Destroying Angels (Leigh Girard Book 1) Read online

  “It looked like a doll’s head,” I had explained. “Except for the part that’s missing.”

  He had been in the middle of his dinner of meatloaf, mashed potatoes and green beans when I had pounded on his cabin door. I wouldn’t have wanted to believe me either.

  “Look, I work for the Gazette. My name’s Leigh Girard. I assure you, I am not making this up.”

  “I read ya,” he said. “But ya sure, this isn’t some prank Stevens put you up to?”

  “What? No!”

  “Okay, then. But let me finish my dinner.”

  By the time we had reached the cave, the moon had crested the trees. Ranger Johnson had taken one look at the tiny skull and shook his head.

  “Guess you’re right, there. Looks as human as you or me.”

  “You’re going to report this to the police?”

  “What do you think, missy?”

  I must have told Deputy Ferry, a short dark man with a mustache shaped like a mascara brush, at least twelve times how Salinger and I had found the bones. Only after I had promised to come by the station at nine in the morning to give an official statement had he been satisfied.

  I threw the covers off and shivered over to the far corner of the room, where I had shoved one of my many boxes of books. I dug through the box until I found the one I was looking for, the perfect antidote to the evening’s events: Nathaniel Hawthorne’s, Tales and Sketches. Book in hand, I crawled back under the covers. Salinger looked up with an expression of annoyed willingness on her face.

  “You’ve done your work for today,” I told her. “You can go back to sleep.”

  As I read the first few pages of Hawthorne's book, I was again reminded that he understood how past sins eventually have a way of surfacing. They come back to haunt us, even when they’re not our own. In my mind's eye, I saw the small holes in the skull where the eyes had been, felt the lightness and fragility of that extinguished life. Whoever had buried that baby in the recesses of a cave had a secret that had finally surfaced.

  17

  Friday, November 10, Present day

  Friday at seven A.M., I was back at the Bay hospital. Lydia woke me at six, her voice edgy with adrenaline. Sarah Peck had been brought into the Emergency Room around midnight. She had taken an overdose of sleeping pills, which combined with a high alcohol level, had put her in a coma. She was in critical condition and the next twenty-four hours, according to Lydia, would be touch and go.

  The nurse on duty directed me to the ICU waiting room. Walking down the green linoleum hall past the patient rooms, I realized my head no longer hurt. As I entered the waiting room, Rob Martin stared up at me.

  “What are you doing here?” He looked like he hadn’t slept in a week. There were dark circles under his eyes resembling smudges. His clothes were wrinkled and smelled musky.

  “I came to see if there was anything I could do.” In truth, I was feeling guilty about Sarah. I had pushed her hard, maybe too hard. “You look like you could use some coffee.”

  “I don’t want anything, especially from you.” For once, his anger toward me seemed justified.

  “What happened?”

  “I don’t know. I found her passed out in her bed.” He caught my look of surprise. “She left a message on my machine asking me to come over, no matter how late. There was something she wanted to tell me. I didn’t get home from the conservation meeting until about ten-thirty. By the time I reached her place, she had already taken the pills.” In the moment, his need to talk about what happened seemed to outweigh his dislike of me.

  “Was there a note?” I asked, wondering if what Sarah needed to tell him had anything to do with those bones Salinger found. In a way, I felt as if Sarah had led me to them.

  “No.” He glared at me. “What did you say to her last night? You must have said something to make her take enough Valium to kill herself.” He stopped. “My God!” He collapsed back against the chair, all the fight suddenly out of him. “I could lose her.”

  “Sarah told you about our meeting?”

  “It was in her message.” He looked away.

  I let that fact register for a moment. “Did she also tell you she was the one who ran me off the road?”

  “Sarah didn’t run you off the road.” He spoke so quietly that I wasn’t sure I had heard him correctly.

  “She admitted it to me.”

  He ran his fingers through his red hair. “She did that for me.”

  “For you?” I got it, I just couldn't believe what he was admitting.

  “You ran me off the road?”

  “Sarah was protecting me. She didn’t want me taking the blame. She was afraid that you’d go to Stevens, get me fired. She didn’t think you’d do anything to her.”

  “But why would you run me off the road in the first place?”

  “I didn’t mean to run you off the road. I was only trying to scare you so you’d back off Sarah. I felt I had to protect her from you, even though she didn’t want my protection. She said that it was too late for anyone’s protection.”

  He put his face in his hands and shook his head. “I should have done something. If only I’d known. But Sarah never said anything. All those years, she never said anything. It’s that old bastard’s fault.”

  “Carl Peck?”

  “Who else? After we moved back from Chicago, he was drinking heavily. He’d go into these rages. He didn’t even care if I was around. Called Sarah a slut and a loser, right in front of me. I should have done something, at least said something. Maybe if I had, she wouldn’t have done this.”

  “Done what? Taken the pills, you mean?”

  He turned his head slowly in my direction and looked at me with such contempt that I felt a flush creep up my neck and spread across my face. “You just never quit, do you? Why don’t you just get the hell out of here!”

  Eva Peck stood in the waiting room doorway. As before, she was dressed in black. However, this time she was wearing a loose-fitting wool suit, black suede heels and black hose. How had she mustered the presence of mind to dress so impeccably?

  Martin stood up. “Has there been any change?”

  “No, no change. She’s still in a coma.” Eva walked over to us. “So nice of you to come, Leigh.” She stared at my bruised forehead, which was now a pasty purplish-yellow. “Oh dear, did you have an accident?” Her sense of propriety was unnerving.

  “You might say that, but I’m fine.” I didn’t look at Martin. “Is there anything I can get for you?”

  She sat down next to Martin, pulling primly on the hem of her skirt. “A cup of tea would be nice, if it’s not too much trouble.”

  “No trouble at all.”

  “Would you mind getting it from the cafeteria? I can’t stomach that tea from the vending machine. No sugar, but just a little cream.”

  When I returned to the waiting room with the tea, Eva was holding Martin’s hand.

  “All we can do now is pray,” she said catching my eye as I entered the room. “It’s up to the Lord now. How much was the tea, dear?”

  “Don’t worry about it,” I said, handing her the tea. I looked at my watch. It was 9:10 AM. I was late for my appointment at the police station. “I’m going to have to go,” I told her.

  “You haven’t seen Sarah. Make sure you see her before you leave.”

  Martin shook his head. “Eva, they only let relatives see ICU patients.”

  “Leigh is Sarah’s friend, and she took the time to come here.” She addressed me. “Tell the nurse you’re her good friend. It’s the same thing as a relative.”

  I couldn’t understand Eva’s insistence that I see Sarah. Especially since she had the mistaken idea that her daughter could stand me. Besides, the last thing I wanted to do was see Sarah Peck attached to mega machines and fighting for her life.

  “I really can’t right now. I’m late for work.”

  “Mr. Stevens will understand, won’t he, Rob?” She didn’t wait for Martin’s answer but stood
up, took me by the arm and guided me to the hallway. We stopped in front of the nurses’ station.

  “Julie, this is Leigh Girard, she’s Sarah’s dear friend from Chicago. Is it all right if she visits Sarah?”

  “Sure. Her room is the second unit on the left.”

  “Oh, I’ll go with her. We won’t stay long.”

  There was no graceful way to avoid accompanying Eva into Sarah's room. The only explanation that I could come up with for this bizarre behavior was that the strain of her husband’s death and now Sarah’s suicide attempt was taking a toll on her. I had seen similar irrational behavior in times of grief. Two women from my cancer group had died, and I had gone through the grieving process with their families.

  “There’s my little girl,” Eva whispered as we stood at the foot of her daughter's bed. The sight of Sarah in a coma clutched at my stomach. Her black hair fanned out starkly against the white pillow. She was hooked up to a heart monitor, oxygen tank, and several IVs. The blipping sound of the monitors bored into my brain.

  “Doesn’t she look peaceful?” Eva asked me. She moved beside the bed, careful to avoid the multiple wires. “She’ll always be a little girl to me.” She bent down and kissed Sarah’s forehead.

  I remained rooted at the foot of the bed. I could endure this if Eva could. “She’ll come out of it, Mrs. Peck. She’s strong.” This was all I could think to say, lame as it sounded.

  She stroked Sarah’s cheek. “Do you think so? Do you really think so?”

  * * * * *

  I looked at my watch as I entered the hospital elevator: 9:30. I pushed the button for the third floor. I was already thirty minutes late for my appointment at the police department, so I figured a few more minutes wouldn’t make any difference. Lorraine Birch should be back from vacation and on duty, hopefully. I needed to focus on something other than Sarah Peck swaddled to machines.

  The third floor station nurse pointed to an elderly woman stacking medicine trays onto a cart.

  “I only work part-time now,” Lorraine explained to me when I told her I’d been trying to catch her at work. Her face looked like crumbled linen, and her short hair was bleached a shade of yellow that didn’t exist in nature.

  “You don’t have any other jobs?”

  “Oh, goodness, no.” She laughed. “I only work here now and then. You know my social security check isn’t much. I’ve been a registered nurse for over forty years. Started out in the emergency room.”

  “Well, I hope you can help me with a small detail that I bet didn’t slip by you. I understand that Joyce Oleander visited someone in the hospital the day before her discharge. Do you happen to know who that was?”

  She turned to face me directly, and looked into my eyes for a moment. Then answered, “I’m not even going to ask why you want to know that. But, yes, I do know.” She paused, still holding my eyes with her own. “She visited Carl Peck. Joyce and Carl's daughter Sarah were friends when they were younger. She was probably paying her respects. Joyce was like that.”

  “How did she seem after that visit?”

  “Seem?” She considered the question. “Let me see. That was the day before she was discharged. Now that I think about it, it was really after her visit with Carl that she became so down. Like all the air had been sucked out of her. In the morning, she was okay. I remember because that morning I told her about Carl being in the hospital, mainly since I recalled that she and Sarah had been friends.”

  “Did she say anything to you about the visit?”

  “No, not really. But. . .” she hesitated.

  I waited.

  “At the time, I didn’t think anything about it. But later, after what she did, I wondered.”

  “Wondered about what?” I couldn't help feeling exasperated by the convoluted way Nurse Birch was getting to the heart of the matter. But I kept myself in check.

  “I wondered if maybe she had been trying to ask for help. You know, one of those warning signs. She said to me, ‘Well, I thought I’d feel relief when it finally was over, but I don’t. I guess she was talking about her surgery.”

  “What else could she have been talking about?” My turn to wonder.

  “That’s what I’m saying. What else, indeed?”

  18

  The vision of Sarah Peck lying in a coma haunted me all day. In a fog, I drove to the police station, gave a formal statement about the discovery of the bones, and returned to work. Deputy Ferry assured me that as soon as the medical examiner had completed his examination, he’d call me with the results. He told me he figured the bones had probably been there for hundreds of years. I had been dismissed with the pat attitude of “Don’t call us, we’ll call you.” Chet Jorgensen was off for the day, so I couldn’t enlist his help. If Ferry thought he could get rid of me that easily, he was wrong. I wasn’t going to be ignored.

  For the remainder of the day, I worked on a particularly disturbing story about a Sturgeon Bay man who had hung his Labrador retriever for biting a seventeen-year-old boy. Stevens had finally given me an assignment that didn’t involve someone’s demise, at least not a human’s anyway. I ended the story with a direct quote from the man in an attempt to explain his action to the judge. “I’d told him the next time he bit someone, I’d kill him. So when he bit the neighbor boy, I got angry. I took the dog to a nearby tree and hung him until he died.” I was so disgusted I wanted to throttle the guy with my bare hands. The judge let him off with a fine and a warning.

  The story left me in a dark mood. When we start hanging dogs, I thought, we’ve sunk pretty low on the evolutionary scale. And human or dog, it was still a death story. I was beginning to feel like an albatross. In my short tenure in Door, there’d been one suicide, one attempted suicide, and one suspicious poisoning. If it wasn’t bad karma, the only other explanation I could think of was that maybe a lot of death and mayhem had been swept under the carpet over the years. If so, perhaps Stevens hadn’t been kidding when he compared the Door villages to medieval hamlets.

  I kept expecting Stevens to appear and start asking questions, but either he wasn’t in or he was avoiding me. I didn’t bother asking Marge where he was because I didn’t want to talk to him about Sarah.

  Marge took one look at my bruise and, with unexpected tact, did not ask me about it. Neither one of us said anything about the women’s group either. She did ask, “Did you hear about Sarah? And would you like to contribute money for flowers?”

  I answered yes to both questions, and beat a hasty retreat toward home.

  As I drove down Highway 42, an overwhelming urge to call Tom came over me. I needed someone to reassure me, and maybe in the process, also absolve me of what I was feeling about Sarah. Maybe I’d start by saying, “Guess what Salinger found?” Or, “They’ve got me writing obits. Who'd-a figured?”

  I looked at my watch. It was 3:35 P.M. Tom would be at work. I knew how the conversation would go. He’d ask how I was doing. I’d say fine. Then the usual silence would fall between us. We’d both tell each other to take care, and that would be the end of it. There was no point to seeking out this predictable disappointment.

  If it was comfort I was seeking, I knew I'd have to find it elsewhere. I turned left on Clark Lake Road and headed toward White Fish Dunes. The day had turned bright, but windy. I was craving the purity of white sand beach and the openness of possibility. Moving past the open fields, I watched a cluster of dark, iridescent birds. They scattered upward as if they’d been thrown into the sky, and then returned again, arranging themselves on a telephone wire in perfect symmetry. I envied their clarity.

  The pavement quickly turned to gravel, and trees crowded the serpentine road. Around the second bend, I slowed my car and peered through an opening among evergreens to see if the grey-scarred fishing boat was still anchored in front of the disheveled cottage with no curtains. No disappointment here: everything still in place as I remembered it from my hikes here with Tom.

  When I pulled into the parking lot near the du
nes, I saw only one other car—a black convertible with the top down. I got out of my truck, zipped up my coat, pulled on my purple hat and grey wool gloves and headed toward the beach. At the entrance to the beach sat the slate-blue Nature Center. Like a squat lighthouse, the weathered building overlooked Lake Michigan. Although the Center was closed, I could see a telescope perched in the eastern window: ready to spot anyone in distress, or scan a splendid sunrise.

  “Doesn’t it remind you of Cape Cod?” Tom had asked the last time we were in Door together. Well before my cancer diagnosis.

  I quickened my pace and jogged down the wooden slat path toward the beach, careful not to step off the path and walk on the sand dunes. Where the slats ended stood a warning sign: “Casual footsteps take a toll on dunes.” Even here, I couldn’t escape reminders of the human capacity to destroy.

  There was a fierce wind blowing from the east. White caps were breaking close to shore, and for a moment, the brilliant sunlight blinded me. I looked in the distance where the beach curved and saw that the water was silvered with light. This was what I had come for: a vista so beautiful, it frightened. As I trotted toward it, my left chest area began a vague aching.

  “Phantom ache,” I told myself. Then those garish colors came back to me, the ones I'd seen last night as I stepped out of the bath and looked into the mirror. This area of my chest wasn’t healing as quickly as the bruise on my forehead. “But it wouldn’t,” I reasoned. “It's been traumatized by the chemo and the mastectomy. Makes sense the tissue wouldn’t respond as fast.”

  I turned into the wind. The cold bit into my fingers. I took my gloves off. The cold on my skin was a good clean feeling making the moment sharper, more real.

  The waves were high, and the water as green as bottle glass. I looked inland at the rim of trees high on the dunes—the pines gave the landscape a rugged quality that broke through the monotony of maples and oaks. The birch trees drew my eye. They seemed to radiate their own light, even though their white bark was splotched with greys, greens, and blacks where it peeled away. That last time Tom and I had been here, I had asked a naturalist at the Nature Center why the birches peel.