Storm Lines Read online

  “You can sit down,” Marley said. Her voice sounded raw, scratchy.

  Devon walked to the other side of the bed and held up Marley’s water cup and straw.

  “Thanks,” Marley said as Devon brought the cup closer. She took a sip and cleared her throat. “You’re saving my life all over the place. Caller of paramedics, stancher of bleeding wounds, bearer of water, and getting ridder of well-meaning colleagues.”

  Devon laughed. She liked Marley’s humour, a little self-deprecating, a little sarcastic.

  “I’m happy to help.”

  Marley lowered the cup to her lap. “You are, aren’t you? A helper.”

  Devon felt a moment of embarrassment. Marley didn’t know how true it was.

  “I was in the right place at the right time,” Devon said, aiming for friendly but neutral.

  “You said you worked here at the hospital. I remember that.”

  “I’m a psychologist. I work with the trauma team.” Present tense felt acceptable in this moment. No matter HR had just signed off on one more month of her leave.

  “The integrated staff health team, yes?”

  Devon was surprised. Few outside of the hospital had heard of it. “That’s right. That’s my baby.”

  “I read about it in the paper, maybe last year? I was curious about how it might apply to other front line professions.”

  “Like police work?” Devon said, smiling.

  “Yes,” Marley said, smiling also but looking earnest. “We keep compiling stats about PTSD and stress leave and depression for first responders, but nothing seems to get done. Your integrated team finally looked like some action.”

  “I actually did ride-outs with the Toronto Police Department as a pilot a number of years ago. It’s where this idea germinated, really.”

  “Tell me more,” Marley said, her eyes bright.

  Devon smiled at her eagerness. She didn’t often get this kind of audience to talk about her work. “The pilot paired up mental health workers with street cops, since so many of the calls involved citizens struggling with mental health and addictions issues.”

  “Sixty-three percent in Hamilton last year,” Marley said.

  “Really?” Devon said as Marley nodded. “That’s high.”

  Marley tried to shrug, and her hands fluttered for a moment then were still. “So you liked doing the ride-alongs?”

  “I did, though they were hard. It made me think about front-line workers and the stressors these kinds of experiences put on them. And I wanted to design a system where someone on the front line had their own ride-along, someone who is there solely for them, making sure they’re okay.”

  “Amazing,” Marley said softly. “It’s so good to hear about something that actually works from a ground roots level.”

  Devon felt her chest fill with pride even as her heart sank with knowledge of her own failure.

  “Sorry, I’m babbling,” Marley said. “It must be the pain meds.”

  “Are you in pain now?” Devon said, thankful for the turn in conversation.

  “No, as long as I sit still.” Marley sighed. “Very still. God, this is going to suck.”

  She closed her eyes for a moment, and Devon studied her. She was very pale, her dirty blond hair hanging in twists around her face and jaw. Like most people, Marley seemed to shrink in a hospital bed, dwarfed by pillows and IV stands and monitors.

  Marley opened her eyes and looked right at Devon. Devon’s heart stuttered a little in a way she recognized. In a way she did not want. Not now.

  “I should go.”

  “Okay,” Marley said quietly.

  Devon didn’t move. She wanted to say she would come back, that she would check in with Marley and follow her progress. But this wasn’t work, and Marley was not a job. The impulse must be personal, then. Would it be an okay thing to say on a purely personal level?

  “You’re worrying,” Marley said, watching Devon. “You don’t need to. Nurses and doctors are taking care of me. I’ve got a good support network, and I’ll…I’ll figure out bed rest.” She smiled a tired strained smile. “I’m okay.”

  Devon nodded and stood. “It was nice to meet you, Constable Marlowe.”

  “Just Marley. And it was nice to meet you, too. Thank you again.”

  “You’re welcome.”

  Devon tried to let that closure be enough, let those words of assurance and thanks be exactly what she came here for. But she looked back before she left, saw the forlorn and hurt and anxious expression on Marley’s face before she sighed and closed her eyes.

  “Would you mind if I visited again?” Devon said, her throat tight.

  Marley opened her eyes, and Devon read some kind of relief. “God. Yes, please. You can save me from my mother next.”

  Devon laughed and the tightness eased. “I’ll come by tomorrow?”

  Marley’s eyes, still tired, looked happy. “Tomorrow.”

  Devon eased her way out of the room, a little bit of her own happiness in her chest.

  Chapter Three

  Devon’s visit and her brother Jamie sneaking her French fries later that night were the last moments Marley felt any semblance of happy. Infection stole into her body in the middle of the night, an invasion that made her vomit and sweat. Each retching movement sent a streak of hot pain through her wound. By three in the morning, she was dehydrated and crying and exhausted from the pain. Her wound was now hot and swollen, and the nurses checked her constantly. The vomiting had stopped by the time her mother arrived at eight, but uncontrollable chills racked Marley’s body. Marley could only feel relief, distant and nearly primal, as Grace Marlowe took charge.

  They changed Marley’s sheets and gown, and propped her body up to untangle her monitor leads and IV lines. Marley’s whole body felt weak, and the room spun alarmingly. She was soon tucked back in under fresh sheets with another dose of pain meds and antinauseants and her mother’s hand on her forehead. Thoughts of Sergeant Crawford coming by surfaced and disappeared. Devon was a sweet slip of a dream. There was something else, though. A worry that made her stomach lurch and plummet. Something she needed to do. But the world spun in a sea of worry and sick, and Marley let the meds pull her down into unconsciousness.

  It took three days for Marley’s body, along with a sledgehammer swing of antibiotics, to fight the infection. On the second day, they talked about taking her into surgery to clear out the infection. But her body finally started responding to the antibiotics, the redness around her wound slowly starting to recede. Marley still couldn’t put her arm anywhere near her abdomen. She couldn’t do much of anything.

  “You’re going for a walk today,” Grace said, as Marley surfaced from another drug-induced sleep. She was filling up Marley’s jug with fresh water.

  “Oh, joyous day,” Marley mumbled. She evaluated her body and her sluggish thoughts. Her body was a trembling, sweaty mess of pain. She was so weak. But her head felt a little clearer. The nurses had said she’d feel more like herself once the infection started to clear.

  “Do you know what day it is?”

  “Thursday?”

  “Friday.”

  “Shit,” Marley mumbled.

  Grace lifted her eyebrows but said nothing. “Monday morning was your…accident. The infection started Tuesday, they wanted to take you into surgery on Wednesday, but by Thursday afternoon, the infection began to abate.”

  “Friday I go for a walk and Saturday they send me home,” Marley said, then coughed. The bruises on her throat were starting to fade, but the soreness was still there.

  Grace handed her some water. “We’ll see,” was all she said to Marley’s prediction.

  Marley sipped, the tang of the city’s tap water settling on her tongue. She’d lived her whole life in Hamilton, a city built on the steel industry. Gritty and tough streets, gorgeous nature trails, the expanse of Lake Ontario, smog in the summer and blasts of snow in the winter, blue-collar workers and university students—Marley loved it all. And she
loved the taste of the tap water. It meant she was home.

  “Earth to Bridget,” Grace said, dumping a cloth bag on Marley’s hospital bed.

  Marley rubbed her eyes. “My head is stuffed with cotton.”

  Grace rubbed her back, at once gentle and prodding. “You’ve taken quite a beating, daughter. Let’s start getting you back on track.”

  They’d had a few days of practice sitting Marley up without tangling her IV lines. Grace produced a pair of Marley’s track pants and a maroon McMaster Marauders T-shirt.

  “Real clothes,” Marley groaned happily.

  It took longer than Marley thought possible to get her into pants and a shirt and she was sweating by the end of it. She had to push her pants low to avoid the bandage around her abdomen, but the worn cotton of her shirt felt heavenly against her skin.

  “Ready?” Grace said, keeping her arm around her daughter’s shoulders.

  “Ready.”

  Marley shuffled more than she walked, but she made it to the nurses’ station in the centre of the ward. Sure, it was only three doors down from her room, but it felt like an accomplishment. The nurses smiled and waved, and an older man in a wheelchair with a plaid housecoat wrapped around his shoulders cheered her on.

  Exhausted and happy, Marley was concentrating on turning around when she saw Devon approach.

  “You’ve got a lot of fans,” Devon said, smiling sweet and shy, her hands shoved into her dark jeans.

  “Devon, hey.” Marley’s tongue felt twisted all of a sudden, as if words were as impossible as sprinting down this hallway. “Thanks for coming.”

  “Devon’s been by every day, dear,” Grace said, tugging on Marley’s arm to get her moving again.

  Marley made the mistake of trying to walk and look over her shoulder at Devon. “You have?” she said to Devon, then gripped the IV pole hard as the hallway started to spin a few degrees off course. “Oh. Shit.”

  Grace took one arm firmly in her grip, and Marley felt Devon’s steadying presence on her other side. This was embarrassing.

  “Open your eyes, Bridget,” Grace was saying in that calm, demanding way Marley had been listening to her whole life. “Find your balance, then we’ll get you back to your room.”

  “Yeah, I’m okay,” Marley said. They began a slow and awkward three-person shuffle back to Marley’s room, Devon steadying Marley and pushing the IV pole. Marley wanted to make a joke to cover the humiliation of this moment but her legs felt weak, her side hurt, and her stomach was starting to roll. All she cared about was getting back to her bed.

  Finally she was there, sweaty and exhausted and embarrassed, but safely back to bed. Grace said she was going to find a nurse and left the room. Marley took a moment to breathe before she looked up.

  “Sorry, that was a bit of a show,” Marley said to Devon, who stood by the foot of Marley’s bed, looking concerned and a little bit guarded. Marley’s stomach plummeted. Maybe Devon was tired of coming to her rescue.

  “It’s okay,” Devon said, running a hand through her short curls. “It’s good to see you awake and moving around.”

  “I’ve been pretty out of it,” Marley said, fighting back the urge to cry. Devon sounded distant, detached. Marley let the disappointment swallow her up. “I didn’t know you’d been in every day. Thanks for visiting, it’s really good of you.” She adjusted herself on the bed, the movement sending a fresh wave of pain through her wound. “You don’t have to keep coming, though. I’m good.”

  Devon didn’t say anything for a moment, and Marley’s polite release of Devon’s responsibility hung in the air between them.

  Before Marley could try and work through what this helpful, distant woman was thinking, her mom returned with Sergeant Crawford in tow.

  “Looks like it’s a day of visitors,” Grace said.

  Devon took a step back from the bed and, to Marley’s surprise, held out her hand to Crawford. “Good to see you again, Sergeant.”

  “Same to you, Dr. Wolfe.”

  They know each other?

  “Why don’t I head down and pick up some coffee and tea,” Grace said.

  “I’ll join you, Mrs. Marlowe,” Devon said. “If you don’t mind.”

  “Not at all, Devon.”

  Everyone knew each other. This was a bizarre fever dream. How out of it had she been? What else had she missed?

  Marley knew what she’d missed. The vague worry and responsibility that had been tugging at her turned into outright worry. She knew who she should be taking care of. She had to believe they were okay. They would be okay for a few more days. Maybe.

  Sergeant Crawford cleared his throat, and Marley looked up. He stood somewhat stiffly at the foot of her bed. Marley respected her commanding officer of the last three years, but they had never been close.

  “How is the recovery, Marlowe?”

  “Slower than I’d like, sir.”

  Crawford nodded, like her answer was just the right combination of detailed and impersonal.

  “I wanted to give you an update, and I have some questions about a case.” He paused, clearly assessing the sweating, pale mess Marley currently presented. “Are you up for that?”

  “Yes,” Marley said, lying. “Go ahead.”

  Crawford pulled out his phone and read something then looked back up. “The Warren brothers were picked up two days ago, both arrested on battery of an officer.”

  “I was off duty, sir. Doesn’t that make a difference?”

  “No,” he said evenly. It was hard to rile up Crawford. “You were targeted because of your role as a police officer. So they’ll be prosecuted on those charges.”

  “Which brothers were they?” There were only four actual Warren brothers, but the Hamilton police included all the cousins, which brought the number closer to twenty.

  Crawford checked his notes. “Cody and Stacy.”

  Marley forced herself to think. “The bowling brother and the one who’s always eating protein bars?”

  Crawford cracked a smile. “I believe you are right, yes.”

  Making this connection felt like a big accomplishment. It was a morning for accomplishments.

  “Next up is the Fleming Street drug bust.”

  Marley’s body went cold, and her muscles tensed. She did not think she had the energy to field these questions. And keep her secret.

  “I thought we got all the major players last month, sir,” Marley said, hoping the slightest shake in her voice could be chalked up to her current state.

  “Distribution, yes,” Crawford said. “But one of the drugs we picked up is an unknown. We’re in the process of getting it tested, but Public Health and the provincial drug unit are on us about finding out who developed this drug and how. They’re looking for information we don’t have. The group we rounded up last month are not the chemical sciences type. Someone else made this drug, and we need to know who.”

  Marley swallowed and dared herself to speak. To show she had nothing to hide. “What about Randolph West?” she said. “I thought he was brought in for both production and distribution.”

  “That’s correct. But he’s all we’ve got. And there’s nothing in West’s history that suggests he has the knowledge to develop this kind of street drug.” Crawford blew out a breath. “We’re missing something.”

  Marley said nothing, still focused on not allowing her body or her expression to give away her nerves. She had not been front line on investigating this case. It had sat squarely in the hands of the drug unit right up until they’d needed the street cops to help on the day of the multi-site raid. That’s when Marley had become involved. That’s when she’d met Carla Slessinger and her granddaughter, Aimee West. Drug kingpin Randolph West’s mother and his eight-year-old daughter.

  Marley swallowed past that shaky feeling of a lie coming to the surface. “How can I help?”

  “The notes indicate you were in charge of Randolph’s daughter once she was brought to the station, is that right?”

&nbs
p; “I was with Aimee from the moment she was escorted out of the Fleming Street house, actually. But since I wasn’t on the first team, Miss West wasn’t officially in my care until we got to the police station. Even then, I had no official capacity around her questioning or follow-up care. That was Constable Sheffield, I believe.”

  Crawford typed a few things into his phone, nodding along. Marley relaxed a little. A mistake.

  “The notes also show you put in an official request and complaint to Constable Sheffield regarding Ms. Slessinger and her granddaughter. You objected to them being released to Family and Children’s Services without further police protection.”

  Marley swallowed hard and, to her horror, began to cough. She reached for her water, feeling like every movement and silent moment was waving a red flag of guilt.

  “I did,” Marley said, once she soothed the dryness in her throat. “I had concerns that Ms. Slessinger, though wonderful, was not in a financial place to be able to take on her granddaughter. And Ms. Slessinger was concerned Randolph would come looking for his daughter. Or send someone. But no one else seemed worried.”

  “Because Randolph West is in jail.”

  “Ms. Slessinger says Randolph still has ties in Thunder Bay, which is where she lives.”

  Sgt. Crawford grunted and took notes. Marley had no idea if this was going well.

  “You also had concerns about the child,” Crawford said. He checked his notes, then pinned Marley down. “Eight-year-old Aimee West.”

  “Yes,” Marley said. Aiming for calm and steady. And factual. This was all in the report. “No one knew how long she’d lived with her father.”

  “Or what she’d witnessed.”

  There it was, the heart of Crawford’s questioning. Marley simply nodded her agreement.

  “When was the last time you saw Ms. Slessinger and young Miss West?”

  Marley’s heart beat a strong, protective staccato in her chest. Before she could speak, she saw Devon in the doorway holding a cardboard tray full of hot beverages. Marley watched her pause, assess the scene, and pull back. Marley went back to Crawford.