Strangewood (10 page)

Yes.

And then music. Wind chimes. And the sound of someone
playing a violin. A fiddle.

Or maybe just the music of a little dragon's wings.

A long sigh escaped Emily Randall's lips. She had stopped
crying, but the wet tracks of tears remained on her cheeks, the slight tang of
salt in the air. With all her might, she held on to Joe Hayes, closed her eyes,
and savored the feeling of his strong arms around her. No matter how hard she
tried, Emily couldn't draw him close enough.

Her heart was pushing him away.

Emily opened her eyes, looked up into Joe's. "You
shouldn't be here," she said.

"I had to come, Em," he said, and looked at her
with such concern and barely disguised pity that she immediately felt both
grateful to know a man of such goodness and caring, and distrustful of such
emotion from any man.

It didn't matter. He didn't belong. She had called him, just
to tell him what was going on, to hear his voice, and frankly, because that was
what one did. He was in her life. She loved him, at least a little. So she had
called to tell him what had happened, told him she'd see him the next day, or
evening.

But she hadn't expected him to come to the hospital. Joe had
asked one of the nurses to tell her that she had a phone call, and when she
left Nathan's room and went to the nurses' station, Joe had been there. She'd
smiled and wept and held him and spoken with him in soft tones. But throughout
their conversation, she felt a chill seep deeper and deeper into her flesh and muscle
and bone.

She ought to have been thrilled that he'd come down. Instead,
Emily was put off by his presumption. The little boy, her little boy, lying in
the dingy, ammonia-reeking room down the hall, was the center of her life. Every
fiber of her being, the blood that flowed in her veins . . . the air she
breathed, she breathed for Nathan. He needed her, and there was nothing she
could do to help him, and the pain of that helplessness was the most savage
agony she had ever experienced.

Now, as she looked into Joe's stormy gray eyes, as he waited
for her to explain her words, Emily herself only just began to understand them.

Joe was an innocent bystander. None of this had anything to
do with him. He cared for her, without question, but he could not even begin to
imagine how she suffered right now. It was as though she were on display behind
glass somewhere, explicit in her pain, and he merely a casual observer, like a
tourist at a museum, able to recognize the beautiful color in the art, but
completely incapable of understanding the art itself.

He didn't belong there. She loved him, cared for him, but
didn't want to be with him at that moment. She wanted . . . she needed to be
with Thomas. Only Thomas could understand.

Emily squinted, bit her upper lip, and shook her head,
unable to meet Joe's gaze.

"I'm sorry, Joe," she said, then grew angry at
herself for apologizing. "It isn't you. But you have to understand that .
. ."

"Sssshhh," he whispered, putting a finger to her
lips, his kind eyes wide and clear. "You don't have to explain. I know
that all of this — between us — is just starting. Whatever we're
going to have, that's for later. Right now you have to worry about Nathan, and
about yourself. That much I do understand."

A pair of fortyish nurses whispered to one another as a
phone rang unanswered nearby. Emily could smell the wonderful scent of lilacs
from a floral arrangement that sat on a pale blue countertop. But no matter how
many flowers the loved ones — for that's what they always were, the loved
ones — brought in, no matter how many cleaning products were used to
scour every surface, hospitals always smelled like death to Emily.

Well, perhaps not death so much as dying.

She hated that disinfectant smell. The thought that Nathan
would have to spend the night here, to stay here until the doctors could
determine what was wrong with him . . . she felt the bile rise in the back of
her throat.

So softly she barely heard him, Joe spoke her name.

"Sorry," she said, though she wasn't quite certain
if she was sorry for closing him out or for drifting off like that. Maybe both.
She felt as though she spent far too much of her life apologizing. To others. To
herself.

An orderly wheeled a new patient by, a girl of no more than
thirteen, whose face and arms were cut and bruised and stitched, and told the
story of a car accident or similar tragedy. The girl's eyes were open, but she
didn't seem to be looking at anything. There was a small gold chain around her
wrist with a little fish or dolphin dangling from it. Emily imagined it was a
token of someone's affection, a parent or other relative, or maybe a boyfriend,
if the girl was old enough to have one.

Then again, what was old enough, these days?

"You'd better get back in there, hmm?" Joe asked. "I
know you're distracted. You should be with Nathan now."

"Yeah, I really should," she agreed, but couldn't
seem to move.

"If you need me, just to talk, or to do errands, go by
the house for any reason, you know you can call anytime," Joe reminded
her.

Emily nodded.

When he bent to kiss her, his lips passed lightly over her
own numb mouth as if they realized they weren't welcome.

"Thanks for coming," she said, dimly aware she was
even speaking, her mind full of lilacs and nurses and stitches and the smell of
dying.

When she blinked again and looked up, she expected Joe to be
gone. She'd zoned out again, and instantly was feeling guilty about it. But he
wasn't gone, just a step or two away. Burnt blond hair, with a tinge of almost
red. Those gray eyes that in the sun could turn green or blue. A college
professor at twenty-six, intelligent and ambitious. He lifted her chin with two
fingers, gently, and leaned over to give a her a kiss that she would notice.

She noticed, and she closed her eyes and kissed him back.

"Thank you," she said again, whispering into his
mouth, and meaning it this time. She was glad he had come and was just as happy
that he was leaving. "I'll call you in the morning," she promised.

"Call when you can," he said to her, brows knit
with concern.

Joe turned and moved down the hall and Emily watched him go
with a lover's pause. Then she turned, steeling herself once more for the sight
of Nathan lying so still in that bed and anticipating a return to the
unexpected comfort she had felt in the presence of Nathan's father. At least,
with Thomas there, she wasn't alone in her anguish.

Emily glanced up at the door to Nathan's room.

Thomas stood, frozen halfway across the threshold, staring
at her.

"So that's him, huh?"

With a sad tilt of her head, blonde hair tumbling over her
shoulder, she opened her mouth to respond, to tell Thomas what she was feeling.
Then she only sighed, gave a barely perceptible shake of her head, and pushed
past him into Nathan's hospital room.

"I know you go for younger guys, Em, but he's pushing
it a bit, isn't he?" Thomas asked bitterly.

Ignoring the swirl of color in a mural on the wall behind
her, Emily sank down into a chair at the edge of her son's bed. When she
finally replied to her ex-husband, she couldn't bring herself to face him
— not from shame, but surrender.

"I know you want this right now, Thomas," Emily
said weakly. "Maybe you need it, I don't know, to distract you. Whatever. When
Nathan . . . when Nathan wakes up, I'll be happy to waste my time telling you
that what I do with my life is none of your business."

Finally, she did turn to regard him, saw that some of the
anger and righteousness had left his face, his stance.

"I just don't have the strength right now," she
concluded.

Emily turned away and reached out for Nathan, caressed his
pale cheek with the backs of her fingers, ran them through his always unruly
hair, wished he would look at her. Smile. Laugh. Anything to let her know that
he was still in there.

Slowly, she lay her head on Nathan's chest, listened to the
beating of his heart and felt the rise and fall of his breathing beneath her
cheek. The tears came freely now. Though she hadn't heard or sensed his
approach, Emily didn't respond at all when Thomas placed his familiar hands on
her back in a gesture of comfort.

At least, that was how he'd obviously meant it. Instead, the
warmth of those hands, and her memory of them, only made her feel more alone. The
communion she'd hoped to have with Thomas, the sharing of their joint pain,
seemed now to have been a foolish hope.

She'd never felt more alone.

"I should go call Francesca," Thomas said, his
voice cracking. He cleared it loudly. "Tell her to cancel my trip to L.A.
tomorrow. I'd like to stay in here tonight with you and Nathan, if that's all
right."

Out in the hall, there was a great clatter as an orderly
fumbled with a pair of meal trays and they crashed to the tile floor. Emily
didn't even start at the noise.

"That's fine," she said, and then had a hint of
amusement that never reached her face. "Your stalker will be so
disappointed."

It wasn't until she heard the quick intake of breath from
above her, and felt the pressure of Thomas's right hand on her shoulder
increase, that she gave any thought to what she had said. Wide-eyed, she turned
to him and gazed at his darting, contemplative eyes. But Emily knew those eyes
weren't seeing anything at that moment. Thomas was thinking.

"You don't suppose . . ." she began.

"It's crazy," he admitted, "but it isn't
impossible."

Thomas reached over to the small nightstand by the bed and
picked up the phone. He pressed nine for an outside line and then called
information.

"I need the main number for the Tarrytown police,"
he said, his voice tight and curt.

While he waited for the number, Thomas glanced at Emily,
nodded toward the long cable with the tiny button on the end. "Buzz for
the nurse," he said. "We've got to have him tested for poison . . .
something."

His fingers curled into her own, and she gripped them
tightly, held his hand. Together they waited.

* * * * *

It rained Monday morning; a storm more common in spring than
midsummer, and even then, it would have been unusual. At sunrise, it had been
warm and only a little cloudy, with very little wind. By nine o'clock, that had
changed. The wind had picked up quickly, dark clouds sweeping across the sky,
and the temperature had begun to drop rapidly.

By nine-thirty, it was just above seventy degrees, and the
horizon looked bruised and sickly, as if the worst of tumors lay just
underneath. It was nearly as dark as if it were night, yet the sky had the odd
quality of twilight, the queer color of a solar eclipse. The air seemed to
shimmer with anticipation of — something.

The first lightning reached electric fingers from earth to
sky just before ten o'clock, and the rumble of thunder that accompanied it was
loud and long and rattled the windows in the hospital cafeteria. On the third
crack of thunder, the downpour began. The shower pounded the windows with huge
raindrops, a thick, saturating storm that instantly began to build wide, deep
puddles in the parking lot and the roads beyond.

Over the almost surreal volume of the rain pelting the
building, Thomas frowned deeply and looked angrily across the table at Walt
Sarbacker, the detective sent by the Tarrytown police to take his complaint
regarding the stalker.

The "alleged" stalker, according to them. That was
the word that had made Thomas angry. But he realized quickly that his anger was
counterproductive.

Sarbacker was a thin, bespectacled man, gray at the temples
and salt and pepper everywhere else. He pushed his glasses up on the ridge of
his nose, awaiting some comment from Thomas, and then glanced out at the
driving rain, apparently having realized that no answer was forthcoming. The
detective was younger than the gray would imply, though Thomas couldn't guess
his age with any real confidence.

He wondered if Detective Sarbacker had children of his own.

The man had raised his eyebrows several times as Thomas told
him about the weird things that had been happening of late. The way Nathan had
been behaving, the boy's concerns that the characters of Strangewood meant him
harm, his contention that they'd actually been there in the house . . . which
now seemed frighteningly more possible than it had previously.

When Thomas told the story of the peanut butter foot and
face prints at his house, Sarbacker actually grunted. Thomas chose to take that
as a sign of consternation on the part of the lanky detective, and in that
regard, as good news. He wanted the man to take him seriously. Wanted the
detective to be concerned.

Sarbacker scribbled in a small notebook as Thomas spoke. The
bustle and buzz of daily life went on around them in the cafeteria. Patients
allowed to walk around and sick of their rooms managed somehow to get trays to
their tables. Families and individuals awaiting answers to questions of
mortality sat in silence or painfully manufactured levity. A pair of new
fathers traded notes as they picked up an early lunch to bring back upstairs to
the women to whom they were now joined for life.

For no matter what happened, Thomas thought, they would
always have the child. Always have the baby they had brought into the world
together.

Anything else was unthinkable.

Thomas shook his head. He felt as though he'd been walking,
seeing, and especially thinking through a fog ever since he'd walked in on
Nathan in the bathroom the night before. But he had to pay attention, now. The
cop was talking to him.

"I'm sorry?"

The detective nodded slightly. "I said it didn't make
any sense to me," Sarbacker repeated. "I suppose anyone can have a
stalker. And I understand how it connects to your work, that much is obvious. I
just don't get why. Obviously you've made some money, but this kind of thing
isn't about that. If someone is stalking you . . ."