Chapter 09
quinn
Quinn doesn’t expect Amy Gray to welcome her with open arms. The last time they met, a few days after the accident, Quinn asked Amy some tough questions on camera about what’d happened on the lake that night; she’d had to, it was her job.
But the woman was grieving her own son, too, so Quinn hadn’t pushed hard, and she wasn’t involved in the subsequent media circus around the civil suit eight months later.
She’s a news journalist for INN, not a scavenging tabloid hack.
Even so, she expects a bit of pushback when she turns up at Al’s Burgers unannounced.
She doesn’t expect a glass jug to be lobbed at her head.
‘Christ on a bike!’ she exclaims. ‘I just want to talk!’
Amy reaches for the fryer basket on the range behind her which may, or may not, be dripping with boiling oil.
Quinn knows when to beat a retreat.
Fortunately, she has a Plan B.
Fifty minutes later, she and her cameraman, Phil, enter the town’s hospital from the underground parking garage, where he’s left their hire car parked near the exit in case a swift getaway is required.
‘You sure I’m not going to get arrested?’ he grumbles, hitching up a pair of “borrowed” pale blue hospital scrubs.
‘Grow a pair,’ Quinn says, settling into a wheelchair they’ve liberated from the ER. ‘It’s not like it’d be the first time.’
She pulls a white hospital blanket over her knees and tucks it neatly around her narrow thighs.
If life gives you lemons, she thinks, removing her piratical black eyepatch.
Ninety-nine per cent of the time, her empty eye socket and keloid scars mark her out as a freak.
But here, in a hospital, her disfigurement actually helps her blend in.
People glance at her as Phil pushes her wheelchair along the hospital corridors, and then quickly look away again. Quinn’s not offended: she’s relying on their embarrassment – ‘Don’t stare, Jimmy!’ – to stop anyone asking awkward questions.
A white-coated doctor stares at her as they get into the elevator, clearly trying to place her, wondering if she’s one of his patients. She looks very different without the eyepatch, but fingers crossed he’s not a regular INN viewer.
‘Are you one of mine?’ he asks finally.
‘We’re heading to the West Pavilion,’ Phil says, with a confidence that surprises even Quinn.
‘Level 3,’ the doctor says, losing interest.
Three days after the IED had exploded beneath Quinn’s Jeep in Syria, she’d asked one of the nurses to bring her a mirror.
She hadn’t been able to tell the woman what she’d wanted, of course: her jaw had still been wired shut.
She’d had to write it with her left hand on the pad they’d given her.
One silver lining: it’s her right arm that’s paralysed, and she’s a leftie.
She’d known as soon as she’d seen the mess the bomb had made of her face she was fucked. Viewers might not expect their war correspondents to be perky blonde auto-cuties, but they didn’t want to be put off their lunch either.
INN hadn’t been able to fire a war hero, so they’d “promoted” her to a desk job in Washington and waited for her to either quit or drown herself at the bottom of a bottle of bourbon.
To be fair, she’d given the latter a creditable attempt.
What had saved her (and her liver) from complete self-destruction was the disappearance of a three-year-old flower girl from a beach wedding in Florida.
The story had got under her skin. She’d sobered up and spent two years tracking the child down, delivering some of the best investigative journalism of her life.
What she’d had to do when she found out what’d happened to the little girl was between Quinn and God.
But then she’d started jonesing for her next fix. The Stowebury disaster happened at just the right time. In the last fifteen months, she’s returned to the story again and again like an addict, unable to put it down.
Something sinister and ugly is at work in this town. Something that’s pitted neighbours and friends and even sisters against each other, despite the united front they present to the outside world.
And the answer is here, in this hospital. She can feel it.
They reach the third floor, where a wall of windows showcases a spectacular view of the Green Mountains, aflame with colour.
Phil wheels her down the wide corridor towards the long-term care wing. No one pays them any attention. He’s left his camera in the rental car; this is a fact-finding mission. Any interviews will come later.
‘Reckon she’s a cabbage?’ he asks, as they stop and study a room map bolted to the wall at an intersection between two corridors.
‘Not according to my source,’ Quinn says.
‘Fifteen months, though,’ he says. ‘You’re not gonna wake up reciting Shakespeare.’
They locate room 307 on the map, and push through a pair of double doors to the ward.
A reed-thin woman with a torch of bright red hair is talking to a nurse just outside the door of the room they want.
Phil quickly pivots the wheelchair away from them and leans over Quinn’s shoulder, pretending to fiddle with the footrest. ‘Is that the mother?’ he murmurs.
‘Iris Gray,’ Quinn says.
Even from this distance, she can see how much the woman’s aged since Quinn last saw her just over a year ago. Her face is grey, and that flaming red hair is threaded now with white, though Quinn knows she’s barely forty.
Of the two Gray sisters – both had kept their maiden names, which must have been confusing given they worked at the same school – Iris is the one Quinn finds more interesting.
Her backstory is darker and more charged than Amy’s, the good-girl sister who married her childhood sweetheart.
Iris spent a year in a psych ward, a biographical detail that piques Quinn’s interest, and she’s curious to know how this free-spirited artist ended up with a jock-turned-mayor like Jesse Spencer.
But it’s the relationship between the two sisters that really intrigues her.
According to everyone she spoke to fifteen months ago, the two sisters were very close before the accident; Amy had raised Iris’s son for a year when she was hospitalised, and the women were best friends, working and socialising together.
And yet when Quinn was last here, she didn’t once see them offer each other support.
Even when they were in the same room, they didn’t come anywhere near each other; in fact, they didn’t so much as look at each other.
Quinn’s asked around town over the past few days; the sisters’ estrangement is common knowledge.
In fifteen months, Amy and Iris Gray haven’t even spoken.
Iris glances briefly their way, and then turns and walks swiftly down the hospital corridor in the opposite direction.
Quinn’s spidey senses twitch. Something happened out on the lake that night, something that drove a terrible wedge between the two sisters.
And Iris Gray has just left the hospital room of one of the few people who might know what it was.