Pushed Too Far Page 13

  His grin was his answer. “Cops charge in. Firefighters like to assess the situation, take a more intellectual approach.”

  “Cowardly, you mean.” She had to match his smile. If ever there was a word that didn’t describe David Lund, cowardly was it.

  “No more coal mines, okay? At least not for a while?” He stepped closer.

  For a moment, she thought he might take her hand in his and was surprised to realize how much she wanted him to. “How long?”

  He gripped the bed rail instead. “How about until Hess is back behind bars?”

  “I have to do my job.”

  “You’re on suspension. It’s not your job.”

  “You don’t really think that’s going to stop me.”

  “Not really, no. But he almost killed you, Val.”

  “The truck … I don’t think it was Hess.”

  His brows arched in surprise.

  “Hess wants revenge.”

  “Ramming you off the road and into the river isn’t good enough for revenge?”

  “It’s not personal enough. He’d want me to know it was him. He would want to look me in the eye.”

  “So who was it?”

  She told him about the inconsistencies and missing documentation surrounding Elizabeth Unger’s death. “The death records show that she died from a car wreck ten years ago, but none of the other paperwork exists. There’s no accident report. The cemetery president says she was never buried there.”

  “And who knows what you found?”

  “I called Harlan Runk around four-thirty and asked him to compare her medical records with the skeleton of Jane Doe.”

  “Let me guess. He was the coroner who certified her death.”

  “Yes.” Just thinking about it made her upset all over again. She’d trusted Harlan, even liked him. She hated the idea that he might be wrapped up in something unethical or even illegal. She couldn’t imagine it.

  “You think the coroner killed her?”

  She automatically shook her head. “That’s a pretty big leap.”

  Lund nodded. “But could it be possible?”

  She wanted to say no, but it was beginning to seem as if anything could be possible. “Haven’t a clue. But I do know he was aware I was driving back to Lake Loyal.”

  “And if he falsified a death certificate for some reason, he might have motive to run you into the river.”

  “Right.” As hard as all this was to wrap her mind around, it felt good to be able to talk about it.

  Lund shifted his feet, the soles of his shoes squeaking on the waxed tile floor. “But if Jane Doe died ten years ago, and she wasn’t buried, why didn’t we find her until now?”

  “Maybe she didn’t die back then. Or maybe her body was hidden all that time.”

  Another knock and the door opened. A beanstalk of a man wearing scrubs and coke bottle glasses entered. His gait was awkward, a cross between Big Bird and Pee Wee Herman, comparisons Val was sure would date her immediately.

  “Doctor Seabrook.” He thrust out a hand, first shaking Lund’s then Val’s. “Sorry to have to break up the party.”

  Lund nodded to the man and tossed her a small smile. “I’ll go only as far as the cafeteria. Be back in a few.”

  Val nodded. Pushing thoughts of false deaths, hidden bodies and murder to the back of her mind for the moment, she reluctantly focused on her health.

  Doctor Seabrook turned out to be as quick, professional and efficient as a doctor could be, save for the strong scent of wintergreen floating around him and his ice cold hands. By the end of the examination, she wondered if she had been fine all along, and he should be the one getting treatment for hypothermia.

  After making several notations on her chart, he eyed her through his thick lenses. “Any medications?”

  “Just birth control pills. I take them for cramping.”

  “Pretty severe?”

  “Without them? Yes.”

  “Are you still taking the Gilenya?”

  “Not anymore.”

  He frowned and peered at her over his hawk-like nose.

  She knew that wouldn’t go over well. But she didn’t want to explain why she’d discontinued the prescription, that taking the drug was an unhappy reminder of a condition she was desperate to ignore.

  Obviously she couldn’t ignore it any longer.

  “We’re going to have to get you back on it.” He made a couple more notes, ending the last with a flourish of his pen. “That should be about it. Any questions?”

  “I’m just wondering … my condition … “ She didn’t know why it was still so hard to just come out and say the words, even to a doctor treating her, but clearly she was still clinging to any form of denial available.

  His eyebrows pulled together and he looked down at the clipboard in his hands. “You’re referring to the multiple sclerosis?”

  There it was, floating in the air like a poisonous cloud. “How does it mix with hypothermia?”

  “Hypothermia can be a complication of multiple sclerosis. It’s rare but severe.” The confusion lifted and he gave a shake of his head and a short chuckle. “But that’s not what you’re asking, is it? In your case, I’m pretty sure it was the river that did the trick.”

  “Will it increase symptoms?”

  “Any stress on the body can increase the incidence and severity of symptoms.”

  That’s what she figured, and she knew what was coming next. “Don’t tell me, we won’t know until we know.”

  He pressed his lips into a sympathetic line. “Everything about the disease is unpredictable. I wish I could tell you more.”

  “When can I leave?”

  “Tonight, if you really want. But I’ll need to see you tomorrow morning to get you back on the medication. Your heartbeat will have to be monitored after taking the first dose. I’ll have a nurse set something up.”

  She nodded. With no vehicle, she’d have to ask Lund to give her a ride to a rental company. “Thanks, doctor.”

  “You’re a lucky woman.”

  Funny, she didn’t feel lucky. But she knew he was right. At least Lund had been at the river to find her, and Grace was safe in Chicago with Jack. “Thanks.”

  Dr. Seabrook turned to leave, coming to a halt in the doorway. “Looks like the party’s back on. Listen, she’s been through a lot. Don’t tire her out.”

  Val eyed the door, expecting to hear Lund’s answer. Instead, a young female voice familiar and dear as her own heartbeat answered with a tear-soaked promise. “I won’t.”

  Fatigue covered Val like the river’s cold water, sapping her strength, dragging her down.

  She watched Grace enter the hospital room, steps tentative, eyes red around the edges.

  “The doctor,” her niece said. “He was talking about multiple sclerosis?”

  Val’s head throbbed. This couldn’t be happening. Out of all the people she wanted to keep the MS secret from, the most important was Grace. “Why aren’t you in Chicago?”

  Grace’s eyes shimmered in the fluorescent lights overhead, another flood building. “I got a call on my cell. They told me about the car, asked who was using it. I … I had to make sure you were okay.”

  The possibility of someone in the Sauk City PD following up on the car in the river hadn’t even occurred to her. If it had, she could have called Jack, warned her, asked her to keep Grace from racing back to Wisconsin in some kind of panic. Of course, her niece had to have left Chicago hours ago, while Val was in no shape to do anything, even if she’d known about the call. “How did you get here?”

  Grace stared at the floor. Grasping her hands in front of her, she picked at the cuticles of her right hand, something she’d done since she was little. During the bad times, she used to keep at it until her fingers bled.

  “How did you get here, Grace?”

  “I borrowed Jack’s car.”

  “Jack’s car? That old Nova?”

  She nodded.

  “You stole Jac
k’s Nova?” Val brought her hand to her aching head, getting tangled in the oxygen tube on the way. Her straight-A, brainiac niece was a car thief? She had to call Jack and explain, apologize.

  “I’ll give it back.”

  “That’s not the point.”

  “The point is that you almost died.” Her voice caught, and the tears surged, spilling down her cheeks. “And … and now you have a disease?”

  “Never mind that.” Val glanced around the room. Her cell phone was laying somewhere on the bottom of the river or being swept on its way to the Mississippi. How in the hell was she supposed to make a call? “I need a phone.”

  “Why didn’t you tell me you were sick? I could help you. I could take care—”

  Val jolted upright in her bed. “That’s exactly why I didn’t tell you.” She wanted to take the girl by the shoulders and shake her, make her listen. Instead she felt so shaky herself, she wasn’t sure she could get out of bed without landing on her face.

  “I can help.”

  “I don’t want your help, Grace. The last thing I want is your help.”

  Her big blue eyes looked genuinely bruised. “Why?”

  “Because I’m the one who’s supposed to help you.”

  “But I don’t need—”

  “Yes, you do. You need to go to school. You need to live your life. You don’t need to take care of someone who’s sick. Not again.”

  “But Aunt Val, I love you.”

  Now tears brimmed her own eyes. The room rippled in front of her, white on white, Grace’s distraught face a blur. “I love you, too, sweetheart. But I don’t want you to worry about me. I don’t want you to take care of me. You’ve had enough sickness in your life.”

  “It’s not your choice what I do.”

  “This part? This is my choice.”

  Grace shook her head, her hair sticking to one wet cheek.

  Val knew she had to find a way to explain, to make Grace understand, but she didn’t have a clue how. “Do you know what MS is?”

  “I don’t know. Not really.”

  “It’s a problem with my immune system. Those defenses my body has to fight off infection? They’re attacking my nervous system. My brain, my spinal column, any of my nerves. When an attack happens, the swelling can make the nerve shut down.”

  Grace said nothing, and Val couldn’t tell if she was following or too upset to even think about seemingly random medical details. She’d never talked to anyone outside of doctors about her disease before, and she knew her description sounded like something she’d read in a pamphlet she’d picked up in a specialist’s waiting room. “Sometimes I have problems, and sometimes I feel perfectly normal.”

  “What kind of problems?”

  This was the part she really didn’t want to get into. Not only was she afraid she’d scare Grace, but there was no list she could rattle off, no definitive symptoms she could recite. “Lots of things. Almost anything. Right now, I have some numbness in my right hand.”

  Her narrowed eyes flew to Val’s right hand. “Just numbness?”

  “Mostly.” Before her dip in the river, she’d thought the hand was improving. Since she’d awakened in the hospital, the fingers again felt like rubber, like something other than her own flesh. She hadn’t been able to get them to move at all, not something she wanted to describe to Grace.

  She decided to skip telling her niece about the spasm in her neck, too, which had also grown worse, and the hint of blurred vision on the road home that hadn’t abated. “The individual symptoms aren’t the important thing. MS can show up just about anywhere. But it also goes away.”

  “You mean it can be cured?”

  “Well, not really.” There was a fine line between reassuring her and outright lying. Val didn’t want to lie. “But I could go years without any sign of it. I have gone years.”

  “Then just let me help you when you are having problems.”

  “And you’re going to do what? Drop out of school to babysit me?”

  Grace turned away as if Val had slapped her.

  “I’m sorry, sweetheart. I don’t mean to be cruel. But you have to realize, the most important thing to me is—”

  “Not needing anybody. I know.”

  “Is that what you think?”

  “Isn’t it?”

  “No. I need you, sweetheart. I love you. That’s why the most important thing to me is you going to college, living your life how you want.”

  “What if what I want is to take care of you?” If she’d been a few years younger, she would have stamped her foot. “It’s always like this. I want to keep the horses, so you buy a farm. I mention fashion, you take me shopping. I want to give back, too.”

  Val had to remember, Grace was just a kid. As smart and caring and pulled together as she seemed, she was a teenager.

  And she was her mother’s child.

  “I didn’t just develop MS out of the clear blue. It runs in our family. Your grandmother had it, too.”

  Her eyes sharpened, and she leaned forward.

  “She was diagnosed around the time I was leaving for college, a little older than you.”

  “Did she tell you, at least?”

  “Yes. She told me.”

  She pursed her lips and nodded, as if Val had just proven her point.

  “And I went to college anyway. And after I graduated, I attended the police academy. I went home during breaks, visited. I saw her getting worse over the years, but I never moved back home. I didn’t give up my life to take care of her.”

  “And you think you did the right thing?”

  Val had to answer honestly, and it was perhaps the hardest word she’d ever uttered. “No.”

  Grace stared at her a long time without speaking. When she did open her mouth, her voice was a whispered plea. “Then why do you want that for me?”

  “I didn’t stay home. I didn’t watch my mother’s body stop working. I didn’t take care of her on the days she couldn’t walk or couldn’t see or couldn’t speak. I wasn’t with her when she finally died. Your mom did all that, Grace.”

  A minute ticked by, maybe two.

  A phone rang at the nurses’ station. Rubber-soled shoes squeaked on waxed floors. A machine beeped out a steady rhythm next door.

  Finally Val managed to clear the thickness in her throat and summon the strength to go on. “Melissa never lived her life. She never went to college. She never got to enjoy parties and dating and dreaming about her future. I think when she met your dad, she just wanted to be normal so desperately, wanted to have a romance, wanted to fall in love …”

  “And he was married.” She didn’t say the words with bitterness, but as fact.

  Val had never met Grace’s dad, but unlike Grace, she did judge. He’d taken advantage of her sister, played around with her, then went his merry way. The only thing she couldn’t hate him for was the baby he’d left behind.

  “But she got to have you. To keep you. After you were born, she was so happy. It was the happiest I’d ever seen her.”

  The corners of Grace’s mouth turned up a touch, then the smile fell away as she remembered the rest. The part Val didn’t have to tell her, because she was there.

  More there than Val.

  And that was the bottom line, wasn’t it?

  “You’ve already had to spend so many years of your life taking care of your mom. I won’t have you spend more of them hovering over me.”

  “But you’re … you’re all I have, Aunt Val. I want to help.”

  Val shook her head. “I owe her, Grace. I took from her. I won’t take from you.”

  “And buying a farm so I could keep my horses, is that paying her back?”

  “I did that just because I wanted to.” Val gave her niece a heartfelt smile. “I always wanted horses, too. Didn’t I ever tell you that?”

  Grace’s frown deepened. “I’m serious.”

  “I am, too. I’d give you everything in the world, Grace, if I could. What I can give you
is a place to keep your horses, an education for your brilliant mind, and freedom to live your life without taking responsibility for me.”

  She swallowed into an aching throat, her eyesight not only blurred by the MS, but by tears. “I want to see you blossom the way your mom never could.”

  Chapter

  Nineteen

  Monica really hadn’t had that much to drink, but the beeping of the slots, the jingle of a jackpot of tokens pouring from the machine, and the hormonal buzz she felt whenever she was around Derrick must have intensified the booze content of the casino’s cocktails.

  She leaned against the solid strength of her man, the brightly patterned carpet swirling in front of her. “Whoever is tending bar tonight makes some kind of strong whiskey sours.”

  Scooping the latest haul of tokens into his plastic cup, Derrick grinned.

  Monica melted.

  He might not be George Clooney handsome, but that didn’t matter to her. Hair was overrated. So was a washboard gut. What Derrick had was more special. Whenever he looked at her—like his grin now or a glance across the room or gazing deep into her eyes while they were making love—she always felt he wasn’t seeing her as she was, flaws and all, he was seeing the woman she wanted to be.

  Another gambler bumped into her from behind.

  She staggered forward, and Derrick wrapped an arm around her, keeping her on her feet.

  Normally she’d be pissed. She might even spin around and lecture the stranger on watching where he was walking. Tonight she appreciated the gentle shove closer to Derrick’s side.

  “You okay?” her prince asked.

  “I’m thinking I’d like to go back to the room.”

  “I’ve never known you to tire out quite so early.”

  “I’m drunk, honey. I never said I was tired.”

  That little twinkle she loved lit his eyes. “So you don’t want to go to bed, Monica?”

  “Bed? Sure. Or maybe floor or shower or whirlpool tub. Hell, maybe we won’t even make it to the room.” She moved her hand down to his crotch and gave him a little feel.

  He didn’t have to tell her he liked the way she was thinking, she could see his excitement in his face … and feel it stir in her palm.

  They made it to the elevator. As soon as the door closed behind them, they were kissing like teens. Derrick skimmed his hands under her sweater, unhooked her bra and had her bare breasts in his hands before the car started its ascent.