“Not another geography quiz.”
“Not right now. I’m wondering why you don’t write down what you want to tell me that you’re having such a hard time talking about.”
Her surprise was genuine, and it struck him again how intelligent people could be robbed of all ability to think rationally when it came to matters of the heart.
“I can try,” she said. She sat up. “Maybe today when I’m done reading the reports. You need to sleep now.”
She tried to roll out of bed, but he stopped her.
“Stay with me ten minutes,” he said.
With the light breeze from the window shifting over their damp skin, every nerve in his body still vibrating, he put his face to her scalp to draw in her scent, and fell asleep.
? ? ?
ANNA BEGAN TO drift off too, but five minutes later she sat straight up in bed with her hands pressed to her mouth.
“What?” Jack sat up too. “What?”
Her eyes were very round.
“Anna,” he said firmly. “What is it? A nightmare?”
“My cervical cap,” she said. “I completely forgot my cervical cap.”
Her eyes raced back and forth as if she were searching for something. Then she drew a deep breath and held it for three heartbeats.
“I think it will be all right. The timing is good.”
“Good? For what?”
“Ovulation. Or rather, the lack of it. I’m at the end of my cycle, not in the middle. Promise me we won’t lose our heads like that again.”
“Anna,” he said, brushing a curl off her damp cheek. “We’ll get carried away plenty, but I promise I’ll ask about the cervical cap first.”
She nodded, yawning. “Good,” she said. “I should get up now or you really will catch my cold.”
That made him laugh. He was still laughing when she slipped away, and left him to his dreams.
? ? ?
WHILE JACK SLEPT Anna read the postmortem reports, making notes and charts until she could no longer deny that there was a pattern. She had been so sure that Janine Campbell had tried to operate on herself, because she couldn’t imagine anyone, man or woman, purposefully injuring another human being in such a blatantly cruel way. She was no stranger to violence, to gunshots and stabbings, beatings and burns. Men were endlessly inventive when it came to hurting women, she understood this; and still here was the evidence that she was neither as worldly or cynical as she had believed herself to be.
It all made her miss Sophie more acutely. There was so much to miss about her cousin: the sound of her voice, the way she hummed when she went about some household chore, her dry sense of humor. Anna missed all those things, but just now, sitting with the autopsy reports spread out in front of her, she missed Sophie’s medical mind most. As diagnosticians they complemented each other, and Sophie would have had useful observations that Anna missed entirely.
? ? ?
IN THE AFTERNOON Jack got up to start his day, and Anna said as much to him. “As I have to do without Sophie, can I ask my cousin Amelie her opinion about the autopsies? She has more experience than Nicholas Lambert and I do, even put together. Something here might trigger a useful association.”
Jack liked the idea, so she wrote out a case-by-case summary along with her own observations, and put it all in an envelope that she addressed to her cousin.
“Ask Ned to mail it for you,” Jack had suggested.
Anna made a sound into her teacup that she hoped he would take for agreement. The truth was, she had a small plan. An innocent plan, really. One that was unlikely to turn up any new information and thus, she told herself, best kept to herself for the time being.
Except Elise came to call in the early evening, and Anna remembered there was another mind available to her. She lacked experience, but that might even work to their favor; clear-sighted and without prior assumptions, Elise might see something.
She debated with herself while Elise talked about what was going on at Roses: Mrs. Lee had declared the little girls to be healthy again, freeing them to bounce around the house and garden like frogs on a griddle for the entire afternoon. Margaret had predicted tears before bedtime and Aunt Quinlan had made a rude sound to that idea and called the girls to her.
“They wanted to come see you, but your aunt said they had to give you another day.”
Anna wanted to hear the stories Elise had to tell, but her mind kept turning back to the reports.
Elise was saying, “. . . reading a story by Mark Twain that had everybody laughing.” And then: “Are you tired, shall I go?”
“Not in the least. Really. How are things at the hospital?”
It was like offering water to a man in the desert. Elise told her about the surgeries she had observed in the last week, stopping to ask Anna questions and to consider the answers.