The Secret Hour (5 page)

 
Kate didn’t wave. Neither did Teddy. They were both staring at each other, but he had the feeling they were thinking of other people. Other people they missed, who weren’t there anymore.

 
The bus sped up, rounding the corner where the seawall dropped down to the rocky beach and breakwater, past the dirt road leading to the tall and lonely lighthouse, and Teddy’s big white house disappeared from sight.

 
The ER was a hive of activity. If John O’Rourke were another type of lawyer, he could be drumming up business left and right. In Exam Room 1, an old woman who had slipped and fallen at All-Save was waiting to have her hip x-rayed; Exam Room 2 contained a child whose inhaler had failed, on oxygen and a heart monitor; Exam Room 4 held a drug addict, thrashing and moaning in withdrawal, waiting for a bed to become available in the detoxification unit. Pain equaled lawsuits.

 
John, in Exam Room 3, heard everything. Waiting for the next in a parade of doctors, he tried to read the brief he’d brought from home. His head spun, and he felt sick to his stomach. Lowering the document, he could practically see his desk calendar looming before him and thought of how he didn’t have time for this.

 
Why couldn’t he at least have gotten the kids off to school? In the midst of life’s total insanity, he calmed himself by knowing he was a good father. Okay, so he gave crummy haircuts. But he had the main bases covered: food, shelter, carpooling. Child care. He hoped Kate Harris would turn out to be the best Baby-sitter X so far.

 
“Hello, good morning,” a technician said, holding a wire mesh basket of vials. “The doctor sent me to get your blood. Roll up your right sleeve.”

 
John complied, staring at the needle. His stomach flipped—he had always hated needles. When his kids got injections, cheering them to be brave, John would feel queasy inside. “Uh,” John said, stalling for time, “any idea when I can get out of here?”

 
The technician chuckled. “What, you’ve got something more important than your health to worry about?” She glanced at his cut; a doctor smelling of coffee and peanut butter had closed it with cool hands. The local anesthetic was wearing off, and the sutures pulled his skin.

 
The technician was taking her time. Had she recognized him? Was she going to stick him extra hard because he was Greg Merrill’s lawyer? John gritted his teeth, waiting for the sting.

 
Bang—the needle pricked his skin. He looked down at his blood, flowing through the tiny tube. Whoa—he felt like he was going to faint. Another reason his kids would laugh—to know that their dad hated the sight of blood. He looked away, up at the ceiling, felt immediately better, and then was hit with a memory of Theresa.

 
They’d brought her here after the accident.

 
John had been home with the kids. He had gotten the phone call, left Teddy to watch his sister, sped here to the hospital. Walking through the wide doors, into the bright room, running to the desk…

 
John had known even before they told him: His wife was dead.

 
It was one of those freak things: Although she had walked away from the wreck, hadn’t gotten even one cut on the outside of her body, her chest had slammed into the steering wheel. The impact had severed an artery in her heart—cut it right in half—so she’d bled to death by the time the cardiac team even started their work.

 
His beautiful wife. His golden-haired, blue-eyed Theresa. Such an old-fashioned, sturdy name for such a delicate, porcelain-skinned girl. She had been wearing such bright pink lipstick the night she died. Such shiny, cool, freshly applied lipstick…The memory of it jabbed him unexpectedly, like a knife in the ribs.

 
“Mr. O’Rourke?” the doctor said now, coming around the curtain with John’s chart in his hand.

 
“Yes?” John asked, dazed, still rocked by the sudden vision of Theresa’s lips.

 
“Your films look fine. There’s no sign of concussion, although I’d like you to take it easy for the rest of the day and watch for symptoms. You’re going to have a bad bruise—that can’t be avoided, and I’ve called for a consult with a plastic surgeon,” the doctor said.

 
“A what?”

 
“A plastic surgeon. The cut was deep, and you’re going to have a nasty scar. Might as well get it looked at now so you don’t regret it later.”

 
John shook his head, already reaching for his file. “That’s okay. I’ll live with it,” he said, thinking suddenly of the cop’s bitter remark about a scar helping him to fit in at the prison.

 
He signed the necessary release forms. Bending over the desk, he felt some of the staff watching him. When he pushed the papers across the desk and said thank you, he heard one secretary say to the other, “I wonder if he knows that one of the girls died here.” “After the killer left her for dead,” the other said, in a much louder voice.

 
John’s head began to pound.
It’s a hospital
, he told himself.
Many people die here
.
Theresa…
He walked fast, out the wide doors. The autumn day was bright and crisp; the cool air sliced into his central nervous system, shooting his alertness up a notch.

 
Patting his pockets for car keys, heading for the parking garage, he remembered his ride in the ambulance. Instead, he caught a cab dropping someone off. At first he gave the address of his office, then changed his mind and told the driver to take him home, to change out of his bloody shirt.

 
Settling back, with nothing to do but be driven, the names came.

 
Antoinette Moore
, he thought. She was the one who had died at Shoreline General. John knew the case, the women, so well; they were inside him now, with him at all times. Antoinette, known as Toni…nineteen years old. A sophomore at Bushnell College, a long-distance runner in training for her first marathon. Petite, wiry, with short dark hair. Parents in Akron, Ohio. An older brother, two younger sisters.

 
A close family, and they had sent her to Connecticut to die.

 
She hadn’t, at first. Merrill’s pattern had been to wait until the waves came lapping at his victims’ mouths, until they were about to bleed to death or drown, but that day he miscalculated the tide, and Toni became the only one of Greg’s victims to live long enough to be rescued.

 
He had left her, like the others, in a breakwater—in this case, a stone-and-wood jetty on private property, jutting into Stonington Harbor. He had slit her throat, wedged her between the weathered boards at the end of the jetty, and waited for the tide to take her away.

 
He hadn’t counted on her amazing strength, on her marathon-woman determination. Toni had hauled herself out of the wet-wood grave, throat bleeding, to crawl into the air, into plain sight. A lobsterman checking his pots had seen her, his attention caught by the crimson streaming from her body, thinking at first that one of his red buoys had gotten snagged in the jetty.

 
She had died at Shoreline General, forty-five minutes later, without ever regaining consciousness.

 
John closed his eyes, picturing Toni’s face from the pictures in his file. The floodgates were now open: The other names and faces and facts came flowing through.

 
Anne-Marie Hicks
: seventeen, five feet four inches, curly blond hair, braces on her teeth, disappeared one April afternoon, her body found snagged in fishing lines.

 
Terry O’Neal
: twenty-two, model, pretty, darkly intelligent eyes, never made it to work at her father’s insurance agency, body found by two boys crabbing off the Hawthorne Town Dock.

 
Gayle Litsky
: eighteen, long blond hair, taking time off from college and living back home with her parents, last seen heading to the movies, body found wedged in the rocks of a Black Hall breakwater.

 
Jacqueline Key
, fourteen, only child and spitting image of her bright-eyed single mother, missing for four nights before being found among the timbers of the Easterly Yacht Club jetty.

 
Beth Nastos
, twenty, bookkeeper at Nastos Seafood, tall and slender with a shy smile, body hidden—more cruelly, perhaps, than any other—in the stone-and-steel breakwater of her family’s century-old Mount Hope fishing business.

 
Patricia McDiarmid
, twenty-three, newly married mother of one, murdered in her workout clothes and stashed in a tunnel under Exeter’s concrete State Pier.

 
Never a day went by without John thinking of the victims. At first they had visited him in his dreams, one by one, and he had begged them to tell him what they wanted while he, in turn, had asked them for something in return: forgiveness. He had wanted them to forgive him for defending their killer. This was his town, and he loved the people in it.

 
Everyone thought defense lawyers were tough and thick-skinned, so intent on obtaining victory for their clients and headlines for their own careers that they forgot about the victims and their families. John was the son of a judge. He had grown up sitting in the back row of his father’s courtroom, watching townsfolk brought before the bench. So many secrets and sorrows went on behind the closed doors of Connecticut’s fine homes—John’s father had taught him to understand and even love his neighbors for their complicated, not always tidy lives, and he understood that justice and life were more complicated than people wanted to believe.

 
“This is it,” he said to the cabdriver as they pulled up in front of his house. John looked through the window at the big white house, stone walls, and tall, old trees. The sugar maple—Theresa’s favorite—had turned brighter red during the cold night, approaching its peak. On the headland a quarter mile away, the lighthouse gleamed white in the cold sunshine. A patrol car cruised slowly by.

 
We had it all covered, the four musketeers…
he thought, taking it all in. Thinking of his high school friends, all of whom had remained local, he was unexpectedly flooded by emotion.

 
John, the son of a judge, had become a lawyer. Billy Manning, son of a cop, had become a cop. And Barkley Jenkins, whose father had been the last lightkeeper, now ran an inn and had a contract to keep the automated lighthouse in working order.

 
Theresa had been the fourth musketeer: From the day they had started dating in sophomore year, John had never wanted to be without her. Although Billy and Barkley would break away from their girlfriends some nights, deep down John had been afraid to let her out of his sight. The guys would razz him, but John was too in love to care. Had he known even then? That she was too beautiful to stay with him forever?

 
Hurriedly, John pulled out his wallet and paid the driver.

 
The broken window gaped in the sunlight, the jagged glass creating an open star. John would call to get it fixed before the kids got home.

 
Walking up the steps, he looked through the front door and saw Maggie’s book bag lying on the hall floor. Had she forgotten to take it to school? John’s stomach tightened, thinking that the new baby-sitter was screwing up already. Hand on the doorknob, he instinctively turned around to glance at her blue car.

 
The car wasn’t there.

 
The door was unlocked.

 
John’s heart beat fast in his throat, like a cluster of moths. He stepped into his own front hall. This was where he and Theresa had stood twice, bringing both kids home from the hospital—why had that memory come to him now? He shook it off, noticing Maggie’s lunch on the chair, the brown bag he’d packed himself last night. She’d stayed home from school, that’s all. That’s what happened.

 
Maybe a stomachache. Maggie, especially since her mother’s death, had been prone to stomachaches. Or maybe it was her patented stubbornness—refusing to go to school till she saw with her own eyes that her dad was okay.

 
“Maggie!” he called, dropping his briefcase.

 
No answer. The hall clock ticked loudly. “I’m home, sweetheart. I’m fine.”

 
That
should bring her running, he thought. His good, caring, easily worried girl: She would want to know her father was safe and sound.

 
But she didn’t come running. She didn’t even answer.

 
“Hey, Maggie. Brainer—where’s Maggie?”

 
Palms sweating, John walked through the first floor. Slowly, in control, he glanced through the living room, dining room, kitchen—faster now, starting to run—into the den, the sunporch.
Where’s Brainer? The dog’s gone too
, he thought.

 
“Mags!”

 
His guts thudded, hard and sudden. What was the baby-sitter’s name, the woman who had shown up at their door—and what kind of
idiot
, knowing what John knew about what human beings are capable of—would leave his kids with a stranger? Where was Mrs. Wilcox? Hadn’t she said she’d stay to help? John heard himself groan, tearing up the stairs two at a time.