Deadly Beloved(35)

Henry reached into his pocket again and came out with his wallet. He opened it up and took out all the green Evelyn could see.

“Here,” he said, handing it all to her, twenties without number, tens and fives and even one fifty-dollar bill. “Take it. Go to the store. I really do have to work today, Evelyn.”

Evelyn took the money. “All right,” she said.

“I’ve got to go up to the office,” Henry said. “I can’t be disturbed today, Evelyn. Not for anything.”

“I won’t disturb you.”

“I’m going to lock the door. I know you don’t like it, but I have to. I have to concentrate. I can’t have interruptions.”

“I won’t interrupt you.”

“That’s fine, then.” Henry looked around at the family room and the breakfast room and the kitchen. “That’s fine,” he said again. “I’ll just go up to the office now. Have a good time shopping.”

“I will.”

“Be careful driving the car. It’s been a long time since you’ve been behind the wheel.”

“I’ll be careful.”

“Try to remember that if you load your cart up with junk food, everybody we know will see it. That ought to help you keep your discipline up. Everybody will see you.”

Everybody sees me every day, Evelyn thought. If I cared, I would already be thin again. But she understood what Henry was trying to tell her. She even understood that he was right, in a way. She did care what the rest of them thought about her. She was just careful never to ask them to explain it.

“So,” Henry said, rocking back on the heels of his shoes. “I’ll be going up.”

“Fine,” Evelyn said.

“I’ll be out of communication most of the day.”

“Fine,” Evelyn said again.

“Right.” Henry put his hands back into his pockets and turned away from her. He hurried out of the room, almost at a run, his shoulders hunched over and his legs moving in an odd, jerky way, as if he had suddenly acquired some kind of nerve disease.

Evelyn looked down at the keys in her hand and shook her head. Keys and money. Keys and money. The car was parked out in the driveway because Henry hadn’t bothered to pull it into the garage when he came back from the club with it last night.

I wonder what all this is about, Evelyn asked herself. I wonder what it is he’s so afraid of.

Then she waddled over to the counter and put the keys and the money in her purse. She thought of the big display of Entenmann’s chocolate cakes down at the Stop ’N Shop and wondered how many she could eat in the car on the way home, eat while driving, eat while stopping for red lights on the road between here and the mall. Maybe I’ll have to pull over someplace, she thought, and give myself time to eat.





2.


Liza Verity never took night duty unless she had to, but last night she had had to, and now, at quarter to nine in the morning, she was exhausted. It had been one of those nights that no nurse likes to have anything to do with. It had started with a bad traffic accident on one of those brutal overpasses that now seemed to define the Philadelphia skyline and then done a domino number on life in the rest of the hospital. The accident was a five-car pileup on one side and a tractor-trailer truck on the other. One of the cars in the five-car pileup had six people crammed into it. One of the other cars had only one person in it, but that person had had a little semiautomatic pistol and been hyped up on something serious. He was at the back of the pileup. As soon as the crashing and the screeching were over, he got out and started firing randomly, hitting cars passing and people standing around to see what had happened. He seemed to take particular offense at the idea of bystanders. There were always dozens of people who stopped to rubberneck at the side of any highway disaster. The man with the semiautomatic pistol shot up ten of them before a teenage boy from Radnor had the courage and the presence of mind to tackle him from behind. The teenage boy got the semiautomatic pistol away from the shooter but suffered a broken arm in the process. By the time all these people got to the emergency room, it was something worse than a mess. They had called six extra doctors and nearly thirty nurses down to duty. There were police everywhere and ambulance men looking green and paramedics looking tired. Liza had been a little surprised to see so few media people. Usually, the local news crews were all over an accident like this one. It was exactly the kind of thing their viewers loved best.

One of the advantages of having been up all night is that it is nearly impossible to summon the energy to be worked up about anything. Coming upstairs from emergency after she was finally let off, Liza had her ass pinched in the elevator by a third-year medical student on apprenticeship roster. She didn’t even turn around and slap his face, which is what she usually did when boys of that sort pulled nonsense on her. In her tiredness, everything about the day-to-day workings of the hospital seemed tacky and absurd. Medical students who had to resort to sexual harassment to have a good day. Doctors who wanted to prove their superiority to God at least once an hour, usually by putting down nurses. Nurses’ aides who were always a little insulted when they were asked to make beds or change bedpans. Liza got off the elevator on the fourth floor and headed down the hall to the pediatrics unit. She could have gotten out of going down to emergency last night. She was a pediatrics specialist and already technically off-duty when they started bringing the bodies in. Maybe she was just getting a little stale, bored with the routine, impatient with the politics—God only knew, she was all of that, there was no maybe about it. Maybe it was time for her to quit and find herself another job.