“I was not stuck,” he said, bristling. “I was pacing myself.”
“Ben, this puzzle is a week old.”
“Is there a rush?”
Christina set down the paper. “So … did you see Mrs. Marmelstein?”
Ben nodded.
“I suppose you told her about the nursing home.”
“I’ve worked out a schedule,” he said. He plopped a sheet of paper down on the coffee table. “Joni and Jami and their mother all said they would help. With four of us, and you pitching in for emergencies, we can manage to have someone looking after Mrs. Marmelstein all the time.”
“You mean—”
“That way, she can stay right here, where she wants to be.”
“But your tour—”
“There’ll be other tours. Besides, I need to focus on my law practice. Now that I have a spiffy office, it’d be nice to have a few clients to go with it.”
Christina raised a hand to her mouth. “Mrs. Marmelstein must’ve been … very happy when you told her.”
“Well … yeah. I think she was, actually.” He grinned. “Surprised?”
“That you did the right thing? No. I knew you would.”
“And how, may I ask, did you know?”
She pressed forward on her tiptoes and kissed him on the cheek. “Because that’s who you are.”
About a week later, after Ben finished up at work, he hopped into his van and drove toward St. John’s. It had been a great day at the office—new clients, new cases, new challenges. Somehow it all seemed fresh again; he was recapturing the pleasure of practicing law.
Why had he ever quit? he wondered. What was it about life that made people want to be something other than what they were? Sure, some changes were improvements: Tyrone leaving the gang, Christina going to law school. But some changes weren’t; some were just people hiding from themselves. Professor Hoodoo, trying to bury himself in his brother’s life. Jones trying to create a false cyber-persona that almost chased Paula away. And Ben—running away from the thing he did best.
He was just lucky he’d managed to get himself straightened out. Lucky he had people who cared.
Which was why he was making this little trip. He passed through the electric doors outside St. John’s with a jumbo box of chocolates and a bouquet of roses tucked under his arm.
The nurse on duty recognized him as he approached the receiving station. “Mr. Kincaid. Good to see you again. How are you feeling?”
“Fit as a fiddle, thank you.”
“I can’t tell you how nice that is to hear. When they first brought you in here, well, I didn’t hold out much hope. But look at you now!”
“Well, I’ve been very lucky.”
The nurse nodded. Her eyes diverted to his goodies. “Got a girlfriend here?”
Ben laughed. “No, no. Actually, these are for a nurse. When I was here before—when I was in the coma—well—” He swallowed, started again. “There was one nurse who was very special to me. Some of the things she said—really helped. Meant a lot to me. So I just wanted to give her a little something.”
“That’s very kind of you. Who was it?”
“Well, I was hoping you could help me find out. Her name was Nurse Tucker. She told me to call her Angela.”
The nurse blinked. “Angela?”
“Right. She had a soft voice, very soothing.”
“Angela Tucker? There’s no one by that name on this floor.”
Ben’s lips parted. “Perhaps—perhaps she came from another floor.”
The nurse shook her head. “Not without my knowing about it. What did she look like?”
“Well, I never actually saw her.” He frowned. “Perhaps she used a different name—”
“What, a nurse with a pseudonym?”
“Perhaps it was a nickname. Perhaps—”
“Mr. Kincaid, I’ve been working here for eighteen years. I’ve seen the personnel records on every nurse in this hospital. Believe me—there’s no Angela and no Nurse Tucker, much less an Angela Tucker.”
“But—” Without even thinking about it, Ben’s hand went to Christina’s Saint Christopher’s medal, still dangling from his neck. The beacon.
“Then—I—” He stumbled, not knowing what to say. “Th-thank you,” he said finally. He dropped the candy and flowers on the counter. “Here. Give these to … I don’t know. Someone who needs them.”
He turned and shuffled back down the corridor, a million questions racing through his mind. How? and who? and most of all why? He continued his contemplation on the drive home, for the shank of the evening, and into the dark of the night until finally, by the time he lay his head on his pillow and surrendered to sleep, he thought that, at last, perhaps, he understood the meaning of jazz.
Acknowledgments
ONCE AGAIN, IT’S THANK-YOU time.
I want to thank everyone who read this book before publication: my wife, Kirsten, who talked me out of the “telltale vibrator” scene; Arlene Joplin, at the OKC U.S. Attorney’s Office, who gave me a refresher course on the Fourth Amendment; Kim Kakish, who provided much needed background information on Oklahoma street gangs; and my editor, Joe Blades, who always manages to deliver a better book to his Out box than the one that came to his In box. I also want to thank Gail Benedict for typing my virtually illegible handwritten revisions, and Vicky Hildebrandt, whose life I continue to plunder for most of my best plot twists.
Since this book is about music, it might be an appropriate time to thank my piano teacher, Julia Thomas, for a gift I’ll cherish all my life. I must also thank my friend and fellow novelist Teresa Miller, the best friend Oklahoma writers ever had.
Special thanks to our family angel, Angel Taylor, for her constant assistance and support.
I want to thank John Wooley for his incisive coverage of the Tulsa jazz scene, which I cribbed from repeatedly, and all my friends who invited me to their favorite jazz nightspots. I want to thank Gwen Gilkeson, daughter of Oklahoma jazz great Bob Gilkeson, for all her help and insight. I should also mention Dr. John’s remarkable memoir, Under a Hoodoo Moon (St. Martin’s Press), which helped me learn the lingo and formulate the backgrounds for many of the old-time jazz musicians in this book.
This book is dedicated to my boyhood hero, Harry Chapin (1941-1981), who not only wrote some incredibly moving folk music, but also managed to donate fifty percent of his concert profits to charity, to counsel young people and speak at hundreds of schools, to financially support a Long Island theater, to raise millions of dollars for organizations dedicated to preventing hunger and malnutrition, and to lobby into existence a Presidential Commission to study the causes of world hunger—all before dying in a car accident at age thirty-nine. I leave you with some of Harry’s words, the ones chosen for his epitaph:
If a man tried to take his time on earth
And prove before he died what one man’s life could be worth,
I wonder what would happen to this world.
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