Jude
Jude woke in a white room, a white sheet pulled to her waist, a flimsy white gown covering her battered body.
“Hi,” Kurt said, giving her a half smile.
He sat in a chair near her bed, his hands clasped in his lap, the knuckles of his right hand split and bruised. His blue knit shirt was bloodstained, and his eye had a purplish tinge.
“Is it possible that I look worse than you?” she asked, lifting a hand to her throbbing throat.
“Considerably,” he said, wincing as his eyes trailed from her face to her neck down to her bandaged arm.
“You saved me,” she breathed, closing her eyes and calling the memories back to her. The night before had the surreal quality of a bad drug trip, likely thanks to whatever pain killers the nurses administered. She remembered Dale’s hands, strong, merciless squeezing and then…
“Yeah,” he agreed, rubbing a hand over his face.
“You hurt him? Dale?”
Kurt nodded.
“I put him in a choke hold. He passed out and I cuffed him and left him there. I called for back-up and they took care of the rest. I brought you here.”
Jude had a vague memory of babbling as Kurt carried her through the woods.
“How? How did you know where to find me?”
“I didn’t,” he admitted. “After you showed me that picture, I went to Dale. That was stupid of me. He’s my brother, and I assumed you were playing a game. He acted funny, but I didn’t think much of it. Later on, I drove back to his house, the house we grew up in, and his truck was gone. I drove around, thinking, and…” he paused as if reluctant to add the rest. “I heard Rosemary speak as if she were sitting right next to me.”
“What did she say?”
“Cabin.”
“That’s how close I came to death,” Jude murmured, dumbfounded. What if he had ignored the call of a sister buried thirty years before?
“Don’t think about it,” he told her, reaching for a cup of water with a straw and stepping toward the bed. He held the cup out and she leaned forward, taking a painful sip.
“About what?” she asked.
“The other possibilities. It’s a block against recovery. I know because I’ve seen enough victims do it. The perpetual cycle of what if? It happened the way it happened, end of story.”
She leaned back against her pillows and studied him.
“I’m surprised a detective in Mason, Michigan would have seen a lot of victims. That wasn’t meant to be as insulting as it sounded.”
He smiled and sat back down.
“I’m getting used to your insults. But it is my line of work after all. I’m not exactly spending my days with old ladies knitting. I don’t see a lot of homicide. That’s true enough. But accidents, assaults, robberies. Every crime has a victim.”
“Except victimless crimes.”
“I’ve yet to see one of those.”
Jude might have argued, she loved to play devil’s advocate, but her throat hurt; in fact, her whole body hurt, and she wanted to cry.
As if sensing her distress, Kurt spoke. “I called your sister last night.”
“Hattie?” Jude asked training her eyes on the little window that showed the pale light of dawn creeping into the sky.
“Yeah. You gave me her number. Not sure if you remember. You were pretty dazed. I left her a message.”
“She didn’t answer?” Jude asked, surprised. Hattie rarely went out at night.
“I thought I’d call your parents, but you said they were dead. Is that true? Did your mother die in the asylum?” He looked crestfallen as he asked and cast his eyes towards the floor. It wasn’t his fault that the town blamed Jude’s mother for Rosemary’s death, but he shouldered the guilt, anyway.
Jude closed her eyes and shook her head.
“My dad is dead and my mom escaped from the asylum almost two weeks ago.”
His head came up.
“Really? And you don’t know where she went?”
A tear slipped down her cheek. Kurt pulled a handkerchief from his pocket and stood, but the door opened and Hattie burst in.
Hattie
“Jude?” Hattie stared at her sister in disbelief. Jude’s face was mottled with yellow and purple bruises. Her lower lip was split, both her eyes filled with tiny red cracks, her left arm in a sling. A fiery red ring marked the tender skin of her sister’s neck. Hattie stood, speechless, one hand on the door, one foot in the room, the other still rooted in the hall where the world made sense, where her sister did not look like someone had used her as a punching bag.
A man stood near Jude’s bed, a hankie in his hand, his eyes studying Hattie. He looked beaten as well, a black eye, bloody knuckles, bloody shirt. The stains stood in sharp contrast to the white room. A slender pole held a bag of fluid steadily drip dripping down to a tube attached to Jude’s un-bandaged arm.
“It’s okay, Hattie. Come in,” Jude croaked.
Hattie started to walk in and then remembered Damien. He hovered in the hall behind her, his hands shoved into the pockets of the slacks he’d pulled on that morning. She’d watched him moving around his room, naked, his body long and lean in the amber glow of his bedside lamp. They’d left his house early; he wanted to take her horseback riding in the mist of dawn, but when she’d stopped at her apartment, she’d heard the message from Kurt and they’d rushed the two-hour drive to the hospital in Lansing, covering the one-hundred thirty miles in record time.
“Damien,” Hattie said, and he looked up, his face unreadable. Did hospitals make him uncomfortable too?
“Damien?” Jude rasped.
Hattie turned back to her sister.
“Is he here?” Jude asked, and Hattie stared at the puzzled, and perhaps hopeful, expression on her sister’s face.
“Hattie, I…” Damien started, his eyes downcast.
He looked like Jude’s dog when he’d chewed her favorite gold pilgrim pumps.
The florescent lights bored down on him. His skin appeared waxy, like a fake person, a man in a wax museum posing as shame. Yes, that was the word, he looked ashamed.
Chapter 33
September 20, 1965
Hattie
The man in Jude’s room nudged Hattie out of the way and pushed the door open exposing Damien to Jude. Hattie looked at Jude’s raw face, the scratches and bruises, but it was her eyes that held a story. When she saw Damien they opened wider, and lit with a hesitant smile.
“What are you doing here?” Jude asked him, and Hattie heard her attempt to sound angry, overshadowed by the deeper truth - joy. Joy that Damien stood in the hospital hallway.
“Do you know each other?” Hattie asked, wondering at Damien’s rigid posture, his eyes that too told a story - not of joy - but regret.
“Of course,” Jude whispered, her voice growing fainter each time she spoke. “Isn’t that why he’s here?”
But Hattie recognized the edge in Jude’s voice, the dawning of an idea that a moment earlier had not existed.
“I’ll give you some time alone,” the man with the beaten knuckles told Jude. He nodded at Hattie and walked down the hall.
“I need to tell you something, Hattie,” Damien said, as if he’d finally remembered her, remembered the night before.
“How do you know my sister?” Jude said, lower this time, venomous. Her eyes had turned to brown slits in her puffy face and her hands held the sheet at her waist like she might rip it in two.