Linwood Barclay: The Twenty-Three

“In the kitchen. On the floor.”

“You need to call 911 right now, Crystal. You know how to do that?”

“Yes. Everybody knows how to do that. I did that. Nobody answered. Your number was in her phone, so I called you.”

“Did your mother tell you what’s wrong?”

“She’s not saying anything.”

“I’m on my way,” he said. “But keep calling 911, okay?”

“Okay,” Crystal said. “Good-bye.”

Before Patricia Henderson decided to try to get herself to the hospital, she dialed 911.

She figured when you called 911, someone answered right away. First ring. But 911 did not respond on the first ring, nor did it respond on the second.

Or the third.

By four rings, Patricia was thinking maybe this was not the way to go.

But then, an answer.

“Please hold!” someone said hurriedly, and then nothing.

Patricia’s symptoms-and there were more than a few-were not subsiding, and she did not believe, even in her increasingly confused state, that she could wait around for some 911 dispatcher to get back to her.

She let go of the receiver, not bothering to place it back in the cradle, and looked for her purse. Was that it, over there, waaaay over there, on the small table by the front door?

Patricia squinted, and determined that it was.

She stumbled toward it, reached into the bag for her car keys. After ten seconds of digging around without success, she turned the bag over and dumped the contents onto the table, most of them spilling onto the floor.

She blinked several times, tried to focus. It was as though she’d just stepped out of the shower, was trying to get the water out of her eyes so she could see. She bent over at the waist to grab what appeared to be her keys, but was snatching at air, some three inches above where her keys lay.

“Come on, stop that,” Patricia told the keys. “Don’t be that way.”

She leaned over slightly more, grabbed hold of the keys, but tumbled forward into the hallway. As she struggled to get to her knees, nausea overwhelmed her and she vomited onto the floor.

“Hospital,” she whispered.

She struggled to her feet, opened the door, made no effort to lock, or even close, it behind her, and went down the hallway to the elevators, one hand feeling the wall along the way to steady herself. She was only on the third floor, but she still possessed enough smarts to know she could not handle two flights of stairs.

Patricia blinked several times to make sure she hit the down instead of the up button. Ten seconds later, although to Patricia it might as well have been an hour and a half, the doors opened. She stumbled into the elevator, looked for g, hit the button. She leaned forward, rested her head where the doors met, which meant that when they opened on the ground floor a few seconds later, she fell into the lobby.

No one was there to see it. But that didn’t mean there was nobody in the lobby. There was a body .

In her semidelirious state, Patricia thought she recognized Mrs. Gwynn from 3B facedown in a puddle of her own vomit.

Patricia managed to cross the lobby and get outside. She had one of the best parking spots. First one past those designated for the handicapped.

I deserve one of those today, Patricia thought.

She pointed her key in the direction of her Hyundai, pressed a button. The trunk swung open. Oops. Pressed another button as she reached the driver’s side, got in, fumbled about getting the key into the ignition. Once she had the engine running, she took a moment to steel herself, rested her head momentarily on the top of the steering wheel.

And asked herself, Where am I going?

The hospital. Yes! The hospital. What a perfectly splendid idea.

She turned around to see her way out of the spot, but the upraised trunk lid blocked her view. Not a problem. She hit the gas, driving the back end of her car into a Volvo owned by Mr. Lewis, a retired Social Security employee who happened to live three doors down from her.

A headlight shattered, but Patricia did not hear it.

She put the car into drive and sped out of the apartment building parking lot, the Hyundai veering sharply left and right as she oversteered in the manner of someone who’d had far too much to drink, or was texting.

The car was quickly doing sixty miles per hour in a thirty zone, and what Patricia was unaware of was that she was heading not in the direction of the hospital, which, ironically, was only half a mile from her home, but toward the Weston Street Branch of the Promise Falls Library system.

The last thing she was thinking about, before her mind went blank and her heart stopped working, was that when they had that meeting about Internet filtering, she was going to tell those narrow-minded, puritanical assholes who wanted what anyone saw on a library computer closely monitored to go fuck themselves.

But she wouldn’t get that chance, because her Hyundai had cut across three lanes, bounced over the curb at the Exxon station, and driven straight into a self-serve pump at more than sixty miles per hour.

The explosion was heard up to two miles away.

Now that he was working as a publicist and campaign manager for Randall Finley, owner of Finley Springs Water as well as the former mayor of Promise Falls on the comeback trail, David Harwood was bringing home free cases of bottled water every day. The stuff was coming into the house faster than he-and the others under his roof-could consume it.

David’s son, Ethan, drank mostly milk anyway, but David was tossing a bottle a day into the lunch Ethan took to school. With his parents, who were living with him and Ethan until the rebuilding of their kitchen was finished, it was a mixed bag. David’s mother, Arlene, was drinking the stuff at every opportunity, forgoing the water that came out of the tap. It was her way of showing support for David in his new job, even if she hadn’t been very happy at first that he was working for Finley, a man whose predilection, at least once a few years back, for underage prostitutes had tarnished her opinion of him.

David’s father, Don, however, did not share his wife’s contempt for the former mayor. As the ex-mayor himself had said to David, and Don could not have agreed more, if everyone in the world refused to work for assholes, there’d be almost total unemployment, and there were a lot bigger assholes out there than Finley. Don’s enthusiasm for Finley, however, did not extend to his product. Don viewed bottled water as the ultimate rip-off. The very idea of paying for what came out of the tap for next to nothing was ridiculous to him.

Not that David disagreed.

“They’ve already got us paying for TV when it was free when I was a kid,” Don railed. “And they’ve got these deluxe radio stations you have to subscribe to. Good ol’ AM radio’s good enough for me. Christ, what next? They gonna put in a coin slot on our upstairs toilet?”

When David came downstairs and opened the refrigerator, he found more space than he was expecting. “You’re really guzzling these down,” he said to his mother, who was already there fixing breakfast for Don. David swore they must get up at three in the morning. He’d never managed to beat them downstairs.

“I’m using them to make the coffee,” she said.

Don, his finger looped into the handle of his mug, looked up from the tablet he was struggling to read the news on. “You what?”

Arlene shot him a look. “Nothing.”

“You made this with that bottled stuff?”

“I’m just trying to use it up.”

He pushed the mug toward the center of the table. “I’m not drinking this.”

Arlene turned, put one hand on her hip. “Is that so?”

“That’s so,” he said.