“Oh, my God,” the nurse said.
And then she was gone.
THREE
1
The news about Annie-Vic Hadley came in a phone call from Dr. Thomas Willard, so early in the morning that Gregor had a hard time remembering where he was or why it mattered that this woman was suddenly awake and alert.
“Not talking yet, mind you,” Dr. Willard said, going off in a spiral of information Gregor had to struggle to retain. “She’s not moving much yet, either, but she’s definitely awake and out of the coma. She can open and shut her eyes at will. She can follow your movement around the room at will, and she will respond to questions and requests by blinking. That may not sound like much, Mr. Demarkian, but under the circumstances, given her age and what she’s been through, it’s really remarkable. And that last thing, about blinking yes or no to answer questions, that’s an incredibly good sign. It means that whatever happened to her in this attack, it didn’t make her mentally incapable. At least not completely. There’s some of her mind left. We won’t know how much of it for a few days. But still, I didn’t really expect the news to be half this good.”
Gregor sat up in bed and looked around. He was in the little lower-level guest room at Gary Albright’s house. The bed was pushed up against one wall. On the other side of it was a night table with a lamp and an alarm clock, which Gregor had not used, because he always used his cell phone as an alarm clock when he was sleeping away from home. He tried to remember what he had done before he had the cell phone, which he hadn’t had for very long. He tried to remember why he had resisted getting one for so long, but he couldn’t remember that either. The room was cold, and there was a sharp clicking sound against the windows that probably meant sleet, at the very least. On the wall against which the bed was pushed there was a framed picture of Jesus in a meadow with a little girl in a pinafore.
Gregor ran his hand through his hair. “What about her memory?” he asked. “Have you any idea if she remembers what happened to her?”
“I didn’t even try to ask,” Dr. Willard said. “And I don’t think you should, either, at least not yet. She might start talking and volunteer the information, and then of course we go with it, but for the moment I don’t want her unduly tired out. She’s been through more than most women her age could survive.”
“I know,” Gregor said. “But two other women didn’t survive it, and I don’t know what’s going on here. At least, I don’t know completely. I’m not sure there won’t be somebody else.”
“Yes, I understand that,” Dr. Willard said. “And I sympathize. But it won’t help you to kill this one off after she’s just managed to show signs of recovery. Take it slowly. Take it one step at a time. She’s been asleep for some hours now. We’ll see what’s happening when she wakes up.”
Gregor thought about it. “Do me a favor,” he said. “Get a nurse and put her in that room. Somebody who will stay there and stay awake. Don’t leave her alone.”
There was a long pause on the other end of the line. “Oh, God,” Dr. Willard said. “You can’t really think that somebody would come in here in the dead of night—”
“Well, whoever it was tried to kill her once,” Gregor said. “There’s nothing to say he won’t try to kill her again. I’ll talk to Gary Albright and we’ll try to get somebody up there on a permanent basis, a police guard, something. But in the meantime—”
“Yes,” Dr. Willard said. “Yes. All right, I’ll find somebody. It didn’t used to be like this around here, did you know that? I moved out here from Philadelphia years ago and the first thing I really loved about the place was that you didn’t have to worry about crime. You’d be amazed at what we get out here these days, in a rural area like this.”
“Yes,” Gregor said, although he wouldn’t have been surprised at all. He had been in rural areas; he knew what they got. He closed his cell phone and tried to pull himself togther. It was only five o’clock, but when he listened he could hear people moving on the floor above him. Five o’clock in the morning, he thought. Bennis got up at five o’clock in the morning. In fact, most of the adults he knew these days did, and those kinds of early hours were endemic in an organization like the Bureau. But where did that come from? When Gregor was growing up, it was the hallmark of adulthood to stay up late and watch Johnny Carson on The Tonight Show. Now the only people he knew who watched The Tonight Show were teenagers trying to pretend they didn’t still have acne.