11
Jack spotted Eddie at the far end of the waiting area, motioning him over.
“It’s her,” he said, relief large on his face as Jack reached him. “Weezy’s their Jane Doe.”
He pressed a hand over his eyes and for a moment Jack thought he was going to sob. He squeezed his old friend’s shoulder.
“At least she’s in good hands.”
He nodded. “I was so worried. She’s nutty as a fruitcake, but I love her to death. She’s the only family left.”
Uh-oh. Jack had never thought to ask . . .
“Your folks?”
“Gone. Mom from cancer, Dad from a car crash a year later.”
“I’m sorry. I never heard a thing about it.”
“It’s okay. Old news.”
“How’s Weez?”
“Pretty banged up and still unconscious.”
“I want to see her.”
Eddie looked at him. “You sure?”
“Hell, yeah. I didn’t get involved in this just to locate her and say, ‘See ya, bye.’ ”
She’d been his best friend at one time and he hadn’t seen her in ages. He needed to lay eyes on her at least once.
He followed him upstairs to a semiprivate room that seemed oddly familiar. At least it wasn’t an ICU or trauma unit. The inside bed was empty. Eddie led him to the one by the window.
“Hey, Weez,” he said to the supine figure under the sheet. “You’ll never guess who’s here.”
The figure didn’t move or respond as Jack stepped closer and looked down at his childhood friend.
He could see that she’d added a few pounds—picked up some of the weight Eddie had lost, maybe? Her face had rounded out, but he could still see the old Weezy Connell in those features. She’d never been pretty in the classic sense, but as a teen she easily could have been considered “cute.” He remembered her dark, dark brown eyes, closed now. Her almost-black hair was shorter than he’d ever seen it and showed minute streaks of gray. Was that unusual for someone in her late thirties? A partially denuded area of her left frontal scalp revealed a stitched-up, three-inch laceration. Her skin was as milk pale as ever—even as a kid she’d never liked the sun.
No endotracheal tube or respirator, just an IV running in from a bag hung high and a catheter tube running into a receptacle slung low. He noticed movement under the sheet where her right hand should be but didn’t lift it to investigate.
“Well,” Eddie said. “There she is.”
Jack felt his throat constrict. He hadn’t given her a thought for so, so long. She’d been a year ahead of him in school, but during pre–high school summers they’d been almost inseparable. He’d never paid much attention to her mood swings; that was the way she was, and he accepted it. Weezy was Weezy—a loner like Jack, a free thinker, one of a kind. During high school a doctor began putting her on medication that smoothed out the swings but, in the process, changed her. Things were never quite the same.
He wished she was awake and on her feet now so they could hug and exchange long-time-no-see clichés.
“Yeah,” was all he could manage.
“Good day,” said a high-pitched, accented voice behind him.
He turned and recognized the tall, lean, dark-skinned man in the white coat. He had a Saddam Hussein mustache and carried a clipboard. Jack checked his ID badge to make sure he was right.
“Hello, Doctor Gupta.”
The man looked confused. “I’m sorry. Have we met?”
Jack now knew why the room seemed familiar.
“Yes. I was acquainted with Professor Buhmann.” When Gupta shook his head, Jack added, “The guy with the stroke who spoke only in numbers?”
His eyes lit. “Ah, yes! How is he?”
“Gone.”
“Yes-yes. The tumor. So sorry. A most fascinating case.” He gestured toward Weezy. “I am told you are the brother of our mystery patient?”
Jack pointed to Eddie. “That would be him.”
“Her name is Louise Myers, Doctor,” he said, stepping forward and shaking hands. “How is she?”
“As you can see, she is comatose from her head trauma. She has a lacerated scalp but no skull fracture. Scans reveal no intracranial hemorrhage or hematoma.”
“What’s her Glasgow score?” Jack said.
Gupta gave him a puzzled look. “You know the Glasgow scale?”
Jack nodded. His father, Gia, and Vicky had all been comatose at one time or another. He knew more about comas than he wished.
Gupta moved toward the bed. “Well, strictly speaking, her score is eight. She makes incomprehensible sounds now and then, and she responds to painful stimuli. Here. I show you.”
He pulled a little rubber-headed percussion mallet from his pocket and removed a pinlike instrument from its handle. Then he raised a flap of sheet to reveal Weezy’s left hand.
“Watch.”
He lifted it about six inches off the bed; when he let go it dropped like a piece of meat.
“Now watch.”
He jabbed her palm with the pin. Her hand jerked away and her eyes fluttered open for a second.
“Hey!” Eddie said.
But Gupta was already moving to the other side of the bed, saying, “So, that gives her a score of eight. But this does not fit with that score.”
He lifted the sheet to reveal her right hand. Its index fingertip was scratching the sheet in a circular motion.
“See? Intermittent spontaneous movement. That should move her above an eight but I’m not sure where. The movement is certainly not consciously directed.”
“What’s the prognosis?” Eddie said.
“Good, I think.”
“When will she wake up?”
“Oh, that I cannot say. It would be foolish of me to predict.”
As they talked Jack stared at Weezy’s finger where it scratched the sheet. After a moment he began to sense a pattern in the movements. She’d make somewhere between fifteen and twenty loops—her movements were too rapid and small for an accurate count—stop for maybe two seconds, then start again. Almost as if . . .
“Doctor Gupta,” he said, motioning him over and pointing to her hand. “Could she be writing something?”
He leaned closer, stared a moment, then straightened, shaking his head.
“It is highly unlikely. The movement is most likely the result of random neuron firings.” He started for the door. “I must continue rounds. I shall check on her later. In the meantime, please fill in the nurses on as much of your sister’s medical history as you know.”
When he was gone, Eddie stepped up to Jack’s side and together they stared at Weezy’s moving finger.
“Doesn’t look very random to me,” Jack said.
“You really think she’s writing something?”
Jack nodded. “Mene, Mene, Tekel Upharsin.”
“What?”
“Nothing.” He leaned close to her ear. “Weezy, it’s Jack. You told Eddie to call me and he did. If you can hear me, stop moving your finger.”
The fingertip kept up its relentless pattern.
“Okay, then, if you can hear me, draw an ‘X’ with your finger.”
No change. The looping motions continued. As Jack watched them, an idea formed. He straightened and turned to Eddie.
“You going to the nursing station?”
“Yeah.”
“Good. I’ll come with you.”
The station lay fifty feet down the hall. While Eddie hunted the head nurse to background her on Weezy, Jack leaned over the counter and got a candy striper’s attention.
“Can I help you?” She was all of sixteen and chewing gum with her mouth open.
“I hope so. I need to scrounge a notepad and some carbon paper.”
She stopped chewing. “Carbon paper?” She turned and called to another girl who was maybe a year older. “Hey, Brit? Do we have any, like, carbon paper?”
Brit looked at her like she’d just spoken Farsi. “Carbon paper? Like what’s that? Is that, like, a color?”
Feeling terminally Triassic, Jack said, “Never mind. How about we try this . . . ?”
Two minutes later he returned to Weezy’s room with a yellow legal pad, a black Sharpie, and a roll of quarter-inch adhesive tape. He pulled a chair up to her right side and seated himself before her hand. He taped the Sharpie alongside her index tip so that its point jutted just beyond the fingernail. Then he placed the pad under her finger and let her rip.
At first all he got was an irregular blotch of black scribbles. So he decided to slide the paper along under the tip. And as he did, figures that looked like letters began to appear. He kept working at it, varying the speed until . . .
“What on Earth are you doing?” Eddie said as he returned to the room carrying some papers.
“Trying to find out what she’s writing.”
“You heard the doctor—random neurons.”
Yeah, Jack had heard. But he knew doctors could be as pigheaded as anyone else, refusing to see what was dangling before their noses because it didn’t fit their preconceived notions.
“Really?” Jack held up the latest sheet he’d run under her finger. “This look random to you?”
Eddie frowned and squinted at it. “ ‘Bummyhouse’? What’s that mean?”
“I was hoping for a ‘Eureka!’ from you. No bells going off, no lightning-bolt epiphany?”
“No.”
“Google it.”
Eddie handed Jack his papers, then pulled out his BlackBerry or whatever and did a fingertip tap dance. A few seconds later . . .
“I’ve got ‘buy my house’ but nothing else.”
“Could it be ‘bummy horse’? Was she into horses, OTB, anything like that?”
“No. She’d never bet on anything anywhere. She thought everything was fixed.”
“Why am I not surprised? Try it anyway.”
In its own nice way, Google told them to go fish.
“Well then, what about ‘bunny house’? Did she have a pet rabbit?”
“No. She’s never been into pets.”
Right . . . she’d never had one as a kid. But that didn’t mean she hadn’t become a cat lady . . . or a bunny lady.
“You’re sure?”
“Absolutely. I was just at her house. I searched it from cellar to attic yesterday and believe me, there’s no rabbit hutch there.”
“They’re usually outside. Did you search outside?”
Eddie hesitated. “No . . .”
“So there could be an old unused hutch there, maybe left over from the previous owner.”
“Could be, but—”
“And maybe she’s hidden something there.”
“Jack—”
“We should go see. Jackson Heights, right? This time of day the subway’ll get us there in no time.”
Eddie was staring at him. “You’re really into this. Why?”
“Because it’s Weezy. And my curiosity’s up. Paranoid or not, she thought something might happen to her. And something did. Now, it might or might not have been an accident—”
“It wasn’t a hit and run, if that’s what you’re thinking.” He pointed to the papers he’d handed Jack. “I got a copy of the police report from the nurse. A lady from Jersey hit her. Said she ran right in front of her.”
Jack scanned the report. A couple of witnesses corroborated the driver’s story. They also said a guy scooped up Weezy’s shoulder bag right after she was hit and took off running.
He handed the report to Eddie. “Okay. So it was an accident—at least that part of it.”
“What do you mean?”
“Maybe she was being chased.”
“Oh, come on, Jack.”
“Was Weezy the type to just step out into traffic?”
“She was the type to get lost in thought. She was also the type to worry about being followed, which might lead her to be watching over her shoulder when she should have been watching traffic.”
Jack sighed and nodded. “You’re right, you’re right. Just playing devil’s advocate.”
“Oh. Almost forgot.” Eddie reached inside his jacket and pulled out a small, flat, metallic rectangle. “They found this in her pocket.”
Jack took it from him and turned it over. IMATION was printed on its side.
“Flash drive.”
“Right. She was never without one. She had all her posts prewritten and ready to go so she could get on and offline as quickly as possible.”
“At these Internet cafés and such she frequented.”
Eddie nodded. “Exactly. A little sad, isn’t it.”
“Yeah, I guess.”
She obviously believed that someone was looking for her.
“I wonder if we should—”
“Excuse me?”
Jack turned and saw a swarthy, dark-haired guy stepping into the room. He looked like he’d just shaved but he still had five-o’clock shadow.
“I understand one of you is brother?”
Jack tried to identify his accent. Polish? Czech?
Eddie said, “That would be me.”
The guy extended his hand. “Bob Garvey. I was there when your sister hit. I call nine-one-one.”
“Well, thank you,” Eddie said, shaking his hand. “I appreciate that, and I’m sure my sister does too.”
“The least one could do.” Bob turned and extended his hand to Jack. “And you are other brother?”
“Just a friend,” he said as they shook. He maintained his grip as he asked, “Did you happen to notice if she was being chased?”
Bob’s fingers twitched as he freed his hand. “No. Why would someone chase?”
“For her purse. It was stolen from the scene, you know.”
“Yes, I heard. Can you believe some people? I was on phone to emergency services when it happened, but my back was turn so I don’t see it. When I turn around and people tell me, I could not believe. I just stand there with mouth hanging open. I would have chased but he was gone.”
“So you never saw him?”
Bob shook his head. “Unfortunately I did not.”
“Why are you here?”
He looked a little sheepish. “Well, you know how it is . . . you help someone, you feel responsible. And because no one know her name . . . I don’t know . . . she become this mystery woman in my mind and I just think I look in on her until her family show up.”
“That’s very kind of you,” Eddie said.
Yeah, Jack thought. Very kind of strange.
Something about this guy wasn’t ringing true. First off, the name didn’t go with the accent.
“I am given to understand her name is Louise.”
Whoa.
“How do you understand that?” Jack said.
“I ask nurses if she still a Jane Doe. They tell me she is identified as Louise Myers.”
Eddie nodded. “Yes, that’s her. We’ve always called her Weezy.”
“Weezy,” Bob said with a slow smile. “That is nice.”
Fearing Eddie might offer his sister’s address and Social Security number and maybe even a dinner date next, Jack blurted, “Where can she get in touch with you, Bob? I’m sure she’ll want to thank you when she’s recovered.”
“Oh, that will not be necessary. I—”
Eddie said, “Oh, she’ll never forgive me if I didn’t get at least a phone number from you.”
“And an address,” Jack added. “In case she wants to send a thank-you note.”
Bob waved his hands. “It is not necessary.”
“Oh, but it is,” Jack said. “In fact, we insist.”
Bob hesitated, then sighed. “Okay. I do not have card—”
“No prob,” Jack said, showing him the blank back of the police report. “I’ve got paper and he’s got a pen.”
Eddie pulled a ballpoint from a breast pocket and handed it to Bob. They both watched him scribble an address and phone number.
“Well,” he said as he handed everything back, “I must go now, but it is pleasure meeting you and even better knowing that Louise’s family has finally found her.”
He walked to the door, then did a Columbo turn as he reached it.
“Oh, may I ask if she is New Yorker? Where does she live?”
“Montauk,” Jack said, stepping in front of Eddie. “Year round. I don’t know about you, but the isolation during the winter would drive me nuts. She loves it, though. Go figure.”
Bob smiled, nodded, and left.
“Montauk?” Eddie said. “She doesn’t—”
“I know.”
“Then why tell him that?”
“Because one good lie deserves another.”
Eddie looked baffled. “I don’t—”
“Because the only true thing he said was that he was glad to know that Louise’s family has found her. I wouldn’t be surprised if he stole Weez’s bag, or knows the guy who did.”
Eddie’s eyes widened. “Are you kidding me? You’re beginning to sound like Weezy.”
Maybe he was, but that guy had had a three-dollar-bill air about him.
“Sometimes a person only seems paranoid. And even paranoids have real enemies. That guy was on a fishing expedition. He knew her name when he stepped in here and—”
“You heard him. He asked the nurses.”
“So he said. And maybe it’s true. Look, I know this is a silly question, but I have to ask: Is Weezy’s phone listed?”
“Of course not.”
“Good. Our friend Bob was looking for her address. Came right out and asked for it. Why? Humor me, Eddie. Play along. Why would he want her address?”
He sighed. “Because she’s got something he wants?”
“Logical. He didn’t get her address from her bag because she never carries ID. So what does he do? He sets up watch on the hospital, hoping friends or family will come looking for her. And when they find her—shit.”
“What?”
“Did you give her address to the nurses?”
“Well, sure. Why wouldn’t I?”
Damn.
“Okay, then, we have to assume that, one way or another, the guy calling himself Bob Garvey will be able to get her address from the hospital records.” He noticed Eddie grinning. “What?”
“All this assumes he really wants to know. But assuming he does, he’s out of luck.”
“Why?”
“Sometimes paranoia pays off. Her mailing address isn’t her house address. She uses a rental mailbox in Elmhurst just the other side of Roosevelt Avenue.”
Jack had to smile. He used mail drops all over the boroughs.
“A girl after my own heart.”
“Why do you say that?”
“Oh, no particular reason.”
He looked again at the scrawl. It sure as hell looked like bummyhouse.
House . . . her house seemed to be a focus of interest. Her house . . . but to her it would be my house. What if . . .
He took a pencil and drew two lines through the word, then showed it to Eddie.
Eddie frowned. “ ‘Bum my house’?”
“I think the first hump there is an r.”
Eddie’s eyes were wide when he looked up at Jack. “ ‘Burn my house’? She can’t mean that.”
“I think we’d better get out there.”
This time Eddie didn’t argue.