“We didn’t talk about why she was here. We didn’t talk much at all. She stood over by the window. Then she got up and left and went down the hall. I could hear the footsteps. Or not. I don’t know. There was something about her leaving. And I got angry.”
“Did you? At something she said to you?”
“Not exactly.” Depression was different from being tired. When you were tired, you just wanted to sleep. When you were depressed, it was as if you had been weighted down with lead. You tried to get up, and there was too much weight you had to pull with you, weight that didn’t belong to you.
“I was angry a lot the last few weeks,” he said. “Since we got back from Vegas. We got back. Listen to me.”
“It was ‘we,’ ” Linda said. “You all went out together. You all came back together.”
“It still wasn’t ‘we,’ ” Jack said. “And it doesn’t matter, I guess. But she was here, and she was being a pain, and then she left. And I got so angry I got up. I know I wasn’t supposed to get up, because of the hand—”
“It wasn’t because of the hand,” Linda said. “It was because of the drugs. You’d been given some kind of drug. Too much of it, Mike Ingleford said.”
“I know.” Really, Jack thought. Lead weights. It was exactly as if somebody had sewn lead weights into the skin of his back and the back of his legs. “It was because it was the wrong drug. People who don’t know anything about drugs don’t know how they work. They pick the wrong ones for the job they want to do. Do you see what I mean?”
“Yes,” Linda said.
“It doesn’t matter,” Jack said. “I knew all about the drug. I just got angry and I thought I’d catch her, I’d catch up with her, I’d talk to her. So I got out of bed. It was really hard. I got myself out of bed and then it was hard to walk. I was stumbling all over myself. I don’t know why I kept on with it. I just kept going. It was like that.”
“Did you catch up to her?”
“I called out to her and she heard me and she stopped. That was right at the fire doors. I’ve been wondering all morning where Leslie was. I mean, it’s not like this ward is a busy place. It’s empty. She must have heard me. Leslie must have heard me. Kendra heard me. Why didn’t Leslie come?”
“She was in the bathroom or something,” Linda said.
“And then things got crazy. Marcey Mandret found her. Found Kendra Rhode. And the silly twit, instead of getting somebody at the hospital to do something, she ran all the way across town to the inn and blurted the whole thing out to a press conference full of idiots. And then you had, you know, what’s been on television all day.”
“There’s supposed to be something else on the Internet,” Jack said. “They’ve been talking about it all morning, but they won’t show it. I passed out on the floor. In the corridor. I just lay down and went out like a light.”
“I know,” Linda said.
“I wish they’d say whether it was an accident or murder,” Jack said. “I just wish they’d say. I was so angry. It’s almost as if my anger reached out and broke her neck.”
“They’re never going to know what broke her neck,” Linda said. “The paparazzi stormed the scene, and it was contaminated, and now they can’t get any evidence at all. It wouldn’t matter if you’d stuck a knife in her heart. They couldn’t catch you on it.”
“I didn’t stick a knife in her heart.”
“I know,” Linda said.
“I know who did this to my hand,” Jack said. “I knew at the time. I know who gave me the drugs. They don’t make you forget things, the drugs. They don’t put you all the way out until the end.”
“Carl Frank came to see me,” Linda said. Then she got up out of the chair and walked to the window where Jack had last seen Kendra standing. She was not like Kendra. Not even a little bit.
Up on the television set, the issue was now whether or not Kendra Rhode had had a will, which it was possible she had had, since she came from a wealthy family, and had money of her own, and lawyers, who would insist. The talk went on and on, filling up time, filling up space. There was a war in Iraq and trouble in the economy and wildfires in California and it was as if none of it was happening. The only thing anybody wanted to talk about was Kendra Rhode, and what had happened to her.
“I should have gone to law school,” Jack said.
“What?”
“I should have gone to law school. That’s what most people do when they go to a good college and get a degree in history. Law school. A partnership somewhere. I thought about it. I really did. It just seemed too, I don’t know. Too everyday. I wanted something more… significant, I guess. Something that would mean something.”