But once it had gone by, he raised his head, clenching his teeth to keep them from chattering, and started swimming in earnest, eager to get his blood pumping again.
But where was Olivia? He didn’t dare call out to her, and he heard nothing at all.
He swam on, the lights of the boathouse glimmering fuzzy and white behind the lenses of his soaking glasses. What he wouldn’t give right now for just a sliver of moonlight on the water, enough to give him a glimpse of Olivia moving safely toward the shore.
In the distance, he heard the phht of the silencer again, followed by the pop of something exploding-the end of his cell phone-and then a cry of joy. The shot must have caught the thing dead center and blown it to smithereens. They probably thought at least one of them, whoever had been holding it, was injured or dead.
He kept swimming, though it was increasingly hard to tell if his feet and legs were cooperating. His whole body was starting to go numb, and the valise felt like a millstone.
He took deeper breaths, cutting through the water as fast as he could, trying to keep himself in line with the lights of the boathouse while searching desperately for some sign of Olivia.
The bulky outlines of the tethered boats eventually loomed into sight, and he moved toward them, his arms as heavy as lead weights. But when he finally threw an arm over the side of one of them, he felt an icy hand clasp his own and pull him up.
“Come on, David! Come on!”
He looked up and saw Olivia’s face, her dark eyes shining in what looked like a frame of frozen hair. Gasping, he hauled himself into the boat, banging his shins and elbows on the thwarts, but his limbs, blissfully, were too cold to feel the pain.
He hugged Olivia’s shivering body to his own, but neither one of them had any heat to share.
“They’ll be back,” David said. “We have to get going.”
He stood up shakily, then clambered after Olivia onto the dock. There was only one place he could think of going before they froze to death. Clasping hands, they ran back up the hill, down the path, and out of the park.
A car rolled by, with a couple of kids who saw them emerge onto the street, drenched and shoeless, and they shouted something derisory as they drove past.
But down the block, David saw that the lights were on in the house of the Marquis di Sant’Angelo.
“It’s just a little farther,” David said, and Olivia immediately understood.
On the doorstep, clutching each other against the cold, David felt the security camera taking them in, and he shouted, “You have to help us!” into the intercom.
The door flew open this time, and the servant stood back to let them in. They stumbled, still dripping and nearly frozen, into the marble foyer, where a man in elegant dinner clothes, his black tie hanging loose at his throat, was standing at the top of the stairs.
“Ascanio,” he barked, “get some blankets!”
David nodded his thanks, his head quivering from the cold, his arms thrown around Olivia.
“I’m Sant’Angelo,” the man said, leaning hard on an ebony walking stick as he descended the stairs. “You’re safe here.”
But David didn’t know what safe felt like anymore.
Part Four
Chapter 31
Gary had seen David’s last call come in, but for the first time he hadn’t picked up.
Because for the first time, he hadn’t known what he would say.
Sarah had collapsed the day before, keeling over in the laundry room, and now she was back in intensive care. Dr. Ross had been called, a whole host of new tests had been done, her condition had eventually been stabilized; but Gary had the impression that they had turned a terrible, and possibly final, corner. Until he was sure it was true, he didn’t want to burden David with that news (even though David had always insisted on being told the truth, whatever it was).
Dr. Ross came into the waiting area, with a sheaf of papers and lab reports stuffed in a folder, and hard as Gary searched his face for any glimmer of hope, he saw none.
The doctor sat beside him, and for several telltale seconds, continued to burrow into the paperwork… as if even he was trying to postpone the inevitable.
“How’s she doing?” Gary asked. “Can I go in and see her now?”
“I would wait a bit,” Dr. Ross replied. “The nurse is still with her.”
Gary nodded, watching the TV mounted from a ceiling bracket. In barely audible tones, a weatherman was announcing yet another storm on its way. Little white icicles on the map pointed down at Chicago like daggers.
“I wish I had better news for you,” the doctor finally said.
It didn’t matter that Gary had seen it coming; he still felt like he’d been punched in the gut.
“The new regimen isn’t working. In fact, it’s made the situation worse.”
“But I thought she was rallying.”
The doctor shrugged, and said, “That can happen, initially. But then the systems can’t sustain it-her blood counts have been so bad for so long, her lymph nodes are all gone or lethally compromised-and one thing after another starts crashing. It becomes a cascade, and even when we’re able to stop one organ failure, it’s usually at the expense of another. At this point, the cancer has simply spread too far, too wide, and too deeply. The disease, I’m afraid, is in control, and all we can do is try our best to ameliorate its more painful effects.”
Gary took some time to digest what the doctor had just said. In the background, he could hear someone on the TV offering advice about avoiding heart attacks while shoveling snow.
“At this point in time,” the doctor said-and Gary, his mind battening on anything but what was about to come, thought, Can time have a point? -“it would probably be best to think about moving her to our Hospice and Palliative Care Center. We could make her a lot more comfortable there, for as long as necessary.”
Gary certainly knew what this meant; it meant Sarah had reached the end of the line. But he still found it nearly impossible to make his mind go there. “I can’t just take her home?”
Lowering his head and pursing his lips, the doctor said, “I wouldn’t recommend it. It’s going to be very hard at this stage, and right now, the hospice unit has room available. It’s very tranquil, very quiet, and I can arrange to have her transferred there in a couple of hours.”
“Does Sarah know about this?”
“She does. She’s the one who first brought it up. No one ever wants to be in the ICU five minutes more than they have to, and I don’t blame them.”
Neither did Gary. It depressed the hell out of him just to visit there, and when he had brought Emme the day before, the old lady in the next cubicle had suddenly expired, and much as he had tried to disguise what was going on from his daughter, Emme knew. Gary and his mom, who had flown up from Florida the day before, had ushered her out into the waiting area, but Emme had broken down in terrified sobs. All that night, Gary had slept in the bed with his daughter cradled in his arms, and Gary’s mom was back at the house right now, just trying to hold things together.
“Why don’t you go on in now and talk it over with your wife? The nurse has given her a mild sedative, but she should still be fairly lucid. Decide what you’d like to do.”
What he’d like to do? What he’d like to do was yank Sarah out of that damn bed and run for their lives.
“I know this is hard,” Dr. Ross was saying, “the hardest thing you’ll ever have to do in your life. But it’s the right thing, for you, for your wife, and for your daughter. At least Emme can see her mother there in a much less frightening, and less clinical, setting. We have found it’s a lot less traumatic this way.”
Somehow, Gary was able to ask, without even looking at the doctor’s face, how long Sarah would be staying in the hospice. It sounded, even to him, as if he was asking how many nights she’d been booked at a hotel.
“It’s always hard to predict these things, but I’d say three, four days, at the outside. The hospice time is
