Retribution: The Second Chances Trilogy Book Three (21 page)

He’s still gripping the tray and clutching the card when the newscaster says that according to informed sources, Mrs. Elliot will be released from a Middlestone, Kent, hospital later today after an overnight stay following the miscarriage she suffered early Monday morning.

He thinks to set down the tray before he drops it. He’s careful to put the card in a safe place inside his wallet till he can give it his full attention. Right now he needs to find out where Middlestone is and how to go there before the day gets much older.

The guy with the title he can’t pronounce is set up with his own desk in the lobby. When asked about Middlestone, Kent, the concierge guy forks over maps and railway timetables lickety-split, followed by leaflets depicting great stately homes and castles in the general vicinity of Middlestone. To that, he tacks on a spiel about Kent being the true garden spot of England and adds an assortment of excursion planners to the growing pile of handouts.

Hoop stuffs all but the railway timetable into the valise and assures the guy at the desk that he can find Victoria Station where, according to the timetable, regular aboveground trains leave for Middlestone at frequent intervals.

Everything will have to go exactly right if he hopes to catch the next train because it leaves at nine-fifteen a.m. and that’s only forty minutes from now.

He sets off at a fast clip, but no faster than anyone else is walking toward the underground station he arrived at yesterday. Yesterday—he can think of yesterday’s tests as practice for today’s; he can think of all the yesterdays and all the tests he’s survived as good practice for now. That thinking worked when he compared the London subway layout with the one he learned from in New York, didn’t it? And it works when he arrives at the outsize Victoria Station that’s no harder to conquer than the huge big Port Authority Terminal was.

He catches the train to Middlestone, Kent, with minutes to spare. As soon as wheels start turning, he sees that this leg of the trip compares with the bus rides made to and from New York City during off-hours. The rail car is maybe half full—he’s got two seats to himself—and most of the passengers have their heads stuck in newspapers of one kind or another. Lacking his own newspaper, Hoop makes do with the maps and leaflets brought from the hotel.

The tourist map of Kent stands out in the assortment and once he’s pinpointed Middlestone, he stares holes in the grids of the surrounding territory as though pure concentration will reveal which one hides the rock star and the lawyerwoman. The thinking here is they’d go to the nearest hospital in an emergency, so they’d have to live somewhere within the haphazard circle he finger-draws around Middlestone, wouldn’t they? This new search isn’t that different from the hunt for the house at 13 Old Quarry Court, is it? And he found that without a lot of extra bother, didn’t he?

He folds the map away, satisfied that when the time comes all this practice he’s had will finally pay off. For a while he looks out the window without seeing anything that interests him except the reflection of a man he barely recognizes as himself. Then he remembers the plasticized card he came across earlier when everything was happening at once. He shifts in his seat to get at his wallet, takes out the card and squints at it even though his new eyeglass have taken some of the strain out of reading fine print.

Hoop studies just the words at first—Curzon, Denver, Dorchester, Harley, King’s, Rock Cent, Forty-ninth, Terra Firma, Wheelwright—runs them through his mind to see if anything sticks. Nothing does, so he reads through the numbers. Some look like telephone numbers and some don’t. Nothing about them wants to stick, either. This doesn’t worry him, though. Nothing about the newfound card worries him. Not finding it till now bothers a little, but maybe he hadn’t earned a look at it till now—maybe he hadn’t had enough practice till now.

He looks back at his reflection in the railcar window, at how the scar on his chin makes his mouth warp when he grins. He cracked Cliff Grant’s record-keeping code, didn’t he? And didn’t he manage to puzzle out Gibby Lester’s ledgers even though the findings didn’t amount to much unless you were a tax collector? He puts the card back in his wallet and tries not to grin again till he gets to Middlestone, Kent.

There’s no mistaking where he’s supposed to get off this train. But when Hoop does get off at the Middlestone East Station, he sees the mistake made by thinking the station would be like the one in Kensington and empty out into a town center. The area around this station doesn’t look like the center of anything, so he goes in the direction most of the other passengers are taking—the ones that don’t have cars or bicycles parked nearby.

He doesn’t mind the walk; it’s the time that has him champing at the bit, impatient that he may have missed the lawyerwoman’s release from the hospital today. In a neighborhood with enough hustle and bustle to say it’s the heart of the town, he looks around for blue and white hospital signs like he’s used to seeing in other heavy-settled areas. The only sign that catches his eye is one advertising Visitor Information. He nearly passes this place by before reminding himself that asking for help isn’t always a show of weakness. When he went to the Chinks for what they could provide, they didn’t look down on him, did they? And the Travelers Assistance people at the airport and the concierge guy at the hotel didn’t sneer when he asked them for directions.

Inside the information center, he finds out right away he’s made another mistake by thinking the hospital would be located in the middle of things, the way the one is in Portage St. Mary. To get to this hospital he’ll either have to fork over taxicab fare or ride a bus that’ll probably make countless stops before arriving at the outlying hospital the attendant shows him on a map. On a more detailed map, this woman shows him where to catch the bus and the best place to find a cab. She says how much he can save by taking the bus, but he’s already decided on the taxicab; he’s got more money than time, after all.

Without asking any direct questions, the woman does her best to find out why he wants to go to the hospital. She expresses hope that he’s not in need of medical care for himself, that it’s not a sick or injured travel companion he plans to visit there; she supposes that his interest could be professional, that he could be a healthcare worker on a busman’s holiday. When none of that gets her a straight answer, she falls back on guessing he’ll want to look in on a few of the cheerier spots before he’s done with Kent. In a high-pitched voice she cautions him not to miss the black swans and the Dog Collar Museum when he tours nearby Leeds Castle.

He does his best not to laugh at the doubtful existence of black swans and the outlandish notion of a museum for dog collars. Straight-faced and businesslike he scoops up the fresh supply of maps and folders she shoves at him and walks away unworried that he’s given her anything in return.

The only worry he feels during the taxicab ride has to do with how much to tip the driver, and that’s nothing to get lathered up about. Nor is wondering how to behave once he gets to the hospital. If he handles himself the way he did at all those checkpoints between New York and London—without sweating or stammering or coming across like a jackassed-fool—there won’t be a problem.

That thought is uppermost when he’s dropped off at the main entrance to the low-slung building that reminds him of the Sawyer Manor Nursing Home back in New Jersey. The inside looks like someplace he’s been before, too. The desk where visitors present themselves could pass for the one in the West Village hospital where it was Sid Kaplan he was after, and it even looks a little like the one at Portage St. Mary Memorial, the first place he ever tried to visit a bedridden patient.

With that kind of practice behind him, he marches up to the sign-in desk, asks to see Mrs. Laurel Chandler Elliot and maybe lays it on a little thick by calling himself a former client of hers from over in the U.S. of A. He knows he’s right to say client, though; he’s troubled himself to learn that lawyers don’t have customers like in a store. And while he was at it, he found out that a lot of fancy college-schooled women hold on to the names they were born with and just tack on the marriage name like an afterthought, so chances are he got that right as well. But if he did, why is the girl behind the desk looking at him like he’s dripping pond scum and shaking one of her hands in the air like some got on her.

A husky woman wearing a long white coat and a listening instrument around her neck is right on top of him before he’s got much of anything puzzled out.

“Better late than never,” she says for hello. “Thinkin’ to check in, were you, or is that the newest thing in camera cases?” The nursewoman glares at the valise he’s holding and spits out more remarks that don’t make sense till she declares that the patient he asked for is long gone and he should be to.

“Your lot hared off to London soon as word got out she was transferred to a private clinic there,” she says and he catches on that he’s been pegged for a celebrity chaser like Cliff Grant or Sid Kaplan.

“What were you, then, the rear guard?” she says, crowding him toward the double doors to the outside. “What were you hopin’ to photograph, the sorry remains?”

He feels her hot damp breath on his face, smells the onions she had for lunch, sees that the two of them are now center of attention for the others in the lobby.

“Elvis has left the building, luv, so you best carry your sorry arse outta here too.” The automatic doors hiss open and she laughs the way Cliff Grant laughed when he was offered the truth about Audrey and scorned it. She laughs the way Sid Kaplan laughed when he was offered the chance to get extra rich and turned it down.

Hoop plants himself in the doorway, opens the valise and gropes the insides for the means of answering her the way he answered Grant and Kaplan, but there’s nothing there for his hand to curl around but a bundle of paperbacks and a wad of tourist leaflets.

This is the biggest mistake yet—thinking, for however many seconds that just went by, that he still had the means of answering this braying donkey of a woman. And it’s the readiness to use a knife right here, right now, in front of watchers, and with every chance of being caught, that has him so seized with worry he barely feels the nursewoman shove him the rest of the way out the door.

If Laurel Chandler Elliot had still been a patient here and he had gotten in to see her, what was he going to do about the rock star husband who was probably at her side? Didn’t he learn anything from watching the two of them from the peephole in her attic that day? Didn’t he judge then and there that he couldn’t take on both of them with a knife, and didn’t that prove true when he went against that judgment and made the giant mistake in her garage?

Saying the lawyerwoman had been alone and maybe asleep, was he going to dope her water supply, smother her with a pillow? What was he thinking? Was he thinking at all? How could he not remember that he’s not packing even a pocketknife or so much as a single dose of doctored aspirin? And how could he have been willing to carry out a public execution just now that would have meant immediate capture and breaking the promise made to Audrey?

He rides a bus back to the Middlestone town center and returns on foot to the train station. His head is swimming when he boards the train back to London; his head is overflowing with forgots and overlookeds. When he stares out a window he sees through his reflection and straight into his failings with nothing in between.

The dull ache seems general in nature, unrelated to the condition of her lower abdomen. Seated in a wheelchair, compulsory transportation for all patients leaving the hospital, Laurel nevertheless favors that area of her body, hesitating even to rest her hands atop the emptied, deflated space. “Dusting and cleaning,” some wag called the D&C procedure undergone yesterday to ensure no remnants of the pregnancy remained. Dusting and cleaning indeed! And precautionary or not, the scraping of her uterus amounted to overkill as far as she was concerned. Too definitive, too final, too much like a deliberate rather than spontaneous abortion.

She returns her attention to Colin and his present attempt to vary the order of the apologies he’s recited in a continuous loop ever since he was summoned from the studio night before last.

“Same song, different verse,” Laurel grumbles under her breath.

“Sorry?” He steps away from the window, where he was monitoring activity in the parking lot and sits down on the edge of the nearby bed, the better to hover over her.

“Nothing.” She smoothes the excess fabric—the wasted fabric—of the roomy dress they brought for her to wear home. “I was just going to say . . . this has to stop.”

“What has to stop, the endless string of disasters I’ve brought you? Damn right it has to stop and I’m—”

“Colin, listen to me. Please. You have to stop blaming yourself. For everything. You have to get straight in your head that I did not lose the baby because of anything you did or did not do. You were in the room when the doctor said the pregnancy may not have been sustainable under any circumstances.”

“But he said
may
not, he put in a qualifier and that leaves room for doubt.”

“But not the kind of doubt you want to give it. He was discrediting outside influences, he was telling us that if I had experienced nothing but tranquility from day one it still might have happened.”