Stars (The Butterfly Trilogy) (73 page)

     Kimmie!

     Seeing a flash of mischievous blue eyes and cheeks like two red apples, Judith rushed forward. But when she got close the image vanished and she was alone again.

     She hugged herself tightly. Don't come apart; not now, it's been two whole years...

     She resumed walking, at a faster pace, eager to leave the apparition far behind. And when she reached the Castle she hurried through the lobby,
slipped into one of the thickly carpeted vestibules that resembled a nave in a medieval church, and inserted her key into the elevator lock. Her apartment was in one of the four Sleeping Beauty-like towers, each of which was accessed only by private key-operated elevator.

     "It's your mind's way of not letting go," Dr. Alrich, a psychiatrist, had explained when she had told him about the visions of Kimmie that were cropping up with disturbing regularity. It could happen anytime, anywhere, and the hallucination, though brief, always left her frightened and nervous.

     "But I don't
want
to keep seeing her, doctor," Judith had argued. "I'm a physician. I am reality based. I know my daughter is dead and gone."

     "Intellectually, yes, but emotionally?"

     Judith quit going to him after that. Twelve months of therapy hadn't helped; Aldrich had had the irritating habit, like Mr. Smith, of constantly probing her about Kimmie. The best way to break free from the past, Judith had decided, was not to talk about it or think about it, but to let it go. Which was why she had ultimately left Green Pines.

     As she hurried inside her apartment and quickly closed the door, thankful she hadn't encountered anyone who wanted to talk, she went to the phone to see if she had any messages.

     Her hand froze on the telephone.

     Someone had been in her apartment.

     She looked around. Her predecessor, Dr. Mitgang, had had the suite done in a monochromatic hybrid of deco and classic contemporary, and Judith had liked it enough to leave it. She appreciated the clean lines, the lack of clutter, the simplicity and neatness of the decor. But now she saw the signs of disruption: the classic Wassily chairs not perfectly aligned around the glass-brick coffee table, the way Judith always left them; the mirrored placemats on her Lucite dining room table smudged and askew; the enormous floor-to-ceiling abstract painting behind the sofa slightly tilted.

     Leaving the phone, she went cautiously into the bedroom. It wasn't a ransacked mess; in fact, to the unaccustomed eye it looked painstakingly neat, like a showcase. But Judith saw the slight disarray of her burgundy and gray bedspread, and the single orchid plant on the gray storage headboard had been moved. But the final sign was the black and red Calder mobile
lying on the floor, as if someone had accidentally knocked it off and hadn't bothered to replace it.

     She quickly dialed hotel security, and a few minutes later a man in a navy blue blazer with a walkie-talkie attached to his belt arrived. He glanced around with a puzzled look on his face. "What makes you think someone has been in here, Doctor?"

     "Because I didn't go out this morning until after housekeeping had been in, and I always neaten up after the maids have left." When he gave her an odd look, she said, "I like things to be just so. Someone came in here while I was gone and moved things around. Maybe they were searching for something. They certainly left enough fingerprints."

     When he bent down to examine the chrome tubular frame of a Wassily chair to satisfy himself that there were indeed fingerprints there, Judith said, "I like my furniture to shine. I'm very particular about that."

     "Was anything stolen, Doctor?"

     "Nothing that I can see." Her jewelry was all there, and a wallet containing sixty dollars in cash. Nothing taken, but everything certainly had been gone through.

     She clasped her arms around herself; she was starting to shake. She felt as if she had been violated.

     The security guard made a discreet phone call, and Simon Jung arrived moments later, saying, "This is most distressing, Doctor." He sounded sincere. "Do you have any idea what they might have been after? Drugs, perhaps?"

     She turned to him. "Do you smell cigarettes?"

     He sniffed the air. "Yes, only faintly, I think."

     "Well I don't smoke, Mr. Jung," she said, "but I know someone who does."

     She found Zoey in the substerile room, languidly unpacking a shipment of sutures that had just arrived. Noticing that Zoey was placing the new sutures in front of the old ones, not rotating the surgical stock the way it was supposed to be, Judith said, "Miss Larson, I'd like a word with you."

     Zoey gave her a slow, lazy look. "You got another one of those calls again, Doctor," she said, a smile playing at her lips. "I told him I was giving him your messages. I told him that maybe you just didn't want to talk to him."

     "Miss Larson, I want you to pack your things and leave."

     Zoey straightened up. "Huh?"

     "You're fired. Pack your things and take the next tram down the mountain."

     "What are you talking about!"

     "My room was searched while I was out."

     "So?"

     "I believe you did it."

     Zoey rested on one hip and folded her arms. She was not wearing her uniform, Judith noticed, even though the clinic was open and anyone could walk in. "Why would I want to search your room?"

     "I don't know, maybe you were hoping to find out some thing about me, something you could blackmail me with."

     "You're crazy. Why are you always trying to pin everything on me?"

     "There was the smell of cigarettes in my room."

     "Oh sure, and you think I'd be dumb enough to smoke while I'm searching someone's room."

     "I can smell cigarettes right now, Miss Larson, and you're not smoking."

     Zoey's flat brown eyes flickered. Then she said, "Sure, like I'm the only person in the world who smokes."

     "The intruder also left a trail of fingerprints on my nice polished glass and chrome. That was very stupid of you. Now please leave."

     "You can't fire me. Only Mr. Jung—"

     "I run this clinic, Miss Larson, and that includes hiring and firing the nurse. And you are one sorry excuse for a nurse. You violated one of your profession's most sacred ethics—a patient's right to privacy. You searched my room and you gave Mr. Smith's story to that tabloid."

     "I told you that story was not my doing!"

     "I believe we are going to discover otherwise. Either way, I don't want you working here anymore. Pack your things. I've already alerted personnel. They will have your final paycheck ready."

     Zoey's insolence dissolved into panic. "Listen," she said, "I'll pay you whatever you want. I got thirty thousand bucks for Mr. Smith's story—you can have half of it.
All
of it. Just don't make me go."

     "Why? What's so special about this job? Is it the autonomy, being your own boss for most of the time? Is it drugs?" Judith flipped open the narcotics cupboard, which, by state law, should have been locked. "Or is it the movie stars, maybe, you like being around celebrities?"

     "I...I just like working here, that's all." Zoey began to wring her hands, and Judith saw perspiration on her upper lip. "This is the best job I've ever had."

     "What about the surgeon you used to work for in Santa Monica? The one who recommended you so highly. No, wait," Judith held up a hand. "I don't think I want to hear it. He either fired you and gave you a good recommendation just to get rid of you or you held something over him—the sort of nasty secret information you were hoping to find in my room. Whatever you're hiding from, Zoey, I can't help you."

     When Zoey tried to speak, Judith turned away and said, "I don't want to hear it. Just be out as soon as possible. And Zoey, you can count on me to write a letter to the state licensing board."

     Mr. Smith was dictating into a machine when he opened his door. "Come in!" he said, turning the recorder off. "You're an hour early, what a pleasant surprise!"

     He was dressed in dark brown slacks and a pale blue silk shirt with his initials on the pocket. His coloring was healthy; everything about him seemed to shine. This was not the ashen-faced man lying in pain she had met five days ago.

     "Can I offer you a drink, Judith, or are you still on duty?"

     She accepted a glass of white wine but didn't touch it as she told him about Zoey. "I guess she had been hoping to find out something about me, something sordid that she could hold over me. But all I was hiding was a poor dead child."

     He waited, not pressing her.

     The words came freely, on their own. "You see, Kimmie often faked illnesses, to get attention. Not that she didn't get any from either Mort or me—I
think we were good parents. But there was a certain amount of jealousy about the sick kids, I guess. If I was called out to treat a child with measles, for example, I would come home and find that Kimmie had painted dots on herself and she would complain that she was sick. It was harmless really. She was only eight years old; I assumed she would grow out of it." Judith went to the window. Sunlight streamed over her like a golden shawl. "A medical conference came up in San Diego. Kimmie didn't want me to go, because I would be gone for five days. But I wanted to go. For one thing, I was looking forward to a small vacation. I hadn't been out of Green Pines in a long time. For another, my paper on the management of wilderness emergencies was the keynote talk. And finally, some old medical school chums were going to be there. I explained all of this to Kimmie, promising to bring her a present from Sea World."

     Judith looked at the wineglass in her hand, as if wondering how it got there. Then she said, "The night before I was due to leave, I was called away from dinner to treat a child who had fallen and cut his head. And so when Kimmie told me the next morning that she had a headache, I thought she was faking. I told her we'd have a wonderful time when I got back, that I'd take her to Playland, you know, all the things you say to mollify a child.

     "The drive to San Diego took nine hours, and as soon as I checked into the hotel I called home. Kimmie was in the hospital. Mort said she had blacked out shortly after I left, and the physician who was taking care of her said she hadn't regained consciousness yet. He suspected intracranial bleeding. I left my car at the hotel and flew back to Sacramento, where I got a rental car and drove the rest of the way. It took me only four hours to get home instead of nine. But I was too late. Kimmie was dead."

     A memory flashed in her mind, one that she hadn't thought of, hadn't allowed herself to think of, in a long time: Judith and Kimmie arguing over what Kimmie was going to go trick-or-treating as—a bride, or a rock star like Madonna. In the end, Kimmie had won, and she went as a bride.

     "What was it?" Smith said. "What did she die of?"

     "My daughter had a congenital cerebral aneurysm. A weak blood vessel in the brain that had been waiting for eight years to burst. It chose the moment I left for San Diego."

     "And you haven't been able to forgive yourself for not being there. Judith, tell me: did Kimmie get sick because you went to that conference?"

     "No."

     "Would she have died from it anyway, even if you had been there?"

     "Yes."

     "Then it wasn't your fault. You're blameless."

     "No. What I'm guilty of was not being there with her in her last moments of life. She might not have regained consciousness, but it was possible that she could hear, and mine wasn't the last voice she heard." Judith pictured Kimmie's hospital room, so stark, devoid of flowers and cards and balloons because she hadn't been in it long enough—making it look like no one cared. And Kimmie beneath the sheets, just a small wrinkle in them, her little chest no longer rising and falling.

     "Do you have a picture of her?"

     Judith carried one with her all the time, in a locket around her neck. When she showed it to him, he said, "Hmm. Funny looking."

     "Yes, she was." She started to cry, and he took her into his arms.

     "Judith," he said as he held her, "I have decided to cause a sensation and attend the ball tonight. Will you do me the honor of accompanying me?"