Mystery

two days ago.”

“We’ll go along and see her, then,” Hattie said, and Bill turned back to the railing.

The three of them walked down the creaking boards until they had nearly reached the end of the walkway. Tom looked over the railing, and Sarah asked Hattie, “Is Bill a friend of yours?”

“He’s Nancy’s brother,” Hattie said.

Tom would have turned around to make sure he had heard her correctly, but just then a man in a grey suit and a grey turtleneck appeared, moving soundlessly and easily down the steps of the wooden structure over the drainage ditch. Bill took his pipe from his mouth and stepped back from the railing. The man in grey stepped into the Second Court and began walking in a straight line that would bring him directly beneath Tom. Bill gestured for Tom to move back, and Tom hesitated before pushing back from the railing. The man was bald, and his face was a smooth anonymous mask. Tom did not realize that he was Captain Fulton Bishop until he had begun to move back into the protection of the walkway. Hattie knocked on the last door, and knocked again. Captain Bishop glanced up without breaking stride as Tom moved back, and the boy saw his eyes through the gaps in the railing, as alive and alert as two match flames.

Then the door opened, and Captain Bishop passed out of the Second Court and went deeper into Maxwell’s Heaven. His footsteps clicked against the stone. Tom heard Nancy Vetiver saying, “Who’d you bring me, Hattie?”

She smiled from Hattie to Sarah, and then included him in the same smile. She did not recognize him, but he would have known her instantly if he had seen her on any street in Mill Walk. Her hair, a darker blond than Sarah’s, had been cut to a rough shag, and the lines bracketing her mouth seemed deeper, but she was otherwise the same woman who had helped him endure the worst months of his life. He realized that he had loved her absolutely then, and that part of him still did love her.

“An old patient of ours came calling,” Hattie said.

Nancy looked from Sarah to Tom and back to Sarah, trying to work out which was the old patient. “Well, you’d better come on in and find something to sit on, and I’ll be able to spend some time with you in a minute.” She smiled, looking a little baffled but not at all irritated, and stepped back to let them in.

Hattie went in first, then Sarah. Tom moved into the room. Several children, some of them bandaged, sat in chairs pushed against the wall. All of them were gaping at Sarah, who had pulled her hair out of the collar of the cape. “Oh, my God,” Nancy said as he went past her. “It’s Tom Pasmore.” She laughed out loud—a real ringing laugh that sounded out of place in Elysian Courts—and then put her arms around him and squeezed him. Her head came to the middle of his chest. “How’d you get so big?” Nancy pulled away and crowed to Hattie, “He’s a giant!”

“That’s what I told him,” Hattie said, “but it didn’t shrink him any.”

Now all the children in the chairs gaped at Tom instead of Sarah. His face grew hot and red.

“And I know you too,” Nancy said to Sarah, after giving Tom a final squeeze. “I remember seeing you with Tom, way back then—Sarah.”

“How can you remember me?” Sarah said, looking pleased and embarrassed. “I was only there once!”

“Well, I remember most of the things that happen to my good patients.” Smiling broadly, Nancy put her hands on her hips and looked them both over. “Why don’t you sit down wherever you can find space, and I’ll take care of the rest of these desperate characters, and then we’ll have a long talk, and I’ll find out why Hattie dragged you into this godforsaken place.”

Sarah twirled the cape off her shoulders and folded it over the back of a chair. The children gaped. She and Tom sat on a padded bench, and Hattie plunked herself down on the edge of the little low bed beside them.

Nancy went from child to child, changing bandages and dispensing vitamins, listening to whispered complaints, stroking heads and holding hands, now and then leading some bedraggled boy or girl to a sink at the back of the room and making them wash. She looked down throats and into ears, and when one sticklike little boy burst into tears, she took him into her lap and comforted him until he stopped.

Two old quilts, washed almost to colorlessness, hung on the walls. An ornate lamp with most of its bulbs and fixtures intact stood on a drum table like the one in his grandfather’s living room. An empty gilt frame, clearly salvaged from the dump, hung on the far wall near the sink.

Hattie saw him looking at it, and said, “I brought that for Nancy—looks almost as pretty empty as filled, but I’m looking for another picture of Mr. Rembrandt, like the one I got. You saw it.”

“Oh, Hattie, I don’t need a picture of Rembrandt,” Nancy said, bandaging a splint onto a boy’s finger. “I’d rather have a picture of you any day. Anyhow, I’ll be back in my own place before long.”

“Could be,” Hattie said. “When you are, I’ll come in here, couple times a week, to bandage up these little ruffians. If your brother won’t mind.”

When the last child had been sent off, Nancy washed her hands, dried them on a dish towel, and sat down on one of the chairs against the wall and at last looked at Tom hard and long. “I am so glad to see you, even here,” she said.

“And I’m so glad to see you,” he said. “Even here. Nancy, I heard that—”

She held up a hand to stop him. “Before we get serious, does anybody want a beer?”

Hattie shook her head, and Tom and Sarah said they would split one.

“You’ll split one, all right,” Nancy said. She went to a small refrigerator next to the sink and removed three bottles; took two glasses from a shelf; popped off the caps, and came back carrying the bottles by their necks in one hand and the glasses in the other. She gave a glass and a bottle each to Tom and Sarah, sat down and raised her own bottle. “Cheers.” Tom laughed, and raised his own bottle to Nancy and drank from it. Sarah poured some into her glass and thanked Nancy.

“If you’re not going to use that glass, maybe I will have a little bit, after all,” Hattie said. Tom poured some from his bottle into the empty glass and Sarah did the same, and then they all sat smiling at each other for a moment.

“I wondered about you, you know,” Nancy said to Tom.

“I know you did,” Hattie said.

“Wondered what?” Sarah asked.

“Well, Tom had this special thing inside him. He saw things. He saw how I felt about Boney right away. But I don’t mean just that.” She pointed her beer bottle at Tom and squinted, trying to get the right words. “I don’t really know how to say this, I guess—but when I looked at you in the bed sometimes, I used to think you’d be something like a really good painter when you got older. Because you had this way of looking at things, like you could see parts of them nobody else could. Sometimes, it looked like the world could just make you glow. Or tear you apart inside, when you saw the bad.”

“I told him that,” Hattie said.

Tom had the strangest desire to cry.

“It was like you had some kind of destiny,” Nancy said. “And the reason I’m saying all this is, I can still see it.”

“Sure you can,” Hattie said. “It’s clear as day. Sarah can see it.”

“Leave me out of this,” Sarah said. “He’s conceited enough already. And anyhow, it isn’t what I can see, or what you can see, or even Tom can see, it’s—” She gave Tom an embarrassed look, and threw up her hands.

“It’s what he does,” Hattie said. “That’s right. Well, he must of done something, because Boney rode all the way out to see me today and gave me a cock and bull story about Tom Pasmore getting ready to sue him and the hospital, and how if the boy or his lawyers showed up, I was to turn ’em all away. And a minute later, here comes this tall fellow, and I thought he was a young lawyer, until I took a good look at him.”

“Boney did what?” Nancy asked, and Hattie had to repeat the whole story.

“I asked why you were suspended,” Tom said. “And he got flustered. The place was full of police.”

“Flustered,” Nancy said. “This was today? At the hospital?”

Tom nodded.

“Oh, dear,” Nancy said. “Oh, damn. Oh, shit.” She jumped up and went to the back of the room and opened a cupboard and banged it shut.

“That’s right,” Hattie said. “That boy died.”

“Oh, hell,” Nancy said.