Crown of Thorns (Nick Barrett Charleston series) Read online

  “Mister?” she said, pulling Maddie loose from her hip and handing her across to me.

  I accepted the child.

  **

  My two elderly friends in the antique shop had also given me Angel’s address southeast of the Citadel. In terms of distance it wasn’t that far from the mansions of lower Charleston; but in this city geographical proximity means nothing, for each different district is merely like one clear hard-shelled bubble touching another. Where I grew up, we were instructed not to use

  the wrong fork; in Angel’s neighborhood, barely two miles away, children were taught not to play with discarded hypodermic needles.

  I drive an older Jeep Wrangler—faded black, well dented, with a roll bar under a canvas roof—and less than a half hour before arriving at the emergency room, I’d parked it just down from the house where Angel lived, ready to walk up and knock on the door with an excuse to ask her about the Van Dyck painting.

  Before I could swing out of the Jeep, however, a taxi had passed me and stopped alongside the other vehicles parked in front of the house. The house had faced decades of heat and storms. It leaned. Old yellow paint blistered on the wood siding, and most of the railing spindles on the front porch were broken or missing.

  Had I arrived five minutes later, I would have missed my chance. She would have been gone already. Had I arrived five minutes earlier, she may well have pressed me into taxi service.

  Before the taxi had settled on its springs to a total stop, Angel had stepped onto the front porch holding a small child, probably her baby sister. She’d marched to the cab, stood outside, and shown a roll of bills. Only then had the shaking of the cabbie’s head changed to nodding as he agreed to let her inside.

  When they drove away, I followed. According to my friends, this young girl possessed the painting, easily worth fifty thousand dollars. If she was going somewhere else to sell it, my friends would want to know. But the cab had not gone to another antique shop or a pawnshop. Instead, it had made a long, circuitous trip here to the hospital. Anticipating Angel’s destination, I’d raced into the parking lot, parked my Jeep, and, hurrying in a way that made it difficult to conceal my limp, arrived at the entrance just before Angel struggled to leave the cab with her sister.

  Her baby sister, of course, was Angel’s urgent mission.

  Although I wasn’t aware of it at the time, by accepting the child in the emergency room that Saturday, she also became my mission.

  **

  Maddie didn’t open her eyes as she settled into my arms. Her blue-black skin and tightly curled hair were much darker than Angel’s; I doubted her eyes would contain any green that reflected some white parentage. The baby whimpered slightly

  as I cradled her. She was hot, too hot.

  “Fare’s twenty-four eighty,” the cabbie said, “and most people tip five bucks on a fare like that, so make it an even thirty and we’re square.” His eyes bore down on her, but she returned the gaze until he had to turn away.

  Then Angel dug into her front pocket. She came up with a roll held together with a rubber band.

  “All ones,” she told the cabbie, tossing it at him. “See ya later.”

  She took Maddie from me again and marched toward the reception area.

  He fanned through the roll. I, like him, saw the bright colors of Monopoly money, wrapped in a one-dollar bill.

  “Hey!” He caught up to Angel and grabbed her by the right upper arm. I began to stand in her defense, but Angel spun quickly and kicked him in the shin, a remarkable move for someone holding a baby.

  I sat but didn’t relax, wondering if he would try anything else.

  The cabbie took a step backward. His eyes bulged with anger as he let go, and I believed if there had been no witnesses, he would have grabbed the girl by the throat.

  “I don’t have any cash,” Angel said calmly. “I was going to give you a watch or something so you wouldn’t feel cheated, but not after how you treated us. See, I got your name and taxi-license number from inside the cab.”

  She shifted her little sister to the other side of her hip to free her right hand, proof to me that she’d been using her sister as a delaying tactic earlier when she’d handed her to me, a subtle choreography that was impressive for someone her age. Angel reached into a front pocket again. She spoke to the cabbie as she flipped out a cell phone. “Harry Sherman. Four-zero-zero-five-two. I also got the complaint number memorized. You took me the long way, plus you smoked even though the sign said it was a no-smoking cab and even though I asked you not to three times because my sister is sick. And I saw that half-empty bottle of vodka rolling around under your front seat. How’s all that gonna sound when I call in?”

  She began to punch numbers on the cell-phone pad, difficult as this task was while she held her sister.

  “People get thrown in jail for skipping out on a fare,” Harry said. “Especially from your part of town.”

  “I had to get my sister to the hospital. She’s hurting bad.” Angel held the phone out so he could hear it ringing.

  “And I got to put gas in my cab,” he answered, trying his tough-guy look on her again.

  A tinny voice reached out from the phone.

  “Yeah,” Angel said as she pressed the cell phone to her face. “I’m with one of your drivers. I’m just twelve, but he’s drunk and saying stuff to me that’s making me scared, like maybe he thinks I’m way older or something. He—”

  “Alright, alright,” Harry said, hands up and backing away. “You ain’t worth the grief. Hang up and we’re even.”

  It probably made Harry’s decision easier that the large security guard had raised his head and swiveled it in our direction, like a fat bear suddenly aware of honey. Harry seemed like the type who preferred to avoid confrontations where he couldn’t be a bully.

  Angel snapped the cell phone shut, no triumph showing on her face.

  As Harry marched out with as much dignity as he could, Angel turned to me. She studied me for twenty seconds. In a way I found her intensity amusing; in another way, unsettling.

  I wondered about the type of life she had lived that made her seem so much older than her years.

  “Mister, want to call anywhere in the world cheap? Cell phone’s yours for thirty bucks. Soon’s they fix Maddie, I got to get home somehow.”

  I hesitated.

  “Twenty bucks,” she said.

  I leaned over and reached for my wallet. I didn’t need the phone, but she needed the money. I was here because I intended to talk to her when I could, and I’d return the phone then. With what I wanted to ask her, it wouldn’t hurt to establish some trust.

  “Don’t shut it off or replace the battery,” she warned me when our transaction was complete. “The way cell phones work, it might need a security code when you power it up again.”

  “Have the code?”

  “Nope,” she said. With that, she made a resolute turn toward the admitting nurse.

  No code. Happy to give it to me regardless of where I called. The phone was recently stolen then, and only usable until the former owner reported it missing. On a hunch, I hit the redial button and listened. I didn’t get the complaint department of the taxi company but an automated message notifying that service to this cell phone had been cut off and the caller should call a toll-free number for details.

  I grinned at the girl’s cool audacity.

  As I set the cell phone down beside me, the luminous face of the phone went blank. Dead battery.

  I grinned again.

  **

  Five minutes later, the large security guard stepped in to stop Angel’s calm, repetitious questions. I’d been listening too, but with admiration, not the irritation that showed on the guard’s face. Each time the nurse explained why they couldn’t help Angel’s sister unless she had proof of insurance or her mother showed up, Angel responded by asking for a doctor. Each time the nurse requested that Angel take Maddie off the counter, Angel responded by asking for a doctor.


  The security guard hitched his pants, stepped to the admitting desk, and interrupted Angel as she began to explain for the thirtieth time that her sister needed a doctor. He winked at the admitting nurse, a pale blonde whose dark eyeliner gave her a Bambi look.

  “Missy,” he said gruffly to Angel, “I think we’ve heard enough from you.”

  I guessed him to be over six feet and heavy in a soft way. If he expected his size and uniform to intimidate Angel because he usually intimidated adults, he was wrong this time. Which by now didn’t surprise me.

  “What’s your name, mister?” Angel asked as she set Maddie on the counter. The nurse had no choice but to accept the silent little parcel.

  “I’ll ask the questions here,” he said.

  Angel squinted and read his name tag. “Well, Mr. John Nesbitt, like I was telling this lady here, my sister is real sick. Someone’s got to help her. Me and Maddie ain’t leaving until

  I get a doctor to fix her up. It’s that simple.”

  “Doctors take money,” John said. “So do big fancy buildings like this hospital, filled with modern machines and expensive medicine.”

  “Don’t talk to me like I’m stupid,” Angel said. “Not only have I got my own computer, but I get paid to fix them and I’m sure I’ve forgotten more things about running hardware and software than you could learn in the rest of your life.”

  John smiled for the benefit of the admitting nurse. Maybe he’d decided it would look better if he played the role of a patient, indulgent father figure.

  “Well, missy—” big smile again—“then you understand that you need to show us a way the doctors can get paid. Maybe your dad—”

  “Ain’t got no daddy. Or Mama. It’s just me and Grammie Zora and Maddie. And Grammie Zora is visiting someone out of town right now. Which is why I’m here. Maddie needs help real bad. Don’t any of you understand?”

  John maintained his indulgent smile, playing to the admitting nurse. “If what you’re saying is that you don’t have a way to pay St. George’s Hospital, that’s alright. The Charleston University Hospital is set up to help people like you. We’ll make arrangements to send you there and—”

  “People like me? You mean poor people? Or mochachinos?”

  “Mochachinos?” Nesbitt echoed.

  “Half white, half chocolate, just the way Grammie says she loves me. Is that the kind of people like me you mean?” She glared at John Nesbitt, daring him to answer in a way that might offend her more.

  “What I mean,” he said, his face turning red, “is that programs are in place to help anyone who needs it in the way that you appear to need it at this moment.”

  “Can’t wait that long,” Angel said. “My sister’s so sick she can’t hold down water. Her cough is getting worse and worse. And feel her forehead. It was hot yesterday and now it’s hotter today. Which is why I brought her in.” No anger. No desperation. Just persistence, like dripping water. “She needs a doctor. How much can it cost this big hospital for someone to look at her for five minutes and fix her up so I can take her home?”

  John squatted so he could look Angel in the eyes. Like he’d read somewhere that getting down to a child’s level improved communication. “If you don’t listen to me,” he said, “I’ll have to do something about this. You don’t want that to happen, do you?”

  “What? Are you going to beat me up? A big man like you against a girl like me?”

  “Um, no.” New wrinkles across his placid face showed that John realized he’d made another mistake, promising a threat he couldn’t deliver. Worse, Angel seemed smart enough to know it.

  “Well, that’s what it’s going to take,” she said, crossing her arms. “I’m not going no place until a doctor looks at my sister. She’s all I’ve got and I’m all she’s got. And right now she needs help bad.”

  There were a half dozen other people in the waiting room who had found this exchange far more interesting than watching the sitcom on the television or worrying about the ailments that had brought them in for help. From their chairs near the admitting nurse, they intently watched the confrontation. Some snickered at Angel’s refusal to move, which didn’t help John and how he looked in front of the Bambi nurse, who was fighting to hide

  a smile herself. Maybe he decided he couldn’t intimidate Angel, but he could at least move her to a place where she wouldn’t have an audience hanging on her every word.

  Still squatting, he reached for the girl’s shoulders, keeping his knees apart to steady himself. Yet another mistake.

  **

  Her name was Retha Herndon, and later she would tell me about that morning, describing how from the moment she pulled the squeaky door shut and reversed Junior’s rusting gray 1978 Chevrolet truck down the red-clay drive from the trailer toward the gravel road that led out of the compound, she began praying hard to Jesus.

  Retha figured if there was any time she deserved to have her prayers answered, this might be it. It had been months since she had wasted Jesus’ time with selfish prayers, like asking him to help her not be overweight. No, Retha was accustomed to it now when people gave her compliments by saying she was “pretty in the face,” knowing exactly what that implied. Besides, everyone knew it was murder keeping the weight off after having a baby.

  More recently, she had also stopped asking Jesus to inspire Shepherd Isaiah to let her and Junior move out of Elder Mason’s trailer into one of their own somewhere on the compound. It was bad enough living with Junior’s father in such close quarters, especially since Junior’s father—his own father! —did not tolerate being addressed by anything less than Elder Mason, even in the dreadfully stifling privacy of the mobile home they were forced to share with him.

  Retha’s own parents had joined the church six years earlier when Shepherd Isaiah founded it. Unlike her older brother, who had been eighteen then and old enough to choose not to stay with the family, Retha at thirteen had had no choice but to move along with her parents, and had lived in another mobile home in the compound. When Mason Anderson Junior had showed interest

  in her just after her sixteenth birthday, she was glad to escape her own household to be married a few months later, especially since it seemed like such a privilege at the time to become part of Elder Mason’s family, as Elder Mason was one of Shepherd Isaiah’s twelve Elders of the Chosen.

  Not only that, but Elder Mason seemed so confident and assured. When it wasn’t Sunday, he wore snakeskin cowboy boots, jeans, a denim shirt, and a John Deere ball cap. Take away his beard and he looked like one of those cowboys in cigarette ads in the old Reader’s Digest magazines she’d once found hidden in her mother’s underwear drawer. Before she’d gotten to know him, Retha had had a secret crush on Elder Mason.

  The privilege of living with Elder Mason had lost its luster, however, when Retha learned that the man of God kept hidden the fact that he had a worse temper than Retha’s own father had, and an iron will to go with it. After she learned exactly how stubborn and mean-tempered he was, Retha had also stopped praying for Jesus to give Junior enough backbone to stand up to Elder Mason, partly because it didn’t seem Jesus had been listening, and mainly because now Retha believed if only so many prayers could be answered, she intended to bank them for Billy Lee, her little boy.

  She was glad she’d kept some prayers back because if ever she needed them, it was the morning she decided to flee.

  **

  In the emergency room, Angel did not hesitate.

  As John Nesbitt’s hands made light contact with Angel, she swung her right foot hard, centering the impact between his open knees, finding her target with the precision and concentrated focus of a field-goal kicker. Had she been bigger or had he been smaller, the force of it might have lifted him off the ground.

  His stunned disbelief lasted during the moments it took his nerve endings to route the shock waves of pain up his spine and into his brain. About the time it took for his eyes to pop wide and for his mouth to form a silent gasp. This
brief mercy of delayed reaction disintegrated in an agony that sent him backward into a fetal position, his speech lost in blubbering and choked howls.

  Angel jumped on top of him. She wrapped her legs around his neck in a scissors hold, clutching his hair in one hand like a bareback rider grabbing the horse’s mane.

  I knew from universal male sympathy that John Nesbitt was beyond caring, hardly aware of the pressure her legs exerted against his windpipe. Hardly aware that Angel had pulled a pen out of his shirt pocket and pressed it against the skin of his closed left eye. Hardly aware as Angel looked up at the circle of adults around them to speak in her calm, persistent voice.

  “Now is my baby sister going to get a doctor or does this guy go blind?”

  Chapter 3

  There was a woman I’d met in the spring in Charleston who had returned to Chicago where she worked as a doctor; we had begun a relationship of long-distance phone calls. Aside from that, I’d gone to great pains to ensure that my adult life had been relatively quiet and settled and alone. I had done a good job of avoiding the messes and complications that come with committed care about the lives of others. I was, without doubt, an expert at solitude.

  Although I would admit to this as one of many of my character flaws, I wasn’t prepared to change it. I knew that part of the allure of the Chicago woman was the distance barrier to further intimacy. My biggest commitment was the phone calls, and as she was a physician, her hectic schedule made that sufficiently difficult.

  Even my friendship with the two dear old ladies in the antique shop reflected my need to avoid closeness; our age difference provided a distance that ensured safety, and if that difference wasn’t enough, I knew they were rich enough and mannered enough and Charlestonian enough that they would never involve me in any personal problems that had potential for embarrassment or vulnerability.