Bellweather Rhapsody (37 page)

He knew her room;
Rabbit
didn’t even know which room she was in. He fought back the blush threatening his face.

“I am,” said Brodie, “concerned.”

“Me too. My sister—I can’t find my sister Alice either. If I help you, will you help me? Find them both?”

“How many people has this bloody hotel eaten?” said Brodie, more flippantly than Rabbit knew he felt. “But that’s the spirit. Lend a hand.”

“Should we tell someone?”

Brodie shook his head. “Not yet.”

They searched for a full twenty minutes. Rabbit recognized plenty of people milling around. Some of them said hello to him, smiled as though they were old friends who hadn’t met for the first time two days before. (Was this how it felt to be popular?) When they asked whom he was looking for, because he was obviously
looking,
he brushed it off. Someone, he said. Just someone.

Brodie, who’d had just as much luck, met him back in an empty main ballroom. The last of the hotel staff were clearing tables, changing soiled linens, stacking chairs. It made Rabbit feel even more anxious, like the scene of a crime was being dismantled before all the evidence had been collected.

“We can split up the upper floors,” Brodie said. “I’ve not been beyond my floor. I don’t know what’s up there.” He shrugged.

“Should we tell someone?” Rabbit asked again.

“Not yet,” said Brodie.

“I think we should tell someone,” said Rabbit.

Brodie glared at him. Rabbit glared back.

Rabbit watched as two of the staff collapsed a screen on the edge of the ballroom floor and carried it off. Behind it he saw chairs stacked in tall rows against the wall, beside a fire door.

There was a dark object on the floor next to the door. Rabbit squinted.

“Purse,” he said, pointing, and Brodie was off. He reached the door just before Rabbit and pushed it open. There was a blast of frigid air. Rabbit saw his teacher cradled in the snow, eyes closed, lips blue. She looked dead. Frozen. And he didn’t do anything but stand there and look at her.

She opened her eyes and looked back.

“Ish,” she said, or something like it, and Brodie was already scooping her out of the snowdrift, dragging her back into the warmth of the hotel. Rabbit slammed the door behind them. He picked up her purse, which was surprisingly heavy, and slung the single skinny strap across his body. What happened next happened quickly and silently. Brodie took one arm and Mrs. Wilson extended the other and Rabbit, called, rushed to her side. She was
cold,
cold like a steak straight out of the refrigerator. He pressed his warm self against her side and they began walking. Through the ballroom. Toward the lobby.

“Can you walk at all?” Brodie asked her.

“Ish,” she said again, and her face twisted. “Oo assed oo.”
Who asked you
. “Oo ave ee nnyayy.”
To save me anyway.
She made some huffing noises that might have been laughter.

“Glad you kept your sense of humor.”

“Oof.”

“What?”

“Ool.”

“What?”

“Esus ucking eist
.
”

Rabbit was struggling to keep Mrs. Wilson upright. Struggling to understand just how well Brodie and his teacher knew each other. Struggling to grasp how much this night was going to teach him, and how much of it he didn’t want to know.

Which was when Alice found him.

He doesn’t let go of Mrs. Wilson but he does stop moving, and pulls Alice in so that the four of them, Brodie, Mrs. Wilson, Rabbit, and his sister are collapsed together in the middle of the lobby in a group hug.

“What the f—” Brodie says.

“Alith,” Mrs. Wilson sort of groans.

“
Alice,
” Rabbit says, but it’s doubtful anyone can hear him over Alice’s chattering—something about the concierge, and being kidnapped, but it turned out fine and Minnie didn’t do it, she wasn’t the killer, she was a cool person and so was her dog—and for the first time in a long, long time, Rabbit doesn’t wish she would shut up.

“I was worried,” he says. “Why didn’t you—” And then he remembers how he acted at the party, how he didn’t dance, and feels like a jerk.

“I’m sorry,” Alice says. Has she ever said this? Has she ever said she’s sorry to her brother? “Are you wearing a purse?”

“Hank oo,” Mrs. Wilson says in his ear. “Eed eye urse.”
Need my purse
. And then her body dips, a bead of sweat rolls down from Rabbit’s hairline, and the severity of the situation reasserts itself. His sister may be safe, but Mrs. Wilson is weak and cold, and what the hell was she doing out in the snow?

Fisher yells to the guy at the check-in desk to call 911, that this woman has been outside in the cold for God knows how long and is suffering from exposure, and Mrs. Wilson dips again, reeling on her feet, and puts her mouth next to Rabbit’s ear and says, “Ake me oo tha ool.”

“The what?” he whispers.

“The.” She licks her lips clumsily and presses them together. “Puh.”

“The pool,” says Rabbit. “She wants to go to the pool.”

Mrs. Wilson goes limp with relief. “Yes,” she says clearly.

“Where is the pool?” he asks Alice, because she’s right in his face and she usually knows everything, but this time she shakes her head. “The pool?” he asks louder, and catches the eye of the guy at the desk, already on the phone. He points up.

“Uh,” says Mrs. Wilson. “Uh. Oof.”

“She wants to go up to the roof,” Rabbit tells Brodie, who is shouldering the bulk of Mrs. Wilson’s weight now. She curls against him, into him.

“Take me. The puh. Ool.” She presses her face into Brodie’s shoulder. “Leeze.”

“She says please,” Rabbit translates, and Brodie looks at him first with frustration, then anger, and then, a thousand times worse than either, with fear. Brodie . . . likes her. Cares for her. He might even be in love with her. He knows it’s stupid to take her farther from the lobby, farther from the coming ambulance crew, but he’s going to take her wherever she wants to go because he loves her.

“Go,” says another familiar voice. Rabbit turns, and confirms it’s the voice of the psycho fat lady in the elevator, the psycho with the dog, who must have been sitting in the lobby with Alice. “Go to the pool and I’ll send up the EMTs.”

“I’m coming with you,” says Alice to her brother.

So they go up.

The pool on the roof is magnificent. Fisher isn’t paying attention to anything other than Natalie, chilled in his arms, drooling with cold, yet he can’t help but notice the ornate tile, the brilliant sapphire circle of water, the warm green fronds all around. It’s close and humid, thanks to the domed glass ceiling. He understands why she wanted to come here—or rather, come back here, for this is surely where she was before she went to the auditorium on Thursday night—but he wishes he could see the stars. All he sees when he looks skyward is glass and metal ribbing and the gray underside of many feet of snow. He knows they’re on the roof but it feels tomb-like, low, insulated, and dim. The only light comes from the pool itself, from blue bulbs ringing the edge beneath the surface.

He would have taken her anywhere she asked, just because she asked him, but dear God, he wishes she hadn’t chosen here. It’s the kind of place they seal you in for eternity.

Fisher is massively unprepared to save anyone’s life. He has no idea what to do for exposure other than dial 911, and he’s done that already, so if anyone else has a suggestion he’s not going to object. He’s glad Hatmaker is here—that two Hatmakers are here. His lucky Bunny Boy, doubled. That has to be a sign. He would rub Rabbit’s head if he thought it would bring him any more luck than he’s already entitled to, which is a frightening prospect, considering he’s entitled to exactly zero.

“How much luck do you have, love?” he mutters as he steers Natalie closer to the water.

“Oo much,” she says. “Not enough.”

Rabbit and his sister bring over a stack of stiff white bath towels.

“Dr. Brodie,” says Alice. “Hi, Dr. Brodie. I think you’re supposed to—how do I say this without sounding . . .” She claps her hands. “If you want to be nude under the towels with Mrs. Wilson, that would be fine.”

Rabbit freezes. Even his eyes stop moving. It’s fucking hilarious.

“Skin to skin. That’s how you treat hypothermia, right?” Alice says. The twins—they must be twins, did Fisher notice this before?—are an optical illusion when they stand side by side. They share the same pert noses and round eyes, only Alice’s make her look like an especially girlish boy, and Rabbit’s, a boyish girl. Fisher looks at one and is reminded of the other, at least until they open their mouths.

“Come on,” says Alice, “we’re all adults here.”

“Oo you ahnt oo geh me
ired?
” Natalie slurs, and then makes weird breathy noises that must be laughter. “Don’t have hypo. Ermia. Need to move. Help me walk.”

She’s already stronger, thank God, though Fisher still has to exert the lion’s share of effort to keep her upright. They walk around the pool. At first her steps are halting, but they grow stronger, surer, her breathing deeper and more regular. “Blood,” she says. “Need to move my blood.”

“
Why
did you go outside?” he hisses. He hates that it sounds like he’s attacking her, accusing her of something, but he can’t help himself. Fear has made him raw. The Hatmakers sit quietly on the other side of the pool, too far to hear her response. “How did you get there?”

She pauses. Looks at him. Her cheeks are streaky with red, burned by the cold.

“Viola,” she says. “Pushed me. Tried to kill me.”

“I’m serious.”

She closes her eyes slowly.

“Me too,” she says.

“That isn’t funny.”

More of those awful laughing sounds. “Why does everyone
say
that?”

Brodie hugs her close, though she doesn’t need all that much support anymore. He can feel her righting herself, holding her weight over her own feet.

“What happened?” he whispers. “Please, please tell me.”

“Karma.” She leans her head against his shoulder. “What I deserved.”

“You didn’t deserve to—”

They’re ten feet from the Hatmakers, ten feet from making a complete circle around the pool, when Brodie notices the man. He’s sitting behind the kids at what looks like a small cocktail table without an umbrella. There’s a hole in the middle, a dark hole where the umbrella stand would go, and why Fisher focuses on this first and not the gun in the man’s hand must have something to do with his brain’s capacity for shock. He saw the gun in the man’s hand and Natalie’s open purse, lying on the other side of the table where one of the Hatmakers must have set it down, and Fisher’s brain said,
Nope, not seeing it—let’s focus on the round black hole five inches from the gun, the round black hole that’s missing an umbrella.

And the man? An older man. In his late sixties, early seventies, give or take a decade. Light hair, light complexion. Wearing a collared shirt, reddish bow tie undone and dangling, a dark rumpled blazer like the one the desk clerk who called the ambulance was wearing. It’s—oh God, what’s his name? The concierge. The man he reported Rabbit’s confession to, the man who called the meeting with Viola and Alice. He looks so different tonight, Fisher didn’t recognize him at first. His eyes are wrong. They’re almost as black as the hole in the middle of the table.

The man holds the gun in his right hand, lightly, resting both hand and gun on the tabletop. His finger is on the trigger, but from the look on his face Fisher isn’t sure he knows who or where he is, let alone what he’s holding.

“Don’t panic,” he whispers into Natalie’s red hair. “The man sitting behind them has a gun and I don’t know why.”

He expects her to tense, to pull closer, but she acts as though she hasn’t heard him. They continue their slow movement forward. Fisher locks eyes with Rabbit
. Don’t turn around but there’s someone there. Don’t turn around.

Alice turns around.

She does so easily, as if she’s been expecting to see the concierge sitting behind her at poolside, holding a gun, all along.

“Mr. Hastings,” she says. “Hello. I’m Alice. Do you remember me from earlier? I’m sorry if we upset you. Minnie and I, we didn’t mean to.”

“I remember,” he says. His voice has no color.

“Minnie wants to help you,” she says. “I do too.”

“I remember,” he repeats, and licks his lips. He lifts both arms theatrically; Fisher’s pulse responds in kind. “I remember,” he says, “when they used to come to this pool with their families. Pink bathing caps with white daisies for the girls, little black flippers and goggles for the boys. The
noise
in here! Shouting. Splashing. And I remember when they’d bring up their wives and their girlfriends, never at the same time, of course, for a late dip under the stars. Considerably quieter. We used to have a little bar over there in the corner to make cocktails. We’d find paper drink umbrellas floating in the water in the morning. They got stuck in the filters.”

Fisher and Natalie stop moving. They stand side by side at the edge of the water, close enough to Rabbit that Fisher can grab him and dive for cover. If they dove into the pool, would that be stupid or brilliant?

“Tell me more,” Alice says.

“She loved it up here. She was a swimmer, a great swimmer. There are speakers hidden in the bushes here—you’d never find them, very cleverly placed. I’d turn on the radio and I’d throw her high into the pool. Like a cannonball. Like a rocket. Splashdown! I can still hear Sam Cooke, that song about having a party. Having a good time with my baby. How he’d echo in here. In this room.” He looks up at the dome. “She was happy here.”

“I can see why.”

“Why,” says Hastings, and the blackness that had started to recede from his eyes seeps back in.

Alice senses it too. “Tell me more,” she says again. She’s turned all the way around in her chair, chin resting on the top of the back, like a little kid would think to do. “Tell me more about what you’re—”

“She was happy. She was my. Daughter.” Hastings’s brow crumples. “Why would she ever? Why would anybody ever?” He looks directly at Alice. Whatever—whomever—they’re talking about, Fisher can only guess, but the specifics of the conversation don’t matter. What matters is the feel of it, the color and the tone, and even Fisher can tell that they’ve encroached on something darker. Angrier. Redder.