Chapter 6 - The Doctor and the Sketch
Dr. Miller arrived four minutes later, carrying a weathered black leather satchel.
He was an older gentleman with thinning silver hair, gold-rimmed spectacles, and the calm demeanor of a physician who had stitched up bullet wounds in back alleys for thirty years.
He asked no questions about why a catering maid was sitting wrapped in blankets in the Don’s private suite at four in the morning.
He knelt silently on the rug before Fay and gently folded back the wool blanket covering her legs.
When he rolled up the hem of her black skirt to inspect her knees, Rafferty’s jaw clenched so tightly the muscles knotted beneath his scar.
Fay’s kneecaps were severely swollen, the pale skin stained a deep, ugly purple from four hours of bearing her weight against the unyielding Carrara marble.
The tissue was icy to the touch.
"Severe contusions and acute hypothermic shock in the patellar bursae," Dr. Miller diagnosed, his fingers moving with clinical gentleness.
"Another hour on that cold stone and she would have suffered permanent tissue necrosis.
The sustained pressure shut down the micro-capillaries entirely."
The doctor reached into his bag and retrieved a jar of pungent herbal ointment.
He began massaging the salve into the swollen joints, his hands firm and steady.
Fay winced, biting her lower lip until it nearly bled to keep from crying out as sensation flared back to life in agonizing needles of fire.
Rafferty did not look away.
He watched her face, marking the silent, unyielding grit in her eyes, the way she refused to shed a single tear of weakness.
"You have remarkable endurance, young lady," Dr. Miller murmured, wrapping both knees in thick layers of thermal wool bandages.
"Most people would have collapsed unconscious after two hours."
"I couldn't afford to collapse," Fay whispered through clenched teeth.
As Dr. Miller secured the final brass pin on the left bandage, Fay shifted her posture slightly to relieve the tension in her lower back.
The movement loosened the folded paper tucked inside her apron pocket.
It slipped free, fluttering downward through the firelight, and landed face-up on the polished floorboards beside Rafferty’s shoes.
Rafferty looked down.
Before Fay could reach out with a trembling hand, Rafferty bent and picked the paper up.
"Please," Fay said quickly, her face flushing.
"That belongs to me.
It's just a silly drawing."
Rafferty unfolded the rough paper.
His gray eyes scanned the crude crayon marks.
The massive, crooked yellow sun radiating heat over half the page.
The two stick figures holding hands on a strip of grass.
And in the lower right-hand corner, drawn in bright blue wax, a small paper boat sailing across wavy black water.
Rafferty’s breath caught in his throat.
His entire frame went completely rigid.
His thumb brushed across the waxy lines of the blue boat, tracing the specific, unusual angle of the folded sail.
A memory, blinding and violent, detonated inside his mind.
Winter of 2001.
The freezing infirmary of Saint Jude’s Monastery on the desolate edge of the Louisiana swamps.
He had been eight years old, burning up with a vicious bout of scarlet fever, shivering beneath coarse, itchy gray blankets while the winter rain lashed against the stained-glass windows.
He had known he was dying.
The parish priests had already moved his cot into the corner room so the other boys wouldn't have to watch him slip away into the dark.
And then, in the dead of the freezing night, a girl had snuck through the corridor shadows.
She was small, younger than him, with pale gray eyes and warm, steady hands.
She had sat on the bare wooden floor beside his cot, holding his fever-slicked hand for hours, whispering stories about the great river to keep the terror at bay.
She had taken a sheet of blue scrap paper from the chapel office, folded it into a little boat, and pressed it into his palm.
“As long as the little boat is sailing,” she had told him, “the dark can't catch you.”
Rafferty slowly raised his gaze from the drawing.
He looked at Fay Delacroix.
He studied the curve of her jaw, the slight arch of her nose, and the unmistakable, pale gray color of her eyes—eyes that matched the girl who had pulled his soul back from the edge of the grave twenty-five years ago.
"Where did your daughter learn to draw this boat?" Rafferty asked.
His voice had lost all trace of the ruthless underworld boss; it was the voice of a lost child standing on the threshold of a forgotten world.
Fay looked at him, startled by the raw emotion in his face.
"I taught her," Fay replied softly.
May you like
"My mother taught me before she had to place me at Saint Jude’s for two years when she was sick."
The room fell into an absolute, breathless silence.
