Dear Old Dead(15)

Pause. Pace. Breathe.

“—Yes, I know—Yes, it’s early—I don’t really care about the trains coming in from Larchmont, Felix, they’re not my responsibility—Yes—”

I should do what Karida wants me to do and keep on going down the stairs, Julie thought. That’s what I should do.

Whoever that is in there doesn’t work at the center. If he did, I would know the voice. He won’t know that I’m not supposed to be here. There’s no reason why I shouldn’t walk right up there and look right in.

“Hey,” Karida said again. “Julie, we’ve really got to—”

That was when Julie realized that the old man had stopped talking. She hadn’t even heard him hang up the phone. He had stopped pacing, too. She wondered what he was doing. She wondered why he was in Dr. Pride’s office. Maybe he wasn’t supposed to be there. Maybe he was dangerous. There was a clock on the wall of the office just across the corridor. Julie could see through its open door to read the time. The time was 7:22.

“Julie,” Karida said urgently. “Come on.”

Julie took a step toward Dr. Pride’s door just as the man came out of it. He was a big man and he was moving quickly, but that wasn’t what startled her. It wasn’t even that he appeared when she wasn’t expecting him. Julie could have taken all that in stride. She had been on the streets a long time.

What startled Julie Enderson was that this old man wasn’t someone she didn’t know after all. In fact, he was someone she knew quite well.

The last time she’d seen him, he’d been in a very different kind of place.





8


IDA VAN STRAADT GREEL was nothing at all like her brother Victor. For one thing, she wasn’t as pretty. In the way of genetic practical jokes from Irkutsk to Antarctica, where Victor had gotten all their mother’s most distinctive features, Ida had gotten their father’s, and their father had been a small, gnomish, distinctly ugly man. Ida was five feet two inches tall and as gnarled as the sort of tree trunk that ends up polished as a coffee table in the living room of a country house of a lawyer from Manhattan. She had the kind of body that never gained weight, no matter how much she put into it, but other women didn’t envy her for it. She looked nothing at all like a fragile fashion model and everything like the girl voted most likely to succeed at competitive sports by her high school graduating class. Nobody would ever mistake her for the cover of a J. Crew catalog. When people discovered who Ida was, they were often both surprised and resentful. The American rich were supposed to be different from this, at least if they were women.

Very few people discovered who Ida van Straadt Greel was, because unlike her brother Ida hadn’t dropped the “Greel” from her name as soon as she turned eighteen and unlike her brother and her cousin Martha she made an effort to keep her identity hidden. Of course, at the center Ida had no real privacy. Martha was there and Martha would talk, and Ida owed her position to her grandfather. At least, she half owed it to him. When Ida was Martha’s age, she had come down here to volunteer for the obligatory two years—the center insisted on two years—and her acceptance in the volunteer program had definitely been a result of her connections. Since then, however, she thought she’d made it on her own. Ida Greel was very good at what she did. She made a point of it. She had gone through Yale with an unblemished straight-A average, made Phi Beta Kappa and gotten herself admitted to the Albert Einstein College of Medicine. She had spent her summers first getting her paramedic training and then serving at the center as a paramedic. She had every intention of ending up twenty-five years from now more famous than Dr. Christiaan Barnard. It was a matter of honor. Ida had spent so much of her childhood hearing about how impossible she was, and how much of a blot on the van Straadt family name (can’t you do something about yourself?), that she had a lot to prove to practically everybody.

She was laying sterile instruments out on a tray when Martha came to the door and waved through the small square of glass at her. Ida waved back and checked her work over one more time before going out. It was seven thirty-five. The shoot-out or whatever it had been—Ida hated rumors, and rumors were all you ever got around here in the middle of a crisis—was over, and the last of the casualties were just coming in. Ida had been feeling a slackening in the tension for a good fifteen minutes. There was no reason why she shouldn’t talk to Martha now. She had her work done. Ida hated to let Martha or Victor or her grandfather or anyone else in her family know she had any free time at all. As soon as she let them know that, she lost control.