Pied Piper

CHAPTER 8

Accustomed to his wife’s bald head and lack of eyebrows, Boldt decided she looked wise, like a Buddhist monk, not sick like a cancer patient. He hated the smell of hospitals.

“It’s early,” she said.

“Priorities.”

“Progress?”

The adjacent bed lay empty and made, its surrounding tables neat and cleared of anything personal. In a ward where people went missing for good, the void pulled at Boldt. Had Rhonda Shotz gone missing for good as well?

Distracted, Boldt answered, “Five days now. Precious little to go on. We’ve lost her for the time being. Worse, we know he’ll strike again in the next few days.”

“What’s he doing with them?”

He shrugged. “Speculation.”

“You’re in a sick business.”

“With sick people. LaMoia calls the kidnapped children thumb-suckers. One of the Feds, a guy named Hale, he calls them ‘milk cartons,’ because their pictures used to be on the sides.” He saw a dying mother, not a sick woman-this happened occasionally. “You don’t need to hear this.”

“You could use some sleep,” she said kindly.

He couldn’t take sympathy coming from her.

She needed the sleep, not him, the insomnia having come with the bed rest, the bed rest with the treatment, the treatment with the disease. She refused the pills. She gladly accepted his reading to her, if and when his schedule allowed, which depended on Marina’s schedule. Lately, everything depended on something. Nothing stood alone: Even the grandest of trees anchored itself in the earth.

“Did you see the kids at all today?” she asked in a tone that bordered on accusation.

He answered with silence, for he would never lie to her. He devoted every spare minute to his two children, but to a mother in a hospital room this would seem like too little.

She suggested, “Maybe if you drove them to day care instead of Marina.”

“I’ll bring them by to see you tomorrow night after dinner.” He drove them to day care three days a week. Argument had no place here. He and his wife had fallen deeply in love again. If only he might be given a second chance. …

“Can I read to you?” he asked.

“Please.”

He dug around on her cluttered end table looking for the Mahfouz novel she had been reading.

“Not there. Here.” She strained to her right, fingers searching. Her nightgown fell open and he saw the broad freckled skin of her back. Her ribs showed. He didn’t know that back. It belonged to a different woman.

He subscribed to the belief that two could solve their individual problems better than one person alone. He felt terrified by the thought he might lose her.

“Read this,” Liz said, handing him a leather-bound Bible that Boldt had never seen. Numbered metal tabs marked sections. “Start at seven. The text is marked in chalk.”

Sight of the Bible sent a shiver through him. Did she sense the end? Had she spoken with her doctor? Panic flooded through him.

“Anything you want to tell me?” he asked, his voice breaking, the Bible shaking slightly in his hands.

“Number seven,” she said. “It’s marked.”

He fumbled with the book. He had ridden this roller coaster for months; he wasn’t sure how much longer he could endure it.

He cleared his throat and read aloud, his voice warm and resonant. She loved his reading voice.

Liz closed her eyes and smiled.

Some things were worth the wait.