Later, I’m sitting again on the Hepplewhite sofa, looking at the empty fireplace, and thinking how nice it would be if James were to come home and light a fire for me. The squad cars have driven away. No longer is the room lit by the unnerving glow of their red and blue flashing lights. Before he left, Adderly clasped my hands and promised to do “everything I know how” in order to find Laurel’s baby. I thanked him for his efforts and invited him to phone me should he have additional questions.
Not having eaten all day, I think about gathering some leftovers from the refrigerator. Even cold, last night’s lamb will be delicious. I contemplate whether to give James a call. If I catch him in a good mood, I’ll invite him to come home and light a blazing fire for us and heat up a carafe of chamomile tea. There is so much I need to tell him. And I should probably call my father for advice. He’ll know the strings to pull, the people to pay off, should Adderly and his men come to investigate again.
Chapter Twenty-Five
LAUREL
I’m a narcoleptic cat unable to stay awake for any decent stretch of time, and though I fall asleep wham-bam easy, I awake in fits of panic, the sweat pouring over my forehead soaking into my pillows and blankets. Doctors at either side of my bed ask, “Hey? Laurel? How do you feel?” Dry at my mouth and dry at my throat, I’m groggy beyond belief. My fingers feel crinkled, gnarled, dispossessed of their natural suppleness. They’re not the fingers of a young mother but of a corpse, a cadaver, a grim reaper clutching a rusting scythe. I long for someone to slip Zerena into my arms, long to feel the comfort of her little body, the murmur of her gurgle, the lap of her mouth against my breasts.
“You’re dehydrated, maybe even delirious,” a nurse, or maybe it’s a doctor, says.
Someone on the other side of me reaches over and touches my lips, and before I know it, she’s forcing something hard and bitingly cold into my mouth—an ice cube—and instructing me to let it melt on my tongue, and while this is happening, someone else switches out my IV bag. Another person flicks on the room’s overhead light. Perhaps it’s the dehydration affecting my eyesight, but I jerk my hand up to shield my eyes from the too-bright light, and when I do so, the IV tubing snags again on the bed railing. A full two units of saline solution have been pumped into me over the past hour, not that anyone spells out for me how much fluid—a cup? a pint?—this represents.
“You’re lucky,” someone says.
I gasp, inflated with hope. “You’ve found Zerena! Have you found her?”
The person who stuck the ice cube in my mouth glances at the nurse or maybe doctor. Someone else, a man hidden behind what appears to be multiple layers of hospital scrubs and latex gloves, produces a hypodermic needle and a glass vial. Needles are my enemy. I’ve always been afraid of them, and I’m trying not to think of the needle. I wish Jimmy was holding my hand, his confident voice prodding me to be brave. The man jabs the needle into the vial, pulls back the hypodermic’s plunger to draw the vial’s medicine into the barrel. My stomach cramps up in anticipation of being injected, and then, as I think of Zerena, my heart sinks: no one has acknowledged my question about her, meaning she’s still missing.
“This is vancomycin, which is a powerful antibiotic,” the man says.
Looking at the needle, I think I’m going to faint. “Why do I need that?”
“It’ll knock out your infection. That’s why.”
Someone else swabs down my arm. At the smell of the alcohol, my nostrils flare.
“Other doctors told me yesterday I was going to be all right. They told me that yesterday, and they told me that the day before, and now you’re saying I’m not all right.”
“We’re doing everything we can. Vancomycin is extremely powerful on bacteria that’s otherwise antibiotic resistant. The side effects are mild—mostly limited to the pain you’ll feel at the site of the injection. It’s safe for lactating women. We’re running tests to see what’s causing the infection, but there’s a good chance this dose will knock out the bacteria even before the lab results come back. Plus, as soon as you’re rehydrated, we won’t need to keep you tied up to the IV anymore.”
“You won’t?”
“No, ma’am.”
“That’s the best news I’ve had all day. That means I can go home then, right?”
Though his eyes are focused on the hypodermic in his hands, I feel a sudden sympathy from him. “I’m sorry your day hasn’t been better,” he says.
“So am I. Do you ever have the feeling you were going to die?”
“Don’t be silly,” he says, patting my hand.
But it’s a feeling I can’t escape, this premonition of imminent death. All throughout the ward, babies cry, and I can’t stop myself from thinking of the babies who are behind the crying. Somewhere, Zerena is still alive and crying, and I hope I can live long enough to hold her again and dry away her tears. Without her, I’m a duck with no pond, a flimsy pink airplane with no sky.
“Hey, where’s Jimmy?” I ask. I wish I could phone him, talk to him, share all my worries with him, but he isn’t here. He isn’t here. I can’t trust him to be here when I need him.
The man sticks the needle in my arm. I know I should turn away, close my eyes, pretend this isn’t happening, but when he presses down on the hypodermic’s plunger, injecting me with the vancomycin, it’s like a cool wind breezes through me.
From somewhere across the room, my phone rings. It rings and rings, and I hope it’s Jimmy calling me. Or someone else—anyone—who might bring me good news about Zerena’s whereabouts, but my mind is a puddle of fear. Someone’s holding me down and jabbing a needle into me, preventing me from jumping across the room and fetching my phone. The needle stays in my arm long after its contents appear to be emptied, and the man counts out the seconds—“Oh twelve, oh thirteen, oh fourteen”—and at the magical number of “oh fifteen,” he raises his eyes from the needle. I feel myself fainting again, the borders of my vision becoming dark and cottony. His eyes widen, alarmed. He starts to say something. I catch his first two words—“Oh, shit!”—before things turn foggy.
Chapter Twenty-Six
JIM
There are no positives to ac-cent-tchu-ate, no ring-a-ding-ding cherishable moments to latch on to from this meeting with Simpkins. All of Tully’s money is counterfeit. Simpkins runs his fingertips over another hundred-dollar bill, brings it to his eyes, raises it to the overhead light, and shakes his head. “Nope. Not this one either. It’s all fake.”
“How can you tell?” Everything around me feels as if it’s falling apart. It’s not only Trish and Laurel tightening the screws. Now Simpkins is doing it too. My hopes, my dreams, sink in this gray tugboat of an office. “How can I be certain what you’re telling me is correct?”
Simpkins squints at me. “Because I know what I’m doing. That’s why.” He expounds with authority the errors of the currency—color-shifting ink that doesn’t shift to the right color when he tilts the bill, the watermarks that don’t appear when he holds it to the light, the blurry microprinting so sloppily rendered it couldn’t have met the exacting standards of a federal printing press. “So now that you’ve tried to pass off a fortune in counterfeit money on me, how do you propose we proceed?”
It never occurred to me that money, of all things, might not be what it seems. The amount is so trivial—a mere $10,000—that most of my clients wouldn’t think it worthy of a petty cash slush fund, but nothing, apparently, raises the hackles of the meek so much as the sense of being wronged, and so Simpkins launches into a rant. He can’t believe I’m so reckless as to sully our good relationship with counterfeit money. “You’re lucky I’m so ethical,” he says, shaking his head disapprovingly. “I’ll give you forty-eight hours to bring me some honest money to replace this junk.”