Lisa Gardner - Say Goodbye

Upstairs, he had to extract Henrietta from the ICU, careful not to jog her, given her delicate state. Once he’d slid her onto the hospital bed/piece of cardboard, he moved her closer to the nightlight and pulled out the magnifying glass.

Upon closer inspection, she appeared hopelessly stuck, her old exoskeleton barely cracked, not a single leg peeking through. It was much worse than he thought and he took a moment to draw in a ragged, pained breath.

Then he steadied himself. With the Q-tip, he dabbed the soap solution on the exuvium, careful to not drip any fluid that might get into Henrietta’s book lungs and drown her.

While he waited thirty minutes for the solution to soften the exoskeleton, he decided to take his intervention a step further and fully remove the sternum piece of the old, molting shell. The plates were connected by a thin membrane, and were very easy to extract using the sterilized tweezers.

This process went smoother than anticipated and soon he’d removed most of the carapace and sternum plates.

Henrietta’s legs remained trapped, however. Long, delicate new legs held prisoner by the hard rings of her old skin. Without use of her legs to work herself out of her old exoskeleton, she still wasn’t going anyplace.

He got back out his magnifiying glass and considered his options.

Downstairs came the sound of the front door opening and closing. Hushed voices murmuring. Debating, no doubt. To disturb or not to disturb. Upstairs was his sanctuary, filled with his own special guests. None of them liked to come up here. At least, not any more than they had to.

Finally, however, the sound of footsteps, creaking up the old stairs, hitting the landing, approaching his room.

The door opened, flooding the room with unexpected daylight.

“Close it!” he snarled.

The door closed.

“Stand. Don’t say a word.”

The intruder stood, didn’t say a word.

Better.

He would have to break the heavy rings articulating each leg. If he could chip away that part of the hardened exoskeleton without damaging the soft, unprotected leg beneath, Henrietta might have a chance. Four joints each leg. Eight legs.

He settled in for the painstaking work, still aware of the presence behind him, the girl who did not move, would not move, until he spoke again.

Five minutes rolled into ten, thirty, forty-five minutes. An hour. He chipped away at the hardened exoskeleton on each leg, slowly, carefully, ring by ring.

When he finally looked up, he was surprised to find that perspiration stuck his shirt to his skin and he was breathing hard, as if he’d been hiking for hours, and not just hunched over a table in a pool of dim light.

He had all eight legs free, though several were bent awkwardly, clearly damaged. As he watched, however, one leg moved, then another. Henrietta was still with him, fighting to pull through.

“You are so beautiful,” he crooned to his favorite pet. “That’s my girl. That’s my girl.”

“Is…is she all right?” a tentative voice finally came behind him.

He didn’t turn around, his voice clipped as he set aside the tweezers. “I don’t know. Molt this bad, she probably has trouble with her mouth, pharynx, and stomach. Odds are she’ll be dead by morning.”

“Oh.”

“But at least this gives her a chance.” He took grim satisfaction in that, snapping off the light, leaving Henrietta to fight her own war the way she would prefer-alone in the dark.

He finally turned, his eyes adjusting rapidly to the gloom and taking in the girl standing in the doorway. She had her chin up, a small show of defiance that showed off the spider tattoo on her neck, but didn’t fool either one of them.

“Did you get it?” he asked without preamble.

Wordlessly, she held out the business card.

He snatched it up, turned it over, read the cell phone number scrawled on the back. For the first time all morning, the man smiled.

“Tell me exactly what you did.”

And the girl, being well-trained by now, did.

THE CALL CAME THREE NIGHTS LATER. KIMBERLY’S team had finally wrapped up the crash scene and she and Mac were celebrating by eating dinner together. He’d brought home a honey-baked ham, accompanied with coleslaw and biscuits.

He ate the ham, she ate the biscuits.

“So once I had the ring all cleaned up,” she was reporting excitedly, “you wouldn’t believe the level of detail. Alpharetta High School is engraved around the center stone. Then on the right side, the word ‘Raiders’-their mascot-with a picture of a football, engraved with a number eighty-six and beneath that the initials QB.”

“Really?” Mac said, helping himself to a fresh beer. “You have the name of the kid’s high school, plus the fact that he’s the quarterback with jersey number eighty-six?”

“Oh, it gets even better. On the other side of the ring is a name: Tommy, with an emblem, Class of 2006.”

“I don’t have any of that on my class ring,” Mac said.

“You have a high school ring?”

“Sure.”

“I’ve never seen you wear it.”

“Well, if my ring were as cool as Tommy’s, maybe you would.”

Kimberly rolled her eyes at him, decided a fourth biscuit probably wasn’t healthy for her or the baby, and went with some coleslaw. “So now I have a first name, high school, and graduating class. I figure, okay, some afternoon when I’m in the area, I’ll swing by Alpharetta High School, talk to a guidance counselor, and, ding, ding, ding, mystery will be solved. But then I have a better idea.”

“Of course.”

“I log on to the Internet. Figure I’ll see what I can learn about Alpharetta High School.”

“And what did you learn about Alpharetta High School, my dear?”

“Hey, sarcasm is only going to earn you more middle-of-the-night diaper changes.”

“Point taken.”

She gave him a look.

He shrugged. “Honestly, I’m interested. I spent the whole day sitting in a van, listening to two alleged drug dealers carry on a highly serious discussion of how Keanu Reeves is the most underappreciated actor of our time.”

“Was it his performance in Speed ?”

“More like his decision not to make Speed 2.”

“So true.”

“All right, all right. Back to the ring…”

“Well,” she started again, mollified, “Alpharetta High School is frighteningly large.”

“Alpharetta is frighteningly large.” They had originally looked at buying a home there. It was a booming, upwardly mobile, decidedly professional community just south of them. In the end, it was the booming that concerned them. From three thousand residents in 1980 to over fifty thousand now, the town was bursting at the seams, with all the public resource strains and traffic woes that generally came of such things.

“Nearly two thousand kids,” Kimberly reported. “That worried me a little. School of that size, one kid could be hard to find. But then it occurred to me, check the sports page. And you’ll never believe what I found.”

“Delilah Rose?” he guessed helpfully.

“No. Tommy Mark Evans. Varsity QB of 2006. His photo, game stats, everything, right there on the information superhighway. For that matter, I found pictures and names of all the cheerleaders, JV sports teams, drama club, chess club-you name the kid, his or her information is all there online. I tell you, it’s not enough to monitor MySpace or YouTube anymore. Every public organization has a website that is freely giving away information and photos of America’s kids. Think about it: I didn’t even leave my desk and from one class ring, I surfed the Internet straight to Tommy Mark Evans’s front step.”