The Other Side - J. D. Robb [165]
“My God, Ryan, you’re bleeding!” She grabbed the back of his shirt to stop him; it was peppered with dime- to quarter-sized red spots. He jerked away.
“Forget it. I need to get Jimmy.”
Calling for an ambulance occurred to her, but it was the last thing they needed at the moment unless Ryan was in serious danger. She grabbed his shirt again. “At least let me look. Jimmy needs his dad, not a corpse and”—this seemed to get through as he held his arms in the air and let her make a full inspection of his upper torso—“I don’t know how I’d explain to him that you got shredded and bled to death protecting me from the . . . Oh, here’s one. Is that better? The rest seem to be stuck in your shirt. Nothing too deep. Here’s another. Okay. Okay?”
“Okay,” he said, looking down at her as she passed below his right armpit to stand before him. He lowered his arms, and when his hand came even with her chin, he pinched it gently between his thumb and his fist and tilted her face up to his. “When this is over, we’re going to have a long talk about keeping secrets from each other in the future. Okay?”
His expression and tone were unsmiling and stern, and she was thrilled. “Okay.”
But she wasn’t so elated that she for one second forgot the peril Jimmy was in . . . or how ill-equipped she was to deal with it. She hiked her skirt up high enough to step through the window casing behind Ryan—her heels making the move particularly tricky—and made straight for the stairs once inside.
The door at the end of the hall opened easily. Odelia and Adeline stood to one side of their sister, their expressions empathetic and disapproving at the same time. They looked at M.J. helplessly when she entered and remained silent.
Imogene sat in the high-backed rocker with Jimmy cradled in her arms, the afghan of muted colors pulled up around her shoulders and tucked securely about his young body.
“Jimmy!”
“Dad!” The boy turned his head at his father’s voice and started to cry at the sight of him. Ryan started to charge forward . . . then flew out the door and halfway down the hall. Staggering, he got to his feet again and after a second or two started back with the same determined step.
“Wait.” She put her hands on his chest and stopped him with her body. “Please. Let me try.”
He cast her a look that was hard to decipher but didn’t push through her. She dropped her hands and turned to the sisters.
“Imogene,” she said softly. The ghost ignored her, pulling Jimmy closer and trying to soothe him instead. She caressed his brow and the outer side of his face. He shivered. “Imogene, he’s cold. You need to let him go now so he doesn’t get sick. He’s frightened. Imogene?”
“His lips are turning blue.” Ryan started forward again, and again she stopped him.
“Imogene, I’ve figured it out. At least . . . I think I have. While I was driving over here . . . I was thinking . . . I think I know what you lost in this house. I think I know what you all lost here because . . . because I’ve found it.” She had Odelia and Adeline’s confused attention. “Please. Let Jimmy go so we can talk about it.”
Imogene raised her head at last and looked at her—ready to listen but far from willing to let Jimmy go. It was a start. A small one, if the grief and yearning on her face were any indication.
“I know it must feel so good to be holding a young boy in your arms again. Like a miracle, maybe . . . if you believed in that sort of thing. But you stopped believing in . . . well, everything, didn’t you? At first it was just your ability to mother another child, and then it was your husband and your marriage that you abandoned; then you moved back here and lost your faith in everything else—God, life . . . yourself. I bet in all the time you’ve been dead you haven’t really looked for what you lost because you had no faith that the Other Side even existed—your life was a misery of loneliness, guilt, and pain, so why shouldn’t your afterlife be? And yet”—she held up her index finger and stepped closer to Jimmy—“and yet you gave up on living because you had no faith in an afterlife . . . but