Deadly Beloved (27 page)

“It stands to reason,” Joey Bracken said.

“I don’t think it stands to reason at all,” Kevin said. “You don’t even know she blew that party up. That’s just speculation.”

“It was the same kind of bomb,” Joey said.

“It’s a really simple kind of bomb,” Kevin told him. “I could show you how to make one myself. I have made one myself. Back when I thought I was going to be a revolutionary.”

“I never knew you thought you were going to be a revolutionary.” Sarah brought the nuts to the table. Joey Bracken grunted when he saw them and reached out for a handful of cashews and Brazils. The peanuts were oiled and salted. Joey got a wash of grease across his palm.

“Are you just going to buy Molly the lot for a birthday surprise,” Sarah asked him, “or are you going to get a builder and put the house up and present the whole thing to her as a kind of big package?”

Joey looked down at the paper he was supposed to sign. “Oh, I couldn’t build the whole house without telling her. She’d know there was money missing. This is about as big a surprise as I’m going to be able to get. And I’m not going to be able to keep it a surprise at all.”

“I keep a private checking account for things like that,” Kevin said. “You ought to think about it. Otherwise, you can’t buy them anything serious, and they like to have things bought for them. Wives, I mean.”

“Yeah, I know. But Molly says she doesn’t trust me with money. I work in a bank, she ought to trust me with money.”

“I know just what she means,” Sarah said. “I have the same problem with Kevin all the time. Men just don’t have the same priorities women do.”

“Molly wants to have a baby,” Joey said. “It just doesn’t seem to happen for us. I was thinking that maybe this would cheer her up.”

“Well, it certainly is a cheerful place,” Kevin said. “Sarah and I can attest to that. We get cheered up every time we think about it.”

“And it’s still so reasonable,” Sarah said. “Oh, I know it doesn’t sound like it when you’re used to land prices in Pennsylvania, but in Florida these prices are ridiculously low. Especially for waterfront. Friends of ours just bought a waterfront lot in Boca Raton and it cost them three quarters of a million dollars. For the lot.”

“Oh, I know. I know,” Joey said. “And Molly wants a vacation place. She’s said so over and over again. Did the Willises have a vacation place?”

“I don’t know,” Sarah said. “We didn’t know the Willises all that well. They were—well, you know. Older people. Set in their ways.”

“Stuffy,” Kevin contributed solemnly.

“I was just thinking that if the Willises had a vacation house, Patsy could have gone there.” Joey reached into the little bowl and took the rest of the nuts out of it. His whole hand looked salted. “She has to be somewhere. She can’t just have disappeared. And yet she has disappeared. Just listen to the newspapers.”

“Listen to the newspapers?” Sarah said.

Joey waved his greasy hand in the air. “To the television news. You know what I mean.”

“The television news doesn’t know everything,” Sarah said. “I’ll bet the police know where Patsy is right this minute. They’re just biding their time.”

“Biding their time for what?” Kevin asked.

“To have all the evidence they need before they go to trial,” Sarah said. “To make sure they can lock her up. All those things. They don’t like to make arrests and then later have the person go free at the trial. You know how it is.”

“You watch too much television,” Kevin said.

“I’d better sign this thing,” Joey told them. He leaned over the paper and signed, which Sarah and Kevin didn’t pay any attention to. Then he took the cashier’s check out from under its paper clip and signed the back of that over to Kevin Lockwood. Sarah and Kevin did pay attention to that. That was what really mattered here. That was what was going to get the bills paid for the next couple of weeks.

“Well,” Kevin said as Joey handed the check over.

“I got to thank you for doing this,” Joey said. “I couldn’t ever have done it on my own. I don’t know enough about this kind of thing.”

“There’s nothing much to know,” Kevin said. “And it’s going to be old-home week down there next year. Evelyn and Henry are doing this too. It’s going to be Fox Run Hill all over again.”

“Molly doesn’t like Evelyn and Henry,” Joey said. “She thinks Evelyn is too fat. And she thinks Henry is a prick.”

“Does she?” Sarah said.

Kevin put the check in the chest pocket of his shirt, folded up, out of sight. “Well,” he said. “I’m glad you’re doing it. It will be good to see you and Molly down there next year. Or this year. Whenever you decide to build.”

“I still think somebody ought to check into whether or not the Willises had a vacation house,” Joey said. “You don’t want a person like that wandering around in the open, do you know what I mean? Even if it is a woman. It isn’t safe.”

“I’m really sure she isn’t after you,” Sarah said.

“The next thing you know, she’s going to try to blow up the president of the United States, and then there are going to be days and days and days of Dan Rather moaning about how we never do things right and get them settled beforehand. You just wait. And don’t forget: If she was gunning for Julianne Corbett, she didn’t get her.”

“What does that mean?” Sarah asked.

“She didn’t get her,” Joey insisted. “Corbett is still alive. Which means maybe they ought to have a guard on Corbett.”

“Maybe she was gunning for that photographer who took the awful pictures of starving people,” Sarah said, “or maybe she was gunning for that woman from the animal rights movement who got blown up. Or maybe it wasn’t Patsy Willis at all. Really, the way people go on about this, you’d think space aliens had landed on the ninth fairway at the Fox Run Hill Country Club.”

Joey Bracken got out of his chair and went to stand at the sliding glass doors that led out to the patio, and that also looked around the back toward the Willises’ mock-Tudor.

“Maybe that’s what happened,” he said solemnly. “Maybe aliens landed at the country club. It sure as hell feels odd enough around here since Patsy offed Steve.”

There was a newsstand in the hospital lobby with its entire top front rack covered in copies of
Bride’s
magazine. The picture on the cover showed a young woman with a long train swirling out from behind her to make a mountain of lace at her feet. She was holding a bouquet of flowers that was bigger than her head, and she looked scared to death. Julianne Corbett forced herself to look away from the display and smile at the nurse at the visitors’ desk. In this day and age, she probably wasn’t really a nurse, but she was dressed like one, and Julianne was too old to adapt. It didn’t matter that she intended to go to Washington to work on health care reform. In her mind, hospitals were still what they were when she was small, staffed by nurses and nothing but nurses, except for a few aides in candy-stripe pink and white. These days, even the real nurses didn’t wear caps anymore. Everybody’s uniform had been streamlined. Nobody wanted to be what they were.

The woman, nurse or otherwise, behind the visitors’ desk was leaning forward. “Here comes Dr. Alvarez,” she was saying. “Dr. Alvarez can tell you everything you want to know. I don’t know if you can bring all those—people—with you upstairs though.”

All “those people,” as the woman referred to them, were Julianne’s regular contingent when she was on any kind of official expedition. Besides Tiffany, who was indispensable at any time except during a sexual tryst, Julianne had three stenographers, a photographer, a bodyguard, and an aide. They were supposed to provide a buffer between her and the public, and they were also supposed to act as witnesses. If some nut came up and started hitting her with an umbrella, she wanted to make sure that when they all landed in court she wouldn’t be the one who was blamed. In the old days, this sort of caution would have been absurd, but nothing was absurd anymore. Nothing was unthinkable anymore either.

Dr. Alvarez was a young woman with very dark hair wrapped into a knot at the back of her neck. She had glasses with thick black frames and thin lenses. Julianne thought that she could never have been pretty, even as a child, and that now she didn’t seem to care. As she came across the carpet of the lounge, she held out her hand and said, “Congresswoman Corbett? I’m Dr. Teresa Alvarez.”

“Dr. Alvarez.” Julianne took the hand. She had always hated shaking hands, but she had learned to do it. She gave this one a sharp, hard pull and then dropped it. “I’m glad to meet you.”

“I’m glad to meet you too.” Dr. Alvarez looked around. “I’m afraid Mrs. Morrissey is correct. This many people, on an ICU ward…”

“That’s quite all right,” Julianne said. “We can leave most of them down here. I do have to take Ms. Shattuck though.”

“Which one is Miss Shattuck?”

Tiffany stepped forward. “That’s me,” she said. “I’m Tiffany Shattuck.”

“All right.” Teresa Alvarez inclined her head. “We’ll be going up to the fifth floor, to a ward called Five West. You understand that Miss Parrish will not be able to speak to you?”

“I understand that she’s totally unconscious,” Julianne Corbett said.

Teresa Alvarez shook her head emphatically. “Coma is not that simple. It’s true that Miss Parrish does not at this point respond to stimuli. She makes no indication that she can hear or see us at any time. That does not necessarily mean that she cannot do either. Her brain wave patterns are good. She is not in a vegetative state. As far as we can determine, her mind is in good working order.”

“But if her mind is in good working order, why isn’t she awake?” Tiffany Shattuck asked. “If everything is okay, why isn’t she sitting up drinking Coca-Cola?”

“I didn’t say everything was okay,” Teresa Alvarez said. “I said her mind was in good working order. And we have no way of knowing at this point whether or not she is awake, as you put it. We know only that she is making no visible response to stimuli.”

“I don’t think this makes any sense,” Tiffany Shattuck said.

“It makes sense,” Julianne said. “What I think I’m getting here, Doctor, is that as far as you know, it’s perfectly possible that Karla sees and registers the existence of where she is and what’s around her and that she can hear when people talk about her.”

“It’s possible. It’s also possible that she knows when she has visitors. Which is why our visit has to be limited. If Miss Parrish is aware of the people in her room, then too many visitors over too long a period of time could tire her, and we don’t want that. No matter what is or is not going on here, Miss Parrish is still a very sick woman.”

“I understand that,” Julianne Corbett said.

Teresa Alvarez turned her back to them and walked rapidly away. “Come with me,” she said, heading toward the elevators. “After we look in on Miss Parrish, I have to do rounds. There isn’t very much time. I have to thank you for being prompt.”

“I am always prompt,” Julianne said. They got to the elevators and stopped. The elevator doors bounced open and let out what seemed to be a hundred people in various states of cheap dress, old brown nubby coats raveling at the hems, stocking caps and knitted gloves grimy around the seams, heavy lace-up shoes and battered socks. Teresa Alvarez waited until the elevator car was entirely empty and then led the way inside.

“Of course,” she said as the elevator doors closed, “Miss Parrish has a constant visitor. She has a twenty-four-hour duty nurse and that young man friend of hers, Evan Walsh.”

“A twenty-four-hour duty nurse?” Julianne asked. “Is that normal for ICU?”

“Mr. Walsh hired her. The hospital certainly doesn’t mind, as long as she’s a trained ICU nurse, which this one is. The way things are, we aren’t in the business of turning down competent extra help when we can get it, especially for free. Actually, I think Mr. Walsh hired three nurses on three shifts. They seem to be working out.”

The fifth floor was cleaner than the lobby. There was a polished metal hospitality cart parked in the foyer when they got out of the elevator with a stack of
Modern Bride
magazines weighing down one end of it. The aide who was supposed to be pushing the cart was reading one of the magazines instead, flipping through a full-color fashion section on miniskirted wedding gowns. Julianne had always looked awful in mini-skirts and had no interest in wearing a wedding gown at all. She made a face at the aide and tried to keep up with Teresa Alvarez.

Teresa Alvarez took them through a set of fire doors, down a corridor, through another set of fire doors. In these corridors the hospital seemed quiet and empty, inhabited only by nurses huddled around nursing stations. Most of the rooms had their doors closed. The rooms that didn’t had no people in them. Julianne saw charts and carts and trays and wheelchairs folded up. It wasn’t even all that late in the day. Where had all the people gone? On the coffee table in a waiting room just outside the fire doors marked
FIVE WEST
, Julianne saw another copy of
Modern Bride
magazine, wrinkled and used this time, out of date.

“This is the ICU,” Teresa Alvarez said, holding the latest set of fire doors open. “From here on in, we’re under the direction of the head ICU nurse. If she wants to get rid of us, we go.”

“Of course,” Julianne said.

The head ICU nurse was a tall black woman in a uniform so white, it could have been the Virgin Mary’s soul. She came forward as soon as Dr. Alvarez brought Julianne and Tiffany through.

“It’s all right to go back,” she told them. “I’ve informed Mr. Walsh that you’ll be coming. And Mrs. Hiller.”

“Mrs. Hiller is the nurse,” Teresa Alvarez explained.

“I’ve been trying to hire her away from her temporary agency.” The large black woman sighed. “She’s very good at her work. But we don’t pay enough.”

“We never pay enough,” Teresa Alvarez said.

Down at the end of an antiseptic-looking corridor—of course the corridor looked antiseptic, Julianne told herself, it was supposed to look antiseptic; this was a hospital—a small figure in wire-rimmed glasses came out of a room. Teresa Alvarez waved her hand to greet him.

“That’s Mr. Walsh,” she said. “We should go in now. But not for long. You do understand that?”