Unfortunately, he had nowhere to go and all Delroy had to wear was the backless pink hospital gown, covered by a lime green bathrobe intended for a much smaller man. They had no slippers his size. Sitting in the waiting room, trying to figure out his next move, he’d drawn a lot of suspicious stares. The fact that his personal items—his wallet, his rings, and his watch—were in a clear plastic bag in his lap didn’t help matters.
Turning his head at the sound of the booming voice and the blunt declaration, Delroy spotted the deputy who had brought him to the hospital standing a short distance away. He wasn’t wearing his rain coat now, though he still wore boots that had been mostly wiped clean of mud. The sheriff’s badge on his chest stood out and attracted the attention of the people in the waiting room.
The deputy came closer, eyeing Delroy skeptically. “They tell me you’re gonna live.”
“I am,” Delroy admitted.
“Must be a lotta tough packed in all that tall.”
Personally, Delroy didn’t feel all that tough. He felt cold and weak. A headache slammed ceaselessly at his temples, and his eyes and nose burned.
After the triage nurses had started Delroy on the paperwork, the deputy had left. That had made Delroy feel somewhat relieved. He wasn’t sure if he could be arrested for trying to dig up Terrence’s grave, but if the deputy wasn’t around to arrest him that was a good thing.
Only now the man was back, not ten minutes after the doctor had pronounced Delroy fit enough and sent him to the waiting room. All it would have taken was a brief phone call to let the deputy know Delroy had been released and outfitted in a bathrobe. His wet clothing sat in a plastic bag next to his chair.
Delroy hesitated. “Am I in some kind of trouble?”
The deputy rubbed his chin thoughtfully as if giving the question real consideration. “A man sleeping in a graveyard in a rainstorm. When he ain’t drunk—I know that ’cause I asked the doc about your tox screen, by the way—I figure that man must be in some kind of trouble.”
“I wasn’t drinking,” Delroy said.
“My first assumption was that you’d gotten out there and tied one on,” the deputy admitted. “These here times, why they’ve been purely tryin’ on everybody. Seen a lotta good folks these past few days trying to find some way to just get through it all. Drinking seems to be high on the list of some of ’em.” He rubbed his hands together and shrugged. “Imagine my surprise when you hadn’t been on a bender.” He paused.
“But you have been in a fight.” He sucked on his lower lip, and sharp accusation gleamed in his eyes. “Yes, sir, you have been in a fight.”
Caution filled Delroy. The deputy’s demeanor was deceiving; all down-home, good old boy one minute, and steel-trap mind the next.
“The reason I know you’ve been in a fight,” the officer continued, “is your face and your hands. Your face, all bruised up like it is, lets me know somebody whomped you pretty good.”
Delroy let that pass without comment. The deputy had delivered the statement baldly in an effort to elicit response.
“But your hands—” The deputy crossed over to Delroy and picked up his hands in both of his. Although the deputy was shorter, his hands were as long and a little broader and thicker than Delroy’s. The man could have filled gallon paint buckets with those hands. “Yes, sir, your hands tell me you give out about as good as you got.”
Looking down at his hands, Delroy saw the split skin and abrasions over his knuckles, and the deep bruising and swelling that accompanied those injuries. As a chaplain and counselor, he’d been trained to look for signs just like those when he suspected men aboard ship had been fighting.
“I was attacked,” Delroy said.
The deputy released his hands. “In the graveyard?”
“Aye. Something—” Delroy caught his mistake immediately—“someone attacked me.”
“You know this someone?”
“No,” Delroy answered, and the lie wasn’t completely a lie. He thought he knew what the creature was, but he had no name for it.
“One or more attackers?”
“One.”
The deputy squinted and made an obvious show of sizing Delroy up. “You’re a big man. I’d want to think twice about jumping you even in the dark if I was alone. Take a pretty big fella to fight you chest to chest and belt buckle to belt buckle.”
“I don’t know what to tell you.”
“I saw your hands when I checked you into the hospital,” the deputy said. “Had a couple things to do here in town, so I went back out to the cemetery. Saw a tore-up piece of ground where it looked like two bulls had been fighting; it hadn’t quite washed away in the rain. That was near your son’s grave.”
Delroy nodded. “That was where it happened.”
“I really went out there expecting to find a body. Surprised me when there wasn’t one.”
“Whoever did it walked away.” Or vanished, Delroy silently amended.
“You don’t know who did it?”
“No.”
“You see that person again, you think you’d recognize him?”
“No.” And that was the truth. Every time Delroy saw the creature it looked a little different. He also knew it could look human if it wanted to. In fact, he suddenly realized that the creature could look like a deputy sheriff if it wanted to.
“Too bad. I hate unanswered questions. They tend to stick in my mind and I worry at ‘em like a dog with a bone. One thing I found out, though:
