Twice

“It’s none of your business, Nurse Jeremiah,” he said with a frown.

She shrugged and gave him a knowing smile.

“Get her back,” she said, turning back to the computer. “All women who leave are hoping you’ll beg them to come back.”

“Thanks for the unsolicited advice,” he said, a little angry, a little embarrassed, and a little bit wondering if she was right.

A soft bing from the computer announced that twenty-five matches had been found to the criterion she had entered. She motioned Ford over and he came to stand behind her as she scrolled through each of the entries, each record complete with driver’s license photograph. She flipped slowly through and each face was unfamiliar to him, all of them young, most of them pretty, none of them the woman he was looking for.

He was starting to think he’d hit a dead end when she came to one of the last records. Her hair was much shorter, her face rounder. The picture didn’t at all capture her fiery beauty, but there was the woman he knew as Geneva Stout.

“That’s her,” he said, moving in closer.

“I remember that one,” said the nurse with a snort. “She walked around here like she owned the place. Lazy as the day is long. Then one day she didn’t show up for her shift. Never came back again.”

“Right after Geneva died?”

She thought about it a minute. “I guess that’s right.”

Ford leaned in to the record to read her name. “Oh, Lord,” he said with a shake of his head. “I should have known.”

“That sure is an odd name for a town,” Nurse Jeremiah said, reading the young woman’s address. “Haunted? I’ve never heard of such a place.”

“Unfortunately,” said Ford, “I have.”

chapter twenty-four

In his hand Jeffrey held a sterling Tiffany baby rattle. He turned it and marveled at how small it looked in his hand. It made just the lightest tinkling as he played with it, watched it catch the light sneaking in through the slats of the drawn blinds. He’d bought the rattle for Lydia after he learned that she was pregnant and had been waiting for the right time to give it to her. That time wasn’t going to come for a while.

Jeffrey hadn’t really begun to conceive of the baby as a real person; he hadn’t thought of whether it would be a girl or a boy, what he would look like, if she would have Lydia’s eyes, her stubborn streak, his pragmatism. Jeffrey had only really thought of the baby as a happy concept rather than as a flesh-and-blood part of himself. But the loss was a crush on his heart. He didn’t see it as a death, necessarily… maybe if Lydia had been further along, it would have felt more like that. But it was the death of a hope, a dream he’d had for their immediate future.

It wasn’t to be for them, right now. He could accept that. All that mattered to him at the moment was that Lydia was all right. When he’d seen her fall on the street, he felt like the world was coming to end. It had seemed like miles between them as he ran to reach her, though it was only a few feet. And when he’d seen her face, pale and wan, her eyes half open, he’d felt fear on a level he didn’t even know existed. Now she rested in their bed, her breathing heavy with painkillers and exhaustion.

Lydia had experienced an ectopic pregnancy, where the fetus had settled in her fallopian tube rather than in her uterus, causing a rupture that led to Lydia’s collapse on the sidewalk outside Midtown North. He was more than a little thankful that the miscarriage was a result of circumstances beyond their control, rather than it being the result of the trauma she’d sustained the night before. He wasn’t sure if he’d have been able to forgive himself for that. He was glad he didn’t have to face anger and guilt, as well as grief.

These were the thoughts in his mind as he sat in the chair by the window of their bedroom and watched Lydia sleep. She looked small and fragile wrapped in their down comforter. But physically, she would be all right. With a laparoscopy, the doctor had managed to repair the ruptured tube. The rest of it would just take time.

It was amazing how the world can come grinding to a sudden halt. Everything that seemed so important three days ago couldn’t mean less to him. When life is reduced to the survival of someone you love, everything else reveals itself as trivial. He hadn’t even called in to the office since he called to tell them what had happened.

He replaced the rattle into its black velvet bag and stood to put it back in the drawer on the top of the dresser.

“Are you okay?” she asked groggily.

“Yeah,” he said, closing the drawer and coming to sit beside her. He put a hand on her head and she looked up at him. “How are you?”

“I’m sorry,” she said, for what must have been the hundredth time.

“There’s nothing to be sorry for. It just wasn’t meant to be right now. We have plenty of time,” he answered, kissing her head. She nodded and then seemed to drift off again.

He stood and walked from the room, pulled the door closed behind him, and walked down the stairs. Before he reached the bottom level, the phone started ringing and he raced for it so that it wouldn’t disturb Lydia.

“Hello?”

“Hey, it’s Craig. How’s Lydia?”

“On the mend,” answered Jeff. “What’s up?”

“I hate to bother you, man. But there’s something you need to know.” Craig’s voice sounded strange to Jeff and it immediately made him alert, brought him back a little to life outside their loss.

“What’s going on?”

“Rebecca’s missing, Jeff.”

“Missing?”

“Yeah,” he said. He paused then as though he weren’t sure how to go on. Finally, he blurted it out like what he had to say was burning his tongue. “Jed McIntyre’s got her.”

The words had the effect of a baseball bat to the stomach. “What?” was all Jeffrey could manage.

Craig started rambling out the details. He was talking fast.

“The day after I told you she called in sick? She didn’t show up, and this time she didn’t call. I left a message for her to make sure she was okay, but she never called back. Then the next morning her mother called, very worried, told me she normally speaks to Rebecca every day but hadn’t been able to reach her at home. Christian headed over to Rebecca’s place, convinced the doorman to let him into her apartment. From the mail the doorman had and the messages on her machine, it looked like she hadn’t been there since Wednesday morning before work. Her coffee cup was still in the sink. We tried her cell phone, friends whose numbers we found in her home address book. Finally at the end of the day we filed a missing person’s report.”

“Why am I just finding out about this now?” said Jeff. His anger and fear were like a balled fist ready to fly.

“We didn’t want to bother you,” Craig said lamely. “I mean, we didn’t know about Jed McIntyre until about an hour ago when we checked the surveillance tape from the lobby.”

“It’s been three days. Nobody thought to look at it sooner?”

“I guess we all just thought she’d show up. We never imagined…”

“What? What didn’t you imagine?” he asked.

“That she’d been taken from the office.”

He wouldn’t have imagined it, either. They all thought of those offices as ultra-secure. Rebecca must have felt the same way. Jeffrey remembered now how both he and Lydia had felt that someone had been rifling though their offices. Now he knew why. He didn’t even have time to think about what Jed might have learned about them, what kind of access he gained to their cell numbers, their security codes.

“How’d he get in?”

“He killed one of the Speedy Messenger guys, took his gear. Used the speed dial on his cell phone and called in a late route to the dispatcher. Christ,” Craig said, his voice catching. “She was basically just sitting here waiting