Undone (34 page)

He got to the opposite side. Fifty yards up the sidewalk was the eastbound stop for people going downtown—toward the
hospital. He made it just as the bus pulled up. The doors opened with a sharp hydraulic hiss and he climbed aboard. As usual, he took a seat near the front.

“Fulton?” asked the driver, whose voice Jasper recognized.

“Yes, thank you,” he said.

“Not your usual time,” the driver said.

“No,” Jasper said with finality.

Panting, heart hammering, he collapsed back against the seat and closed his eyes. He had suddenly known, in the lobby with Dunwoody, that more important even than alerting the authorities was the urgency of telling Pauline of his discovery. Whether she could hear him or not, whether she could process his words—whether anyone else ever believed him—he must tell
her
that her Herculean efforts to warn him about the fraud had not been in vain. Carlucci had said that Pauline’s condition was not dissimilar to that of people suffering posttraumatic stress, her brain and body shut down in defense. Was it not possible that Pauline’s state derived from the unimaginable frustration of having tried—and failed—to alert him to the hoax? He would not be able to forgive himself if she died before he had the chance to tell her that her messages had been heard; that she had
reached him.

He asked the driver how close they were—surely they were almost there? The driver named a street ten long blocks from the hospital. Panicked, Jasper touched the face of his glassless watch. Noon. He should, right now, be stepping through the door at his workplace. How long before his boss called Dunwoody to alert him that he was AWOL? How long before Dunwoody put out a bulletin to have Jasper apprehended?

The bus moved with aching slowness through the clogged traffic, edging up, tentatively, to each stop to let people in and out. Sluggish passengers disembarked, and sluggish passengers climbed laboriously in. Then the driver sat for a seeming eternity before pulling the handle that caused the doors to shut with a wan sigh. Often he was obliged to open the doors again, to allow a passenger to yank his bag or elbow or coattail from between the doors’ rubber gusset, before once again closing them. Then he would nudge the bus into gear and slowly pull away from the curb, only to lurch immediately to a stop in the unmoving traffic.

Jasper was seized suddenly with horror. Perhaps Pollock was right—perhaps he had imagined everything. He was overwrought. He had gone mad. He ripped the drawing tablet from under his arm, opened it and brought the page close to his face. Yes—yes, there they were, those words.
Chloe not yours. Maddy’s DNA.
He had not imagined it. He was not insane. He paged ahead. Saw the ACE man message. Then he turned to the tablet’s last page, where there was another set of shakily drawn letters and words—a message he had not yet seen:

DR GELD ACE M

The message was incomplete—but he knew its meaning, and even recalled when it must have been written. He was sitting beside Pauline and Maddy on the sofa, on that last day they were ever together as a family. Chloe was in her session with Dr. Geld. Maddy was softly singing the alphabet song as Pauline stared at her hypnotically. He had snapped irritably at Maddy, interrupting her in mid-song, interrupting Pauline (he now realized) in
mid-message. But he knew now what Pauline was trying to tell him:
Dr. Geld is the ACE man.
Had he known it, on some level, all along? Those pale eyes? That mocking smile and aura of amused insolence? A chill shivered his marrow.

“Here’s Fulton,” said the driver.

He stuck the tablet under his arm, struggled to his feet and then climbed down from the bus onto the sidewalk. He peered around helplessly through his dark glasses, suddenly disoriented in his excitement. A deep-voiced man said, “Can I help you?” Jasper felt a hand gently take his upper arm and he was enveloped in a comforting aroma of pipe smoke and leather. “On the way to the hospital?” the man asked in a kindly voice. Jasper said he was. “So am I,” the man said. “I’ll take you.”

They crossed the busy avenue and together negotiated the stairs up to the hospital entrance. In the lobby, the man said that he had to see someone on the first floor. “You’ll be okay?” he asked. Jasper said he was fine, thanked his invisible angel, and headed for the elevator bank. The whole time, he expected to hear a voice cry out, “There he is!” and to hear the hard-soled shoes of the hospital’s security personnel scuff rapidly up to him over the polished marble floors. But the lobby remained a placid, sunlit aquarium where soft shapes swirled and swam like fish. He joined a large, vague crowd waiting for the elevator. He heard the musical ping followed by the oily swish of the doors. Carried forward like a cork on a wave, he stepped inside.

The nurses expressed surprise when he limped, tapping, out of the elevator and up to the reception desk. “We usually
see you at the
end
of the day,” one of them sang out cheerfully.

“I have a little time off,” he said, trying to sound breezy. “I thought I’d say a quick hello to Pauline.”

“Be our guest!”

He moved down the hallway, expecting at any moment to hear a phone come to life in the nursing station behind him, then one of the nurses calling out, on a note of hysteria and surprise, “Mr. Ulrickson!” That did not happen. He made it to Pauline’s room and stepped inside. He approached the bed. She lay, as usual, utterly still, eyes closed, face pointed toward the ceiling, inert. He felt for and took her hand. He brought his face close. “Pauline,” he whispered.

Her closed eyelids remained still.

“Listen to me, honey,” he said. “Deepti brought me Maddy’s drawing tablet. I saw the messages. I read the warnings. I
know
the truth. I know that Chloe is
not
my daughter. I know it was a
trick
—a hoax.”

He paused. He squinted at her face. He thought he saw Pauline’s eyeballs stir beneath the thin flesh of the lids. But he could not be sure.

“I know about the man in the ACE cap,” he continued. “I know he went to Maddy’s bedroom when she was napping. He swabbed her. You saw it all. Honey,
I got your messages.
”

Her closed eyelids compressed, once. This could not be a random reflex, Jasper felt sure.

“I know about Geld,” he whispered. You managed to tell me
everything
, my love.”

Her eyelids trembled. Then, tentatively, quiveringly, they cracked open. He glimpsed through the slits the moist brown of her irises.

“My God,” Jasper said. “Oh my God.” He filled his lungs to bellow for the nurses. But he quashed the impulse. He had something to ask her. Something of grave importance. “Honey,” he said, “are you listening?”

Her eyelids fluttered. Opened wider. She was looking at the ceiling, her irises moving wildly, restlessly. Then, with her head rigidly immobile on the pillow, she turned her gaze in Jasper’s direction. She stared into his face. He saw her pupils contract, as she focused on him. He snatched off his dark glasses so that she might better recognize him. Was she registering the changes in him? The weight loss, the empty eye socket, the silvered hair? He watched with disbelief as her eyes began to take on a glint of life, to fill with recognition, animation, that spark of vitality and awareness that had always brimmed within them, that had convinced Jasper of her fierce determination to live.

“In a minute, I’ll tell the nurses you’re awake,” he whispered. “Everything is going to change. They’ll start the physio again. You’re going to improve. And I’m going to be with you. Forever. But first—I’ve got to ask you something. Something very important.” He cocked his head, listening, to hear if anyone was coming who might interrupt them. The corridor outside was silent. He turned back to her. “Did
Chloe
know?” he asked. “Was
she
part of this?”

Pauline saw, in her mind’s eye, the way Chloe had clutched
at the man’s arm—then let go when aware that the touch had been witnessed. She blinked once.

“Good Lord,” he said.

There had existed the possibility, however remote, that Chloe too had been the victim of his unknown adversary; she too might have been tricked into believing she was his biological daughter. He had, he realized, been clinging to this hope. But no. She knew. She was part of the conspiracy. Part of the plan to destroy him. Her every smile and batted eyelash a stratagem. That transparent pink nightie, and carefully prepared glass of Scotch, part of a coldly calculated trap. The revelation was nightmarish, unthinkable. The depth of her evil so much more chilling for being hidden behind that seeming innocence. But now, at least, he had a place to start, a thread to pull. He did not have long. By now, Dunwoody would know that Jasper had not arrived at work. That he had fled.

“I’ve got to go,” he whispered to Pauline. “They’re going to be looking for me. But please don’t worry. Everything is going to be all right. I promise. You were not too late.” He kissed her cheek. “You were
not
too late.”

He stabbed his glasses back onto his face and tapped his way out the door.

Approaching the nursing station he tensed, preparing to try to run, even with his damaged hip, if they tried to accost him. But, miraculously, he heard the nurse at the desk call out, “See you soon!”

Jasper limped up to her. “My wife is conscious,” he said,
addressing the indistinct shape. “She’s blinking in response to questions. Get the doctor—hurry!”

He heard a rattle as the nurse snatched up the phone.

“Hurry!” he cried. “She is awake. She is aware!”

He heard the nurse slam down the phone. The sound of her shoes hurried off down the hall.

He went to the elevator and pushed the Down button. Behind him, one of the phones in the now-abandoned nursing station exploded to life, letting out ring after ring. He heard the nurse’s shoes moving rapidly back up the corridor toward the phone. The elevator doors slid open. He stepped inside. He heard the plastic rattle of a receiver being lifted, then the nurse saying, “Hello?”

The doors closed.

The elevator swooshed downward. He felt the floor push up against the soles of his shoes, forcing his knees to flex. The doors slid open and two people surged at him out of the gray mist. But they were not the police—only a woman in a white lab coat and a doctor in green surgical scrubs. Jasper tapped out into the lobby. He made his way, heart pounding, to one end of the welcome desk, where there was a free public telephone—he had used it on his previous visits to notify Dunwoody that he was on his way back to the center. He took out his wallet, extracted a slip of paper, brought it to his face, squinted at the digits written upon it, then punched them into the phone. He turned his back on the brightness from the revolving doors at the entrance, hiding his face. He heard two rings, then a female voice said, “Hello?”

“Deepti,” he said. “It’s Mr. Ulrickson. I need your help.” He told her to meet him at the diner across the street from the hospital. “Right away,” he added. “And don’t tell
anyone.
”

J
asper arrived first and was shown to a booth near the back. His hypersensitive ears were assaulted by the din of crashing cutlery, waitresses calling out orders, frozen hamburgers clacked onto hissing grills and the roar of frozen french fries plunged into hot oil. A shadow fell over him. He waved away the menu and ordered a ham sandwich. He was not hungry but feared he would be asked to go if he tried to occupy a prime table without eating during the lunch rush.

He glanced up hopefully every time he heard the jingle of the bell over the door. In the wavering dimness, he could make out only the blurred silhouettes of people against the midday glare. He had been there for almost ten minutes and had seen
scores of people come and go before a figure entered the restaurant, hesitated, then rapidly approached.

“What is going on, Mr. Jasper?” Deepti said as she settled into the seat opposite him. “I was leaving to come here when that Officer Dunwoody phoned. He asked if you were with me. Or if I knew where you were.” Jasper, unable to respond, waited. “I told him no.”

His breathing and heartbeat resumed. “Thank you, Deepti,” he said. He glanced out the window beside him, toward the gray monolith of the hospital. Any minute now, he thought, a cruiser would pull up.

The waitress appeared, placed Jasper’s sandwich and coffee in front of him and offered Deepti a menu. “Just a coffee for me, please,” she said. The waitress dissolved into the noisy blur.

“Look at this,” he said, pushing his food aside and placing the drawing pad on the table between them. He opened the cover. “These are messages. From Pauline. Transcribed by Maddy. The alphabet game.” He explained about the day when the man in the ACE cap came to the house, ostensibly to inspect the furnace. “You were in the guesthouse, phoning your daughter, so you didn’t see him. But he went into Maddy’s room and swabbed her cheeks. He used
Maddy’s
DNA to establish that Chloe was my child. Pauline saw it all, and tried to warn me.”

Deepti seemed to be struggling with doubts. Then he showed her the final message, the one about Dr. Geld being the man in the ACE cap. “He was an impostor,” Jasper said. “He was no doctor.”

The memory of Dr. Geld’s insolent face flashed in Deepti’s
mind. “I did not trust that man,” she said. “There was something about him.” She recalled those final moments, after Pauline had been taken by ambulance to the hospital, and she had been alone with that man on the front path. He had said something impossibly rude in reply to her questions. A few minutes later, she had seen him, through the sliding glass doors of the living room; he had shown a disturbing overfamiliarity with Chloe. Recalling this, a sickening suspicion arose in Deepti’s mind. “Could Chloe have been part of this?” she asked.

Jasper nodded. He explained that he had confirmed this with Pauline.

“Pauline?” she said, incredulous.

He described how she had awakened from her coma when he told her that he had deciphered her warnings.

“Poor Miss Pauline!” Deepti said, when the full implications of this had sunk in. “Knowing the truth, and not being able to tell anyone!”