No Time for Goodbye - Linwood Barclay [114]
Chances were good that someone was going to stop me at some point, but I figured if I could just make it to Clayton Sloan’s room, I’d be okay.
The elevator doors parted onto the third-floor nurses’ station. There was no one there. I stepped out, paused a moment, then turned left, looking for door numbers. I found 322, discovered the numbers got bigger as I moved on down the hallway. I stopped, went back in the other direction, which was going to take me past the nurses’ station again. A woman was standing with her back to me, reading a chart, and I walked past as noiselessly as possible.
I looked for numbers again. The hallway turned left, and the first door I came to was 309. The door was partly ajar, the room mostly in darkness except for a neon light mounted to the wall next to the bed.
It was a private room, one bed. A curtain obscured all but the foot of the bed, where a clipboard hung on a metal frame. I took a few steps in, beyond the curtain, and saw that there was a man in the bed, on his back, slightly raised, fast asleep. In his seventies, I guessed. Emaciated-looking, thinned hair. From chemo, maybe. His breathing was raspy. His arms lay at his sides, his fingers long and white and bony.
I moved around to the far side of the bed, where the curtain gave me cover from the hallway. There was a chair near the head of the bed, and when I sat down, I was able to make myself even more invisible to anyone passing by the room.
I studied Clayton Sloan’s face, searching for something there that I was unable to find when I looked at Enid Sloan’s. Something about his nose, perhaps, a trace of cleft in his chin. I reached out and gently touched the man’s exposed arm, and he made a slight snorting noise.
“Clayton,” I whispered.
He sniffed, wiggled his nose about unconsciously.
“Clayton,” I whispered again, rubbing his leathery skin softly back and forth. Inside his elbow a tube ran into his arm. An IV drip of some kind.
His eyes fluttered open, and he sniffed again. He saw me, blinked hard a couple of times, let his eyes adjust and focus.
“Wha…”
“Clayton Bigge?” I said.
That not only brought his eyes into focus, but made him turn his head more sharply. The fleshy folds of his neck bunched together. “Who are you?” he whispered.
“Your son-in-law,” I said.
41
As he swallowed I watched his Adam’s apple bob along the length of his throat. “My what?” he said.
“Your son-in-law,” I said. “I’m Cynthia’s husband.”
He opened his mouth to speak, and I could see how dry his mouth was. “Would you like a drink of water?” I asked quietly. He nodded. There was a pitcher and glass next to the bed, and I poured him some water. There was a straw on the table, and I put it to his lips, holding the glass for him.
“I can do it,” he said, grasping the glass and sipping from the straw. He took the glass with more strength than I expected. He licked his lips, handed the glass back to me.
“What time is it?” he asked.
“After ten,” I said. “I’m sorry to wake you. You were sleeping pretty good there.”
“No harm,” he said. “They’re always waking you up here anyway, all times of the day and night.”
He took a deep breath through his nostrils, let the air out slowly. “So,” he said. “Am I supposed to know what you’re talking about?”
“I think you do,” I said. “You’re Clayton Bigge.”
Another deep breath. Then, “I’m Clayton Sloan.”
“I believe you are,” I said. “But I think you’re also Clayton Bigge, who was married to Patricia Bigge, who had a son named Todd and a daughter named Cynthia, and you lived in Milford, Connecticut, until one night in 1983, when something very terrible happened.”
He looked away from me and stared at the curtain.