The Sanctity of Sloth Page 8

  "I'll take you home," he said.

  She placed a hand on her father's leg. "I'll see you later, Daddy." There was no response, not a flicker of an eyelid. Not a twitch of a finger. "I'll be back." Her voice caught. She stood for another moment, composed herself, and then turned. "Okay."

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  FRIDAY, MARCH 16TH, 8:15 AM (EARLIER THAT DAY)

  The Wife

  I DICED AN onion with my favorite knife. My husband had given it to me for Christmas two years ago. It was so sharp I'd almost sliced my finger off before I'd learned to use it correctly. But I had, and now I loved it.

  I decided to make a special dinner. I was so relieved the girl was gone for good. It didn't appear she'd be coming back. We hadn't heard anything for three days. I did feel a pinch of guilt, but didn't know what more I could have done. I'd spent an entire day nursing her. I would've taken her to the doctor if I could have. But she had no papers.

  Seb had connections. That's what my husband said. He knew a doctor who wouldn't ask any questions. I was so tired of hearing about Seb, and doubted half of what I'd heard.

  I'd just read an article in the papers about refugee camps in Greece and traffickers who made a living from them. Wasn't Skandalis a Greek name? I was beginning to believe it more likely Seb's nephew was in Greece forging papers than working in the American Embassy in Egypt.

  But I did hope the part about the doctor was true. I hoped that right now Hannah was in a clean bed with antibiotics coursing through her system, on the road to recovery.

  What if Seb wanted us to take her back when she was well? My hand shook, and my cup clattered to the counter. No. That couldn't happen. I wouldn't let it happen. The burden of her presence far outweighed the burden of caring for the house. The past two days had been a reprieve, so calm after that storm. I wouldn't allow the peace of my home to be disrupted again.

  The radio was on, dialed to a local news station. My husband liked to listen while he had breakfast in the mornings. I walked across the kitchen to turn it off, but stopped with my hand on the dial. A newscaster's voice said, "A witness has come forward who claims to have seen two men on El Camino Real the night before the body at the San Juan Capistrano Mission was discovered. They are not suspects, but the police would like to talk to them. If anyone has any information in this unusual case, please contact the Orange County Sheriff's Department."

  Cold crept up my arms. A premonition, an inner voice, her ghost maybe, something told me the mysterious girl was Hannah. It couldn't be. I tried to push the thought from my mind, argue myself out of believing it. But the feeling was as insistent and insidious as a plague.

  I turned off the radio, ran to the living room, grabbed the remote from the coffee table and aimed it at the television. After flipping through several stations, I found one that covered local news.

  Perched on the edge of an easy chair, I listened to a story about gang violence in Santa Ana, a commercial for dish soap, and then a feature about the increase in Orange County's homeless population. The third story covered what I'd tuned in to hear.

  A well-groomed man in his forties stood at the Mission gates. "The mystery at the San Juan Capistrano Mission deepens," he said. "Yesterday a young girl, who appears to be of Arab descent, was found dead inside these walls by a volunteer. At this time authorities believe she died of natural causes, but they would like to know who she is, who left her there and why.

  "This morning we learned that an unnamed Mission employee reported seeing two men, possibly a father and son, on El Camino Real near the Mission wall late Tuesday night. If anyone has any information regarding these men, they're asked to contact the Orange County Sheriff's Department. It's a slim lead, but it's all they've got at this point. Back to you, Becky."

  I clicked off the TV and stared at the blank screen. Tuesday night. Two men. Father and son. How could he have done such a thing?

  I walked to the kitchen in a fog, forgetting why I'd entered. I turned to leave, and remembered. My phone. I had to call my husband, had to hear it from his own lips. I found it on the counter and began to dial the numbers with trembling fingers. The sound of the front door opening, made me pause. I waited. A moment later, he entered the kitchen.

  His face was as white as death. He opened his arms to me, but I didn't go to him. Instead, I sank into a chair, my legs about to give way. "I thought you were taking her to Seb."

  "I did. He wouldn't take her."

  "So you decided to heave her over the wall at the Mission and let her die, alone and afraid." The words came out in a monotone, a simple statement of the facts. My emotions were tied up tight in a corner of my heart. I couldn't afford the luxury of giving them free rein.

  "No. It wasn't like that."

  "What was it like?"

  My husband sat in the chair opposite me. "Is there any coffee made?" I jerked my head toward the pot on the counter. He could get his own. But he didn't. He put his elbows on the table and dropped his head into his hands. "I brought her to his house, like I told you I was going to do. But he told me to go away. He said she was my problem, not his. I would have left her anyway, but he had a gun."

  "A gun?" I stifled a laugh. This was a television crime drama, not our life.

  "Yes, a gun." His voice rose. He stood, opened a cupboard, slammed a mug onto the counter with such force I was surprised it didn't break and filled it.

  He took a large gulp, then turned to face me. "He said if I took her to a doctor, I would be arrested. He said if I told the authorities where I got the girl, he and I would both go to jail. But before the police took him, he'd kill you and the children. I didn't know what to do."

  "So you took her to the Mission?" That decision made no sense to me.

  "Not at first. I drove to the emergency room. I thought I could leave her there, maybe in the parking lot. But there were too many people, too much light. There was no way. Then I remembered you said you found a cross on her." His eyebrows raised as if I should understand why this was relevant.

  "Yes?"

  "Those are her people. The Catholics. I figured someone would find her and take care of her."

  I closed my eyes, but the scene continued to play in my mind. My husband and my son taking that poor girl and leaving her out in the cold night air to die. It was murder. A murder of neglect. And, he'd made my son a party to it. "You did a terrible thing."

  "Maybe it was a mercy. She was half-starved. Sick. Her family didn't want her. We didn't want her. Nobody wanted her."

  "She wasn't a dog to put out of her misery. You had no right."

  "What else could I have done? You tell me? You said, 'Get rid of the girl.' But you didn't say how. You didn't offer to help."

  My emotions came unleashed, and I stood. "I didn't bring her here in the first place. I don't understand how you could have thought for one minute that buying a girl was a good idea. It's not only illegal, it's immoral." He didn't say anything, just stared at the floor. He knew I was right. "And you were seen."

  "What?" His head snapped up.

  "You were seen. I heard it on the news right before you walked in."

  "Who? When?"

  "A Mission employee. The person said they saw two men near the wall on El Camino Real late Tuesday night."

  "I don't see how that could be. There was no one there on the street. We looked."

  "You've been missing the obvious lately."

  "There was no one there, I'm telling you."

  I didn't argue with him. There was someone there, and that someone saw him and my son. I hoped and prayed for my child's sake, the police would have no way discovering the truth.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  SATURDAY, MARCH 17, 8:45 AM

  CLEAN, BUT ONLY somewhat more rested, Abby made her way through Mission Hospital's maze of hallways to the ICU. She prepared herself as she walked. She already knew her father's condition was precarious, no surprise there. She would control her emotions, make cool, clear-headed decisions. She'd be
there for him the way he'd always been there for her. She took a deep breath, stepped through the doorway into his room, and stopped short.

  The lights, bright today, beamed onto a bare mattress. The bank of computer monitors no longer blinked and beeped, but stood quiet and dead. Where was he? Surely, someone would have called her if he'd taken a turn for the worse—if he'd. . . She shoved that thought away.

  She spun and walked with rapid steps through the corridor to the medical station. Her phone. She'd been so exhausted the night before, she hadn't bothered going to her father's house in San Juan to get it. Her purse with her car keys and wallet were at her apartment, so she went there. She'd crept in so she wouldn't wake Sharona, collapsed on her own bed, and fallen into a dead sleep. But she didn’t have her phone. What if they'd tried to call her? She broke into a run.

  She turned a sharp corner and collided with a cart loaded with breakfast trays. Mumbling an apology to the orderly pushing it, she jogged the final distance to the desk. "Paul Travers." The words came in panted breaths.

  "What room is he in?" said the almost pretty woman seated behind the counter.

  "That's what I want to know," Abby said.

  The nurse stared at the ceiling for a moment, trying to curb her annoyance, Abby thought. "Is he in the ICU?" she said through pinched lips.

  "He was in room 302."

  The woman took an immense amount of time plugging information into her computer. Abby resisted the urge to scream. A phone at the woman's elbow trilled. She answered it with a crisp, "ICU," listened for a moment, and relaxed into her chair as if settling in for a nice long chat. "Again?" she said in mock reprimand.

  Abby stared at her.

  "Don't worry. Your secret is safe with me." A ripple of laughter erupted from her no longer pinched lips.

  Abby said, "Paul Travers?"

  The woman raised a silencing hand and frowned. "Yes, Doctor." She emphasized the word "doctor" and glared. Apparently Abby, who had no initials after her name, should understand her status. "I'll hold you to that." The smile returned as the nurse turned her attention back to her phone conversation. "I most certainly will. Yes. See you tomorrow then. Okay. Okay. Goodbye."

  The grin slipped from her face as the receiver dropped onto the cradle. "Paul Travers was moved into the general population. He's on the second floor. Room 212." Abby darted toward the elevators without a thank you.

  She found her father in the first bed of a double room. He was still ashen beneath the bruises, but his open eyes looked alert. Relief almost buckled her knees. He reached a hand toward her. She took it and sank onto the edge of his bed. "How did you get out?" His voice was a rasp of sandpaper.

  "Carlos."

  "Good. I'm glad I told him. I know I wasn't supposed to."

  Abby squeezed his hand. "How did this happen?" She was afraid to ask, afraid he would say that the accident was his fault caused by his distraught state of mind. But she had to know.

  "I was crossing El Camino Real to get a cup of coffee at that shop near the Mission. A car——" His words were interrupted by a coughing jag. He wrapped an arm around his ribs and yelped with pain.

  Abby reached across him for the plastic cup of water on his bedside table. She helped him fit the straw between his dry lips. "You were walking?" She asked when he pushed the glass away.

  "Yes. Car came out of nowhere."

  Her father had become a man of extreme caution after Scottie's death, and he'd drilled that caution into her. Abby never rode bicycles, was afraid of heights, was a nervous driver, and wouldn't even consider hopping on the back of a motorcycle. She only swam in pools or on beaches attended by lifeguards, and never on red flag days. She carried a canister of pepper spray in her purse, although she'd never taken it out because she never went anywhere alone at night.

  Needless to say, she always waited for the light, crossed at crosswalks, and looked both ways before stepping off the curb. And her father did the same. The accident couldn't have been his fault. "Was the driver drunk? On drugs?" she asked.

  "I don't know." His eyes closed.

  She felt a stab of guilt. "Of course you don't, and you don't need to bother about that now. Get some rest."

  His head tipped, and then nodded. His breathing became steady and deep in moments. Abby slipped her hand from his when his fingers relaxed their hold. She needed to speak to his doctor or nurse. To someone who might know the answers to her growing list of questions.

  She blinked in the bright light of the hallway and wondered where the nurse's station was on this floor. She turned right, back the way she'd come. But before she reached the end of the corridor, she heard a familiar voice coming from a patient's room. Dr. Trudeau stood in a doorway, one hand on the jamb, posed to leave. "I'll be back tomorrow," she promised someone Abby couldn't see. "Ms. Travers." The doctor smiled when she caught sight of Abby.

  "My father's awake. He's lucid," Abby said.

  "I know. I heard. I was just headed that way."

  Abby fell in alongside the doctor. "He said he was hit by a car while he was walking. I didn't know that. I'd assumed it was a collision."

  "I was told the same thing. An investigator visited last night. She wanted to speak to your father, but he wasn't awake. I talked to her briefly, confirmed the injuries were consistent with the eyewitness accounts."

  "An investigator?"

  "Her name was Sylla, I believe. She's with the Orange County Sheriff's Department."

  Sylla? Abby stopped in her tracks. Sylla investigated homicides. She’d come the morning they’d discovered the girl at the Mission. Did she investigate other kinds of crime as well? Dr. Trudeau disappeared into her father's room. Abby hurried to catch up. Either way, it was the police's business to find the idiot who hit her father. Her job was to take care of him.

  ***

  Abby nosed her car up the gravel drive in back of her father's house. Dr. Trudeau had said if her father continued to progress at the rate he'd been progressing, Abby would be able to bring him home in a day or two, but he'd need care. She still had two and half weeks before she had to return to work, so she could stay with him.

  Her plan today was to take stock of the food situation and make a list of things she needed to get from the store. She'd also do a bit of cleaning. Her father was tidy, but he'd never be confused with Mr. Clean.

  She entered through the back door and headed straight to the kitchen. The musty smell of day-old garbage and dirty dishes greeted her. As she dropped her purse onto the table, she saw her phone. She'd left it in the desk on the far kitchen wall, and wondered why her father had moved it. Was he checking her messages? She must have a lot of them. She'd told her employer and most of her friends she was going to a remote cabin in the mountains to work on her book. That cell reception was sketchy there. But she hadn't told everybody.

  She pressed the power button, but nothing happened. She took it to the desk, found her charger in the drawer where the phone should have been and plugged it in. She hadn't told Carlos. She'd been hurt and angry, which wasn't much of an excuse. Truth is, she would have felt guilty lying to him. They were too close for lies. But she hadn’t been up to up facing his disapproval either, so she hadn't said anything about where she was going.

  Abby threw open the dishwasher with more force than she needed to and began loading the dishes from the sink into it. In their early days together, it seemed as if she could do no wrong. He’d thought everything about her was wonderful. He'd listened to her author dreams and her musings about books she might write with rapt attention. They never disagreed about anything more serious than which restaurant had the best tacos.

  Sometime toward the end of their first year together, things began to change. He listened less, switched topics more, and they'd started bickering now and then. She guessed it was to be expected. Something that happened to most couples once the honeymoon phase was over.

  In some ways it showed their relationship had become deeper. The more serious things we
re, the greater the stakes, and the more important it was to know where the other stood.

  But recently, his opinions about what she should and shouldn't do had become too strong. They felt less like love and more like disrespect. She flipped the dishwasher on, took the trash bin from under the sink and dragged it over to the fridge.

  As she discarded leftovers and wilted vegetables, the words she'd used the night they'd fought ran through her head. "No ring," she'd said. "I need time," she'd said. If he'd accepted that, maybe things wouldn't be so awkward between them now. But he hadn't, and he'd said some things she was having a hard time forgetting.

  Abby lifted the garbage bag from the can and walked to the back door. She rounded the corner of the house, heading for the outside trash cans, and was startled by a car in the driveway of the house next door. Sage, the woman who'd owned the home before, had been gone for months. Abby knew the place had been on the market, but her father never mentioned new neighbors. She hadn't known it had sold until he'd introduced himself to the Asian woman at the Mission.

  She was glad it had. The house had terrible secrets. But she never held it against the place. Like her, it seemed an innocent victim of its terrible past.

  She hoped it would have a new life, filled with happiness. And, on a more practical note, it was good that her father wouldn't be here at the end of the long drive all by himself. A neighbor who could look in on him from time to time would ease Abby's mind.

  She dumped the trash in the can and replaced the lid. Maybe she should go over and introduce herself? They might wonder who she was. Later. She'd do it later, after she had a chance to finish cleaning up and run to the store. She'd buy them a houseplant or something. It would give her an excuse to stop by.

  Her phone had half-power by the time she entered the kitchen. Enough to check her messages. She had eight. Five were from Carlos. They covered a wide range of emotions: from casually apologetic, to irritated, to angry, to worried, to bereft. She chewed her bottom lip as she listened. Maybe she'd been too hard on him.