“Who do you want to call?” Vince asked.
“That’s not one of your business.”
He looked at me. “She’s going to call Jeremy,” he said calmly. “She wants to warn him. That’s not such a good idea.”
“What about Clayton?” I asked her. “Is Clayton Sloan actually Clayton Bigge? Are they one and the same person?”
“Let me use the phone,” she repeated, almost hissing like a snake.
Vince held on to the chair. I said to him, “You can’t just hold her like that. It’s, like, kidnapping, or confinement, or something.”
“That’s right!” Enid Sloan said. “You can’t do this, you can’t barge into an old lady’s house and hold her like this!”
Vince let go of the chair. “Then use the phone, to call the police,” he said, repeating my bluff. “Forget about calling your son. Call the cops.”
The chair did not move.
“I need to go to the hospital,” I said to Vince. “I want to see Clayton Sloan.”
“He’s very sick,” Enid said. “He can’t be disturbed.”
“Maybe I can disturb him long enough to ask him a couple of questions.”
“You can’t go! Visiting hours are over! And besides, he’s in a coma! He won’t even know you’re there!”
If he were in a coma, I figured, she wouldn’t care whether I went to see him. “Let’s go to the hospital,” I said.
Vince said, “If we leave, she’s going to call Jeremy. Warn him that we’re waiting here to talk to him. I could tie her up.”
“Jesus, Vince,” I said. I couldn’t condone tying up an elderly disabled woman, no matter how unpleasant she seemed. Even if it meant never finding the answers to all my questions. “What if you just stayed here?”
He nodded. “That works. Enid and I can chat, gossip about the neighbors, that kind of thing.” He leaned over so she could see his face. “Won’t that be fun? Maybe we can even have some of that carrot cake. It smells delicious.” Then he reached into his jacket, took out the keys to the truck, and tossed them my way.
I grabbed them out of the air. “What room is he in?” I asked her.
She glared at me.
“Tell me what room he’s in, or I’ll call the cops myself.”
She gave that a moment’s thought, knew that once I got to the hospital I’d probably be able to find out anyway, then said, “Third floor. Room 309.”
Before I left the house, Vince and I exchanged cell phone numbers. I got in his truck, fiddled with getting the key into the ignition. A different vehicle always takes a minute or two to get used to. I turned on the engine, found the lights, then backed into a driveway and turned around. I needed a moment to get my bearings. I knew Lewiston was south of here, and that we’d gone south from the bar, but I didn’t know whether continuing in a southerly direction would get me where I had to go. So I backtracked up Main, cut east, and once I’d found my way back to the highway, headed south.
I took the first exit once I saw the blue “H” in the distance, found my way to the hospital parking lot, and entered by way of the emergency department. There were half a dozen people in the waiting room: a set of parents with a crying baby, a teenage boy with blood soaking through the knee of his jeans, an elderly couple. I walked right through, past the admissions desk, where I saw a sign indicating that visiting hours had ended a couple of hours ago, at eight, and found an elevator to the third floor.
Chances were good that someone was going to stop me at some point, but I figured if I could just make it to Clayton Sloan’s room, I’d be okay.
The elevator doors parted onto the third-floor nurses’ station. There was no one there. I stepped out, paused a moment, then turned left, looking for door numbers. I found 322, discovered the numbers got bigger as I moved on down the hallway. I stopped, went back in the other direction, which was going to take me past the nurses’ station again. A woman was standing with her back to me, reading a chart, and I walked past as noiselessly as possible.
I looked for numbers again. The hallway turned left, and the first door I came to was 309. The door was partly ajar, the room mostly in darkness except for a neon light mounted to the wall next to the bed.
It was a private room, one bed. A curtain obscured all but the foot of the bed, where a clipboard hung on a metal frame. I took a few steps in, beyond the curtain, and saw that there was a man in the bed, on his back, slightly raised, fast asleep. In his seventies, I guessed. Emaciated-looking, thinned hair. From chemo, maybe. His breathing was raspy. His arms lay at his sides, his fingers long and white and bony.
I moved around to the far side of the bed, where the curtain gave me cover from the hallway. There was a chair near the head of the bed, and when I sat down, I was able to make myself even more invisible to anyone passing by the room.
I studied Clayton Sloan’s face, searching for something there that I was unable to find when I looked at Enid Sloan’s. Something about his nose, perhaps, a trace of cleft in his chin. I reached out and gently touched the man’s exposed arm, and he made a slight snorting noise.
“Clayton,” I whispered.
He sniffed, wiggled his nose about unconsciously.
“Clayton,” I whispered again, rubbing his leathery skin softly back and forth. Inside his elbow a tube ran into his arm. An IV drip of some kind.
His eyes fluttered open, and he sniffed again. He saw me, blinked hard a couple of times, let his eyes adjust and focus.
“Wha…”
“Clayton Bigge?” I said.
That not only brought his eyes into focus, but made him turn his head more sharply. The fleshy folds of his neck bunched together. “Who are you?” he whispered.
“Your son-in-law,” I said.
41
As he swallowed I watched his Adam’s apple bob along the length of his throat. “My what?” he said.
“Your son-in-law,” I said. “I’m Cynthia’s husband.”
He opened his mouth to speak, and I could see how dry his mouth was. “Would you like a drink of water?” I asked quietly. He nodded. There was a pitcher and glass next to the bed, and I poured him some water. There was a straw on the table, and I put it to his lips, holding the glass for him.
“I can do it,” he said, grasping the glass and sipping from the straw. He took the glass with more strength than I expected. He licked his lips, handed the glass back to me.
“What time is it?” he asked.
“After ten,” I said. “I’m sorry to wake you. You were sleeping pretty good there.”
“No harm,” he said. “They’re always waking you up here anyway, all times of the day and night.”
He took a deep breath through his nostrils, let the air out slowly. “So,” he said. “Am I supposed to know what you’re talking about?”
“I think you do,” I said. “You’re Clayton Bigge.”
Another deep breath. Then, “I’m Clayton Sloan.”
“I believe you are,” I said. “But I think you’re also Clayton Bigge, who was married to Patricia Bigge, who had a son named Todd and a daughter named Cynthia, and you lived in Milford, Connecticut, until one night in 1983, when something very terrible happened.”
He looked away from me and stared at the curtain. He made a fist with the hand lying at his side, opened his fingers, clenched again.
“I’m dying,” he said.
