Deadly Beloved (12 page)

Henry couldn’t stand the reports about Patsy and Stephen, but he watched them, right through dinner, with the television blasting in the family room while he ate his steak filets and baked potato at a folding tray set up in front of the set. Evelyn had a tossed green salad with balsamic vinegar and a nonfat banana yogurt with wheat germ sprinkled along the top. She had a folding tray too, which was usually an absolute no-no. According to Henry, she was supposed to be “retraining,” and while she was “retraining” she was not allowed to do anything else while she ate her food. She was supposed to sit at the kitchen table and concentrate on her plate, with no distractions. She wasn’t allowed to read or watch television or listen to the radio. She wasn’t allowed even to think about anything except her food, and what it felt like in her mouth, and what it tasted like, and whether this was what she really wanted or not. She almost never had to ask that last question. She already knew the answer. Of course salad with balsamic vinegar wasn’t what she wanted, and neither was non-fat yogurt with wheat germ. She wanted a pair of little steaks just like Henry’s and a baked potato with butter and sour cream and chives in it. Henry’s baked potato had all those things. Now that he was thin, he was allowed to eat.

“I think it was damned stupid of Molly Bracken to go into that house just because she found the door open,” Henry said when Molly was interviewed on the CBS affiliate. “That door could have been left open for any reason. There could have been a burglar.”

“How could there have been a burglar?” Evelyn asked reasonably. “There’s the gate. We have security guards.”

“France had the Maginot Line,” Henry said—cryptically, as far as Evelyn was concerned. “Think about the Gordian knot. Security can be breached.”

“I still don’t see that Molly should have worried about a burglar. I wouldn’t have.”

“Would you go into that house just because you found a door open?”

“Of course not.”

“There, then.”

“But it wouldn’t have had anything to do with there being a burglar,” Evelyn went on patiently. “It’s just that I never really knew Patsy all that well. I wouldn’t have wanted to intrude.”

“It seems like none of us knew Patsy very well. It seems like the woman was crazy.”

“Oh, I don’t think so.”

“Well, what else would you call it? When a woman kills her husband and then blows up her own car?”

“Maybe she was just angry with him,” Evelyn said, pushing a piece of lettuce around the small round bowl that contained it. “Maybe he wasn’t nice to her and she just lost it.”

“Women don’t kill their husbands just because their husbands aren’t nice to them. Christ, Evelyn, if women did that, there wouldn’t be a husband left alive in America.”

Maybe there wouldn’t, Evelyn had thought at the time—and now, only hours later, she was thinking it again. It was a quarter to eight in the morning and Henry was up and sitting in front of the television set again. He had woken half an hour early and nearly caught Evelyn at her ritual morning window-seat binge. Then he had gotten Evelyn her half grapefruit without sugar and her four-ounce glass of juice from the locked refrigerator, and sat down to watch the news again.

Evelyn was watching him. Feeling huge. Feeling bulky. Feeling fat enough to explode into fragments everywhere in the room, and maybe choke him with them. She wanted his pancakes so badly, she nearly snatched them out from under his nose. On the television screen, a young blond reporter was going over and over what it was the police knew now, which wasn’t much different from what they had known the night before. The television reporter was as thin as a rail and arrogant with it.

“I’ve been thinking about things,” Henry said. “About today, I mean. We may have to change the schedule a bit.”

“We can’t change the schedule,” Evelyn said. “We have to go shopping. We’re nearly out of everything.”

“I know. But I can’t go shopping today. I have some work I have to get done.”

“I have to go shopping.” Evelyn tried to keep the panic out of her voice. “We’re low on everything. We hardly have a thing in the house.”

“This is not a good psychological sign,” Henry said. “It shouldn’t make you crazy just because we have to postpone shopping for a few days. We’re not going to starve. Food shouldn’t be that important to you.”

Evelyn took a deep breath. The window seat was nearly empty. Something about the Patsy and Stephen thing must have gotten to her. She had eaten practically her whole stash of Hostess cupcakes. She hadn’t been able to make herself stop. She had told herself it didn’t matter, because they would go shopping, she would be able to replace them, she would find a way to get away from Henry in the store and eat and eat and eat. Now she rubbed the palms of her hands against her face and tried to breathe normally. She needed something to make the fear go away.

“We’re almost out of everything,” she said, sounding rational even to herself. “It’s not the food I eat that we’re out of. It’s the food
you
eat that we’re out of.”

“Well, yes. I know that.”

“We can’t just go without food, Henry. And there are things. Dishwashing detergent. Laundry soap. We run out.”

“I know that.” Henry sounded patient, the way he used to when really stupid students wanted his attention, or when girl students who were plain and stocky instead of slim and pretty tried to ask him a question. “I know there are things we legitimately need, Evelyn. That’s not my point.”

“If there are things we legitimately need, we should go and get them.”

Henry cut the last big wedge of pancakes still in front of him into bite-sized pieces. In pieces, the pancakes looked to Evelyn like caramelized corn, waiting to pop up and get her.

“Well,” Henry said. “I’ve been thinking about it. Maybe I could trust you just this once to go to the store by yourself.”

“By myself,” Evelyn repeated.

Henry waved irritably. “I can’t go on policing you forever, Evelyn. Eventually, you’re going to have to take responsibility for all this yourself. I wish you’d join a support group.”

“I don’t want to join a support group.”

“Anyway.” Henry wasn’t really listening. The television news was showing a weather report. He wasn’t really listening to that either. “You have to go out on your own sooner or later. With this work I’m caught up in, it might as well be now.”

“I would need the keys to the car.”

“You can have the keys to the car.”

“I might do anything if I had the keys to the car,” Evelyn said.

Henry turned his face away from the television set.

“For Christ’s sake, Evelyn. Don’t start sounding like
The Three Faces of Eve
.”

“I might stop at Burger King or Dairy Queen,” Evelyn went on. “I might stop at Taco Bell and buy six ten-packs of hard-shelled tacos and extra sour cream and eat them right there in the parking lot.”

Henry stood up quickly and reached into the pocket of his trousers. He came out with his car keys and tossed them to her. Evelyn almost didn’t catch them. She was that surprised to see them.

“Here,” Henry said. “Take those. Go when you want.”

“I don’t have any money.”

Henry reached into his pocket again and came out with his wallet. He opened it up and took out all the green Evelyn could see.

“Here,” he said, handing it all to her, twenties without number, tens and fives and even one fifty-dollar bill. “Take it. Go to the store. I really do have to work today, Evelyn.”

Evelyn took the money. “All right,” she said.

“I’ve got to go up to the office,” Henry said. “I can’t be disturbed today, Evelyn. Not for anything.”

“I won’t disturb you.”

“I’m going to lock the door. I know you don’t like it, but I have to. I have to concentrate. I can’t have interruptions.”

“I won’t interrupt you.”

“That’s fine, then.” Henry looked around at the family room and the breakfast room and the kitchen. “That’s fine,” he said again. “I’ll just go up to the office now. Have a good time shopping.”

“I will.”

“Be careful driving the car. It’s been a long time since you’ve been behind the wheel.”

“I’ll be careful.”

“Try to remember that if you load your cart up with junk food, everybody we know will see it. That ought to help you keep your discipline up. Everybody will see you.”

Everybody sees me every day, Evelyn thought. If I cared, I would already be thin again. But she understood what Henry was trying to tell her. She even understood that he was right, in a way. She did care what the rest of them thought about her. She was just careful never to ask them to explain it.

“So,” Henry said, rocking back on the heels of his shoes. “I’ll be going up.”

“Fine,” Evelyn said.

“I’ll be out of communication most of the day.”

“Fine,” Evelyn said again.

“Right.” Henry put his hands back into his pockets and turned away from her. He hurried out of the room, almost at a run, his shoulders hunched over and his legs moving in an odd, jerky way, as if he had suddenly acquired some kind of nerve disease.

Evelyn looked down at the keys in her hand and shook her head. Keys and money. Keys and money. The car was parked out in the driveway because Henry hadn’t bothered to pull it into the garage when he came back from the club with it last night.

I wonder what all this is about, Evelyn asked herself. I wonder what it is he’s so afraid of.

Then she waddled over to the counter and put the keys and the money in her purse. She thought of the big display of Entenmann’s chocolate cakes down at the Stop ’N Shop and wondered how many she could eat in the car on the way home, eat while driving, eat while stopping for red lights on the road between here and the mall. Maybe I’ll have to pull over someplace, she thought, and give myself time to eat.

Liza Verity never took night duty unless she had to, but last night she had had to, and now, at quarter to nine in the morning, she was exhausted. It had been one of those nights that no nurse likes to have anything to do with. It had started with a bad traffic accident on one of those brutal overpasses that now seemed to define the Philadelphia skyline and then done a domino number on life in the rest of the hospital. The accident was a five-car pileup on one side and a tractor-trailer truck on the other. One of the cars in the five-car pileup had six people crammed into it. One of the other cars had only one person in it, but that person had had a little semiautomatic pistol and been hyped up on something serious. He was at the back of the pileup. As soon as the crashing and the screeching were over, he got out and started firing randomly, hitting cars passing and people standing around to see what had happened. He seemed to take particular offense at the idea of bystanders. There were always dozens of people who stopped to rubberneck at the side of any highway disaster. The man with the semiautomatic pistol shot up ten of them before a teenage boy from Radnor had the courage and the presence of mind to tackle him from behind. The teenage boy got the semiautomatic pistol away from the shooter but suffered a broken arm in the process. By the time all these people got to the emergency room, it was something worse than a mess. They had called six extra doctors and nearly thirty nurses down to duty. There were police everywhere and ambulance men looking green and paramedics looking tired. Liza had been a little surprised to see so few media people. Usually, the local news crews were all over an accident like this one. It was exactly the kind of thing their viewers loved best.

One of the advantages of having been up all night is that it is nearly impossible to summon the energy to be worked up about anything. Coming upstairs from emergency after she was finally let off, Liza had her ass pinched in the elevator by a third-year medical student on apprenticeship roster. She didn’t even turn around and slap his face, which is what she usually did when boys of that sort pulled nonsense on her. In her tiredness, everything about the day-to-day workings of the hospital seemed tacky and absurd. Medical students who had to resort to sexual harassment to have a good day. Doctors who wanted to prove their superiority to God at least once an hour, usually by putting down nurses. Nurses’ aides who were always a little insulted when they were asked to make beds or change bedpans. Liza got off the elevator on the fourth floor and headed down the hall to the pediatrics unit. She could have gotten out of going down to emergency last night. She was a pediatrics specialist and already technically off-duty when they started bringing the bodies in. Maybe she was just getting a little stale, bored with the routine, impatient with the politics—God only knew, she was all of that, there was no maybe about it. Maybe it was time for her to quit and find herself another job.

The pediatrics unit had a wing of its own with twenty-six rooms in it and over sixty beds. The nurses’ station was a curved counter that was always supposed to have somebody standing behind it. There was nobody there. Liza walked around the counter to the door at the back and stuck her head inside. Sharon Birch and Mia Zhiransky were sitting side by side on the office couch, watching something on television.

“Don’t you think you ought to be doing something sensible,” Liza asked them, “like listening for patients?”

“We’ve got the warning system on in here,” Mia said. “We were just discussing politics.”

“Hospital or government?” Liza asked.

“Race.” Sharon Birch was tall and thin and black. If she hadn’t had bags under her eyes big enough to pack the Rolling Stones into, she might have been beautiful. “We were talking about the news reports. How did it go with the accident?”

“Awful,” Liza said.

“Anyone dead?” Mia asked.

Liza nodded. “At least three people. There’s probably going to end up being six or more.”

“All black people?” Sharon asked.

Liza had to think. It was honestly not the kind of thing she noticed in the middle of an emergency. “Yes,” she said finally, having gone over all the patients in her head. “I think so.”

“There,” Sharon Birch said.

“I still don’t think it’s race.” Mia Zhiransky was small and blond and perfect, their own hospital china doll. “I think it’s money. It’s always more exciting when something happens to people with money.”