The Extinction Event (10 page)

The bureau drawers were pulled out and dumped. Sweaters and blouses, panties and bras and G-strings, socks and slacks and shorts. The wastebasket had been upended; a crumpled toilet paper wrapper, some balled-up paper towels, a rolled copy of
Cosmopolitan
, a tampon carefully folded into a tissue …

“The place has been tossed,” Jack said.

Covering his hand with his handkerchief, he rummaged through the cupboards over the sink and stove.

Chipped cups, glasses and plates. A half-empty box of Cap'n Crunch—which somebody had pawed through. Peanut butter, grape jelly—which had also been examined. Kid's food.

A half-size refrigerator sat on the floor, supporting a small TV. The cable was connected. Still covering his hand with the handkerchief, Jack turned the TV on. It worked.

Jack found the remote and, using the handkerchief, ran up and down the channels.

“HBO,” Jack said. “She sprang for premium service.”

“No bills,” Caroline said. “No check book. No personal papers of any kind.”

Behind the scattered dirty laundry pushed under the bureau, Caroline found a plastic bracelet with Jean's name on it, a number, some other codes. The kind worn in a hospital.

“This can't be from after her beating,” she said, handing it to Jack. “She never came back here.”

Before he even read the markings, Jack recognized the typeface, the look, of the bracelet.

“Berkshire Medical,” Jack said, examining it. “Whatever was wrong with her, she needed more than a Samaritan could give her.”

3

“AIDS?” Jack asked. He was driving Caroline's car, heading to the Berkshire Medical Center in Pittsfield, Massachusetts. The rain was now coming down hard, drops ricocheting off the windshield like bullets. “Hepatitis?”

“Maybe she went in to detox?” Caroline said.

Jack let that sit.

After a long silence, Caroline glanced at him. Glanced away.

“Were you ever married?” she asked.

Jack kept his eyes on the road.

“It was a big mystery around the office,” she said.

Jack cranked up the defogger.

“You had quite a fan club,” she said. “They wanted to know.”

After another long silence, Jack asked, “You?”

“You want to know was I ever married?” Caroline said. “But you're going to remain a man of mystery?”

“Fifteen years,” Jack said, fiddling with the windshield wiper. “Right out of college. Off and on a commune. It was the Sixties. One kid. Not with my wife. She never knew. I never saw the kid. One night after a party, I couldn't sleep. Got up to pee. Realized my wife was crying. I moved out the next day.”

They drove a mile in silence.

“I'm leaving a lot out,” Jack said.

Another mile. The windshield wipers did their dance. Rain rattled on the car roof. They passed an abandoned industrial site:
Half-Moon Naptha and Petroleum
. Jack looked at Caroline: Had she been married? But Caroline didn't say anything.

“Maybe you haven't had a chance to be disappointed yet,” Jack said.

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

1

The clerk in the intake office at the Berkshire Medical Center said, “I don't know if I can give you that information.”

She was tall, rangy, with hair the unnatural red of supermarket beef. Her skin looked like hide, tough; she must have spent her childhood in the sun. She wore a blue sweater draped over her shoulders, held in front by a gold-colored chain. She frowned, unhappy not to be able to accommodate them.

“Can you at least tell us the name of the doctor who treated her?” Caroline asked.

Rain dripped from Caroline's hair, which was plastered to her face; from her chin, from her elbows. Her blouse and sweater, sopped, clung to her. So did her slacks. Jack admired the outline of her ass.

“I'm a lawyer,” Caroline explained. “It's germane to a case I'm handling.”

“I think you need something from the courts,” the clerk said.

“It involves a murder,” Caroline said.

“Then, the police, too,” the clerk said. “I guess.”

Jack had told Caroline he'd hang back, figuring she came across as more respectable, more trustworthy than he did.

“You think?” she had asked.

“It's your face,” Jack had said. “The bone structure.”

Caroline had put her hands on Jack's cheeks and had turned his head so he was staring at himself in the car's rearview mirror. They were parked in the hospital lot next to the Emergency Room. Outside, the rain swept across the asphalt in what under the sodium lamps looked like mica sheets.

“That face,” Caroline said, forcing Jack to look at himself. “How could you not trust it?”

“I don't trust it,” Jack said. “And I've been looking at it all my life.”

Gently, he detached Caroline's hands from his face, not releasing them, holding them lightly in his upturned palms.

“When I was ten,” he said, “maybe I trusted it then. But since puberty, no way.”

“I trust it.”

“That's news.”

She nodded and said, “A recent development.”

“I don't trust recent developments,” Jack said. “Not in my emotional landscape.”

“What's your emotional landscape look like?”

“Andros Island,” Jack said. “In the Caribbean.”

Puzzled, Caroline knit her brows. The three vertical lines forming between her eyes made it look as if someone had tugged a string on a sachet, furrowing the cloth.

“Mangrove swamp and clay,” Jack said. “A few palmettos. Nothing can live on it. At least, not on the west side. I went there on vacation once.”

“And my emotional landscape?” Caroline asked.

“Very green,” Jack said. “An arbor. Covered with baby-blue trumpet flowers.”

“A secret garden?” she asked.

“I saw it through a hole in your hedge.”

“You've got a dirty mind,” Caroline said, reaching for the door handle.

The rain slapped the sides of the car.

“Just like getting out in a car wash,” Jack said. “Ready?”

Caroline nodded.

They opened their doors at the same time and ducked into the downpour.

2

Once the intake clerk had turned them down, Jack and Caroline ran back out into the rain, slammed into the car, and drove around to the hospital's main entrance. Again, dripping, clammy, their clothes sticking to them, they entered the hospital.

“Do you have a towel?” Jack asked a guard, who was so bony it looked as if he had a wire hanger inside his square-badge jacket. “My wife,” Jack gestured at Caroline, who looked like a wet cat. Rain puddled where she stood. “She got a call, her uncle Monroe, they brought him in about an hour ago. Monroe Ruggerio?”

“I just got back from my break,” the guard said. When his mouth was closed, his large teeth under his upper lip made his face look like a death's-head. As if someone had pulled thin rubber over the bone. He poked his thumb over his shoulder. “The ladies' room is down the hall. Around the corner. First door on the right.”

“Honey,” Jack took Caroline in his arms. Their clothes squished, drizzling between their bodies. “Why don't you dry off? I'll see what I can find out about Uncle Monroe.”

Jack kissed Caroline on the lips, which tasted fresh. Rainwashed. Surprised, she opened her eyes wide, then relaxed, and stuck the tip of her tongue into Jack's mouth.

Jack watched her sway down the hall, leaving damp footprints.

“Men's room?” Jack asked the guard.

“Across from the ladies',” the guard said.

Jack caught up to Caroline around the corner, out of sight of the guard, and grabbed two towels from a supply cart. He tossed one to her, wiped his face, ruffled his hair.

“What's with the tongue?” Jack asked.

“Did it give you a thrill?” Caroline said.

From the cart, he took a white medical smock, which he slipped on.

“Upstairs,” Jack said. “Find an empty room. Make a scene.
Where's my uncle?
”

“Uncle Monroe Ruggerio.” Caroline smiled.

From her pocketbook, she took a comb, ran it through her hair, and handed it to Jack, who also combed his hair. Then, ducking into a dark room where two patients were sleeping, Jack grabbed a clipboard from the bottom of a bed.

“What if there's an emergency?” Caroline asked, nodding at the sleeping patient, whose chart Jack had stolen.

“There is an emergency,” Jack said. “Two people have been murdered.”

3

In the elevator, Caroline held her forefinger over the panel and gave a questioning look at Jack, who shrugged. Randomly, Caroline hit a button: the third floor. The elevator door slid closed.

The third floor was quiet. The neon lights under their marcelled ceiling panels buzzed. At the nurses' station, a woman with close-cropped blond hair, sitting at a computer, glanced at Jack and Caroline, both in their medical smocks, Jack holding a patient's chart.

“Rubinstein?” Jack asked.

“Not on this floor,” the nurse said and went back to the computer.

“Third,” Jack said.

“Not here,” the nurse said.

Another nurse, a man rubbing his face, was going into the nearby break room. At the end of the hall to the left, a custodian was polishing the floor with an electric hum. Jack smelled the wax.

The hall to the right was empty.

Jack walk up to the nurses' station, tapping the chart he held.

“R-u-b-i-n-s-t-e-i-n,” Jack spelled the name.

“I know how to spell it,” the nurse said, concentrating on her typing. The more insistent Jack was, the more the nurse ignored him. “He's not on this floor.”

“She,” Jack said. “Sadie. Sadie Rubinstein.”

Caroline walked down the hall to the right.

“I can't help you,” the nurse said, not looking up.

“Could you check what floor she's on?” Jack asked. “They told me third.”

The nurse sighed, typed, looked, typed again.

“No Rubinstein Sadie,” she said.

Jack flipped through some pages on the clipboard.

“Find her records, would you please? She's got to be somewhere.”

Again sighing, the nurse again typed, again looked, again typed.

“No record of Rubinstein Sadie,” she said.

Which is when the nurse heard Caroline's scream.

Leaving the computer on the patient records file, the nurse jumped up and ran down the left-hand hallway, almost colliding with the nurse running from the break room.

“Uncle Monroe!” Caroline cried at the end of the hall. “Where's my uncle?”

Jack glanced at the custodian, who ignored everything, moving the polishing machine in circles across the right-hand hallway floor.

He slipped around the counter of the nurses' station and quickly typed in Jean Gaynor's name.

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

1

Caroline's car stalled half a dozen miles from Mycenae. Two miles from the closest house, they hit a puddle deep enough to swamp them.

“Just as well,” Jack said. “Can't see anything in this rain anyway.”

… missed Houston but ravaged the Beaumont-Port Arthur area in southeastern Texas yesterday, blowing down trees, knocking out power and interrupting refinery operations. The storm hit shore—

Jack cut the engine, turning off the radio.

Now that the car wasn't moving, plowing through the rain as if parting billowing curtains, the wipers were useless.

“If you get chilly,” Jack said, “I'll turn on the motor. Turn on the heat.”

During the forty minutes they'd driven from the Berkshire Medical Center, they had both dried a little in the blowing heat from the vents.

For the first half hour out of Pittsfield, they had discussed what Jack had found on the computer: Jean Gaynor had checked into the Emergency Room complaining of headaches, muscle aches, fatigue, dizziness, ringing in the ears, irregular menstruation, irregular heartbeat, hallucinations, difficulty in concentration.

“She was a drug addict,” Caroline said.

“That's what the doctor who looked at her figured,” Jack said, leaning forward and peering as he plowed through the rain, going no faster than ten miles an hour.

“A lot of symptoms,” Caroline said, also peering through the windshield. “There's a stop sign. So many symptoms,” Caroline continued.

“She said it started when she moved,” Jack said.

“To the place that was searched?” Caroline asked.

“Another address.” Jack handed her a slip of paper from the hospital. On it he had scrawled:
17-41 Rostyn
.

“Mycenae?”

Jack nodded.

“Where she was living when she went to the Emergency Room. At least, it was the address she gave. Said about three months after she moved there, she started feeling sick.”

“So she moved out.”

“To Galvin Avenue.”

“Because she thought the place”—Caroline looked at the piece of paper again—“17-41 Rostyn was making her sick.”

“That,” Jack said as he hit the puddle that stalled them, “and the ghosts.”

2

About three in the morning, the rain let up.

“Hey, Five Spot,” he said gently. “Time to wake up.”

Caroline blinked. Turned her head, gazed at Jack.

“I'm the guy who's driving,” Jack said. “Remember?”

“I fell asleep,” Caroline said.

Ahead, the setting moon hung close to the horizon. Jack's window was open. The air smelled of soil, manure, cinnamon. The wet road hissed under their tires.

Before Caroline fell asleep, the rain drumming on the car roof, Jack had told her about the notation at the end of Jean's hospital record: Along with physical symptoms, Jean had complained about seeing a ghost. A little girl bouncing on a bed and running through the halls of 17-41 Rostyn.