“What happened?” he whispered.
“I found you in the snow.”
He took in the news as he tried to collect himself. His arms and legs felt weighted down. He didn’t know how he got here or why, and couldn’t think through the pain eating at him from just above his brow.
“I’ve got a headache,” he said, propping himself up.
She left the warm washcloth against his forehead and rose. The kitchen was to his back, and he couldn’t see what she was doing. As he listened to several cabinets open and close, his eyes returned to the fire. The oak logs were dry, the heat reaching him with its soothing touch from across the room.
Sally sat down on the couch, passing him two Tylenol caplets and a glass of cold tap water.
“What time is it?” he asked.
“Three in the morning. When you didn’t come back to the hospital, I got worried and called a cab. You were lying beneath a tree by the front door.”
Her words were barely audible, her eyes swollen with worry. Teddy swallowed the pills and noted that she was trembling. Barnett had been in an accident, he recalled. He’d come to their house to pick up some things for Sally. He remembered seeing blood all over the snow in the driveway. What happened after that wasn’t clear. It had been dark, and he wondered if he hadn’t run into a tree.
Sally took the glass and set it down on the table. Then she picked up a tube of Neosporin and a large Band-Aid and set to mending the wound on Teddy’s head.
“It just missed your temple,” she said. “Do you think you need to see a doctor?”
“I’m okay,” he said, even though he wasn’t sure. His headache seemed way too big for a couple of pills. “How’s Jim?”
“They won’t know for a few days,” she said, turning her face away. “But they think he’ll make it.” She covered her eyes with her hands. “The car crushed his legs. They won’t tell me if he’ll ever walk again. His recovery will take time, they said. A long time. I’m not very good at living on my own.”
Teddy listened to her voice trail off and didn’t know how to respond. The reality of what had happened to Barnett seemed so overwhelming. So horrible. She turned back to him, dabbing his wound with Neosporin and applying the large bandage. As she smoothed her hands over his forehead, he noticed the smell of fresh coffee brewing in the kitchen.
Sally got up and left the room. A few minutes later, she returned with two piping hot mugs.
“Jim’s a fighter,” Teddy said, trying to sound hopeful.
She didn’t say anything. She couldn’t.
“If the doctor’s are saying he’s gonna make it, then he will,” he said.
She listened to him and nodded, taking a seat at the other end of the couch and sipping her coffee. Barnett was strong willed and in good shape. Teddy had spent enough time with him to know that if the man had a chance, he’d take it and run with it. While it was true that he seemed to be dipping into an unknown variety of medications recently, Teddy had never seen him do it before they took the Holmes case.
“He’s been upset lately, hasn’t he?” Teddy said.
She turned to the fire without responding, her expression blank as she stared at the flames.
“I’ve never seen him like this before,” he said. “It’s got something to do with Oscar Holmes.”
“He wants it to end quickly,” she whispered.
“That’s the part I don’t understand.”
“He’s lived a troubled life, Teddy.”
“Holmes, you mean.”
She nodded, still gazing at the fire. “His family’s been worried about him for most of his life.”
“How so?”
She paused, thinking it over. “He never seemed to fit in,” she said after a moment. “He always had to do things his own way. There have been times as an adult when he couldn’t take care of himself very well. He’s had a problem with depression, but I think Jim already told you that. His family knew it would come to something like this one day and it has.”
“Jim told me he’s known the family for a long time,” he said. “Who are they?”
She turned to him, the fire reflecting in her eyes. “Oscar Holmes is my brother, Teddy. My maiden name is Holmes.”
It settled in with the subtlety of a death ray.
Oscar Holmes was Sally’s brother. Holmes was Barnett’s brother-in-law. It settled into the room like a deeply kept secret that had just been ripped open and exposed. As far as Sally knew, her own brother had brutally murdered two young girls. And now the DA was saying there might be ten more.
Another family tragedy was unfolding, Teddy realized. He thought about Barnett’s desk drawer again-how it had become the pharmacy drawer in recent days. And Barnett’s attitude from the beginning-how he couldn’t be reached on the phone, and when he could, all he wanted was to end the case quickly and make sure Holmes got the care his family thought he needed. Barnett was the family, not a mysterious friend from childhood or a client with the firm. The murders weren’t something to be read about from the safe distance of words printed in a newspaper. Jim and Sally Barnett were part of the story, the crime, intimately connected to it by family. No wonder Barnett wasn’t seeing things clearly.
Teddy set down his coffee mug. It occurred to him that the night Holmes checked into prison he’d tried to make a collect call to his sister but she wouldn’t accept the charges. That sister was Sally Barnett. He looked at her at the other end of the couch, her head against a pillow and her eyes closed. Her breathing had quieted and it appeared as if she was sleeping. He wondered why she hadn’t taken the call that night. It seemed odd, curious. She hadn’t paid her brother a visit either.
Teddy lifted the blanket away and draped it over her. He slipped into his shoes and stood. His legs wobbled at first, and as he steadied himself and felt the ache deepen inside his head, he wondered if he shouldn’t call a doctor. He saw his coat on the chair by the fire and pulled it on. As he walked to the front door and looked outside, he noticed it was snowing again. He could see the impression his body had made in the snow right outside the door. Stepping out into the cold air, he buttoned up and looked at the marks he’d made crawling up from the driveway. The falling snow had almost filled them in. Curiously, there were a faint set of footprints running alongside the same path. He stared at them for a while, wondering what he was looking at. It didn’t really seem like he’d crawled to the door. Instead, it looked more like his body had been dragged.
The fog lifted and burned away in a single moment. He remembered the Sterling silver shot glass with tall ships and whales etched into its side. He hadn’t run into a tree. Nothing that occurred here tonight had been an accident. He glanced back at the snow falling to the ground, softening the impressions and wiping them out.
He bolted across the lawn to his car, ignoring the pain. Ripping open the glove box, he fished out his flashlight and switched it on. Then he hurried into the yard, picking up the footprints and following them across the drive into the trees. It was difficult to see them, the impressions had become vague-some of them already obliterated by the falling snow.
There was a man, he remembered. The shape of someone standing in the darkness right behind him. A dog had been barking from somewhere in the neighborhood, but Teddy hadn’t understood it as a warning.
He moved to the spot where he remembered standing with the silver shot glass. The place he’d been knocked out and fallen to the ground. He didn’t expect to still find it here, but knelt down anyway, sifting through the snow with his hands. After fifteen minutes, he’d covered the entire area and knew it was pointless. The man had obviously returned for the shot glass, seen Teddy holding it in his scarf, and struck him as he turned.
Teddy looked back at the house, watching the lights in the windows switch off one by one. The dark house looked like every other house in the neighborhood. When the breeze picked up again and he heard the branches rattling over head, he pretended he wasn’t afraid even though he really was. He turned his flashlight the other way and took a step into the vacant lot bordering Barnett’s house. Raking the beam of light across the snow, the tracks leading from tree to tree toward the street were gone now. Everything the man had left behind was either gone or erased, except for those impressions, however fleeting, Teddy kept locked in his head.