The Sisterhood - Michael Palmer [105]
“Well, Doc, given the options, I’d say that was your best bet. I’m glad you’re not this tense in the operating room.”
David managed a laugh at himself, then pressed the bell. They waited, listening for a response. Nothing. David shivered and knew that the chill reflected more than the fine, wind-driven mist. He rang again. Ten seconds passed. Then twenty.
“Do we break in?” he asked.
“We may have to, but I’d suggest trying the back door first.” Joey walked to the street and motioned to Rudy Fisher that they were going around to the back. David gave the button a final press, then fought through a wave of queasiness and followed.
It was that third ring that woke Christine. She was stretched across her bed, careening through one grisly dream after another. On the floor, shards of torn note-paper were strewn about two pill bottles. Both of them were full.
“Wait a minute, I’m coming,” she called out. Could both her roommates have forgotten their keys? Knowing them, a likely possibility. She pushed herself off the bed, then stared at the floor. The shredded note, the bottles of gray-and-orange death—how close she had come. She threw the pills into a drawer, then swept up the scraps with her hands and dropped them in the basket. By the end of the terrible dark hour that had followed her return home, Christine had resolved that nothing ever would make her take her own life. Nothing, except perhaps a situation such as Charlotte Thomas’s. She would face whatever she had to face.
Again the doorbell sounded. This time it was the buzzer from the back door. “I’m coming, I’m coming.” She rushed through the kitchen and was halfway down the short back staircase when she stopped dead. It was him, David, propped on crutches and peering through the window. She reached down and flipped on the outside light; then she gasped. His face was drawn and cadaverous, his eyes totally lost in wide, dark hollows. A second man, his back turned, was standing behind him. Christine’s pulse quickened as first confusion, then mounting apprehension gripped her.
“Christine, it’s me, David Shelton.” His voice sounded weak and distant.
“Yes … yes, I know. What do you want?” She felt frightened, unable to move.
“Please, Christine, I must talk to you. Something has happened. Something terrible …”
Joey grabbed his arm. “Are you crazy?” he whispered, working his way in front of the window. “Miss Beall,” he said calmly, “my name is Joseph Rosetti. I’m a close friend of the Doc’s. He’s been hurt.” He paused, gauging Christine’s expression to see if any further explanation was necessary before she let them in.
Christine hesitated, then descended the final two stairs and undid the double lock. “I … I’m sorry,” she said as they entered the hallway. “You took me by surprise and … Please, come up to the living room. Can you make it all right? Are you badly hurt?”
For the next fifteen minutes she did not say another word as the two men recounted the events of the night. With each detail a new emotion flashed in her eyes.
Surprise, astonishment, terror, pain, emptiness. David studied them as they appeared. He wondered if she were even capable of a successful lie. Whatever she might have done, he was now certain that in no way was she responsible for Ben’s murder.
Still, she was somehow involved. That reality pulled David’s attention from her face. “Christine, what did you tell Ben?” She seemed unable to speak. “Please, tell me what you said to him.” There was a note of urgency and anger in his voice.
“I … I told him that it was me. That I was the one who … who gave the morphine to Charlotte.”
David’s heart pounded. His arrest, the filth and degradation of his night in jail, the unraveling of everything he had regained in his career, Ben Glass’s death—she was responsible. “And the forged prescription?” There was bitterness in his words now. “Were you responsible for that, too?”
“No! … I mean, I don’t know.” The muscles in her face tensed. Her lips quivered. The only explanation she could think to give him was the