The Storm King(38)
“I’m telling you—”
“Yes, that you’re fine. Other than the concussion. Other than the bruise to your brain that you got when a random hoodlum smashed you over the head with a stepladder. I don’t suppose you asked him why he was carrying a stepladder around in the dead of night in the middle of a hurricane?”
“I’m alive. I’m not going to die. I’ll get a second opinion on the CT scan as soon as I get home, just to be safe.”
“I wish you’d never gone back there.”
“That makes two of us.” His first real lie to her. They were quiet together for a few moments. “But I really am fine.”
“I’m actually glad now that you didn’t drive there. But taking a bus back is ridiculous. Can’t you fly from Albany or something? Or are you even supposed to fly with a concussion? God, then there’s this damn hurricane.”
“I’ll figure it out, love. You need your sleep now. Solo monkey duty and all.”
“Don’t worry your sweet little head about all this complicated medical business, dear,” Meg said in her grumbling facsimile of Nate’s voice.
“Exactly right, dear.” Even woken from a dead sleep by an emergency call, she could make him smile.
“Be more careful, please?” Meg said after some silence.
“Believe me, if I see another stepladder, I’m running in the opposite direction.”
“I’m serious, Nate.”
And he knew she was.
“Come back here the fastest, safest way you can, as soon as you can.”
“I will, love. I promise I will.”
They said their goodbyes, and when Nate hung up, the waiting room seemed colder and emptier than it had been.
He was tired but actually did feel mostly fine. The stitches on his scalp felt tight, but he hardly had a headache. He was cold, though. The hospital was refrigerated, and his clothes were still wet.
While he waited for Grams and the CT technician, Nate tried to sear the details of the vandals he’d tussled with into his memory. He’d caught only the edge of the boy’s profile, but he thought he’d have a decent shot at identifying the girl. The light hadn’t been great, but he guessed her age somewhere between thirteen and fifteen. That put her between eighth grade and sophomore year.
In Nate’s day, Greystone Lake’s school district had hovered at around a hundred students a grade. The classes were probably larger now, but it still wouldn’t take him long to go through a yearbook.
He could find this girl. Once he did, he’d have them all. He’d know everything they knew.
Outside, sirens crescendoed, and Nate guessed he wouldn’t be alone in these fluorescent halls for much longer.
His phone startled him with a sound like that of a live cat being skinned. He’d hoped it would survive getting wet, but this looked increasingly unlikely. It wouldn’t even display the name of the incoming caller.
“Hello?”
“Nate, thank Christ you have your phone on. You’ve got to get to the hospital.”
“Tom?”
An ambulance shrieked to a stop outside the emergency entrance, its revolving lights blazing through the automatic doors.
“Dad just called. There’s been an accident.”
“I’m already here. I’m fine, though.”
Police and paramedics were clustered like a fist around a stretcher they ran through the doors.
“There was an explosion at the Union. I don’t know much, but—”
Nate missed everything else Tom said. He repeated the words he’d heard to himself. He rearranged them and tried all kinds of punctuation, but couldn’t find a way to make them mean anything else. The smell of smoke entered the room with the emergency squad.
He would have recognized the form on the stretcher anywhere, but he still searched it for proof of identity.
The scuffed shoes, the singed strips of a cardigan.
Her familiar hands, charred and blistered.
His grandmother’s blackened face under the fogged plastic of an oxygen mask.
Eight
Ten percent of Grams’s body had second-and third-degree burns. She had a fractured spine and two cracked ribs. She’d been unconscious when they found her and had yet to wake up.
From interrogating police and paramedics, Nate constructed a skeleton of what had happened.
His best guess was that Grams had been on her way to Bonaparte Street to get him dry clothes when she drove by the Union and noticed that its lights were on. The pub should have been locked up hours ago. She’d had the foresight to call the police before entering the place to investigate.
Perhaps things in the bar and eating areas of the pub looked as they were supposed to, but she’d been drawn to the kitchen. When she opened its swinging doors, she’d breathed fresh life into an oxygen-starved fire that smoldered there. This triggered a flare-up powerful enough to knock her across the room. An officer, responding to her call, saw the explosion and pulled her free of the blazing pub.
Nate had seen her chart. They were keeping her fluids up and were worried about her lungs. Her face was blistered, her hands and arms ravaged, and she’d fractured two vertebrae. Nate couldn’t shake the smell that had accompanied her arrival at the hospital. Melting plastic and burned food. He’d washed his face a dozen times, but couldn’t flush it from his nostrils.