Cast a Pale Shadow

chapter Three





The cemetery and the railroad tracks marked the boundaries of his meandering that rainy night as Nicholas roamed the quiet side streets sprouting from Trissa's bus route. He had gotten himself thoroughly lost the first time he'd tried blazing new trails from the bus map. He had wandered the streets until dawn that day before he crossed a street that would lead him home.

Since then he had armed himself with a city map and a small flashlight for his quest for Trissa and the dragons that made her so unhappy. But this night he wouldn't need them. All he had to do was walk east until he reached the tracks, turn south along the gravel right of way to the next dead end leading west to the stone and black iron fence of Calvary Cemetery.

Gilmore Street to Switzer Avenue to Robin to Thrush, then Baden to Church to Christian. Brick and frame bungalows lined the streets with tiny lawns and just-budding forsythia. He could imagine Trissa living in one of these houses, maybe behind that half-drawn shade or that lighted dormer.

He wished the weather were warmer. He was sure the folks in this neighborhood sat out on their front porches on balmy evenings, chatting about their gardens or city politics or baseball. Maybe Trissa brought her books to that porch swing to study in the golden circle from the light over the door. Maybe when the work was done and the night grew darker, she just sat, searching for the first star and whispering her wishes.

And maybe he was a damned-fool romantic or, worse, an obsessed lunatic. Questing white knight or predatory beast? Or were they both just the same?

Nicholas kicked at a chunk of blacktop in the graveled embankment along the railroad track and tried to rid his mind of the predator-prey imagery. His motives were honorable, he reminded himself. Rescue, only rescue. He was more Lancelot than Bluebeard. Wasn't he?

Wasn't he?

He shuddered as the face of Cynthia, cold and still, finally and unalterably at peace, floated before him as if in answer to his question. Grinding at his closed eyes with his clenched fist in a vain attempt to rub the memory away, he felt the black shadows descending on him.

This was wrong. He was wrong. It was not Trissa who needed him. He needed her. Driven by his bitter memories of one he'd loved and couldn't rescue and another who'd come to him too late for saving, he needed salvation from his guilt. He needed Trissa to save him from the blackness again. He needed her to guide him from the shadows so he wouldn't be lost.

And as much as he knew he needed her, that was how much he knew he mustn't have her. He must turn away from this madness now before it was too late. Blinded by the swirl of his own shadows, he missed his footing across a rain gully and stumbled to his hands and knees in the gravel. Puzzled, he stared dumbly at the white scrapings on his palms and the beads of red springing up along them.

"Nicholas. Nicholas. Nicholas," came the fluttering whoosh and thump of his blood in his ears as if to remind him who he was and who he was losing. The blackness was broiling up through his veins and would soon fill and drown him. When he managed resurface again, he knew he'd be far away from here and Trissa would be only a memory. The submergence was always swift and unexpected.

It had never taken this long before. He had never struggled this hard against it.

"Let go," he heard the murmur in his brain. Was it his voice or someone else's? "God take you, Nicholas!" he heard the deep, masterful command, and he felt himself sinking into blackness.



*****



Trissa counted the railroad ties as she walked them and had reached one hundred and twenty-seven before it didn't matter to her anymore, before it didn't help to keep the tears from falling or her heart from slamming against her ribs like a bird trying to escape its cage. Though the rain had stopped, she was cold, having fled the house in only her cotton blouse and wool skirt, but that didn't matter much either. She could no longer determine whether the pain of the cold came from without or within.

Still and chilling, the night pressed her, urged her on toward anywhere, nowhere, as long as it was away from where she had come. Through the thin clump of woods to her right she saw the winking headlights of the cars parking along Calvary Drive. How many summer nights had she watched them from her hidden spot among the trees, wishing she were in one of them. They were hope to her back then. A sign that somewhere love or something like it went on.

But now she knew with dreadful finality that she would never be one to find love there. Or anywhere. That would not be her future. There would be no future.

She felt the faint hum of a distant train through the soles of her shoes and it filled her with a shiver of anticipation. Peering down the tracks to where they disappeared round the bend into the darkness of the night, she let her tormented mind make the decision her heart was too torn and ragged to make.

She couldn't see it yet, but she collapsed to her knees and waited. Now the hum became a pulsing throb and then a numbing rumble that gently rocked her soul into acceptance. She closed her eyes and swayed on her knees then bent to press her cheek against the rail. The icy steel wrenched one gasping sob from her. Then only the thunder of the train and the wailing cry of its whistle rent the night as she waited.



*****



A sound lurched Nicholas into awareness. It was not the steady roar of the train or the piercing shrill as it trumpeted its approach round the bend, but something closer, softer, something that reached into his soul and shook it out of its slide into eclipse. His muddled mind told him it was Cynthia, and he remembered how he used to hold her as she whimpered in her sleep, unaware that he was close and that he ached to save her from the sadness that made her cry through her dreams.

He spoke her name but it was less than a whisper, the sound of it enough to make him see it was impossible. Not Cynthia but someone. Someone, something, a child, an animal huddled on the track less than twenty feet above him.

The train. It couldn't see the train. Or maybe it was trapped. He scrambled up the embankment, kicking the churned-up gravel out behind him.

The whistle sounded again and the growing beam of the train's headlight illumined her face, her eyes clamped shut and her features set tightly in a determined grimace as she hugged the track.

"Trissa?" he mouthed in wonder then "Trissa!" he shouted as he hurled himself at her, tackling her and hurtling them both off the track. He tumbled with her in his arms down the embankment on the other side and he heard her soft moan as she settled into stillness just as the train thundered by.

"Trissa, my God, it is you." His hands trembled as he gently straightened her crumpled body, examining her for injuries, alarmed at the chill of her skin and the deadly paleness of her face. There was a spattering of blood on her blouse but he could find no source beyond the gravel burns that marked both of them.

"Please, Trissa, please be all right. I'm here to help you. I'll take you to help." From where he stood, he could not see the houses on the street below the raised berm of the tracks, and he tried to recall whether any of them showed lights and life.

He heard the grind and sputter of an igniting car engine and turned to see the line of cars parked along a road on the other side of a clump of trees. Some of them had their lights on and their engines idling. It was obvious what the purpose of their drivers' parking in such a deserted spot. It didn't matter. Nicholas was thankful for their presence.

Trissa groaned again as he lifted her. "I'm sorry, Sweetheart, it won't be long now." He sheltered her head against his shoulder as he trudged through the weeds and the low hanging branches of the thicket. As he emerged, he was all but blinded by the headlights thrown on by the driver of the car immediately ahead of him.

"Jesus Christ, Jack! What'd you do to her?" the driver shouted as he charged from his car toward him.

"Nothing. She's hurt."

"Shit, I can see that! What? Did she change her mind once you got her up here? Goddamn exasperating that way sometimes, ain't they? There's been a time or two when I've been tempted--"

"Tom," cautioned a woman's voice from the car.

Tom waved off the warning. "You look like you been in a cat fight, both of you. Feisty one, hey? What say we trade? Mine's a little too willing if you know what I mean."

"I haven't time for your nasty innuendoes," Nicholas said with tightly restrained anger. "Tris... my wife has been hurt and I need to get her to a hospital fast." He wasn't sure why the word wife had sprung so readily to his tongue, sister would have worked as well to cut off the crude comments of this a*shole. But it didn't matter. Explanations could come later if they were needed.

"Wife? Oh yeah, sure, sorry, man. I didn't mean to -- Come on, I'll take you. Judy, get in the back." Once motivated to think beyond his crotch, Tom proved to be a man of decisive action. He settled Nicholas with Trissa on his lap into the front seat, backed out of his parking place and peeled off down the road with the urgency of an ambulance driver. "St. Andrew's okay?"

"What?" asked Nicholas.

"Hospital? St. Andrew's is the closest, don't you think?"

"Yeah, sure, I guess." Nicholas took a handkerchief from his pocket and dabbed at the welling scrapes on Trissa's face. He worried that she hadn't wakened yet. Her hands seemed so limp and pale against the dark blue of her skirt.

"What really happened?" Judy asked from the back seat.

"She -- uh, we were walking along the railroad track and the train..."

"Lord, you were hit by a train?"

"Tom, don't be so stupid," Judy said.

"No -- I mean, almost. We had to jump out of the way and we fell down the gravel embankment. She must have hit her head."

"What were you doing on the railroad track?" Judy asked.

"Walking. Just walking."

"Yeah?" Judy scooted forward in her seat and asked the next question right at his ear. "Well, then, where's her coat? What else do you do for fun? Play in traffic?"

Nicholas answered her probing with silence. He held Trissa closer trying to warm her with his own body. God, he wished he knew where her coat was. Or what had driven her out without it to embrace death with such grim determination. God, please, let me help her. He rubbed his cheek against her soft, frigid one. Don't let it be too late.

Judy wouldn't quit. "You two have a fight or something? She was running away from you, wasn't she? You beat her, don't you, you bastard?"

Now it was Tom's turn to warn, "Judy, watch your mouth. It ain't none of our business."

"I'm just speaking the truth. All men are bastards, ain't they, dearie?" Judy reached out to pat the top of Trissa's head but Nicholas fended her off by raising his shoulder and casting her a warning scowl. "Sure. Now, you're looking out for her. Bet you ain't that sweet when you got her alone," she hissed and slid back. Soon the only sounds from the back seat was the flare of a match and Judy's soft puffs as she lit a cigarette.

"Don't mind her," Tom said. "We were having some words, if you know what I mean, when we seen you coming out of the woods."

"How much longer?"

"A few blocks is all."

Trissa stirred a little, and Nicholas feared that she would come to and say something to further arouse Tom and Judy's suspicions. He worried, too, that getting help at the hospital would not be all that easy. She might look too young for them to believe she was his wife, and without any proof, how could he convince them he was? An ambulance with its lights flashing but no siren sliced passed them, and Nicholas peered beyond it to see the hospital. The neon of the emergency room sign glowed a welcome.

"This is it," Tom said as he pulled the car to a stop behind the ambulance. "Need some help carrying her?"

"No, thanks. I wish I could pay you but I don't--"

"That's okay, Jack. The doctors will be picking your pocket soon enough. Glad to be of help. Hope everything turns out all right."

"Thank you. And I didn't beat her, Judy. I would never."

"Right," snapped Judy, slipping back into her rightful place in the front seat as he left it. "And she looks young enough to believe in Santy Claus, too."

The sudden brightness of the reception area dazzled him and before he had sorted out the bustle of activity there, Nicholas was relieved of his burden by a brawny man in a white coat. Nicholas' arms served as safety net beneath his until he deposited Trissa on a waiting gurney.

"What happened?" the man asked as he began examining her, taking her pulse, and gently lifting her eyelids to check her pupils.

"She fell and hit her head." He would leave out the train for now. The train would be hard to explain.

"How long has she been out?"

"Twenty minutes." It seemed like a lifetime. "Yes, it's been about twenty minutes."

"And these bruises? They're all from the fall?"

For the first time, in the bright light of the emergency room hallway, Nicholas could see them clearly, angry red and darkening bruises on her arms and on her cheek, neck, and jaw. Some showed the clear outline of fingers. "My God, Trissa," he whispered, his heart seething to know someone had mistreated her so.

"Well?"

He had to be a doctor. No intern or assistant could muster such imperious authority into one cold syllable. Nicholas had had enough experience with doctors to both respect and resent their power. "Yes. I guess so. We both fell, tumbled down a gravel embankment. She got pretty banged up."

"You're not such a pleasant sight yourself. Check her in at the desk. I'll take care of her here. I might need to ask you some more questions later, so don't run off," the doctor advised.

"I won't. I wouldn't."

"Yeah." An equivocal frown creased the doctor's brow as he studied Nicholas through black, unreadable eyes. "You called her Trissa?"

"Yes. Yes, Trissa." It might be best not to tell this skeptic that her last name was Brewer in case she came to and told the doctor otherwise. Nicholas wondered if it might be better if he fulfilled the doctor's expectation and did run off. Sooner or later more questions would be asked, and his jumble of lies and truth and half-truth seemed so unbelievable that he would clamp himself in jail if he were a cop.

He watched until they wheeled Trissa out of sight, then approached the desk warily. Torn between his concern for Trissa and his growing apprehension for himself, he replied to the admissions clerk's questions with a recital of what he knew.

"First name?"

"Trissa."

"Last name?"

"Brewer," he lied.

"Age?"

"Eighteen." It was a guess

"Relationship to the patient?"

Nicholas glanced toward the room where they had taken Trissa and was startled to see a policeman loitering at the door, his hat under his arm, chatting amiably with a nurse.

"Sir, your relationship to the patient?"

"Husband." Nicholas's voice cracked on the lie. It seemed to be one he was stuck with. He watched the policeman out of the corner of his eye while the clerk typed the lie into fact.

"Religion?"

"Uh. Mine or hers?"

"The patient's."

"Catholic." She traveled with a Catholic college crowd, so it was a safe assumption.

"Insurance?"

The policeman moved off at last toward the waiting room area where he sat down with the nurse. Nicholas relaxed a little and turned his attention back to the clerk.

"Pardon?"

"Do you have insurance?"

"Yes. Uh, well, I have it. From work. But it doesn't cover her. Don't worry, I'll pay. I don't have a lot with me tonight, but--" He could sell his car if he had to. Whatever was needed, he would get it for her, if only he could help her.

"That's all right, Mr. Brewer. Arrangements can be made. Your wife is in good hands. Dr. Edmonds is one of our best residents. If you will just sign this treatment permission and release." The clerk handed him a pen and the completed forms.

Nicholas glanced over them then signed below the line that read "I attest that the above information is true and accurate to the best of my knowledge." There was a loophole there, he guessed. What little truth he had given was the best of his knowledge. That his knowledge didn't cover all the pesky details they asked for was not really his fault. Still, his hand shook slightly as he finished his signature.

"Why don't you take a seat in the waiting room, Mr. Brewer? I'll have someone see to your abrasions."

"Can't I see her now?"

"The doctor will call you shortly."

"But I--"

"Please, take a seat."

The only seat to be taken was the armchair across from the cop and the nurse, so Nicholas ambled in that direction slowly, hoping another would vacate. He stopped to get a drink at the water fountain, to read the Emergency Room Rules and Policy posted on the wall, and to sort through a stack of tattered magazines. Just as he was about to sit down, a nurse appeared with a first aid tray.

"Mr. Brewer?"

"Yes?"

"If you'll come with me, please."

He followed her to a small treatment room and for the next ten minutes, she cleaned and medicated his injuries. He did not realize until he winced from the sting of the medicine how extensive they were. His left temple and cheekbone were thoroughly scuffed and abraded along with the knuckles of his right hand and the palm of his left.

"You're limping. Should a doctor have a look at your leg?"

"It's an old limp," Nicholas assured her and thanked her for her care.

Before returning to the waiting room, he stopped at the restroom and got a first look at himself. His face was not only skinned and tinted red with antiseptic down the whole left side but a bruise colored the corner of his eye. It was no wonder that Tom and Judy and the doctor jumped to the conclusions they had.

The clerk had promised him Trissa was in the best of hands. Maybe now would be the time to leave. But, he shrugged, what would be the point? They had his address and his place of employment, and his signed and dated confession that he had brought Trissa to this hospital. Unless he was willing to run and keep running until he was well out of town, he might just as well stay here and see how everything turned out.

Maybe, just maybe it would all turn out right this time. How could it get any worse?

Before he had the chance to consider that question, Nicholas hurried out of the restroom. He had to see Trissa. If they wouldn't tell him where she was, he would just have to go looking for her. He had found her before, hadn't he? And she really had needed him, hadn't she?

"Mr. Brewer, I've been looking for you." Dr. Edmonds was leaning against the wall outside the restroom, like a cat waiting at a mouse hole. "We should go somewhere and talk."

Nicholas felt himself crumbling, and he braced himself with one hand on the doorframe. He had difficulty summoning the breath to speak. "My God, is she--"

"She'll be all right. We will keep her overnight for observation, though. Most likely by morning, she can go home. And that's what we need to talk about."

"Can't I see her first?"

"She's sleeping. Follow me."

Nicholas considered balking but was too uncertain of his standing to do so. There was something in Edmonds' voice and posture that made him doubt the wisdom of questioning his authority. And he could not forget that policeman. He followed him to a lounge at the end of the hall.

"Take a seat. Coffee?"

"Yes. Black."

Edmonds brought two steaming paper cups and took a long, leisurely drink of his own. Nicholas had the uncomfortable feeling of being the mouse to his cat again. Edmonds studied him through horn-rimmed lenses that gave his dark eyes a sharp intensity. Nicholas felt he intended to see him squirm before he deigned to speak, but he was determined not to give him that satisfaction.

"What is it you have to say to me? I would very much like to be spending my time with my wife."

"Is that so? And where might she be?"

"You know better than I."

"Do I? I didn't believe your story when you walked in here and I have even less reason now. That girl is not your wife, is she?"

Nicholas did not answer but met Edmonds' accusing gaze without wavering.

"You know what I believe, Brewer? I believe you tried to rape that girl. And when she resisted you beat her and you beat her good. The only reason you're not under arrest right now is because she denies it. And because she won't give me her name so I can call her family to take her home."

"She--" The word escaped before he was able to choke it off. Rape. Was that what happened? Was that what drove her to the railroad tracks?

"Does that surprise you? She says she fell. The same story you gave." Edmonds took off his glasses and rubbed at his eyes. His authority seemed to evaporate, and for the first time, Nicholas saw before him a man more puzzled and weary than threatening. "And frankly, I can't understand why a rapist would carry his victim to a hospital and wait around to see how she is."

"That would be a little insane, wouldn't it?" said Nicholas, feeling complacent enough to use a word he almost never spoke out loud. No use putting ideas in people's heads.

"I admit you haven't heard the whole truth here tonight. But I would never hurt Trissa. I promise you that, Dr. Edmonds." Nicholas drank the last of his coffee and stood. "I want to see her now."

"Room 320," Edmonds said. "But Brewer, if I ever see her in here again with a mark on her, I won't wait to hear your stories or your promises. Do you understand me?"

"Yes. Fully." He left his empty cup on the table, shoved in his chair, and strode away from him with an air of jaunty confidence that was all pretense. He didn't see Bryant Edmonds' clenched fist reach out and smash his cup flat. But he heard it.