mother and daughter had died in the course of the night.
I sat in the waiting area for a while with a magazine on my lap, hoping no one would talk to me, feeling sick at heart.
When my mind finally began functioning again, I was almost sorry. My thoughts were all unpleasant ones. Could it really be a coincidence that Beverly Rillington, who had threatened Angel publicly, and Angel’s husband Shelby had both been admitted to the hospital with head wounds in the same week?
Finally I roused myself to find Shelby’s room, and knocked gently on the door. Angel stuck her head out.
“How is he?” I whispered.
“Come in.”
Shelby looked horrible. He was asleep, but Angel told me in a low voice that the doctor had said he must not sleep long at a stretch. He had to be woken up periodically. There was a good reason for this, but my overloaded system didn’t absorb it.
“He didn’t see whoever did it, Roe, he doesn’t remember anything since he ate supper last night. He didn’t remember putting on his clothes and his raincoat, or why he thought he ought to go outside ...”
I stared at Shelby while Angel murmured on and on. She was chatty with relief now that she was reasonably sure Shelby was going to recover.
Shelby’s face was stubbly with unshaven beard, a state I’d seen before, but the skin underneath the bristles was a distressing gray. The hair protruding from underneath the bandage was matted with blood and stringy from drying with rainwater on it. There was a huge dark bruise on his right arm, which Angel thought was a defense wound. Shelby had taken a blow on that arm defending his own head, but it hadn’t worked a second time. One of his ribs was broken, too, Angel said... he’d been kicked when he was down.
I didn’t have to look at Angel to know she would kill whoever had done this to Shelby if she could find him.
After a while, Angel ran down. She stood looking at Shelby as if her eyes could glue him to her, as if his life could not escape him if she were there to make sure it stayed.
I was thinking my own thoughts. Why hadn’t Shelby heard the attack coming? He’d made his living as a bodyguard for years. He was tough and quick and ruthless. Had the sound of the rain and wind dulled Shelby’s senses, so the approach of the trespasser was totally unexpected?
Or had he turned to see someone he knew, someone he did not think of as an enemy?
Chapter Seven
Normally, when Martin returned from a business trip I got to tell him about the kid who threw up on the Berenstain Bears book, or what the plumber had told me when he’d come to repair the hot water heater.
When he walked in the front door late that afternoon, I hardly knew where to begin. As it turned out, Martin had stopped at the Pan-Am Agra plant, so he already knew that Shelby was in the hospital. After his first anxious questions, he settled down to listen with that total concentration that made him such a good executive.
I think Martin was just as shocked by Angel’s pregnancy as by Shelby being attacked in our front yard. And when I told him about the ribbon around Madeleine’s neck and the deaths of Beverly and Selena Rillington, he had to get up and walk around the kitchen.
It was still raining, and I watched the drops hit the large window by the table where Martin and I usually ate, the window overlooking the side of the garage and the steps up to the apartment, as well as some lovely pink azaleas hidden now by the darkness. The drops might hit at random, but they ran down the glass with monotonous regularity. The rain increased my sense of being stockaded against the danger outside, besieged.
Martin strode through the dining room, out into the living room, back through the archway into the dining room. He circled the table and shot back into the kitchen again, stopping by the window to stare out into the blackness.
“Who sent the flowers?” he asked abruptly, and I glanced into the dining room to see that they were still in their vase on the table. A few blossoms were shriveling, and one or two bits of baby’s breath had fallen to the polished surface of the old table.
The delivery of the flowers seemed so long ago I’d forgotten about it