Shine - Lauren Myracle [56]
“Sounds to me like someone don’t want Patrick waking up,” Hannah said timidly.
The ladies nodded.
“That’s why I think it was a local boy, and a smart one at that,” the choir woman said. “One who ain’t interested in getting caught.”
“We might even know him,” Hannah said with wide eyes.
“He might go to this very church,” Dottie said. “He might be in this very room with us right now.”
Everyone glanced around, myself included. I spotted old Mrs. Lawson sipping a cup of coffee, but Tommy wasn’t with her. None of the members of the redneck posse had dragged themselves out of bed for church this morning, not that I was surprised. The congregation lacked guys in that age group, period. Still, the group of ladies tightened their circle.
The choir woman eyed the ladies, her gaze coming to rest, inexplicably, on me. A bolt of alarm shot through my bones, and with it came the recollection of her name. Obedience Burwell. She went by Biddy.
“People say you’re hunting for the perpurtrator yourself,” Biddy said. She’d learned the word from Verleen, and it didn’t set comfortably on her tongue.
“No,” I said. My chest went up and down, up and down.
Biddy stared at me. Her birthmark stared at me, a fat, blood-filled sac. “If I were you, I’d leave it.”
The ladies nodded as a single unit. A flock of hens.
“Cat!” Hannah said anxiously. “Oh my gracious, you can’t go poking around in something like this. Not when it involves criminal activity!”
“He don’t want to be found,” Dottie chimed in. She stepped closer and squeezed my shoulder. I pretended to be a statue. “And you don’t want to be the one who finds him. Believe me, hon.”
“You could get sliced up, like that window screen,” Hannah said. She blinked rapidly. “Or worse.”
Verleen said, “Now, Cat, I can’t believe you’d act as illafformed as that, getting into business that ain’t yours to get in. Surely you have more sense.”
“I do,” I said in a panicked, breathy voice.
But Verleen wasn’t done. “If you are poking around, it stops today. You hear? You leave that business to Carl and Bubba.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“That gasoline nozzle,” Hannah whispered, looking at me like I’d already gone and gotten such a thing stuck up in me.
“All right, I think we’ve said enough,” Biddy said, although I swear to God she was pleased with what she’d made. “I think we all need to be careful. A perpuhtater like that, we don’t none of us want to come face-to-face with him.”
She’d changed her pronunciation. Purple tater, I thought. Purple tater, purple tater.
“And we won’t,” Verleen said. “He’s wily enough to wipe his prints off the windowsill, he’s wily enough not to get caught.”
“Oh my,” Dottie said. “Verleen, hon, you might be bringing Carl sandwiches for a long time.”
WHEN IT WAS TIME FOR THE SERVICE, I DIDN’T file into the sanctuary with the others. Instead, I snuck into the church office. I used the slow-as-molasses computer to see if I could find out anything more about the hospital break-in.
I didn’t, but I did learn more about comas and other medical stuff. I tried to educate myself as best I could, because Patrick was not a plant, and I couldn’t believe that Hannah—who had a baby! an itty-bitty, crying, and smiling baby!—had said something so thoughtless.
Patrick probably had blisters erupting around his mouth, that was one thing I read on the medical sites I pulled up. Because of the gas fumes. And I learned a new word: hypoxia. It meant lack of oxygen, and sometimes people recovered completely from a hypoxic hit to the brain, and sometimes they didn’t.
I also found an online Toomsboro Community College student directory, and guess whose information was listed in it? Jason Connor’s, that’s whose. He was a college boy, just like I’d suspected. He opted to “share his contact information with prospective students,” so now I had his email address as well as what dorm he lived in . He was taking summer classes, I guess. Whoop-de-doo for him.
I could take the bus into town tomorrow morning and be at Braiden Hall by nine. If he was asleep, I’d wake