A nurse came out of the room next door and saw me scanning the hall. “You need something?”
I said, “A man was just in here. Did you see him?”
“A man?”
“He was talking to Cora Mathers’s roommate. I don’t know her name.”
“Grayberg.” I noticed she didn’t give a first name. Maybe when you stop normally responding to other people, they stop thinking of you as a two-named person.
“He said some cruel things to her.”
The nurse studied me. “Are you related to Cora?”
“He told Mrs. Grayberg she should have been smothered when she had her first stroke.” That wasn’t exactly what he’d said, but it was what he’d meant.
She said, “I didn’t see you get off the elevator. The nurse’s station is right by the elevator, and I didn’t see you get off.”
“I took the stairs. Oh, that’s probably where he went. He went down the stairs.”
“What did he look like?”
“I just heard his voice and saw his back as he left. He was big.”
“Ms. Grayberg watches TV a lot. Maybe it was a man on TV.”
“No, it was a real man.”
She turned away and started down the hall. Over her shoulder, she said, “I’ll watch for strange men.”
I could tell she didn’t believe me. When I thought about it, I didn’t blame her.
I went back to Cora’s room and spoke to Mrs. Grayberg. “Was that your son who was just here?”
Her face twisted in a rictus of despair. “I’d of stayed in Mississippi if it hadn’t of been for the hurricane.”
I couldn’t think of any appropriate answer, so I turned up the sound on her TV and went back to Cora’s side of the curtain.
I whispered, “Was that Mrs. Grayberg’s son?”
“Is that her name? We haven’t actually met, what with her being so loony and all. I wouldn’t worry about her boy. I don’t imagine she even heard him.”
From the despair I’d seen on the woman’s face, I thought she’d heard plenty, but I didn’t say so. It was probably better for Cora to be complacent about him than to be vaguely alarmed like I was.
I promised to come back the next day, kissed the top of Cora’s downy head, and retraced my path past her roommate’s bed. She had stopped crying and gave me a slight smile.
She said, “I’d of stayed in Mississippi if it hadn’t of been for the hurricane.”
From the other side of the curtain, Cora laughed. I gave Ms. Grayberg a friendly wave and hoped nobody told her that Florida got hurricanes too.
As I went down the stairs, I probed all the corners of my mind, trying to remember where I’d heard the man’s smug, pompous voice before. But it was like trying to dislodge a speck of lettuce stuck in your back teeth. Every time I thought I had it, it stayed locked in place.
I made it all the way to the parking lot before I remembered where I’d been when I first heard the man’s voice. It was so unlikely that I sat in the Bronco and argued with myself for a long time before I pulled out my cell phone and called Guidry.
He answered with a curt, “Guidry here.”
I said, “I was just at the Bayfront Village Nursing Unit, and a man came in the room to talk to the woman in the other bed. I know it doesn’t make any sense, but you need to know who he was.”
A beat or two passed, and Guidry said, “Dixie, I’m not even going to try to understand what you just said. Do you have something to tell me?”
I stuck my tongue out at the phone and took a deep breath.
“Cora Mathers is in the nursing unit at Bayfront. She has a roommate named Grayberg. While I was visiting Cora, a man came to visit Mrs. Grayberg. I didn’t see him because a curtain was between us, but I recognized his voice, and I’m positive it was the same man who called Laura Halston while I was at her house. She said she met him at Sarasota Memorial in the emergency room. Maybe he’s a doctor. Or a nurse.”
“You didn’t see him. You didn’t talk to him. But you’re sure it was the same man.”
“I know it sounds crazy, but he has a distinctive voice, and he speaks in a peculiar way. He left before I could get a look at him.”
“Peculiar how? Lisp? Stutter?”
“He talks like a college professor too full of himself. Pedantic. Prissy.”
“So you want me to go to the hospital unit over at Bayfront and ask this Mrs. Grayberg about him?”
“Well ah, Mrs. Grayberg is a little bit senile. She might not be able to give you much information.”
Guidry heaved a deep sigh. “I can’t talk any longer, Dixie. I’ll catch you later.”
He clicked off without saying goodbye, leaving me staring at the phone and wondering what he was avoiding telling me.
17
Idrove home in a fog of fatigue and fury. Even though I’d told Guidry about the other men who’d been irrationally drawn to Laura, I knew it was her husband who had killed her. The man had to be completely insane to think he could follow her to Siesta Key and kill her without anybody knowing. His colleagues would know he was gone, and everybody who knew him and Laura would suspect him the minute her murder became public knowledge. If he’d been a nobody, he might already be cooling his odious heels in a jail cell. Since he was famous and wealthy, he would have an attorney to forestall the moment when homicide detectives talked to him. Guidry was probably collecting irrefutable evidence before he moved.
Just the thought of Guidry investigating Laura’s murder sent a chill into my bones, because it was a reminder of Guidry’s job. Every day, he dealt with murder—the grisliest, ugliest, most sordid side of humanity.
Being involved with any law enforcement officer means being vicariously close to violence, at least to some degree, but being involved with a homicide detective means being close to the ultimate effects of brutal hatred. I wasn’t sure I was strong enough for that. I wasn’t sure I wanted to be strong enough for that. I wasn’t sure I could spend my nights in bed with a man who spent his days investigating murders.
Not that I’d been invited to spend any nights with Guidry. Not that he had ever even hinted that it was on his mind. But it must have been somewhere in my mind, and I wished it weren’t.
At home, I trudged up the stairs to my apartment and fell into bed. Before I went to sleep, I remembered the noise Laura and I had heard while we ate dinner. Could it have been her husband? Could he have been lurking outside, waiting to make sure Laura lived in that house? I wished I had gone outside and investigated. If I had, he might have been frightened away, and Laura might not have died.
I woke with a start from the remnants of a bad dream. In the dream, my father had hit me. The dream was true. I had been seven years old at the time, and my gentle, patient father had smacked my bottom for the first and only time in my life.
He had been about to leave for his shift at the firehouse, and I had sassed my mother one time too many. “You don’t speak to your mother like that,” he said. “It’s rude and it’s unkind, and it’s unfair.”
I’d been so shocked that I yelled, “I hate you! I wish you were dead!” and ran to my room. Within twenty-four hours, he had died saving a child in a burning house.
With a child’s belief in my own magical powers, I believed for a long time that I had killed him. Even now, I sometimes wonder about it. He hadn’t been the kind of man to hit little children, and maybe he had been so upset over my hateful words that night that he’d lost his concentration and got careless.
When Todd and Christy were killed, that childish belief in magical powers must have returned because I had the same kind of nagging guilt. I knew the things the religious fanatics said weren’t true—that God had not punished me for being a working mother. Even so, I’d grieved that I hadn’t remembered to buy Cheerios and orange juice when I went grocery shopping, because if I had, Todd and Christy wouldn’t have been in that Publix parking lot when the old man hit the gas instead of his brake.