CHAPTER 4

SARA PACED AROUND THE MOTEL ROOM with the phone tucked up against her ear, the cord limiting her movement like a leash on a dog. Both Sara and Jeffrey had been relieved when they had seen the “vacancy” sign outside the Home Sweet Home Motel as they drove out of Reese last night, but Sara had regretted their decision to stay the moment Jeffrey had opened the door. The place was almost from a parallel universe, the kind of dump that Sara thought only existed in B movies and Raymond Chandler novels. Just thinking about the dank shag carpet in the bathroom was enough to bring a shudder of revulsion. Making matters worse, neither Jeffrey’s nor Sara’s cell phone could get a signal in the motel. Sara had used all the alcohol swabs she could find in the first-aid kit from her car before she could even think about using the phone.

“What did you say?” her mother asked. She was somewhere in Kansas. Her parents were only two weeks into their road trip and already Sara could tell that Cathy was desperate to return home.

“I said that Daddy’s not that bad,” Sara answered, thinking it was a rare day indeed that she felt compelled to defend her father. Cathy and Eddie Linton had been married for over forty years, yet Sara had guessed from the beginning that their dream vacation together was a big mistake. The fact was, her parents did not spend much time in each other’s company, let alone stuck in a confined space. Her father was always at work or fooling around in the garage, while her mother usually had some meeting to attend, a rally to organize, or a church group that took her away from home for hours on end. Their independence was the secret to their happy marriage. The thought of them both trapped in the thirty-seven-foot Winnebago they had purchased for their two month-long trek across America was enough to give Sara a headache.

“I just never realized how irritating he can be,” her mother insisted. She was obviously in the kitchen of the RV; Sara could hear cabinets opening and closing. “How hard is it to hook up to a waste trap? The man is a plumber, for the love of God.” She gave a heavy sigh. “Two hours, Sara. It took him two whole hours.”

Sara held her tongue, though her mother had a point. On the other hand, her father was probably dragging out the chore in order to prolong his life.

“Are you listening to a word I’m saying?”

“Yes, Mama,” Sara lied. She was wearing thick socks, but she used her big toe to prod a green M&M that seemed to be stuck in the carpet by the window. “Two hours.”

Her mother was silent for a moment, then said, “Tell me what happened.”

Sara gave up on the M&M when her sock kept getting stuck to the candy. She resumed pacing. “I told you what happened. I let her escape. I might as well have opened the door for her and driven her to the airport.”

“Not that,” Cathy insisted. “You know what I’m talking about.”

It was Sara’s turn to sigh. She was almost glad she’d made a fool of herself last night at the hospital because Lena’s rapid departure had given Sara a new thing to toss and turn over when she was supposed to be sleeping. Now her mother’s question brought the malpractice suit firmly back into her consciousness.

Sara told her, “I would say their strategy is to claim that because I was attacked ten years ago, I was too distracted to tell the Powells that Jimmy had leukemia, and that he died because I waited an extra day.”

“That’s the most ridiculous thing I’ve ever heard.”

“Their lawyer can be pretty persuasive.” Sara thought about the lawyer, her Tourette’s-like crocodile smile. “She even had me convinced.”

Another cabinet was opened and closed. “I can’t believe that another woman would do this to you,” Cathy said. “It’s disgusting. This is why women will never get ahead: other women are constantly cutting them off at the knees.”

Sara held her tongue, not in the mood for one of her mother’s feminist lectures.

Cathy offered, “I can come home if you need me.”

Sara nearly dropped the phone. “No. I’m fine, really. Don’t ruin your vacation because of—”

“Shit,” her mother hissed; it was rare that an expletive crossed her lips. “I have to go. Your father just set himself on fire.”

“Mama?” Sara pressed the phone to her ear, but her mother had already hung up.

Sara held the phone in her hand, wondering if she should call back, deciding that if something had been really wrong, her mother would have sounded less annoyed. Finally, she returned the phone to the cradle and went over to the large plate glass window looking out into the motel parking lot. Sara had kept the drapes closed most of the morning, thinking sitting alone in the dark room was less bleak than staring out into the empty lot. Now, she opened the polyester drapes a few inches, letting in a thin ray of light.

The table and set of white plastic lawn chairs by the window seemed perfect companions to the dismal view. Sara adjusted the threadbare towel she’d draped over one of the chairs and sat down. Exhaustion overwhelmed her, but the thought of getting back into bed, sliding between the rough, yellowing sheets, was too much to bear.

She had walked across the street earlier in the morning to buy coffee and ended up purchasing some Comet with bleach additive and a sponge that smelled like it had already been used. Her thought had been to tidy the room, or at least make the bathroom less disgusting, but every time she thought about taking the supplies in hand and actually using them, Sara found that she didn’t have the energy. What’s more, if she was going to clean anything, it should be her own home.

She tried to list the chores she could be doing back in Grant County right now: folding the laundry piled on the bed in the spare room, fixing the leak in the bathroom sink, taking the dogs for a walk around the lake. Of course, the reality was that Sara had done none of these tasks in the weeks since she’d closed the clinic. For the most part, she’d sat around the house brooding about the lawsuit. When her sister called from Atlanta, Sara had talked about the lawsuit. When Jeffrey got home from work, she had talked about the lawsuit. She had become so obsessed with discussing the suit that finally, her mother had snapped, “For the love of God, Sara, do something. Even patients in mental homes have to weave baskets.”

Unfortunately, getting out of the house only exacerbated the problem. Whether Sara was at the grocery store or picking up Jeffrey’s suits from the cleaners or even raking leaves in the front yard, she had felt people’s eyes on her. Not just that, but she’d felt their disapproval. The few times she’d talked to anyone, the conversations had been brief if not downright cold. Sara hadn’t told anyone about these exchanges—not Jeffrey, not her family—but she had found herself sinking deeper and deeper into depression with each encounter.

And now, courtesy of Lena Adams, Sara had one more failure to add to her list. How could she have been so easily tricked? How could she have been so utterly idiotic? All night, Sara had tried to parse each moment of her time with Lena, picking apart the seconds, trying to see how she could have acted differently, how she could have changed the outcome. Nothing came to mind except her own glaring stupidity.

Lena had been up on her knees in bed, the restraints keeping her from moving any farther away. As soon as Jeffrey and the sheriff left, she relaxed, her arms going limp.

Sara had studied her, noticed the way the other woman’s chest shook with every exhale of breath. “What’s going on, Lena? Why are you so afraid?”

“You have to get out of here. Both of you.” Her voice was quiet, ominous. When she looked up, her eyes seemed to glow with terror. “You have to get Jeffrey out of here.”

Sara felt her heart stop. “Why? Is he in danger?”

Lena did not answer. Instead, she looked down at her hands, the tangled sheets. “Everyone, everything I touch—it all turns to shit. You have to get away from me.”

“Do you really think we’re going to abandon you?” Sara had said “we,” but they both knew that she meant Jeffrey. “Someone died in that car, Lena. Tell me what happened to you.”

She shook her head, resigned.

“Lena, talk to me.”

Again, no answer came. That must have been when Lena had decided her course of action, that if she could not control Sara, she could at least use her.

“I’m so dirty,” she’d said, her tone of voice indicating the filth was more than skin-deep. “I feel so dirty.” She’d looked up at Sara. Tears wet her eyes, and though her voice was more restrained, her hands still shook in her lap. “I need to wash off. I have to wash off.”

Sara hadn’t even thought about it. She’d walked over to the side of the bed and unstrapped the Velcro restraints. “You’re going to be okay,” she’d promised. “You need to trust me, or I can get Jeffrey—”

“No,” Lena begged. “Just…I just need to wash off. Let me…” Her lips trembled. All the fight seemed to be drained out of her. She slid to the edge of the bed, tried to stand on shaky legs. Sara put her arm around the other woman’s waist, helped her gain her footing.

Lena had really acted the part, Sara thought. A decided frailty had marked her every move. Nothing about her actions suggested she was capable of climbing on a toilet and pulling herself up into a drop ceiling, let alone eluding a manhunt.

Sara had been completely fooled, walking alongside Lena across the room, keeping her arm out a few inches from the other woman’s back in case her support was needed. It was an automatic gesture, the sort of thing you learned your first week as a resident. Sara had escorted her all the way to the bathroom, shuffling her feet to match Lena’s slow gait.

What Sara had been thinking as they walked was that Lena was not a whiner. She was the type of person who would rather bleed to death than admit she had been cut. Sara found herself wondering if maybe the doctors had misdiagnosed Lena, that she should look at the chest X-rays, find a stethoscope, review the drugs that had been administered, run some fluids, do some blood work. Was there brain damage, some kind of shock from the explosion? Had Lena fallen? Hit her head? Had she lost consciousness? Smoke inhalation was deadly, claiming more victims than fire alone. Secondary infections, fluid in the lungs, tissue damage—all sorts of possibilities were flashing through Sara’s mind, and she’d realized that without warning, she was thinking like a doctor again. For the first time in months, she felt useful.

Then Lena had stopped her at the door to the bathroom, holding up her hand so that Sara would get the message that she needed privacy. Then, just before shutting the door, Lena had turned to Sara. “I’m so sorry,” she’d said, her apology seeming so genuine that Sara could not believe this was the same woman who had been almost hysterical with fear and hatred five minutes earlier. “I’m so, so sorry.”

“It’s all right,” Sara had assured her, smiling, letting Lena know that she was no longer alone in this. “We can talk about it later, okay? We’ll get Jeffrey in here and we’ll all figure out what to do.”

Lena had nodded, probably not trusting her voice.

“I’ll wait out here for you.”

And Sara had waited, standing outside the door, grinning like a fool, thinking about how much she was going to help Lena. Meanwhile, Lena was probably bolting down the stairs, laughing at how easy Sara had made her escape.

Now, sitting at the plastic table in the dreary motel room, Sara felt her face redden with humiliation.

“Stupid,” she said, standing up before the chair sucked out what little life was left in her.

Cathy was right. Sara needed to do something. She picked up the Comet and the odd-smelling sponge she’d bought at the convenience store and headed toward the bathroom. For some reason, the sink was outside the door, a long counter that was burned at the edges where people had rested their cigarettes while they—what?—brushed their teeth?

It didn’t bear thinking about.

Sara sprinkled some Comet into the sink and started scrubbing, trying not to take any more chrome off the plastic drain in the process. She put some muscle into it, cutting through years of grime as if her life depended on it.

Pride before the fall, she thought. All those years of being the teacher’s pet—the best student in the class, the highest grades, the best accolades, and the brightest future—for what? Emory University had accepted her before she graduated from high school. The medical college had practically rolled out the red carpet, offering enough financial aid for her father to easily make up the difference. Thousands of people a year applied for the limited number of residencies at Grady Hospital. Sara hadn’t even had a fallback. She knew she was going to get into the program. She was so damn sure of her own abilities, her own intelligence, that she had never in her life thought she would not succeed at anything she set her mind to.

Except for stopping a one-hundred-ten-pound college dropout from escaping the Elawah County Medical Center.

“Stupid,” Sara repeated. She gave up on the sink and went into the bathroom. She started on the toilet, using the scrub brush mounted on the wall to clean the bowl, trying not to wonder what had turned the bristles dark gray. As she got down on her knees beside the bathtub, Sara remembered her mother showing her years ago how to clean a bathroom—how much cleaner to use, how to gently scrub the porcelain with a sponge.

Sara sat back on her heels, thinking that one day, maybe soon, she would show her own child how to clean the tub or vacuum the living room. Jeffrey would have to explain how to sort laundry because Sara was forever pulling pink-streaked, formerly white socks out of the dryer. She could take the kid to the grocery store, at least. Jeffrey thought a frozen dinner was a well-balanced meal, which might explain why his blood pressure had to be controlled with medication.

A thought came to Sara like a knife in her chest. What if she ran into Beckey Powell at the grocery store? What if Sara was standing in the meat section, holding her child’s hand, and Beckey walked up? How would Sara explain to her new son or daughter why Beckey Powell hated her? How would she explain why the whole town believed that her incompetence had led to the death of a child?

Sara wiped her forehead with the back of her hand, eyes watering from the overwhelming stench of bleach in the tiny bathroom. She wished that Jeffrey was there to keep her mind from going to such dark places. Since filing the adoption papers, they’d started playing what-if games. “What if we get a boy who hates football?” “What if we have a girl who loves pink and wants her hair braided?”

Sara imagined games were the last thing on her husband’s mind at the moment. A dead person had been in that SUV and Lena was somehow entangled in that death. After meeting Jake Valentine, Jeffrey did not trust the local force to solve this crime without leaping to the easiest conclusion and pinning it all on Lena. He had left early this morning to plot strategy with Nick Shelton, a friend of his who worked for the Georgia Bureau of Investigation. Sara had not been invited to tag along.

She leaned back over the tub, rinsing the Comet, then sprinkling more powder to start the process again. The sponge was just about to give up the ghost, but Sara would not stop until the job was done. She folded the sponge in two and used the edge to attack the black ring around the periphery that probably dated back to the seventies.

Sara muttered a curse under her breath, wishing again that she was back home. At least in Grant County, she could stay out of Jeffrey’s way and let him do his job. Here, all she could do was make sure he had a clean place to put his toothbrush. Overnight, she had turned into a glorified housewife, and for what? So that Lena could laugh her way out of town?

Sara knew that Jeffrey bent the rules sometimes. If he had been by himself last night, Jeffrey would have taken the empty nurses’ station as an invitation to find Lena on his own. If he had walked into that hospital room alone, Lena might have opened up to him. She might have told him why she needed to get out of there instead of breaking out. She sure as hell wouldn’t have tried to use Jeffrey in order to make her escape; she respected him too much.

Unlike Sara.

Cathy had said that women were their own worst enemies. Was Sara Lena’s enemy? She didn’t think so. It was true that Sara had never understood the bond between her husband and the thirty-five-year-old detective, but Sara wasn’t stupid enough to be jealous. Barring the fact that Lena was as far from Jeffrey’s type as you could get without going outside the species, their relationship was too much like that of an older brother and errant young sister to cause Sara concern.

Maybe the dislike came from Lena making such bad choices for herself. After her sister, Sibyl, had died, Lena had fallen into a deep depression. She even managed to get herself temporarily suspended from the force. That was when she’d started seeing Ethan Green. That was when Lena had lost all of Sara’s sympathy.

As a doctor, Sara should have understood the process. Grief can lead to depression, depression can lead to chemical changes in the body that make it impossible to crawl out of the spiral without some help, be it pharmacological or therapeutic or both. God knew that over the last few months, Sara was more than intimate with the dangers of depression. Still, her personal experience did not help her understand why Lena had turned to Ethan.

Sara had read the women’s journals, knew the statistics, studied the causal relationships. Depression can lead to vulnerabilities. Vulnerabilities attract predators. It was like a shark sensing blood in the water. Just because a woman gave the outward appearance of being strong, that did not preclude her from becoming a victim of domestic violence. In some cases, it made her more likely to fall victim; you could only keep up that tough act for so many hours before it all fell apart.

Sara knew this in her brain. She accepted that some women—smart women—got mixed up with the wrong person, ended up making compromise after compromise until there was nothing left but to sit there and take it. But, still, the fact that Lena’s twenty-four-year-old boyfriend had abused her—not just abused her, but beaten her to a bloody pulp—was something that Sara could not get past.

It was as if Lena had been obsessed with the man, like she could not get him out of her system. Maybe if Ethan had been a drug, Sara would have better understood the addiction. Heroin, meth, opium…that would explain Lena’s devotion, her inability to get through the day without a hit. The brainwashing would have made more sense if she had been in a cult, but there was nothing for Lena to fall back on but her own damaged personality. She had a good job, her own money, her own support structure. She had a gun and a badge, for chrissakes. Ethan was a paroled violent offender. Lena could have arrested him at any time. As a police officer, she was bound by law to report any case of domestic violence, even if she herself was the victim.

And yet she had left it up to Jeffrey. Lena was the one who had tipped him off that Ethan was carrying a gun in his backpack. Jeffrey refused to discuss it with Sara anymore, but she was certain that Lena had planted the gun, that the only way she had been able to get rid of her abuser was this coward’s way. Ethan had ten years hard time hanging over his head. Lena had hidden the gun, then called in Jeffrey to do her dirty work.

And of course, Jeffrey had come running.

But wasn’t that why Sara loved Jeffrey? Because he refused to give up on people, no matter how beyond reach they seemed? Sara was hardly one to talk about women making stupid mistakes with men. She had married Jeffrey twice, leaving him the first time after coming home to find him in bed with another woman. Jeffrey had changed in the years since their divorce, though. He had grown up. He had worked to get Sara back, to regain her trust and mend their relationship. She loved this new Jeffrey with such passion that it scared her sometimes.

Was that what had driven Lena to stand by Ethan no matter how many times he beat her? Had she felt the same lovesickness as Sara, the same lurch in her stomach when they were apart? Had she made such a fool of herself over him that she could not let go?

Sara dropped the scraps of the sponge into the wastebasket and rinsed the tub again. Jeffrey would be shocked when he got back from his meeting. She could not remember the last time she had cleaned her own bathroom so thoroughly. Sara hated most domestic chores and did them only because in a town as small as Heartsdale, her mother would find out if she hired a maid. Cathy’s belief was that chores built character, and paying other people, especially women, to do them showed what sort of character you really had. Sara’s belief was that her mother’s Puritan work ethic had gone round the bend. There was a reason Sara had graduated from high school a year ahead of her class. When she was growing up, her mother thought that homework was the only valid excuse for getting out of cleaning duty.

She washed the cleaner off her hands, her mind going back to Lena and wishing that Ethan Green could be washed out of all their lives just as easily. Sara had seen Ethan only once—seen his body. The tattoos must have taken hours to ink onto his skin. There were at least ten that Sara had counted, but the one she could never put out of her mind was the large black swastika over his heart. What made a man embrace such hatred? What did it say about Lena that she could be with such a man, want him, make love to him, and not be repulsed by the hateful symbol on his body?

Last night, sitting in the car outside the hospital, Sara had seen the way the skinhead in the white sedan had looked at Jeffrey, the recognition that Jeffrey was a cop, his callous disregard for what that means. She had also seen the red swastika on the man’s arm and felt a sudden sickening fear when Jeffrey made it obvious that he was not intimidated, would not back down. Now, she felt sick just thinking about it.

The phone rang and Sara’s heart jumped. She ran into the other room and picked up the receiver. “Hello?” She waited, listening to static on the line, the sound of someone breathing. “Hello?” she repeated, then, for no reason, “Lena?”

There was a soft click, then the quiet of a dead line.

Sara returned the phone to its cradle, shivering. She looked at her watch, then checked it against the alarm clock on the bedside table. Jeffrey had left almost two hours ago to meet with Nick Shelton. He had told her he’d call on his way back, but there was no telling when that would be.

She saw a takeout menu on the table, the notes she had scrawled on the back. Sara picked up the menu, tried to decipher her own handwriting.

Jeffrey had left Sara an assignment. She loved him for trying to make her feel useful, but the fact was a monkey could’ve performed the task. After her coffee run to the convenience store, she had called Frank Wallace, Jeffrey’s second in command, and asked him to track down the license plate from the white sedan they had seen at the hospital last night. Even Frank had sounded puzzled when he’d heard Sara’s request. He had played along, though, typing the plate into the computer, humming under his breath. Sara had known Frank for as long as she’d been alive—he was a poker buddy of her father’s—but she had felt uncomfortable talking to him on the phone, mostly because they both knew that she had no business doing policework.

Frank had the registration in under a minute. Sara had scrambled for something to write on and found the takeout menu in one of the bedside drawers. A corporation named Whitey’s Feed & Seed owned the Chevy Malibu.

So, the Nazi in the white sedan had a sense of humor.

Sara had rung off with Frank and decided to take some initiative—something a monkey surely could not do—and run down the articles of incorporation for Whitey’s Feed & Seed. After spending almost twenty minutes on hold with the secretary of state’s office, she knew a man named Joseph Smith was listed as CEO and president of Whitey’s Feed & Seed. Going on the assumption that this was a valid name and not some allusion to the founder of the Mormon Church, Sara called directory services. There were over three hundred listings for the name of Joseph Smith in the state of Georgia. Oddly enough, none of them lived in or around the Elawah area.

Frank’s computer search had yielded a post office box as the address for the vehicle’s registration, but the woman at the secretary of state’s office had given Sara a local address, 339 Third Avenue. If Reese was like every other small town in the world, it was laid out on a grid pattern. The Elawah County Medical Center was on Fifth Avenue. Sara knew that the hospital was less than a ten-minute drive from the motel, which meant that Third Avenue had to be within a few miles.

Sara stared at the menu, her scribbled letters crisscrossing the dessert selections. She’d talked to her mother, cleaned the bathroom, refolded all the clothes in their suitcase, and left three messages on her sister’s cell phone to please call before boredom atrophied her mind. Short of sweeping the motel parking lot, there really was nothing else left for her to do.

A motorcycle revved outside, the pipes so loud that the plate glass window rattled. Sara looked out the slit in the curtains, but she could only see the back of the bike as it pulled onto the main road. Overhead, the sky was turning dark, but she guessed that any rain was at least a few hours away.

Sara tore off the address she’d written on the menu and wrote Jeffrey a note on the entrée section. She had seen some local maps at the convenience store when she’d walked over earlier that morning. Third Avenue had to be close by.

She snatched the motel key off the table and left the room before she could stop herself.