Chapter 10: Don’t Go to the Hospital

Mason drove a battered grey Honda that smelled of coffee and old files. He checked the mirrors every few seconds, and neither of us spoke until the lights of the 10 freeway began to blur into long gold streaks. Natalie sat beside me in the back seat with her arm around my shoulders. I could feel her heart beating through her sleeve.

“Where are we going?” I finally asked.

“To a woman named Grace Mitchell. She was close to your grandmother.” His eyes met mine in the rearview mirror. “You’ve already met her.”

“This morning.”

“Then you’ll know how to reach her.”

“She texted me from a number I deleted.” I opened Natalie’s phone with unsteady fingers. “But she told me she lives in Inglewood.”

He nodded, as if that settled it. “Then we’ll start there.”

Natalie squeezed my hand. Out the window, the city went by in a smear of neon, taco trucks and billboards and a palm tree strung with white lights, and I tried to picture a woman I’d met for one hour that morning, who had known my grandmother for thirty years and had waited three of them just to speak to me. I wanted to thank her. I wanted to ask whether Mrs. Ruth had laughed easily, or whether she’d been stern, or whether she had ever, even once, said my name out loud.

I had said nothing more specific than that, though. It struck me as odd, a small cold pebble in my shoe. But I was too tired to follow the thought down, and it slipped away.

Grace’s building was a faded pink stucco off La Brea, wedged between a tyre shop and a storefront church. The gate hung half open and the stairwell smelled of cooking oil and bleach. Third floor, apartment 9. A strip of yellow light lay across the hallway carpet, because the door stood slightly ajar.

“Grace?” I called.

Nothing.

I pushed the door with my fingertips and it swung inward in a small, tidy living room. Lace doilies on the arms of the chairs. A rosary hanging from the lamp. A framed photograph of a younger Grace and a laughing, white-haired woman in a church hat that I knew at once was my grandmother. Everything was in its place except for the coffee table, which lay on its side, and a teacup broken on the carpet with tea still soaking the fibres.

And Grace.

She lay curled on the kitchen floor, one arm stretched toward the door. Dark red had bloomed across the front of her white blouse and spread over the linoleum like spilled paint.

“No,” I said. “No, no, no.”

I dropped to my knees beside her. The linoleum was warm and wet, and I would remember that for the rest of my life. She was breathing in shallow, wet little gasps. Her scarf had come off, and her grey hair lay spread over the tiles.

“Call 911!” I screamed.

Mason already had his phone out. Natalie ran for towels, her feet slapping on the floor. I pressed both hands against Grace’s side, and my palms went hot and slick in a moment.

“Grace, stay with me. Please. Help is coming.”

Her eyes fluttered open. They found my face, and for a moment, impossibly, she smiled.

“Ruth’s girl,” she whispered.

“Don’t talk. Save your strength.”

“I must.” Her fingers closed around my sleeve with startling strength. “They came for the register page. I told them it was gone. I lied.”

“What register page? Grace, who came?”

“Patience.” Her breath rattled in her chest. “The nurse. She’s alive, Amelia. Altadena. She is the only one who saw that night. You must find her before they—”

“Who? Who are they?”

“Don’t go to the hospital.” Her eyes slid past me and fixed on something over my shoulder. “St. Anne’s. Stay away from it. The doctor has your face on his wall.”

“What does that mean? Grace, what does that mean?”

Her grip tightened. She dragged me down until her lips brushed my ear, and her whisper was so faint I had to hold my own breath to hear it.

“Don’t trust the man who found you.”

Then her hand went slack against my sleeve.

“Grace!” I shook her gently, then harder. “Grace! Please!”

Sirens rose in the street below, wailing up La Brea. Natalie was sobbing into a dish towel, pressing it against Grace’s side beside my hands. I heard her saying “come on, come on, please” over and over, like a prayer she’d forgotten the rest of. Grace’s face had gone the colour of candle wax, and her lips were turning grey.

I had known this woman for less than a day. She had given me a letter, a bracelet and a photograph, and somewhere in the last hour she had bled onto her own kitchen floor because of me. I thought of the cup of tea she’d ordered at the café, which she never touched, and the way she’d said Ruth would never forgive me if I did this carelessly.

I wasn’t ready to lose anyone else.

Somewhere behind me a floorboard creaked.

I looked up. The paramedics had reached the landing, and one of them was already crouching at Grace’s side, two fingers against her throat, calling out numbers I didn’t understand. Another pulled Natalie back by the shoulders, firmly and kindly, and a third gently lifted my red hands away from the wound as though I were a child who’d been caught with something sharp. “We’ve got her, miss. You did good. Let us work.”

I stumbled back against the refrigerator, and the world narrowed to the sound of tearing packets and the bright rasp of a zipper.

Mason stood in the kitchen doorway, phone still in his hand, completely motionless. His face had gone pale and his eyes were fixed on Grace’s body. For a split second, before he realised I was watching, I saw something cross his features that was not horror. It was not grief either.

It was a calculation.

I thought about the way he had appeared on Natalie’s doorstep with my grandmother’s handwriting in his pocket. I thought about the Land Cruiser he said he’d been following, and the two weeks he claimed to have watched our house. I thought about the quick, sure way he’d said Inglewood, as if he’d always known the address, though I had told no one but Natalie.

The man who found you.

I stood up slowly, my hands red to the wrists. Behind us, the paramedics’ boots hammered up the stairs. I met Mason’s eyes across Grace’s kitchen, and I made my voice as quiet and steady as I could.

“Mason,” I said.

“How did you know Grace lived in Inglewood?”