Dear Old Dead(8)

“Yes,” Augie said. “Yes, I do know.”

“Fine,” Sister Kenna said. She went to the door, opened it up, and looked outside. Augie caught a sudden rush of noise, made up of the groans and screams of injured people and the hard clang of metal instruments being used with too much haste and too much force.

“See you later,” Sister Kenna said, and slipped outside.

The door closed again and the station was silent. Augie thanked God for the decision, made three years ago, to get this station in the emergency room soundproofed. They’d done that because the nurses were finding it impossible to do the necessary work on dosages and diagnoses in the middle of crises like this one. Augie stood and went back to the window, taking the chocolate pie with her. There were a pair of ambulances pulling up outside. The attendants jumping out the backs of them looked worse than strained. The picketer had stopped his pacing to watch the action. He had his sign up over his shoulder, resting on his collarbone, so that the ambulance men could read it. THIS CENTER IS A DEATH CAMP, his sign read. The ambulance men weren’t paying any attention.

Augie went back to the desk and began to attack the hot turkey sandwich. Sister Kenna was right. She had to get moving and be a help to Dr. Pride. She had to be a help to somebody.

As for the rest of what Sister Kenna had said—

Augie put her fork down and stared out across the desk. She knew exactly how the girls felt about Charles van Straadt. She knew better than they did why they felt that way. The man was a snake, that was the truth, sneaking around Michael the way he did, insinuating himself where he didn’t belong, stocking the center full of his own grandchildren and expecting the rest of the volunteers to put up with them. There was something… sly about this whole operation, something wrong. She only wished she knew what it was.

In the absence of knowledge, Sister Augustine wished she had the guts to poison the man’s tea.





5


WHEN VICTOR VAN STRAADT first heard that his grandfather was thinking of changing his long-standing will to one that left virtually everything to Victor’s cousin Rosalie, he panicked. It wasn’t the loss of the money itself that bothered him—although that did, of course, bother him. He got mixed up whenever he tried to think about it. No, the real problem was time, his own time, the way he would spend it and what it would mean to the dozens of people who knew him, but not very well. Victor never allowed anyone to know him very well. Victor was twenty-two years old and very good-looking, in a cover-of-a-J. Crew-catalog sort of way. He looked best in cotton crewneck sweaters and baggy khaki pants and the kind of overly expensive sun visor that litters the slopes of Aspen at the end of every season. The adjective preppy might have been invented to apply to him. Beyond what he looked like, though, he had very little. He had graduated from Yale with a bachelor’s degree in classics, but his grades had been no better than mediocre and classics wasn’t good for anything. He had done his grandfather-mandated eighteen-month stint at the Sojourner Truth Health Center, but he had done it with such a commitment to laziness, he hadn’t got much out of it. Now he had a job at the New York Sentinel, but it wasn’t much of a job. They had started out trying to train him as a reporter, but that had been impossible. Now he ran the contests the paper was so fond of, like the Father’s Day contest it was red-bannering over the masthead daily now—except he didn’t. Victor never did his own work if he could help it. He got his sister Ida and his cousin Rosalie to help with the contests, because they were both so much smarter than he was and so much better with money. Sometimes he got his cousin Martha to help, too, but he didn’t like Martha very much. Victor didn’t like much of anything that required a lot of work, and work was what he would have to do if grandfather changed his will. Victor thought he really had to do something about that. His parents were both dead. Who would support him? If he never accomplished another thing in his life, he had to stop his grandfather from handing eight hundred and fifty million dollars into the hands of dear cousin Rosalie, that world-class bitch.

Victor’s appointment to meet Martha and Ida for dinner at the Sojourner Truth Health Center had been set up over a week ago. If he watched the news on television or listened to any radio station besides the all-music Rock Bop on 107.7 FM, he would have known not to come. If he had bothered to look around his own newsroom, he would have known not to come. But Victor had spent the entire day in his office, his Walkman earphones glued to his head, listening to the Beach Boys moan peppily about hot cars and tanned girls and places where it never, ever got any snow. No one had bothered him, because no one ever bothered him. The people he worked with had long ago realized that Victor was useless.