Sandra Robbins - Trail of Secrets

“Thank you, Seth.”

The curtain parted, and a doctor stepped into the room. He glanced from Seth to Callie before he spoke. “Miss Lattimer, we’re ready to take your uncle to surgery. Would you like to see him before he leaves?”

“Yes, I would.”

Seth watched her hop down from the table, and then the two of them stepped into the hall where two nurses stood beside Dan’s gurney. Seth didn’t move as they stopped beside his friend.

Callie leaned close to him and whispered in his ear. “I love you, Uncle Dan. I’ll be waiting for you when you come from surgery.” She kissed him on the cheek, jammed her fist into her mouth to stifle her sobs and stepped away from the gurney.

Seth bent over and touched Dan’s shoulder. “I’m here, Dan. I promise you I’ll get whoever did this to you.”

For one brief moment, Dan’s eyes blinked open, and he stared up at Seth before he darted a glance at Callie and then back to Seth. A look of desperation lined his face. Once more he cut his eyes to Callie and back to him, and Seth knew Dan was trying to send him a message.

Seth’s eyes filled with tears, and he nodded. “Don’t worry about Callie, Dan. I’ll take care of her.”

Dan’s eyes drifted closed, and the nurses pushed the gurney down the hall. When it disappeared through the doors that led to the elevators for the surgery floor, Callie began to sob.

Seth searched his mind for something to offer her comfort. Finally, he decided she needed to get out of this area and to a place that might offer some peace. He reached out and touched her arm. She jerked her head up and stared wide-eyed at him.

“It’s not going to be easy waiting,” he said. “Why don’t we go down to the hospital chapel? Maybe being in that quiet room will help calm you down some.”

She frowned. “I’m not very religious.”

He nodded. “I know. That was something else we never saw eye to eye on, but like I tried to tell you then, it’s not about being religious. It’s about finding some peace in life. How about it? You might find it helps to be in a more soothing place for a while.”

She brushed her hands across her eyes and glanced around the stark emergency room. “Okay. I guess it can’t hurt.”

A nurse stepped out of an adjoining exam room at that moment, and Seth told her where the doctor could find them before he led Callie out of the emergency room and into the hospital proper.

When they arrived at the chapel, he opened the door and held it for her to enter. As he stepped into the room behind her, he closed his eyes for a moment and let himself relax into the peace that being in this place evoked in his soul. A table with a cross and an open Bible on it sat at the front of the room, and he led her to seats directly in front of the display.

They sat without speaking for a while until she finally broke the silence. “This is much better than the E.R. It’s quieter and more peaceful. Thank you for bringing me here.”

“I’ve been in this room a lot in the past few years.”

She turned her head, a questioning expression on her face. “Oh? How so?”

He sighed and rubbed the back of his neck. “This is where we bring families when they’re waiting to hear if their loved ones will survive after a violent crime. It’s a peaceful place, and we hope it can afford the families some measure of comfort.”

Tears pooled in her eyes. “Is that why you brought me here?”

“Partly. But I wanted to ask you about the shooting, too. I don’t want to cause you any more stress than you’re already under, but I thought it might be easier to talk about it here than in the hustle and bustle of the emergency room.”

She nodded. “I think it is, but there’s something I need to know, too.”

“What’s that?”

She inhaled a deep breath. “From the moment Uncle Dan picked me up I could tell something was wrong. He kept looking in the rearview mirror, and it seemed he almost suspected something was about to happen. When the EMTs were loading him in the ambulance, he opened his eyes long enough to tell me to call you. He needed to tell you something.”

Seth frowned. “Did he say what it was?”

She shook her head. “No. But he had to be restrained on the gurney because he was so determined there was something important he had to tell you about the case, he said. Has he been helping you with a case you’re working on?”

Seth’s stomach curled with fear at Callie’s words. After a moment he shook his head. “No, I’ve been helping him with a case for the past year or so.”

“I don’t understand. What kind of case would he need help with? He’s not a policeman anymore. He’s a judge, and judges don’t investigate cases.”

Seth stood up and paced to the far wall before he turned and walked back to stand in front of her. Dan had mentioned several times that Callie knew nothing about the case he’d worked on for years because he knew she would be upset he was investigating a murder. It had been something he didn’t share with many of the people in his life. Seth happened to be the exception to the rule. But it was time Callie knew, especially if that case was the reason Dan was in surgery fighting for his life.

He dropped back in his chair and nodded. “I guess it’s time you learned about the burden Dan has carried for years. He knew you would try to persuade him to give up if he told you about it, so he never did.”

Callie clasped her hands in her lap and swallowed hard. “What kind of case is it?”

He spread his hands in a helpless gesture and shook his head. “I can only tell you what Dan has told me. This case dates back to when he was on the police force.”

She sat up straighter, her eyes wide. “On the force? But that was years ago.”

Seth nodded. “Twenty-five years, in fact. One morning he was called to the banks of the Mississippi River just south of downtown where a woman’s body had washed up. She looked to be in her early thirties, and she’d been shot. There was no identification on the body, but Dan felt sure that as pretty and as well dressed as she was, someone would report her missing.”

“Did they?” Callie asked.

Seth shook his head. “When he didn’t hear anything, he went by the medical examiner’s office and learned she didn’t fit the description of anyone who’d been reported as missing in Memphis. That made him wonder if she was from somewhere else. He asked about her personal effects, and they gave him an envelope that only contained a locket she was wearing. Inside was the picture of a little boy who looked to be about five or six. Then he asked to see her body. That’s when something strange happened to him.”

“What?”

“He said he stood there and looked down at her and there was something about her face that reminded him of your mother.”

“My mother?” Callie’s question was barely more than a whisper.

“Yes. He said your mother had died a few weeks before, and you had just come to live with him. You’d cried the night before for your mother, and he wondered if the little boy in the picture in the locket was crying for his mother. So he made a pledge to the dead woman that he wouldn’t rest until he’d found her family and returned her body to them. When no one ever came forward to claim the body, Dan bought a burial plot and a tombstone and had the woman buried at his own expense. For the past twenty-five years, every time he read or heard about a missing woman, he’d check it out to see if it was his victim, but it never has been.”

“He had her buried and a tombstone placed at her grave?”

“Yes.”

“What name did he put on the tombstone?”

“Since he didn’t know her name, he decided to give her one. He thought she deserved more than Jane Doe. She needed a special name, so he put the name Hope on her tombstone.”