He is dying. Gretchen has him on a morphine drip because he can’t keep the pills down anymore. He is coughing blood. He cannot remember the last time she left his side. She just sits there, holding a white washcloth to his face to catch the blood when he coughs, the drool of saliva he can’t swallow. He can smell the corpse and he can hear her voice, but that is it. There is no other sensation. No pain. No taste. His vision has narrowed to a circle a few feet around his head. He is aware of her when she touches him, her blond hair, her hand, her bare forearm. There are no more lilacs.
Gretchen puts her face next to his and gently turns his head so that he can see her, her face shimmering and folding in the light. “It’s time again,” she says.
He blinks slowly. He is bathed in soft, thick, warm blackness. He doesn’t even register what she has said until he feels the spoon in his mouth. This time, he cannot swallow the poison. She pours water down his throat after it, but he chokes and vomits all the fluid up. His entire body spasms, sending a black wall of pain from his groin to his shoulders. He fights for oxygen, and in his alarm, his consciousness is forced back into his body and all of his senses come horribly alive. He screams.
Gretchen holds his head against the bed, her forehead pressed hard against his cheek. He lurches against her hand, screaming as loudly as he can, letting all the pain and fear drive out of his body through his lungs. The effort tears at his throat and the screams turn into choking and the choking to dry heaves. When his breathing returns to normal, Gretchen looks up, and slowly begins to wipe the sweat and blood and tears off his face.
“I’m sorry,” he gasps stupidly.
She sits, her attention fixed on him for a time, and then stands up and walks away. When she returns, she has a hypodermic. “I think you’re ready now,” she says. Gretchen holds the hypodermic up for him to see. “It’s digitalis. It will stop your heart. Then you’ll die.” She touches his face tenderly with the back of her hand. “Don’t worry. I’ll stay here with you until it’s over.”
He is relieved. He watches as she injects the digitalis into his IV tube and then takes her seat at his deathbed, one hand resting lightly on his pale knuckles, the other on his forehead.
He does not think about Debbie or Ben or Sara or Detective Archie Sheridan or the Beauty Killer Task Force. He just concentrates on her. Gretchen is all there is. His only thread. If he can stay focused, he thinks, he will not be afraid. His heartbeat increases, coming faster and faster, until it loses all rhythm to him—so foreign and wrong that it doesn’t even feel like his heart anymore. It is just someone knocking, panicked, desperate, on a faraway door. Gretchen’s face is the last thing he sees when the sudden pain seizes him by the chest and neck. The pressure grows. Then there is a blinding, excruciating white burn and finally, peace.
CHAPTER
40
I an pulled into a parking spot in front of Susan’s building. Susan picked a strand of ginger pet hair off her black pants, feeling it between her fingers for a moment before she let it float onto the floor mat below. Ian’s Subaru smelled like Armor All and his wife’s Welsh Corgi. Chic twentysomethings slumped in the afternoon sun outside the coffeehouse on the corner, smoking cigarettes and thumbing through alt weeklies. They worked as waiters or at galleries, or didn’t have jobs, and always seemed to have a great deal of disposable time. Susan envied them. They were like some marvelous high school clique that Susan’s reputation kept her from joining. She looked up at the old brewery building with its large windows like yawning mouths. Its brick facade seemed embarrassed by all the glass and steel that surrounded it.
“Do you want to come up?” she asked Ian.
Ian made an apologetic face. “I’ve got copy to look at.”
“Later?” Susan asked, carefully shaving the edge of neediness off of her voice.
“Sharon’s having people over for dinner,” Ian explained. “I’ve got to go right home after work. She’s making some kind of meal that involves boiled chard. I said I’d stop and pick up cheese.”
“Boiled chard and cheese? It must be important.”
“Tomorrow?” Ian asked.
“Forget it.”
“No,” Ian said awkwardly. “I mean you’ll have the story for me tomorrow, right? The next installment?”
Susan picked another dog hair off her pants and flicked it on the floor mat. “Oh, right. Sure.”
“By noon, okay? Seriously.”
“No problem,” Susan said. Then she got out of the car and walked inside.
Archie walked back outside into the backyard. The mayor was nowhere to be seen, presumably off in a quiet corner preparing for the press conference. The Hardy Boys were standing with their hands on their hips in the door of the garage, and Anne was now standing with Claire near the shed. Archie saw Henry emerge from the garage with McCallum’s gray cat in his arms, and he waved him over.
“They fingerprint the bike yet?” Archie asked.
The cat nuzzled its head under Henry’s chin and purred. “Yeah. It’s clean.”
“Totally?” Archie asked.