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The Falls - Chapter 3
by menme
Chapter 3 - (Black and White)
...and the disease meant that she always got to work early - no matter how tired she was - because she would see him there. The moment each day when she first heard his deep voice in argument around a corner or caught a glimpse of his silhouette - all crooked angles and yet straight, seeming to lean heavily on his cane one second only to twirl it the next - was like the first shot of coffee warming her blood, or better yet, like her alarm clock, waking her from a torpid sleep. The first real thing every morning, so that when he hadn't arrived by ten, it felt like atrial flutter, her heart shaking with cold, needing its hit, and hearing his name was even worse.
"Dr House?" Nurse Sheila looked confused. "But he asked me for this file only yesterday."
Hayward shrugged. They stood at the far end of the counter and she could barely hear them. "...not even a two-week notice. Just caught me in front of the garage this morning and asked me to let the hospital know. Said it was time to move on."
No, she wasn't awake, because it had to be a dream, and in dreams you acted as you did in real life; if you harbored secrets in your daily life you did it automatically in nightmares, simply reaching for a file and saying: "I'll take the copies over to him, Sheila. He may still want them." If you were good at never letting anyone into your thoughts, then they would hand you the file without that questioning look. They wouldn't even exchange that knowing glance between them, because you knew how to conceal every emotion, no matter how devastating, with a disinterested smile and it was natural that you would want to visit a colleague at his apartment one last time - quickly, before he left - to say goodbye.
Goodbye.
It hit her in the car, that word, the no hammering at her, dread at the pit of her stomach spewing into her heart, then she was on Duprey, and pulling into the Haywards' drive, climbing his stairs. Knocking on the door with a hand that wasn't hers.
The door flew open so abruptly it frightened her. His blue eyes met hers a second too long. She had known they could do that. That stare of utter disinterest had been levelled on her from the start, taking time - months - to evolve into the soft-shelled longing she had come to live for. The crinkles of a laugh. Now his eyes might have been chips of ice. He left the door wide, without a word, ignoring the file she held toward him, and turned back to what he was doing, which was tossing objects into a cardboard box.
"What are you doing?" Stupid. She hadn't thought she would be able speak, almost couldn't.
"Leaving."
So matter-of-fact. Goodbye. Surely his own failures - with the boy in Princeton, with Cooper - even the odd thing that had happened to him at Cooper's bedside - wouldn't push him to run away twice. It was something else. The tension emanating from him was unbearable. He had left his cane dangling from the lampshade and cringed back and forth across the room as he packed, beating at his leg now and then in a way she realized he probably did thoughtlessly when he was alone. As though she wasn't there. She felt the pressure behind her eyes - This is the last time you will see that face - the pressure of her heart in her throat. That straight crooked body. It was impossible. There had to be something to give him pause, anything, no matter how idiotic. "But...you've got evidence in a murder, Greg. Evidence you haven't even shown to Cooper."
He stopped packing to toss a paper onto the desk beside her. The tox screen. "You do it." He caught her gaze. "This town's problems aren't mine. I've got my own problems, which I've been neglecting lately, and I plan to spend some quality time with them." His eyes narrowed. He was waiting for her reply.
She fingered the tox screen. "But...you're the one who could convince him." Because you're you. "Because that's the way you are."
"I might once have been. I'm not anymore." She was shaking her head. "Oh come on. What do you expect me to do, Am? Ride out and save the day? Lasso Leland Palmer and drag him into the town square?" He was tossing things into the box again. "Hero material I am not."
"I don't know what that means."
He spun. "Oh, look at me. I'm a cripple, dammit." It shocked her. He had never spoken of himself like that. "I'm already on the run from the last mess I made. I pumped an FBI agent full of an unlicensed drug and he probably knows." His eyes filled with shadows. "My girlfriend makes me do her in a broom closet because she's ashamed to let it be known she's seeing me, and I go along with it. How's that for a hero?"
With a jolt she realized that whatever crisis of confidence he was going through she had added to it. For a second it left her giddy with joy, the thought that she could have that much effect on him.
"That's - that's not true, Greg. I'm not ashamed of you." It was only the fear, she wished she could tell him. The terror that, once others knew they were involved, then rumors - the truth about her - would get back to him. His gaze would not be disinterested then, it would be scornful, hating. She would curl up and die under it.
"Right. If you're not ashamed of me, what is it then?" He was still watching her, tensed. "You've been screwing me like lanky middle-aged men were going out of style, but when I say let's take this on stage you're suddenly Miss Prim about it. What - me? Screwing him? - no way."
"It - it wasn't about the sex."
Pain ran across his face and hid again. I didn't mean it like that. "Thanks. Also nice to know. Aside from all the other crap going on, it's just obvious you don't want me in your life. Not much keeping me here, is there?"
Issues all so complicated she couldn't think. From his side it would have looked as though she were toying with him. He wanted more, things she couldn't give. She'd held herself from him for reasons only she could know, and it was part of what was driving him away. From the way he stood, waiting as though for his own execution...it meant everything. "No, that's - that's not it," she stammered. "It's just that...if I were to let you into my life, Greg, so many things would have to change."
"Sort of the definition of not wanting someone in your life, isn't it?" He barked a laugh and tossed an ashtray which must have belonged to the Haywards in the box then retrieved it. So angry, she realized, he didn't know what he was doing. "I can't order you to publicly declare we're together, Amalie. Can't order you to do anything, according to your very prim instructions. Maybe I'm too used to telling people what to do and maybe that's bad, but take that away from me like you have, and I feel like I'm just being led around by the cock."
He spit the last word out like dirt. A hole was opening up inside her, the knowledge that his entire anger was directed at her, that he would walk out the door in a moment because of her, sand slipping through her fingers, lanky middle-aged sand with a cane and an attitude, but the only thing in her life keeping her sane, and there was nothing she held that would stop him. Unless it was the one thing - honesty. And that was entirely impossible. Do something. "You can tell me what to do, Greg," she whispered.
"Oh, I can?" His voice had grown loud. She felt her blood beneath her skin tremble. "That a fact?" He turned to face her. "Take your clothes off."
"What? Greg, please -"
"Take your clothes off."
She felt as though he had told her to shoot someone. He couldn't be that way. He stood waiting.
"Go on!"
A test and yet her fingers against her throat as she plucked at the top button of her blouse were cold; other, ghost hands plucking in her mind, always rushing at her clothes, always that moment when she would think You could walk out now and never did. His eyes held that same greed now, not for her body, she knew, but for her obedience. For one vicious moment of power over her not you, you can't need that, then her hands were moving, fumbling swiftly though they trembled, working down her blouse and letting it fall behind her, not an ounce of erotic in it, then her bra, couldn't be happening, not with him but it was. His eyes, she saw, had changed, intent not on the fact that he had ordered her to do something, but the fact that she was doing it, his mouth opening and then closing; the slow start of amazement, as though witness to a chemical reaction he had never expected. She stood bare-chested, but there went the tears, she couldn't let that happen, and she daubed at her face before moving her fingers to the button of her slacks, all so hard because she was trembling, trying to hurry-
"Take your hair down." Barked out again, more testing, but with an stunned curiosity now, would she really do it, and she forgot the pants, brushed shaking fingers through her hair, loosing the pins which fell on the floor in a clumsy clatter that made her gasp out a sob, the tears spilling over now, just obey, stumbling ham-handed obedience, do what he ordered if it would only make him stay. The look on his face was beyond amazement: it was utter, incredulous shock and why not, it wasn't every day he saw a train wreck, got to see a woman he might have respected just fall apart in front of him, transformed into this automaton that cried while it stripped for him, about as erotic as a doctor's appointment, but then it was the disease driving her, you see doctor I'm sick. She tried to smooth her hair on her shoulders, but the tears were dripping from her chin, and she moved back to the button of her slacks, yes just a wreck inside, a slut who would do whatever a man told her to. Time to see her for what she was. This is me, Greg, she wanted to say, and knew she'd already said it.
Then he had moved to her, his hands were on hers, preventing her from going on, so tight on her wrists it hurt. His look said I get it, still shocked but determined not to let her make any more of a fool of herself. And then the tears were there for real, a flood she couldn't hold back, her own miniature Snoqualmie Falls right there in his apartment, and he held her while she leaned into his chest, sobbing, begging him to please please not leave her there, alone with herself.
His arms were all the way around her. She could hear his voice in her hair, or rather sensed its low tones, deep and mellow, a whiskey voice, they used to say, murmuring: "No. I won't."
****
When they finally peeled away from each other he still looked shell-shocked.
"Put your clothes back on, Lady Godiva," he told her.
He sat at the table and she sat across from him, her blouse a wad in her lap, trying to dry her tears. His face said he was still battling to comprehend what had just happened. They sat for so long, just gazing at each other, that she felt the sun crawl up the window; she was being reassessed.
He flicked at the file in front of him. "I guess I need to call Hayward and tell him I'm not quitting." She could barely nod. "The nurses are going to know you had your hair down."
"I don't care."
A split-second of joy crossed his face. "Really?"
"Really."
He looked away, flipped open the file. "This the excuse you gave them for coming over here?" She nodded. He snorted, a strained chuckle. "I had this plan to wake up Ronette." He extracted a sheet from the file. "You know what this is?" He was avoiding her gaze, she realized, looking for a distraction. Easier to get lost in doctor talk than to try and pick apart their little drama. He pointed to a line of the read-out. "Diurnal variation in Ronette's cortisol. What does that tell you?"
"Sleep-wake cycles." His approving gaze warmed her.
"Which rules out a coma. That moron Krumberg hasn't even looked at this. Or if he did, his moustache got in the way."
"You could still wake her up, Greg."
"And she would tell us who their attacker was, Leland Palmer or otherwise. But then that would make me the hero, wouldn't it?" He grew quiet. "Tell me -" He was studying the rest of the room, anything to avoid meeting her eyes. "Tell me what - just happened over there, Am."
"I don't know." I'm sorry. They were beyond apologies. "I - I'm not strong, Greg." He finally looked at her. "You're the only strong thing I know." He looked lost. She might as well have told him he was polite, or had a good bedside manner. She picked up the paper with Ronette Pulaski's readings and shoved it at him, ignoring the absurdity of sitting there topless talking about Laura's murder. "Do this. You have to."
He hesitated for a long time before taking the paper from her. "I know."
****
He couldn't get her voice out of his head.
Not the things she had said trying to persuade him to stay. (He had known she would come to his apartment, why else had he told Hayward and put off packing for hours? - The subconscious wins again). Not her words, growing ever more desperate, until they had reached the farce stage, her arguments he could counter like some superman batting away bullets with his bare hands because it all came down to her not wanting him, or not wanting the same way he did, the wish he had sometimes to stand in the middle of the hospital lobby and yell it, stretch like a bird in ecstatic display, crow mine, so that the anger made him try a stupid test instead of confronting her with the truth of having seen her at three a.m. No, it was the moment, once the shock of her crying had shrivelled to a frightened knot inside him, the moment he had stepped to her, stopped her hands from doing their little self-destruct strip act, and she had whispered, as though he were commanding her to go on: "I am, I am!" Not really seeing him, seeing someone else perhaps, pleading, as though she expected to be punished for not obeying quickly enough. Expecting punishment as her due.
I am, I am.
All the classy veneer he thought he knew fallen away, just herself, as screwed up apparently in her own way as he was, though he still didn't know why.
Her hands struggling against his, then yielding. Her tear-streaked face so beautiful, so...real he had thought he wouldn't be able to hold her, simply too weak with love even while he put his arms around her.
I am, I am.
Ronette Pulaski's room was dim; it was six in the evening but her parents still sat in the corner like coma patients themselves. Tree stumps. A male doctor he didn't know - very young, with pimples and a look that yelled uncertainty - was checking the bed chart.
Just do it. He crossed quickly to the bed and took the vial from his pocket.
"What are you doing?" The doctor's voice even sounded pimply. "You can't do that."
"Sorry, I don't take can't from anyone who hasn't started shaving yet."
"What's going on?" The father had stood and approached the bed. His wife behind him trembled. They were simple people, he saw, the kind society termed good. They probably deserved an explanation, even if it was one they couldn't understand.
"You've been lied to," he told them as he pushed the L-dopa. The doctor rotated in place, apparently torn between going to rat on him and staying to watch the crime. "A doctor lie, the kind used in lieu of Hey we don't know what's wrong with her. Believe me, I've been there myself. Only this - " He lifted the comatose girl's arm and laid it half across her chest. It sank only slowly back to her side. "This is called motor response. If the little tyke here -" he indicated the doctor - "were actually finished with med school, he could tell you that. A coma has a lot more flop to it. Think rubber hose. Which means it's not a coma and she can be woken up."
"You're House, aren't you?" The doctor turned to the parents. "This is the one Krumberg warned us about. This treatment is dangerous -"
Ronette jerked.
"Beautiful," he murmured. He hadn't expected it to work that quickly.
The swelling around the victim's beaten face had had time to recede. Ronette Pulaski was a plain thin girl, with dark lank hair that lay in oily strings on the pillow. About twenty, he remembered from the chart. Older than Laura Palmer. No acquaintance between them, according to the town.
When her eyes opened he felt a tremor. Dark pupils hugely dilated, black pits full of horror. She was not awake.
It was going to be bad.
"Laura," she croaked. The dry rasp from her throat hurt to listen to. "We can't - can't leave Jack's. I don't want to!"
"Ronette, honey -" Her mother was at her side. Ronette didn't see her. Trapped in her relived nightmare.
"I don't care if they pay more!" The sentence echoed through the quiet room, its implications loud. They were all holding their breath, he realized. "It's safe here at Jack's - Laura !" The last was a scream. She sat bolt upright. Her arms beat at him, then clutched, and he tried to hold her while the younger doctor pressed her in vain back toward the bed. Her hands in his sleeve were hard as stone. Her skin was cold, though sweat stood out on her forehead. Adrenaline shock. Where the sheet had slipped away he could see her legs cramping up, curling in on themselves, the skin of the calves knotting, which would have been excruciating if she had been aware of it. "No! Nooo!" Her screams collapsed into a sob. "Laura." She was looking straight into his eyes, huge pupils seeing - not him, he knew - but a pretty seventeen-year old. Seeing horror. Ronette smelled of the woods, he realized with a slight shock, vegetation and smoky pine needles, a film that should have washed off her after two weeks in a hospital. Her fingernails had found his arms. She had her lips at his ear. "He - he burns," she whispered, then drew back to look him straight in the eye again. So rational. "He burned you."
Then she jerked again, a spasm so strong it threw her across the bed and tore the drip from the back of her hand, a cry like a shot animal, seeming to come not from her mouth but from her very body, which jerked now uncontrollably. "Seizing - help me get her on her side!" The young doctor flipped her, found a compressor for her tongue, a quicker response than he would have credited the guy with, while he struggled to stanch the blood, freed from its drip tube, that fountained from her hand, working automatically because he didn't want to think, couldn't think: the machines, the white sheets, all the accoutrements of his professional life of twenty years suddenly strange beasts because of what she had said, their outlines moireing around him, near then far. He was dizzy, a blackness in his throat that would choke him.
He burned you.
Cigarettes to burn you with.
She had been talking to Laura, dammit, not to him.
The seizure stopped. Ronette went limp.
"Is she dead!" It was the mother, her daughter's panic devolving onto her. "Oh god, is she?"
"No," the other doctor told her, with a sharp glance at the monitor. "But she's worse off than she was before. Respiration failing. She's going to have to be intubated. Here, help me, for chrissake!"
He let the doctor go to work with the tube. "What's Jack's?" he asked him.
"Are you going to help me or not? Bag!"
He handed him the bag. "What's Jack's?" Across the bed the parents were hugging each other. The daddy knew what Jack's was, he saw.
The doctor wouldn't look at them. "One-Eyed Jack's. It's a - casino up on the border," he replied.
The place he had heard about. "You mean the one with the bordello in the back?" The mother stared at him. "Was she working as a croupier there?"
The doctor had finished intubating, but he continued to fiddle with the bag, embarrassed. "The Jack's croupiers are all men," he finally said.
"Wow, you know a lot about it."
"What are you saying?" the father yelled. "That she worked in the back or something? She had a good job at the department store!"
"You heard it from Sleeping Beauty's own lips." Ronette's mother groaned and the father turned on him. "She was apparently in it for the money. Or rather - it was in her. Often, I presume. You should have given her more pocket money, daddy."
"You shut up!" Pulaski was rounding the bed. He gripped his cane, readying himself to block a punch. The guy halted in front of him. "My girl ain't no hooker!" Mother Pulaski was crying. "Whatever you give her made her crazy - she wouldn't a said those things in her right mind. And now she's worse." The daddy's breath smelled of onions and bad teeth. "You call yourself a doctor? You can kiss your license goodbye, fucker - I'm gonna have a lawyer on your ass so fast you'll be working alongside me in the sawmill in a week!" He took his sobbing wife's arm and dragged her from the room, calling for Krumberg.
The younger doctor had stabilized Ronette. "You're insane," he said, straightening.
"But at least now we know more. Our little doe here went out in the woods and bit off more than she could chew. Bet she'll never do that for a buck again." He winked on the word buck.
"You're not only insane - you're an insane bastard."
"I've always felt you shouldn't have one without the other."
The doctor left.
He gazed down at Ronette's slack features. So Laura Palmer had finished up her candy-striping for the day or her Meals on Wheels round, told her mom she was going out for the night, and driven, once - possibly several times - a week, up to the border to play dipstick with sweaty loggers, maybe the fathers of girls she went to school with, or to suck off rich Canadians down for a good time. It was hard to imagine. He thought of pretty eyes and a soft smile, the demons that a good deed could hide. The darkness clouding his own thoughts.
****
He found Amalie leaving her office. "I woke Ronette up."
She smiled and kissed him, a peck on the lips. "I'm glad it worked."
"Except she reverted to a coma again." She was stealing a glance at her watch while she put on her coat. "You once said something about Laura Palmer having odd tastes in men. What did you mean?"
"Greg, I've got to go -"
"It's important. This has to do with Ronette."
"- I'm meeting some other women doctors for dinner. Harassed pediatricians' night out." He had his hand on her arm. It had been two days since their confrontation in his apartment (Hayward merely nodding, unperturbed, when he told him he would be staying), and as though it had never happened Amalie had grown distant again. Her usual cool self, harder than ever, with no intention apparently of making their affair public as she had seemed prepared to do.
"Ronette said these strange things," he told her. "I don't know what to make of it. She looked right at me and -"
"I've really got to go. You should talk to Cooper about it." She extricated her arm from his grip. At the door she gave him an odd glance back. "I'll see you tomorrow, Greg."
"Don't do this," he told her. For a moment they stood frozen, her eyes wide as though his words reverberated with other meanings, then she turned and left.
Burned. He wandered the halls until he came to the operating room on the second floor. The room was deserted and he leaned against the bed, rubbing his palms across the pristine sheets, until the frustration in him sublimed away and he no longer thought of Amalie's body there, standing so straight and compact waiting for him, or her voice with its roots all tangled through his heart wall. Until he could think of Ronette again, and the black place in his brain.
When he left the room evening had descended. The air in the hall seemed to emanate from a different sphere, the crisp night of outside suffusing the walls. The coming of winter. Fluorescent lights flickered, a bad sign for a hospital if it couldn't control power dips. Winter in the town probably knocked the lights out all the time. Good for them, even though he would be one of them this winter. Let them live in darkness.
He retrieved his coat from his office, still feeling cottony, eyes burning as though he had half hypnotized himself by staring so long at the white wall of the operating room. Except for Sheila standing at the desk, frowning down at her monitor, the lobby was deserted. A nurse exited the clinic jiggling a baby on her arm. "This damn thing -" Sheila muttered.
"Power's decided to make a bush stop," he told her as he halted to sign out. "Can't you see the way the lights are flickering?" Actually it was subtle, a subliminal hum in his corneas that was giving him a headache. The baby gazed at him over the nurse's shoulder - no, not at him, at someone behind him, big-eyed and intense the way tiny children got, and then it smiled. He turned around. There was no one there.
Sheila looked glassy-eyed. Her monitor was blank. "Try -" he started and then she sank into the chair, her large frame squeaking the wheels, so abruptly lethargic it alarmed him. "Sheila?" The nurse with the baby had left. "Hey -"
He was about to wave his hand in front of Sheila's face when someone tapped him on the shoulder.
He spun.
Leland Palmer stood grinning at him. Impossible, because no one had been there seconds before - no, that had been the other direction, over toward the elevators. He could feel his heart in his chest like a drum roll.
"Dr. House?"
Idiot. Lawyers were scary, but not that scary. "Depends on who's asking."
Leland Palmer's hair (previously a humus brown that matched his own, he remembered from the funeral) had turned completely white. With his lawyer grin below the glittering obsidian eyes it proffered upon him the aura of a skull. A change from the grieving father that was so startling he felt his skin crawl. "I represent Mr. and Mrs. Pulaski, Dr. House. They plan to sue due to your actions earlier this evening regarding Ronette."
A glance at the clock on the wall told him it was eight. He had sat in the operating room for over an hour.
"Wow, now that's what I call fast. Do you work up that kind of speed from chasing ambulances?"
"Could we talk in your office?"
He glanced at Sheila. Her odd bout of lethargy seemed forgotten. "Still some coffee in the main lounge," she told them.
"I won't be that long," Palmer grinned.
His office was cold. He sat across from Palmer and watched him take papers from his calfskin briefcase. Aside from what he suspected him of (that alone enough to keep his heart thumping and his skin crawling) the guy gave him the creeps. He reeked of oily lawyer. A tailored suit and silk tie, at eight in the evening. His own jeans and T-shirt felt rough in comparison, but he had his best brass-headed cane with him, not too shabby itself, and he laid it on the desk between them with a thud. Palmer smiled down at his papers and laid them out in front of him.
"Restraining order - you're not to come within fifty feet of Ronette. State Medical Board complaint and review request. First brief in a civil suit for damages. Letter to the D.A. in Seattle seeking criminal charges for wilful injury." The papers filled his desk. "I have more -"
"What happened to your hair?"
The smile vanished. "It went this way overnight."
Which, if true, he knew, would be a phenomenon beyond the pale of medicine. Terrible stress, over the course of three or four weeks, might have someone reaching for the Grecian Formula but no one's hair turned white overnight. It was a common myth. He supposed the guy might have been under enough strain since his daughter's murder not to have noticed a gradual change. The question being whether the strain was grief or the fear of being caught. He recalled something Hayward had said when he thought he wasn't interested, that Leland Palmer had been exhibiting wildly erratic behavior since the funeral, seeming to accept Laura's death one minute only to break down the next with sobbing fits in public. He reached out and inched his cane closer to him.
"Ronette was put at great risk by your actions, Dr. House. Now, we can talk about a settlement -"
"Did you know that, of all the professional groups, lawyers get elective surgery the least?" Palmer eyed him. "A study proved it. Can you guess why that is? Tell a doctor his patient is a lawyer and he won't touch him with a ten-foot scalpel. Too afraid of being sued. Better no operation than one that goes wrong."
"I'm sure we lawyers are all the healthier for being ignored by our doctors. Especially if they're like you."
"My point is that as soon as you involve lawyers every procedure suddenly looks risky in retrospect. They get their briefs in a wad about nothing." Palmer ran a hand through his freak hair. "What I did to Ronette was not risky."
"She's on a ventilator now."
"Not a consequence of the L-dopa. This is all about the parents not liking what they found out. They didn't like it being shoved in their faces that their daughter was working as a hooker. But it was necessary. There may actually be some information in what Ronette said that will help solve your daughter's murder." A cool breeze, as though someone had opened a door, brushed his neck. He realized he was sweating. Palmer's grin suddenly seemed plastered on. "This One-Eyed Jack's thing."
"The Jack's connection was already known, Dr. House. Agent Cooper in fact has been looking into some of the things going on up there - quite apart from...from Laura. Aside from the bordello and the unlicensed gambling, drug smuggling appears to have been high on their list. A man named Jacques Renault has even been a patient in your hospital here since a shoot-out with law officers at the casino yesterday. Renault was the owner of One-Eyed Jack's." The was, so lawyerly pedantic, made him squirm. "So, no, there was no information gained by your treatment of Ronette."
"Wow, this Jack's sounds like just the septic tank for the whole region, doesn't it?" He took an inner breath. "Tell me, does it bother you at all that your seventeen-year old daughter had her after-school job there? I mean, what kind of father were you - emphasis on the were - if you were letting your daughter lead that kind of life?" Or forcing her to, to deal with whatever hell she faced at home.
He had read that if the magnetic poles of the earth were to shift as they had in the distant past scientists believe we would feel it, a pulse in the bones below sound. Leland Palmer's face had changed. He stared at a spot on the desk, just past the cane, then looked up, dark pupils like some inorganic material, glass or tar. The pulse was his own breath, he realized, the guy was borderline, he had pushed him over the edge -
Palmer leaned in. "You wanna play with fire?"
The hospital around them was deserted, the world, the universe. He could defend himself physically against anything less than psychotic. Fire. He burned me, he heard Ronette say, her beaten face near his, no, she had said, He burned you. He felt the press of water behind his eyes, so incongruous. The black place in his brain that was like a bruise.
"Because that is what you're doing, Dr. House. There's a good chance you will lose your medical license because of all this." Palmer leaned back, relaxed. He was the sane one. "If I have any say in it you will."
"Get out."
Palmer's grin gave the appearance now of a facial tic. He gathered his papers, leaving only the restraining order. "I'll see you in court, Dr. House."
Where you will be the one charged with murder. He didn't say it.
Alone in his office he tried to pull himself together. Fear, pure physical terror, was something he was unacquainted with. His heart was still racing. He popped a Vicodin to slow it. Coffee would be good, take the chill out. Sheila had mentioned some, and he rose, grabbed his cane -
- and threw it down with a yell -
The brass head was burning hot.
He was shaking his hand, then staring at the unmarred skin. Wave after wave of nausea hit him. His palm was cool. The head of the cane when he snatched it up was as cold as the rest of the office and he dropped it again. He had backed up to the long windows that looked out on the wooded night and he could feel the frost through the glass numbing his shoulders. There were diseases that prevented the victim from telling hot from cold - neurological disorders, a brainstem stroke - but none that would make you feel heat in place of cold. So he was going insane. Should have seen it coming. Hallucinations. Lights that flickered and babies that smiled at no one.
He watched the office door with his back to the glass for a long time, until his breathing quieted and he could pick up his cane again without examining it.
His computer was still on and he sat, controlling his thoughts, and began to type. Insanity was not an option. Diagnose thyself, doctor. Leland Palmer spewed out a long list of cases with which the bastard's name was associated through a Seattle firm, accomplishments only a lawyer could be proud of: takeovers, downsizes - all the measures by which the little guy in corporate America was constantly screwed, and all dating from before Palmer had moved upstate with his family, though the guy still played the shark in small waters, he saw, closing what had probably been very beneficial deals for the sawmill and the Great Northern only the year before. He went back farther, Leland Palmer in a high-school yearbook, a place called Pearl Lake, (who put these things on the net?), looking smarmy even then. Before that - nothing.
He didn't know what he was looking for. Anything, a reprieve from the thought that anyone could shake him up so much it could make him see things. Or feel things, in the case of his cane. He ran one finger absently over its brass head. The blue from the computer screen bathed his office. He typed in Palmer, got about a zillion hits, it should say that up there, he pondered, just have the screen say `around a zillion, dude' in place of that unreadably huge number, he'd suggest it to the Google guys. He sighed. At least he was thinking like himself again. He tried Palmer together with Pearl Lake.
The newspaper article was small. A boy of six, Laylon Palmer (the misspelling having kept it from popping up before, though it had to be Leland, every other fact checking out) had disappeared while playing near his home and was found a day later in one of the cabins up near the lake, having been driven there by a man he didn't know and held against his will. The boy was returned to his parents unharmed. In spite of the abductee's description, no suspect was found.
Twenty-four hours. One day, long ago in the life of a child. Early sixties. There would have been few questions asked back then, he knew. No psychological counseling. No one would want to know what games a pervert could get up to with a six-year old in the course of a day and night if it would mar the snow-glass purity of their world. A seed of evil buried in a child's soul, left to grow inward.
He shut down the computer. The dark places in his brain were throbbing. Another Vicodin, then he found his coat.
Sheila was still at the lobby desk, having apparently pulled the late shift though she didn't need to with her seniority. "We have a Jacques Renault here?" he asked her. She looked up the room for him, first floor near the back, then went with him to check on the young nurse in charge who tended to wander off on coffee breaks. He found Jacques Renault's room alone. Stood staring down too long at the slack body with a pillow over its face, his skin expanding to take it in, a feeling like dizziness of the limbs; his cottony detachment was back, he had a pillow over his own face perhaps, unable to act.
Then the nurse appearing in the door behind him screamed and Sheila ran in, saw the situation and gasped, "Oh don't touch it!" It shattered the spell. He tossed the pillow aside, started to check for a pulse, and saw the wide, useless eyes, the dots of red petechiae in the whites from asphyxiation. Monsieur Renault had been dead awhile. He leaned heavily against the bed, and Renault's hand that had been clenched in a death grip beneath the pillow, as though the beery casino-owner had fought his smotherer with all his strength, slid down and flopped against him. Real flop, about as much flop as you could get.
"Oh doll, you shouldn't have touched anything."
****
"You shouldn't have touched anything." Cooper studied him, and the dead man's room behind him, with a dazzling smile. "But I understand that you thought there might be some hope of reviving Renault." Behind him, Sheriff Truman grimaced. "You're a good man, Dr. House, and not the least because you saved my own life. I'd give my dictaphone to have you beside me in a crisis."
Cooper's breezy tone had resurrected his headache. He watched the experts dusting Renault's room, a pointless finger exercise as scores of doctors and nurses had likely entered the room to treat the patient. The corpse being carted away still sported a bandage on its shoulder from the bullet wound that had been its ticket to the hospital in the first place. The bandage seemed like a bad joke.
"People used to come to hospitals to get better," he said to no one in particular. "Oh well, times change." It reminded him of Ronette. "I woke up Ronette Pulaski earlier this evening, Agent Cooper." The agent nodded expectantly. "It seems she and Laura - "
"Coop." A man in charge of the fingerprint dusters called and Cooper turned away, saying "Hold that thought, Dr. House."
He found himself leaning in the doorway with Truman. Sheriff Truman had never occupied his thoughts, merely a black-hatted shadow attached to Cooper's heels. The sheriff, still gazing at the room, suddenly asked: "Do you believe in the supernatural, House?"
Ah, the cardboard dummy speaks. "Why should I? The natural itself is hard enough to believe in most of the time."
"Did you know we're looking into that kind of thing? The supernatural and all. I mean, Coop is. I would never have believed it before, but I've seen some things the past few weeks..." Truman might have been talking to himself. "We've discovered there's a demon in this town."
He wanted to run the guy's hat through a centrifuge. The only demon in the town was complacency. "Have you ever loved a woman, Sheriff?"
Truman glanced at him. "Yes."
"More than your own life?"
The glance became a gaze, wrapped up in thought. "Yes."
"And do you think that is supernatural?"
"No. it's the most natural thing in the world."
He could almost admire the honesty. They watched Cooper direct his team for a moment. "Humans are capable of great love," he told Truman, "but they're capable of great evil too. There's nothing supernatural about that. It's all too natural." The beast in us. "That's why I don't believe in hocus-pocus."
"You haven't seen what I've seen on this case."
Maybe I have. Cooper approached. "There are video cameras on the main doors. We'll want the footage."
"There was a power problem earlier," House told him. "You might not get anything." Cooper beamed at him, good news and bad equally cause for joy, but Sheriff Truman assumed his prior grimace of suspicion. "Funny," he muttered. They started to turn away.
"Agent Cooper, Ronette talked about One Eyed Jack's when I woke her." They paused. "She and Laura worked there."
Cooper turned back. "And that surprised you, Dr. House?"
"Shouldn't it be surprising when a seventeen-year old is taking after-school classes in how to pick up johns?"
"Nothing surprises me in this world, Dr. House. No, I just mean the connection to Jack's. You are seeing Amalie Parker, aren't you?"
There were times you could be glad not to have a heart monitor on you for all to see. Not to have to swallow to get words out. "What...do you mean?"
"I thought that - the two of you being on intimate terms like that - she would have..." Cooper's voice trailed off, "...told you." He saw his mistake. "Oh, I'm sorry, Dr. House." For the first time the agent seemed more human than G-man. Embarrassed. Seeing him perhaps for the first time as another man. Truman had turned away. "It's just well-known among certain men in town who visit Jack's and I thought..." Cooper's eyes were large. "I just assumed you knew."
He felt his leg pain, magnified a hundred times; as though his thigh had grown to encompass him he was nothing but that throbbing mangled sinew of flesh; it pushed blood through his brain and beat his heart for him. A fool's heart. An idiot stripped naked and what a laugh he was, except that the eyes on him in his storming thoughts were not those of the half-strangers around him, but rather - oddly - Cuddy's and Wilson's, his fellows'. As though he had never left Jersey. Their gazes held pity.
Cooper still studied him. His look must have been a shock even to a hardened FBI agent. "I'm really very sorry, Dr. House," he murmured, then turned and left.
He found his cane and stumbled into the night, got in his car (a lost moment to decide, staring at the bare trace of his reflection in the windshield) then he started the car and headed north, toward the border.
****
End of Chapter 3
(A/N: There's a lot of Twin Peaks in this. I didn't plan for it to take over the story and I hope the plot is followable. Two chapters to go. I thrive on feedback so any comments you might have are very appreciated. Thanks for reading!)
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Legal Disclaimer: The authors published here make no claims on the ownership of Dr. Gregory House and the other fictional residents of Princeton-Plainsboro Teaching Hospital. Like the television show House (and quite possibly Dr. Wilson's pocket protector), they are the property of NBC/Universal, David Shore and undoubtedly other individuals of whom I am only peripherally aware. The fan fiction authors published here receive no monetary benefit from their work and intend no copyright infringement nor slight to the actual owners. We love the characters and we love the show, otherwise we wouldn't be here.
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