Read Online Brass Ring by Diane Chamberlain - Free Book Online Page B

fellow patients.”
    “But she spoke to me on the bridge,” Claire said. “It didn’t make much sense, but she was talking.”
    Ginger nodded. “Oh, she’d utter a few scattered words here and there, but nothing of substance. I know she was
able
to talk. I always got the feeling she didn’t feel like it was worth the bother. She was bright, though.”
    “How do you know she was bright if she didn’t speak?”
    “She read constantly. We have a little library here, mostly paperbacks, and I bet she read every one of them. Fiction, nonfiction, it didn’t matter. And she wrote, too.”
    “Really?” Claire was intrigued. “Stories?”
    “No, or if she did write stories I didn’t know about them. She wrote letters to other patients. They were often quite long and well written, although her handwriting wasn’t very good. Lack of practice, maybe, or it might have been the medication she was on. She’d usually give advice in the letters. She was the Dear Abby of ward C. During group therapy, she’d hear someone talk about a problem they were having, and of course she’d offer nothing during the group, but later she’d write out her thoughts to the person.”
    “Wow. Was her advice on target?”
    Ginger grinned. “Surprisingly insightful. Except for the fact that she’d say that God had told her what to write, or sometimes it would be her dead brother, Charles.”
    “Oh.” Claire smiled. For a moment she had forgotten why Margot had been a resident in this sad place. “If you like, I could take the picture to Margot’s older brother,” she offered impulsively. She pointed to the photograph, still in Ginger’s hand. “Save you mailing it. I’d like to talk with him.”
    Ginger hesitated. She looked at the picture again. “I suppose that would be all right,” she said, handing it to Claire. “I’ll call him to let him know you have it.”
    Once she’d stepped outside the hospital again, Claire gulped in the cold, clean air with relief.
    She should have called Jon to let him know she was on her way home, she thought as she got into her car. He was worried about her these days. She could hardly blame him. She would stop somewhere on the road to call him.
    She set the photograph of Margot and her family on the passenger seat of her car and looked again at the taller boy. Randall. Randy. With his dark hair and his adolescent gawkiness, he didn’t quite fit in. He squinted in the sunlight, and from between his dark lashes, his eyes seemed to be looking directly at the camera. At her.
    She glanced over at the picture from time to time during her drive back to Vienna, her gaze drawn to the narrow-eyed boy. He had tried to get through to Margot, Ginger had said. He had tried to save her, too. Who better than Randy St. Pierre could understand how it felt to fail in that effort?

6

    VIENNA
    THE LUNCH CROWD AT Carney’s Cafe was boisterous as usual, but Jon had requested a table in the rear of the restaurant, and he and Pat were at least able to carry on a conversation. Carney’s was their favorite lunchtime restaurant, despite its perpetually fevered level of activity. Like Jon, Pat Wykowski used a wheelchair, and Carney’s had an easily negotiated ramp to the front door and plenty of open space between the tables. The fact that the food was palatable was merely a bonus.
    Claire was on her way home from West Virginia. She’d called him from the road a few minutes before he left the office and told him about her meeting with the social worker at the psychiatric hospital. He’d listened to her as patiently as he could. He didn’t understand her preoccupation with Margot St. Pierre. Something was changing in Claire, and it worried him. She wasn’t keeping up with her work at the foundation, and at home he’d catch her staring off into space. If this sort of obsession had occurred in anyone else, he might have been able to make some sense of it. But Claire was a woman who could rise above the worst