I sat in the tub under the shower, rinsing the mud out of my hair. When I finally felt clean, I filled the tub and lay back, almost comatose, letting the hot water soak into my ripped-up muscles. The place in my pectoral where I’d pulled out the dart was an angry red, but my thigh only showed a small pink circle.
When the water turned cold I finally stepped out and wrapped up in a fluffy dressing gown that Jake had given me for my birthday. In the living room, Mr. Contreras handed me a mug of hot tea that was half milk and filled with sugar. I gulped it down gratefully. Alison took the mug to the kitchen to refill it and came back with a plate of poached eggs on toast.
Mr. Contreras watched me eat, nodding seriously at each mouthful I swallowed. When I’d finished, and was starting to fall asleep, he gave me a shamefaced look but said, “You ain’t going to like this, cookie, but I called the doc. She’s going to come by to look at you on her way home from the hospital.”
“It’s okay,” I yawned. “We’ll have a party.”
The eggs and the sugary tea had revived me enough that I was able to give him and Alison a more coherent description of what had happened in the coach house. Alison’s sensitive mouth quivered, but she had herself in hand and didn’t turn my experience into her own drama.
When I finished, I said to her, “I heard you say a reporter had been to the house. Was that Murray? Murray Ryerson, I mean?”
She flung up her hands. “I don’t remember his name. He’s big, with reddish hair, and a Mercedes convertible?”
“Yes, that’s Murray. He came out to ask why Julius Dzornen had been at the house Tuesday night, didn’t he?”
“Mother didn’t know what Mr. Dzornen and Dad talked about, but when she called Dad over at Metargon, he came roaring home. He’s never done that, not when I fell as a kid and broke my arm, not even when Mother started hemorrhaging after her second miscarriage, so I was pretty tense.
“First he threw the reporter out, then he started shouting at Mother, how could she be so stupid as to have let him inside to begin with. And Mother said, she said—” Alison’s eyes got bigger and her voice wavered.
“What?” Mr. Contreras demanded.
“She said Tuesday night she’d heard Durdon banging away in the garage; it’s beneath her studio. She’d gone down and seen him under Mr. Dzornen’s car! Dad was so furious he almost hit her! Then Dad said he’d better not find out that Warshawski—Vic, I mean—had taken the BREENIAC sketch and I said how could she, because it was already gone when she was up at the house on Tuesday! And he said he was sending Durdon down to Hyde Park to make sure she hadn’t taken it from the coach house, and the whole thing was so insane I couldn’t bear to be around them. I couldn’t go to any of my friends’ houses, even if they were home, I can’t tell anyone what’s going on, so I drove down here.”
Her voice petered out. Mr. Contreras patted her hand comfortingly. Lotty rang the bell about then. When the old man went to buzz her in, I asked if he’d bring my iPad back with him: I wasn’t up to talking to the police, but I needed to alert them to the skeleton I’d uncovered in the coach house—especially before Alison’s father had another brainstorm and sent Durdon down to dig it up and dispose of it.
I wrote an e-mail to Conrad Rawlings in the Fourth District, putting Murray Ryerson in the blind copy line.
I’m leaving police business to the police, but this morning I stumbled on a body buried in the cellar of a Hyde Park coach house. I would have written you sooner, but two goons, one named Rory Durdon who works for Cordell Breen, the other a Palfry County sheriff’s deputy named Glenn Davilats, Tasered me and locked me in the cellar. It’s a long story, but you might want to dig up the body before Cordell Breen comes down himself to haul it away.
Ciao, Vic
Lotty came in as I was hitting the send key. She’d spent six hours in the operating room and was tired herself. She forbore from any barbed words, just inspected the wound sites with gentle fingers. I’d gotten the whole dart out of my thigh, but the point of the other one had broken off in my shoulder. Lotty injected me with a topical anesthetic and pulled it out, covered both wounds with an antibiotic salve and gave me a course of antibiotics to take.
“I will say this is a first in our acquaintance, Victoria,” she announced when she’d finished. “No drownings, shootings, stabbings or acid, but a poison dart. Worthy of Sherlock Holmes, no?”
“Something like that,” I mumbled. “My shoulders—I’ve torn up those muscles from digging up part of a skeleton, and then whacking the side out of my prison.”
“Yes, you’ll feel that for some weeks, I’m afraid.”
“Can you do something for me? I can’t afford to lie in bed for weeks, or even days.”
“Even if I could implant new muscles in you, it would take months for them to take hold,” Lotty said. “Let Nature take her course for once in your obstinate life.”