'I am calm,' he assured her.
He released the hand brake, shifted the car into reverse instead of into drive, and backed away from the street, along the side of the house.
Startled, he braked to a halt. Agnes didn't say anything until Joey had taken three or four deep, slow breaths, and then she pointed at the windshield. 'The hospital's that way.'
He regarded her sheepishly. 'You all right?'
'Our little girl's going to walk backward her whole life if you drive in reverse all the way to the hospital.'
'If it is a little girl, she's going to be exactly don't think I could handle two of you.' he said.
'We'll keep you young.'
With great deliberation, Joey shifted gears and followed the drive way to the street, where he peered left and then right with the squint-eyed suspicion of a Marine commando scouting dangerous territory. He turned right.
'Make sure Edom delivers the pies in the morning,' Agnes reminded him.
'Jacob said he wouldn't mind doing it for once.'
'Jacob scares people,' Agnes said. 'No one would eat a pie that Jacob delivered without having it tested at a lab.'
Needles of rain knitted the air and quickly embroidered silvery patterns on the blacktop.
Switching on the windshield wipers, Joey said, 'That's the first time I've ever heard you admit that either of your brothers is odd.'
Not odd, dear. They're just a little eccentric.'
'Like water is a little wet.'
Frowning at him, she said, 'You don't mind them around, do you, Joey? They're eccentric, but I love them very much.
'So do I,' he admitted. He smiled and shook his head. 'Those two make a worrywart life-insurance salesman like me seem just as light hearted as a schoolgirl.'
'Your turning into an excellent driver, after all,' she said, winking him.
He was, in fact, a first-rate driver, with an impeccable record at the age of thirty: no traffic citations, no accidents.
His skill behind the wheel and his inborn caution didn't help him, However, when a Ford pickup ran a red traffic light, braked too late, and slid at high speed into the driver's door of the Pontiac.
Chapter 9
Rocking as if afloat on troubled waters, abused by an unearthly and tormented sound, Junior Cain imagined a gondola on a black river, a carved dragon rising high at the bow as he had seen on a paperback fantasy novel featuring Vikings in a longboat. The gondolier in this case was not a Viking, but a tall figure in a black robe, his face concealed within a voluminous hood; he didn't pole the boat with the traditional oar but with what appeared to be human bones welded into a staff. The river's course was entirely underground, with a stone vault for a sky, and fires burned on the far shore, whence came the tormenting wail, a cry filled with rage, anguish, and fearsome need.
The truth, as always, was not supernatural: He opened his eyes and discovered that he was in the back of an ambulance. Evidently this was the one intended for Naomi. They would be sending a morgue wagon for her now.
A paramedic, rather than a boatman or a demon, was attending him. The wail was a siren.
His stomach felt as if he had been clubbed mercilessly by a couple of professional thugs with big fists and lead pipes. With each beat, his heart seemed to press painfully against constricting bands, and his throat was raw.
A two-prong oxygen feed was snugged against his nasal septum The sweet, cool flow was welcome. He could still taste the vile mess of which he had rid himself, however, and his tongue and teeth felt as if they were coated with mold.
At least he wasn't vomiting anymore.
Immediately at the thought of regurgitation, his abdominal muscles contracted like those of a laboratory frog zapped by an electric current, and he choked on a rising horror.
What is happening to me.
The paramedic snatched the oxygen feed from his patient's nose and quickly elevated his head, providing a purge towel to catch the thin ejecta.
Junior's body betrayed him as before, and also in new ways that terrified and humiliated him, involving every bodily fluid except cerebrospinal. For a while, inside that rocking ambulance, he wished that he were in a gondola upon the waters of the Styx, his misery at an end.
When the convulsive seizure passed, as he collapsed back on the spattered pillow, shuddering at the stench rising from his hideously fouled clothes, Junior was suddenly struck by an idea that was either madness or a brilliant deductive insight: Naomi, the hateful bitch, she poisoned me!
The paramedic, fingers pressed to the radial artery in Junior's right wrist, must have felt a rocket-quick acceleration in his pulse rate.
Junior and Naomi had taken their dried apricots from the same bag. Reached in the bag without looking. Shook them out into the palms of their hands. She could not have controlled which pieces of fruit he received and which she ate.
Did she poison herself as well? Was it her intention to kill him and commit suicide?
Not cheerful, life-loving, high-spirited, churchgoing Naomi. She saw every day through a golden haze that came from the sun in her heart.
He'd once spoken that very sentiment to her. Golden haze, sun in the heart. His words had melted her, tears had sprung into her eyes, and sex been better than ever.
More likely the poison had been in his cheese sandwich or in his water bottle.
His heart rebelled at the thought of lovely Naomi committing such Sweet-tempered, generous, honest, kind Naomi had surely been incapable of murdering anyone-least of all the man she loved.
Unless she hadn't loved him.
The paramedic pumped the inflation cuff of the sphygmomanometer, and Junior's blood pressure was most likely high enough to induce a stroke, driven skyward by the thought that Naomi's love had been a lie.
Maybe she had just married him for his? No, that was a dead end. He didn't have any money.
She had loved him, all right. She had adored him. Worshiped would not be too strong a word.
Now that the possibility of treachery had occurred to Junior, however, he couldn't rid himself of suspicion. Good Naomi, who gave immeasurably more to everyone than she took, would forevermore stand in a shadow of doubt in his memory.
After all, you could never really know anyone, not really know every last corner of someone's mind or heart. No human being was perfect.
Even someone of saintly habits and selfless behavior might be a monster in his heart, filled with unspeakable desires, which he might act upon only once or never.
He was all but certain that he himself, for example, would not kill another wife. For one thing, considering that his marriage to Naomi was now stained by the most terrible of doubts, he couldn't imagine how he might ever again trust anyone sufficiently to take the wedding vows.
Junior closed his weary eyes and gratefully submitted as the paramedic wiped his greasy face and his crusted lips with a cool, damp cloth.
Naomi's beautiful countenance rose in his mind, and she looked beautific for a moment, but then he thought he saw a certain slyness in her angelic smile, a disturbing glint of calculation in her once loving eyes.
Losing his cherished wife was devastating, a wound beyond all hope of healing, but this was even worse: having his bright image of her stained by suspicion. Naomi was no longer present to provide comfort and consolation, and now Junior didn't even have untainted memories of her to sustain him. As always, it was not the action that troubled him, but the aftermath.
This soiling of Naomi's memory was a sadness so poignant, so terrible, that he wondered if he could endure
