Deadly Grace. Taylor Smith

oxygen feeder tube, and her breathing seemed raspy and labored. Her long legs were bare and bruised, tangled in the quilt but folded up in a near fetal position making her seem small, childlike and lost in the big institutional bed. Her face was strained and pale, eyes puffy, skin smeared with traces of soot. Her long hair was tangled and falling unheeded in her eyes. Thin arms poked from the short sleeves of a blue cotton hospital gown; like her legs, they seemed covered with bruises—although maybe, Cruz thought, it was only soot. There was, however, no mistaking the thick, gauze bandage on her left arm, just below the elbow, the aftermath, he presumed, of the incident with the air-filled hypodermic syringe.

      Scattered on the mattress beside her were the spilled contents of a box of felt markers. Her right hand clenched one of the markers as she scribbled, rapidly and frantically, in a thick notebook, pausing only to flip pages. She was supporting herself on her left elbow as she lay on the bed, and that hand was compulsively kneading a corner of the quilt. Cruz watched the counterpoint movements, mesmerized by her left hand clawing at the covers while her right went on, scribbling and scribbling—down the notebook’s left-hand page, then flying to the top of the right, madly filling that one, and then flipping to the next. She worked with a frenzy that left him inclined to believe she was truly insane. And at that speed, he thought, she had to be writing gibberish.

      So was she mad? Or too clever by half?

      “She looks awful,” Berglund muttered. “Locked up in there, all alone. Isn’t there something…?”

      “We’re doing all we can for her right now,” Kandinsky said. “At this point, the most important thing seems to be that she get down in that notebook whatever it is that she seems driven to put there. That and, hopefully, for her to sleep, and also to eat something. I might see if we can get her into a shower eventually, too. I know that would make her feel better. But right now,” she added, “this is what she needs to be doing.”

      Berglund couldn’t seem to take his eyes off the crumpled figure on the bed. The doctor watched him for a moment, her face shifting to a puzzled frown, and then she reached out to touch him on the arm. “Deputy? Why don’t you and Agent Cruz go now? You can come back tomorrow and we’ll see where we stand then. She’s not going anywhere, and I’m sure you’ll find her much improved after a night’s sleep.”

      Berglund snapped back to attention, pulling his gaze away from the window. “Right, that’s what we’ll do. I’d like to know right away if her condition changes, though,” he added, pulling out a business card, and then a pen that he used to scribble a number on the back. “These are my office and home telephone numbers. Would you tell her I was here, if you get a chance? And if she wants to talk, any time, no matter how late, call me?”

      Kandinsky took the card he held, looked it over, and then slipped it into her sweater pocket. “I will, I promise.”

      Berglund studied her for a second, then turned on his heel and headed up the hall without a backward glance.

      Cruz took one last look at the figure on the other side of the glass. Jillian Meade’s one hand continued its frantic kneading of the bedclothes while, clenched in her other, the turquoise marker flew across the notebook pages.

      CHAPTER 9

      I don’t know where to begin to tell this story. I lie here, searching for meaning in what happened, finding none that makes any sense. At the very least, I need to lay this out in a logical sequence of events, but I’m so confused by guilt and anger I can hardly think straight.

      How do I do this? How do I explain why a woman as admired as my mother had to come to the end she did? And how do I account for the sick, twisted fate that forced me, a daughter as fatally flawed as she was, to sit in judgment over her?

      I want to scream out at the unfairness of it. My throat and chest ache with the pressure of unshed tears, the way a dam must ache as it holds back a flood. But I can’t indulge myself. I haven’t earned the right to cry.

      One thing seems clear: if I’m going to get this all down, I’m going to have to try to muster up some kind of detachment. Treat Grace Meade as just another one of my research subjects, a minor historical figure upon whom a handful of fates turned. Ignore the emotion-laden tie that binds us even now—that soft, invisible umbilical cord that’s been wrapped around my neck since the day I was born, slowly strangling the life out of me.

      And who knows? Maybe it strangled both of us. For years now, I’ve harbored the guilty feeling that my mother would have been happier if I’d never been born. That the burden of my childish needs forced her to abandon any thought of pursuing her own. That ensuring my security destroyed any chance she might have had to find a little happiness of her own.

      She left her country and the life she knew to bring me here to live with my father’s parents. I can’t remember a time when my grandparents weren’t the most loving influence on my life, and I will always be grateful for the safe cocoon of their warmth. I’m certainly glad they’re not alive now to see how I’ve ended up.

      In spite of my grandparents’ unswerving love and support, though, there was a sadness that permeated our home like a layer of fine dust. Now and then, it lifted a little, but inevitably it would soon settle back over us all.

      My late father was Nana’s and Grandpa’s only child, and of course, no worse tragedy can befall a parent than to lose a child. Now, as I look back through adult eyes, I can see how my young life was marked by the faint shadow of grief behind their encouraging smiles. Every milestone I passed successfully must have reminded them of that other child they’d nurtured safely through the pitfalls of childhood, only to have him perish alone in a foreign land.

      And my mother? His shadow seemed to hang over her, too, and I sometimes felt she could barely make me out in the gloom of those memories. When I was little, there were moments when I wanted to fly into a room and just crash into her—anything to break through, to get her to notice me. But fear or training or both held me back. I waited, watching and hoping she would turn on me the radiant, incredible smile that she bestowed like a blessing on so many others who came to love and admire her. She never did—at least, not when we were by ourselves and I could be absolutely certain that she meant it for me and me alone.

      For years, I thought the problem was that I reminded her too much of my father, whose silver-framed photograph smiled down on us from the living room mantle. That my existence was a constant, aching reminder of his absence. In recent years, though, I resigned myself to the possibility that she might simply have been one of those women who didn’t enjoy motherhood. I even wonder whether she’d ever really wanted a child. She never said, but I can’t help thinking that I was an accident with which she simply coped, just as she coped with all the other setbacks and tragedies in her life. There is nothing worse than thinking your very existence is a mistake.

      Mind you, I’m sure all of Havenwood would testify that she was a model parent, utterly conscientious. As a child, I adored her and lived in terror of losing her. But as I grew older, I began to realize that her life might have been so much more had she not sacrificed herself for my sake—buried herself alive in this tiny prairie town where her experience and skills would always be underutilized, her past little understood, no matter how much she was admired.

      I knew—everyone knew, vaguely—how her life before coming to this country had been full of action, danger and passion, like something out of great fiction or the movies. Living on the front lines of World War II, plunged right into the action, she’d been part of one of the greatest struggles between good and evil the world has ever known. Lines were clearly drawn then, more so than at any time before or since. For my mother’s generation, there was the evil of fascism on one side and all those who opposed it on the other. As a partisan, she led a life of action and passion—and unthinkable tragedy. But when the battle for freedom was won, she retired with me, her infant daughter, to a remote and foreign place, the small hometown of the husband she’d found, then lost in the midst of that great struggle.

      I can’t believe she wasn’t sometimes bored to utter despair here. Bored and lonely. And yet, to my knowledge, she never