'Millicent and I are trying to work out the side chains, but that's the basic molecule.'
Kate felt sick. 'Mr. Toole, what is it?'
'I'm a chemist, not a doctor, but as far as I've been able to determine, you're taking a painkiller of some sort. Nonnarcotic. Some kind of nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory drug. The basic molecule is listed in our manuals, but I don't think we're going to find the exact side chains.
Whatever it is, it's not a commercially available drug in this country.
If it were, we'd have it in the book. I'll check out the European manuals as soon as we know the full structure.'
'Let me know? ' Kate had written out the word 'anthranilic' and begun a calligraphic version.
'Of course. Probably won't be until next week, though. I had to promise Millicent a bottle of wine to get her to put off her date with her boyfriend even this long.'
'Mr. Toole, is it dangerous?'
'What?'
'Anthranilic acid.'
'Like I said, I'm not a doctor. It's not poisonous, if that's what you mean, but it's not vitamins either. Any drug can do you dirt if you're unusually sensitive or allergic to it.'
'Thanks, ' Kate said numbly. 'And thanks to Millicent, too.'
'No problem, ' Ian Toole said. It was a hot, sultry day at Fenway Park when Kate, seated in a box next to Jared, began to bleed to death.
Silently, painlessly, thick drops of crimson fell from her nose, landing like tiny artillery bursts on the surface of the beer she was holding, turning the gold to pink.
She squeezed her nose with a napkin, but almost instantly tasted the sticky sweetness flowing down the back of her throat. Jared, unaware of what was happening, sipped at his beer, his attention riveted on the field. Help me. Please, Jared, help me, I'm dying. The words were in her mind, but somehow inaccessible to her voice. Help me, please. Suddenly she felt a warm moistness inside her jeans, and knew that she was bleeding there as well. Help me.
In the box to her right, Winfield Samuels looked her way, smiled emptily as if she weren't even there, and then turned back to the field and genteelly applauded a good play by the shortstop.
The players and the grass, the spectators and the huge green left field wall-all had a reddish cast. Kate rubbed a hand across one eye and realized she was also bleeding from there.
Giddy with fear, she stood and turned to run. Sitting in the row behind her chatting amiably and smiling as blandly as Jared's father had, were Norton Reese and a man with the overalls and gray hair of Carl Horner but the grotesque face of a monkey.
'I see you're bleeding to death, ' Reese said pleasantly. 'I'm so sorry.
Carl, aren't you sorry?'
Jared, please help me. Help me. Help me.
The words faded like an echo into eternity. Kate became aware of a gentle hand on her shoulder.
'Dr. Bennett, are you all right?'
Kate lifted her head and blearily met the eyes of night watchman Walter Macfarlane. She was at a table, alone in the hospital library, surrounded by dozens of books and journals dealing with bleeding disorders, ovarian disease, and pharmacology. 342 'Oh, yes, Walter, ' she said, 'I'm fine, thank you. Really.'
Her blouse was uncomfortably damp, and the taste in her mouth most unpleasant.
'Just checking, ' the man said. 'It's getting pretty late. Or should I say early.' He tapped a finger on the face of his large gold pocket watch and held it around for her to see.
Twenty after two.
Kate smiled weakly and began gathering her notes together.
'I'll see you to your car if you want, Doctor.'
'Thanks, Walter, I'll meet you by the main entrance in five minutes.'
She watched as the man shuffled from the library. Then she discarded the notion of calling Jared, knowing that she would just be adding insult to injury by waking him up, and finished packing her briefcase. As she neared the doorway, she glanced out the window.
Across the street, the winter night reflected obscenely in its dark glass, stood the Omnicenter.
Sunday 16 December
The night was heavy and raw. Crunching through slush that had begun to gel and shielding her face from blowgun darts of sleet, Kate crossed Commercial Street and plowed along Hanover into the North End. Traffic and the weather had made her twenty minutes late, but Bill Zimmermann was not the irritable, impatient type, and she anticipated a quick absolution. Demarsco's, the restaurant they had agreed upon, was a small, family-owned operation where parking was as difficult to find as an unexceptional item on the menu.
Initially, when Kate had called and asked to meet with him, Zimmermann had proposed his office at the Omnicenter. It was, perhaps, among the last structures on earth she felt like entering on that night.
Unfortunately if there were a list of such things, Demarsco's, his other suggestion, might also have been on it. Demarsco's was one of her and Jared's favorite spots. And now Jared was gone. 'A sort of separation, but not a separation, ' he had called it in the note she had found waiting for her at three o'clock on Saturday morning. He had taken some things and gone to his father's, where he would stay until leaving for business in San Diego on Monday. 'A sort of separation, but not a separation.'
There was no lengthy explanation. No apology. Not even any anger.
But the hurt and confusion were there in every word. It was as if he had just discovered that his wife was having an affair-an up-and-down, intense, emotionally draining affair-not with another man, but with her job, her career. 'Space for both of us to sort out the tensions and pressures on our lives without adding new ones, ' he had written. 'Space for each of us to take a hard look at our priorities.'
Kate wondered if, standing in the center of his fine, paneled study, his elegant mistress awaiting him on his black satin sheets, Winfield Samuels, Jr., had raised a glass to toast his victory over Kate and the return of his son and to plan how to make a temporary situation permanent. It was a distressing picture and probably not that far from reality. However, as distressing to her as the image of a gloating Win Samuels, was the realization that her incongruous emotion, at least at that moment and over the hour or so that followed before sleep took her, was relief. Relief at being spared a confrontation. Relief at being alone to think. Someone was trying to sabotage her reputation and perhaps her career. Her close friend was lying in a hospital bed bleeding from a disorder that had killed at least two other women-a disorder that had no definite cause, let alone a cure. And now, there was the discovery that she herself had been exposed to contaminated vitamins, that her own body might be a time bomb, waiting to go off-perhaps to bleed, perhaps to die. Priorities. Why couldn't Jared see their marriage as a blanket on which all the other priorities in their lives could be laid out and dealt with together? Why couldn't he see that their relationship needn't be an endless series of either-ors?
Why couldn't he see that she could love him and still have a life of her own?
Demarsco's was on the first floor of a narrow brownstone. There were a dozen tables covered with red- and-white checkered tablecloths and adorned with candle-dripped Chianti bottles-a decor that might have been tacky, but in Demarsco's simply wasn't. Bill Zimmermann, seated at a small table to the rear, rose and waved as she entered. He wore a dark sport jacket over a gray turtleneck and looked to her like a mix of the best of Gary Cooper and Montgomery Clift. A maternal waitress, perhaps the matriarch of the Demarsco clan, took her coat and ushered her to Zimmermann with a look that said she approved of the woman for whom the tall dashing man at the rear table had been waiting. 'They have a wonderful soave, ' Kate answered, settling into her seat, 'but you'll have to drink most of it. I haven't been getting much sleep lately, and when I'm tired, more than one glass of wine is usually enough to cross my eyes.'
'I have no such problem, unfortunately, ' he said, nodding that the ample waitress could fill his earlier order. 'Sometimes, I fear that my liver will desert me before my brain even knows I have been drinking. It is one of the curses of being European. I stopped by the hospital earlier to see your friend Mrs. Sandler.'
