Triptych (Will Trent #1) - Karin Slaughter Page 0,125
the back of the notebook, seeing that the last entry was a week before she went into the hospital for the last time. “She shouldn’t have been doing this. She should’ve been focusing on getting stronger, getting better.”
“Emily knew she wasn’t going to get better,” Kathy told him. “She spent the last days of her life doing exactly what she wanted to do.”
He was really crying now—big, fat tears as he thought about his mother poring over all this information every night, trying to find something, anything, that would get him out.
“She never told me,” John said. “She never told me she was doing this.”
“She didn’t want to get your hopes up,” Joyce said.
He swung around, wondering how long his sister had been standing behind him.
Joyce didn’t look angry when she said, “Kathy, what are you doing?”
“Interfering,” the other woman answered, smiling the way someone smiles when they’ve done something wrong but they know you’ll forgive them.
Kathy said, “I’ll leave you two alone.” She squeezed Joyce’s hand as she walked past her, then pulled the door closed.
John was still holding the notebook, Emily’s life’s work. “Your office is nice,” he said. “And Kathy…”
“How about that?” she said, wryly. “A bona fide homo in the Shelley clan.”
“I bet Dad was proud.”
She snorted a laugh. “Yeah. So happy that he changed his will.”
John clenched his jaw. He didn’t know what he was supposed to say.
“Mama made me promise not to throw those out,” Joyce told him, waving her hand toward the closet. “I wanted to. I wanted to dump them all out in the yard and have a big bonfire. I almost did.” She gave a humorless bark of a laugh, as if she was still surprised she hadn’t torched everything. “I should have. I should have at least put them in a storage place or buried them somewhere.” She let out a heavy sigh. “But I didn’t.”
“Why?”
“Because it’s her. All of those files, all of those stupid notebooks. Did you know she never went anywhere without one?” Joyce added wryly, “Of course you didn’t. She never took them inside when she visited you, but she worked on them, thought about them, the whole way down and the whole way back. Sometimes she’d call me in the middle of the night and ask me to look into some obscure law she found, something she thought might wrangle a new trial for you.” Joyce looked back at the filing cabinets, the notebooks. “It’s like they’re tiny little pieces of her heart, her soul, and if I throw them out now, then I’m throwing her out, too.”
John smoothed his hand along the cover of the notebook. His mother had given her life to him, dedicated her every waking moment to getting him out of Coastal.
All because of Michael Ormewood.
Michael might as well have killed Emily after he finished with Mary Alice. He should have reached into Joyce’s chest and squeezed the life out of her heart. Oh, God, John wanted to kill him. He wanted to beat him senseless, then wrap his hands around Michael’s neck and watch the other man’s eyes as he realized he was going to die. John would loosen his hands, taking him to the edge then bringing him back just to watch the fear, the absolute fucking terror, as Michael realized he was completely helpless. Then, John would just leave him. He’d leave him alone in the middle of nowhere and let him die all by himself.
“John?” Joyce said. She had always been intuitive, always known when something was bothering him.
He opened the notebook again, skimmed his mother’s writing. “What’s this?” he asked. “Bradycardia. What does that mean?”
Joyce walked over to the closet and opened one of the file drawers. “When they arrested you,” she said, “you were too weak to stand on your own.”
“Yeah.” He had been terrified.
“They took you to the hospital. Mom kept insisting something was wrong with you.” She searched through the files. “She made them do an EKG, an EEG, bloodwork, MRI.”
John had a vague recollection of this. “Why?”
“Because she knew that something was wrong.” Joyce finally found what she was looking for. “Here.”
He took the medical report, carefully reading the words while Joyce waited. The numbers on the tests made no sense to him, but John had worked at the prison infirmary. He knew the section to look for. He read aloud from the handwritten doctor’s notes under the box labeled “conclusions.”
“ ‘Resting heart rate below sixty, ataxic breathing and general physical condition