Interpreter for the Dead Page 16

  He made his way through the house. Each creak of the floorboards ricocheted through his brain. He had to stop twice to keep from passing out. His body struggled to retain its equilibrium as blood alternately surged then slushed through his veins.

  He fumbled toward the bathroom, left the lights off and felt his way into the shower. Hot water hit the ice-cold porcelain and enveloped him in a cloud of steam.

  He'd survived, thanks to AJ, but it wasn't over. Whoever had doped his beer wouldn't stop until he was either dead or in jail. Reason and logic dictated that he take the information to the police, if AJ hadn't already.

  The thought of AJ bringing cops back along with a couple of sausage McMuffins ought to have upset him, but he found himself too tired to care.

  Now would be a good time to leave, the sensible part of his brain told him. The back of his mind quickly plotted his exit from the bathroom, then the house, and then the state of Colorado.

  It was hard to argue with the logic. Whoever had poisoned him was more than just a greedy real estate salesman or a pissed off neighbor. Whoever had tried to take him out would be back to finish the job.

  Dane inhaled warm steam as he worked the knots out of the muscles of his neck.

  He was in a game where not only were there no rules, but even the spectators and referees were out for blood. If he had any advantage, it was the fact that they probably didn't know he'd survived the attempt on his life.

  The water started to turn lukewarm and Dane got out. He turned on the lights to look for a towel, squinting. He unscrewed two of the three vanity bulbs above the mirror to dim the room and dried off. He wiped the fog off the bathroom mirror and wasshocked at the sight of his own face.

  You look like shit.

  He dug up and old razor and scraped the stubble from his chin. Only a month ago he had been a free man. Nothing had changed since last night. It had just gotten more personal.

  He wrapped the towel around himself and treaded back to the bedroom. The dog was still lying on the bed, barely opening her eyes long enough to acknowledge his presence.

  Surprised you didn't finish me off while I was asleep, thought Dane. He found a fresh change of clothes laying on top of a pile of his father's.

  He dressed, staring at the belt as he buttoned his shirt.

  Why had he come back to Cottonwood?

  He should have just pointed the rental car the other way when he got out of Eagle County Jail. All he'd gotten by coming back to Boulder was a lot of shit from the neighbors, a trip to jail and an attempt on his life.

  You came for the money, the asshole part of his brain reminded him.

  "Who asked you?" The dog woke up and hopped off the bed. She looked at him quizzically.

  "Don't give me that look. All I've succeeded in doing is almost getting myself killed."

  The dog yawned widely and licked her lips, not overly concerned with his brush with death. Dane asked her if she was the one who had drugged him. He was not surprised when she didn't deny the charge and simply wagged her tail.

  "C'mon," said Dane. He lead her to the kitchen where he found another note from AJ and a bottle of aspirin.

  Dane shook out a handful tablets. The idea of them being poisoned flashed through his mind, but death seemed welcome at this point. He swallowed all except for one. He chewed and let it dissolve underneath his tongue in hopes of speeding up the relief.

  He filled a bowl of water for Brandy then went to living room, hoping it wasn't as bad as he remembered.

  It was worse. He sighed and began picking up the debris.

  Spurlitz must have been wetting himself, thought Dane - remembering the gleam in the parole officer's eye when he saw the damage.

  You won't catch me on this one.

  He smiled to himself, remembering how AJ dumped soda down the front of the courier's shirt.

  The smile faded as he looked around and caught sight of the shattered answering machine. It was all coming back to him, the phone call that had triggered his drug-induced rage.

  And the school was going forward with litigation.

  Even after Dane had managed to verify all the information on the will, the doctor had turned him down. Why? It didn't matter. His court date was only three weeks away and he was all out of tricks. Spurlitz was an annoyance, but a federal judge was something else altogether.

  Run, advised the part of his brain that saw the insanity of staying even one minute longer. Dane began picking up papers and putting them back into their boxes.

  Too tired to run.

  He filled the first box and carried it to the kitchen. He paused over the shattered picture of his father and the McConnells. He cleared off the broken glass and held it closer, examined his father's face.

  The man seemed genuinely happy. Rows of apple trees behind him, the future straight ahead and his best friends to either side.

  It wasn't the man Dane knew. Something had happened since he'd been gone. The old man had changed. He looked so deeply into the picture that his father's face blurred into a montage of dots.

  What had happened after his mother died and he'd left?

  Dane reached into the box and found his father's high school yearbook. He compared the young Henry Dane with the old one. His father seemed happy before he had a wife and son, and after. Had his father resented them? Dane knew his mother had gotten pregnant with him before she graduated. Had his father married her out of a sense of obligation?

  Dane felt his chest tighten.

  Probably an after-effect of the drugs.

  His father could have used the money from selling the property to do whatever he wanted. Dane looked out the window. Had his father stayed here out of a sense of guilt? Had they all just been playing roles?

  He would never know. Dane put the yearbook back and started cleaning.

  A brightly colored piece of paper caught his eye. He bent down and picked it up. It was an old crayon drawing he'd done in third grade, according to the scrawl in the bottom corner. It was a picture of him lying in bed, his tiny stick fingers holding a blanket up to his face as he stared out an oversized window at jagged yellow lines that filled the sky.

  Dane remembered those terrifying nights.

  His room was in the converted attic, and flashes of lightning behind the cottonwoods would send twisted shadows across his walls. Thunder would shake the roof and drown out his voice as he cried out for his mother and father. He knew they couldn't hear him, but he was too scared to get out of bed. He'd awaken in the morning with dried tears on his cheeks and the sheets soaking wet. His mother always tried to wash the sheets and clothes before his father found out.

  Something cold and wet against his neck brought him back to the present. Brandy. She looked back and forth between him and the door until he figured it out. Dane put the drawing in the box and let her out. He scanned the road for any sign of AJ. The torn telephone line lying on the ground reminded him why she wouldn't be able call or leave a message.

  He went back to the stacks. He found one of his parents wedding invitations. It had been printed by his mother.

  More old photographs, letters, birthday and holiday cards, old school reports. More crayon drawings.

  Dane remembered none of them, but smiled as he wondered what the schools put in the lunches that compelled kids to make horses green and suns purple. He kept going through the stacks. More drawings of five-wheeled flying cars and genetically mutated dinosaurs.

  The last one he found was by far the most bizarre. He'd drawn a tiny stick figure lying on top of some kind of altar looking thing with wheels. His hand hands were held out as he fended off some kind of ghost brandishing a long, thin sword.

  The drawing was enough to give Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds a run for its money.

  Little flourishes included a tie on the ghost and blood dripping down the side of the altar.

  Whatever movie he'd seen, it must have been a doozy.

  Dane turned the drawing over to see how old he was when h
e drew it.

  He frowned. He hadn't drawn it. His father had.

  The name 'Henry' was scrawled tinily into one yellowed corner. Dane flipped it back over and looked at it again, noticing now how much more yellow and brittle the paper was than any of the rest.

  It should be, he thought. It was over fifty years old.

  He had never thought of his father as having been a child. Nor had he ever imagined his father being frightened. But there he was, as small and frightened as he had ever made Michael feel.

  An odd sensation swept over Henry Dane's son. He tried to chase it away.

  He refused to feel empathy or pity for his father. There was a difference between an imaginary ghost with a fake sword and a real leather belt. The picture blurred in Dane's hands anyway, and he found himself blinking back tears.

  This was bullshit. The man was a bastard.

  But something about the picture would not let him put it down.

  It's just a goddamned picture.

  The altar with wheels seemed somehow familiar.

  It's just a table.

  And the sword, the blade with marks all along its length.

  He was losing it.

  A ghost wearing a tie.

  Ghost, tie, thin sword, table with wheels.

  The pieces began to come together.

  The ghost was a doctor.

  The tie was a stethoscope.

  The sword was a hypodermic needle.

  The altar was an exam table.

  What about the blood?

  Dane looked closely at the little boy's outstretched hands. Both were formed into the sign for 'no'. If Dane was right, the blood was very real.

  Jesus Christ.

  An image of the cracked pager flashed into Michael Dane's mind. The last words his father had ever typed.

  DR EMER.

  The room seemed to spin.

  His father hadn't been crying out for a doctor as he lay dying with his pager gripped tight in his frozen hands.

  He'd been screaming out an accusation.

  Chapter 30

  Dr. Hiram Emerson liked his new office.

  It was far better than the one he'd been in half a century ago when he first came to the Boulder Valley School for the Deaf and Blind. That office had been small, cramped and cold. What little heat trickled through from the school's ancient furnace ran straight up the walls and pooled in the high ceilings. He'd had to pop methamphetamines just to keep himself warm. His new office was wide and roomy with a low ceiling and much warmer.

  And the view was much better now. The south and west facing windows let in the sun and allowed him an unobstructed view of the playground.

  He went to the window and looked out, imagining how it would look in wintertime, watching them through the snow-drifted windowpanes as they chased one another, their cheeks pink from the cold and their breath coming out in little cotton candy clouds.

  "Dr. Emerson?"

  He turned to the door, hiding his irritation.

  "Yes?"

  "I've got your mail and your coffee," said his secretary, in a tone of voice used to address the simple and senile. She let herself in and set them on his desk, smiling and blinking at him stupidly before turning to leave.

  "Is that today's paper?" he asked, noticing the rolled up newspaper tucked under her arm.

  "It is, Dr. Emerson, but its Miss Adams subscription. I don't-"

  "I just want to check the weather. I'll see that she gets it when I'm done." He held out his hand until she handed it over, looking very much like a recalcitrant child handing over a piece of gum.

  He thanked her and took it to his desk, barely aware of her departure. His milky blue eyes moved back and forth behind his thick bifocals as he read through the pages, his tongue stained black from where he licked his fingers.

  No mention of the Dane boy as of yet, but that was okay. He would be gone within a day or two. He rolled the paper back up and went back to the window.

  If Hiram Emerson had learned anything over the years it was to be patient and to trust the Compass. For it had been that, more than any conscious planning on his part, that had gotten him safely into the house and out again two times.

  Whatever it was (intuition, a higher-self, prescience) it had served him well, always leading back out of the Darkness and keeping him one step ahead of the Uninitiated.

  He had ignored it only once, when he was fifteen and staying at the Lewis B. Chapman Home for Boys in western Kentucky, and it had nearly cost him his life. Lured into a trap by a gang of the boys, he'd been beaten mercilessly and left for dead out back in the storage shed. He swore that if he lived he would never ignore it again.

  Promise? The Voice had asked him as he lay there broken and bleeding.

  Yes, he swore, lying in the dark, barely able to move.

  Cross your heart and hope to die?

  Yes, he giggled back through a mouthful of blood and broken teeth.

  Then lie still and be quiet. He'll be back.

  And he did come back, the dark-haired boy who had Betrayed him. Whispering and crying to Hiram through the padlocked door, begging Hiram to tell him that he still loved him.

  He remained quiet, even when the dark-haired boy with lips like angels wings told Hiram that it was his own fault for making eyes at him in front of the others.

  Did Hiram still love him? The boy asked again. Hiram bit his tongue.

  Afraid that they might have hurt Hiram too badly, the dark-haired boy unlocked the door.

  "Hiram?"

  Hiram's hand had found the handle of a garden spade as he lay there waiting in the dark. He had used the spade to pull himself up from the ground, had used it as a crutch to hobble to the door. Used it to keep himself from collapsing on to the ground.

  Now he pulled it back and buried it in the boy's face with a sickening thwack.

  The boy fell back, yanking the spade out of Hiram's hands as he desperately tried to pry it from his own skull. The boy stumbled around in circles, blinded by his own blood, his screams muffled behind the rusted metal that pinned his tongue to his lower jaw.

  Hiram caught up to him and knocked his legs out with a shovel, sending the boy forward and snapping the wooden handle. The boy scrambled to his feet, the blade still stuck beneath his bright, shocked blue eyes. The boy swung the broken handle back and forth through the air as he tried to keep Hiram away.

  Hiram grabbed a shovel, swung it around so hard he nearly took the boy's head clean off.

  Hiram fell to his knees, panting and crying. He wanted so badly to take care of the others, but the Compass told him that no, he could not. Not if he wanted to Love again.

  So he dug the hole and put the boy in it, feeling his heart break with every shovel full of dirt. He would never Love again, he told himself. But he was wrong. He did Love again, being more careful this time and giving his Love only to those too young to Betray him.

  He was a different man, after that.

  No, he was two men after that. There was the Hiram Emerson that the world saw, then there was the Hiram Emerson that had been created that day - who wore the other one like a skin.

  The outer Hiram did well at the Chapman Home for Boys, was a model student, gave all the right answers. Even showed all the right emotions when certain boys disappeared. Ran away, is what they were told, by the staff. Gone to a life on the streets.

  But the inner Hiram knew where they really went.

  But it wasn't just revenge. Their deaths had served him well.

  He knew the human body very well by the time he got to medical school. He just didn't know the names for all the various parts.

  Yes, he excelled at medical school. In the classroom, to be sure, but especially in the operating room. But the operating room was never as satisfying as the Real Thing.

  There was no joy in opening up someone who was dead or unconscious.

  Old Hiram Emerson glanced over at the degree framed and hanging on the wall. His medical skills, self-taug
ht, went far beyond those of the ordinary physician it proclaimed him to be.

  Any idiot could set a bone or stitch a cut, but it took somebody Special like him to see the wounds within. Emerson could see it. The way the children held their eyes, the way they moved and spoke, it revealed to him the ones that suffered in their souls. The neglected, the forgotten, the inconvenient, these were the ones that he treated. Derived through a secret Alchemy shared with him by his uncle when he was only five, Emerson was careful to use the healing Elixer only on those most needy.

  Henry Dane had been one such boy. New to the school and knowing even less sign language than he did, Emerson fell in Love the moment he saw him. He smiled down into Henry Dane's wide, beautiful face, lost in his eyes as he gently held his head and dressed the small cut on his cheek.

  When he was finished he took Henry's tiny hands into his own. He showed him how to make the sign for doctor and boy and friend. When the boy smiled up at him it was like the feel of the sun on his face. He sent Henry back to class with a butterscotch candy and a note telling the teacher he wanted to check the bandage the next day.

  Soon he and Henry became the best of friends. The boy knew that coming to see him for a sudden headache or upset stomach would get him not only candy, but also the affection that he needed even more.

  Emerson enjoyed these times the most, even though he knew they would not last and on the other side lay only heartache. Most of them he'd been able to keep quiet by letting them know what would happen to their mommy or daddy if they revealed their Little Secret. The others he was able to get rid of. But always in the end he would have to leave them behind, following his Compass to wherever it led him next.

  Things with Henry Dane began to fall apart around Christmas Break. Haggard-looking and complaining of bad dreams, the boy had been brought to his office after one of the dormitory wards found blood in his sheets.

  "Don't want no Dream Gas," signed Henry as Emerson pushed him down on the table.