“Just nature.”
Billy kept her in Ferrier’s care also because the physician was straightforward about his belief in utilitarian bioethics. Another doctor might believe the same but conceal it… and fancy himself an angel—or agent—of mercy.
Twice a year, Ferrier would make this argument, but he would not act without Billy’s approval.
“No,” Billy said. “No. We won’t do that. We’ll go on just the way we have been going.”
“Four years is such a long time.”
Billy said, “Death is longer.”
172
Six o’clock sun on the vineyards filled the window with summer, life, and bounty.
Beneath her pale lids, Barbara Mandel’s eyes followed the action of vivid dreams.
Sitting on the barstool by her bedside, Billy said, “I saw Harry today. He still smiles when he remembers you called him a Muppet. He says his greatest achievement is never having been disbarred.”
He didn’t tell her anything else about his day. The rest of it would not have lifted her spirits.
From the standpoint of defense, the two weak points of the room were the door to the hallway and the window. The adjoining bathroom was windowless. The window featured a blind and a latch. The door could not be locked. Like every hospital bed, Barbara’s had wheels. Thursday evening, as midnight approached, Billy could roll her out of here, where the killer expected to find her, and put her in another room, somewhere safer. She wasn’t tethered to life-support systems or to monitors. Her food supply and pump hung from a rack fixed to the bed frame.
From the nurses’ station at midpoint of the long main corridor, no one could see around the corner to this west-wing room. With luck, he might be able to move Barbara at the penultimate moment without being seen, then return here to wait for the freak.
Assuming it came to that crisis point. Which was a safe if not happy assumption.
He left Barbara alone and walked the west wing, glancing in the rooms of other patients, checking a supply closet, a bathing chamber, reviewing possibilities.
173
When he returned to her room, she was talking: “… soaked in water…
smothered in mud… lamed by stones…”
Her words suggested a bad dream, but her tone of voice did not. She spoke softly and as if enchanted.
“… cut by flints… stung by nettles… torn by briars…”
Billy had forgotten his pocket notebook and his pen. Even if he had remembered them, he could not take the time to settle down and record these utterances.
“Quick!” she said.
Standing at her bedside, he put a comforting hand on Barbara’s shoulder.
“Give it mouth!” she whispered urgently.
He half expected her eyes to open and to fix on him, but they did not. When Barbara fell silent, Billy squatted to look for the cord that powered the bed’s adjustable-mattress mechanism. If he needed to move her the following night, he would have to pull that plug.
On the floor, just under the high bed, lay a snapshot taken by a digital camera. Billy picked up the photo and stood to examine it in better light. “…
creep and creep…” Barbara whispered. He turned the snapshot three ways before he realized that it depicted a praying mantis, apparently dead, pale upon pale painted boards. “… creep and creep… and tear him open…” Suddenly her whispering voice twitched like a dying mantis down through the spiraling chambers of Billy’s ears, inspiring a shudder and a chill. During normal visiting hours, family and friends of patients came through the front doors and went where they wished, without any requirement to sign a register. “… hands of the dead…” she whispered. Because Barbara required less attention than conscious patients with their myriad complaints and demands, nurses did not attend her as frequently as they did others. “… great stones… angry red…” A quiet visitor might stay here half an hour and never be seen at this bedside—or entering, or leaving. He did not want to leave Barbara alone, talking to an empty room, though she must have done so on countless previous occasions. Billy’s evening, already fully scheduled, had been complicated by the addition of one more urgent task. “… chains hanging… terrible…” Billy pocketed the snapshot. He bent to Barbara and kissed her forehead. Her brow was cool, as always it was cool. At the window, he drew down the blind. Reluctant to leave, he stood in the open doorway, looking back at her. She said something then that resonated with him, though he had no clue why.
“Mrs. Joe,” she said. “Mrs. Joe.”
174
He did not know a Mrs. Joe or Mrs. Joseph, or Mrs. Johanson, or Mrs. Jonas, or anyone by any name similar to the one that Barbara had spoken. And yet somehow… he thought he did.
The phantom mantis twitched in his ears again. Along his spine. With a prayer as real as any that he had lied about to Gretchen Norlee, he left Barbara alone on this last night in which she might be safe. Less than three hours of daylight remained in a sky too dry to support a wisp of a cloud, the sun a thermonuclear brilliance, the air gathered to a stillness as if in anticipation of a cataclysmic blast.
175
The picketed front yard contained no grass in need of mowing, but instead a lush carpet of baby’s tears and, under the graceful boughs of pepper trees, lace flower.
Shading the front walk, an arbor tunnel was draped with trumpet vines. Orchestras of silent scarlet horns
