Chat - Archer Mayor [8]
Joe wasn’t even sure he could talk. “You okay, Leo?”
Leo winced, as if at some joke Joe couldn’t fathom. “Top of the world,” his brother whispered, adding, “How’s Ma?”
Joe slipped his hand into Leo’s and gave it a squeeze. He made his voice sound upbeat. “Haven’t seen her yet, but you’re in much worse shape. They told me she’s fast asleep—breathing fine, though, and everything else looks okay. No breaks, no messed-up major organs. The doc on the phone told me not to be overly concerned—that sometimes the body just needs to rest awhile. Sounds pretty good.”
Leo closed his eyes, and Joe realized he was fighting back tears.
“Leo,” he told him, “it was an accident.”
Leo took a ragged breath, reopened his eyes, and murmured, “It was the car, not the road.”
He coughed once then, not forcefully, but the effect was telling. His face contorted, and one of the monitors began chirping. A nurse gently moved Joe out of the way in order to adjust something.
“I’ll look into it, Leo, and I’ll take care of Mom. Just get better, okay? I’ll be back in a bit and give you an update.”
Now, in the stillness of his mother’s room, Joe thought of the deeper meaning behind Leo’s parting words. In Leo’s world, there were really only four areas to which he paid any attention—Mom, the butcher shop, his short-term girlfriends, and cars. The barn their father had once filled with farming equipment, livestock, and hay now housed a mismatched, dust-covered, much tinkered-with collection of automotive relics. Leo never worked on the Subaru he used to chauffeur their mother—she’d made it very clear that she wanted a professional doing that—but Joe trusted his brother’s mechanical instincts and knowledge. If Leo thought the car had somehow been the root cause of this accident, Joe was ready to believe him.
He pulled out his cell phone and dialed.
“VBI Dispatch.”
He recognized the woman’s voice. It was that kind of state, where people joked about there being only a few dozen residents, grand total. It was more like six hundred thousand really, but that still made it the second least populous state in the country. The number inside the law enforcement community was even more minute by comparison.
“Hey, Gloria. It’s Joe.”
Her voice instantly slipped into maternal mode. “Oh, my God. I just heard about your family. I am so sorry. How’re they doing?”
He wasn’t surprised. Vermont was a small town in some ways, spread thinly across a hilly map. It didn’t take long for everyone to know your business. Fortunately, that was one of the aspects of living here that he cherished. He had no wife, no children, not even a significant other at the moment. The fact that virtual strangers—even a disembodied voice on the phone—knew his life’s latest news actually came as a comfort.
“They’re hanging in there, thanks. I’m at the hospital now. Actually, I was wondering if you could do me a big favor in connection with that.”
“Anything at all.”
“Could you find out who was working the car crash that banged them up? I’d love to talk to him or her.”
Gloria couldn’t keep the keenness from her voice. “You suspect something?”
Joe made an effort to laugh easily. “Whoa. You need to cut back on the cop shows, Gloria. I just want to find out who’s on the job.”
She laughed in return, but he could almost hear her cataloging his request for future in-house gossiping. “It’s the company I keep, Joe. You guys have made me paranoid. I don’t even watch cop shows anymore. Give me about five minutes and I’ll call you back.”
Joe made sure the phone was set to vibrate, and returned it to his belt. He went back to gazing at his mother’s pale profile, propped on a white pillow, uncomfortably reminiscent of a carved tomb lid in a medieval church.
She was certainly deserving of a monument of some sort, he thought, though a much more upbeat one. In all his experience, he’d never known a person with more considerate