Velocity (19 page)

chapter 41

AS BILLY FOLLOWED THE MAIN HALL TOWARD
Barbara’s room in the west wing, Dr. Jordan Ferrier, her physician, exited the room of another patient. They almost collided.

“Billy!”

“Hello, Dr. Ferrier.”

“Billy, Billy, Billy.”

“I sense a lecture coming on.”

“You’ve been avoiding me.”

“I’ve tried my best,” Billy admitted.

Dr. Ferrier looked younger than forty-two. He was sandy-haired, green-eyed, perpetually cheerful, and a dedicated salesman for death.

“We’re weeks overdue for our semiannual review.”

“The semiannual review is your idea. I’m very happy with a once-every-decade review.”

“Let’s go see Barbara.”

“No,” Billy said. “I won’t talk about this in front of her.”

“All right.” Taking Billy by the arm, Dr. Ferrier steered him to the lounge where the staff took their breaks.

They were alone in the room. Vending machines for snacks and soft drinks hummed, ready to dispense high-calorie, high-fat, high-caffeine treats to medical workers who knew the consequences of their cravings but had the good sense to cut themselves some slack.

Ferrier drew a white plastic chair away from an orange Formica table. When Billy didn’t follow suit, the doctor sighed, pushed the chair under the table, and remained on his feet.

“Three weeks ago I completed an evaluation of Barbara.”

“I complete one every day.”

“I’m not your enemy, Billy.”

“It’s hard to tell around this time of the year.”

Ferrier was a hard-working physician, intelligent, talented, and well-meaning. Unfortunately, the university that turned him out had infected him with what they called “utilitarian ethics.”

“She’s gotten no better,” said Dr. Ferrier.

“She’s gotten no worse, either.”

“Any chance of her regaining high cognitive function—”

“Sometimes she talks,” Billy interrupted. “You know she does.”

“Does she ever make sense? Is she coherent?”

“Once in a while,” Billy said.

“Give me an example.”

“I can’t, offhand. I’d have to check my notebooks.”

Ferrier had soulful eyes. He knew how to use them. “She was a wonderful woman, Billy. No one but you had more respect for her than I did. But now she has no meaningful quality of life.”

“To me, it’s very meaningful.”

“You’re not the one suffering. She is.”

“She doesn’t seem to be suffering,” Billy said.

“We can’t really know for sure, can we?”

“Exactly.”

Barbara had liked Ferrier. That was one reason Billy did not replace him.

On some deep level she might perceive what was happening around her. In that event, she might feel safer knowing she was being cared for by Ferrier instead of by a strange doctor whom she’d never met.

Sometimes this irony was a grinding wheel that sharpened Billy’s sense of injustice to a razor’s edge.

Had she known about Ferrier’s bioethics infection, had she known that he believed he possessed the wisdom and the right to determine whether a Down’s Syndrome baby or a handicapped child, or a comatose woman, enjoyed a quality of life worth living, she might have changed physicians. But she had not known.

“She was such a vibrant, involved person,” Ferrier said. “She wouldn’t want to just hang on like this, year after year.”

“She’s not just hanging on,” Billy said. “She’s not lost at the bottom of a sea. She’s floating near the surface. She’s
right there.
”

“I understand your pain, Billy. Believe me, I do. But you don’t have the medical knowledge to assess her condition. She’s
not
right there. She never will be.”

“I remember something she said just the other day. ‘I want to know what it says…the sea, what it is that it keeps on saying.’”

Ferrier regarded him with equal measures of tenderness and frustration. “That’s your best example of coherence?”

“‘First do no harm,’” Billy said.

“Harm is done to other patients when we spend limited resources on hopeless cases.”

“She’s not hopeless. She laughs sometimes. She’s
right there,
and she’s got plenty of resources.”

“Which could do so much good if properly applied.”

“I don’t want the money.”

“I know. You’re not the kind of guy who could ever spend a dime of it on yourself. But you could direct those resources to people who have a greater
potential
for an acceptable quality of life than she does, people who would be more likely to be helped.”

Billy tolerated Ferrier also because the physician had been so effective in pre-trial depositions that the maker of the vichyssoise had chosen to settle long before getting near a courtroom.

“I’m only thinking of Barbara,” Ferrier continued. “If I were in her condition, I wouldn’t want to lie there like that, year after year.”

“And I would respect your wishes,” Billy said. “But we don’t know what
her
wishes are.”

“Letting her go doesn’t require active steps,” Ferrier reminded him. “We need only be passive. Remove the feeding tube.”

In her coma, Barbara had no reliable gag reflex and could not properly swallow. Food would end up in her lungs.

“Remove the feeding tube and let nature take its course.”

“Starvation.”

“Just nature.”

Billy kept her in Ferrier’s care also because the physician was straightforward about his belief in utilitarian bioethics. Another doctor might believe the same but conceal it…and fancy himself an angel—or agent—of mercy.

Twice a year, Ferrier would make this argument, but he would not act without Billy’s approval.

“No,” Billy said. “No. We won’t do that. We’ll go on just the way we have been going.”

“Four years is such a long time.”

Billy said, “Death is longer.”

chapter 42

SIX O’CLOCK SUN ON THE VINEYARDS FILLED
the window with summer, life, and bounty.

Beneath her pale lids, Barbara Mandel’s eyes followed the action of vivid dreams.

Sitting on the barstool by her bedside, Billy said, “I saw Harry today. He still smiles when he remembers you called him a Muppet. He says his greatest achievement is never having been disbarred.”

He didn’t tell her anything else about his day. The rest of it would not have lifted her spirits.

From the standpoint of defense, the two weak points of the room were the door to the hallway and the window. The adjoining bathroom was windowless.

The window featured a blind and a latch. The door could not be locked.

Like every hospital bed, Barbara’s had wheels. Thursday evening, as midnight approached, Billy could roll her out of here, where the killer expected to find her, and put her in another room, somewhere safer.

She wasn’t tethered to life-support systems or to monitors. Her food supply and pump hung from a rack fixed to the bed frame.

From the nurses’ station at midpoint of the long main corridor, no one could see around the corner to this west-wing room. With luck, he might be able to move Barbara at the penultimate moment without being seen, then return here to wait for the freak.

Assuming it came to that crisis point. Which was a safe if not happy assumption.

He left Barbara alone and walked the west wing, glancing in the rooms of other patients, checking a supply closet, a bathing chamber, reviewing possibilities.

When he returned to her room, she was talking: “…soaked in water…smothered in mud…lamed by stones…”

Her words suggested a bad dream, but her tone of voice did not. She spoke softly and as if enchanted.

“…cut by flints…stung by nettles…torn by briars…”

Billy had forgotten his pocket notebook and his pen. Even if he had remembered them, he could not take the time to settle down and record these utterances.

“Quick!” she said.

Standing at her bedside, he put a comforting hand on Barbara’s shoulder.

“Give it mouth!” she whispered urgently.

He half expected her eyes to open and to fix on him, but they did not.

When Barbara fell silent, Billy squatted to look for the cord that powered the bed’s adjustable-mattress mechanism. If he needed to move her the following night, he would have to pull that plug.

On the floor, just under the high bed, lay a snapshot taken by a digital camera. Billy picked up the photo and stood to examine it in better light.

“…creep and creep…” Barbara whispered.

He turned the snapshot three ways before he realized that it depicted a praying mantis, apparently dead, pale upon pale painted boards.

“…creep and creep…and tear him open…”

Suddenly her whispering voice twitched like a dying mantis down through the spiraling chambers of Billy’s ears, inspiring a shudder and a chill.

During normal visiting hours, family and friends of patients came through the front doors and went where they wished, without any requirement to sign a register.

“…hands of the dead…” she whispered.

Because Barbara required less attention than conscious patients with their myriad complaints and demands, nurses did not attend her as frequently as they did others.

“…great stones…angry red…”

A quiet visitor might stay here half an hour and never be seen at this bedside—or entering, or leaving.

He did not want to leave Barbara alone, talking to an empty room, though she must have done so on countless previous occasions. Billy’s evening, already fully scheduled, had been complicated by the addition of one more urgent task.

“…chains hanging…terrible…”

Billy pocketed the snapshot.

He bent to Barbara and kissed her forehead. Her brow was cool, as always it was cool.

At the window, he drew down the blind.

Reluctant to leave, he stood in the open doorway, looking back at her.

She said something then that resonated with him, though he had no clue why.

“Mrs. Joe,” she said. “Mrs. Joe.”

He did not know a Mrs. Joe or Mrs. Joseph, or Mrs. Johanson, or Mrs. Jonas, or anyone by any name similar to the one that Barbara had spoken. And yet somehow…he thought he did.

The phantom mantis twitched in his ears again. Along his spine.

With a prayer as real as any that he had lied about to Gretchen Norlee, he left Barbara alone on this last night in which she might be safe.

Less than three hours of daylight remained in a sky too dry to support a wisp of a cloud, the sun a thermonuclear brilliance, the air gathered to a stillness as if in anticipation of a cataclysmic blast.

chapter 43

THE PICKETED FRONT YARD CONTAINED NO
grass in need of mowing, but instead a lush carpet of baby’s tears and, under the graceful boughs of pepper trees, lace flower.

Shading the front walk, an arbor tunnel was draped with trumpet vines. Orchestras of silent scarlet horns raised their flared bells to the sun.

The arched-lattice tunnel, a preview of twilight, led to a sunny front patio where pots were filled with red garnet, red valerian.

The house was a Spanish bungalow. Modest but graceful, it had been tenderly maintained.

The black silhouette of a bird had been painted on the red front door. The wings were on the upstroke, the bird in an angle of ascent.

Halfway through Billy’s brief knock, the door opened, as though he had been expected and had been awaited with keen anticipation.

Ivy Elgin said, “Hi, Billy,” without surprise, as if she had seen him through a window in the door. It had no window.

Barefoot, she wore khaki shorts cut for comfort and a roomy red T-shirt that sold nothing. Hooded and cloaked, Ivy would still have been a lamp to every moth that flew.

“I wasn’t sure you’d be here,” he said.

“I’m off Wednesdays.” She stepped back from the door.

Hesitating on the sun side of the threshold, Billy said, “Yeah. But you have a life.”

“I’m shelling pistachios in the kitchen.”

She turned and walked away into the house, leaving him to follow as if he had been here a thousand times. This was his first visit.

Heavily curtained sunlight and a floor lamp with a tasseled sapphire-silk shade accommodated shadows in the living room.

Billy glimpsed dark fir floors, midnight-blue mohair furniture, a Persian-style rug. The artwork seemed to be from the 1930s.

He made some noise on the hardwood floor, but Ivy did not. She crossed the room as if a slip of air always separated the soles of her feet from the fir planks, the way a sylph fly may choose to step across a pond without dimpling the surface tension of the water.

At the back of the house, the kitchen matched the size of the living room and contained a dining area.

Beadboard paneling, French-pane cabinet doors, a white tile floor with black-diamond inlays, and an ineffable quality made him think of the bayou and New Orleans charm.

Two windows between the kitchen and the back porch were open for ventilation. In one window sat a large black bird.

The creature’s perfect stillness suggested taxidermy. Then it cocked its head.

Although Ivy said nothing, Billy felt invited to the table, and even as he sat, she put a glass of ice in front of him. She picked up a pitcher from the table and poured tea.

Also on the red-and-white-checkered oilcloth were another glass of tea, a dish of fresh cherries, a sheet-cake pan piled high with unshelled nuts, and a bowl half full of liberated pistachios.

“You’ve got a nice place,” Billy said.

“It was my grandmother’s house.” She took three cherries from the dish. “She raised me.”

Ivy spoke softly, as always. Even at the tavern, she never raised her voice, yet she never failed to make herself heard.

Not one to pry, Billy was surprised to hear himself ask, in a voice softened to match hers, “What happened to your mother?”

“She died in childbirth,” Ivy said as she lined up the cherries on the window sill beside the bird. “My father just moved on.”

The tea had been sweetened with peach nectar, a hint of mint.

As Ivy returned to the table, sat, and continued shelling the nuts, the bird watched Billy and ignored the cherries.

“Is he a pet?” Billy asked.

“We own each other. He seldom comes farther than the window, and when he does, he respects my rules of cleanliness.”

“What’s his name?”

“He hasn’t told me yet. Eventually he will.”

Never in Billy’s life, until now, had he felt entirely at ease and vaguely disoriented at the same time. Otherwise, he might not have found himself asking such an odd question: “Which came first, the real bird or the one on the front door?”

“They arrived together,” she said, giving him an answer no less odd than his question.

“What is he—a crow?”

“He’s more lordly than that,” she said. “He’s a raven, and wants us to believe he’s nothing more.”

Billy did not know what to say to that, so he said nothing. He felt comfortable with silence, and apparently so did she.

He realized that he had lost the sense of urgency with which he had left Whispering Pines. Time no longer seemed to be running out; in fact time seemed not to matter here.

Finally the bird turned to the cherries, using its bill to strip the meat from the pits with swift efficiency.

Ivy’s long nimble fingers appeared to work slowly, yet she quickly added shelled pistachios to the bowl.

“This house is so quiet,” Billy said.

“Because the walls haven’t soaked up years of useless talk.”

“They haven’t?”

“My grandmother was deaf. We communicated by sign language and the written word.”

Beyond the back porch lay a flower garden in which all blooms were red or deep blue, or royal purple. If one leaf stirred, if a cricket busied itself, if a bee circled a rose, no sound found its way through the open windows.

“You might like some music,” Ivy said, “but I’d prefer none.”

“You don’t like music?”

“I get enough of it at the tavern.”

“I like zydeco. And Western swing. The Texas Top Hands. Bob Wills and the Texas Playboys.”

“Anyway, there’s already music,” she said, “if you’re still enough to hear it.”

He must not have been still enough.

Taking the photo of the dead mantis from his pocket and placing it on the table, Billy said, “I found this on the floor in Barbara’s room at Whispering Pines.”

“You can keep it if you want.”

He didn’t know what to make of that. “Were you visiting her?”

“I sit with her sometimes.”

“I didn’t know.”

“She was kind to me.”

“You didn’t start to work at the tavern until a year after she was in a coma.”

“I knew her before.”

“Really.”

“She was kind to me when Grandmother was dying in the hospital.”

Barbara had been a nurse, a good one.

“How often do you visit her?” Billy asked.

“Once a month.”

“Why have you never told me, Ivy?”

“Then we’d have to talk about her, wouldn’t we?”

“Talk about her?”

“Talking about how she is, what she’s suffered—does that give you peace?” Ivy asked.

“Peace? No. How could it?”

“Does remembering how she was, before the coma, give you peace?”

He considered. “Sometimes.”

Her gaze rose from the pistachios, and her extraordinary brandy eyes met his eyes. “Then don’t talk about now. Just remember when.”

Finished with two cherries, the raven paused to stretch its wings. Silently they opened and silently closed.

When Billy looked at Ivy again, her attention had returned to her shelling hands.

He asked, “Why did you take this snapshot with you when you visited her?”

“I take them all with me everywhere, the most recent photos of dead things.”

“But why?”

“Haruspicy,” she reminded him. “I read them. They foretell.”

He sipped his tea.

The raven watched him, beak open, as if it were shrieking. It made no sound.

“What do they foretell about Barbara?” Billy asked.

Ivy’s serenity and fey quality concealed whether she calculated her answer or whether instead she hesitated only because her thoughts were divided between here and elsewhere. “Nothing.”

“Nothing at all?”

She had given her answer. She didn’t have another.

On the table, in the photo, the mantis said nothing to Billy.

“Where did you get this idea to read dead things?” he asked. “From your grandmother?”

“No. She disapproved. She was an old-fashioned devout Catholic. To her, believing in the occult is a sin. It puts the immortal soul in jeopardy.”

“But you disagree.”

“I do and I don’t,” Ivy said more softly than usual.

After the raven finished the third cherry, the naked pits were left side by side on the window sill, as if in acknowledgment of the household rules of neatness and order.

“I never heard my mother’s voice,” Ivy said.

Billy did not know what to make of that statement, and then he remembered that her mother had died in childbirth.

Ivy said, “Since I was very little, I’ve known my mother has something terribly important to say to me.”

For the first time he noticed a wall clock. It had no second, minute, or hour hands.

“This house has always been so quiet,” Ivy said. “So quiet. You learn to listen here.”

Billy listened.

“The dead have things to tell us,” Ivy said.

With polished-anthracite eyes, the raven regarded its mistress.

“The wall is thinner here,” she said. “The wall between the worlds. A spirit might speak through if it wanted to badly enough.”

Pushing the empty shells aside, dropping the nut meats in the bowl, she made the softest symphony of sounds, quieter even than the melting ice shifting in the tea glasses.

Ivy said, “Sometimes in the night or in a particularly still moment of an afternoon, or at twilight when the horizon swallows the sun and fully silences it, I know she’s calling me. I can almost hear the quality of her voice…but not the words. Not yet.”

Billy thought of Barbara speaking from the abyss of unnatural sleep, her words meaningless to everyone else, yet fraught with enigmatic meaning to him.

He found Ivy Elgin as troubling as she was alluring. If her innocence sometimes seemed to approach the immaculate, Billy warned himself that in her heart, as in the heart of every man and woman, must be a chamber where light didn’t reach, where a calming silence could not be achieved.

Nevertheless, regardless of whatever he himself might believe about life and death, and in spite of whatever impure motives Ivy entertained, if indeed she entertained any, Billy felt that she was sincere in her belief that her mother was trying to reach her, would continue trying, and would eventually succeed.

More important, she so impressed him, not by reason but by the judgment of his adaptive unconscious, that he was unable to write her off as a mere eccentric. In this house, the wall between worlds might well have been washed thin, rinsed by so many years of silence.

Her predictions based on haruspicy were seldom correct in any detail. She blamed this on her incompetence in reading signs, and would not abide suggestions that haruspicy itself was useless.

Billy now understood her obstinacy. If one could not read the future in the unique conditions of each dead thing, it might also be true that the dead have nothing to tell us and that a child waiting to hear the voice of a lost mother might never hear it no matter how well she listened or how silent and attentive she remained.

And so she studied photos of possums broken along roadsides, of dead mantises, of birds fallen from the sky.

She silently walked her house, noiselessly shelled pistachios, softly spoke to the raven or did not speak at all, and at times the quiet became a perfect hush.

Such a hush had fallen over them now, but Billy broke it.

Interested less in Ivy’s analysis than in her reaction, watching her more intently than ever the bird had done, Billy said, “Sometimes psychopathic killers keep souvenirs to remind them of their victims.”

As though Billy’s comment had been no stranger than a reference to the heat, Ivy paused for a sip of tea, then returned to shelling.

He suspected that nothing anyone said to Ivy ever elicited a reaction of surprise, as if she always knew what the words would be before they were spoken.

“I heard about this case,” he continued, “where a serial killer cut off the face of a victim and kept it in a jar of formaldehyde.”

Ivy scooped nut shells from the table and put them in the waste can beside her chair. She didn’t drop them, but
placed
them in the can in such a way that they did not rattle.

By watching Ivy, Billy could not tell if she had previously heard of the face thief or if instead this was news to her.

“If you came upon that faceless body, what would you read from it? Not about the future, but about
him,
the killer.”

“Theater,” she said without hesitation.

“I’m not sure what you mean.”

“He likes theater.”

“Why do you say that?”

“The drama of cutting off a face,” she said.

“I don’t make that connection.”

From the shallow dish she took a cherry.

“The theater is deception,” she said. “No actor plays himself.”

Billy could only say, “All right,” and wait.

She said, “In every role, an actor wears a false identity.”

She put the cherry in her mouth. A moment later, she spit the pit into the palm of her hand, and swallowed the fruit.

Whether she meant to imply that the pit was the ultimate reality of the cherry, that was what he inferred.

Again, Ivy met his eyes. “He didn’t want the face because it was a face. He wanted it because it was a mask.”

Her eyes were more beautiful than readable, but he did not think that her insight chilled her as it did him. Maybe when you spent your life listening for the voices of the dead, you didn’t chill easily.

He said, “Do you mean sometimes, when he’s alone and in the mood, he takes it out of the jar and wears it?”

“Maybe he does. Or maybe he just wanted it because it reminded him of an important drama in his life, a favorite performance.”

Performance.

That word had been impressed upon him by Ralph Cottle. Ivy might have repeated it knowingly, or in all innocence. He could not tell.

She continued to meet his eyes. “Do you think every face is a mask, Billy?”

“Do you?”

“My deaf grandmother, as gentle and kind as any saint, still had her secrets. They were innocent, even charming secrets. Her mask was almost as transparent as glass—but she still wore one.”

He didn’t know what she was telling him, what she meant for him to infer from what she had said. He did not believe that asking her directly would result in a more straightforward answer.