The Long Count (20 page)

Quarrie stood straighter where he was leaning against the wall. ‘Isaac said that?’

‘Yes, he did, yesterday; last night in fact: early hours of this morning.’

Again he dialled the operator and this time asked her to connect him to the Bowen house in Fannin County. The phone rang and rang but Isaac did not pick up. Settling the receiver back on the hook, Quarrie returned to the table where his steak was waiting.

Back at the hospital a couple of hours later he and Alice walked from the gate to the main entrance where all was quiet. With the patients locked in their rooms for the night there was only a minimal number of staff on duty. Using Beale’s keys again, Alice took him into the women’s wing where this time the common room was empty. Formica tables and chairs neatly stacked, the floor had been freshly polished and there was no light at the nurses’ station. They passed beyond the next locked door and the one after that, and then they were outside the door to the isolation corridor.

On the other side of the glass panel Quarrie could see that the hall was only dimly lit and no nurse occupied the desk.

‘That station isn’t staffed at night.’ Alice repeated what she had told him earlier. ‘There’s no need, the patients are checked by an orderly every couple of hours but usually things are pretty quiet.’ She looked doubtful all over again, weighing the keys in her hand then clutching them tightly. ‘I’ll have to come with you,’ she said. ‘And I hate going down there. You know this could cost me my job.’ She peered back the way they had come. ‘Look, I’m not sure anymore. I’m really worried. This is Miss Annie we’re talking about. Just about anything could happen.’

Taking her hand Quarrie held it tightly. ‘All you have to do is get me the key from the nurse’s desk. I can do the rest.’

She snorted. ‘How do you think she’s going to react to some stranger in her room in the dead of night, a woman as unbalanced as that? She’ll think you’re there for her baby. She thinks everyone wants to take her baby away from her and she might try and hurt you. She’s capable of just about anything, you know. In Texas she put out the eye of an orderly.’

He nodded. ‘I know, Alice. I’m aware of that. But I’ve got an idea how I can deal with her.’

‘I’m sure you can handle her physically,’ Alice went on, ‘but that’s not the point. No matter what you tell me, if we’re found down here I will lose my job.’

Again Quarrie peered through the panel. ‘Alice,’ he said, ‘you’re not going to lose your job. Look, I understand how you feel but I have to do this and we’re here already. Miss Annie won’t attack me. And if she does I can deal with it.’ He tapped the weight of the door. ‘These are fire-proof. Any noise she makes won’t be enough to disturb anybody.’

Inside the corridor Alice re-locked the door behind them and together they walked the floor all the way past Miss Annie’s room to the nurse’s workstation. Locating the keys, Alice worked them around the ring until she came to the one she wanted. Prising it loose she handed it to him and Quarrie stripped off his jacket. Unbuckling his shoulder holsters, he placed his weapons on the desk and was about to leave his hat as well, but then he remembered Miss Annie had seen him wearing it.

Alice took a seat at the desk. ‘Try not to let her make too much noise because fire doors or not, if the other patients start up you’ll be able to hear the racket clear across to Texas.’

Quarrie glanced at her. He could feel his heart beating a little bit faster than he would’ve liked, and he could not help but be reminded of two dark nights at the ruin in the Piney Woods. ‘Wish me luck, Alice,’ he said.

‘I’ve already done that.’ She wasn’t smiling. ‘On account of how badly I figure you’re going to need it.’

Quarrie walked back the way they had come with the key in his palm and his palm sweating. When he got to the door he looked the length of the corridor but could no longer see Alice’s face where she was hidden deep in the shadows.

Through the reinforced glass panel he could see the bed and the
frail-looking figure of its occupant under the glow of a nightlight. Alice had told him that Dr Beale agreed to humor Miss Annie with the light for the sake of her baby. Apparently she’d had one like it at Trinity.

Inside the room she did not stir. With the door closed, Quarrie stood with his back to it and listened to the sound of her breathing. It was even and regular, coming in little whistles from deep in her throat. Quarrie could not quite believe he was there, and now that he was, he wasn’t sure if his plan would work. He wondered what he would do if she attacked him.

‘Miss Annie,’ he said softly. ‘My name’s John Q and I’m a Texas Ranger. I’m the guy in the hat who came by this afternoon and I’m here to protect you and your baby.’

Her breathing stilled, the whistle died to nothing. Still he remained with his back to the door and she lay exactly where she was, only he could no longer hear any sound.

And then she sat up.

Hunched against the wall where stick children played she peered through the darkness and he could just about make out those bulbous blue eyes that, once upon a time, might have been her best feature.

She did not speak. She just stared at him, but he noted how she did not clutch the doll to her breast like he’d thought she would, it remained on the pillow.

‘I’m on guard, Miss Annie,’ he told her. ‘I know they try and take your baby away from you, but I’m on guard tonight to make sure nobody does.’

Still she remained silent and Quarrie indicated the chair by the side of the door. ‘If it’s all right with you I’m going to set down here so I can keep a better watch on the corridor.’

Slowly, he lowered himself onto the chair. Hat on his head and hands on his knees he was barely two feet from the bed. Still Miss Annie sat there. She was absolutely silent and Quarrie was close
enough that he could see her face, pinched and bitter and looking so much older than it ought to.

She lay down. He could hardly believe what he was seeing but Miss Annie lay down again and curled up next to her porcelain doll. Quarrie peered through the gloom where the emerald-colored nightlight cast a ghoulish glow across her face.

‘All right then,’ he said. ‘I’m here to protect the two of you, so if you want to go back to sleep you-all go ahead.’ He waited a moment before he added. ‘On the other hand I know how you don’t get a lot of company, so if you want to chat awhile that’d be just fine too.’

Isaac watched as his mother packed an overnight bag, her movements a little stiff as if she had not yet recovered from the shock of seeing him. Leaning in the doorway he had his arms folded across his chest.

‘Fifteen years is a long time, Mom,’ he said. ‘I know how you feel because it’s as difficult for me as it is for you. It was all I could do to summon the courage to drive up here.’

Taking fresh clothes from her dressing-table drawer Clara placed the garments in the bag.

‘Make sure you pack plenty,’ Isaac said. ‘I don’t know how long it’ll be before you can come back here so make sure you have enough.’

‘Why don’t we just stay here? If you think you have to protect me, why can’t you do that here?’

Isaac shook his head. ‘I told you, it’s not safe. You have to trust me. I’m good at this. I know what I’m doing. I was long-range recon just like Dad. Escape and evasion, extraction; we’d go in after American prisoners and get them out without the enemy knowing we’d ever been there.’ He nodded towards the window. ‘This position cannot be properly defended. He could come from any number of different directions and I can’t cover them all. No,’ he said. ‘I know where we’ll be safe, and even if he figures it out it’s somewhere I’ll be able to deal with him.’

Expelling an audible breath his mother sat down heavily on the bed. Head bowed, she seemed to be thinking.

‘It’ll be all right,’ Isaac assured her. ‘It’s difficult to get a handle on it all, I know. But it’s been hard on me too. Dad dead and Ish
missing, then this Ranger shows up and tells me Dad didn’t kill himself when the other cops are saying he did.’ He threw out a hand. ‘I didn’t know what hit me. I mean, I figured it couldn’t get any shittier than it was over there in Nam, but it sure did, I can promise you.’ His eyes had darkened slightly. ‘Fifteen years without a single word. Why didn’t you call? Why didn’t you get in touch?’

Clara was trembling. She opened her mouth as if she wanted to explain it to him but she closed it again and sat there staring at her bag.

‘It’s OK,’ Isaac said more gently. ‘It’s been too long and this is too much of a shock. We don’t have to do this now. We can talk about it later. We can talk about it as much as we want.’ He nodded as if to himself. ‘I got so many questions. After all this time you have no idea how much I want to talk. I tell you what though, when that Ranger first suggested they try and get a-hold of you I couldn’t see the point. I mean, you’d taken off and I figured you wouldn’t want to see me. But that was before I knew about Ishmael. We’ve got a lot of time to make up,’ he said. ‘Now I’m here and we’re talking like this all I want to do is make up for the time we lost.’

Quarrie was sitting just feet from a woman who had stabbed her husband three times and jammed a knitting needle through the eye of an orderly. A woman who had been locked up for twenty-five years, she was sleeping with a porcelain doll, and despite how macabre the whole thing was, he felt nothing but a deep-seated sense of sadness.

‘You like to draw, Miss Annie, don’t you? The walls of this room are the same as the walls of your old one back at Trinity.’

She sat up again and he could see her eyes where they were almost too big for her emaciated face. She seemed to consider him very carefully, resting on the palm of her hand she was hunched
over the doll now as if to make sure he could not grab it.

‘You must really love children,’ Quarrie went on. ‘I understand that. I got a boy of my own. His mother passed away back when he was a baby. Not quite a year old, it’s been him and me since then, and I guess we’re similar you and me. I mean both of us being sort of single parents. His name’s James by the way. Did I tell you that? My boy’s called James. What do you call your baby?’

Miss Annie did not answer. She just looked at him and then swung her legs from underneath her and sat on the edge of the bed. If she reached out now she could touch him.

‘What are you doing in my room?’ Her voice sounded chill and she peered at him, her bone-thin arms reminiscent of those in the drawings where the sleeves of her pajamas swamped them.

‘I told you,’ Quarrie’s tone was gentle still but he could feel the way a chill was working through him. ‘I’m here to protect you. I’m here because I know everyone wants to take your baby away and I’m not going to let that happen. I’m a policeman, Miss Annie, a Texas Ranger, and protecting people is what I do. I’m not a doctor or a nurse or an orderly. That means we could be friends. It means you can talk to me if you want to. What’s your real name by the way? I know it’s not Miss Annie.’

Miss Annie lay down again only on her back this time and she drew the doll very close. She soothed it, stroking its hair where it was thin as hers and making little cooing sounds in her throat.

‘You had a room like this at Trinity,’ Quarrie said. ‘I saw that room, Miss Annie: on the second floor it had a window that overlooked the grounds. That was a nice room, really nice, overlooking the garden like that. This room doesn’t have a window.’

‘They moved me,’ her voice came as a crackle, rasping a little where she lay. ‘They took me away from Trinity.’

‘You used to be a nurse there, didn’t you?’

The silence that followed seemed to hold the tiny room in its grasp and the images on the walls crowded around them ever
more closely. Quarrie sat where he was with his gaze fixed on the bed. ‘Do you remember that? Do you remember working at the hospital?’

She did not reply. She was cradling the doll and he could hear the whistle again of her breathing.

‘Can you remember anything about that time?’ he asked. ‘Do you remember working with Nurse Nancy?’

She sat up. A sudden movement, she was cupping the doll in one arm and blinking at him through the half-light cast by the lamp.

‘Nancy.’ She tasted the word, as if she knew the name but could not remember where or why she had heard it.

‘Nancy McClain,’ he said. ‘Nurse Nancy; she works here now. She looks after you just as she did at Trinity.’

Slowly, as if finally she remembered, Miss Annie nodded. ‘She follows me. She follows me everywhere I go. She walks where I walk because she wants to steal my baby.’

‘Why would she want to do that?’

She worked her jaws; he could hear the way her teeth were grinding.

‘That’s what she wants. She always wants to take my baby. Nurse Nancy wants to take my baby away from me.’

‘Why would she want to do that?’

‘Because he’s special, a special case; they told me my baby was special.’

‘Who told you, do you remember? Was it Nancy that told you?’

She did not answer.

‘Dr Beale perhaps? Was it Dr Beale who said your baby was special?’

Again she did not answer.

‘What’s your real name?’ Quarrie asked. ‘Who were you before you were Miss Annie?’

Still she did not speak. She hunched forward now, the globes of her eyes fixed steadfastly on his.

‘When you were a nurse at the hospital,’ he prompted, ‘what did they call you?’

He heard her sucking a breath. ‘When I was a nurse,’ she echoed. ‘What did they call me?’

‘You used to be a nurse at Trinity. Do you remember that? Do you remember what they called you when you were a nurse at the other hospital?’

For a long time she looked at him and then those massive eyes seemed to light up, only the light was a little brittle. ‘Peggy,’ she murmured. ‘They used to call me Peggy.’

Half an hour later Quarrie was back in the car, driving as fast as he could with the red light flashing under the clamshell grille. Isaac had left a message telling him he understood what was going on and now Quarrie thought he too might just have an idea. In his mind’s eye he could see Miss Annie as he had left her, a wretched creature hunched on the end of the bed with that porcelain doll clutched once more to her breast.

It was 2 a.m. when he got to the Bowen house. The pickup was in the yard and the garage doors were closed but not locked and when Quarrie opened them he saw the sedan was gone. The security lights were on but all the windows in the house were dark, and those lights were bright enough to wake the dead.

For a moment he stood by the garage doors and considered the weight of the metal trapdoor. With another glance across the driveway, he lifted the trap to reveal the deeper darkness below. Backwards he made his way down the ladder, scrabbling for the light switch he was not able to find it, and it was the same in the storm shelter. Using the flame from his Zippo to see his way, he crossed the room to the second passage and walked to the door that opened onto the wooden panelling.

It took him a few minutes to locate the hidden switch but he did so eventually and the panel swung open. Inside the study it was coal black just as it had been in the passage. He could make out the desk by the flickering flame from his lighter and he fumbled for the switch on the lamp. Finally the shadows were banished and he slipped the overheated lighter back in his pocket. He was thinking about Miss Annie. He was thinking about what Alice had told him about the poor woman having been a nurse at Trinity before she was admitted as a patient.

Stripping his hat from his head he worked a hand across his scalp then sat down at Ike Bowen’s desk. Opening the top drawer he considered the sheaf of letters Isaac had sent home from Vietnam, then he put them to one side and concentrated on the rest of the drawers. He did not know what he was looking for but he did know he would recognize it if he found it. He didn’t find it. He could see nothing in any of the drawers that gave him a clue as to what Isaac might have discovered and he got up from the desk again.

Upstairs in the kitchen he considered the work surfaces and closets, thinking how everything was just as spotlessly clean now as when he had been here the first time. Isaac had the same sense of detail, the same fastidiousness as his father – he had seen that in the way he pressed his uniform.

In the living room he found the family photograph upright once more and in its proper place on the mantelpiece, though the glass was smashed. Quarrie took a good long look: Ike and his wife, the two boys who were alike but not identical, though Isaac had said they’d been born with only fifteen minutes between them.

Moving to the little bar area he searched the shelves but there was nothing that caught his eye. He was stumped. No clue as to what Isaac had discovered and yet he had left that message in Austin. He walked the hallway to the stairs once more, conscious that he must have missed something down in the study. He noticed one of the bedroom doors was ajar and he paused. For a moment
he stood there and then stepped inside and fumbled on the wall for the light.

The bed was neatly made, a nightstand and chair alongside it. On that chair a set of Ike Bowen’s clothes still folded. A clock beside the bed, no book, no photograph, this was where a soldier slept and that space was entirely functional. Reaching for the light once more, Quarrie was about to go back downstairs when he noticed the open closet.

Inside he found two rails of jackets, shirts and trousers, one fixed below the other, and underneath those a pair of work boots he had seen Isaac wearing. Next to them a sweater lay discarded. Lifting that he found a small wooden shelf with a space underneath, but the space was empty.

He checked the nightstand drawers and the other half of the closet, but found nothing there either. Back in the hallway he went downstairs and searched Ike’s study a second time without any luck, and again he climbed the stairs. In the living room he stood in the middle of the floor trying not to let the frustration get the better of him. He considered the bar area and the coffee table then he stared at the green felt card table. Crossing to it, he dropped to one knee and sought the alcove Isaac had mentioned. He stared. No deck of cards, no chips. What he saw was a slim, metal box.

It reminded him of something from a safety-deposit vault in a bank. He could see no trace of a key, however. He hunted for it, felt around in the alcove then looked behind the bar again. Carrying the box to the kitchen, he searched the drawers and cupboards but still there was no sign of any key, so he took his knife to the lid instead. It took him a couple of minutes and he was cursing under his breath, but finally he got the box open.

Papers, insurances, the deeds to the house and an aged-looking address book. He flicked through that and came to where a page had been torn out, but on the page after that an indentation had been left and somebody had shaded it with a pencil.

Quarrie stared: Clara Bowen née Symonds who had left the family fifteen years ago, she was living in Tulsa as Carla Simpson. Taking a moment to consider what that actually meant he leafed through the rest of the papers and found yet another letter that Isaac had written to his father. This one was still in its envelope however, unlike those in the desk. Another mission, a marine captured by the Vietcong in the Crow’s Foot, Isaac had been part of a two-man insertion team sent in to get him back. The boy had seen some action, that was for sure. Quarrie slipped the letter back inside the envelope and as he returned it to the box he noticed the postmark stamped on the front.

Clara was sitting in the passenger seat as Isaac propelled his father’s car south. The road not lit, a median separating the four lanes of blacktop, she sat with her knees drawn up, her heels pressed to the floor and her hands together in her lap. Next to her Isaac drove with both hands on the wheel and his gaze intent on the road. He didn’t speak. She didn’t speak. Every now and then, however, he would look round at her as if he still couldn’t quite believe it was her.

‘You’ve changed,’ he said, finally. ‘I know it’s been fifteen years already, but you’re not how I remember. You’re not how I thought you’d look.’

‘I’m older,’ she said. ‘We’re all much older. You were only a boy when I left.’

He nodded; eyes on the road once more, he pushed out his lips. ‘So why did you leave us anyway?’

Clara did not answer.

‘You need to tell me,’ Isaac said. ‘You need to explain. Fifteen years is a long time. Me and Ish were only kids and we never could get our heads around why you took off.’