Dickey came to see me today. He asked about people with grudges against the Centre, people who hated Dr. Treadwell.… Bobbie, you don’t hate Dr. Treadwell, do you?”
No answer from inside. Gunn felt dizzy in the gloomy silence, but she had something to say, and she was going to finish no matter what. “Of course, I didn’t tell him anything—I didn’t know anything—Bobbie, Dr. Dickey took the files, lots of files. He said he wanted to check out all the disciplinary actions taken against staff for patient errors. He took some patient files, too.…
“Bobbie, he took the files, and there wasn’t a thing I could do to stop him. You know he’s the head of the Committee. He wanted them, and everybody from upstairs was already gone. There wasn’t even anybody to ask if it was all right.”
Gunn could hear Bobbie breathing on the other side of the door, but he didn’t open up. She said, “Something’s going on, Bobbie. Dr. Dickey told me somebody wants to hurt Dr. Treadwell. I feel so bad about it I didn’t know what to say.” There was a pause while Bobbie, unseen behind his door, breathed in and out.
“Oh, Bobbie, I’m afraid. Please … Tell me you don’t hate Dr. Treadwell. You wouldn’t do anything to hurt her, would you?”
Gunn did not like the dark, the tight space, the dense stillness in the decaying building, the slight wheeze at the end of Bobbie’s exhalations. She knew him, knew he sat on her fire escape sometimes in the middle of the night, not doing anything at all except breathing in and out just like this. She remembered Dr. Dickey’s own words so many times over the years: “We’re all a little crazy, Gunn. Don’t let it worry you one little bit. Most crazy people never hurt anyone but themselves.” Gunn had tried not to let the crazy things worry her.
Suddenly the light went off under Bobbie’s door, and his voice came out of the dark. “Go away, old woman. The bastard is looking for someone else, not me.”
Now she breathed a sigh of relief. “I’m glad, sweetheart, because your file was one of the ones he took.”
“Fuck!” Some heavy object crashed against the flimsy wooden door, stressing the lock and cracking the wood. Gunn jumped back, cringing.
“Bobbie? Bobbie, don’t get upset, please don’t get upset. We can talk about this—”
But Bobbie didn’t want to talk about it. Gunn heard him slam the door to the garden and knew he’d gone out again. She started worrying again, this time that he’d go out drinking and get into another fight. She felt real bad about upsetting him.
thirty
A slick of sweat gathered on Clara’s upper lip and between her breasts and thighs as she brooded about Hal’s many betrayals in the hot sun by the pool at Arch Candel’s beach house on Sleepy Key, a prime spot in the Gulf of Mexico off the coast of Sarasota, Florida. She had considered the situation with Hal on the plane from New York to Florida and was sure she was doing the right thing, wondered how long it would take to end. In front of her, thousands of diamond lights from the Gulf winked between the palms that studded the thick green lawn bordering the beach.
Senator Candel himself sat farther back on the patio at an antique iron table that had been made for his family at the turn of the century. The valuable table with the signs of the zodiac arranged in a circle around its top was badly rusted from the salt and humidity and heavy rains of many summers. Its owner showed the same signs of wear. Born fair, Arch Candel was permanently reddened and freckled from a lifetime of deep and dangerous sunburns. Even now he was indifferent to the hazards of sun worship. He was shirtless at noon, wore only a pair of navy swimming trunks with a Polo insignia on them. Beneath his shrewd and penetrating blue eyes, the sun damage could be seen on jowly cheeks and a red nose that was needle-thin and peeling. His long bony legs supported a thick upper body that had begun softening many years ago. A substantial slab of gut spilled over the edge of the waistband of his trunks.
Clara studied him reading at his rusty table.
He felt her gaze and looked up. “What?”
She was mentally reliving her old grievances about Hal when she thought she loved him, and the recent incidents of Hal’s harassment now that he wanted her back. The complete
The first message she’d received had come nearly six months ago. It was composed of letters cut from newspaper headlines and pasted on a piece of hospital stationery. The neatly folded paper had been on the podium when she’d gone up to introduce a seminar. She’d silently read the words
“Darlin’?”
Clara shook her head, adjusting the brim of her straw hat to hide her face. She was lying on a chaise with a green-and-white-striped mattress under an umbrella by the pool. Her bathing suit was basic black, cut low in the bosom and high on the hips. She crossed her legs the other way to even her tan.
Distracted, Arch removed the reading glasses from the end of his sharp nose and twirled them between two fingers. For the last two hours he’d been studying the thousand-page committee report he’d have to debate in Senate hearings the following week. Without the ballast of his elbows, the sheaf of printed pages fell shut from its own weight, closing on his notes and the list of questions he was preparing to ask Clara to get her opinion on the issues.
“Darlin’, I know something’s bothering you. And whatever bothers you bothers me.” His soft lazy voice came from between thin chapped lips, but no one who heard it was ever fooled. Arch Candel was as tough as the ’gators he grew up with.
He was also a man who knew what he wanted. When he met Clara Treadwell, he was still reeling from the long decline and death from cancer of his wife of twenty-eight years. He had been instantly impressed by Clara’s energy, her electric smile and shrewd intelligence. He’d wanted to marry her immediately despite the undisguised misgivings of his two grown children. He’d shown Clara his houses in Florida and Washington and told her she could redecorate them as she wished, she would be the mistress of all he owned.
At the time Clara had just emerged from her second divorce, still childless and with nearly a million dollars in her pockets. Her mother, like Arch’s wife only a few months before, was in the final stages of cancer and not taking it well. On her deathbed, she reviled her daughter for abandoning her years ago, then for using one man after another to get ahead Clara’s dying mother repeatedly called her a slut and a whore. Her mother’s words never touched Clara. She knew it wasn’t any parade of men that enraged her mother. What her mother bitterly resented was that Clara had succeeded and succeeded on her own terms.
Clara was successful, but she had also been burned a few times in her rise to power. Though she would not admit it in any conscious way, deep inside she felt she had been hurt, even abused, by the men in her life. She touched the bandage covering the cut on her hand. The cut was healing and now itched unbearably. Clara knew she had reached the top of her profession. She knew there were people out there who could hurt her if she wasn’t constantly vigilant. She also knew she had to be careful who she married next. Arch was almost too eager to get her. He was crowding her, pushing.
Arch stood up, patted his belly, and stretched. Then he crossed the mossy stone patio to the pool area where Clara lay. “You’re awful quiet, gorgeous.” He lowered his bulk to the edge of her recliner and began stroking Clara’s carefully tanned thighs.
This close she could see the telltale dry patches on his leathery skin and the sweat trickling down his sagging breasts, tiny rivulets catching in his graying chest hairs. “Come on, baby, tell Daddy what’s bothering you.” Arch’s freckled hands traveled up her leg, two fingers heading toward the tight elastic bands of her bathing suit.
This one liked tight places—elevators, backseats of cars. His fantasy was pretending he was still a boy who had to grab any opportunity he could get, fight the good battle with unyielding undergarments so he could get to the
