The Thunder Keeper(15)

“Excuse me,” Vicky said.

The woman barely lifted her eyes. Vicky could see traces of pink scalp beneath the gray curls.

“Has Vince Lewis been brought in?”

“One moment,” the woman said, pulling a clipboard out from the newspaper and running a finger down a column of names. “Vincent R. Lewis,” she said without looking up. “He was just brought in.”

“How is he?”

“You family?” Eyes still on the clipboard, as if the response was bound to be positive, but the question had to be asked. Regulations had to be followed.

“No.”

The gray head snapped back, and the woman peered up at her. “I can only give information to a family member.”

“You don’t understand. I saw what happened.”

The woman seemed to study her a moment, making up her mind. Finally she reached across the opened newspaper and picked up a phone. “Your name?”

Vicky gave her name.

“You can wait over there.” She nodded toward an area across the hall from the steel doors while simultaneously pressing some keys on the phone.

Vicky walked over to the waiting area, the woman’s voice trailing behind: “Someone named Vicky Holden’s here about the hit-and-run victim. Says she saw the accident.”

There was a stale odor of hopelessness in the waiting room that permeated the gray carpet, the worn chairs, the tables with thumbed-through magazines scattered across the top. A pop machine and ice maker hummed in the far corner. Vicky sank into the chair inside the entrance, ignoring the young couple seated side by side across the room, the look of relief and expectancy in their faces, as if news of another tragedy might lighten the burden of their own. She didn’t want to trade stories. She wanted to think. On the other side of the steel doors, a man who had been on his way to see her could be dying.

And it was no coincidence. She knew it with the cold certainty that gripped her when a witness was lying on the stand. She had never tried to explain the knowing, never tried to fix a name—sixth sense, intuition—the way white people did. She accepted that she knew.

“I demand to see Vince Lewis.” The sound of a man’s voice, angry and insistent, came from around the corner. Vicky stood up and walked back into the corridor. A short, broad-backed man in a gray suit, gray raincoat bundled under one arm, pounded a fist on the desk.

“I’m sorry, sir, but if you’re not family—” The receptionist was gripping the newspaper. She looked as if she might burst into tears.

“I’m his employer. Tell your superior I have the right to see him.”

“Are you Nathan Baider?” Vicky walked over.

The man whirled about, the blue eyes sizing her up, she felt, then dismissing her: Indian woman. He looked younger than she’d thought at first, despite the red puffiness in his cheeks and the two vertical creases between his eyes. “Do I know you?” he barked.

“Vicky Holden. I had an appointment with Mr. Lewis this afternoon.”

The man continued staring. “Yes, I’m Nathan Baider,” he said finally. “You saw Vince this afternoon?”

Vicky shook her head. “I was on my way to meet him when he was hit.”

“You a friend of his?” Still trying to place her, Vicky thought.

She began explaining: she was an attorney at Howard and Fergus; Lewis had called—

He held up a fleshy hand. “We have a law firm that handles company legal business.” As he started to turn back to the desk, something behind her caught his attention.

“Jana,” he called, stepping past her.

Vicky glanced around. A woman with stylishly cut auburn hair pushed behind her ears and a determined control in the perfectly made-up face was coming down the corridor, her long black raincoat hanging open over a black dress.

“Dastardly thing to happen,” Baider said, taking her hand. “Don’t worry. I’ll see that the doctors do everything possible.”

“Where is he?” The woman withdrew her hand and walked over to the receptionist. “Where is my husband?” she said in a tone accustomed to being obeyed.

Baider was at her side again. “This is Lewis’s wife,” he said. “I demand that you take us in.”

The gray-haired woman hesitated, then got to her feet, maintaining a space between herself and the stocky man as she came around the desk. She walked over to the steel doors and leaned into the intercom panel, throwing nervous glances over one shoulder. A buzzing noise sounded, and she pushed the doors open. Without waiting for the couple, who fell in behind, she headed down a corridor lit like an aquarium and lined with gurneys and steel poles that dangled plastic bottles. Slowly the steel doors closed.