'I'm a healer, not a prosecutor. I'm not in the habit of making accusations, especially not against my own patients.'
'Wouldn't dream of asking you to make it a habit. Just this one time. If anguish, why not guilt?'
A Dr. Parkhurst considered the question, which he ought to have dismissed out of hand. 'Well? yes, I suppose so.' Spineless, unethical quack bastard, Junior thought bitterly.
'I believe I'll just wait here until Mr. Cain wakes,' Vanadium said. 'I've nothing more pressing to do.'
An authoritative note came into Parkhurst's voice, that emperor-of- tone that probably was taught in a special medical-school course on intimidation, though he was striking this attitude a little too late to be entirely effective. 'My patient is in a fragile state. He mustn't be agitated, Detective. I really don't want you questioning him until tomorrow at the earliest.'
'All right, of course. I won't question him. I'll just? observe.'
Judging by the sounds Vanadium made, Junior figured that the cop had settled once more into the armchair.
Junior hoped that Parkhurst was more skilled at the practice of medicine than he was at browbeating.
After a long hesitation, the physician said, 'You could switch on that lamp.'
'I'll be fine.'
'It won't disturb the patient.'
'I like the dark,' Vanadium replied.
'This is most irregular.'
'Isn't it, though,' Vanadium agreed.
Finally wimping out completely, Parkhurst left the room. The heavy door sighed softly shut, silencing the squeak of rubber-soled shoes, the swish of starched uniforms, and other noises made by the busy nurses in the corridor.
Mrs. Cain's little boy felt small, weak, sorry for himself, and terribly alone. The detective was still here, but his presence only aggravated Junior's sense of isolation.
He missed Naomi. She'd always known exactly the right thing to say or do, improving his mood with a few words or with just her touch, when he was feeling down.
Chapter 12
Thunder rattled like hoofbeats, and dapple-gray clouds drove eastward in the slow-motion gallop of horses in a dream. Bright Beach was blurred and distorted by rain as full of tricks as funhouse mirrors.
While sliding toward twilight, the January afternoon seemed also to have slipped out of the familiar world and into a strange dimension.
With Joey dead beside her and the baby possibly dying in her womb, trapped in the Pontiac because the doors were torqued in their frames and wedged shut, racked by pain from the battering she had Agnes refused to indulge in either fear or tears. She gave herself to prayer instead, asking for the wisdom to understand why this was happening to her and for the strength to cope with her pain and with her loss.
Witnesses first to the scene, unable to open either door of the coupe, spoke encouragingly to her through the broken-out windows.
She knew some of them, not others. They were all well-meaning and concerned, some without rain gear and getting soaked, but their natural curiosity lent a special shine to their eyes that made Agnes feel as though she were an animal on exhibit, without dignity, her most private agony exposed for the entertainment of strangers.
When the first police arrived, followed closely by an ambulance, they discussed the possibility of taking Agnes out of the car through the Missing windshield. Considering that the space was pinched by the crumpled roof, however, and in light of Agnes's pregnancy and imminent second-stage labor, the severe contortions involved in this extraction would be too dangerous.
Rescuers appeared with hydraulic pry bars and metal cutting saws. Civilians were shepherded back to the sidewalks.
Thunder less distant now. Around her-the crackle of police radios, the clang of tools being readied, the skirl of a stiffening wind. Dizzying, these sounds. She couldn't shut her ears against them, and when she closed her eyes, she felt as though she were spinning.
No scent of gasoline fouled the air. Apparently, the tank had not burst. Sudden immolation seemed unlikely- but only an hour ago so had Joey's untimely death.
Rescuers encouraged her to move safely away from the passenger's door, as far as possible, to avoid being inadvertently injured as they tried to break in to her. She could go nowhere but to her dead husband.
Huddling against Joey's body, his head lolling against her shoulder, Agnes thought crazily of their early dates and the first years of their marriage. They had occasionally gone to the drive-in, sitting close, holding hands as they watched John Wayne in The Searchers, David Niven in Around the World in 80 Days. They were so young then, sure they would live forever, and they were still young now, but for one of them, forever had arrived.
A rescuer instructed her to close her eyes and turn her face away from the passenger's door. He shoved a quilted mover's blanket through the window and arranged this protective padding along her right side.
Clutching the blanket, she thought of the funerary lap robes that red the legs of the deceased in their caskets, for she felt sometimes cove half dead. Both feet in this world-yet walking beside Joey on a strange road Beyond.
The hum, the buzz, the rattle, the grinding of machinery, power tools. Sheet steel and tougher structural steel snarling against the teeth of a metal-cutting saw.
Beside her, the passenger's door barked and shrieked as though alive as though suffering, and these sounds were uncannily like the cries of torment that only Agnes could hear in the haunted chambers of her heart.
The car shuddered, wrenched steel screamed, and a cry of triumph rose from the rescuers.
A man with beautiful celadon eyes, his face beaded with jewels of rain, reached through the cut-away door and removed the blanket from Agnes.
'You're all right, we've got you now.' His soft yet reverberant voice was so unearthly that his words seemed to convey an assurance more profound and more comforting than their surface meaning.
This saving spirit retreated, and in his place came a young paramedic in a black-and-yellow rain slicker over hospital whites. 'Just want to be sure there's no spinal injury before we move you. Can you squeeze my hands?'
Squeezing as instructed, she said, 'My baby might be? hurt.'
As though giving voice to her worst fear had made it come true, Agnes was seized by a contraction so painful that she cried out and clutched the paramedic's hands tightly enough to make him wince. She felt a peculiar swelling within, then an awful looseness, pressure followed at once by release.
The gray pants of her jogging suit, speckled with rain that had blown in through the shattered windshield, were suddenly soaked. Her water had broken.
Darker than water, another stain spread across the lap and down the legs of the pants. It was the color of port wine when filtered through the gray fabric of the jogging suit, but even in her semi-delirious state, she knew that she was not the vessel for a miracle birth, was not bringing forth a baby in a flush of wine, but in a gush of blood.
From her reading, she knew that amniotic fluid should be clear. A few traces of blood in it should not necessarily be alarming, but here were more than traces. Here were thick red-black streams.
'My baby,' she pleaded.
Already another contraction racked her, so intense that the pain was not limited to her lower back and abdomen, but seared the length of her sphic, like an electric current leaping vertebra to vertebra. Her breath pinched in her chest as though her lungs had collapsed.
Second-stage labor was supposed to last about fifty minutes in a woman bearing her first child, as little as twenty if the birth was not the first, but she sensed that Bartholomew was not going to come into the world by the book.
Urgency gripped the paramedics. The rescuers' equipment and the pieces of the car door were dragged out of
