Jeffery Deaver: Praying for Sleep

But the city was hardly for Lis and she declined.

Cranking closed the upper vanes of the greenhouse today, shutting out the winter air, Lis had this thought: We face death in many ways and most are hardly as dramatic as finding the ghosts of our dead ancestors in greenhouses or learning that it’s your husband who’s traveled miles to slice your thin throat as you lie drowsing in bed. Reflecting on these subtler confrontations with mortality, Lis thought of her sister and she understood that Portia wasn’t being perverse or cruel all those long years of separation. Nothing so premeditated as that. There was a simpler point to her escape from the family: she did what she had to.

Too many willow switches, too many lectures, too many still-as-death Sunday dinners.

And who knew? Maybe old man L’Auberget changed his tune after Lis’s fateful swimming lesson, and climbed into the sack with Portia when she was twelve or thirteen. She, after all, was the pretty one.

There was a time when this thought would have been madness and seething heresy. But madness had since come to roost in Lis’s own backyard and if the night of the storm-the delicate euphemism the sisters had settled upon-taught her anything it was that there are only real two heresies: lies and our willing acceptance of them.

Trenton Heck would also be at the hearing today. He had an interest in this case beyond justice. Before being removed as director of Marsden hospital by the Department of Mental Health, Dr. Ronald Adler had reneged on the reward Heck felt he was due. Adler’s successor could find no moral, let alone legal, reason to pay over the money, which Adler apparently had no authority to pledge in the first place. And so with a certain reluctant desperation Heck sued Owen for shooting him in the back.

The insurance company wouldn’t pay off for such malfeasance and Heck was horrified to find that suing Owen ultimately meant suing Lis. He immediately offered to withdraw the case but Lis told him that he more than anyone deserved to profit from this tragedy and over her exasperated lawyer’s objections wrote him a check for far more than he asked.

There was, Lis understood, no reasonable connection between the two of them, Trenton Heck and herself, yet in some ways she felt they were stations along the same route. Still, when he asked her out to dinner last week, she declined. It was true that he needed something in his life other than a mobile home and a dog. But she doubted that it was for her to provide whatever that might be.

One person who wouldn’t be at the hearing was Michael Hrubek.

On Thanksgiving, at the patient’s shy request, Lis had paid him a visit at the Framington State Mental Health Facility, where he was once again under the care of Richard Kohler. Michael at first had been peeved that Lis, as an agent of God, refused to take his life in exchange for that of a nineteenth-century president. But he had apparently come to accept that saving her was part of a complicated spiritual bargain that only he understood and had acquiesced to remaining on this good earth for the time being.

Michael himself had an upcoming trial-for the murder of a fellow prisoner during his escape from Marsden. The evidence clearly suggested that the man’s death was a suicide and the case was going forward only because Michael’s escape made fools of the hospital and the police. Michael, his attorney assured Lis, would emerge from the trial not only innocent but with a better public image than that of the prosecutor, who, at least one editorial pointed out, ought to have better things to worry about than the death of Bobby Ray Callaghan, an institutionalized killer.

There were other charges too. Auto theft, breaking and entering, assault and the intentional confinement of two extremely unhappy Gunderson police officers in their squad-car trunk, one of them with an extremely painful broken wrist. Michael was admittedly the perpetrator. But he probably would serve no time in prison, the lawyer reported. All he need do was tell the judge the truth-that he was simply evading Pinkerton agents pursuing him for Abraham Lincoln’s assassination-and, bang, he’d be out of the lockup and back into his hospital room in no time.

Michael Hrubek was a good example of using history to your own advantage.

Lis now pulled on her coat and called to her sister that it was time to leave. They were taking two cars; after the hearing she was planning to spend an hour or two at Framington.

She’d been back to the hospital several times since Thanksgiving. She was still somewhat wary about seeing him. But she’d found that when sitting across from Michael, sometimes in the company of Richard Kohler, sometimes not, she got an indefinable pleasure from his company. When she entered the room, he took her hand with a delicacy and awe that sometimes moved her nearly to tears. She would like to understand the immensely complex matrix of his emotions. She’d like to understand why he undertook his quest to save her, of all people, and why-even though it was rooted in madness-that journey touched her so.

But those were questions beyond Lis Atcheson, and she was content simply to sit with him in a lounge overlooking the snowy fields and drink coffee and soda from plastic cups while they talked about dairy cows or the state of American politics or insomnia-a problem, it seemed, they both suffered from.

With dancing eyes, Michael would listen carefully to what she had to say then lean forward, sometimes touching her arm for emphasis, and offer his thoughts-some of them illuminating, some preposterous, but always delivered as if he were speaking God’s own truths.

And who’s to say, Lis sometimes thought, that he isn’t?