A Density of Souls (20 page)

Rumor went that Andrew had tried to tear up the letter. Angela had thrown a bottle at him and landed in confinement at Bayou Terrace the night of her son’s funeral, several hours before her oldest son’s death.

Angela’s cell was actually a room, which looked to Meredith like an old administrative office. A faded rectangle in the oak door indicated it once bore a plaque with a doctor’s name. Meredith stood on tiptoe to look through a small rectangular window in the door.

Next to a single bed, sitting on a wooden stool, Angela Darby stared out the room’s single window at the low chain-link fence and parking lot.

“She’s sedated?” Meredith asked quietly, looking at the red hair cascading down the back of the woman’s hospital gown. She had not moved. “Where was she before?” Meredith asked.

“Violent admissions,” Debbie answered.

“How long?”

“First week or so. According to her file . . .” Debbie hesitated.

“Let’s get this straight,” Meredith began. “Somehow she goes schizo-144

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phrenic overnight. She’s considered violent when she’s admitted and now she’s stashed here with no other patients behind a locked door.”

Debbie said nothing.

“Does she get fed?”

“Of course she gets fed!” Debbie snapped.

Meredith again looked through the window. Angela’s hair looked lustrous and a more violent shade of red than Meredith remembered.

“What drugs is she on?” Meredith asked.

“She’s not my patient, Meredith,” Debbie retorted.

“That’s in her file, isn’t it?”

Debbie reluctantly extracted the file from beneath one arm. Something was very wrong here. Debbie had her own motive. She obviously wanted Meredith to see Angela, to note her condition, yet she wouldn’t discuss the case. “Haldol,” Debbie answered.

“Anything else?” Meredith asked.

Debbie shut the file. “Thorazine. Other tranquilizers. Milder. To help her sleep.” She waved a hand in protest. “Meredith, the circumstances under which I obtained this file in the first place were false. I can’t exactly go to her consulting therapist with questions about the drug regimen she’s been put on without arousing some suspicion . . .”

“So in your opinion her medication is extreme?” Meredith cut in.

“My opinion is not that important, considering I’m not intimate with her file and her history. I wasn’t even on staff here when she was admitted.”

“She’s catatonic, right?” Meredith said, struggling to keep her voice down.

Debbie looked as if she’d been punched in the stomach. She nodded.

Meredith gave one last look at Angela’s back. “This way he doesn’t have to tell her,” she said, in a whisper of breath that fogged the window. “He doesn’t have to tell her Greg is dead.” She realized she had hit on Debbie’s motive. Angela Darby was being held prisoner.

“Were you close with her?” Debbie asked.

Meredith didn’t answer.

Meredith heard Debbie’s voice calling after her as she sprinted down the corridor, bursting out the entrance door. Once inside her car, she gunned the Acura out of the parking lot. As she veered down the private drive running alongside the hospital, she saw the sun reflecting off Angela’s window and she was a dark shadow on the other The Bell Tower

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side of the glass. But Meredith could see what the window looked out on—an empty parking lot without a security guard.

Several days later, Debbie Harkness was summoned into the office of Dr. Ernest Horne, the head of Bayou Terrace’s inpatient therapy, and questioned about the young woman she had brought into the hospital, the one who had been spotted running down the staff corridor.

“Now I would like you to tell me in your own words if you feel you did something less than orthodox, Debbie?” he asked pointedly.

The doctor had been Angela Darby’s therapist since she had been admitted. In Debbie’s opinion, he was also a dinosaur and an asshole.

“My own words . . .” Debbie finally said.

“Yes, please,” Dr. Horne urged.

“I would like to leave this facility before someone finds out what you’re doing to Angela Darby,” Debbie said. After that sank in, she continued. “I will keep this knowledge to myself on the condition that my leaving this facility does not jeopardize your recommendation of me to the Masters and Johnson program. As I said, my only interest is in not being on staff at this hospital when someone finds out about this case. I do not intend to cause any trouble.”

Debbie knew a great deal about Angela Darby, none of which she had shared with Meredith. She had found out that Dr. Ernest Horne’s wife was Andrew Darby’s older sister. She had found out that the “violent episodes” mentioned in Angela’s file could not be verified by the nurses. Angela Darby was no doubt ill, but also a victim of grief. Until Angela Darby had been placed in the previously empty Bordeaux Wing, there was no such thing as a grief ward at Bayou Terrace Hospital.

“Your recommendation will be mailed tomorrow,” Dr. Horne said.

“By that time, please have your office cleared out.” Debbie left Dr.

Horne’s office without telling him one other person also knew about Angela Darby’s condition.

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H
e’s the boy in the picture, Monica thought.

Jordan Charbonnet looked up at her from the kitchen table where he was reading a copy of The Times-Picayune. “Sixth Bomb Threat Has Gay Community On Edge,” the paper proclaimed. Monica’s shock was evident. Jordan rose from the table.

“Nice to meet you, Mrs. Conlin,” he said.

“Jordan?” Monica asked as she clasped his hand.

“Mom’s upstairs getting ready,” Jordan said. “Can I get you something to drink?”

Monica and Elise were going to hear the Louisiana Philharmonic.

Elise had suggested the concert. The Philharmonic was performing Mahler’s “The Resurrection”.

Monica had swung by to pick Elise up. “No, thank you . . .” She swallowed. “The door was unlocked so I just . . .”

“Mom always forgets to lock it,” Jordan said, and winked as if he and Monica shared an amused tolerance for Elise’s carelessness. “You look wonderful.”

“Thank you,” Monica said with a nervous smile as she set her purse down. Having him compliment her looks made her feel desirable and guilty. The boy was beautiful, which saddened her. There was something distant and isolated about him. He moved with an exaggerated authority, as if he needed all the oxygen in the room.

“How’s Stephen?” Jordan asked, opening the refrigerator door.

“He’s fine. He’s at Tulane. On break, right now.”

“Summer,” Jordan said, smiling as he poured himself a glass of orange juice. “You sure you don’t want anything to drink?”

“Monica!” Elise’s voice called down from upstairs.

“I’m here,” she shouted.

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“How’d you get in?” Elise called again.

“The door was unlocked.”

“Jordan!” Elise cried.

“He’s right here . . .” Monica answered. She noticed Jordan tense up before he capped the orange juice and returned the carton to the refrigerator shelf.

“Do you know Stephen?” Monica asked, a hint of suspicion creep-ing into her voice.

“Not really. He and Brandon used to be friends, right?”

“A very long time ago,” she said flatly.

Elise sauntered into the kitchen, fastening one diamond earring.

She was wearing a sequined, low-cut cocktail dress. Monica was startled. She didn’t even know Elise owned such a dress. “I thought you had to go to work,” Elise said to Jordan, sounding put out that he was in her house.

“I got cut,” Jordan said.

“Cut? Is that bad?” Elise asked.

“No. It just means they had too many hosts scheduled so they let me go for the night,” he said, taking a seat at the table, unfolding the news section of the paper again in a theatrical gesture that Monica thought indicated a sudden boredom now that his mother had entered the room.

“Ready?” Elise asked, as if she had decided to hustle her friend away from her son as fast as possible.

“As ready as I’ll ever be,” Monica said, her eyes moving from Jordan to Elise.

“Nice meeting you, Jordan,” Monica said as she followed Elise into the foyer.

“Tell Stephen I said hi,” Jordan said without looking up.

Jordan Charbonnet had a strange, dizzying effect on Monica. At first, she assumed it was simple shock when she realized he was the boy in Stephen’s picture. Halfway through the first movement of Mahler’s Second, Monica abruptly realized that Jordan reminded her of her dead husband, from his dark features to his apparent insensitivity to those around him. And she could see how anxiously Elise had reacted to Jordan, an uncontrollable presence. It was much the same way Monica had been with Jeremy during the early years of their marriage. In the end, Monica blamed it on the symphony. “The Resurrection” had been Jeremy’s favorite, so naturally its chords would stir her memories of him.

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• • •

Jordan found Meredith at Fat Harry’s. Rich had invited Jordan to meet him and this girl he was dating for a few beers. The bouncer at the door, Jordan’s old favorite wide receiver, Scott Sauber, patted him on the back as he ushered him into the smoky, raucous college bar. When Rich spotted Meredith at the video poker machines, he punched Jordan on the shoulder. “You two datin’ or something?” Rich yelled over the jukebox.

Jordan walked over to Meredith. “Small world,” he said to her. He had gotten off from work, lying to his mother about how he happened to be at home, to check out Monica Conlin, and in hope of later finding Meredith here.

He sat down on a stool next to her and inserted a five-dollar bill into a machine. She kept her eyes focused on the display screen.

“Stephen Conlin,” he said.

Meredith didn’t answer. She bet four more credits and examined her new hand.

“The fourth one in the picture is Stephen Conlin.” Jordan held three cards and dropped the rest with quick taps of his finger on the screen, losing seven credits.

“My brother was an asshole, wasn’t he?” he asked, looking straight ahead and studying his new hand.

“Did you ever hear what they did to Stephen’s car?” Meredith said to the screen. “They smashed in all the windows. Flattened every tire, just about. And spray painted the word cocksucker on the windshield.

He’d only had the car for a day.” Her machine let out an electronic belch, signaling that she was out of credits. Meredith stood up and retrieved her beer. Jordan saw how drunk she was, how wrecked—eyes bloodshot, face pale and gaunt, bangs combed haphazardly off her face.

“Greg told me all about it after. They were so proud.” She lifted the bottle to her mouth and swigged. The movement of her arm shifted her weight awkwardly, and she fell back into the stool. It scraped across the floor. Jordan caught her with one arm around her waist. He saw heads snap toward them throughout the bar, including a few he recognized as Cannon alumni. The old missing homecoming queen and the all-American hero, separated by a few years, now supporting one another.

“I almost drank myself to death a month ago. That’s why I’m a little The Bell Tower

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tipsy . . .” Meredith said, shrugging Jordan’s arm from her waist. He persisted, bracing her shoulders. Meredith pried his arm away and slapped it back to his side. “Answer me something,” she said.

“What?” he asked.

“Why did you come back here?”

“This is where I’m from,” he said, after a pause.

“That’s the curse, isn’t it?” Her bloodshot eyes locked on his. “We can never get away, can we? We always want to come home. Where it’s easier to drink.” She waved her beer bottle proudly. “And drinking makes it easier to watch everything rot.” She leaned forward, jabbing a finger into his chest. “But really, what’s the real reason? You think there’s something in the water here, or you think maybe it’s just easier to be someplace where everything’s so fucked up?”

“I don’t understand,” Jordan said. He wanted to tease more out of her, even though each word of it stung.

“Bullshit, you don’t understand,” she said.

Jordan didn’t protest. He did understand. No matter how far he strayed, New Orleans had never left him. Memories of slanting sunlight through oak trees had haunted him. He should have known that after a month the intoxicating charm of his hometown would lure him back into a world where homecoming queens staggered drunkenly around bars and brothers vanished into the cracks and gutters of the present.

Meredith must have seen it on his face. She lifted her finger from his chest and caressed the side of his cheek. He saw pity in her eyes.

“You’re all right, Jordan. You are. Believe me, you’re a much better man than your brother.”

Something started to give way inside of Jordan, provoked by the grief of Meredith Ducote, too drunk to stand up. Her boyfriend dead by his own hand. Her youth poisoned. It occurred to him that he might never find out what had happened to his brother, that maybe his mission was an excuse to cover for the fact that he had come home because returning to New Orleans was easier than beginning life. At night, he waited tables and by day he pondered where his brother could be; all the while his Princeton diploma hung above his childhood bed.

Meredith sobered slightly, backing away from him.

“Was it that horrible?” Jordan asked, barely audible over the jukebox. “So horrible that there’s no possible way I can even know Brandon again? I’m an idiot for wanting to help him, isn’t that right?”

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“No, you’re an idiot for thinking I can help you,” Meredith said with surprising gentleness. “I don’t know anything.”

Anger flickered in Jordan’s chest. His features hardened. “You’re lying,” he whispered.

She couldn’t hear him but she could read his lips. She had passed into a state of sudden calm, as if she were studying him like a painting.

“All I know is this . . . If your brother goes anywhere near Stephen, I’ll hurt him. Badly.”

She turned and moved out of the video poker booth. Jordan watched her weave through the thicket of patrons. Now he knew he had to talk to Stephen Conlin.