Cruel Doubt Read Online Free PDF

if someone had come to the house to murder Lieth Von Stein.
    * * *
    At the hospital, Bonnie drifted in and out of consciousness. She was as pale as the sheets on which she lay. A tube was in her chest where a lung had collapsed, and through another, in her arm, she was receiving a blood transfusion, and through another, intravenous fluids. Her hair was matted with blood, her eyes were glazed from sedatives, and there were gashes in her forehead where she’d been struck by a club.
    By four-fifty A . M ., when she’d arrived at the emergency room, her blood pressure had dropped to ninety over sixty. A pair of inflatable antishock trousers had been placed on her legs in an attempt to stabilize her blood pressure.
    The two-inch-long stab wound in her chest had punctured her right lung, causing such severe internal bleeding that she required an immediate two-pint blood transfusion. When a tube was first inserted into the collapsed lung, more than five hundred cubic centimeters of bloody fluid were sucked out.
    In addition to the stab wound, she had a large bruise on the right side of her chest. She’d also been hit three times on the forehead with a blunt object, each blow producing both a bruise and a cut severe enough to require suturing. She also had a fractured thumb.
    Had she not managed to call the police, she might easily have slipped into shock and died from blood loss, or other complications of her punctured lung. By seven A . M ., however, the doctor who examined her was able to write that she was “alert and conscious and responding well to stimuli.” He termed her condition “stable,” which was not to say she had not been very badly hurt, or that she was yet out of danger.
    By shortly after noon, she had improved to the point where not only was her physical condition termed “stable,” but a doctor who examined her wrote that she was “emotionally controlled, pleasant, and cooperative.”
    Within hours, in various quarters of Little Washington, this demeanor would come to be described as being not at all what one would expect from a woman whose husband had been brutally murdered in the middle of the night, and who herself had been seriously injured—unless, of course, the event was just what she’d been hoping for, and what she might even have managed to arrange.
    * * *
    Chris reached the house shortly after eight A . M . He did not go in. His facial features, small and still not fully formed, gave him a childish appearance, which, combined with his slight build, always made him seem younger than he was, no matter how many days he went without shaving.
    On this morning, he looked like hell. He hadn’t shaved in three days, his spiky brown hair was greasy, his breath foul. He was wearing the same NC State “Wolfpack” sweatshirt he’d had on when he’d collapsed into bed hours earlier. His hands were shaking, his voice was high-pitched, and his eyes were so big and queer-looking that anyone familiar with the effects would have guessed that at some time in the not too distant past he’d consumed a drug stronger than beer.
    Angela was sitting on a lawn across the street from her house. A group of her friends, having heard the news, had already begun to gather. They were smoking and talking and looking across Lawson Road at all the policemen running in and out, and at the television trucks starting to arrive.
    Chris spoke briefly to his sister, who left her spot at the edge of the lawn long enough to tell him that Lieth was dead and that their mother was in intensive care.
    A Washington patrolman gave him a ride to the hospital. He went to his mother’s bedside. She looked as close to being dead as anyone he’d ever seen. Tubes seemed to be everywhere, pouring fluid in and sucking fluid out. Her whole head seemed caked with dried blood.
    But she opened her eyes as he stepped toward her and made a small sound that let him know