Free When Secrets Die by Lynn S. Hightower Page B

ferocious politeness that masked the rage that washed over him when dealing with a litigator who was trying to spin the science.
    But the energy, the fizzle, it wasn’t there anymore. Lucca had gotten used to him not looking happy. But now she did not think her brother looked well. His skin was tinged red, he looked flushed more often than not. He’d put on weight, and he looked puffy—the wristband of his watch straining around the swollen joint.
    Nothing new in his eating habits. No breakfast, peanut butter crackers and Sprite for lunch, if he didn’t send out for something. His face was taking on a worn look, as if he didn’t sleep well, though when she’d asked, he’d said he slept too well, and was having trouble getting up.
    Not that he’d see a doctor. Marcus had a horror of hypochondria, and always seemed convinced that no one believed him when he complained. Since he was rarely sick, but usually deathly ill when he was, this worry made no sense. But that was Marcus, and had been since they were little. Lucca remembered him bellowing at their mother when he was eleven about being hauled to the ER to get stitches in a cut on his head. He’d had a severe concussion, his pupils had contracted to pinpoints, and he was bleeding like a pig. Still, he was sure the doctor would think he was, making a big deal out of nothing.
    So Lucca did not bother to suggest her brother see a doctor. If he got miserable enough, he’d go. Maybe he just needed some sleep, or better still, a long vacation. Her diagnosis was emotional exhaustion and not enough fun. No surprise, with a job like his.
    Marcus had no idea who she was, this woman who’d called him up at seven-thirty, well past office hours, and who did not seem surprised to find him working late. From her voice he could tell that she was old, from the accent that she’d grown up in the coal mine regions of eastern Kentucky. She knew his name, the number of his private line, and talked to him as if they’d just resumed a conversation that had been interrupted but was still on track.
    â€œMa’am?” he said.
    The flow of her conversation slowed and eased away, like she’d gently applied mental brakes.
    â€œI didn’t catch your name. Did you say Calhoun?”
    â€œI did, sir. Jodina Calhoun. I met you seven years ago when my daughter died. You remember when that ambulance got hit at the railroad crossing?”
    The image was instantaneous, a flashback launching the posttraumatic stress that had haunted him more and more these last years. A flicker of images moved through his mind like pictures rotating on a Rolodex, until he was in the middle of the memory, and he was once again listening to the crunch of his boots on the snow and ice.
    A deputy led the way with a flashlight, the cone of illumination jittering as the man’s hand shook. It was a long walk, because they had to approach from the back of the train and thread their way past sixteen boxcars. The intermittent rotation of emergency lights lured them toward the wreckage. Every police car in the county was there, as well as a fire truck, and two ambulances—one on its side, crumpled like a wadded ball of tinfoil, the top of the ambulance sliced open and lying upside down in the snow. And still the lights from the roof flashed, and the glow of red played against the frozen road, as if the ambulance were a living creature, dying slowly now, only able to light the way to disaster.
    The deputy was muttering something that sounded like a prayer. There were none of the swift and mumbled pleasantries common between professionals at disaster sights, the familiar and worn groove of surface-friendly greeting used to separate the worker bees from the victims, their way of assuring themselves that their world was still intact.
    There were no macabre witticisms or dark dirty humor, because no one ever indulged rude humorous tendencies in Franklin’s