Dennis Lehane - Prayers For Rain

“I’m hoping, yeah,” I said. “You?”

She looked back at the hospital. “A fellow doctor, yeah. I’m not sure how Houston’s going to affect it. It’s amazing what it takes.”

“How’s that?”

She raised her hand to the road, then dropped it. “Oh, you know, holding down a career, holding down a relationship, second-guessing your choices. Then one day your path is decided, you know? Your choices have been made. For better or worse, it’s your life.”

Grace in Houston. Grace gone from this city. I hadn’t spoken to her in nearly three years, but it’d been comforting, somehow, knowing she was around. A month from now, she wouldn’t be. I wondered if I’d feel the lack like a tiny hole in the fabric of the cityscape.

Grace reached into her bag. “Here’s what you asked for. I didn’t see anything odd. The girl drowned. The fluid in her lungs was consistent with the fluid from a pond. Time of death was consistent with a girl that age who’d fallen in icy water and been rushed to us.”

“She die at the home?”

She shook her head. “In the OR. Her father resuscitated her at the accident scene, got her heart pumping. But it was too late.”

“Do you know him?”

“Christopher Dawe?” She shook her head. “Only by reputation.”

“And what’s his reputation?”

“Brilliant surgeon, weird man.” She handed me the manila folder, looked down the river, then out at the street. “So, okay, well…Look, I…I have to go. It was nice seeing you.”

“I’ll walk you back.”

She put a hand to my chest. “I’d be grateful if you didn’t.”

I looked in her eyes and saw regret and maybe a kind of wild nervousness over the uncertainty of her future, a sense of the buildings that rose behind us closing in.

“We did love each other, didn’t we?” she said.

“Yeah, we sure did.”

“That’s too bad, isn’t it?”

I stood by the river and watched her walk up to the light in her blue scrubs and white lab jacket, her ash-blond hair damp with the moisture that still hung in the air.

I loved Angie. Probably always had. Some part of me still loved Grace Cole, though. Some ghost of myself still lived back in the days when we’d shared a bed and talked of the future. But that love we’d had and those selves we’d been were gone, placed in a box like old photographs and letters you’d never read again.

As she disappeared in the throng of medical people and medical buildings, I found myself agreeing with her. It was too bad. It was a fucking shame.

Bubba had placed his bullets in stacked white cases beside his chair by the time I got back to the apartment. He and Angie played Stratego on the dining room table, shared some vodka, and had Muddy Waters playing on my stereo.

Bubba’s rarely good at games. He gets frustrated and usually ends up dumping the board in your lap, but at Stratego, he’s tough to beat. Must be all those bombs. He places them in the last place you’d suspect, and gets downright kamikaze with his scouts, wading into certain death with glee in his baby’s face.

I waited till Bubba took Angie’s flag, studying the intake and birth and death forms on Naomi Dawe, and finding absolutely nothing unusual.

Bubba shouted, “Ha! Now take me to your daughters,” and Angie swept her hand across the board, knocked the pieces to the floor.

“Man, she’s a sore loser.”

“I’m competitive,” Angie said, and bent to pick up the pieces. “There’s a difference.”

Bubba rolled his eyes and then looked at the papers I’d spread across my side of the table. He got out of his chair, stretched, and looked over my shoulder. “What’re those?”

“Hospital records,” I said. “Mother’s intake when she came to give birth. Daughter’s birth. Daughter’s death.”

He looked down at the forms. “They don’t make sense.”

“They make perfect sense. Which word’s giving you trouble?”

He slapped the back of my head. “How come she’s got two blood types?”

Angie raised her head from the other side of the table. “What?”

Bubba pointed down at Naomi’s birth record, and then her death record. “She’s O neg in that one.”

I looked at the death record. “And B positive in this one.”

Angie came over to our side of the table. “What are you two talking about?”

We showed her.

“What the hell could it mean?” I said.

Bubba snorted. “Means only one thing. The kid who was born on that day”-he stabbed the birth record with his finger-“ain’t the same kid who died”-he stabbed the death record-“on this day. Man, you guys are slow sometimes.”

“That’s her,” I said as Siobhan walked down the Dawes’ street, her small head and body hunched as if she expected hail.

“Hi,” I said as she passed the Porsche.

“Hello.” Her flat gaze said she wasn’t particularly surprised to see me.

“We need to see the Dawes.”

She nodded. “He spoke of a restraining order against you.”

“Just talk,” I said. “I haven’t done anything.”

“Yet,” she said.

“Yet. I understand they’re in Nova Scotia. I need an address.”

“And why should I help you?”

“Because he treats you like the help.”

“I am the help.”

“It’s your job,” I said. “Not who you are.”

She nodded to herself, looked at Angie. “You’re the partner then?”

Angie held out her hand, introduced herself. Siobhan shook it, said, “Well, they’re not in Nova Scotia.”

“No?”

She shook her head. “There right back there. In the house.”

“They never left?”

“They left.” She looked over her shoulder at the house. “They came back. I’d say your partner there, pretty as she is, could ring the bell, get them to open the door, as long as you’re nowhere to be seen, Mr. Kenzie.”

“Thanks,” I said.

“Don’t thank me. Just, for fuck’s sake, don’t kill them. I need the job.”

She lowered her head, hunched into herself, and walked away.

“That’s one hard chick,” Angie said.

“Talks cool, though.”

“‘For fook’s saik,’” Angie said with a grin.

We parked up the street, walked back to the Dawes’ house, and walked swiftly up the path leading to the door, hoping no one was watching from the window, because there was no alternative but to just gut it out and hope they didn’t spot me from inside, bolt the door, and call the Weston police.

We reached the front door and I stood to the right of it as Angie swung the screen door wide and rang the bell.

It took a minute, but then the front door opened and I heard Christopher Dawe say, “Yes?”

“Dr. Dawe?” Angie asked.

“How can I help you, miss?”

“My name is Angela Gennaro. I’m here to speak to you about your daughter.”

“Karen? Good God, are you from a paper? It was a tragedy that happened over-”

“Naomi,” Angie said. “Not Karen.”

I stepped around the door and met Christopher Dawe’s eyes. His mouth was open and his face was bone white and he held a shaky hand to his goatee.

“Hi,” I said. “Remember me?”

Christopher Dawe led us out to an enclosed rear porch that looked out upon his expansive swimming pool, expansive lawn, and a small liquid dime of a pond far off through a small stand of trees. He grimaced as we settled into the seats across from him.

Dr. Dawe placed a hand over his eyes and peered through the gaps between fingers at us. When he spoke he sounded as if he hadn’t slept that week. “My wife is at the club. How much do you want?”

“A ton,” I said. “How much you got?”

“So,” he said, “you are working with Wesley.”