The Summer We Lost Alice (25 page)

"What I do is for entertainment purposes only," Ethan said. "I don't conduct investigative work."

"So you're a fraud. Like those carnival fakes people used to run out of town on a rail."

Ethan refused to rise to the bait. Morse kept circling. Ethan didn't like the way he was struggling for breath.

"Maybe you should sit down."

"Maybe I will," Morse said
. He sat down right where he stood. He sat awkwardly, not even taking the few steps that would have put him on a fallen tree trunk.

"The problem is," Morse said, "a fake would be defending
himself right now. You have the confidence of somebody who doesn't give two craps what I think. You know what you can do and if people don't want to believe it, that's their business.

"You've got a gift, but you're a Judas to it. You deny it. Even while you make a living off it, you're denying it, because you know it makes you a freak."

Ethan rolled his eyes. He turned his back on the former sheriff to see Heather standing there. She was frozen to the spot. Her eyes were wide and her mouth hung loose. She shivered, and not from the slight chill blowing in from the lake. Slowly she raised her hand and aimed a shuddering finger at Morse.

"I saw you bury that boy," she said.

Morse winced in pain.

"What's the matter?" Ethan said.

"Nothing," Morse said. The words barely cleared his lips before he winced again. He doubled up and clutched his chest. "Damn," he said. He leaned over, propped himself on one arm.

Ethan rushed forward. "You're having a heart attack," he said.

"No kidding."

"
Here. Can you walk?"

"Get me to my car. Hurry up, damn it!"

Ethan slipped a palm under Morse's arm and heaved. He looked over at Heather. It took a moment, but she hurried forward to assist. Together they lifted Morse to his feet.

"Where's your car?"

Morse nodded. "Over there, just off the road."

"Put your weight on me," Ethan said. "Christ, not
all
of it."

Together the three of them staggered up the slope of the bank
. Morse moved his legs and more or less stood upright, but he couldn't do it without Ethan and Heather carrying a good portion of the load. Progress was slow. The armpits of Ethan's shirt were soaked through by the time they reached Morse's station wagon. The car—a scarred veteran of fifteen years of hunting trips and family vacations—was as battered as Morse himself. With luck, it sported a sturdier engine.

"Can you navigate?" Ethan said. "I don't
remember where the hospital is, exactly."

"I'll get you there. Don't let me die, kid. Not yet."

They loaded the former sheriff into the front seat.

"Keys," Ethan said
. Morse dug them out of his pocket. Ethan tossed his own keys to Heather.

"Can you manage by yourself?" she said.

"I'll manage. Call Sammy—the sheriff."

She watched them drive off. The rented Mustang was on the other side of the lake, but she had cell reception and was able to call the sheriff's department while she walked. She could only imagine the expression on Sammy's face a
s he put together the words "Ethan" and "heart attack."

It wasn't Ethan's doing though. It was hers. It was the words that popped out of her mouth unbidden, as if spoken by someone else.
Alice's words.

I saw you bury that boy.

SAM MORSE SR. did not die. Ethan rushed him to the emergency room at County General where two young attendants transferred him to a gurney. He said something to them as they began to wheel him away. They looked at one another and one of them shrugged. They stood by while Morse beckoned Ethan over.

"There's no need to thank me," Ethan said.

Morse beckoned again. Ethan leaned in close. Morse whispered into his ear.

"Go home," he said.

The attendants wheeled Morse away. He vanished behind a pair of swinging doors. A nurse told Ethan he could have a seat in the waiting room.

"Or," she said, "
if you need a ride somewhere, I'm sure the county will be happy to give you one. The judge is a popular figure around here."

"The judge?"

"Twelfth District. Been there, must be fifteen years," she said. "You're not from around here, are you?"

At this point, Ethan considered it a break not to be recognized. Apparently the nurse did not have cable.

"No, I'm not."

"You're going to be a hero to a lot of folks," she said, then a buzzer sounded and she excused herself.

Ethan took a seat on a plastic chair in the waiting room and wondered how the day could get any worse. He found out when he tried the coffee, which tasted as if it had been drained straight from the liver of a dying patient. He was leafing through a ragged magazine about what the celebrities of the world had been doing six months ago when the woman entered.

She was a handsome woman in her late fifties, maybe early sixties. She was plainly but not shabbily dressed. She carried herself well. But her brow was furrowed with care and something in the way she hesitated in the doorway gave her the appearance of being on the verge of collapse. She dabbed tears from her cheeks with a handkerchief. She was the spitting image of the witch from Ethan's childhood.

Ethan's head swam. It couldn't have been Mrs. Nichols, who had died of cancer in Florida. Even if she had lived, she'd have been in her eighties or nineties by now. Mrs. Nichols had been a fearsome creature—this woman seemed anything but. She was smallish, a full head shorter than Ethan, while Mrs. Nichols had been a towering figure. Mrs. Nichols's hair had been wild, but this woman's was merely disheveled the way anyone's hair might be if they'd rushed to the hospital without brushing it first. Her face was lined with care, not menace. She seemed worn out, threadbare, like an old chair.

She looked over to see Ethan staring at her. She did not seem to recognize him.

"Your nose," she said to him.

Ethan tasted blood on his lips
. Someone had turned on the tap.

* * *

"That was my mother Ruth," the woman said. "My name is Lilian. Lilian Nichols. They call me Miss Lilian around here. I take it as a sign of respect."

Ethan slumped in the chair, head back, cotton balls stuffed in his nostrils. It was an awkward position for conversation. Mainly he nodded, which made the back of the chair cut into his neck. He wondered if he could saw off his own head on the sharp plastic. He was tempted to try.

Miss Lilian had sat him down and tilted his head back, then she coordinated the rest of Ethan's care, obtaining a wad of cotton balls from the nurse. With the worst of the flow dammed up, Ethan and Miss Lilian sat down for a chat.

"I moved out from Kansas City and took over the nursing home that summer," she said. "My fiancé was going to join me.

"I thought the whole situation would be temporary. All I had to do was let time and old age claim the existing clients one by one. Soon enough I'd be free.

"I'd always felt different from my friends who married young and instantly saddled themselves with children. That's one thing that kept me single for so long, not wanting children. When I did finally meet a man who felt as I did, who was as selfish with his giving as I was, the nursing home proved to be a bigger burden than any child. He couldn't stand the thought of living so far away from 'civilization,' as he called it, surrounded by decrepitude and death. He postponed the marriage, stayed in K.C. I was all right with that. I understood. I didn't want to be here myself, so how could I ask someone else to make that sacrifice?

"That first year, I gritted my teeth and waited for the 'fogies,' as one nurse called them, to die so that I could get back together with him. Thing was, I couldn't stop myself from taking on new clients. There are so few places for people to go, especially those of modest means, that I found myself taking more of them in. Most of them don't last long. My longest was only with me for four years.

"They just kept coming like a procession of defeated soldiers. I couldn't say 'no' unless the house was filled to capacity. Before I knew it, they had become my life. I guess they brought out the maternal instinct I would have sworn I lacked. I couldn't turn them
away, and there were always more—always more old people needing a place to live and someone to take care of them. More fogies.

"I stopped thinking about marriage. At least my mother had had a husband for a time, before he left. I've had no one, really, for more than twenty years, except my fogies. I don't use the term disparagingly. It's an endearment, now, even if it didn't start out that way."

"Unh-huh," Ethan said through his stuffed nose. He seemed to have gotten everything wrong about Miss and Mrs. Nichols. He was just a kid when he'd seen the elder Nichols cutting herbs from the graveyard. These days, herbal tea was the magic cure for everything from PMS to postpartum depression. Now here was the younger Nichols woman spilling her guts about a life derailed by a too-caring heart.

"Then one day," Miss
Lilian said, "I woke up and I was almost a fogy myself, and I wondered who was going to take care of me. I didn't have a husband. I didn't have any children. All I had was Sam.

"He's a good man, you know. He's gruff, but he has a good heart. Oh! That's a terrible thing to say, isn't it, about a man who's just had a heart attack? But you know what I mean."

Ethan made a noise that could have been either agreement or an attempt to clear coagulated blood from his nasal passages.

"He's always been there for me, Sam has," Miss
Lilian said. "Not in a romantic sense, but as a ... as a good neighbor. I can't tell you how many hours he's spent keeping that old place of mine together. He always said he did it for the old folks, but I knew he was sweet on me. He was married, of course, and a man of his principles would never do anything improper."

Ethan coughed through his nose
. The cotton wads shot out like darts from a blowgun. The image of Morse who, not so many minutes before, had all but threatened to tar and feather him—the very notion of this bullying blowhard as a righteous family man and tragic romantic made him choke. Clearly the old fart had been on his best behavior around Miss Lilian. Maybe it was true, what they said about the transmogrifying power of love.

"Are you all right?" Miss
Lilian said.

Ethan nodded that he was, although his nose was still bleeding. The nurse brought more cotton.

"Tell me more about Sam," Ethan said, though it came out sounding more like "Dell be bore aboud Dam." Miss Lilian seemed to have no trouble translating.

"I suppose I kind of urged him on at first," she said, "maybe invented a crisis or two before I realized what a
... a
constant
man he was. Then I put my feelings for him on the shelf. I dusted carefully around them from time to time, but I knew what we could have and what we couldn't.

"We started spending more time together. We had the most wonderful walks in the woods. He was so patient while I rooted around for herbs. I'm a believer in natural medicines—my mother was a healer—and he indulged me. I think I even brought him around a little bit, to
holistics. Those were such wonderful times!

"Then, his wife passed on. He was devastated. It should have been a liberating thing—terrible, of course, but with her gone
... well, you know what I'm trying to say. But he was so broken by it, guilty over the time he'd spent with me when he should have been with her—I don't know, but he stopped coming around.

"Then one day, right out of the blue, he showed up with his toolbox, said he'd come to fix the stair railing that he'd promised to work on three years earlier, as if it had been yesterday.

"We've been seeing each other ever since. I wish we'd gotten married before now. If he's an invalid, I want to take care of him, if he'll let me. I want to wait on him hand and foot. I want him to grump at me for bringing him an apple instead of a muffin. I know he'll protest about being a burden, but there comes a time in life when one is grateful for a burden or two, if it brings contentment.

"It isn't too late for me, is it? I'm not too old and worn out to find love, am I, Mister
Opos? Is that what I should call you? Or should I call you Mr. Opochensky?"

"
Ethud," Ethan said through the cotton. "Judst caw be Ethud."

* * *

Sammy arrived while Ethan was in conversation with Miss Lilian.

He joined his father in the examining room and spent some minutes there. Eventually he emerged and walked over to the waiting room. He nodded to Miss
Lilian.

"He's
askin' for you," Sammy said. Miss Lilian excused herself.

Sammy glared down at Ethan. "What did you do to him?" he said.

Ethan sat up. He dug the bloody cotton from his nose and squeezed his nostrils. The flow had stopped. He picked gently at the dried blood around his nose.