Текст книги "Brain Dead"

Автор книги: Eileen Dreyer

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Текущая страница: 19 (всего у книги 26 страниц)

Mary Jane arched an eyebrow, once again the supervisor. "I'm not giving you information just so you can take it back to your lawyer."

"I'm not taking it anywhere. I just want to know if it has anything to do with this."

Mary Jane shook her head. "Certainly not. It was just a schedule for the next level of streamlining we need to implement to strengthen the hospital's financial future."

Streamlining. Read "downsizing." Layoffs. No wonder it was hot stuff. The staff found out early and all hell could break loose. Still not enough to ruin her car, Timmie thought.

"I don't suppose this stage includes the introduction of GerySys to the family, does it?" she asked, looking for a reaction.

The reaction was Timmie's, because Mary Jane just nodded briskly. "As a matter of fact, it does."

"You don't look upset about it."

"Why should I? It's a logical business decision. GerySys has the capital and we have the reputation."

It made Timmie even angrier. "What would Alex say?"

Mary Jane smiled, almost fondly. "If we're lucky, Alex will never lift his head from his workload long enough to figure it out. He doesn't understand finances, Ms. Leary. He shouldn't have to. But a unit like ours simply can't survive now without additional funding. It's as simple as that."

Go figure. Timmie clamped her evidence box under her arm and prepared to get the hell out of Dodge.

She didn't get out fast enough. She'd just made it out Alice's door when she heard skidding footsteps.

"Oh, Ms. Leary, there you are!"

Timmie looked up to see Tracy rush from her father's wing and slide to a halt in the unit doorway, looking almost as frazzled as the bunch on this end. Amazing what a person could block out of her receptors if she really tried. The minute Timmie saw Tracy, she heard what she knew had probably been going on for at least ten minutes over on the other hall.

"Where's my daughter? Timmie, help! Help me, Timmie!"

The evidence box became a football on a forty-yard run as Timmie took off toward the smell of popcorn and certain disaster.

He was backed into a corner like Frankenstein's monster facing the pitchforks. Except that the pitchforks were really upheld hands belonging to some nurses and more than one security guard.

"I'm sorry," Timmie gasped, skidding to the edge of the crowd. All up and down the aisle she could hear the anxious babble of fractious voices responding to the uproar.

Joe never looked her way. "Timmie! Where's my daughter?" he pleaded, striking out at the nearest security guard, a beefy kid named Dave who just ducked and held his ground. "They have her," he insisted, pleading, his eyes wet. "In Glen-Car. Look for her there, please?"

"Glen-Car?" one of the nurses asked at the back of the crowd. "Where's that? What's he talking about?"

Dave smiled, never taking his eyes off Timmie's father. "That poet he likes, Yeats. 'The Stolen Child,' isn't it, Joe? 'Come away, O human child! To the waters and the wild'? It's about fairies."

The nurse nodded, impressed. "No shit."

"Da!" Timmie called, shoving her way through. "Da, it's me! It's Timmie!"

It was the damn popcorn. She should have remembered that that was something else she'd rarely had at home for this same reason. He smelled it, boomeranged back to the great old days, and became frightened when he couldn't find the door into the bar.

He still couldn't. '"For the world's more full of weeping,'" he all but sang to Dave, as if explaining, tears trickling down his face, "'than you can understand.'"

Timmie carefully set down the coat-wrapped box with the county seal on it before approaching her father, hands lifted so he could see her better. Don't, she wanted to beg. Don't be wild and sad. Not tonight. I can't take it tonight.

"Da, I'm here," she pleaded. "I haven't gone off. I'm here."

He was too lost in his own fairy world to even hear. "Timmie, where are you? Help me! They won't let me out and I have a gig at nine!"

She lifted her hands to his clean-shaven, soft face. "Da, I'm here!"

He swiveled those watery blue eyes her way like a horse trying to escape fire and flinched back. "Where is she?" he pleaded, taking hold of her arms so tightly it hurt. "I can't find her. I... she'll be afraid, and I can't find her..."

"I'm here," Timmie pleaded back, suddenly tired to death of all this drama. She wanted to go home and crawl under her comforter, play with her daughter, chase a chameleon or two. She wanted, for once in her life, not to have this man on her conscience.

He looked straight through her. "I know she can't get home, please, please help me because she comes to the water and the wild..."

Well, at least it wasn't "Innisfree."

"Da, please, Da, it's Timmie, it's all right, I swear, shhhhh, come on now, Da, please," Timmie begged until she was chanting just like he was. Like they all were, the words mindless and meaningless and meant to be soothing.

Except that they weren't. They grated in her like ground glass until she was sure she was bleeding, and she ended up holding on to him as he crumpled into an untidy ball in the corner, sobbing because his daughter had never come home and he didn't know what to do.

* * *

In the end, Timmie made it back to her own daughter. She sent Cindy home after getting one more harangue about faithless asshole boyfriends, and then she crawled up into her bed and let Meghan do her homework on top of the aqua-and-pink duvet. And all the time she thought of gomer noises. The chanting, wailing, mindless repetition she could no longer stand. The morass her father was quickly sinking into, from which she couldn't save him. Near which she was so afraid to venture.

She must have fallen asleep, because the next thing she knew it was late and Meghan was curled up next to her, sound asleep in her play clothes. For a minute Timmie couldn't figure out what had woken her. Then the phone rang again and she jumped to answer it.

The alarm clock said 2:00. Only bad things happened at two in the morning, which meant that either her father had had a new crisis or the emergency department had a disaster on its hands.

"Hello?"

"Timmie?"

The voice was soft. So soft. Creepy. It made her shiver, even cocooned within down and her daughter's small warmth.

Timmie sucked in a breath to calm her racing heart. "Yes?"

"You're not alone, Timmie. I thought you should know that."

"Alone? What do you mean?"

"Your father..." The voice paused, but Timmie had already held her breath, not recognizing it. "He's such a special man. An awful lot of people in town love him. They can't stand to see what's happening to him any more than you can."

Not creepy. Hypnotic. Compelling. A snake that had slithered straight out of her subconscious to torture her. "Yes?"

"He used to be so strong.... Why, he could hush a room by just walking in, remember? He could bring the entire town to tears with just one song... a poem. Like the poem about the lions of the hills, you remember it?"

Timmie heard her voice grow smaller as the other voice took hold. A low voice, a soothing voice, a compelling voice in the dead of night. "Yes."

'"The lions of the hills are gone, and I am left alone—alone.' It's him, yes? Such a beautiful thing. It's so hard to see that light fade right before your eyes when you know how magnificent it once was."

Now her heart was bouncing around like a frog in a skillet. "Who is this? What do you want?"

"This just has to hurt him so much. Somebody like him, not even remembering his name, much less all those beautiful words he used to love so much. But I know you know that."

I do. Jesus, I do.

"It's torture, isn't it?"

Yes.

"What do you want?" she repeated, her voice a whisper.

It was so dark outside, no moon, no stars. The lights were off in the house, too, so that Timmie could see only shadows. Could hear only tickings and creakings and whisperings, as if the house were already haunted with her father's voice.

"What do you want?"

A soft sigh, like the wind. Like her own regret. "I just want to help."

"To help."

"To help you and Joe both. You have the power to help him, Timmie, do you know that? Only you. It would be so easy."

She couldn't breathe. She couldn't think. "I do?"

"So easy," the voice purred, sinking straight into her. "He deserves better than to be tied down and drugged, Timmie."

Don't ask me to answer, she all but begged. Don't.

"And you just have too much to deal with right now. You have to be tired. And you have to be wondering if you're really helping anybody after all with all those questions."

In all truth? Probably not. Timmie turned her head toward the window where the sky should have been, where trees should have stood out against a moon of some kind. There was just the faint reflection of her own face, moon pale in the darkness. As insubstantial as the voice on the phone.

"And?"

"And... I thought we could help each other out. You could just kind of leave this alone, and I could... well, your father could finally have some peace."

Timmie went perfectly still. She closed her eyes and held on to the phone. "If I just... stop. Right?"

"He's only going to get worse, Timmie. You know that."

She didn't answer. She couldn't. It didn't seem to matter.

"Tell you what," the voice said, its cadence even and soothing and sweet. "Why don't you take a day on it? Visit your dad. Think of what he'd want to do. You can get another call tomorrow night about this time if you have any questions. That would be all right, wouldn't it?"

"Yes. Yes, I think it would, if you promise to... uh, wait."

"Of course. I only want what's best for him and for you."

"And he wouldn't..."

"Suffer? No, of course not. That's the whole point, isn't it? Take your time. Just think of what you'd be doing for him, how easy it would finally be for him, how much you want him to finally have peace. Just think about that, Timmie."

Timmie didn't answer. She didn't even hang up the phone. She just lay there staring at the sky and shaking. She didn't call Micklind. She didn't call Murphy, which she should have.

She had twenty-four hours to decide.

Twenty-four hours.

Because the man on the phone hadn't just offered to make her a deal. He had offered to fulfill her most terrible wish.

Chapter 20

When Murphy stumbled into his house later that morning from his abbreviated run, the phone was ringing. He wasn't really in the mood to answer it, so he let it go. It refused to stop.

It rang while he brewed coffee and while he washed his face and while he opened the paper to see the front-page teaser about his article on Joe Leary. It stopped briefly and then began to ring again when he poured his coffee.

So he picked it up.

"Do you know what time it is?" he demanded.

"You've been out running," the soft voice retorted.

Instinctively Murphy hit the record and caller id buttons. A woman, he thought, although he couldn't say why, or whether it was the same one. The voice was more muffled than the last time he'd heard it, deep in the night.

"I've been out limping," he corrected, sitting down at his table. "What do you want?"

"I... you... you need to do something."

Murphy sipped at his coffee. "You think I'm not doing anything?"

"No. If you were, it wouldn't still be happening."

Murphy stopped sipping and sat up straight. "What do you mean?"

"Last night. It's not going to stop, because nobody wants it to. It's only old people, after all. Well, nobody asked those old people, you know?"

"Yeah," he answered, his brain kicking painfully into gear. "I know. You say somebody else died last night? Who, do you know? Was it Bertha Worthmueller?"

There was a startled little sound and a pause. "Then you know."

"I may not be flashy," he said, "but I get the work done. Was it Bertha?"

"No. She's still alive. It was Alice Hampton, a newer patient, which doesn't make any sense. But ask Timmie Leary. She was there. She can tell you."

Leary, huh? Why hadn't she called him about it? What did she know, and what had she done about it?

"You tell me," he insisted. "Tell me what you know."

"No... I can't. Timmie can do it."

"Do you know who it is?"

Another, microscopic pause, more telling than the last. "No. I just know that somebody does, and it has to stop."

Click.

A new death. Another call from his mysterious angel, who most certainly did suspect who was responsible for the deaths but was too afraid to admit it. And, this time, a tape of the conversation and a phone number to boot. Murphy wrote it down, just to be sure, but figured with his luck it was probably a pay phone someplace.

He was going to have to talk to Leary. He didn't really want to. Not after what he'd forced out of her yesterday. He'd sat up most of the night staring at the pictures of his daughters, trying to decide if it was time to call them, and hadn't been able to come to any conclusions. He couldn't imagine how she'd spent her night. She knew too much, that little nurse did. She'd told him things about his own kids he'd successfully avoided for years, and he could have done without that for the rest of his life. He could just imagine what kind of night she'd spent.

So, why hadn't she called him about the latest death?

Murphy checked his watch and still came up with only a quarter after the crack of dawn. Leary was not a crack-of-dawn person. So he would call her after he showered and checked a couple of things, like who belonged to the phone number in his hand. And, maybe, checked on the girls. By then Leary should at least be communicative, if not any happier to see him.

* * *

He tried at nine and he tried at eleven, and then he called the hospital to find that she wasn't scheduled for work. He called his buddies at the Post and got the address of that phone number from the cross-street reference, to find that it belonged to a gas station pay phone. He called Barbara to find out that Timmie had asked the doctor to do some testing on one Alice Hampton, who was even now cooling her heels in the hospital morgue waiting for her primary physician to decide what to do with her mortal remains. The physician in question was due back from a gerontology conference that afternoon. Barbara couldn't say much more than that, since Leary had evidently decamped immediately after her request, and hadn't been heard from again.

Murphy was starting to get nervous. He called again and got the same damn answering machine. "Yeah, it's an answering machine. Live with it. Better yet, communicate with it. Beep."

The last two times he'd called, he'd left messages.

As the clock edged toward noon, Murphy decided it would be just as easy to go over.

He was sure she was fine. Probably just working in the yard or something. Attending parents' day at school. Walking the lizard. It wouldn't hurt to check, though. He got there in record time and blamed it on the Porsche.

The house was quiet. A pretty place ringed in flowers with a porch that creaked right at the top step. He remembered that from the night he'd done a belly flop on Leary's floor. Amazing how different the outside and inside of that house were.

Nothing looked out of place, though. There weren't fire engines or worried neighbors. Just a pretty, tree-lined street where kids played in the afternoons. Slamming the door of his Porsche shut, Murphy trotted up the steps, still expecting Leary to appear any minute with a trowel or something in her hand.

He rang the doorbell and waited for an answer.

Nothing.

He could hear something inside, though. He leaned closer, trying to make it out. A flute? No, it wasn't as full-throated as a flute. Pretty, though. Soft and sweet. She must have a CD on, although where she'd gotten a recording of some wind instrument playing Barber's "Adagio for Strings", he couldn't figure.

He rang again. And again, he got nothing.

This wasn't right. The back of his neck was itching, and he had the most overwhelming urge to walk away before he found something bad on the other side of that door. So he did what any self-respecting newsman would do. He tried the knob.

And just like in the movies, it opened.

"Leary?"

Nothing.

Somebody was in here. He could sense it. He was already holding his breath, and he wanted to tiptoe. The flute, or whatever, stopped. It had been coming from upstairs. There wasn't another sound in the house. No obvious signs of a struggle. The Nerf ball had been knocked off the line again, but Murphy imagined that happened a lot around here.

"Leary?" Gingerly, Murphy mounted the stairs.

Those creaked, too, which didn't help his heart rate any. Jesus, he hated walking into something like this. He'd walked in on one too many crime scenes, and in almost every one the victim had greeted him with wide eyes, as if still startled by what had happened.

"Leary? You up here?"

He got three fourths of the way up the stairs and saw her.

Alive. Sitting in the first bedroom on the left, on top of an old mahogany sleigh bed. Disheveled and pale, cross-legged and dressed in a pink sweat suit, a punk Buddha of the Flea Market.

"What the hell's wrong with you?" Murphy demanded, trying as hard as hell to calm his heart down. He was still half-expecting to see a gun-wielding madman forcibly keeping her in the room.

She didn't move. "I should have remembered to lock the door."

She was way too quiet. Her body language was all wrong. Tight, curled, her fingers tapping like a typist's against something in her lap. Murphy suspected she'd slept in that sweat suit, and at the foot of her bed sat a sealed brown evidence box and a phone that dangled a broken chord. This was going to be complicated, and he hadn't even had breakfast yet. He climbed the rest of the stairs and made for her room.

"What's wrong?" he asked.

"I'm out of practice," she said in an odd, small voice, her attention back on whatever she was mangling in her lap. "I can't remember the whole piece."

She was way, way too quiet.

Then Murphy saw what she'd been holding. A tin whistle. The kind of thing you saw the Chieftains play jigs and stuff on, all high, sharp notes that could shatter glass. She'd been playing that? She'd been playing Barber on that?

"You play that thing?" Murphy found himself asking.

"Maudlin, but appropriate, don't you think?"

"Aren't you supposed to play, like, 'MacNamara's Band' and stuff like that?"

She almost smiled. Lifted the thing to her mouth and spun off about thirty bars of the most complicated jig Murphy had ever heard. Then she dropped it back in her lap and went back to battering it.

Murphy decided it was wiser to stay where he was and leaned against the doorway where she wouldn't notice how uncomfortable she was making him. "Wanna tell me what's going on?"

She shrugged, still not facing him. "I'm just sitting here."

"You're not answering your calls."

She shrugged again, fingered the instrument. Made him even more nervous. This just wasn't the Leary he'd come to know and fear.

"I saw your article on my father," she said. "You did a good job."

Murphy couldn't contain his surprise. "I didn't think you'd read it."

She nodded absently. "You were right. He really did make an impact on the town. On everybody he met, really. He's never known a stranger or had a dollar that didn't need to be in somebody else's pocket more. My mother always yelled at him because he spent his paychecks at the bars. The truth is, he never paid for two drinks in the same night. But he never said no if a person needed help."

"I'm just sorry I didn't know him before," Murphy said.

Unbelievably, she smiled. She smiled fondly, as if they'd never had the conversation the day before. "You would have loved him," she admitted. "I probably wouldn't have been able to pry you two out of the saloon for a month."

Murphy was itching again. He had the most insane urge to look over his shoulder, as if the real conversation were going on right behind him. He sure couldn't figure this one out. So he lobbed a test missile.

"I heard we have another set of statistics," he said.

She started a little, as if she'd come in contact with a live wire. Then she just tightened up a little more. "Maybe," she said. "Maybe not. After all, like everybody said, she was old and she had Alzheimer's. Maybe it was just her time to go."

Murphy blinked in surprise. "You believe that?"

She looked out the window, then back at her hands. "Ah, who knows? I think it's one of the great conceits of the modern world that so many people know just what other people need or want or believe. I don't think I want to do that anymore."

Now he knew he was nervous. "You don't."

She shook her head. "My mother does that, and she doesn't have any friends left. Only dependents."

"And you think that's what this is all about."

Another shrug. Another silence.

"I will tell you one thing I've figured out," she said as if continuing a thought. "An awful lot of people are trying to cover up something they haven't figured out yet. They think maybe patients are being murdered in their geriatric center, but they don't want to know for sure. Landry because it would hurt the hospital. Mary Jane because it would hurt Alex. Davies because it would hurt research, and Van Adder because it might interfere with his towing business. Oh, and the nurses up in the nursing care wing because it could hurt their reputations as good nurses. You know what I haven't heard as a reason yet, Murphy?"

"What's that?"

She looked at him, and he saw what she'd been hiding. Tight, old eyes that glittered with shame. "Those patients. Not one person is doing what they're doing because they think maybe they're helping those poor little old people." She sucked in a shaky breath. Shook her head. "Maybe if one person..."

She shook her head again, uncrossed her legs. Climbed out of bed, as if the words demanded action.

"Leary?"

"It's a question we all ask," she explained, standing there looking out her window into the trees, her hands cradling that tin whistle as if it were a relic. "What's best for the poor old gomers we have to take care of all the time. You know, just how hard should we fight to save them? When does it stop being sensible and become obscene instead? I could understand if any one of the people who's covering this up had said they were doing it because deep in their hearts they really believed it was better for those old people. Because they really did think whoever's doing this was giving them peace. A chance to be rid of all of us, ya know?"

He'd thought it when he'd finally sat down with Joe Leary. "Yeah. I know."

"But not one person really even thought about it. Not one." She turned on him, her eyes accusing. "Not even me. And that's just the most enlightening thing of all."

She was trembling. Murphy wasn't even sure she knew it, but he could see it in her hands and along her arms. She looked like she was going to break, those big blue eyes of hers bleaker than any survivor's waiting at a mine shaft. And Murphy didn't know what to do about it.

"What happened, Leary?" he asked.

She laughed. "Happened?" She hesitated a heartbeat, as if battling something. When she turned away from him, Murphy had the most unholy feeling she'd lost. "Nothing happened. Nothing at all."

This wasn't helping his peace of mind.

"All right," he said. "Let's try this. What's in the box?"

She didn't move. "Nothing."

"You just developed a fetish for evidence boxes."

"Uh-huh."

Murphy had been able to weasel the truth out of four embezzling senators, a bomb-hiding revolutionary, and several dozen reticent whistle-blowers. He stood at the edge of Leary's room and didn't have a clue what to say next.

"And you have nothing to say about this Alice Hampton, or whoever, who died last night."

She tensed like an animal scenting predators. "Not right now."

"Then when?"

"I don't know. Tomorrow... I think, tomorrow. You might want to take today off, too. Go see a movie or something."

"Are you sure it can wait?"

Not a breath of movement.

"Leary?"

She never turned around. Just shook her head. And Murphy, not knowing what else to do, turned around to leave. He'd made it all the way down the steps before he heard movement behind him.

"Murphy?"

He stopped. She was standing at the top of the stairs, her face in shadow, her hands tight around that damn sliver of tin.

"What?"

It took her a minute to speak, and when she did, she sounded scared. "Would you come back later tonight?"

"Why, Leary? What's going to happen?"

She lifted her head a little, and almost smiled. "You mean you don't believe I just want some mindless sex?"

"Not really."

"Please." Murphy heard desperation and couldn't believe it. "Come over about midnight. I think I'm going to need some help."

Murphy knew something substantial was happening here. He just wished like hell somebody'd tell him what it was.

"I'll be here." He was all set to walk out when he remembered at least one of the reasons he'd intended to come over here in the first place. "One thing. I got another call from my whisperer this morning. It's a woman. And she called from a service station. Any ideas?"

"A service station?"

"Yeah. Mike's Mobile. Mean anything?"

And here he'd thought she sounded bad before. This time when she spoke, she sounded as if she were going to die. "Yeah," she said. "It does."

"And?"

"Tomorrow. We'll talk about it tomorrow."

Leary just turned back to her room, which left Murphy nothing better to do than leave. He made it all the way out the door this time. When he closed it behind him, though, he couldn't shake the feeling that he'd just run away.

* * *

Timmie spent the rest of the day right where she was. Far away from the phone, far away from her friends, as far from her father as she could manage. She listened to the phone ring half a dozen more times and didn't move an inch to answer it. She thought about calling Murphy back more than once. She didn't. She didn't do anything, because there was just nothing she could manage to do right now.

At three the door opened again and Meghan clomped in. "Mom!" she yelled. "Hey, Mom! I'm home! I have the mail! And Mr. Mattie's here!"

Timmie wasn't ready for Meghan. She definitely wasn't ready for the Reverend Walter with his sweet, Christian heart and old, old eyes. He'd see right through her. He'd know exactly what she'd been thinking ever since the moment that voice on the phone had offered to solve all her problems. And then he'd forgive her, and Timmie really wasn't ready for that.

So she climbed out of bed and walked to the head of the stairs. Down below, standing square and tall and strong, just like a soldier of God should, Walter took up the entire doorway.

"Timmie? Brought your baby home."

"Thanks, Walter."

Walter leaned over a little so he could see Timmie better as Meghan bounded up the stairs with a handful of bills and one manila envelope in her hand. An envelope from Conrad. Timmie wasn't sure how she could feel worse. She dropped it on the floor where it couldn't hurt her and hugged her baby. It wasn't until Meghan had galloped back down to the kitchen for cookies that Timmie realized that Walter still stood at the bottom of the steps.

"My pleasure," he rumbled in a soothing baritone Timmie loved. "She's a treasure. How much longer you think I'm gonna need to keep an eye on the children?"

No longer, she wanted to say. It's all over. The children will be safe, I'll be able to sleep again, and my father will be... safe. Far away from me and my mother and anybody else who can't remember how wonderful he could be.

"I'm not sure," she said instead, feeling it in her chest. In her stomach. In the tense ache of her hands where they were clenching that damn tin whistle. "Do you mind?"

The reverend shook his head. "Not if it means you can stop this evil with a clear mind. I'm happy to do it." When Timmie couldn't seem to manage an answer, he frowned, a polite man. "Are you all right, Timothy Ann?"

Stupid question. She needed to confess, but Walter wasn't a priest. She needed to act, but she was frozen. She needed to believe that whatever she ended up doing tonight, it would be the right thing. That it was all right that she hadn't told her caller no last night.

She needed to believe that she'd hesitated only because she couldn't stand to see her father hurt anymore, and she couldn't quite do that. Which didn't leave her with much.

"I'm fine, Walter. Just fine."

Walter's nod was slow. "All right, then. I'll see you tomorrow."

Timmie meant to tell him to tell Mattie to stay home. She didn't quite manage that, either. So twenty minutes later to the minute, the front door crashed open and Mattie, Ellen, and Cindy marched into the house. Timmie waited for them on the top step.

"You are not all right," Mattie accused from the bottom of the stairs.

Timmie didn't move. "Go away, Mattie," she said softly. "I'll call you tomorrow."

Mattie straightened like a shot. "I will not. And you'll tell me now."

"Mom?" Meghan had heard the noise and run out of the back room where the single television lived. Then she spotted the trio, who were still trying to stare Timmie down, and frowned herself. "Mr. Mattie went home already," she said. "Didn't he get there?"

"He did, honey," Mattie said without looking at her. "Thank you. I just need to talk to your mama right now, okay?"

Meghan looked at Mattie. She leaned around the banister to where she could see Timmie and checked her out. Timmie smiled.

"It's okay, baby. It's just work stuff."

So she was lying to everybody now. How pleasant. The minute Meghan walked back in to her after-school treat and TV, Timmie climbed to her feet and walked back into her room. Inevitably, the three women followed.

"You look terrible," Cindy blurted out. "What can we do?"

Timmie sat back up on her bed. "You can tell Walter not to worry about me. Everything's fine." Even she heard the lie in that one.

Mattie came to stand over her like a mother about to feel her forehead for a fever. "We're not going," she said softly. "So spill it."

She couldn't. Not now. Not here. Certainly not with an audience, especially after what Murphy had told her.

"It's nothing," she said. "I promise." And then she lied some more. "I got served again by Jason this morning, and I'm just feeling sorry for myself."