The Best of Me - Nicholas Sparks [103]
His words only amplified the anxiety coursing through her. “Why? What’s wrong?”
“I don’t know.”
“Is Jared going to be okay?”
“He seemed fine when we got here.”
“Then why is he seeing a cardiologist?”
“I don’t know.”
“He said you were covered in blood.”
Frank touched the swollen bridge of his nose, where a black-and-blue crescent surrounded a small cut. “I banged my nose pretty good, but they were able to stop the bleeding. It’s no big deal. I’ll be fine.”
“Why didn’t you answer your phone? I called a hundred times!”
“My phone is still in the car…”
But Amanda had stopped listening as the weight of everything Frank had said sank in. Jared had been admitted. Her son was the one who was hurt. Her son, not her husband. Jared. Her firstborn…
Feeling like she’d been punched in the stomach and suddenly sickened by the sight of Frank, she marched past him, heading straight for the nurse behind the admitting desk. Doing her best to control her rising hysteria, she demanded to know what was going on with her son.
The nurse had few answers, repeating only what Frank had already told her. Drunk Frank, she thought again, unable to stem the tide of rage. She slapped both hands down on the desk, startling everyone in the waiting room.
“I need to know what’s going on with my son!” she cried. “I want some answers now!”
Problems with her car, Abee thought. That’s what had been bothering him about his earlier conversation with Candy. Because if her car was having problems, then how had she gotten to work? And why hadn’t she asked him if he could drive her to work, or back home?
Had someone else driven her? Like the guy in the Tidewater?
She wouldn’t have been that stupid. Of course, he could call her to find out, but there was a better way to get to the bottom of this. Irvin’s wasn’t very far from the small house where she lived, so he might as well swing by to check if her car was there. Because if it was there, it meant that someone had driven her, and then they’d definitely have something important to talk about, wouldn’t they?
He tossed a few bills onto the table and motioned for Ted to follow. Ted hadn’t talked much during the dinner, but Abee had the sense he was doing a little better, despite his poor appetite.
“Where we going?” Ted asked.
“I want to check something out,” Abee answered.
Candy’s place was located just a few minutes away, toward the end of a sparsely inhabited street. The house was a ramshackle bungalow, fronted with aluminum siding and hemmed in by overgrown bushes. It wasn’t much, but Candy didn’t seem to care, and she hadn’t done much to make it any homier.
As Abee pulled into the drive, he saw that her car was missing. Maybe she’d got it working, he reasoned, but while he sat in the truck and stared at the house, he noticed that something wasn’t quite right. Something was missing, so to speak, and it took a few minutes before he figured out what it was.
The Buddha statue was missing, the one she kept in the front window, framed by a gap in the bushes. Her good luck charm, she’d called it, and there was no reason she should have moved it. Unless…
He opened the door of the truck and got out. When Ted glanced over at him, he shook his head. “I’ll be back in a minute.”
Abee pushed past the overgrown bushes and climbed onto the porch. Peering through the front window, he saw that the statue was definitely gone. The rest of the place looked the same. Of course, that didn’t mean much, since he knew it had come furnished. But the missing Buddha bothered him.
Abee worked his way around the house, peering in the windows, though curtains blocked most of the views. He couldn’t make out much.
Finally tiring of his efforts, he simply kicked in the back door, just like Ted had done at Tuck’s house.
He stepped inside, wondering what the hell Candy might be up to.
Just as she had every fifteen minutes since she’d arrived, Amanda approached the nurses’ station to ask if they had any further information. The nurse responded patiently that she had already given Amanda all the information