Not a Creature Was Stirring(73)

“It also made The Wall Street Journal,” Anne Marie said. “That’s not the point. There’s a large estate involved here, a lot of complicated legal questions. Mother and I spent an hour and a half with the lawyer today. Today, Dr. Borra, with my sister dead in a room down the hall and God knows what else going on around here. You’ve got to understand—”

“I do understand. You’re the one who doesn’t. I can’t make the kind of predictions you’re asking for. Your mother has an unsteady heart—”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“It means I don’t like the way it sounds, that’s what it means. I’m not saying I’ve found any evidence of heart disease. I haven’t. I’m just hearing some irregularity. It could mean everything and nothing.”

“Wonderful,” Anne Marie said.

“If you want my instinct, I’d say she was good for another three months. At least.”

“Oh.”

“On the other hand—”

“Don’t spoil it,” Anne Marie said. She turned away from him and started down the hall toward the landing, listening to be sure he followed her. He did. “I’ll let you out now,” she told him. “I suppose you’re busy with something. But I wish you’d remember—”

“That I’m supposed to come any time you call? If I did that, I wouldn’t get anything else done.”

“That’s the most ridiculous lie I’ve ever heard. We don’t call you every hour. We don’t call you every day. We don’t even call you every week. Mother wouldn’t have it.”

“Nevertheless, you always call at the most inconvenient possible time.”

They were out on the landing now, going down the stairs to the foyer. Anne Marie stared at the black-and-white checkerboard marble floor and saw it start to swim before her eyes. She was boiling.

“Do you believe in euthanasia?” she asked him.

Dr. Borra said, “What?”

“Euthanasia,” Anne Marie repeated. “There are so many people these days, young doctors mostly, from what I read in Time, who think old people who have lost their faculties are simply being irrational when they want to go on living. Who think—”

Downstairs, the front door opened and Teddy came in, limping painfully. Anne Marie bit her lip. She was very good at what she had just started to do to Dr. Borra, very good. Aside from the satisfaction it would have given her—sometimes she just wanted to smash this man’s face—it might have had its uses, in the long run. Now she was stopped, by Teddy planting himself down there at the bottom of the stairs. She marched past him, not looking at him, and pulled open the front doors.

“Good night,” she said to Dr. Borra.

Dr. Borra pulled up the collar of his coat and shrugged.

“Christ,” Teddy said. “What did you do to him?”

Anne Marie slammed the front doors and headed back up the stairs. “Mother’s better,” she said. “I have to go up and make sure she stays that way.”

Then she went on up to the second floor, stomping all the way, making the central well of the house reverberate as if it were being attacked by a wrecking ball…





2


For Teddy, the day had been futile and frantic. Worse, it had been insubstantial. Everything that had happened—from the phone calls he had made to “friends” in Boston and New York, to the searching he had done through the papers he had brought with him from Greer, to the candles nestled in evergreen boughs on every surface in the house, to Emma’s dying—had seemed less and less real. By the time he’d decided to go out for a walk, he had managed to convince himself he was wandering through a dream. It had to be a dream. Only in a dream would he have decided to go wallowing through the snow, especially on a day when his leg had been aching since the moment he woke up. It was aching even more now, going beyond dull throbbing to the dreaded territory of sharp, shooting pains. Teddy’s doctors always said those pains were imaginary, but they seemed real enough to him. And they made him angry. It was like Prometheus and the eagle, or whatever it was. Constant pain, constant torture, constant punishment—and for what? He’d never done a thing in his life to hurt another person. Even stealing his students’ papers hadn’t hurt the students. The little idiots had no use for the damn things once they’d been handed in—and Susan Carpenter was a fool for thinking otherwise. Why he’d ever decided to make an issue of his libido in her case, he’d never know. She wasn’t even all that attractive. She always had a big cluster of pimples on her butt.