The Thousand - Kevin Guilfoile [105]
He wondered what they must be saying about him back home. He was tempted to turn the phone on and call somebody, anybody—his mother, his brother, Peter (Peter’s from a family of lawyers, isn’t he? Back east? People who could help?)—and just tell them he hadn’t done it. That’s what an innocent person would do, right? Somewhere his mother was hearing the news—from the paper, from friends, from the cops. No doubt she would be protesting his innocence to anyone who would listen, telling everyone what a good boy Wayne had always been. But for Mrs. Jennings, Wayne’s lack of contact would carry with it the slightest, barely conscious, nagging doubt.
Right now his own mother was considering the possibility that her youngest son was a murderer.
By noon, he had fashioned his blazer into a tent to cover his exposed parts. The heat underneath was intense, but it was preferable to the desert sun, which attacked like breath from a dragon. Around two, a car pulled over, carrying a middle-aged woman, alone. She cracked her window an inch, and as Wayne approached he felt the cool conditioned air rushing out across his face. He tried to say he’d been robbed. The woman studied him until the concern and empathy on her face were flushed away by fear. Before pulling away, she squeezed a large bottled water, three-quarters full, through the gap and promised to send help from the next exit, over Wayne’s desperate protests.
She meant help in the form of cops, which was help he didn’t need.
Three times he spotted the Mars lights and blue stripe of an Arizona Highway Patrol car, a sight that sent him scrambling behind a large rock. When night came without a ride, he felt despair, but also relief. At least the sun was gone.
He found the outline of his bed from this morning and settled into it. Sleeping seemed both impossible and necessary. He’d conserved the water and still had about a quarter bottle for the next day, but he was starving and exhausted.
He heard a helicopter in the distance and checked again to make sure his phone was turned off. “They got these satellites that can detect your heat signature from space,” Peter had said. Wayne tried to cover himself with sand, but digging with his hands was useless and he suspected the sand was hotter than his body was anyway. Instead, he curled up into the smallest ball he could, and wondered if there was any possibility at all—maybe if he had another of Ginny’s little pills—that the sun would stay down for a whole day.
37
FAINTING WAS ALL IT WAS, she tried to explain when she was able. Just the heat.
Myra Jameson, who answered Molly’s cries from the kitchen, wouldn’t let her return to her room like she wanted. “Sleep is all I need,” Nada said. “A nap.”
“Keep her awake,” Myra said to Molly.
Within ten minutes, she was prone across a settee in the library, with Hugh holding her hand and a doctor on the way—Jameson’s personal physician. Apparently, if you were a man as important as Gary Jameson, you could get a house call from a doctor at any old time, even on a Saturday, even in a blackout. In another twenty minutes, Nada was looking at a slim middle-aged man who had a bit of a gimp and a tailored brown suit. He told her she could call him Dennis, or Dr. Russo if she preferred.
The exam consisted mostly of questions and some gentle probing into her ears and her eyes. Using an old coatrack, Jameson helped the doctor run an IV to her arm and asked her to sit and wait a few minutes. Then Russo disappeared for maybe an hour, during which the pain and ringing in her head crescendoed and subsided. When he returned, Russo set down a thick green envelope and probed her again, after which he said he didn’t think the bump on her forehead looked serious enough to have caused a concussion and that she wasn’t showing signs of brain swelling. The fall hadn’t caused any additional injuries, or not serious ones anyway.
“Additional?” Nada asked.
Russo smiled without showing teeth. “You’re dehydrated. Diarrhea, headaches, dizziness, mild hallucinations. But