Her head was spinning. Her skull throbbed. Was she having a stroke? In the blink of an eye, the illusion was gone.
He got out of the Lexus and strode through the driving snow. “This is dangerous. What are you doing?”
“I just saw something.”
“What?”
She balked. She could tell by the set of his jaw that he was beginning to lose confidence in her. That he was becoming afraid for her.
“What did you see?” He gestured wildly into the snowstorm. “There’s nothing out there.”
“My head is pounding.”
“We’ve both had an incredibly stressful day. Let’s go home.” He tried to take her by the elbow, but she brushed him away. “Kate… please.”
Back in the Lexus, he watched for oncoming traffic as he pulled out onto the road, while Kate stared at the frozen river, little vortices of snow curling off its surface. She rubbed her temples.
He shot her a concerned look. “Are you getting a migraine?”
“I think so.”
She got them about twice a year. Sometimes the pain was so bad she had to lie down for twenty-four hours. Her stomach was doing somersaults. “Today totally sucked.”
He nodded solemnly but couldn’t help himself. In typical James fashion, he burst out laughing. Soon they were both laughing. It was the kind of sick humor that grabbed you and shook you and wouldn’t let go. She laughed so hard, her stomach hurt. Her temples were throbbing.
“Everything’s going to be okay,” he said with tears in his eyes.
“Just get us home in one piece, you jerk.”
7
THE GARGOYLES LOOKED OMINOUS in the snowstorm. They crouched in the corners of the building, as if ready to pounce on unsuspecting passersby. The lobby seemed much less elegant than it had last night. Kate and James weren’t laughing anymore. And they didn’t feel like fooling around.
Their front door stuck a little as James pushed it open. Kate entered the high-ceilinged living room and collapsed on the sofa.
“Coffee?” he asked from the kitchen.
“Is there any wine left?”
“Just Heineken. Want me to go get some?”
“No, babe. Stay with me,” she pleaded.
He came into the living room and handed her two Aleves with a bottled water. “Here, take this,” he said gently. He sat down beside her, ready to comfort her, but suddenly she couldn’t stand his sympathy anymore and got up and padded around the living room in her stockinged feet, feeling claustrophobic. She wanted to hit something.
It had stopped snowing outside. According to the weather report, the cloud cover would burn off by mid-afternoon, but Kate didn’t want the sun to come out. She preferred the blanketing gloom of winter. She wanted to curl into a hibernating ball without having to explain herself.
She stood in front of the bay windows overlooking Massachusetts Avenue and watched the traffic as it whooshed past in slow motion. Another effect of the migraine. She crawled into James’s lap and closed her eyes.
“Today was bad, but I’ll get past it… and I’ll be stronger because of it.”
“That’s my girl.” He kissed her forehead and stroked her hair, and her greasy chignon fell apart beneath his fingers.
She took a deep breath and sighed. “I’m afraid to tell you what I saw.”
“I’m not going to judge you, babe.”
“I saw my sister, coming toward me through the snow… trying to warn me.”
“A visual hallucination from the migraine.”
“That’s what I figured.”
“Combined with snow flurries playing tricks on the eyes. Combined with a near-collision on the road. Combined with a sleepless night…”
“Gotcha.”
“You haven’t had nightmares about Savannah in a long time. You’re under a lot of stress right now and Nikki’s death came as a terrible shock. It’s pretty obvious that stirred everything up.”
“So I’m not crazy?”
“No, and I should know. I’ve got an MD after my name and everything.”
She smiled through the pain.
“Hey, I have an idea. After the funeral, let’s take a few days off and head down to the Cape.”
She rolled her eyes. “I can’t go anywhere yet. There’s the Risk Management interview.”
“Okay.”
“And what if Nikki’s parents file a lawsuit?”
“Let the hospital handle that.”
“Anyway, I won’t be able to relax until everything’s settled down. I’m sorry we lost our deposit, James. But I’m going back to work. I can’t leave right now.”
He frowned. “Listen, sweetie, you’re a dedicated doctor, and I love that about you. But even superheroes have their limits, right? You’ve been up all night. You’re under an enormous amount of strain. It’s no surprise you’re seeing things, because at some point the dam is going to burst and—”
“Hey,” she interrupted. “No lectures.”
He sighed. “I’m just saying, it’s been more than a year since we’ve taken a vacation, and you can’t keep going like this. Besides, I think your workaholism is a manifestation of a much deeper issue…”
“Shh.” She put a finger to his lips. “We’re going to be okay.”
“But…”
“I promise. Everything’s going to be fine. Once the funeral’s over we’ll book another two-week vacation for the end of April. Cross my heart.”
“End of April?”
“Best I can do.”
“Deal.” He kissed her. “Forget Sedona, we weren’t thinking big enough… Let’s go to Cancun… or maybe the Cayman Islands.”
She curled up beside him and listened to him plan their trip. It was so warm and cozy with just the two of them, she never wanted to move.
James finally stopped talking. “What are you thinking?”
She nestled into him. “I was thinking about the time… they wouldn’t let me into the morgue, because I was too young. So Dad went in by himself, but he left the door open a crack, and I could see her lying on a table covered with a sheet, and I remember staring at the bottoms of her feet. It’s funny, because you don’t usually notice people’s feet. Savannah’s were so small and blue, and I remember thinking that was odd—they were dusk-blue. And there was this man, the medical examiner, and he saw me watching, and he got very angry. My father had to take me home. We didn’t speak in the car. We never talked about it again.”
Savannah had been abducted by a man with a history of DUIs and domestic abuse arrests, a monster who’d buried her alive in his backyard. Alive. Kate could barely fathom it. Even now, after all these years, she could still hardly process it. Buried alive.
Savannah’s killer was on death row. His name was Henry Blackwood. It sounded like a serial killer’s name. It suited him. Kate hated thinking about him or even acknowledging his existence; she wished she could blot him out of her mind completely. There had been appeal after appeal, and she’d spent years wishing it would be over with. And soon it would be—the execution was scheduled for next week. But there were some misguided people—a bunch of blustery do-gooders and anti-death-penalty advocates—who blindly believed in his innocence. They somehow kept finding Kate’s email address, which she kept having to change, and appealed to her to step forward and save his life. Her sister’s killer! How absurd was that? How sick. Sometimes she wished they were all dead. But she kept these thoughts to herself, on a shelf next to Savannah’s cold blue feet.
*
A few hours later, James was busy working in their shared office space, while Kate sat staring in exhausted silence at a PDF of the funeral announcement she’d received from Nikki’s mom. Anxiety nibbled around the edges of this new dilemma. In her accompanying email, Elizabeth McCormack had asked Kate to say a few words at the funeral, and Kate had no idea where to begin. What could she say without entering forbidden territory? Everything was protected by doctor–client privilege. Nikki would’ve died of shame if her parents ever found out half the things she’d said about them.