What the Dead Know Read Free

against her, who would betray her?
    At St. Agnes Hospital, she continued to be selectively mum, answering only direct questions about what hurt where. Her injuries were relatively minor—a gash to the forehead that required four tiny stitches, which she was assured would leave no visible scar, something torn and broken in her left forearm. The arm could be stabilized and bandaged for now but would require surgery eventually, she was told. The young patrolman must have passed along the Bethany name, for the billing person pressed her on it, but she refused to speak of it again no matter how they poked and prodded. Under ordinary circumstancesshe would have been treated and released. But this was far from ordinary. The police put a uniformed patrolman outside her door and told her that she was not free to leave even if the hospital determined it was appropriate. “The law is very clear on this. You must tell us who you are,” another cop told her, an older one, from traffic investigation. “If it weren’t for your injuries, you’d be in jail tonight.” Still she said nothing, although the thought of jail terrified her. To not be free to come and go as she liked, to be held anywhere—no, never again. The doctor entered the name “Jane Doe” on her chart, adding “Bethany?” in parentheses. Her fourth name, by her count, but maybe it was her fifth. It was easy to lose track.
    She knew St. Agnes. Or, more correctly, had known it once. So many accidents, so many trips. A calf sliced open when a jar of fireflies was dropped, the shards ricocheting up from the sidewalk and nicking the roundest part. A flyswatter applied to an infected smallpox vaccination with nothing but good intentions. A knee opening like a flower after a fall in the underbrush, revealing the terrifying interior of bone and blood. A shin scraped on the rusty valve of an old tire, a huge inner tube from some tractor or truck, their father’s makeshift version of a bouncy castle, obtained and erected in deference to their mother’s Anglophilia. The trips to the emergency room had been family affairs, more father-enforced togetherness—terrifying for the injured party, tedious for those who had to tag along, but everyone got Mr. G’s soft ice cream afterward, so it was worth it in the end.
    This is not the homecoming I imagined, she thought, lying in the dark, allowing self-pity, her old friend, to come for her, envelop her.
    And she had imagined returning, she realized now, although not today. Sometime, eventually, but on her own terms, not because of someone else’s agenda. Three days ago the hard-won order of her life had jumped the track without warning, as out of her control as that pea-green Valiant. That car—it was as if there were a ghost in the machine all along, nudging her north, past the old landmarks, toward a moment not of her choosing. At the I-70 exit, when it would have been so easyto go west, toward her original destination, and possibly escape detection, the car had turned to the right and stopped on its own. Prince Valiant had brought her most of the way home, trying to trick her into doing what was right. That’s why the name had popped out. That, or the head injury, or the events of the past three days, or her anxiety about the little girl in the SUV.
    Floating on painkillers, she fantasized about the morning, what it would be like to say her name, her true name, for the first time in years. To answer a question that few people had to think about twice: Who are you?
    Then she realized what the second question would be.

CHAPTER 2
    â€œT hat your phone?”
    The sleep-creased woman staring at Kevin Infante was angry about something, not exactly a first for him. He also wasn’t sure of her name, although he was reasonably sure it would come to him in a second or two. Again, not a first.
    No, it was the combination—a strange woman and a baleful glare—that