Disclaimer I own very little, especially not CSI NY.
Notes Chapter 30: THANK YOU for all reviews! Hope you enjoy this chapter. Please continue reviewing - I love to know what you think - welcome at any time, for any chapter, always replied to if logged. Thanks to everyone who's alerted and favourited; to fatkat, Juliette, shadowfox and autumngold for your reviews - sorry I couldn't send a proper reply; to Miss Poisonous for inspiring the scene between Danny and Stella, chrysalis escapist for extra thoughts, Blue Shadowdancer and iluvCSI4ever for reading.
Lost Letters: Chapter 30
25th July
… You know, I think you'd adore Mrs Adams, and of course her cat; you don't get one without the other. Maybe one day you'll be able to come out here and get to meet all the people and places I've met. Joshua and I are great friends, which makes me a great friend of Mrs Adams - apparently he doesn't share his affection with just anyone, so maybe I'm not such a bad person after all. We understand each other very nicely, even if we do have our little disagreements about who the food in my fridge, and even sometimes on my plate, really belongs to…
………………………………...
Twelve days after the crime scene, and the two people at the heart of the hurt caused sat together for the first time since that time. No words between them. Until one of them, out of desperation, created a break in the stillness.
"Talk to me, Stella." Danny rasped, "You been sitting not saying a word so long we're in danger of an uncomfortable silence."
It was an attempt to draw some of the pursed-lipped solemnity out of her face, which was making him uneasy.
She had walked into his room a short time earlier; slowly, and leaning on Mac's arm, but with a look of triumph on her face at the accomplishment as she eased herself into a chair.
Mac, looking worn, had given him a few words and taken his hand in a brief, tight grip, before asking Stella to stay where she was until he returned. The request was met with a sharp look, and the moment he left, Stella's features had fallen into their current sombre expression. There was something unspoken between the head of the lab and his second in command that was not entirely happy, Danny was certain. That, and the apprehension he felt at what Stella might say to him, berefted his tongue temporarily of any smart comments.
But he tried again to leaven the atmosphere, "You're freaking me out here. Don't do this to a guy in a hospital bed."
It lowered her face even further.
Danny sighed and pinched the bridge of his nose with his undamaged hand, wishing he was not in such a vulnerable position; lying on his back straitened within hospital sheets, facing a taciturn Stella Bonasera only inches away from him, "So you're mad at me, I get it, okay, just say it."
She said nothing.
He flopped back into the pillow. Three days since he surfaced from the deeps of the unknown, where he had been enfolded in slumbering, white eiders of oblivion; that blanked memory and identity; hearing whispers that tickled like feathers at the edge of consciousness. Until something had pulled him up and out.
Something that had reached him and found its way into the heavy dreams and siren songs of never-waking solitude. Someone who had spoken, called his name, turned him against the tenor of succumbing and made him remember who, and why and what he was: Danny Messer; a man who did not give up so easily; a man who loved his life and his friends; a man who had almost given up the one for another…
The one who was sitting with him now, who until a short time ago, he had not seen since the day she was snatched from their sight; shortly followed by his own snatch from life. Since taking the unthinking decision, the decision that did not need thinking about, to try and stop the bastards he knew had hurt one of his friends. It needed no more thought.
But the decision had almost taken his life; and the consequences were still making their aftershocks felt.
And this was one of them; the reaction of Stella herself. Manifested in her silence and the look in her face that he could not quite fathom, but he was going to try. If only she would talk to him.
Danny tried again, "Say anything; yell, shout, curse - whatever, anything… Talk to me. Please."
She shook her head, sighing heavily, and spoke at last, "I'm not going to yell, or shout, or curse, not here anyhow. I'm not mad at you… "
"You're a bad liar, Stell."
Running her hand through her hair, she bayoneted him with a glare, "All right, fine. Yes. Yes, I am mad at you, Danny. For nearly getting yourself killed for no good reason!"
He grunted, and turned his head away, fixing his gaze on a faded print of sunflowers on the opposite wall, "It was a good enough reason for me. What else was I s'posed to do? Let them drive off with you, without doing nothing to stop 'em? Don't think so." Danny risked a glance at her, and saw glints in her eyes, "I couldn't do nothing else! Me and Mac, we shot at 'em, and they kept on going. I was closer, car was coming towards me… and they got too close to me. I had to try and help you, somehow…"
"By throwing yourself in front of the car?" Stella's tone was a mixture of anger and something else. It made him wince as she continued, "There's a fine line between heroism and stupidity, Danny. I'd say you walked it there, if not crossed it!"
"Don't tell me you've never done the same…"
"I've never thrown myself in front of a car!" She retorted, "What the hell were you thinking? No, wait, you weren't thinking, were you?"
"I was thinking about trying to help a friend." He mumbled, rubbing his face where the first prickles of stubble were fuzzing over his cheeks; the day after he had woken, Lindsay had given him one of the most welcome shaves in his life, but he was in need of another. His face itched.
Stella did not reply; instead she turned away with another shake of her head, and he felt compelled to add gruffly, "And I'd do the same again."
She whipped back round to him, "You shouldn't have to, Danny, you shouldn't! I didn't need heroics…"
"I know! And it wasn't. Wasn't nothing to do with heroics! We heard you shouting, we heard the shot… reactions took over."
She dropped her hands onto the arms of the chair, giving him a thundercloud glower which did not completely overcast a softer shine, "It nearly got you killed! What good would that have done anyone, huh?"
He had no answer, and they fell silent again. Danny looked at her, taking in the differences in her appearance since he had last seen her, on that day he could remember so little of other than the heat; the suffocating heat that had broiled his brains, razed his skin…
He remembered Stella sending him for water; the first icy drops down his throat; the bottle hitting the ground as he heard her shout… then the shot; his own and Mac's in return… then the scream of car tyres and his yells and Mac's, and the car coming towards him so fast, something hitting him, hard. So hard it knocked all else out of his head and himself out of time.
Until he woke up and registered the pain. So much pain, more than he had ever felt in his life. The litany of injuries that the doctor had recited meant nothing other than pain.
Everything hurt. His leg, his wrist, his ribs with a breath-stealing ache every time his lungs inflated, his head… everything. Hurt.
But the pain he saw in the faces of his parents, was suffering that he almost could not bear; it serrated his heart. Theirs were the first faces that had blurred then focused and drawn him through the glassy seas of surfacing. His mother clutching him - all the parts of him she could reach - as if she never meant to let go; his father weeping with a shocked, white face and his hands holding his so tightly it wrapped webbings of fear around him.
Their terror and their grasp on him told him more than any doctor could how close he had been to slipping away and being lost forever.
Then as he breathed and realised he was still alive, he had remembered what happened…
Stella.
It was the first panicked, hoarse question to his parents; but they had let him rise further back to life with the answer that she was alive. Still alive.
The rest of the details on how came later; how close she had also been to never seeing another day. And seeing her now, with the lack of colour in her complexion, the faint scar on her forehead and the hand she unconsciously held against her side, confirmed it. They had both come too close. It terrified him if he let himself think about it, and about the injuries that had left his body harrowed.
But they were both alive, and it was still unmistakably the Stella he knew, sitting here beside him.
Looking at him.
Danny shifted himself to better face her, "You're giving me that look."
"What look?" She narrowed her eyes.
"That look…" A sudden coughing spasm laid him out for a moment; Stella helped him gulp down some water, before he wiped his mouth and blinked at her, "The look… look you're giving me right now, Stella. Like you're afraid you're about to see me disappear in front of your eyes. Same look people have been giving me since I got back to the land of the living - ma and pa, Lindsay, Flack… now you. The one that says… that says 'you shouldn't be here'…"
As the brightness of tears appeared in her eyes, he added in a quieter voice, "You been getting the same from people, huh?"
Stella nodded mutely, and Danny felt the fear that was squashed up inside him like a ball of cellophane start to unfurl and explode open again. Fear that was replicated in her face. He had to talk, keep on talking, to crush it up again and stop it crushing him, "Then don't look at me like that, please, don't. 'Cause I am here, alive. I ain't disappearing. I survived…" He grabbed her hand, "And so did you…"
A tear silvered down her cheek, "I know, I know. We both did, Danny."
For a moment, no more words were needed between them in the stillness of a September afternoon.
………………………………..............
With Adam as passenger, Hawkes drove through Manhattan. Waiting at a red light, he stared out of the window; not at the streets, but up and above at the sky; oceans of moonstone blue that captured his eyes; with a shoal of birds that swam and danced in scintillation between the buildings. He smiled at the shifting configurations breaking apart into whirling bodies that flung themselves into everywhere, and then returned to the whole.
Out of the corner of his eye, he saw Adam sitting with a serious expression on his face, "You okay?"
The quick glance he threw the younger man was returned with a smile, "Yeah, I'm good, Doc… yourself?"
"Doing okay."
Conversation died down as they continued into the suburbs. Hawkes let his thoughts run on events of the last few days that had caught up the lab and its people, and most of all the head of them, Mac. Everyone in the team knew the broad details of what had happened in the interrogation room; what Mac had done to the man responsible for at least four homicides and the injuries to Danny and Stella. The man who was now secured and awaiting trial.
Hawkes knew unequivocally where his sympathies lay; and not for the first time wondered what he would have done in Mac's place. That was not such a clear-cut answer, and it troubled him.
The IAB investigation had so far concluded with Mac issued a warning and an enforced leave of absence for a week - something that could only do the head of the lab good, so Hawkes saw it. Events had taken a terrible toll on him; not only physically and emotionally. When he saw him yesterday, alongside Stella, the strain was still etched into every line on his face. They had not spoken beyond the superficial, but it was behind the eyes of all three of them.
They were all still feeling the tremors of the crime scene, he realised. Sitting next to him, Adam was unusually subdued, and Hawkes lent a hand of good news.
"I saw Stella yesterday." He began.
Adam's face brightened, "How's she doing?"
"Doing good. She's being discharged tomorrow."
"Hey, that's great!" He beamed, "Any idea when Danny's going to get himself out of there too? I'm going over later, catch him up with stuff, you know, keep him up to date."
"Going to be a little while yet, but knowing Danny, I'd say he's not going to be in any longer than he has to be."
Hawkes could not keep a grin off his face as he spoke; it felt good to speak about Danny without a wave of fear and misery sweeping over him as it had done so few days before, when his prognosis was very different.
But time had changed, and so had their hopes and fears. And now one had almost consumed the other.
There was much to hope for.
Where they were going however, was not to give hope, and Hawkes found his heart sinking again at the thought of what he and Adam were about to do. The part of his job he found hardest to do - not deaths, not bodies, not the perpetrators of violence that he was forced to share hours of his working life with - but the living victims. The ones left behind who lived on after death. Sometimes, as he knew too well, in their own never ending deaths, lost to futures hoped and dreamed for, and destroyed. And he was about to bring the details of death to another living victim.
The destroyer of hopes.
The journey ended too soon, in front of a small clapboard house in Queens; the white boards gleaming bright and dazzling his eyes as he stopped the car. The house of Mrs Delaney, mother of Joe, the young man found in the lake.
"We here?" Adam slipped his seatbelt off.
"We are."
He wished they were not.
With a heavy heart, Hawkes climbed out and waited for his colleague to join him at the white picket gate. It boundaried a garden that threatened to spill out onto the sidewalk. In contrast to the white gate and fence palings, the front yard was a rampaging tangle of weeds, shrubs and wild, waving grass either side of the path. Reaching tendrils of unidentifiable plants caught at their ankles as the two men picked their way to the front door.
Hawkes gave it a smart tap and footsteps were soon heard along a wooden floor.
The door was opened cautiously by a middle-aged woman with sleek chestnut hair wearing a trim, navy blue tunic and trousers. A smell of cleaning fluids and polish wafted round them, and the view Hawkes had of the hall was of furniture and fittings cleaned to the bone.
"Mrs Delaney?" He held up his badge, "Sheldon Hawkes and Adam Ross, NYPD crime lab…"
The woman took a studied look at his badge, and frowned, "NYPD…? Well, first off, I'm not Mrs Delaney, but may I ask what your business is here?" Her tone was brisk and business-like.
Hawkes ruffled a little, ""May I ask who you are then? If this is Mrs Delaney's address?"
"It is. I'm Sara Burns, Mrs Delaney's carer." She held out her own badge, identifying her as a nurse employed by a care company Hawkes had knowledge of as being reputable, "Are you here to speak to her? Because if so…"
It threw him off-kilter, and he exchanged a look with Adam, "Her carer? Ms Burns, I'm here to speak to Mrs Delaney on an urgent matter, is she able to speak to us?"
The woman's gaze switched back and forth between Adam and him before she stepped back and ushered them through the door, "You'd better come in then gentlemen and I'll explain. And you can do the same."
"Thank you ma'am." Hawkes raised his eyebrows to Adam's startled look, and they followed her along the hallway.
She led them into a painfully pristine sitting room. Only after being invited to, did they both sit down.
"Can I get either of you coffee?"
"No, thank you, we're good." Hawkes, in tandem with Adam, shook his head and then perched on the edge of the couch, feeling the usual discomfort at being an intruder into someone's house and day.
Sara nodded, sat down opposite them, and waited.
Hawkes cleared his throat, "Ms Burns, we really do need to speak to Mrs Delaney, I have to ask you again, are we able to? Is she at home?"
Sara flicked a hand across the arm of the chair and no dust flew. There was not a speck in the room to be seen.
"She's home, but Mrs Delaney isn't going to be able to speak to you, I'm sorry. But as well as being her carer, I also have her power of attorney, and I'm able to speak for her…" A flash of something passed across her face and she stiffened in her chair, "Is this… is this about her son, Joe? Only, we haven't seen him in a little while, and I was only thinking this morning, that, maybe I ought to…"
Hawkes leaned forward, "I need to know why Mrs Delaney isn't able to speak to us, please Ms Burns, before I can tell you any more. I need to know the reason for this."
She sighed, "Mrs Delaney suffered a massive stroke a year ago, and it's left her incapable of speech or much movement, and confined her to a wheelchair. It also affected her mind and memory; she lost who she was, and who she'd been. And unfortunately, it's meant she's lost most of her friends and family too - most days, we're lucky to get a visit even from the postman. I've been her live-in carer since it was decided she could return home." A look of cynicism appeared as she continued, "The hospital and her medical insurance decided it would be more cost-effective for her to be cared for here. It also meant she lost the social contacts she had in the hospital."
Hawkes felt the sorrow of a story that was not unfamiliar. Adam bowed his head.
Sara plucked at the cushion beside her, "Unfortunately, her condition is deteriorating. So much so that most days now, she's unable to leave her bed." Her hands dropped into her lap, and grief spilled into her voice, "Most days, she's… she's not really here anymore, in the present. That's something Joe finds really tough, and I suspect why his visits have dropped off recently. Last time I saw him must have been a month ago; he and his girlfriend Rita called, but they didn't stay much above an hour. She didn't seem to know her own son, and became very distressed when he was in her sight. Joe looked devastated when they left and… and I haven't seen him since."
"You had no more contact after that?"
She hesitated, and a faint flush came to her cheeks, "No, but if I hadn't heard anything by the end of this week, I was going to call him - it was one of those tasks I hadn't gotten around to, you know how it is…"
Hawkes nodded, "I do, it's okay, I understand."
He understood, even though he wished he did not. It was too easy not to do so many things; to put the phone aside, leave the letter unanswered, the visit unmade.
And he understood too that Mrs Delaney and her son had lost each other even before death.
He continued in a gentler tone, knowing the story he had come to tell of Joe's death could remain untold no longer, however how much hurt it would cause, "You see, Ms Burns, Joe is the reason why we're here…"
………………………………..............
Across the city, Lindsay sat in the trace lab packing up the last of the letters belonging to Mrs Adams, in preparation for the return to their owner. She knew now what the old lady had meant on that day, almost two weeks ago, when she spoke of lives and deaths within the letters. If what she suspected was true then there were several lives caught up in the paper sheets; and one life created amongst them.
There were still questions, and she was impatient for answers. There were still too many questions she was hanging theories onto. Still much to do before Mrs Adams's robbery case was closed, and before the addendum to Rita Franklin's could be solved - the reason for her identity hidden between layers of different names and addresses.
Lindsay picked up the bagged letter she had found along the street, the one that revealed the real Rita, the real name, the real address. The real recipient. A phone call and a message waited for a response from Rita's correspondent.
Closing the box lid after laying the last letter carefully inside, Lindsay picked up her jacket and prepared to leave. She was stopped, however, by her cell phone ringing. For a moment her heart banged in a sudden horror: something was wrong with Danny…
But it was a number unconnected with Danny. It was the one she had called the day before.
"Detective Monroe"
A young woman's voice, its accent holding a ring of the mountain states close to her home, answered her.
"Detective Monroe, this is Jenny Anderson. You called me and left a message? You said you needed to speak to me about Rita. Is everything all right? Has she gotten herself into trouble? Please tell me she's all right."
I wish I could…
Lindsay sat back down and composed her voice as she began the story of the end of another life.
At the risk of repeating myself, I'm unsure about this chapter. Does it make sense? Is it what you were wanting to happen? There's going to be more about what Stella thought of Mac's actions in the next chapter. Please review, if you liked it or not! Any thoughts really help. Thanks, Lily x