Jan Burke - Remember Me, Irene

She nodded, her eyes wide and fearful.

Frank came back and saw that look, and was about to ask something when Becky called to us. “She’s in a room. Sorry, but the neurosurgeon will only give us a few minutes with her.”

Frank took my hand as we walked to the intensive care unit, but said, “I’ll wait here for you,” when we reached the door.

AT FIRST, the being on the bed-if it was a being-didn’t seem to be Roberta. Her face was ash gray, relieved only by the black stitches on her lower lip and left eyebrow. The left side of her face was swollen. Her head was swathed in a white bandage. Tubes led in and out of her. An ICU nurse-calm, busy, the one to whom that burden of “intensive care” would fall-was making an adjustment to an IV. A man whom Becky was introducing as the neurosurgeon stood nearby, watching monitors. In the midst of all of this, Roberta seemed little and far too still.

I felt sick to my stomach.

“Only a few minutes, please,” the neurosurgeon was saying.

A few minutes. How were we to take this in-to begin to believe what we were seeing-in a few minutes? What could I give her in that amount of time? I looked at her misshapen face.

Roberta?

I heard Becky saying it aloud. Becky the emergency physician. She was better at this than we were. She saw people who might be mistaken for dead all the time, right?

“Roberta, it’s Becky. Ivy and Irene are here with me.”

Nothing.

“Well, I guess I’ll call Lisa and tell her we’ll have to rent that movie on videotape, since you insist on lying around here,” Ivy said. “Wonder if they’ll let me bring popcorn into the ICU?”

Roberta’s hand twitched. Becky looked over at the neurosurgeon, who seemed interested, but said nothing.

“I’m going to stay nearby, Roberta,” Ivy said, her voice shaking as she added, “Here’s Irene.”

Here’s Irene. Irene’s tongue is cleaving to the roof of her mouth.

Find some way to encourage her, I told myself. Shouldn’t be tough. What would she say? I suddenly remembered her office.

“Hello, Robbie,” I said, and the hand twitched again. “There are all of these little strays that are going to be worried about you. Who else can they confide in? Just Robbie. There isn’t any room in here to hang their artwork. Shall I tell them you’ll be back soon?”

Her eyes flickered open, just for the briefest moment. I hoped she didn’t really see me in that moment, hated to think my terrified face would follow her into unconsciousness. But the neurosurgeon made some kind of sound that I took to mean “good.”

I told her that she was missing a chance to meet Frank, and that Ivy had already been caught staring at his buns when he went to get a drink of water, but outside of a laugh from Becky and Ivy, there was no response. I stepped back, and Becky took over. She was calling her Robbie, too.

The neurosurgeon smiled at Ivy and me, then made a shooing sign at us. We stepped out into the hallway, leaving Becky behind.

“I’M GOING TO STICKaround here as long as possible,” Ivy said, tears welling up. “God, she looks awful!”

No argument from me. Ivy walked with us as far as the front doors of the hospital. It was dark outside.

“Anything we can do for you?” Frank asked.

She shook her head. “I’ll fax that stuff on Nadine to you tomorrow, Irene.”

“Thanks. Have you read it?”

She shook her head. “Just glanced through it.”

“What’s the last place to request a transcript?”

“Nowhere. She didn’t finish her master’s.”

“What?”

“Dropped out. Never showed up for the fall semester. I guess Andre really hurt her that second time around.”

“SO TELL MEwhat’s on your mind,” Frank said as we began the drive home.

I tried to go over all I had learned that day. It had been a long day, and when the story was starting to take longer than the ride home, he took an unexpected detour.

“Keep talking,” he said. “We can drive around for a while. This way you won’t get distracted or attacked by twenty-pound tomcats or hear phones or pagers. Besides, we’ve got a sitter.”

“Good old Jack. Hope he doesn’t feel like we’re taking advantage of him.”

“Are you kidding? He gets all of the benefits of having pets, with none of the vet bills, food bills, or shovel duty. Quit worrying about him. Go back to your story.”

“I can’t help but believe that what happened in town this past week-Ben’s suicide, Allan’s resignation, Lucas’s death, this attack on Roberta-all have something to do with what went on in the summer of 1977.”

“When Selman’s first redevelopment study had been accepted and was being acted upon in city hall.”

“Right. In seventy-seven, Andre completed a study for the city, one that probably ensured that certain folks made a lot of money. Lucas, who knew the statistics in the study were phony in some way, was discredited, thrown out of school. The person who helped discredit him was Nadine Preston.”

“The only woman Selman ever went back to,” Frank said.

I nodded. “And who conveniently left town after a fishing trip with Andre. I don’t know if it will do much good to locate her. She seems completely untrustworthy. She destroyed Lucas’s academic career and was apparently in cahoots with Andre. She probably knew she had Andre and his friends over a barrel, so she used Lucas to make her threat clear.”

“You think she never intended to go into that hearing?”

“Exactly. I think Andre got the message and bought her off somehow. And Andre made other people buy him off, too-Ben Watterson was involved in it in some way, and Andre blackmailed Ben into giving him the Bertram for a song.”

“How can Selman afford the slip fees and maintenance on something that size?” Frank asked.

“That was my question. I’ll bet you’ll discover that consulting fees and all kinds of other income find their way to him.”

“Hmm. So you want to try to find Nadine Preston. You’ll have her Social Security number tomorrow?”

“Yes, Ivy’s faxing it to me. I know you can’t look her up for me,” I said, coaxing all the same.

“Oh, that would be illegal, wouldn’t it?” he said, barely suppressing a grin.

“Yes.”

“Don’t worry. I think I can convince Reed that he ought to pursue her as someone who may have information on a possible homicide. That is, if you don’t piss him off again tomorrow.”

“Listen, Frank-I’m looking into all of this because I owe this much to Lucas, and for my own peace of mind. But it’s also a story-one that John has been waiting for with more patience than I thought he possessed. Can Reed be trusted to keep this to himself?”

“He’s trustworthy, so is Vince. But this gets tricky.”

“If this gets into the hands of a competitor-I don’t even like to think about it. I won’t be working for a newspaper. My former coworkers would drive through my new workplace just to hear me say, ‘May I have your order, please?’”

“Can’t have that,” he agreed. “Those places are bad for the complexion, too. Wait a minute-would you give me extra fries?”

“You’d be looking for your beef.”

“Okay, okay. I’ll try to work something out with Reed. He owes me a couple of favors.”

“I need for you to look up something else.”

He shook his head in disbelief. “May I have your order, please?” he mimicked.

“This is serious. Could you look up Jeff McCutchen’s suicide?”

He looked out at the darkened road. “August of 1977?”

“Right.”

“Selman loses a lot of friends to suicide, wouldn’t you say?”

“The thought did occur to me. They happened fairly far apart, and there are reasons to believe they were both suicides,” I said. “I guess I still want to know where Andre was on the night Ben died.”