Pressure Drop (32 page)

The rocks were spread out now on the cave floor. Where the pile had been, he saw a small hole in the limestone wall, about the size of a manhole cover, perhaps smaller. He moved closer to it and shone the light inside. In the yellow beam he saw a narrow tunnel, stretching to the end of the range of his torch, and beyond. He squeezed his shoulders into the entrance, pulled himself a few feet inside. His tank scraped against the rock and he halted. He gazed along the beam again, still without seeing the end of the tunnel. He began to reconsider his aversion to safety lines.

Then he noticed the debris. There was lots of it, scattered on the tunnel floor. He began picking it up and examining it under the light.

Green sea glass.

A rusty nail.

Steel-framed eyeglasses, the lenses still intact, although the frame was badly rusted. It crumbled in his hand.

Matthias checked his air. Only 550 p.s.i., and now he'd have to decompress. Time to go. Past time. He started backing out of the tunnel. At that moment, his hand brushed something, something round with a handle. He knew without looking that it was a cup or a mug, and he held on to it as he pushed himself out of the tunnel, out of the cave, and into the blue hole.

Matthias swam up out of the salt water, into the red layer, up into fresh water. He stopped at 10 feet to decompress. The water was clear and luminous. He didn't need the torch to see what he had brought up from the tunnel.

It was a ceramic coffee mug, thick and heavy. He cleaned it while breathing the rest of his air. The mug was white, with black trim around the lip. Except for a small chip on the inside of the handle, it was unmarred. The mug was a simple, cheap, utilitarian object. There was nothing interesting about it except for where he had found it and the black swastika etched on the outside.

29

Nothing.

Not blackness. Nothing.

Then her lips burned, and nothing became blackness. Her lips burned again, and black and white flashed on and off, like a balky slide projector. The slide projector flashed up an image of Jason. He was very upset, crying and shaking and saying, “Oh my God, oh my God,” over and over. Nina felt sorry for him until he burned her lips again.

“No,” she said, or tried to say, and turned her head away. She felt hot liquid flow down the side of her neck, onto her shoulder. First it was hot, then warm, then she couldn't feel it at all.

“Oh my God. Drink, Nina. Please, please, please.”

Her eyelids closed instead, all by themselves. They weighed thousands of pounds, and no human power could keep them open. The smell of coffee came. And went.

She looked down a long tunnel and saw flashing at the end: black and white. White, black. Black, white.

Then just black again. Nothing came next. There was a big difference between blackness and nothing: the difference between life and death.

She slipped toward nothing. It was easy. It was acceptable.

But a finger forced its way into her mouth, scratched her palate, prodded the back of her throat. She tried to twist away from it, but couldn't. The finger prodded. She retched.

“Puke it up, Nina, puke it all up.”

The finger prodded. She retched, and retched again.

“Good girl. Good good girl.”

Hands pulled at her body. “Come on, Nina. Get up. We're going to walk.”

“No,” she said, or tried to say.

Thumbs, somehow strong enough to lift thousands of pounds, pushed open her eyelids. She saw Jason's eyes, wet and wide open with fright. “Come on.”

“No.”

“Can you talk?”

“No.”

“Make a sound.”

“No.”

“Come on.” Jason pulled her to her feet. “Walk.” She slumped. He held her up. “Walk.”

“No.”

He dragged her across the room, back and forth.

“No, no, no.”

“Open your eyes, goddamn it. Walk. Say something. Oh my God. Why, Nina, why?”

Nina vomited again, all over him.

The Birdman had gorgeous red plumage and horn-rimmed glasses. He soared over the forest primeval with a blue-wrapped bundle clutched in his talons. Nina strained to see what was in that bundle. All at once she was soaring too, until she made the mistake of taking a peek at the greenness far below and immediately began spinning down, down, down.

“Nurse. I think she's waking up.”

Nina opened her eyes. She was in a hospital room: far from the forest primeval.

“Nurse. Her eyes are open.”

A blinding light shone in one open eye, then the other. Nina blinked a few times. Two faces came into focus. She could see every pore, every hair, every mole on those faces. One face had coarse skin, rough and dry. That was the nurse's. The other had smooth, beautiful skin. That was Jason's.

“Nina,” Jason said. “Can you hear me?”

“Yeah.”

“How do you feel?”

Her mouth was dry, her tongue crusty. She tried to swallow. “Like shit,” she said.

“But at least you're …” Jason stopped himself. He exchanged a glance with the nurse; a glance Nina didn't like.

“What is it? Is something wrong with me?” She tried to sit up, but couldn't. Her muscles were slack and feeble, that was part of the reason. The other part was that her arms and legs were strapped to the sides of the bed with leather restraints. “What the hell is going on?”

“It's just a precaution,” Jason said. “In case no one was around when you woke up.”

“A precaution against what?”

“Well,” said Jason, not meeting her gaze, “not against, exactly, more like just to be extra-safe.”

“What are you talking about, Jason?” Nina had started to raise her voice, but reined it in when she felt the rawness in her throat.

“You're on suicide watch,” the nurse said. “Frankly.”

Nina shouted, a wordless howl that ripped through her throat. The sound, even to her own ears, sprang from the margins of human emotion; from Bedlam and Bellevue and the mouths of those mad wanderers in the streets who sometimes had to be strapped down. That realization didn't prevent her from uttering it again. She struggled to sit up, jerking her body on the bed, to no effect.

“Oh God, Nina, please,” Jason put a hand on her shoulder. She tried to writhe away from his touch. “Please,” he said.

Nina stopped writhing, forced her body to be calm. She lay quietly for what seemed like a long time, but was probably no more than half a minute. Then she took a deep breath and spoke in an even tone. “Untie me.”

Jason turned to the nurse. The nurse said: “I can't.”

“Why not?” Nina said, starting at once to lose her even tone.

“Because, like I told you,” said the nurse, perhaps tiring of her dramatics, “you're on suicide watch, that's why not. Or don't you remember downing a bottle of Seconal?”

“Seconal? I didn't take any fuck—” Nina froze in mid-sentence.

“We pumped it out of you downstairs,” the nurse told her, a little more gently.

“I—I didn't …” It all began coming back: the note in her typewriter, her signature, the liver-spotted hand. “I didn't do it,” she said.

“Denial, huh?” said the nurse.

“You must have gone to school with Hal Palmeteer.”

“What's that suppose—” said the nurse.

“Nina,” Jason interrupted, “what are you saying?”

“I'm saying someone must have done it to me.”

“Who?”

Nina had no answer. Jason and the nurse looked at each other again. Nina could see that the nurse didn't believe her. A handy diagnosis stuck to people who made Bedlam sounds and blamed their problems on “someone”: paranoia. That hurt, but nothing like seeing that Jason didn't believe her either. He was worried; he felt sorry for her; but he didn't believe her. Nina began to cry. She cried like never before in her life, a wail that accompanied bad emotions: rage, bitterness, self-pity. This wasn't weeping: there was nothing pretty about it, nothing sympathetic, nothing feminine. It was the sound of unrestrained and unmannered female pain.

“Nina, please. Please, Nina.”

“Go away,” Nina cried. “Just go away.”

“Nina, I—”

“Go away.”

“I can't stand seeing you like this.”

“Go.”

They went. Nina's crying became sobbing, slowly diminished to nothing except the occasional sudden and involuntary gasp, like a crying baby's.

Like a baby. That set her off again.

Later she slept.

It was a dreamless sleep until the end. Then bright red wings fluttered in her subconscious. The Birdman was coming with his little bundle. Nina opened her eyes before he arrived.

Jason was gone. So was the nurse. They had been replaced by a thickset woman with frosted hair and a fresh suntan. The woman resembled someone Nina had seen in the past, but seemed much more rested and relaxed than before. It was only because they were occupying the same positions as they had on their previous meeting—Nina in a hospital bed, the woman on a chair beside it—that she recognized her visitor: Detective Delgado of the NYPD.

“You're back,” Nina said.

“Yup.”

“With a tan.”

“Cancún.”

Nina's mind began to clear. She uttered the first thought that came to it. “You've found him?”

“Found who?”

“Who? The—my baby.”

“Oh no. Nothing like that.” Detective Delgado was watching her closely. The whites of her eyes were white; the blue bruises under them were gone. “You don't look so good,” Detective Delgado said.

“I feel fine.” Nina started to sit up; the restraints held her in place. “For Christ's sake. Why are they doing this?”

“To protect you. And them, from liability.”

“Who's going to sue them if I jump out the window? My ghost?”

Detective Delgado didn't smile. Her face sagged a little. Cancún was speeding away from her, like another galaxy in an expanding universe. “It's just routine,” she said.

“But I didn't try to kill myself.”

“That's what your partner says you said. Which is why I'm here.”

“Jason called you?”

Detective Delgado pulled out her notebook and plucked a ballpoint from behind her ear. “Yup,” she replied, and flipped through the pages. “He's your business partner, right?”

“Right.”

Detective Delgado's eyes moved back and forth across the page. “Jason,” she said. “Came up to your apartment with some take-out. Got worried when you didn't answer. Couldn't find the doorman to let him in so he broke down the door. He found you on the floor, found the note and the empty bottle of pills, and called nine-one-one. He also induced vomiting, which is probably why you're alive now.”

“Jason broke down the door?”

Delgado turned the page. “Only knocked the lock loose, actually. But it was good enough.” Delgado picked up a metal evidence case, opened it and approached the bed. She held up a sheet of Kitchener and Best stationery. Nina read: “
I cannot live without my precious baby. Please, please don't think too badly of me
.”

“Is that your letterhead?”

“Yes.”

“Your signature?”

“Yes. But I didn't write that note and I didn't sign it.”

“Who did?”

“I don't know.”

Delgado reached into the case and took out an empty brown pharmaceutical bottle labeled “Seconal: 100 milligrams x 36.” “This was on your kitchen table. Is it yours?”

“I don't know.”

“Did you have a bottle of Seconal in the apartment?”

“Yes, but I only took one, and it wasn't last night.”

“Then how did the other thirty-five get into your stomach?”

Nina didn't reply right away. From the hall came sounds: squeaking wheels, a man whistling “Memories.” Then there was quiet, and Nina said: “Someone tried to kill me.”

“Who?” asked Detective Delgado.

“I—I don't know who. I only saw his hand.”

“Why do you say ‘his'?”

“Because it was a big hand, old, with big veins.”

“There are big women.”

“Yes, but …”

“But what?”

“I think I saw that hand before. Earlier yesterday. He was a man, an old man. But powerful looking.”

“What man?”

“The appraiser.”

“What appraiser?”

“I don't remember his name. I'm not sure he even said it.”

“Why do you call him an appraiser?”

“That's what he said he was.”

Detective Delgado rubbed her forehead, on the spot between the eyes. When she stopped there were two vertical furrows in her forehead that hadn't been there when Nina opened her eyes, but which she remembered from their first meeting. “What was he appraising? Where was this?”

“In Dedham.” Nina said.

“Dedham?”

“A suburb of Boston. It's about—”

“I know where Dedham is,” Delgado interrupted. “What were you doing there?”

Nina told her about Laura Bain. She told her about Clea in her carriage in the backyard, and the Cambridge Reproductive Research Center that was now an electronics store; she told her about Laura's hopeful last conversation with her; she told her about Laura's suicide note and Laura's Seconal; she told her about the real estate agent and the appraiser in Laura's study.

Detective Delgado watched her the whole time. The whites of her eyes weren't quite so pure now. There was a long silence after Nina finished. Then she said: “Seconal?”

“Yes. That's suspicious, isn't it?”

“That's one way of putting it.”

“What do you mean?”

“No one takes Seconal anymore. Not as a sleeping pill. Too easy to abuse. They've got safer drugs now.”

“Therefore?”

“Your friend left a note, you left a note. She took Seconal, you took Seconal.”