted his partner with gratitude. Drew chuckled, started to leave, then walked back to the sofa and looked down at Tom with sadness in his eyes.

“Call Penn, Tom. Nobody in the world will work harder to get you out of whatever trouble you’re in. Your son is your best hope. You know that.”

“He may be, Drew. But I can’t call him. Not this time.”

The young doctor’s face remained hard. “You could die. Right here in my lake house. What do I tell Peggy, if you do? What do I tell Penn?”

Tom looked over at Walt, then back up at Drew, his eyes suddenly wet. “If that happens … tell them I was protecting our family. They may not understand it right away. Penn might never understand. But that’s what you tell him. One day I think he’ll figure it out. Now … get going, before the cops show up and arrest you.”

Drew stared down at his mentor for a few moments longer; then he snapped his head up, walked to the door, and left his house without looking back.

Tom looked up at Walt, his eyes blurred with tears. “I’m tired, buddy. And I’m so sorry I got you into this.”

Walt sat beside Tom, then laid a hand on his forehead with the gentleness he’d always displayed as a combat medic.

“Get some rest, soldier. Tomorrow’s another day.”

SIX BLOCKS FROM
my house on Washington Street, ten blocks from the
Natchez Examiner,
and two hundred feet above the Mississippi River, I kiss my daughter’s sleeping face, then roll carefully out of the bed and move to the central staircase. This house, this unexpected sanctuary, is called Edelweiss. I bought the place two months ago as a surprise wedding present for Caitlin, and I’ve had contractors working practically around the clock to get it ready by the date of our wedding. Three stories high and covered with gingerbread, this authentic German chalet was built on the edge of the Natchez bluff in 1883. You can see fourteen miles of river from its wraparound gallery, and more from its third-floor windows. Rumors have swirled for weeks about the possible new owner: some wags say it’s a Hollywood actor who wants to remain anonymous; others claim the owner of one of the casino boats beneath the bluff bought it as a weekend retreat from Las Vegas. Had Viola not been murdered two days ago, the truth would have been revealed two Saturdays hence, when the horse and carriage leaving the gazebo on the bluff carried Caitlin and me only a hundred yards to the steps of our new home. Now it’s become a safe house in the middle of a town where almost every citizen knows my face.

At the bottom of the stairs, I turn and go into the kitchen, where my mother waits, her face haggard with exhaustion and guilt. Peggy Cage is remarkably beautiful for a woman of seventy-one, but the past two days have taken a toll, and for once she looks her age. Sitting on the stool beside her, I lay my right hand over hers.