Lisa Gardner - The killing hour

Nothing left to do now but grab a shower and snatch a few hours’ sleep. Soon enough, they would all be up again.

Kimberly watched Nora Ray disappear behind the plain white door of the single-story structure. Then she watched as Dr. Ennunzio crossed the parking lot to his wing of the motel. She waited until he was gone from view before finally turning toward Mac.

“Here,” she said. “I got us a room.”

If he was surprised, he didn’t say anything. He simply took the key from her trembling hand. Then he picked up their bags and carried them through the doorway.

Inside she almost lost her courage again. The room was too beige, too generic, too worn. It could’ve been any room in any motel in any part of the country, and for some reason that nearly broke her heart. Just once she wanted something more out of life than desperate attempts at happiness. They should go to a bed-and-breakfast. One of those places with rose-patterned wallpaper and red quilted comforters and a giant four-poster bed. Where you could sink deep into the mattress and sleep well past noon and forget the real world ever existed.

They didn’t have that kind of luxury. She supposed she wouldn’t have known what to do with it if she had.

Mac set their bags down at the foot of the bed. “Why don’t you shower first,” he suggested quietly. She nodded and disappeared gratefully into the solitude of the tiny bath.

She showered. First, hot and steamy to relax her tired muscles, then cool and crisp to eradicate all memories of the heat. She didn’t cry this time. She didn’t stand there with haunted images of her mother or sister. The worst of her grief had passed, and in some ways, she felt the most composed she’d been in weeks.

They had tried again. They had failed again. And soon, maybe in a day, maybe in an hour, they would try yet again. That’s the way life worked. She could either quit now, or forge ahead, and for whatever reason, she wasn’t the quitting type. So that was it, then. She had chosen her path. She would keep trying, and keep trying, even if some days it broke her heart.

She took her time drying off. She searched her small toiletry bag for the bottle of perfume she didn’t own. She wondered if she should do something with her hair, or put makeup on her wan face. She wished she possessed even a bottle of lotion to smooth over her sun-battered skin.

But she wasn’t that kind of girl. She didn’t travel with those kinds of things.

She walked back into the bedroom with a threadbare white towel wrapped self-consciously around her breasts. Mac still didn’t say anything. He merely grabbed his shaving kit and disappeared into the bathroom.

She put on a plain gray FBI T-shirt and waited as he showered.

It was pitch black outside now. Still hot, she imagined. Was that easier on a missing person than being someplace cold and dark? Or by now, was the girl delirious with her need for something cool and soothing against her overheated skin? It must seem like a ridiculous joke for the air to remain so hot, long after the sun had retreated from the sky.

Nora Ray had survived out there. She’d protected herself from the sun; she’d found a way to keep cool as endless day slipped into day. How small she must have felt, as she dug deeper into the marsh and waited for someone to find her in the vast line of a coastal horizon. She’d never given up hope, however. She’d never succumbed to panic. And in the end, she’d survived.

Only to lose sight of the victory in her grief for her sister. She had won the battle, then lost the war. It was such an easy thing to do.

The shower shut off. Kimberly heard the rake of metal as the shower curtain was pulled back. Her breathing grew uneven. She took a seat in the broken-down chair next to the TV. Her hands trembled on her thighs.

The sound of running water in the sink. A toothbrush sudsing across teeth. Now some fresh splashes. He was probably shaving.

Kimberly got up, paced the room. She had had final exams easier than this. She had held her first loaded firearm with less trepidation. Oh, how could this be so hard?

Then the door opened. Mac was standing there, freshly showered, freshly shaven, with just a towel wrapped around his lean, tanned waist.

“Hey, beautiful,” he said softly. “Come here often?”

She crossed to him, placed her hands on his bare shoulders and it wasn’t so difficult after all.

Nora Ray didn’t sleep. Alone at last in the motel room, she plopped down in an old chair and contemplated her traveling bag. She knew what she needed to do. Funny, now that the moment was at hand, she was stalling. She was nervous.

She hadn’t thought it would feel like this. She’d expected to be stronger, more triumphant. Instead, she was terrified.

She got up out of the chair, idly inspecting the room. The lumpy double bed. The cheap TV cabinet, covered in fresh nicks and ancient water rings. The TV itself, so old and small no one would even consider it worth stealing. She counted the cigarette burns in the carpet.

Three years was such a long time. She could be wrong, but she didn’t think so. You didn’t forget your last moments with your sister. Nor one man’s voice saying, “You need some help, ladies?”

So now here she was. And now here he was. What was she going to do?

She crossed to her bag, unzipped the canvas top, reached in and pulled out the plastic Ziploc bag that passed as her toiletry kit. She hadn’t lied to Mac. There wasn’t much a young girl could get past airport security.

But there was something. In fact, she had learned it straight from him.

She pulled out the bottle of eyedrops. Then from the inside of her hiking boot, she found the long needle slipped between the sides of the rubber sole. It took her only a moment longer to retrieve the plastic syringe from her bottle of shampoo.

She assembled the needle first. And then, very carefully, she squeezed out the liquid from the bottle of Visine. Once the tiny bottle had contained genuine eyedrops, but she had replaced the contents just last week.

Now, it held ketamine. Fast acting. Powerful, and in the proper dosage, quite deadly.

The man was dreaming. He thrashed from side to side. Waved his hands and kicked his feet. He hated this dream, fought to bring himself back to waking. But the dream memory was stronger, sucking him back into the abyss.

He was at a funeral. The sun burned starkly overhead, an unbearably hot day in an unbearably hot graveyard, while the priest droned on and on at a service no one else had bothered to attend. His mother gripped his hand too tightly. Her only black dress-long-sleeved and woolen-was too heavy for this weather. She rocked from side to side, panting pitifully, while he and his younger brother fought to keep her standing.

It was finally done. The priest shut up. The coffin sank down. The sweaty gravedigger moved in, looking relieved to get his task under way.

They went home, and the man was grateful.

He used the last of the coal to light their oven when they returned to the cabin. The air was too stuffy for the heat, but without electricity, it was the only way to get supper on the table. Tomorrow he’d have to find wood to feed the stove. And tomorrow after that, he’d have to think of something else. That was okay. This was now, and he just wanted to get food on the table and see some color in his mother’s cheeks.

His brother was waiting with a saucepan to heat broth.

They fed their mother wordlessly. Didn’t take a drop for themselves, but spooned beef bouillon past her bloodless lips, while tearing up chunks of stale bread. Finally she sighed, and he thought the worst had passed.

“He’s gone, Mama,” he heard himself say. “Things will be better now. You’ll see.”