In the morning, they all visited Abigail at the hospital: Jenny, Zoe, Penelope, and Tony, since Penelope believed there was strength in numbers and at least one of them might get in to see her.
“There are already two people with her,” said a plump and tough-looking nurse seated behind the floor desk. “Sorry. You’ll have to wait.”
“Is one of the people with her a policeman?” Tony asked.
She shook her head. “The policeman’s in the hall. There’s one woman and one man with her. That’s all I can say.”
“Could you go back and ask Ms. Cane if she’ll see us?” Tony leaned heavily against the desk, taking the weight off his bad leg. Jenny noticed him wince and hurt for him. Too much going on. Of course he would be hurting.
The nurse reluctantly agreed and left them behind to wait.
When she came back, Rudkers was with her, walking fast, arms swinging beside him. His face was anything but friendly.
“Mr. Rudkers is Ms. Cane’s attorney,” the flustered nurse tried to say.
“We know who Mr. Rudkers is.” Jenny stepped up to meet him.
“You certainly do,” Alfred sputtered. “And you’ve been told to leave Abigail alone. My next step is to have you barred from bothering her, if I have to obtain a restraining order. No visits. No phone calls. There have been two murders in her family. Now an attempt on her life. Personally, I think the whole group of you should be jailed.”
Tony’s face was the best cop face Jenny had seen on him when he stepped up nose to nose with Alfred. “Abigail was on her way to see Jenny, here, about something important. It wasn’t Jenny or her mother who attacked her. And not Zoe Zola.”
“We don’t know that.” Alfred leaned back and shook his head. “The killer used one of her fairies to knock her down with. Zoe’d never hurt one of those little people.”
Tony turned to the nurse. “Did you ask Ms. Cane if she will see us?”
The nurse was flustered, caught in the middle of a dogfight. “I was asking when he interrupted.”
Alfred narrowed his eyes. “Ms. Cane has a concussion. She is not aware enough to know the danger she is in. These people are not her friends. They may be involved in her brothers’ murders. As her attorney—” He reared back and frowned as Carmen Volker came hurrying down the hall, shoes half-tripping her. The woman’s eyes bulged when she saw who stood with Alfred.
“They won’t allow them in with Abigail, will they?” Carmen demanded of Alfred, her eyes going from face to face.
Something very odd about those eyes, Jenny thought. More intrigue than worry.
Carmen’s face wrinkled. “Abigail’s in pain, you know. This isn’t right. You people shouldn’t be bothering her.”
Carmen turned to Jenny. “Not right at all. Why do you want to torture poor Abigail this way? She’s lost both her brothers.”
Alfred left them, but only for a few minutes. He was back with a new nurse. A male nurse. A burly nurse.
“We want these people to go. They’re bothering Ms. Cane. I’m her guardian now.”
“Show me the guardianship papers,” Penelope demanded, standing in Alfred’s face. He backed away. His thin eyebrows shot up.
“Don’t have them? Okay, show me your power of attorney.”
Alfred frowned as the burly nurse shook his head. “I have to check with the patient anyway. Rules are rules.”
“But you don’t know—”
The nurse was on his way back down the hall.
When he returned, he said, “Ms. Cane would like to see her visitors. Two of them can go on back.”
Alfred sputtered, but Tony and Jenny were off to Abigail’s room, with Zoe and Penelope waiting behind.
***
Her head was still wrapped in bandages, but her face had color today. She sat up to greet her guests, though the welcome look quickly turned to confusion. Like the good hostess she’d been taught to be, she covered her dismay with a warm welcome.
At first there was the usual hospital talk: she was doing fine and no, she didn’t need anything. Then Jenny asked when she would be getting out, and she answered, “Oh, not long. Not long. I’m hoping to go home today. I’m fine, you know. Completely fine. Except for this . . .” She touched the bandage on her head. “I suppose I’ve been hurt. But I don’t remember a thing. Can you imagine . . . eh, you are?”
“Jenny Weston. Dora Weston’s daughter.”
Abigail smiled but couldn’t cover that the name meant nothing to her.
“Well, you’re all my guests, so please sit down. And please, what is the weather like today? Hot yet? Soon enough it will be fall, then winter, and we’ll all dream of these warm and sunny days, won’t we? And dream of things that used to be.”
Alfred and Carmen stood in the hall, listening near the door. Abigail leaned around Tony and waved at them. “My good friends,” she beamed, then looked puzzled. “Now what was I talking about? Oh yes, about things that used to be . . .”
She leaned back on the pillows, her eyes drooped then flew open.
“What was I saying? Oh, yes—things that used to be. A sin. A terrible vision.”
She lowered her voice to near a whisper, then looked hard at Jenny. “Have you ever done something so terrible it cost you everything?”
Jenny didn’t answer.
Abigail fixed her eyes on Tony. She let her eyelids drift slowly closed.
They waited. It was a few minutes until she opened her eyes and motioned them as close as they could get.
“I saw it all so clearly,” she said with effort. “Just the way it was. I don’t understand how a brain can get so twisted. I was in my thirties; I should have been onto him by then. So much a dream now. More than thirty years.”
“I spied on my father one day.” She glanced at them coquettishly; in her eyes Jenny could see the little girl. She put her fingers to her lips. “I often did, you know. I never married. All my curiosity was focused on an aging man who never loved me.”
“Abigail! You should be resting,” Carmen called from the hall.
Abigail shook her head, which made her wince and put a hand up to the bandages.
She put a finger to her lips and motioned Tony and Jenny even closer, so she could whisper.
“He didn’t love my brothers, either. Nor my poor mother. My father hated and distrusted the world around him. Sad, don’t you think, that he had children who wanted to love him and he couldn’t stand the sight of us?”
She drew a few deep breaths.
“I dislike telling this to anyone. Now there’s something . . . my brothers are dead. But let me go on. I need you to understand. People shouldn’t do the things my father did.”
She rested another minute, tuning out the voices calling to her from the hall.
“I filled my life with good works and tried to stay out of Father’s way.” She tried to lean up to be closer to her listeners. “But as I said, I spied on him. As often as I could. Especially when he was in his den. My little game. Often, when he came out he would be smiling. A thing so rare, it made me uncontrollably inquisitive.”
She exhaled slowly. “One afternoon, he was sitting at his desk, but he’d left the door open, so I could see through the crack. A small wooden box, I’d seen it long before when I was spying. He sat at his desk with the box in front of him. He unlocked it with a small key on a chain he wore. He took out a sheaf of papers and read them one by one. He smiled. The papers gave him pleasure. When he was finished, he bundled the papers together, put them back into the box, and locked it with that little key. He took the box to the closet, climbed up on a chair, and set it on the shelf. When he was finished, he locked the closet. I scurried away before he came out of the room, but what had surprised me was that there were four papers this time, where I’d only seen three when I’d spied on him before. For weeks I couldn’t get it out of my mind. I was so curious as to what could possibly give my father so much pleasure and be such a welcomed addition to his file.
“I would never have looked, not really, but I found that little key on the foyer floor one day. It must have dropped off his chain. I picked it up and held it in my palm. What a conflict in my nine-year-old soul.”
She closed her eyes at the rising commotion near the door. A nurse had come to quiet Carmen and Alfred.
Abigail cleared her throat.
“Where was I?”
“You found the key to the box.”
“Yes. Sneaky, I know. Reprehensible. Father was to be out all that morning. I couldn’t help myself. I put a chair in the open closet and climbed up. I took the box down and sat on the chair. I opened the box and found many papers, not just the four I’d recently seen him gloating over. There were deeds to forest land we still own—which made me dream of being free to run through the trees. There were signed agreements and contracts I didn’t understand. On top of the others were the folded sheets of paper that gave him so much pleasure.
“In my heart, I think I’d hoped they were our birth certificates—his three children. And maybe his wedding license. That would have been nice. He would have seemed to be a caring man even though he never showed his feelings for us. How I wished that I’d find something that made him human, something exposing a heart.”
“What were those papers, Abigail? Did you find what you were looking for?”
She lay back and closed her eyes again. Jenny and Tony exchanged a look across the bed. They wondered if she was asleep, if they should wake her. Their fifteen minutes with her were almost up.
It was a few minutes more until her lips moved.
“I didn’t read them, only unfolded them. I looked up, and he was standing in the doorway, watching. I had no place to hide. No place to quickly stash the papers and the box. I’ve often wondered . . .” She looked above their heads, back into a place no one should ever go. “I’ve often wondered if he left the key behind to test me.”
She closed her eyes and this time dropped into a deep and soundless sleep.