grandkids dead!” Reba shouted. A doctor writing in a chart at the nurses’ station looked up as if wondering what the hubbub was about. He put his finger to his lips to hush us.
“Did Jacob ever tell you that he had trouble with Myles?” I said softly. “Had Myles made any threats?”
“No,” Michael insisted. “Laurel was a virtuous wife to our son, Clara. She was—”
“Trouble,” Reba said, finishing her husband’s sentence.
“How trouble?” I asked.
“I don’t know how, but she was,” she insisted. “When you have a man who loves a woman like Myles Thompkins loved Laurel, and she marries another, there’s bound to be bad blood.”
“Reba, please!” her husband begged. “Gossip is the devil’s work.”
“This isn’t gossip, Michael,” I explained. “If I’m going to solve this case, I need to know everything you and Reba can tell me that might lead me to the killer.”
“But it’s not true,” Michael pleaded. “Laurel would never have kept up a relationship with another man. Any other man. The murders have nothing to do with that.”
“How do we know?” his wife pushed, her voice coarse with emotion and her lips curling in anger. “We weren’t there to see what happened, were we?”
“We know because that wasn’t our daughter-in-law,” Michael said. “Laurel did nothing to bring this terrible event to bear.”
I wondered what to think, who to believe, and then Reba Johansson said, “If Myles and Laurel weren’t still involved with each other, why were they together just two days ago? On Saturday.”
“Myles and Laurel were together? On Saturday?” I repeated.
“We have no first-hand knowledge of this, but, yes, that’s what we heard,” Michael conceded.
“Heard from whom?” I asked.
“One of your mothers, Clara. Naomi Jefferies saw them together. She told us,” Reba said. “You just missed her. She was here to check on Jacob. She only left fifteen minutes or so ago to go work at her hives.”
“Naomi was here?” I asked, wondering why she would come to the hospital when she’d been in such a hurry to return the van to my mother.
“Yes, she was,” Michael said. “She still had Jacob’s blood on her dress. She didn’t even go home to change, because she was so worried about our son. We were glad to be able to express our gratitude when she explained how she’d saved his life.”
“And she just left how long ago?” I asked.
“A short time ago,” Reba confirmed. “You’re lucky to have her as one of your mothers, Clara. Naomi is a righteous woman.”
I felt uncertain. Why would Naomi have come to the hospital? It seemed like an odd thing to do under the circumstances, and to not have even taken time to change out of her bloody dress.
At that moment, Carl Shipley angled his head out of the doorway and fixed his eyes on Reba. “Jacob moaned,” Carl said. “I think he’s coming out of it.”
“Oh!” Reba released a small cry, and we all jumped up and rushed into the room. The doctor saw us and followed us in. I stood off to the side, out of the way but close enough to hear anything Jacob might say. His eyes remained closed. Monitors tracked his oxygen, his heartbeat, his pulse. The slit in his trachea had been cleaned up, the edges bandaged, but it remained open, and he made the same horrible gasping sound with each breath.
“What did he do that you thought he might be coming out of it?” the doctor asked.
“A noise kind of like this,” Carl said, imitating a long, drawn-out groan. “I said his name, and, I’m not sure, but I thought that his eyes moved behind the lids. There was kind of a flutter.”
The doctor took a penlight from the pocket of his blue scrubs, flicked it on, and then pried open Jacob’s eyelids and assessed his pupils. He moved the light from one eye to the other to see if Jacob’s eyes reacted. Whatever the doctor saw, it made his frown grow. He turned off the light and slipped it back into his pocket. “The sound he made was probably just a muscular reaction,” he said. “He’s still unconscious.”
“Is it a good sign, that he made some kind of a noise?” Reba asked. She’d moved over to stand next to Carl, and they had their arms protectively around one another, like a mother might with a son.
“It’s too early to tell how much damage your son has suffered,” the doctor said. “Jacob lost a lot of blood.”