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Tossing the small crumpled cup into the larger paper one, she sets both down on the nightstand, staring at it when she speaks. “Why would he go there?”
Officer Walsh leans forward and the movement steals my attention. He looks at me as he asks Melody, “Did you know about the others going there? Maybe just the man who hurt you?”
“I don’t know anything,” she answers him in a whisper, but she can’t look at him.
The rush of blood that met me when I opened the door, slows to a trickle. Melody’s quiet. Her gaze is still focused on the cups on the nightstand. Or something else that’s there maybe. There’s nothing else present except for a clock, but maybe in her mind, something else is staring back at her.
“What happened at the farm?” I ask the officer, remembering something I read a week ago. Six men were killed in a fire at a farm off the highway, just before the state line. They hadn’t identified the bodies yet.
“A fire,” Officer Walsh answers and I’m quick to look back at Melody. The sweet girl who hums to herself. She came in the day I read that article, which was the day after it happened.
“Five members of a gang from upstate were locked in an old cattle farm two nights ago…” He watches Melody for her reaction before adding, “And a priest.”
Her eyes close solemnly and then Melody readjusts, seeking refuge with her blanket as she covers herself up to her waist.
“The five deserved it,” she speaks up and then looks back at the officer. “You know that one did, you know what he did to me,” she says, pressing Walsh to agree with her. Her body sways first and then the action turns to a gentle rocking. It speeds up with every passing second of silence. “I’m not sad that they’re gone.”
“Did the priest deserve it?” Walsh asks her and Melody’s large eyes gloss over.
“I don’t know,” she whispers on every rock. “I don’t know anything.”
“I think that’s enough for tonight,” I say to break the moment, moving between Walsh and Melody. The officer rises, ready to object, but I don’t let him. “I don’t know what’s right and wrong. I don’t know what she did, but she’s my patient. She’s not well, and she’s not in the right mind to talk right now. You can always take her in for questioning.”
Gathering the tray, I open the door to Melody’s room and wait for Walsh to leave. He tells her to feel better before leaving. She tells him good night and the exchange is odd to me.
I don’t know if he’s with her or against her. If he wants her to feel like he’s her friend, he’s certainly accomplished that.
The door closes with a resolute click. Keeping my pace even and doing everything I can to remain professional, I walk straight ahead to the end of the hall then to the left, to the nurses’ station.
Slipping the tray on top of the pile, I watch as Officer Walsh signs the check-in sheet. Signing himself out.
“I appreciate you letting her talk,” he says absently, not looking at me as he does. The pen hits the paper and he stares at it, looking at all the names, I guess.
His large frame towers over the small desk in front of me and it makes him appear all the more foreboding.
The manner in which he speaks throws me off. Letting her talk. As if he’s not grateful that he was questioning her, just that she needed to get something off her chest. That’s the real reason.
“You can’t get reliable information from her,” I tell him although I can’t look him in the eyes. There are things Delilah wrote and I know they’re coloring my perception of this man. “She’s not in the right mind.”
“She’s never in the right mind,” he tells me. When he closes his eyes, he runs a hand down his face, letting his need for sleep show. “She could barely focus when she first came to me.”
I don’t know what to say or what to think. I don’t know much about her, only what’s on her chart, what she prefers to eat and the songs she must like, because she hums them constantly. I’m not her therapist or her doctor. Only her nurse.
“You’ve talked to her a lot?” I ask him, probing to see what he knows.
He nods once and then leans against the desk with the palms of his large hands bracing him. “She came to me for help; I tried to… but the evidence.” A frustrated sigh leaves him. “I did everything I could but there wasn’t enough to charge him with anything and he didn’t confess. I thought we were close to getting one, but he didn’t give us anything.”
