Skeleton Key(36)

She was only half aware of slipping to the floor, of sitting there hunched with her back against the wall. The chills were so bad now that she was shuddering more than shaking. She felt like one of those old cars you see on the highway sometimes, rattling so much that you think they’re just going to fly apart.

If she couldn’t get to the car, she couldn’t get to the hospital. If she couldn’t get to the hospital, what would happen to her? Maybe she would die here, in this hallway, and the next person to come through would find her body on the carpet, curled into a ball like a sleeping cat.

She took a deep breath. She wished with everything she had that her neck didn’t hurt so much. She counted to ten and got lost in the middle somewhere.

Then she felt a heaviness on her shoulder, and turned to find a young woman standing beside her, dressed in jeans and the whitest sneakers that had ever existed on the planet They were so white, they hurt Eve’s eyes.

“Excuse me?” the young woman said. “You’re Ms. Wachinsky, aren’t you? You live right over there? Are you all right?”

Eve tried to look up and started crying, instead. She saw that the door to the apartment across the hall was open. The music had stopped. This must be her neighbor, the one she had never seen, the one who had moved in just last month. She buried her head in her arms and rocked.

A hand came down on her head, then on her forehead.

“Jesus Christ,” the young woman said. “You’re burning up. Do you need to go to a doctor?”

Eve kept her head very still. Her neck hurt so much she never wanted to move it again. “Hospital,” she said. “Going to hospital.”

“You want to go to the hospital. Good plan. I can do that. Do you want me to take you to the hospital?”

“Hospital,” Eve said again. “St.—”

“St. Mary’s. Right. Okay. Look, let me go get you a sweatshirt or something to wear—I’ve got some that are as big as coats. Then I’ll go get the car. Then we’ll take you to the hospital. Will that be all right?”

Of course it would be all right, Eve thought. This was ridiculous. This woman was ridiculous. She was dying, of course she had to go to the hospital. She wondered what had happened to the music. She wondered what was going on.

The young woman disappeared and came back with a big red sweatshirt. Eve let her force it over her head and only cried out once, when her neck was moved too far.

“Damn,” she heard the woman say, “you’ve got meningitis. I’ll bet anything.”

Eve tried to remember what meningitis was and couldn’t. Something terrible. Something people died of. She tried to remember if it was catching, and couldn’t get hold of that information, either.

“Listen,” she tried to say.

The young woman was pushing her out their mutual front door. The car was right there. Eve had no idea when the young woman had had a chance to go get it. The whole world seemed cold and hot at once. The sun was much too bright. Her eyes hurt. She felt herself being folded into a bucket seat and began to shudder again.

The door next to her closed. On the other side of the car, the driver’s side door opened, and the young woman climbed in behind the wheel. Then that door closed, too—God, but the noise was loud; it was explosive—and the engine started up.

“I’m Grace Feinmann, by the way,” the young woman said.

That was when a voice from the radio started talking about how Kayla Anson had been murdered, only the night before, and something in Eve’s head began to struggle mightily to put the information in context. BMW. Jeep. The Litchfield Road.

The cold gave way to heat. Eve was suddenly burning up, so hot that there was no way she could move, no way she could shudder, no way she could do much of anything except sweat and sweat until big rivers of water ran down the front of her chest.

But the car was out on the road now, moving, and that made her feel a little better.





2


Annabel Crawford knew that the death of Kayla Anson had done her at least some good—although she didn’t like to think about it like that. She didn’t like to think about Kayla dying at all. It had been so odd to get up this morning and see it all over the news like that. It had been odd, in fact, just to see the television on at ten o’clock. Annabel’s mother always said she hated television, the way women like her were supposed to hate it. The set was kept in a cramped little “sitting room” at the back of the house, off the kitchen, and only turned on in the early evenings, when Jennifer Crawford had nothing else to do. Annabel’s father wasn’t home enough for decisions like that to matter. Annabel thought she should have known, as soon as she came downstairs looking for coffee, that something was terribly wrong. Her mother only kept the television on like that for major league airplane disasters.