thinking about the possibility that the attack on your wife was actually directed at you?'
'I don't see what you mean.' John Ransom probed me with a look, trying to see if I had made sense of this question. 'You mean Blue Rose thought April might be me?'
'No.' Tom smiled and leaned against the door frame. 'Of course not.' He looked across the street, then up and down, and finally at the sky. Outside, in the natural light, his skin looked like paper that had been crumpled, then smoothed out. 'I just wondered if you could think of someone who might want to get at you through your wife. Someone who wanted to hurt you very badly.'
'There isn't anyone like that,' Ransom said.
Down the block, a small car turned the corner onto Eastern Shore Road, came some twenty feet in our direction, then swung over to the side of the road and parked. The driver did not leave the car.
'I don't think Blue Rose could know anything about April or me,' said Ransom. 'That's not how these guys work.'
'I'm sure that's right,' Tom said. 'I hope everything turns out well for you, John. Good-bye, Tim.' He gave me a little wave and waited for us to move down onto the walk. He waved again, smiling, and closed his door. It was like seeing him disappear into a fortress.
'What was that about?' Ransom asked.
'Let's get some dinner,' I said.
John Ransom spent most of dinner complaining. Tom Pasmore was one of those geniuses who didn't seem too perceptive. Tom was a drunk who acted like the pope. Sat all day in that closed-up house and pounded down the vodka. Even back in school, Pasmore had been like the Invisible Man, never played football, hardly had any friends—this pretty girl, this knockout, Sarah Spence, long long legs, great body, turned out she had a kind of a
I didn't tell Ransom that I thought Sarah Spence, now Sarah Youngblood, had been the driver of the car that had turned the corner and pulled discreetly up to the curb thirty feet from Tom Pasmore's house as we were leaving. I knew that she visited Tom, and I knew that he wished to keep her visits secret, but I knew nothing else about their relationship. I had the impression that they spent a lot of time talking to each other—Sarah Spence Youngblood was the only person in the whole of Millhaven who had free access to Tom Pasmore's house, and in those long evenings and nights after she slipped through his front door, after the bottles were opened and while the ice cubes settled in the brass bucket, I think he talked to her—I think she had become the person he most needed, maybe the only person he needed, because she was the person who knew most about him.
John Ransom and I were in Jimmy's, an old east-side restaurant on Berlin Avenue. Jimmy's was a nice wood-paneled place with comfortable banquettes and low lights and a long bar. It could have been a restaurant anywhere in Manhattan, where all of its tables would have been filled; because we were in Millhaven and it was nearly nine o'clock, we were nearly the only customers.
John Ransom ordered a Far Niente cabernet and made a ceremonial little fuss over tasting it.
Our food came, a sirloin for Ransom, shrimp scampi for me. He forgot Tom Pasmore and started talking about India and Mina's ashram. 'This wonderful being was beautiful, eighteen years old, very modest, and she spoke in short plain sentences. Sometimes she cooked breakfast, and she cleaned her little rooms by herself, like a servant. But everyone around her realized that she had this extraordinary power—she had great wisdom. Mina put her hands on my soul and opened me up. I'll never stop being grateful, and I'll never forget what I learned from her.' He chewed for a bit, swallowed, took a mouthful of wine. 'By the time I was in graduate school, Mina had become well known. People began to understand that she represented one very pure version of mystic experience. Because I had studied with her, I had a certain authority. Everything unfolded from her—it was like having studied with a great scholar. And in fact, it was like that, but more profound.'
'Haven't you ever been tempted to go back and see her again?'
'I can't,' he said. 'She was absolutely firm about that. I had to move on.'
'How does it affect your life now?' I asked, really curious about what he would say.
'It's helping me make it through,' he said.
He finished off the food on his plate, then looked at his watch. 'Would you mind if I called the hospital? I ought to check in.'
He signaled the waiter for the check, drank the last of the wine, and stood up. He pulled a handful of change from his pocket and went toward the pay telephone in a corridor at the back of the restaurant.
The waiter brought the check on a saucer, and I turned it over and read the amount and gave the waiter a credit card. Before the waiter returned with the charge slip, Ransom came charging back toward the table. He grabbed my arm. 'This is—this is unbelievable. They think she might be coming out of her coma. Where's the check?'
'I gave him a card.'
'You can't do that,' he said. 'Don't be crazy. I want to pay the thing and get over there.'
'Go to the hospital, John. I'll walk back to your house and wait for you.'
'Well, how much was it?' He dug in his trousers pockets for something, then rummaged in the pockets of his suit jacket.
'I already paid. Take off.'
He gave me a look of real exasperation and fished a key from his jacket pocket and held it out without giving it to me. 'That was an expensive bottle of wine. And my entree cost twice as much as yours.' He looked at the key as if he had forgotten it, then handed it to me. 'I still say you can't pay for this dinner.'
'You get the next one,' I said.
He was almost hopping in his eagerness to get to the hospital, but he saw the waiter coming toward us with the credit card slip and leaned over my shoulder to see the amount while I figured out the tip and signed. 'You tip too much,' he said. 'That's on your head.'
'Will you get away?' I said, and pushed him toward the door.
Apart from two UI students in T-shirts and shorts walking into a bar called Axel's Tuxedo, the sidewalks outside Jimmy's were empty. John Ransom was moving quickly away from me, swinging his arms and going north along Berlin Avenue to Shady Mount, and as he went from relative darkness into the bright lights beneath the Royal's marquee, his lightweight suit changed color, like a chameleon's hide.
In two or three seconds Ransom passed back into the darkness on the other side of the marquee. A car started up on the opposite side of the street. Ransom was about fifty feet away, still clearly in sight, moving quickly and steadily through the pools of yellow light cast by the street lamps.
I turned around to go up the block and saw a blue car move away from the curb across the street. For a second I stopped moving, aware that something had caught in my memory. Just before the car slid into the light spilling out from the Royal's marquee, I had it: the same car had pulled over to the curb on Eastern Shore Drive so that we would be out of sight when Sarah Spence Youngblood drove into Tom Pasmore's driveway. Then light from the movie theater fell on the car, and instead of Sarah Youngblood, a man with big shoulders and long gray hair pulled back into a ponytail sat behind the wheel. The light caught the dot of a gold earring in his left ear. It was the man I had almost bumped into at the hospital pay phones. He had followed us to Tom Pasmore's house, then to Jimmy's, and now he was following John to the hospital.
And since I had seen him first at the hospital, he must have followed us there, too. I turned to watch the blue car creep down the street.
The driver bumped along behind John. Whenever his target got too far in front of him, he nudged the car out into the left lane and slowly rolled forward another twenty or thirty feet before cutting back into the curb. If there had been much other traffic, he would not have been noticeable in any way.
