Jeffery Deaver: Praying for Sleep

A mud-spattered state-police car arrived, its rooftop speaker already turned to the receiving channel and stuttering with broadcasts, all of which were related to the cleanup efforts following the storm. A tall, gray-haired man stepped out of the car. Lis thought he resembled a cowboy.

“Mrs. Atcheson?” he called.

She caught his eye and he started for her but then paused halfway through the muddy yard to gaze with undisguised surprise, then concern, at Trenton Heck, lying on a gurney. He was barely conscious. The two men said a few words to each other before the medics carted the lanky tracker off to an ambulance.

Don Haversham approached her and asked if she felt like answering a few questions.

“I suppose.”

As they were talking, a doctor emerged from one of the ambulances and put a butterfly bandage on the cut on Lis’s arm then retreated, saying only, “Hardly a scratch. Wash it.”

“No stitches?”

“Nup. That bump on your head, that’ll go away in a day or two. Don’t worry.”

Unaware that she had a bump on her head she said she wasn’t worried. She turned back to Haversham and spoke with him for the better part of half an hour.

“Oh, listen,” she asked, after she’d finished her account, “could you get in touch with a Dr. Kohler at Marsden hospital?”

“Kohler?” Haversham squinted. “He’s disappeared. We were trying to find him.”

“Hey, would that be a Richard Kohler?” The Ridgeton sheriff had overheard them.

“That’s him,” Lis said.

“Well,” the sheriff responded, “fella of that name was found drunk an hour ago. At Klepperman’s Ford.”

“Drunk?”

“Sleeping off a bad one on the hood of a Mark IV Lincoln Continental. To top it off, had a raincoat laid over him like a blanket and this skull, looked like a badger or skunk or something, sitting on his chest. No, I’m not fooling. If that ain’t peculiar I don’t know what is.”

“Drunk?” Lis repeated.

“He’ll be okay. He was pretty groggy so we got him in a holding cell at the station. Lucky for him he was on the car and not driving it, or he could kiss that license good bye.”

This hardly seemed like Kohler. But nothing would have surprised her tonight.

She led Haversham and another deputy into the house and coaxed Michael outside. Together they walked him to an ambulance.

“Looks like that’s a broken arm and ankle,” the astonished medic said. “And I’d throw in a couple cracked ribs too. But he don’t seem to feel a thing.”

The deputies stared at the patient with fear and awe, as if he were the mythical progeny of Jack the Ripper and Lizzie Borden. Michael, upon Lis’s solemn promise that it was not poison, consented to a shot of sedative and allowed his own wounds to be cleaned though only after Lis asked the medic to dab antiseptic on her wrist to prove it was not acid. Michael sat in the back of the ambulance, hands together, staring down at the floor, and said not a word of farewell to anyone. He seemed to be humming as the doors closed.

Then Owen, battered but conscious, was taken away.

As was the horrible rag-doll body of the poor young deputy, his blood, all of it, lost in his squad car and in a bed of muddy zinnias.

The ambulances left, then the squad cars, and Lis stood next to Portia in the kitchen, the two sisters finally alone. She looked at the younger woman for a moment, examining the bewilderment on her face. Perhaps it was shock, Lis pondered, though more likely a virulent strain of curiosity, for Portia suddenly began asking questions. Although Lis was looking directly at her, she didn’t hear a single one of them.

Nor did she ask Portia to repeat herself. Instead, smiling ambiguously, she squeezed her sister’s arm and walked outside, alone, into the blue monotone of dawn, heading away from the house toward the lake. The bloodhound caught up with her and trotted alongside. When she stopped at the far edge of the patio, near the wall of sandbags the sisters had raised, the dog flopped onto the muddy ground. Lis herself sat on the levee and gazed at the gunmetal water of the lake.

The cold front was now upon Ridgeton and the trees creaked with incipient ice. A million jettisoned leaves covered the ground like the scales of a giant animal. They’d glisten later in the sun, brilliant and rare, if there was a sun. Lis gazed at broken branches and shattered windows and shingles of wood and of asphalt yanked from the house. The heavens had rampaged, true. But apart from a waterlogged car the damage was mostly superficial. This was the case with storms around here; they didn’t cause much harm beyond dousing lights, stripping trees, flooding lawns and making the good citizens feel temporarily humble. The greenhouse, for instance, had seen several howling tempests and had never been damaged until tonight-and even then it’d taken a huge madman to inflict the harm.

Lis sat for ten minutes, shivering, her breath floating from her lips like faint wraiths. Then she rose to her feet. The hound too stood and looked at her in anticipation, which, she supposed, meant he’d like something to eat. She scratched his head and walked to the house over the damp grass, and he followed.

The blossoms of the floribunda are complicated.

This is a twentieth-century rose plant, and the one that Lis Atcheson now trimmed, a shockingly white Iceberg, was a hearty specimen that spilled in profusion into the entryway of her greenhouse. Visitors often admired the blossoms and if she was to enter it in competition she was confident that it would be a blue-ribbon rose.

Today, as she cut back the shoots, she wore a dress that was patterned in dark-green paisley, the shade of a lizard at midnight. The dress was appropriately somber but it wasn’t black; she was on her way to a sentencing hearing, not a funeral.

Although the results would make her a widow of sorts, Lis was not in mourning.

Against his lawyer’s recommendation Owen rejected a plea bargain-even after Dorothy turned state’s witness in exchange for a manslaughter charge. Owen insisted that he could beat the rap by pleading insanity. An expert witness, a psychiatrist, took the stand and in a long-winded monologue characterized Owen as a pure sociopath. This diagnosis, however, apparently didn’t have the same allure to juries that Michael’s illness did. After a lengthy trial Owen was convicted of first-degree murder on the first ballot.

Last week Lis signed the contract to purchase Langdell’s Nursery and that same day she gave notice to the high school; at the end of the spring semester her twelve-year bout as an English teacher would officially end.

Surprising her older sister, Portia had asked for the nursery’s P &L statements and balance sheet, which she’d then shown to her current boyfriend-Eric or Edward, Lis couldn’t recall. An investment banker, he’d seemed impressed with the company and recommended that Portia buy into the deal while she still could. The young woman had spent several days considering the proposition then waffled in a big way and declared that she wanted more time to think about it. She’d promised Lis an answer when she returned from the Caribbean, where she planned to spend February and March.

Portia had spent the night and would be accompanying Lis to the hearing today. Following Owen’s arrest, the young woman had stayed for three weeks in the Ridgeton house, helping Lis clean and repair. But a week after the indictments were handed up, Lis decided that she wanted to be on her own again and insisted that her sister return to New York. At the train station Portia suddenly turned to her. “Listen, why don’t you move into the co-op with me?” Lis was touched by the offer although it was clear that the majority of Portia’s heart voted against it.