Henrietta Potter stared at me. “Anthony and Mark,” I said. “Jennifer and Adrian. You broke Herne’s circle. He took almost everything but you broke the circle that would bind their souls. They’ll get another chance.” My whole body hurt, and I was exhausted beyond belief. My thoughts were too thick and slow to be chaotic, but they felt that way anyway. I needed to go sit somewhere, quietly, and figure out what had happened. What it meant. I pushed to my feet and wove my way to the door.
I bounced off Gary as he and Billy returned with coffee. Gary dropped both the cups he carried, swore, and grabbed my shoulders as my knees gave out and I tried to follow the coffee to the floor. “What in hell happened to you? You look like you saw a ghost.”
“Bad day at the office.” I giggled. Billy and Gary exchanged glances. Billy pushed the door to Henrietta’s room open and went in. “C’mon,” I said to Gary. “I wanna go home. Tired.”
“You were fine two minutes ago, lady.”
I smiled up at him and patted his cheek. “Aw. Gary. Didn’t know you cared.” My knees went out from under me again and this time I did drop, flopping to the floor like a rag doll.
Into the spilled coffee. I stuck a fingertip in it. “Aw, man. Now my panties are gonna smell like coffee.” I put both my hands into the air and let Gary pull me to my feet as Billy came back out of the hospital room, looking pale.
“What in hell did you do?” he demanded. I stared at him without comprehension.
“Aw, shit. She’s not dead or anything, is she?”
“Not quite,” Henrietta Potter said from behind Billy’s shoulder. He moved out of the way and she stepped out, looking surprisingly dignified in just a hospital gown and bare feet.
“You oughta be lying down,” Gary said sternly. He kept a firm hand around my waist, which I thought was sweet of him.
“I believe, actually, that I’ll be checking out as soon as someone is kind enough to fetch me some clothes.”
“You could borrow mine,” I said too loudly, “but they all smell like coffee now.” I was very tired. If Gary didn’t keep his arm around my waist, I thought I might just collapse again and not wake up for a week or two. No, I couldn’t do that. I had to think. I nodded several times to myself, big motions that took on a life of their own as I forgot why I was nodding.
Mrs. Potter looked up at me, amused. “I’m tall for my generation, Joanne Walker, but I would trip on your sleeves.”
I stopped nodding, astonished. “But they’re short,” I protested. Henrietta quirked a smile.
“So they are,” she agreed.
“What did you do? ” Billy asked again. I waved a hand at him.
“Just a lil’ fixer-upper. Noooo big deal. Do it anytime. No problem. Lil’ hole in the tummy to kill a king? Sure. Hey. To kill a king.” I snickered against Gary’s arm. “That’s funny.”
“Detective,” Gary said, “Jo needs to go home and sleep.”
“Oooh, good idea.” I tilted over, then frowned and started shaking my head. Big swinging shakes of my head. “Nooo. Can’t sleep. Have to think. ” Now I was nodding again. It was all very confusing, and I was losing my balance. Gary tightened his arm around me. I giggled and patted his shoulder. “Nice Gary.”
This was starting to get embarrassing. I peeled out of Gary’s grasp and carefully began maneuvering my way down the wide, empty hallway. After several steps, with a gentle thump, I maneuvered my shoulder right into the wall opposite Henrietta’s room. That wasn’t at all what I’d been aiming for, but it struck me that the wall would help me walk in a straight line. I leaned on it and concentrated on putting one foot in front of another. Left. Right. Left. It wasn’t all that hard, as long as I kept my head down and watched my feet. Feeling rather proud of myself through the haze of exhaustion, I picked up a little speed.
“Joanie…” Billy’s voice bounced off the gray walls, a warning. Another pair of shoes intruded themselves on my line of vision. I didn’t exactly have momentum in my favor, but I still didn’t manage to stop until the top of my head ran into the chest belonging to the intrusive shoes.
I didn’t even bounce, just lifted my head and found myself toe to toe and nose to nose with Captain Michael Morrison.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
Morrison was close enough to kiss. He had tired shadows under his eyes, and his hair had silver threads in it, neither of which I’d ever noticed before. We stared at each other, almost cross-eyed, our noses nearly touching. He drew in a magnificently deep breath through his nostrils in preparation to launch a tirade. I lifted my hand and put my fingertips over his mouth, clumsily. His eyebrows shot up, as much surprise as I’d ever seen on Morrison’s face.
“Shh,” I whispered. “There’s lots of sick people here. Yelling makes bad juju. You don’t want to make anybody die, do you? Shh.”
In a very modulated tone that did nothing to hide his anger, Morrison demanded, “Are you out of your fucking mind?”
It seemed increasingly likely that I was. I rocked back on my heels, lost my balance and staggered half a step backward, which took me well out of kissing distance, if not out of Morrison’s personal space. One of his hands flashed out and clamped around my biceps, steadying me. I was too startled to answer him.
He didn’t really want me to answer anyway. “What the hell are you doing here? I have this dream,” he charged on as I tried to formulate an answer. “I have this dream that I’ll get up one day and the whole damned world will make sense. Being a practical man, I know that’s not going to happen.” Morrison’s volume was building. “But it seems like I should at least be able to stop by for a visit with a key witness without finding the mechanic I suspended yesterday hanging around a police-protected wing of the hospital!”
I found the wall with one hand and leaned on it, letting Morrison’s crescendo break and wash over me. It took a great deal of careful thought to manage, “I thought I could help.” My voice sounded thick and fuzzy, like I’d been snacking on polar fleece.
“Help? What the hell do you know about helping in a murder investigation? You want to be a mechanic. And even if you wanted to be a police officer-”
I leaned against the wall a little harder, closing my eyes. If he’d only choose one pitch and stay at it, I could probably go to sleep standing here, but the fluctuations in volume forced me to listen to him.
“-I don’t want anyone I’ve suspended to ‘help’ with criminal cases they’re involved in. If you have information that will help, give it to the police and we’ll take it from there. You know that’s how it works, Walker. There’s nothing you can do that we can’t.”
“On the contrary.”
I peeled my eyes open to discover Mrs. Potter had come up the hallway and was standing at Morrison’s elbow, waiting for him to acknowledge her interruption. He glared at her.
“Thank you, ma’am, but I don’t need your opinion right now. You-” The last word was directed at me, and then Morrison’s head snapped back around as he recognized the schoolteacher. “You shouldn’t be on your feet.”
“As I was saying,” Henrietta said equitably, “I believe Miss Walker may be able to do a number of things you can’t.”
The next few hours got very blurry while people asked me the same questions over and over, sometimes several at once and frequently in a staccato series. I kept looking up to see if there was a single hard white light bulb dangling over my head. All I wanted to do was leave. There was something important I had to go think about, but I couldn’t think with all the noise and the yelling and the questions. I needed sleep. The world would make more sense once I’d had some sleep.
What I got instead was Morrison’s scowl and doctors who wanted desperately to know how I’d done what I’d done. I remembered shouting, “I’m not a goddamned faith healer! I don’t talk to God! I’m a mechanic and her goddamned engine was broken!”
