A Quiet Death (6 page)

I felt my face flush. ‘Duh.'

‘I'll tell you what,' the staffer began again. Maybe he was softening. ‘Why don't you leave whatever the mixed-up thing is with me, and if this fellow called Skip is in the hospital here, surely he'll notice that it's missing and ask about it. Then, we can make sure it gets back to him.'

I tend to get huffy when thwarted, so I fixed the volunteer with a steely gaze of my own. ‘I'm sure you'll understand that unless you can confirm or deny the presence of a patient nicknamed Skip in this hospital, I can't return the items now in my possession to you directly, only to Skip himself, or to a designated member of his family.'

The old guy smiled. He actually smiled. ‘OK. Point taken. Why don't you write Skip a note? If it turns out he is, or was, a patient here, I can see that it gets to him. If, regrettably, he's passed away, I'm sure his next of kin would want all his effects returned and they'll get in touch with you. How does that sound?'

I faced Connie. ‘I don't have anything to write on. Do you?'

Connie pawed through her handbag, then shook her head.

‘There's a gift shop,' the staffer pointed out helpfully.

I popped into the gift shop and purchased a greeting card – a cocker spaniel holding daisies in his mouth on the outside, blank on the inside, where I wrote:

‘Skip. I hope this finds you recovering from your injuries. I have your Garfinkel's bag. If you get this note, please telephone me at . . .' I turned to Connie who was inspecting some stuffed bears. ‘Home or cell, do you think?'

‘Both, I imagine.' So I wrote the numbers down, signed the note ‘Hannah (the woman on the train),' stuffed the card into its envelope, scribbled on the front and handed it to the staffer behind the desk.

He raised an eyebrow. ‘Skip. Parens. Garfinkel bag. Not a lot to go on.'

I shrugged apologetically. ‘It's all I know.'

‘What now?' Connie asked as we strolled back to the spot where she'd parked her car.

‘Now?' I asked.

Connie pressed the keyless remote and the car beeped. ‘Yes, now.'

Using my good arm, I reached for the door. ‘Nothing to do but wait.

Later that afternoon, when Paul came home from class, he found me sitting in the dining room, the contents of the Garfinkel's bag spread out neatly on the table in front of me, a photograph in my hand.

After Connie dropped me off, I'd untied the letters, carefully preserving the pale green ribbons that had held them together for so long. I'd arranged them in chronological order – 1976 through 1986 – like a game of solitaire.

I held a pencil, freshly sharpened, with an eraser on the end. A spare pencil, equally sharp, was tucked behind my right ear.

I had a notebook in which I had already written ‘#1, Sep 15 1976 New York' and the address of the apartment in Paris where Lilith had been living at the time.

A cup of tea sat at my right hand, the bottle of pain pills at my left, but, surprisingly, I'd been so engrossed in what I was doing that I'd missed the last dose and hadn't even noticed.

‘Hannah, what on earth are you doing?'

I looked up at my husband and grinned. ‘Isn't it obvious? Research.'

‘Well,' Paul said as he set his briefcase down on one of the dining-room chairs, ‘so much for your protestations about invasion of privacy.'

‘I feel like a voyeur, I admit. But I've promised myself that I'll read only enough to help me find out who these letters belong to.' I tapped the letter dated 1976. ‘There have to be clues in the letters somewhere.'

Paul dragged a chair over from the wall next to the buffet and sat down at the table across from me. ‘What progress have you made?'

‘Look at this picture,' I said, sliding it toward him across the polished mahogany.

Paul studied the black and white image carefully. It showed a young man in his twenties with dark fluffy hair, long in back and trimmed to just cover the tips of his ears. Sunglasses dangled by one earpiece from the three-button placket of his Izod polo shirt. He was perched on the lip of an ornate fountain and smiling broadly for the photographer.

‘Who's this, then?'

‘His name is Zan.'

SEVEN

S
ometimes my husband has a one-track mind.

‘What's for dinner, or dare I ask?'

Abandoning the photograph, he had come around behind me, kissed the back of my neck, then begun to massage my aching shoulders with his thumbs. I rotated my shoulders against his hands. ‘Um, that feels good.'

‘Pizza?' I asked him after several more minutes of bliss. ‘Chinese carry-out? Or . . . do you fancy a stroll down to Galway Bay?'

Galway Bay won hands (and pink fluorescent cast) down, so we set out into the deliciously cool evening for the short walk up the street and around the corner to our favorite Annapolis hang-out.

‘What happened to you?' Fintan wanted to know when we appeared at the door.

‘Metro crash,' I told the restaurant owner simply.

‘My God,' he said, fumbling the pile of menus he was carrying. ‘Tonight, drinks are on the house. The usual?'

Fintan seated us in a quiet, two-table alcove near the front of the popular neighborhood restaurant, then, after admiring my eye-catching cast, went off to fetch our drinks – a frozen margarita for Paul and a mojito for me.

Paul spread a napkin in his lap. ‘So, his name is Zan. What's Zan short for? Alexander?'

‘I don't know. He just signs the letters Zan.'

‘Zandros,' Paul mused on. ‘Zander. Maybe even Zane. Last name?'

I shook my head. ‘Never. The man was married, I discovered very early on, and not to Lilith.'

‘Aha! The plot thickens.'

Just then, a waiter appeared with our drinks. After he took our dinner order, Paul tested his frozen margarita, licked salt off his lips and pronounced it good. ‘Without a last name to go on, it's going to be pretty tough tracking this Zan person down.'

‘I know. We're back to Mr Skip No Last Name again,' I complained, taking a sip of what turned out to be a very tasty mojito, heavy on the lime and crushed mint, just the way I like it.

‘Speaking of Skip, how do you think he's going to feel if he shows up asking for his Garfinkel bag and finds you've gone pawing through it?'

‘Well, I hope he'll understand that the only reason I was pawing through it, to use your term, is so I could find out who to return the bag to. Besides, you encouraged me to do it, if you recall.' I stared at the decorative window etched with a map of Ireland that separated our table from the hostess station on the other side of the wall. ‘If only Skip had told me his last name, instead of . . .' I took another sip of mojito. ‘Well, that's water under the bridge now. But, oh my God, Paul, he was so horribly injured, I can't believe he would have survived.'

‘Doctors can work miracles, Hannah.'

‘I just wish certain hospitals wouldn't be so close-mouthed about everything.'

‘Would you want just anybody prying into your medical history?'

‘No, but . . .'

‘I rest my case.'

‘One thing I don't get,' Paul said to me a few minutes later as he cut my portabella burger into pieces I could eat with one hand, while I tried to keep my left elbow elevated above my heart, as per doctor's orders. ‘Why didn't this guy, Zan, simply divorce his wife and run off with Lilith? She was single at the time, wasn't she?'

‘As far as I know.' I speared a wedge of mushroom and popped it into my mouth.

‘It's nuts,' Paul continued. ‘The two were obviously crazy about one another, and, according to the letters, the affair went on for over a decade.' He shoveled a forkful of mashed potatoes into his mouth. ‘Maybe the wife was rich, and he couldn't divorce himself from her money?'

I shook my head, chewing thoughtfully. ‘Somehow I don't think so. In one of the letters Zan beats himself up because even during mass, when he should be thinking pure thoughts, visions of what they did, and the times and places that they did it were running like a movie through his head. I'm one hundred percent positive that Zan was Catholic. In that case, divorce would have been out of the question.

‘In any case,' I continued, ‘Zan seems to be one of those high-principled “till death us do part” sort of chaps, although he never talks about that, or much about his personal life in any of the letters I've read so far. It's like . . .' I paused to wipe greasy fingers on my napkin. ‘I'm sure Lilith and Zan discussed these things when they were together, but in his letters it's like their own private little world.'

‘Are there any letters from Lilith to Zan?'

‘Not a one, but I know she wrote him.'

‘How?'

‘Well, he'd respond specifically to something she'd written to him earlier. Curiously, he seemed to know and be accepted by her grandmother and her uncle. When Lilith's grandmother turned eighty, for example, Zan asked Lilith to pass on his birthday wishes. There's nothing about Lilith's parents, though.' I waved a French fry. ‘And before you ask, I don't know their names either, although her parents were most likely Chaloux, too.'

‘You are a poet, and didn't know it,' Paul wisecracked.

‘Ha ha ha. After they'd been together,' I went on, ‘Zan would spend half the letter reminiscing about what they did during their time together, the rest of it anticipating their next rendezvous. I suspect they spent a lot of time in hotel rooms.' I grinned and waggled my eyebrows. ‘If it weren't for the postmarks and the letterhead he sometimes used, I wouldn't have a clue where he was writing from.'

‘Like where?'

‘He used hotel stationery, mostly, so I figure his job – whatever it was – kept him moving. Omaha, Chicago, Dallas, Rome, Mexico City, Paris. I'm trying to put it all together, looking for a pattern.'

I reached into the pocket of my jacket for the vial of pills, shook two out on the table, popped them into my mouth and chased them with a swallow of mojito.

Paul looked up from his shepherd's pie and gaped. ‘Hannah! Doesn't the label warn you not to take those things with alcohol?'

I coughed modestly. ‘Of course it does, silly, but they work much better on the pain part if you do. Besides . . .' I winked. ‘I don't have far to drive.'

After we finished our main courses, I threw caution to the wind and ordered dessert – bread pudding with Irish Mist custard sauce – and two spoons. By the time I scraped the bottom of the bowl and licked the last of the custard off my spoon, I was feeling no pain. Paul and I walked home slowly, arm in arm, stopping now and then along the way to admire the Halloween displays that were beginning to crop up in some of the shop windows.

Back home, while Paul cleaned up the dishes I'd left soaking in the kitchen sink since lunchtime, I climbed upstairs and sat on the edge of our bed to undress. I managed to remove my shoes, socks and jeans, but discovered that, no matter how hard I tried, I couldn't wriggle out of my shirt. I was able to slide my right arm out of its sleeve and ease the shirt over my head, but the logistics of threading the cast through the left-hand sleeve had me completely stumped.

‘Come sit with me until the news comes on!' Paul called from downstairs.

‘The hell with it,' I muttered to myself. Leaving the shirt dangling from my shoulder, I used my good arm to squirm my butt into some drawstring pajama bottoms. Then I grabbed an XXL navy ‘Fear the Goat' T-shirt from Paul's bottom drawer and padded downstairs to join my husband.

When he caught sight of me in the doorway wearing nothing above the waist but my bra and a T-shirt flapping from my shoulder like a flag of surrender, he grinned. ‘Need help?'

‘Got scissors?'

Paul fell back against the sofa cushions and dissolved in gales of laughter. ‘That's the most pathetic thing I've ever seen!'

I stood in the doorway and drooped. ‘I know. I managed to get into the shirt this morning, so I simply don't understand why I can get out of it now.'

Paul unfolded his long legs, stood, and crossed the room in a couple of long strides. He drew me into his arms, resting his chin on the top of my head. ‘Poor Hannah. I'm not hurting you, am I?'

‘Oh, no. Just the opposite. I'm medicated, remember?'

He lifted my chin and kissed the tip of my nose.

I smiled into his eyes. ‘Thanks, I needed that.'

Paul's lips found mine and I melted into him, pink fluorescent cast, uncooperative underwear and all.

‘I gather you need help,' he whispered against my ear.

‘I do.'

Keeping one hand on my waist, his other hand crept around my back, found the hooks on my bra and flicked it open.

‘Clever boy!' I whispered against his neck. ‘But then, you've always been skilled at one-handed bra removal.'

‘Practice makes perfect,' he said. Still holding me close, he duck-walked me over to the sofa. Soon it was just Paul, me and my pink fluorescent cast. He kissed my forehead, eyes, nose and mouth, then pressed his cheek against mine. ‘God, Hannah, I was so frightened. I don't know what I'd do if I lost you.'

I wrapped my good arm around his waist and drew him even closer. ‘Turn out the light,' I ordered as I shimmied along the upholstery until I was lying down.

Paul slipped a pillow under my head and asked, ‘Sure you're OK?'

‘I'm perfectly OK. Just elevating my arm,' I said, holding it over my head and out of the way. ‘Doctor's orders.'