Innocence

Her brutal murder long behind her, the lost wife, Claire, smiled eternally in the two photographs framed in chased silver.

Gwyneth’s Goth makeup couldn’t fully conceal her anguish. The thick mascara colored her tears as black as her grief.

The newsreader on the TV said something about a moratorium on all international air traffic in and out of the United States, but we couldn’t consider his breaking news because the stairs commanded our ascent, as the steps to the gallows call forth those condemned.

In the upper hallway, we passed the open door to the children’s bedroom, where the nurse named Cora had been brought to be murdered with them. There were no children there now, no nurse. They had gone and left their bodies behind them.

In the room where the nameless girl received care, Ryan Telford sat on the edge of the bed in which Cora should have been sleeping. He bent forward with his forearms on his thighs, hands between his knees, a pistol gripped in them. He looked up as we entered the room and smiled, but there was no humor in his smile, only the feverish glee of a rabid jackal.

66

TELFORD’S HAIR HUNG AS WET AND LANK AS IF HE had just stepped from the shower, but this was the greasy wetness of sour sweat. In his pale glistening face, the centers of his bloodshot eyes appeared less like black irises than like portals to the lightless realm of his mind. His ham-pink lips were overlaid with gray, as if he had gone for a touch of Goth himself.

“Little mouse, you’re a masturbation fantasy.”

“You’re not,” she said.

“Who’s the masked man, Kemosabe?”

“Don’t you recognize him, the hood and all? He’s Death.”

“I don’t think Death goes skiing.”

His voice was as throaty as on the phone, and perhaps weaker.

“You don’t look well,” Gwyneth said.

“I would agree.”

Soaked with sweat, his shirt clung to him, and his pants were spattered with blood, but the blood wasn’t his.

Moving to the nameless girl’s bed, looking across it at Telford, Gwyneth said, “You were in Japan.”

“The Far East isn’t good for business anymore.”

“So you came back ahead of schedule.”

“Not soon enough.”

Concerned that we were now surrounded, I asked, “Where are your two… associates?”

“Bastards spooked and ran.”

“After slaughtering a family,” I said.

“That doesn’t faze them. But I have one of my moments, and they run away like little girls.”

“Moments?”

That mirthless smile again. “You’ll see.” Gwyneth put her contact Taser on the nightstand.

“I’m not up for it, either,” Telford said, and put his pistol aside on the bed where he sat.

She said, “When did your symptoms start?”

“A little light-headed late morning. Slight queasiness midafternoon. Fever by dinnertime. Then wham.”

“It goes fast.”

“Express train.”

In my recent trips to the library, I had not read newspapers. Fragments of things heard on TV in the past two nights suddenly coalesced in my mind, and I understood why I had seemed to be missing some subtext in Gwyneth’s conversations with Edmund Goddard and the archbishop.

I have always been of the world but little in it. In this case, the price of isolation was ignorance.

Gwyneth began to put down the safety railing on her side of the girl’s hospital bed.

“Better not touch her,” Telford advised.

“I’m taking her out of here.”

“I’ve touched her. Pretty much all over. Sweet thing. Succulent. She’ll die of it now.”

Gwyneth pulled back the sheet and blanket. The sleeping girl’s pajamas had been disarranged.

I looked away.

“Couldn’t manage more than touching,” the curator said. “But it was lovely—the sharing.”

Abruptly he wrapped his arms around himself and doubled over, almost toppling from Cora’s bed. He made that keening noise, as if he were straining to lift a heavy weight, but it was a more tortured sound and went on longer than when he’d been on the phone. He looked as if he were coming apart inside and was trying desperately to hold himself together. Something that didn’t look like vomit and that smelled worse drooled from his mouth.

Having one of his moments.

Gwyneth leaned over the bed, adjusting the girl’s pajamas. “Addison, in the nightstand drawer, you’ll find a bottle of alcohol, a package of cotton pads, and adhesive tape. Please set them out for me.”

I did as she asked, glad to be useful. I worked with my left hand, keeping the little pressurized can of Mace in my right.

When Telford recovered, he sat up straighter and wiped his mouth on his sleeve. The tears on his eyelashes and those sliding down his face were tinted with blood. He looked around as if trying to recall the nature of this place and how he had gotten here.

Gwyneth withdrew the plastic cannula from the vein in the girl’s left forearm and let the drip line dangle from the bag of fluid that hung on the IV rack. She said, “I don’t think this is necessary, but just in case,” and with alcohol, she swabbed the point of insertion from which she’d withdrawn the cannula.

Having oriented himself, Telford said, “What’re those stitches in her side?”

“We had the feeding tube taken out two days ago,” Gwyneth said.