Free Gravedigger by Joseph Hansen Page A

and wanted to report a missing person. “From the music camp at Buenos Vientos.” Yes, he knew it was closed, but this boy had been holed up in one of the sheds. “His gear is all there—clothes, even boots—and his car is there, but he’s nowhere around. It’s snowing hard up here. Somebody ought to try to find him. The name? Lyle Westover, age about nineteen, slight build. He—” A hand tugged Dave’s shoulder and he turned. The motherly woman was shaking her head.
    “Don’t bother them,” she said.
    “Sir?” the voice on the line said. “Are you there?”
    “Yes, just a second.” Dave covered the mouthpiece. He asked the woman what she meant.
    “Isn’t he the little one that can’t talk right?” she asked. Dave nodded. She said, “I thought so. You get to know them all here in the summer.”
    “You know where he is—is that what you’re saying?”
    “In the hospital at Cascada,” she said.
    Dave said into the telephone, “I’m sorry. False alarm. I’m at the café here in town. They’ve located him for me. Excuse the trouble.”
    “No problem, sir.” The line went dead. Dave hung up.
    “At least,” the woman said, “I guess that fat girl took him to the hospital. She come running in here, asking where the nearest one was. I know her too. Trio, they call her.” She laughed. “I guess because she’s bigger than any three of the rest of them.”
    “When was this?” Dave said.
    “Said she had somebody in the car very sick, and she had to get them to a hospital right away. Last night, around six. Busy in here. But she was scared, plain to see that. I told her the way to Cascada. She was so jittery, I wasn’t sure she took in what I said. She was out that door before the words were hardly out of my mouth. I ran after her to yell the directions to her all over again, and that was when I saw who it was that was sick. Passed out cold, head over against the window glass. Oh, he was pale, white as a ghost, blue around the mouth. Frail little thing, anyway, you know.”
    Dave drank more of the scalding coffee, set the mug down. “She hasn’t come back, of course?”
    “She went up first in the morning. I saw her pass, saw her come down too, not more than an hour after. She tore right on through, lickety-split. I guess I was busy when she drove up there the second time. Never saw her. Then, of course, here she came, barging in wild-eyed, out of breath. Quick—where was the nearest hospital?”
    “Thanks,” Dave said. “Where is it?”
    Cascada huddled dreary in cold rain. Its Main street store fronts were red brick, brown brick. Feed and grain, hardware, drugstore. Modern crisp-lettered white plastic signs gleamed, so did the windows at McDonald’s and the Pizza Hut, but no one was around, and the effect was sad. He found the hospital at the end of Main street, where the motherly woman had told him it would be—a new, sand-color stucco building with a white rock roof, one story, maybe twenty rooms. The lawn around it was bright with new grass, the plantings of eucalyptus trees young and lacy. He left the Triumph on the new blacktop of a parking lot almost empty, glossy with rain. Plate-glass doors led him into a shiny little reception area. An elderly nurse pointed him down a hallway. In the hallway, he found Anna Westover, seated on a stiff, minimally upholstered armchair, and looking drawn and bitter.
    “What are you doing here?” she said.
    “I told you I was looking for him,” Dave said.
    “He’s in a coma,” she said. “He tried to kill himself with sleeping pills. God, that child, that child.” Her voice shook. On the big, soft leather bag in her lap, her thin hands clutched each other so tightly the knuckles shone white. She was angry—at Lyle, or at herself? “What in the world is the use?” It was a cry from the heart. She looked up at Dave with tears in her eyes. “You struggle to raise them, to understand them, to make life easy for them, to train them not to