He reaches into his glove box and, with a magician’s flourish, whips out a chocolate Tootsie Pop. This actually brings a smile to my lips.
“How about we get the hell out of here now?” he says.
I nod gratefully.
Michael shuts me into the passenger seat and gets behind the wheel. As I pull the clothes over my underwear, he makes a three-point turn and skids back onto the highway, headed north.
“How did you get down here?” he asks.
“In my car. It’s on the other side of the river.”
“Do we need to get it?”
I would like to have my car back. But to get it, we’d have to cross the ferry at St. Francisville. That’s the only way across the Mississippi River between Natchez and Baton Rouge-other than the ferry at Angola, which is used only for prison business-so it’s an ideal ambush site for whoever was trying to kill me on the island. If the gunman waits for me near my parked Audi, he risks being caught if I bring the cops back with me. But the ferry is a choke point with plausible deniability. If I push my luck and try to cross there, he could get lucky.
“No. I’ll get it tomorrow.”
“Okay. Take it easy now. I’ll have you back in Natchez in an hour.”
I recline my seat and take a few deep breaths. With the air conditioner on, I feel like I’m resting in a suite at the Windsor Court.
“I don’t want to pry into your business,” Michael says, “but what the hell happened to you today? You sounded bad when you called my office this afternoon.”
“I got some bad news.”
“Okay.”
He doesn’t ask for details, but I don’t see much point in holding back the rest of it. “Just before I called you, I found out that I was sexually abused as a child.”
He nods slowly. “I thought it must be something like that, when you asked about repressed memories. I’ve been reading up on the subject today. You got me curious.”
I’ve been in this vehicle less than five minutes, but already my head feels fuzzy. “We can talk about it,” I murmur. “I just need to rest my eyes for a little bit.”
“Cat? Wake up!”
I blink awake and look around. I’m sitting in a truck in a brightly lit garage
“Where are we?”
“My house,” Michael says. “In Brookwood.”
“Oh.”
“I wasn’t sure where you wanted to go. I tried to ask you, but you wouldn’t wake up. I stopped by my office for some sutures, then brought you here. Let’s get that cut stitched up. Then I’ll take you to your grandfather’s house.”
Nathan Malik’s words come back to me like a brand burned into my brain:
“You don’t have to. I’ll take you wherever you want to go. Or you can stay here. I’ve got three extra bedrooms. It’s up to you.”
I nod thanks but say nothing. I don’t know what I want to do. I definitely want my leg stitched up. It hurts like hell, and stitching means local anesthetic. At least I hope it does. “Did you bring some lidocaine?”
Michael shakes his head. “Nah. I figured anybody who can free dive to three hundred feet can handle a couple of stitches without breaking a sweat.”
He looks serious, but after a few moments of eye contact, he reaches into his pocket and brings out a vial of clear liquid.
“The magic elixir,” he says with a smile. “Let’s do it.”
Michael sutures my leg while I sit on the cold granite of his kitchen island. The gleaming room reminds me of Arthur LeGendre’s kitchen, only there’s no corpse lying on the floor. Michael’s house was built in the 1970s, and until Mrs. Hemmeter sold it, the decor was original to the house. Avocado green appliances and heavy brown paneling like that in my old bedroom. Michael has totally redone the place, and with surprisingly good taste for a bachelor.
“This reminds me of my grandfather stitching me up on the island when I cut my knee,” I tell him as he pulls the Ethicon through my skin with a curved needle.
“I guess he always carried his black bag with him?”
“Oh, he has a whole clinic down there. When my aunt Ann was ten years old, the family got trapped on the island in a storm. She had a hot appendix. Grandpapa removed it by lantern light with one of the island women assisting him. That’s one of his hero stories, but it’s pretty impressive.”
Michael nods and continues stitching. “You’d be surprised what you can do when conditions demand it. I’ve been on a few medical mission trips to South America…saw some unbelievable things. OBs sterilizing women one after another in the open air. They stretch them out on benches, cut them open, clip their tubes with special plastic clips, and close them up again.”
“Jesus.”
He laughs. “I wouldn’t recommend it to a suburban housewife, but it does the job.”
Medical mission trips. I have a feeling there’s a lot more to Michael Wells than most people know. “I like what you’ve done with this house.”
“Do you? Your mom did most of it.”
“You’re kidding.”
“No, when I first got to town, I was too busy to breathe, much less decorate a house. I stopped by Gwen’s interior design store one afternoon and hired her to do the whole place.”
“Now I’m not sure I like it.”
He laughs. “You don’t get along with your mother?”
“We do, as long as we don’t see too much of each other.”
He ties off the last stitch, then lays his forceps on the countertop. “You hungry?”
“Starving.”
“Steak and eggs?”
“Are you ordering out?”
“No.” He goes to the refrigerator and brings out a package of rib eyes. “Go sit on that sofa. You’ll be digging into this in twenty minutes.”
The sofa sits against the wall beyond a round table in the dining area. Too far away for conversation, or even to watch Michael cooking. Given my earlier experiences today, I don’t really want to lie on the couch and let my mind wander.
Sliding off the counter, I sit on a barstool and watch Michael. It’s strange to have a man cook for me, though Sean sometimes boils crawfish in my backyard.
“You want to talk about today?” Michael asks, meeting my gaze long enough to let me know he’s genuinely concerned.
“It isn’t just today. It’s the past month. It’s my whole life, really.”
“Can you give me the gist in twenty minutes?”
I laugh. And then I start talking. I start with my panic attack at the Nolan crime scene, the one prior to Arthur LeGendre’s house. That leads me to LeGendre, then to Carmen Piazza removing me from the task force, and then to my trip back to Natchez and to finding the bloody footprints in my bedroom. I’m talking on autopilot, though, because what I’m really doing is watching Michael cook. He’s good with his hands, and I can tell from the way he uses them that he’s a good doctor. He asks questions during my pauses, and before long I’m telling him about the depression that began in high school, the mania that followed, and my serial monogamy with married men. He’s a good listener, only I can’t tell what he makes of all this. He looks as though he’s hearing nothing out of the ordinary, but inside he may already regret rescuing this particular damsel in distress.
When the steaks and eggs are done, we move to the glass dining table, but I do as much talking as eating. I can’t seem to stop. The funny thing is, he doesn’t try to force me to eat, as most men would. He just keeps watching my eyes, as if they’re telling him as much as my words. I tell him about my father, Grandpapa, Pearlie, my
