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He raised his head just in time to see Cheryl Beth walking purposefully toward him. She was wearing street clothes, jeans, a turtleneck and carrying a heavy coat. He couldn’t help noticing how nicely she filled out those clothes. He managed a smile—she had to be relieved at the news. But she had a look of wild fear in her eyes.
“I’ve got to talk to you.” She pulled a chair close.
“Did you see?” Will indicated the newspaper.
“It’s not right. Mason may be a little creep, but he didn’t kill Christine.”
“How…?” Will barely got the word out before she continued in an agitated voice.
“Somebody broke into my house last night. I’ve stayed the last couple of nights with my friend Lisa. I was just too creeped out to stay at home. Yesterday afternoon, around six, I stopped off at home to get some clothes. Everything was fine. Today I drove by just to check on things and my front door was open. I called the police. Somebody had broken in.” She leaned in close. “My bed, the comforter and the pillows, had been sliced up. Somebody went up to my bedroom and did that. There was a computer and a stereo and a TV, and they’re all fine. But somebody sliced up my bed, and they threw everything out of my desk drawers.”
“Mason would have already been in jail.”
“Exactly.” She bit her lip. “There’s something else.” She hesitated then recounted her ambush by Gary Nagle of the day before. Will listened carefully, listened as a simple case fell apart.
“Could it have been him?” Will asked.
“I don’t know. I used to think I knew him, now I’m not sure about anything. He just seemed like a wild man yesterday. But your former friend Dodds doesn’t care. He’s not interested. He would barely talk to me.”
He could almost detect she was shaking. He wanted to reach out to her but didn’t. He said, “I don’t know how else to push this. I wish I could get out of here.”
She didn’t miss a beat. “I can get you out.”
Chapter Twenty-four
Half an hour later, Cheryl Beth wheeled Will out to the drive-up entrance to the neuro-rehab wing. She had signed him out for the day with the ward’s patient coordinator—usually it was a privilege given for family members, so patients could spend a few hours outside the hospital. She made sure to take along all of Will’s meds and some extra, just in case. The cold hit them when they came out the door. The temperature was in the low thirties, the gusts making it feel colder. Cheryl Beth had draped a blanket over Will because he didn’t have a coat among his things. They would stop by his place and pick one up.
“Here’s how we’re getting you in the car,” she said, opening the door and pulling out a thin board that measured about two and a half feet long. “This is a transfer board. I lied and said you had been trained in how to use it.”
“Whatever it took to spring me.” He smiled.
She instructed him on the use of the plastic transfer board, pushed his wheelchair close to the open car door, and removed the arm side closest to the car. She asked him to raise up while she positioned one end of the board under the seat of the wheelchair and the other end on the car seat.
“This might not work,” he said. “I’m pretty big, and I don’t know if I can scoot that way.
”
She leaned down to him. “Do you trust me?”
He nodded. “Yes.”
Cinching the gait belt around his waist, she coached him to move across the board and into the car seat. She wasn’t a physical therapist and had never done this before. But it worked well enough. She held the belt from behind and he did the work. One inch out onto the board, then half his butt was on it, then he was moving into the car. He fell into the bucket seat and used both hands to lift his left leg in. Then he swung his right leg inside and pulled down the seat belt.
“Okay?” she asked.
He nodded, short of breath. Then she took the chair and transfer board and stowed them in the trunk. The newer wheelchairs folded with amazing ease and were not that heavy.
“Drive me around for a minute.” He added: “Please.”
It was not a demand. She could see the wonder in his face at actually being out of the hospital for the first time in almost three weeks. So she drove out of the maze of Pill Hill and into Clifton, around the university.
“I went to school there,” she said. “I never thought I’d stay in Cincinnati. I thought it was very smug and insular—and I came from a small town. And it is all that. But I fell in love with it and stayed.”
“Lots of people who come here say that,” he said. “I always thought I’d leave, but I never did.”
“So you’re a native?”
He said he was.
