Dead Letter Day (16 page)

My ears rang like I’d been standing next to the speakers at a Manowar concert, but the loudest sound in the car was now my own breathing. A small wisp of smoke wafted around the edges of the radio. I left it alone until I got to the hospital parking garage. I wound my way up to the top level, my favorite place to park, and put the car in park.

Gingerly, I touched the power button for the radio. It was still hot. Nothing happened, though. No sound at all. Now that I could look a little closer, I saw that the edges of the metal had a singed look to them.

This was going to be hard to explain to the mechanic.

THERE DIDN’T SEEM TO BE ANY PERMANENT EFFECTS FROM my radio malfunction—and I so wanted it to be just a malfunction—except having to ask everybody to repeat things a little louder. Would it hurt people to enunciate?
I really didn’t think so. I understand if you’re in an emergency room at one o’clock in the morning, you’re not at your best, but I don’t think it would kill anyone to speak up. Still, it was a relief to go on an errand away from my little cube.

I felt the tingle as I headed down the hallway to carry to the charge nurse a set of faxes that had come in. I tried not to let my steps slow. After all, it might not have anything to do with me. If you think hospitals are full of germs, you’re 100 percent correct. They are also full of all kinds of things that most people would have a lot more trouble accepting than a stray microbe or two.

Think about it. Do you know how many prayers are uttered in waiting rooms and ICUs and surgical suites? People who haven’t believed in anything their whole lives, sometimes suddenly get religion when faced with illness, disease or disaster. If they don’t themselves, then someone in their family will. That person will start praying and pretty soon everyone else is praying along with them.

All that beseeching and begging, desperation and torment, can be pretty darned attractive to ancient and Arcane beings.

“Hey, you. Messenger. In here,” a voice rasped out of the waiting room.

I froze in my tracks and glanced around quickly to see if there were any ’Danes around. Everything looked clear.

“Yes, you.”

I turned slowly. A dryad peeked out from behind the door, beckoning to me to come in. “What? Are you waiting for an engraved invitation?”

Okay. Something was not right here. I was totally getting a tingle and it had a decidedly woodsy flavor to it. The creature beckoning to me was a willowy woman, ethereal in her beauty. Everything was screaming dryad. Why the
hell was she talking like a New York cabbie? Normally they don’t speak above a whisper.

Then again, I reminded myself, mine was not to reason why. I sighed. “What do you want?”

“I want you to make a delivery. What did you think I’d want? A new carpet?” She rolled her beautiful moss green eyes.

Well, two could play that game. “Fine. Let me have it.”

She gave a little snort, then handed me a piece of bark with an address scratched onto it.

“Seriously?” I asked. “You’ve never heard of paper?”

She pursed her full and luscious lips. “It needs to be of a tree.”

“Whatever.” I actually didn’t care, so it wasn’t difficult to feign indifference. “Who’s it for?”

The dryad leaned back against the wall. “Chick up in the psych ward. Her name’s Willow.”

I couldn’t help it. I snorted. “You’ve got to be kidding me. On the nose, much?”

The dryad cocked one hip and threw her head back. “Tell me about it. How ridiculous is that? A dryad named Willow? Can’t really blame them, though. They didn’t really know what they were naming.”

Great. Now I was getting interested. No good ever came of that. “I don’t get it. Who didn’t know what they were naming? Why didn’t they know she was a dryad?”

“She’s not full dryad. She’s not even half. Probably no more than an eighth. Her mother was probably about a quarter and she didn’t even know what she was. Get this, though. The mother’s name was Cedar.” She barked out a laugh. “Who would name their kid Cedar?”

I had gone to school with several Cedars. “This is northern California.”

The dryad sighed and coughed a little. “True that. Awful lot of tree huggers around here.”

“Wouldn’t you be one of them?” Dryads were all about trees and frolicking around them. That was their whole shtick. That and being all gorgeous and everything.

She slid onto the couch, folding herself into something that looked like one of Norah’s yoga poses. “Absolutely. Love them. Great things, trees. Do you know how long a redwood tree can live, though?”

“Couple hundred years?” I guessed.

“Try a couple thousand for some of them. Know what they do during all those years? All those minutes and hours and weeks and days?” She stretched and yawned.

“I don’t know. Grow, maybe?” Another guess.

“Bingo, Messenger girl. They grow. Roots go down. Trunk goes up. Leaves sprout.” She leaned forward. “It’s great for the first couple of hundred years, then it starts to get a little boring.”

I could see that. Sometimes I could barely stand to wait at a stoplight. “So what are you supposed to do?”

“Whatever I want, really. I’m not a hamadryad. I don’t live IN the tree. I live near it. I can wander a bit.”

“So what’s the deal with this Willow chick up in psych?” I sat down next to her. “And what’s your name?”

The dryad stuck out her hand. “Jenny.” Excellent. So much more sensible.

“Melina,” I said and shook her hand. “Now about Willow?”

Jenny sighed. “Poor thing. She’s got some dryad blood in her. We don’t intermix much, but it happens. Anyway, it’s a few generations back. No one in the family really knows about it. They just think they’re woodsy sorts of people.”

I could see that happening. I knew a few woodsy types
that didn’t have a speck of dryad in them. “How’d that land her in the psych ward?”

“Long story short. Something happened to her tree.” Jenny began twirling her long blonde hair around one finger.

“That made her go nuts?”

“It’s a little more complicated than that and probably could have been avoided if anyone had been keeping track of her or her mother. They’d sort of slipped through the cracks. Again, it happens.” Jenny shrugged, but she seemed a little less hostile.

I found myself fingering the piece of bark. It had a nice feel to it. “So they both went nuts?”

Jenny shook her head. “No. Somehow it’s a little stronger in the daughter than the mother. I don’t know why.”

“Let me guess,” I said. “It happens.”

“You know it does. You’ve probably seen something like it in your family. You know, when someone seems like sort of a throwback to an earlier generation? Genetics are crazy.”

I did know it. I was the throwback. I actually look so much like photos of Grandma Rosie’s mother at my age that it even creeps me out, and I hang out with vampires and werewolves. I am relatively creep-proof. “Okay. Sure. I get that.”

“So the redwood that this chick’s like great-great-grandmother was tied to is finally dying and I guess she experienced some kind of, I don’t know, psychic distress. If she’d known why, it’d probably have been okay. She could have probably handled it, but instead it made her sort of…crazy.” Jenny made circles in the air with her finger by her ear.

“Hence her stay upstairs in a locked ward?”

“Let’s just say she started acting out a bit. Apparently public nudity is frowned upon in midtown.”

“And this?” I held up the piece of bark with the address on it.

“She’s here for seventy-two hours. You know. The whole
5150 thing.” Jenny pointed at the bark. “That’s where she should go when she gets out. There’ll be a couple of us there waiting. We’ll be able to help her.”

In California, Section 5150 was the part of the Welfare and Institutions Code that allowed someone—like a cop or a doctor—to involuntarily commit someone. It’s kind of code for “serious whack job.”

“What if she doesn’t want to go?” I asked. I mean, why would she? Especially if she thinks she’s already crazy. Why would a strange woman handing her a piece of a tree seem like anything more than another piece of the crazy?

“She’ll want to. Once she holds it in her hand. She’ll feel it. It’ll speak to her.” Jenny pressed her lips into a firm line and nodded.

“Got it.” I did, too. Inanimate objects often had conversations with me, whether I wanted them to or not. I stood up. “It’s been nice meeting you.”

“Likewise.” Jenny smiled. “Sorry if I was a little…sharp before. I didn’t really know what to expect, given your reputation.”

Well, wasn’t that just the pot calling the kettle black. “What reputation?”

She gestured in the air. “You know. Word on the street. The down low. The four-one-one.”

“Yeah. I know what reputation means. What’s mine?” I wasn’t sure I wanted the answer, but there was no way I was not asking.

She looked at me for a moment as if she was considering how much to say. “That you meddle. That you’re a bit of a troublemaker.”

I blinked a few times as I waited for that information to register. “I don’t meddle unless I’m forced to. There’s nothing I’d like better than to never meddle at all.”

She held up her hands in front of her in a gesture of surrender. “Whatever,
chiquita
, I’m just telling you what the word on the street is. I get it. I’m not exactly what people expect either.”

She could say that again. She was right, though. Whatever, indeed. People—or creatures—could say whatever they wanted. It didn’t matter.

Except maybe it did when you were trying to find out what was going on with your friend, the disappearing werewolf. Would I get more cooperation if people didn’t think I was going to stick my nose into business that wasn’t mine?

I slipped the piece of bark into the pocket of the sweater I was wearing and headed down to the lab to see if they had some reports to deliver to the psych ward, to give me some cover for my visit up there.

THE LAB TOTALLY HAD SOME RESULTS THAT NEEDED delivering. It really wasn’t a surprise. A huge amount of body fluids made their way there and, for some reason or another, someone somewhere always wanted to know what was in them. The tired looking man sitting behind the desk in the front seemed a little surprised when I offered to take the ones to the psych ward for him since I was headed that way anyway, but he wasn’t going to argue with me. Most of the hospital staff spends a ridiculous amount of time on their feet. They’ll do almost anything to get to sit for a few minutes here and there. Plus, I gave him one of my best smiles. The one where I cock my head a little to the side. I was hoping it was coquettish without being slutty. It worked, so it must have been okay.

I walked up to the door of the psych ward and waited to be buzzed in. It was pretty much the same setup as the place
where we’d seen Michael Hollinger. I tried to imagine what it would be like to have been a little kid coming in here to see your father.

Say what you will about my mother—and I have said plenty at one point in time in my life or another—she has always been sane, if not reasonable, at least to my own vision of what is reasonable. What would it have been like if the adult you counted on couldn’t be counted on to even take care of himself, much less you?

No wonder Ted had a great big hero complex. He’d been rescuing everyone around him his whole life, even when he was alone.

Could I be someone to count on for whatever little tadpole was swimming inside me right now? Would I be a source of security or a source of instability? I didn’t exactly get to call the shots in my own life. How would that impact a kid who was counting on me?

The door buzzed open in front of me and I walked onto the ward. I dropped the stack of lab results off at the nurse’s desk, made some small talk with the little Filipino nurse at the counter and looked around.

It didn’t take me long to figure out which patient was my partial dryad in distress. First of all, she had that tall-slender-blonde thing going for her. Second, she was pressed up against the reinforced glass in the common room, staring at the leaves of the oak tree outside it as if they were communicating with her. Third, she gave me a tingle.

I walked up next to her. “Willow?” I asked.