Chapter 3 - THE GHOST IN ROOM 418
The residents moved like men under fire, but their hands were too young. One of them—a boy with sweat pooling in the hollow beneath his lower lip—fumbled with the central line kit, dropping a plastic cannula onto the floor where it skittered against my boot.
"Get out of the way," June said, shoving him aside with an elbow that had forty years of emergency triage behind it. She took the large-bore needle herself, finding the vein in Mara’s neck on the first pass without waiting for the skin prep to dry. "Dopamine at five micrograms. Hang the second unit of O-negative. And somebody call respiratory—she’s aspirating her own secretions."
"Grant," someone said.
It was Mateo.
He was standing in the doorway, his six-foot-four frame filling the opening, his olive wool overcoat black with rain across the shoulders. Mateo had been my driver, my bodyguard, and my shadow since the night we pulled three of my father’s cousins out of a burning fish-processing plant in Gloucester twelve years ago. He was the only man in Boston who knew how many keys were on my ring and how many rounds were in my magazine.
"The mother’s car is sitting at the corner of Longwood," Mateo said, his voice a low rumble beneath the clatter of the IV stands. "She didn't leave. Victor Vance is on the radio with someone from the district attorney's special investigations unit. Two cruisers from the state police just pulled up to the emergency bay downstairs."
"Are they coming up?" I asked, not letting go of Mara’s ankle. It was the only part of her that felt solid beneath the blankets, though the skin was as cold as harbor ice.
"Not yet," Mateo said. "I put four of the Charlestown boys in the stairwells. They told the troopers the freight elevator was out of service due to an electrical fire in the basement. That bought us twenty minutes. After that, they’ll bring the building superintendent up with the emergency keys."
"June," I said, my voice cutting through the noise of the residents who were now bagging Mara with an ambu-mask, the blue silicone bulb expanding and collapsing with a rhythmic *whuff-whuff*. "Is she stable enough to move?"
"Move her?" June looked at me as though I had suggested throwing the woman out the four-story window. "She’s in hypovolemic shock, Grant. Her hematocrit is nineteen. If you put her on a gurney right now, her heart will stop before you hit the street."
"If she stays here, Eleanor’s judge will have her in a state psychiatric ward in Taunton before sunrise," I said. "And the boys will be in a private foster home in Dedham under sealed records."
June didn't answer immediately. She adjusted the flow clamp on the blood line, her fingers steady despite the tremor in her chin.
"There is an old recovery ward in the basement," she said, her voice dropping so low the young residents couldn't hear it over the monitor’s alarms. "Under the old chapel. It was used during the polio epidemic in fifty-two. The steam lines still run through the floor, so it’s warm, and the electrical panels are tied directly to the church next door, not the hospital grid. Eleanor’s people won't have it on the modern blueprints."
"Can you keep her alive down there?"
"Not alone," June said. "I need two more units of blood, an arterial line monitor, and Chen. Dr. Chen won't sell out to your mother—his sister’s clinic in Chinatown depends on the dockworkers' union for its lease."
"Get him," I told Mateo. "Offer him whatever he wants. If he says no, tell him I personally guarantee his sister’s building will have its roof replaced before the week is out."
Mateo nodded once and vanished back into the gray light of the hall.
I leaned back over the bed. The ambu-mask had forced some color back into Mara’s cheeks—not the warm, living peach of her skin when we used to spend Augusts in Maine, but a strange, mottled purple that looked like ink spreading through wet linen.
"Mara," I said.
Her eyes cracked open. The pupils were fixed, but the gray iris moved slightly, catching the glint of the brass key I had pulled from my coat and held between my two fingers where only she could see it.
"Tell me what it opens," I whispered. "If I have to tear Boston apart brick by brick tonight, I need to know where to start."
Her lips moved against the plastic of the mask. June reached down and lifted the edge just enough for the words to clear the rubber seal.
"The... church," Mara whispered.
"Which church? The cathedral?"
"No..." Her head moved an inch from side to side. "The... Polish church. Near the old sugar refinery. St. Stanislaus. In the... the crypt beneath the floorboards. The third station of the cross."
"The sugar refinery burned down six years ago, Mara," I said gently, trying to keep the frustration from creeping into my tone.
"The vault didn't," she breathed. A tiny shudder ran through her neck, and her hand—the one that had played the third movement of the Mendelssohn concerto at Symphony Hall when she was nineteen—curled into a claw against the sheet. "Your father... he didn't trust Eleanor either, Grant. He knew... he knew what she did to the ledger. He knew she gave the manifests to the feds."
The world seemed to stop moving on its axis.
"What did you say?"
"She framed me," Mara whispered, and this time a tear finally broke from the corner of her eye, cutting a clean, dark track through the dried sweat on her temple. "She put the... the terminal codes into my personal laptop while I was at the conservatory. She knew... she knew you would choose the business over me. You always chose the business. You’re your father’s son."
The resident holding the ambu-mask looked up at me, his eyes wide with the realization that he was standing in the middle of something that could get a man dropped into the Mystic River with thirty pounds of scrap iron wired to his ankles.
"Out," I said to the two young doctors.
"Sir, we need to monitor the—"
"Out," I repeated, not shouting, but using the register that my father had used when the longshoremen’s union thought about going on strike in seventy-eight.
They didn't look at June. They dropped their plastic packs and backed out of the room, their rubber soles squeaking in double-time until the door shut behind them.
"Eleanor took the ledger?" I asked, my voice barely more than a growl. "Eleanor gave the marshals the search warrant?"
"She wanted... the terminal sold to the Dutch conglomerate," Mara said, each word costing her a fraction of the life left in her chest. "You wouldn't sell. Your father wouldn't sell. She needed... an indictment to force the board's hand. She used me... because she knew you would believe it. You always believed... everyone had a price, Grant. You thought I took the money."
"You didn't take the three million?"
"I didn't take... a single dollar," she cried out, the effort tearing at the fresh sutures in her abdomen. A red stain began to bloom through the white sheet, right over her left hip, spreading like an oil slick. "I went to Revere... with ninety dollars in my coat. I lived on bread and tea... because I wouldn't touch a nickel of Waverly money. Not after what she told me."
"What did she tell you, Mara?"
"She told me... if I told you about the pregnancy... she would make sure the boys were born... in the state facility at Framingham. She said... you would never believe they were yours. She said... you would think I slept with the lawyer... to get the immunity."
The rage that hit me then was not the cold, calculating anger that had made me the head of the family at thirty-four. It was something older, hotter, something that smelled of sulfur and gasoline.
My mother had known.
She had known seven months ago. She had watched me sign the divorce papers while I sat there with three fingers of bourbon in my glass, thinking the woman I loved had sold our family’s fifty-year history to the Department of Justice for an offshore trust and an apartment in New York. She had watched me walk through that empty house on Louisburg Square every night for seven months, listening to the grandfather clock strike the quarters, while my wife was starving in a two-room flat above a dry cleaner's with two of my blood growing beneath her ribs.
"Grant," June said, her hand dropping onto my shoulder, hard and heavy. "She’s bleeding out internally. The uterine artery has reopened. We have five minutes before she arrests."
Mateo reappeared at the door. Behind him was Dr. Chen—a thin, severe-looking man in his fifties, wearing a surgical cap and green scrubs that were already spotted with iodine.
"The service lift is cleared," Chen said, looking once at the monitor and once at the red circle spreading across Mara’s sheets. "I have two units of platelets coming down from the third-floor lab. If we are going to do this, we do it now. The state police are at the front desk."
I didn't wait for a gurney.
I slid my left arm beneath Mara’s shoulders and my right beneath her knees, ignoring the sharp cry of agony that tore from her throat as the movement wrenched her stitched belly. She weighed nothing. She felt like an armful of dried birch twigs, her head falling back against my shoulder, her short, jagged hair brushing against the wet wool of my collar.
"Hold the IV lines, June," I said.
Mateo went first, his right hand flat inside his overcoat, his eyes scanning the empty hallway. Dr. Chen followed with the dopamine bag held high on a steel pole, his thumb regulating the drip with mechanical precision.
We didn't take the main elevators. We moved through a pair of double doors marked *Maintenance Only*, down a flight of concrete stairs where the paint had peeled in long, scabbed ribbons from the damp, and into a corridor that hadn't seen an electric light bulb since the Carter administration.
The smell of coal dust and damp mortar hit us immediately.
The basement under the chapel was dark, lit only by a string of sixty-watt construction lamps wired to a temporary yellow cord. In the center of the room, beneath the heavy brick groining of the arches that supported the church floor above, stood four antique iron hospital beds, their white enamel chipped down to the dark metal beneath.
"Put her on the third one," June ordered, her voice echoing strangely against the brick vaults. "It has the original hydraulic lift. Chen, get the pressure cuffs on her. Grant—give Mateo your coat."
"Why?"
"Because your sleeves are soaked in blood," June said, not looking at me as she reached for a surgical tray that had been set out on a wooden workbench. "And if you’re going to St. Stanislaus to get whatever is in that box, you can't walk through the North End looking like you just butchered a steer."
I looked down at my forearms.
The gray cashmere was black with it. Mara’s blood had soaked through the wool, through my cotton shirt, through the leather strap of my watch, until it was warm against my skin.
Mara’s hand reached out from the iron bed, her fingers brushing the brass key that was still clutched in my fist.
"Grant," she whispered. Her eyes were clearer now, focused on me with a terrifying, luminous intensity that seemed to belong to someone who had already stepped halfway across the threshold. "Don't let them... don't let them turn Julian into you."
Julian.
She had named the first one after my brother. The brother my mother had sent to a military academy in Virginia because he had cried when my father shot an injured horse in the paddock at Hamilton. The brother who had drowned in the Rappahannock River six months later while trying to swim to the highway.
"I won't," I said, leaning down until my forehead touched hers. "I swear to you, Mara. On Julian's name. On Leo's name. I won't."
I turned to Mateo.
"Take the town car," I said. "Go to the warehouse on D Street. Tell my uncle Thomas that the season is open."
Mateo’s eyes widened slightly. "Thomas? Grant... if you bring Thomas into this, Eleanor will go to the state police with the entire corporate register."
May you like
"Let her," I said, stripping off the ruined overcoat and dropping it onto the damp concrete floor where it landed with a heavy, wet thud. "By the time she finds a judge who isn't terrified of what’s in that crypt, I will have the ledger that puts her in Framingham for the rest of her natural life."
***
