She jerked convulsively, wild-eyed, and the shotgun fell from her hands and tumbled to the floor. Instinctively I ducked and covered my head with my arms, but there was no blast from the gun. The only blast was a piercing shriek from Angie.
“Son of a bitch,” she yelled, scrambling to a sitting position against the headboard as I dove for the gun. “You scared the living shit out of me.” She pounded the mattress a few times with her fist. “Thank God that thing’s not loaded. You’d be picking my brains off the floor for sure.” She took a deep breath and whooshed it out, then took in another and let it out more slowly. “Wow,” she said, and then she looked at me and laughed—actually laughed. I was still kneeling on the floor, clutching the gun and staring at her, as confused as I’d ever been in my life. “Bless your heart, how awful,” she said. “You must have thought I was about to pull the trigger.”
“Well, yeah. Weren’t you?”
“No. I’m not suicidal. I’m just . . . obsessed, I guess. Still trying to figure this thing out. Still trying to understand how in the world my sister ended up with a Mossberg twelve-gauge in her mouth.”
“I thought we already figured that part out.” I got to my feet, my heart still pounding, and took a few deep breaths of my own. “Learn anything new?”
“Yeah,” she said. “Always make sure the door’s locked when you’re doing something questionable in a low-rent motel.”
I tried to smile, but it felt more like a grimace. I laid the gun on the bed, after making sure the safety was on.
Suddenly I heard a door banging somewhere nearby, then heard Vickery yelling, “Angie? Are you okay? Angie?”
“Oh, shit,” she said in a low voice. She tucked the gun into the gap between the bed and the wall. “Keep this between us, would you? I don’t want Stu to think I’m cracking up.” She held my eyes for an instant, and I nodded. Then she tucked her feet beneath her and sprang into a standing position on the mattress.
Vickery appeared in the doorway, breathing hard, on high alert, his pistol in his hand. He looked at Angie, standing on the bed, then at me, then at Angie again. “I heard a scream. What’s wrong?”
“Nothing,” she said. “Sorry to scare you. It was just a mouse.” He stared at her, his eyes still wide, his nostrils flaring, his breath rasping loudly enough to be heard over the air conditioner. “A mouse? You’re kidding me, right?” He turned to me and rolled his eyes. “Doc, is she pulling my leg?”
I shrugged. “I didn’t see the mouse. But I sure heard the scream.”
Angie stepped off the bed and sat on the edge of the mattress. “I was lying down, resting for a minute before dinner. I felt something crawling up the leg of my pants, and I freaked out. Sorry, guys.”
Vickery shook his head. “Jesus, Angie. And everybody thinks you’re tough as nails.” He holstered his gun. “What’s it worth if I keep my mouth shut about this?”
“Stu, are you blackmailing me?”
“I sure am.”
“Uh . . .” Clearly she was struggling to switch gears. “Well, could I buy your silence with the meat-and-three special at the Waffle Iron?”
“I was thinking more like a lifetime supply of cigars,” he answered. “But I’m a reasonable man. Throw in a piece of apple pie, and the mouse incident stays in the vault.”
“Shake on it,” said Angie, “and let’s go eat. Dr. Brockton, will you be my witness?”
“Sure, I’ll be your witness,” I agreed.
But a witness to what? I wondered all through dinner—the dinner Angie had earlier said she didn’t want. There was a reason I wondered. As we’d left Angie’s room to head to the diner, I’d glanced back at her bed, and my eyes had caught sight of a small box sitting on the lower shelf of the nightstand. I wouldn’t have staked my life on it, but in the instant before she switched off the lamp, I thought I’d glimpsed the image of a shotgun shell printed on the side of the box.
I continued to wonder about Angie after we returned to the Twilight, and then my wondering shifted gears, became more personal and more painful. I wondered about my father, and the moments just before he pulled the trigger and shot himself. If someone—anyone: my mother, a client, even my own three-year-old toddling self—had come into his office and found him with the gun to his head, might he have explained away the scene, put away the gun, and set about cleaning up the financial mess he’d accidentally made?
I would never know, of course. And therefore I would forever wonder. “Remember me, remember me, remember me.” The ghost whispering those words was not Angie’s sister nor Hamlet’s father this time, but my own.
Chapter 19
The next morning Angie, Stu, and I returned to Pettis’s place. We were met there by ten crew-cut-sporting students who’d been bused over from the Pat Thomas Law Enforcement Academy, a training facility located in the nearby town of Quincy.
We were also met by Nat James, from the Computer Forensics Section. “Do you want the last track,” he asked Angie, “or do you want the dog’s last track?”