feverish. Her lips were cracked, her tongue rough and dry.
The hospital room was softly lighted, and shadows roosted on all sides like a flock of slumbering birds.
When Agnes groaned, one of the shadows spread its wings, moved closer, to the right side of the bed, and resolved into a nurse. Agnes's vision had cleared. The nurse was a pretty young woman with black hair and indigo eyes.
'Thirsty,' Agnes rasped. Her voice was Sahara sand abrading anienct stone, the dry whisper of a pharaoh's mummy talking to itself in a vaulted sealed for three thousand years.
'You can't take much of anything by mouth for a few hours yet,' said the nurse. 'Nausea is too great a risk. Retching might start you hemorrhaging again.'
'Ice,' said someone on the left side of the bed.
The nurse raised her eyes from Agnes to this other person. 'Yes a chip of ice would be all right.'
When Agnes turned her head and saw Maria Elena Gonzalez, she thought she must be dreaming again.
On the nightstand stood a stainless-steel carafe beaded with condensation. Maria took the cap off the water carafe, and with a longhandled spoon, she scooped out a chip of ice. Cupping her left hand under the spoon to catch drips, she conveyed the shimmering sliver to Agnes's mouth.
The ice was not merely cold and wet; it was delicious, and it seemed strangely sweet, as though it were a morsel of dark chocolate.
When Agnes crunched the ice, the nurse said, 'No, no. Don't swallow it all at once. Let it melt.'
This admonition, made in all seriousness, left Agnes shaken. If such If such a small quantity of crushed ice, taken in a single swallow, might cause nausea and renewed hemorrhaging, she must be extremely fragile. One of the roosting shadows might still be Death, holding a stubborn vigil.
She was so hot that the ice melted quickly. A thin trickle slid down her throat, but not enough to take the Sahara out of her voice when she said, 'More.'
'Just one,' the nurse allowed.
Maria fished another chip from the sweating carafe, rejected it, and scooped out a larger piece. She hesitated, staring at it for a moment, and then spooned it between Agnes's lips. 'Water can to be broken if it will be first made into ice.'
This seemed to be a statement of great mystery and beauty, and Agnes was still contemplating it when the last of the ice melted on her tongue. Instead of more ice, sleep was spooned into her, as dark and rich as baker's chocolate.
Chapter 15
When Dr. Jim Parkhurst made his evening rounds, Junior didn't continue to feign sleep but asked earnest questions to which he knew most of the answers, having eavesdropped on the conversation between the physician and Detective Vanadium.
His throat was still so raw from the explosive vomiting, seared by stomach acid, that he sounded like a character from a puppet show for children on Saturday-morning television, hoarse and squeaky at the same time. If not for the pain, he would have felt ridiculous, but the hot and jagged scrape of each word through his throat left him unable to feel any emotion except self-pity.
Though he had now twice heard the doctor explain acute nervous emesis, Junior still didn't understand how the shock of losing his wife could have led to such a violent and disgusting seizure.
'You haven't had previous episodes like this?' Parkhurst asked, standing at the bedside with a file folder in his hands, half-lens reading glasses pulled down to the tip of his nose.
'No, never.'
'Periodic violent emesis without an apparent cause can be one indication of locomotor ataxia, but you've no other symptoms of it. I wouldn't worry about that unless this happens again.'
Junior grimaced at the prospect of another puke storm.
Parkhurst said, 'We've eliminated most other possible causes. You don't have acute myelitis or meningitis. Or anemia of the brain. No concussion. You don't have other symptoms of Meniere's disease. Tomorrow, we'll conduct some tests for possible brain tumor or lesion, but I'm confident that's not the explanation, either.'
'Acute nervous emesis,' Junior croaked. 'I've never thought of myself as a nervous person.'
'Oh, it doesn't mean you're nervous in that sense. Nervous in this case means psychologically induced. Grief, Enoch. brief and shock and horror-they can have profound physical effects.'
Ah.'
Pity warmed the physician's ascetic face. 'You loved your wife very much, didn't you?'
Cherished her, Junior tried to say, but emotion me, clotted like a great gob of mucus in his throat. His face contorted with a misery that he did not have to fake, and he was astonished to feel tears spring to his eyes.
Alarmed, concerned that his patient's emotional reaction would lead to racking sobs, which in turn might stimulate abdominal spasms and renewed vomiting, Parkhurst called for a nurse and prescribed the immediate administration of diazepam.
As the nurse gave Junior the injection, Parkhurst said, 'You're an exceptionally sensitive man, Enoch. That's a quality to be much admired in an often unfeeling world. But in your current condition, your sensitivity is your worst enemy.'
While the doctor proceeded with his evening rounds, the nurse remained with Junior until it was clear that the tranquilizer had calmed him and that he was no longer in danger of succumbing to another bout of hemorrhagic vomiting.
Her name was Victoria Bressler, and she was an attractive blonde. She would never have been serious competition For Naomi, because Naomi had been singularly stunning, but Naomi, after all, was gone.
When Junior complained of severe thirst, Victoria explained that he was to have nothing by mouth until morning. He would be put on a liquid diet for breakfast and lunch. Soft foods might be allowable by dinnertime tomorrow.
Meanwhile, she could offer him only a few pieces of ice, which he was forbidden to chew. 'Let them melt in your mouth.'
Victoria scooped the small clear ovals-not cubes, but discs-one at a time, from the carafe on the nightstand. She spooned the ice into Junior's mouth not with the businesslike efficiency of a nurse, but as a courtesan might perform the task: smiling enticingly, a flirtatious glimmer in her blue eyes, slowly easing the spoon between his lips with such sensuous deliberation that he was reminded of the eating scene in Tom Jones.
Junior was accustomed to having women seduce him. His good looks were a blessing of nature. His commitment to improving his mind made him interesting. Most important, from the books of Caesar Zedd, he had learned how to be irresistibly charming.
And although he was not a braggart in these matters, never one to participate in locker-room boasting, he was confident that he always gave the ladies more satisfactory service than they had ever receive from other men. Perhaps word of his physical gifts and his prowess had reached Victoria; women talked about such things among themselves, perhaps even more than men did.
Considering his various pains and his exhaustion, Junior was some what surprised that this lovely nurse, with her seductive spoon tech nique, was able to arouse him. Though currently in no condition for romance, he was definitely interested in a future liaison.
Ile wondered about the etiquette of just a little reciprocal flirtation when his dead wife was not yet even in the ground. He didn't wish to appear to be a lout. He wanted Victoria to think well of him. There must be a charming and civilized approach that would be proper, even elegant, but would leave no doubt in her mind that she made him hot.
Careful.
Vanadium would find out. Regardless of the subtlety and dignity with which Junior responded to Victoria, Thomas Vanadium would learn of his erotic interest. Somehow. Some way. Victoria would not wish to testify as to the immediate and electrifying erotic attraction be tween her and Junior, would not want to help the authorities put him in prison, where her passion for him would go unfulfilled, but Vanadium would smell out her secret and compel
