Murder Carries a Torch by Anne George Read Free Book Online Page B

sturdy and comforting.
    It took several minutes after I explained to her that I was Luke’s cousin, not his wife, for her to locate his insurance cards. She called the treatment room where they had taken him, and a nurse brought Luke’s wallet out. Irene had me go through it to find his cards. The first card I pulled out was his driver’s license. Luke looked startled in the picture. Vulnerable. I suddenly felt like crying.
    “Here.” I handed Irene the insurance card.
    “Trash!” she said.
    “Blue Cross?”
    “Of course not. Look what just walked in. Don’t turn around. Just look.”
    Between jet lag and everything that had already happened that day, I was totally confused.
    “What?”
    “Well, just turn around a little bit and look. You won’t believe this.”
    A tall bearded man had walked into the emergency room. He was wearing a black short-sleeved T-shirt that had KILL THEM ALL. LET GOD SORT THEM OUT emblazoned in large white letters below a death’s head that was wearing a pirate’s hat.
    “My God!”
    He was here to rob the emergency room of its drugs. And there was nothing between us and his semiautomatic but glass. This was it. This was Death. I waited.
    Death sat down and glanced through a Southern Living magazine.
    “Comes in here every afternoon to pick up his wife,” Irene sniffed. “She’s nice as she can be. One of our best nurses. Just no sense.”
    My heart began to beat again. I could feel it drumming against my ribs.
    “Well, it’s none of my business she wants to be a fool,” Irene said. She picked up the card. “Okay, let’s see what we’ve got here.”
    The outside door opened again and two young women came in brushing off their coats.
    “It’s snowing, Irene,” one of them called as they headed down the hall.
    Irene waved in their direction. “Snow. Just what we need.”
    I thought of the hairpin curves on Chandler Mountain. Surely the policemen would let Sister leave before the roads got too icy.
    “Things ice up around here in a second,” Irene said as if she were reading my mind. “Causes all kinds of problems.”
    Guilt. I had left my sister on top of a booger-occupied mountain in a snowstorm in a snake-handling church with a dead body.
    “What happened to your cousin?” Irene asked.
    “I’m not sure. We were at this church up on Chandler Mountain, and he went in to look for his wife, and when he didn’t come back we went in to look for him and he was unconscious and bleeding and there was a dead woman on the bench across from him. A dead woman with a lot of red hair and a broken neck.” I paused for breath.
    “Is that right?” Irene pushed some papers toward me. “Here, sign these.”
    “Her head was on backward.”
    “Have mercy.” Irene handed me a ballpoint pen. “Sign right here and,” she lifted the top sheet of paper, “here.”
    I signed.
    “Okay,” she glanced at my signature, “Mrs. Hollowell. Somebody will be out in a little while when they find out what’s what with your cousin.”
    Backward heads didn’t seem to make much of an impression on Irene. They sure as hell did on me, though. I sat in the waiting room with my teeth chattering. Fortunately Death had left with his pretty young wife, who had fussed at him for not wearing a jacket.
    I wondered how Luke was doing. I wondered what had happened to him. The most reasonable scenario I could come up with was that he had seen the dead girl, fainted, and hit his head on the corner of the bench. Thatmade sense. And he had been talking out of his head when he said he had seen Virginia. We had been sitting in front in the car and hadn’t seen anyone come out of the church.
    But there was a back door. I closed my eyes and tried to remember the details. On the right-hand side was a door and if anyone had left that way, we wouldn’t have been able to see them. I remembered thinking that the door should have been on the other side, the side that the house was on so the preacher wouldn’t