And There He Kept Her (Ben Packard #1)(79)
***
Susan had a private room on the hospital’s second floor. Packard wondered if it was the one Patty Gherlick had been discharged from earlier in the day. One floor up, Shannon Gherlick was sleeping or nervously waiting for the rehab van that would take her away in just a few hours.
The doctors had given Susan something to help her sleep. Packard sat in the chair beside her bed in the dark room and didn’t wake her. From what he’d gathered, Susan had fallen asleep behind the wheel and driven her car into a ditch. She had a broken nose from the airbag. Her eyes were already turning black.
He finally nodded off and was awakened when someone tapped him on the shoulder. Karen Roth—the woman who had asked him on a date at the carnival—was standing in front of him in navy-blue nurse’s scrubs.
“What are you doing here?” she whispered. She looked put out by the sight of him. Their encounters on the job were awkward after he never her called for that date. They’d hardly crossed paths since she’d quit her EMT job and moved to nursing.
Packard looked out the window and wiped his face. “Waiting for her to wake up. What time is it?”
“It’s seven thirty. Shift change. I’m coming on. Is she your… Are you guys dating?”
Packard shook his head. “She’s my cousin.”
Karen said, “I was gonna say…”
“You were gonna say what?” Packard asked. “That you thought I was gay?”
“Well, aren’t you?”
Packard shrugged. “Under the right circumstances, I guess.”
Karen rolled her eyes and wrote her name as the nurse on duty on the whiteboard across from Susan’s bed. “You guess. Under the right circumstances—Gwyneth Paltrow and two bottles of chardonnay—I might step a foot over the line, but I’m not gay. No guessing about it.”
“All right, yes, I am,” Packard said. “I should have told you. I was trying to keep it on a need-to-know basis. When I first moved here, I didn’t think anyone needed to know.”
“I’ve got news for you. It’s a small town. Everybody knows,” she said.
“It’s not news. I’ve heard.”
Karen woke Susan so she could take her blood pressure and give her a pill. On her way out, she slugged Packard in the arm. “You ‘guess,’” she repeated, shaking her head. She was smiling.
Susan hadn’t said anything. She blinked slowly, and for a second Packard thought she was asleep again.
“Sean called you,” she said as she struggled to keep her eyes open.
“He did. Tell me what happened.”
“I was out looking for Jenny and Jesse. I’ve been going out every night after the restaurant closes. I fell asleep at the wheel.”
“Susan, you don’t need to do that. You need to take care of yourself and get some rest. I’m going to find Jenny.”
He had no right promising such a thing, no matter how confident he was in his abilities or what leads remained to be followed. They both knew people went missing and stayed missing.
Susan turned her head and looked out the window. “Something bigger is going to come along and you’ll have to move on. You’re not the Wheeler family’s personal deputy.”
Packard scooted the chair closer and reached for her hand. “Hey, look at me. This isn’t going to be like it was with Nick. Those guys didn’t care. We were out-of-towners back then, and Nick was just another case to them. That’s not going to happen with Jenny. I won’t let it. We still have leads to follow. I’m still looking.”
Susan studied his face. “What was the worst part of Nick’s disappearance for you?” she asked.
Packard didn’t have to think. “It was that we’d spent our last moments together fighting. We fought all the time. I was still a kid and he was practically an adult. I always wanted to hang out with him and he didn’t want me around. I acted like a total shit that night. We fought, he took off…and I never saw my brother again.”
“I would have thought it was the not knowing. All these years with no answers.”
“Mom says he’s alive until it’s proven he’s not. I wish I had the same faith.”
Susan closed her eyes. “Faith doesn’t produce results. Actions are what will find my daughter. I went to you for help; I’m hanging flyers and looking for her myself. If we don’t find her soon, I’ll think of something else. I’m not going to sit around and rely on hope.”
“I’m not asking you to have faith in me, Susan. I’m asking you to believe me when I say that I’m not going to quit looking.”
Susan didn’t say anything. She pulled her hand away from his and turned her head. In a minute she was asleep.
***
Packard left the hospital, driving home into the sunrise, hoping a swim would keep him going after being up most of the night.
The water was still bracingly cold. Shannon Gherlick’s words came back to him as he did his laps.
You go for an ice-cold swim in the lake every day because you’ve got no one to get you off.
He’d never thought of his morning swim as a cold shower before. Maybe she was right.
Sitting in the sauna, he realized he had no plan for the day. Thielen was going to meet the woman from Lutheran Social Services in charge of Meals on Wheels. They could pull a list of all the people Sam ever visited. They might find the eighty-milligram oxy user that way, but their user might also have never been registered for Meals on Wheels.