True Evil

CHAPTER 18

It was nearly dark in Natchez, but the stadium lights of three baseball fields had turned the surrounding park into an emerald island in the night. Chris had seen no further sign of Alex Morse, but he sensed that she was close. He had delayed going home to give himself time to think, but he wasn't going to get that time. After moping by the fence for a few minutes, Thora was now making her way up to him in the bleachers, two sweating bottles of Dasani in her hands. Chris had chosen a seat on the top bench, hoping to avoid endless recitations of medical symptoms. Thora spoke to every patient she passed, and they responded with the effusive welcome reserved for the wives of physicians on whom they depended.

"Are you going to tell me what's wrong?" Thora whispered, sitting beside him at last.

"Nothing," he said, staring straight ahead. "I just don't like to lose."

She set one of the bottles on the bench seat. "Seems like more than that."

"Nope."

Leaning toward him, Thora kept her eyes forward and spoke in a low voice. "I thought the prospect of sex would get you home early, win or lose."

He looked at her then. When she turned to him, Chris saw unfamiliar lines of tension around her eyes. "What did you do today?" he asked.

She drew back slightly. "That's a quick transition."

He shrugged.

"The usual things," Thora said, looking back toward the field. "I ran, I swam, I worked out at Mainstream. Then lunch. Then I argued with the contractors and bought a few things for my trip."

Chris almost said, "How did lunch go?" but instead he asked, "What's happening with the contractors?"

Thora shrugged, then clapped for a St. Stephens boy who'd hit a double. "Same old, same old. Delays on the woodwork, change orders. They want more money in advance."

Chris nodded but said nothing.

On the next pitch, Ben's friend C.J. cracked the ball out to the right-field fence, driving in the run and scoring a triple.

"Dad!" Ben cried from two rows down. "Did you see that? Are y'all even watching the game?"

"I saw it, all right. Next year maybe we can get you and C.J. on the same team."

"Oh, yeah." Ben high-fived one of his buddies, then climbed up to Chris's side.

Chris almost sighed with relief. He didn't want to talk to Thora. Not here. Not at home either, come to that. He wished she were leaving for the Delta tonight.

With Ben so close, Thora watched the game in silence. Chris couldn't help but notice that almost everything Ben said was directed toward him. As the game wore on, Chris scanned the fences and the other bleachers. He knew nearly every face he saw. That was how it was in small towns. Some families had four generations sitting at this field, the infants rolling around in the dirt while their great-grandparents sat against the fence in wheelchairs. Looking down toward home plate, he saw a man about his own age waving at him. A strange numbness came into his hands and face. The man was Shane Lansing.

Before he was even aware of it, Chris found himself reappraising the surgeon's sharp-jawed handsomeness and athletic build. For the first time it struck him that Lansing bore a marked resemblance to Lars Rayner, Thora's absentee father. Their hair color was different, but apart from that, the similarities were considerable. They were both lean and muscular, both arrogant and sometimes cruel, both surgeons with outsize egos. Lars Rayner, of course, was a topflight vascular surgeon and thus had reason for his arrogance. Shane Lansing, on the other hand, was a journeyman cutter who cared as much about golf as he did about medicine. He was grinning now, and Thora was waving back as though Lansing were a long-lost relation.

"Wave, Chris," she urged, nudging him in the side.

Fuck him, Chris thought, almost saying it aloud. He inclined his head slightly in Lansing's direction, then looked pointedly back at the game.

"What's gotten into you tonight?" Thora asked.

"Nothing, I told you."

"I thought you liked Shane."

"I thought he was waving at you."

She looked at him strangely. "What's going on with you? What's the matter?"

"Hey, Ben?" Chris said, taking out his wallet and handing the boy $2. "Run get me some popcorn."

"Aw, Dad, there's a line! A long one."

Chris handed him the money and gave him a push. Ben got up and walked dejectedly down the steps.

"You ever see Lansing out at Avalon?" Chris asked in a casual tone.

"I saw him today," Thora said without hesitation.

This admission brought Chris up short. "You did?"

"Yes. He stopped by the site on his way home for lunch."

"What for?"

"To look at the house, for one thing."

"What else?"

For the first time, Thora looked uncomfortable. "I've been meaning to talk to you about this. But you've been so busy lately-"

"About what?" Chris felt his face flushing. "You've been meaning to talk to me about what?"

"God, Chris. What's the matter? Shane asked me to come work for him, that's all."

Chris didn't know how to respond. Nothing could have surprised him more. "Work for him? Doing what?"

"You can't tell anybody this, but Shane is planning to build a large outpatient surgery center. It will compete with the local hospitals, so you can imagine the stink it will cause."

The idea that Shane Lansing wanted to build a surgical center didn't surprise Chris. Lansing was one of the new breed; they started building their empires the first year they could legally tack the letters MD after their names. But why Lansing would want Thora to work at his surgical center was beyond him.

"What does he want you to do?"

"Supervise the personnel. Nurses and technicians mostly."

"But…"

"But what?"

"You're a multimillionaire, for God's sake. Why would you go to work as a nursing supervisor?"

Thora laughed, her eyes twinkling. "I didn't say I was going to take it."

"Are you considering it?"

She looked down at the field. "I don't know. I get pretty bored sometimes playing the yuppie housewife."

Chris said nothing.

She looked at him again, and this time she let her real self shine through. "Are you going to tell me what you think? Or can I already tell?"

"Is that Lansing's only interest in you?"

Thora laughed louder this time, the sound like a handful of bells. "What do you mean?" she asked, but the flicker in her eyes told him she knew exactly what he meant.

"Don't be disingenuous."

Her smile faded. "Shane's married, baby."

"And if he wasn't?"

In the silence that followed this question, the give-and-take of their previous exchanges escalated to something more unsettling. "Come on now," Thora said. "You're not serious?"

"Shane's had three affairs that I know about in the last year."

"That's just gossip," she said dismissively. "You know this town."

"No, the gossip has him screwing six or seven nurses in the past year. The three affairs I mentioned are fact. He had to pay off two of the women to make them go away."

Two tall boys had joined Shane Lansing behind the backstop. The surgeon had four sons, all handsome, all good athletes.

"I hadn't heard that," Thora said thoughtfully.

"I can't believe I've actually heard some gossip that you haven't."

"I'm not in the hospital loop, you know that."

Chris turned his attention back to the game. Thora's revelation of a job offer had flabbergasted him. Could that be the explanation for their secret contact? If Lansing was putting together his own surgical center, he was right to keep it a secret. The two local hospitals would do all they could to stop him. After a silent inning, Chris said, "I've got to pee," and climbed down to the ground, choosing a route that took him behind the backstop. When he passed Lansing, he stopped and shook the surgeon's hand, fighting a juvenile urge to crush it in his grip.

"Heard you guys lost tonight," Lansing said.

Chris forced down a surprising amount of bile and nodded. "What about y'all?"

The surgeon laughed. "With four boys, you win some and lose some every night."

"Hey, Thora told me you came by the house today."

The remark seemed to take Lansing by surprise, but he recovered quickly. "Yeah, the place is really coming along. It's hard to believe Thora designed it all."

"Not if you know her. She can do pretty much anything she sets her mind to."

Lansing chuckled again. "Yeah, I heard she used to upset a lot of doctors by telling them how to do their jobs."

"Where did you hear that?"

Lansing shrugged. "Around. You know the hospital."

Chris forced a smile. "Been playing much golf lately?"

"When I can, you know me."

"I was thinking about playing this week. You going to be in town?"

Lansing's eyes locked onto his. "Yeah, sure."

"All week?"

"Yeah. You want to play a couple of rounds?"

Chris nodded. "I'll call you."

Lansing smiled, then turned back to the field at the sound of a hit.

Chris walked toward the restroom, his ears ringing as though he had tinnitus. Halfway there, he looked back at Thora. She was staring intently at Shane Lansing. Lansing was watching the game, though. After several moments, Thora turned toward the restroom and spied Chris watching her. He looked back at her long enough to let her know he'd seen her watching Lansing, then turned and walked on.

He was standing at the kid-size urinal when a female voice hissed, "Chris! Can you hear me?"

He almost pissed on his jeans as he whipped left to find the source of the voice. When it came again, he realized that the cinder block wall dividing the men's and women's restrooms stopped six inches short of the tin roof. The voice was coming from the crack there.

"Agent Morse?"

"Who else?" she whispered. "What did you do this afternoon? You didn't show Thora the picture, did you?"

"No."

"Did you confront her about Lansing?"

"No. Not directly."

"What did you say?"

"Don't worry about it. It's not what you think, okay?"

"Christ, Chris. Are you kidding me?"

"Just leave me alone, damn it!"

"I wish I could. But I can't."

"I'm going back to my seat."

"Call me tomorrow," she said. "As soon as Thora leaves town."

Chris flushed the urinal.

"Will you call?" Morse asked as he washed his hands.

"Who the hell is talking?" drawled a deep male voice.

A man wearing grease-stained overalls had walked into the men's room behind Chris. Chris smelled alcohol, which was forbidden at the park but which always seemed to be a part of Little League games nevertheless.

"Some chick in the ladies' room," Chris said. "I think she's looking for some action."

The man in the overalls was trying to climb onto a lavatory to see through the crack by the roof when Chris walked out of the restroom.

Alex was late logging on to MSN. Discouraged by Dr. Shepard's response at the baseball field, she had stopped at a liquor store and bought a $12 bottle of pinot noir. Before she reached the motel with it, one of her mother's nurses had called and informed her that the oncologist was moving her mother back to the critical care hospital because of worsening liver involvement. Alex had started packing and drinking at the same time, all the while checking her computer to see if Jamie had gotten online. She drank more than she'd intended to-a lot more-and as a result had passed out in her clothes, only to startle herself awake at 11:45 p.m. with a full bladder and a terror of having let both Jamie and her mother down.

A flood of relief went through her when she saw the little green man that signaled Jamie's presence on the network. Before she could type a word, an invitation for a videoconference popped up on-screen. She accepted, then watched the miniature video screen appear. When Jamie's face materialized, her voice caught in her throat. The boy's face was red, and there were tears on his cheeks. Bill must have told him that his grandmother was going back into the hospital.

"What's the matter, little man?" she asked, hoping it was only a lost baseball game. "What happened?"

"Missy's moving in with us."

Alex felt a thunderclap of shock. "What? Why do you say that?"

"She came over to eat with us tonight. She was acting all weird, like she's my new best friend or something. Then Dad said something about how great it would be for me to have a lady around again. They both watched me really close after he said it. I'm not stupid, Aunt Alex. I know what they're doing."

Alex almost got up and walked away from the webcam. She couldn't conceal her emotions in this situation. But maybe she shouldn't hide them. What the hell was Bill thinking? His wife hadn't been in the ground six weeks, and he was planning to move his mistress into the house with his bereaved son? The man had no shame!

"What should I do?" Jamie asked, and in that moment Alex felt the full weight of responsibility for his future.

"You hang tight, bub. That's what you do."

Jamie wiped his eyes. "Do I have to stay here if she moves in?"

Alex gritted her teeth and fought the temptation to give him false hope. "I'm afraid you do. According to the law, anyway."

He winced, but anger seemed to be getting the better of his sadness, now that Alex was online.

"Can you do anything to help?" he asked. "Is there any way I can come live with you?"

"Maybe. I'm working on that every day. But you can't say anything about it. Not to your dad, and not to Missy."

"I hate her," Jamie said with real venom. "Hate, hate, hate."

Missy's not the problem, Alex thought. Bill is the fucking problem.

"I didn't do my homework," Jamie said uneasily. "I told Dad I did, but I didn't. I couldn't think about it."

"Do you think you can do it now?"

Jamie shrugged. "Can you stay on while I do it?"

Alex needed to start for Jackson. She was already late, and it was a two-hour drive. But how could she turn away from the confusion and fear in Jamie's eyes? What choice would her mother make in this situation? Alex forced herself to smile as though she had all the time in the world.

"Absolutely. Just let me run to the bathroom."

Jamie giggled. "Me, too! I was afraid I'd miss you, so I waited right here in this chair. I almost peed in my Coke can."

"See you in a minute."

Jamie held his opened hand up to the camera, their substitute for physical contact. Alex held up her hand in reply, but she had to turn away to hide her face. That boy, she thought proudly, that boy is keeping me alive right now. And he's worth ten of his daddy.

As she walked away from the computer, she spoke softly but with conviction, in a voice that could have come from her father. "That boy is a Morse, not a Fennell. And he's going to be raised by somebody who gives a damn."

Five miles from Alex Morse's hotel room, Chris lay in his adopted son's bed, listening to the slow, rhythmic sound of Ben's breathing. He was exhausted, and he'd about decided to sleep right where he was. Today had been one of the worst days of his life, and he had no wish to continue it by getting into further discussions with Thora before bed. His mind was spinning with Morse's accusations and Thora's explanations, and beneath that storm of words was an inchoate terror of having screwed up yet again. He had dated his first wife for five years before marrying her, and he'd thought he knew her well. But in a few short years, life had proved him wrong.

Kathryn Ledet had been a physical therapy student at UMC in Jackson when Chris married her. A native of Covington, Louisiana, she'd attended Tulane as an undergrad, and thus was ecstatic when Chris was able to secure his residency at Tulane Medical Center in New Orleans. But when the time came for Chris to repay his school loans by practicing two years in the impoverished Mississippi Delta, Kathryn had been less than ecstatic. Still, she toughed it out, until Chris was informed that his replacement would be four months late. Chris was ready to leave the Delta, too; he had a plum job waiting with a premier internal medicine group in Jackson. But despite this, he did not feel that he could abandon the near-desperate patients he'd been treating for two years. Kathryn felt no such obligation. When Chris told her that he felt obliged to stay on until a replacement could be found, she packed up her things and drove back to New Orleans. After his replacement arrived, Chris went after her to try to save the marriage, but there was no point. He had already proved that he was not the man Kathryn wanted. By the time he'd worked three months in Jackson, he realized that neither Kathryn Ledet nor boutique medicine were for him. But lingering over him like a pall was the realization that, even after living with Kathryn for years, he had not seen through the beautiful facade to the true woman within.

He'd dated Thora less than a year before proposing to her. He'd known her longer than that, of course, mostly as the devoted wife of one of his patients. And in that time, he had come to respect and desire her more than any other woman he'd met in the seven years since his divorce. But now…even without Alex Morse whispering at his side, he sensed that the Thora he had come to know as Red Simmons's wife was only one facet of a much more complex character. How deeply could you know a woman, anyway? A sailor could sail around the world a couple of times and believe he knew the sea, when in fact all he knew was a set of waves and tides that had long since changed behind him.

And what about Ben? In a remarkably short time, the boy sleeping beside him had put all his trust and faith in Chris. Ben looked to him for answers, for friendship, for support and security. Not financial security-Thora could provide that on her own-but for the feeling that there was a man twice his size ready to stand between him and any danger that might come his way. And though some of the boy's admiration would fade during his teenage years, right now he looked up to Chris as though he were invincible. It was hard to believe that Thora would put that bond at risk to have an affair with a guy like Shane Lansing. Almost impossible, really. And yet…he had seen friends and patients cast off everything of value in a desperate grasp for something they believed they needed.

A vertical crack of yellow light appeared in the darkness. Then a shadow darkened the crack. Thora was at the door, looking in at them. Chris closed his eyes and lay still.

"Chris?" she whispered.

He didn't answer.

"Chris? Are you sleeping?"

No reply.

After several moments, Thora tiptoed in and kissed each of them on the forehead. "Good-bye, boys," she whispered. "I love you."

Then she slipped out and closed the door behind her.