Twice

Ford and Jeffrey both looked at her with disbelief as she turned and walked out the door.

Outside the precinct, the air was cool, and that was exactly what she needed. A cold rain had fallen in the early morning, but now the sky was a bright blue with some light wisps of white clouds. The trees in the lot across the street were nearly bare and the wind blew the fallen leaves up to flutter into the sky, some of them sticking to the wet hoods of the crisp blue and white cruisers that lined the block.

Lydia took the cold air into her lungs and tried to breathe against the pain she felt in her abdomen. But instead of subsiding the way it had the last few times, it seemed to grow hot and sharp inside her. She clutched her bag to her side, leaned against the concrete of the precinct building, and tried to keep herself together. Suddenly she wished she hadn’t walked out of the building and away from Jeffrey, but the office had seemed so hot and close. She’d thought if she could just get some air, she would feel all right again. Now she was alone on the street and the pain grew even more intense. Somewhere in the distance, she heard a familiar voice, heard her name. Then there were hands on her. Everything around her pitched horribly, like she was on a boat in a storm. Then the street and the sky and her awareness of these things faded away.

part two

chapter twenty-three

It was a bright, clear day as Ford McKirdy pulled his Taurus up the sidewalk in front of the Sunnyvale Retirement Home on Broadway in the Bronx. It was a sad-looking place, as were all nursing homes, no matter how hard they tried. Really, there was no escaping the fact that even the best of them were the antechamber to death. As he pushed open the white double doors and was assaulted by the odors of decay and disinfectant, he tried not to imagine himself in a place like this, nothing but a nuisance to his children, awake all day with his regrets, waiting to die.

Geneva Stout didn’t exist. Well, she had existed, until two years ago when she’d died alone at the age of eighty-eight in a nursing home in Riverdale, leaving no children, no relatives at all. There was no one registered at NYU under that name. So the nanny, whatever her real name was, had disappeared.

But he had to wonder how the nanny had managed to usurp Geneva’s identity, and his wondering had led him to the place where the old women had died, looking for answers.

Nurse Jeremiah was about as pleasant and easy on the eyes as an old bulldog. With a pronounced underbite, and a head of gray hair that was clearly store-bought, her tremendous girth commanded about two-thirds of the counter behind which she sat. She turned an evil eye on Ford as soon as he’d put foot on the linoleum floor, her scowl seeming to deepen the closer he came.

“Good morning,” he said with his most winning smile.

“If you say so,” she answered, staring at him as if trying to figure out his game.

He took out his gold detective’s shield and placed it on the counter in front of her, expecting her attitude to improve.

“I’m Detective Halford McKirdy from the New York City Police Department,” he said.

She glanced at him, then down at his shield with cool distaste.

“That supposed to scare me?” she asked.

“Uh, no.”

“What do you want, Officer?”

“Look, what’s your problem? You get bonus pay for attitude?”

“I don’t get bonus pay for nothin’. I see you walking in here and I know you’re going to make my morning difficult. I can just see it in that cocky walk of yours.”

Ford looked into her middle-aged face and saw that beneath the crust was a marshmallow center. There was a glitter to her brown eyes and just the slightest upturning of the corners of her thin pink lips. In the lines on her face, he saw a woman who had changed diapers, read stories, gone to graduations. He saw a woman who, in spite of her size, still got out on the dance floor at weddings, whose generous arms were a safe place for the people who loved her. He smiled and leaned in to her a little.

“Come on,” he said. “Give me a break?”

She gave a little laugh, knowing somehow that he’d seen through her. “All right,” she sighed. “What is it?”

“Does the name Geneva Stout mean anything to you?”

She looked past him as if running the name through her mental database.

“I do remember Geneva,” she said finally. “A sweet, sweet old woman. She liked to play Scrabble. Never gave anyone a moment’s trouble. She was all alone, I remember. No one to visit.” She followed her sentence with a quick little cluck of her tongue, a noise that communicated sympathy and a little sadness. “What about her?”

“It’s not her so much as who was working here when Geneva died that interests me.”

She raised an eyebrow at him. “This place has a revolving door. It’s gritty work, sad work. Reminds people of what the end could bring.”

“She’s a young woman, maybe in her late teens, early twenties when she was here. Exotic-looking, long dark curly hair. Pretty, petite. On the short side, maybe five-two, five-three.”

She shrugged. “Like I said, a lot of people have been through here.”

“What about employment records?”

The woman heaved a sigh. “See, now, there you go.”

“What?”

“I knew you were gonna make me get up from this seat,” she said, but she gave him a smile and hefted herself from the desk.

“Follow me,” she said, buzzing him through a door to her left.

She asked another woman to watch the front for her and led Ford down a hallway, and through a door marked RECORDS.

“What’s your name?” he asked her as they walked into the room.

“Katherine Jeremiah, my friends call me Cat. You can call me Nurse Jeremiah,” she said with a teasing smile.

When she flipped on the light switch, he expected to see rows of file cabinets; instead, he stood in a room filled with computers. The room was ice-cold and somewhere a vent rattled.

“Most everything is on computers these days. It took years to convert all our records. But we’re mostly caught up. The older files got moved into the basement. And these machines hold all employee and patient files since, I think, 1980 or something.”

Ford just nodded and smiled politely as if he cared. She pulled up a chair in front of one of the computers and began to type.

“Let’s see, if she was that young, then she probably wasn’t a nurse and definitely not a doctor,” she muttered, thinking aloud. “I’m going to search for all females between the age of seventeen and twenty-five working here from 1998 to 2001, and that should cover it.”

She typed a few things on the keyboard and then sat back. “Should take just a minute.”

“You have photographs on there?” asked Ford after they’d waited for a minute.

“There should be a photograph for everyone who worked here.”

She swiveled around in the chair and gave him a blatant once-over. “Wife left you?” she said out of nowhere.

“What?” Ford felt like she’d punched him in the gut.

“I’m just wondering because I see you’re wearing a ring. But no wife would let her husband go out of the house looking all messy like you slept in your clothes. You have a five o’clock shadow and it isn’t even noon.”