What Comes Next (58 page)
Then he gave her the grade: A.
He had a reputation at the university as an exceptionally tough grader, and he could recall giving out only a few such high grades in his years teaching, and never before in a freshman survey course. Young Ms. Riggins’s effort was a match for the papers he anticipated from the juniors and seniors taking his advanced Abnormal Psych seminars.
Professor Parsons added the paper to the top of the stack he expected to return to the other students after the next lecture, which would be the last before the summer break was upon them. He was reluctant to pick up another teenager’s effort and start the assessment process again. When he did, he grimaced widely and groaned loudly, for the next paper had an obvious typo in the very second sentence of the opening paragraph.
“Haven’t they heard of spell-check?” he muttered. “Don’t they bother to read through their work before handing it in?”
With a flourish he circled the error in dramatic red.
Jennifer hurried out of her Social Trends in Modern Poetry class and rapidly made her way across campus. She had a set routine that she followed every Thursday, and even though she knew there would be some necessary changes this last time she wanted to make certain she stuck to it as much as possible.
Her first stop was a small florist in the center of town, where she purchased an inexpensive bouquet of mixed flowers. She always chose the brightest, most vibrant colors, even in the dead of winter. Whether it was bitterly cold or sunny and mild, as it was this particular start-of-summer day, she wanted the arrangement to jump out.
She took the flowers from the nice saleslady who recognized her from her many visits but who had never asked her why she needed the flowers with such impressive regularity. Jennifer simply assumed that the lady had accidentally noticed where she placed them, and that was why she’d never intruded by asking what they were for. The saleslady thought the girl was interesting, because everyone else buying flowers in the shop was ordinarily quick to loudly state their purpose. A wedding anniversary luckily remembered. A birthday. Mother’s Day.
Jennifer’s flowers were for something different.
She took them wordlessly, hurried back outside into the midafternoon sunshine, and dropped them on the seat of her car. She drove directly across town to police headquarters. Usually there were parking spaces close by, and the few times the street had been crowded, patrol officers had waved her into their private lot behind the station.
This last day she was fortunate, easily finding a spot right in front of the modern-design brick and glass entranceway She didn’t bother to feed the parking meter; she simply jumped out, flowers in hand.
She crossed the broad sidewalk to the front doors. Just outside there was a large bronze plaque mounted prominently on the wall. It had a glistening gold star at the top that trapped rays of sunlight and highlighted the raised inscription.
In Memory of Detective Terri Collins.
Killed in the Line of Duty.
Honor. Dedication. Devotion.
Jennifer placed the flowers beneath the plaque and took a quiet moment. Sometimes she recalled the detective seated across from her during one of her aborted runaways, trying to explain why escape was such a poor idea when clearly she didn’t really believe that herself. She would say to Jennifer that there were other routes out. All she had to do was search hard for them. This, Jennifer had learned in the three years since the detective died rescuing her, was true. So often she would whisper to the plaque, “I’m doing exactly what you said, detective. I should have listened to you. You were right all along.”
More than one police officer had overheard her say this, or something similar, but none had ever interrupted her. Unlike the florist who expected her on Thursdays, they all knew why Jennifer was there.
“It’s Thursday, it must be poem day,” the nurse said in a friendly, welcoming lilt. She looked up over some paperwork and a computer screen at the main desk inside the wide doors of a squat, unattractive cinder-block building off one of the main roadways leading into the small college town. The doors had been designed to accommodate wheelchairs and gurneys and were equipped with electric open assists that
whooshed
when anyone pressed the right button.
“Absolutely,” Jennifer replied, smiling in return.
The nurse nodded, but then she shook her head, as if there was something both happy and sad in Jennifer’s arrival.
“You know, dear, he might not understand anything much anymore, but he really looks forward to your visits. I can tell. He just seems a little more with it on Thursdays, waiting for you to come by.”
Jennifer paused. She turned for a second and looked outside. She could see sunlight diving between the branches of trees that swayed in a light breeze, their full green leaves wrestling with breaths of wind. From where she stood, she saw the sign outside the building: Valley Long-Term Care and Rehabilitation Center.
She looked back at the nurse. She knew that everything the nurse said was untrue. He wasn’t
more with it.
He was deteriorating a little more each week.
No,
Jennifer thought,
every hour more drops away.
“I can tell, too,” she said, joining in on the lie.
“So who did you bring along for today’s visit?” she asked.
“W. H. Auden and James Merrill,” Jennifer replied. “And Billy Collins, because he’s so funny. And a couple of others, if I have the time.”
The nurse probably didn’t recognize any of the poets, but she acted like each choice made absolute good sense. “He’s out back on the patio, dear,” she said.
Jennifer knew the way. She nodded to a few of the other staff she passed. They all knew her as the Thursday poetry girl and her regularity was more than enough reason for them to leave her absolutely alone.
She found Adrian seated in a wheelchair in a corner shadow.
He was bent over slightly at the waist, seemingly inspecting something directly in front of him, although the angle of his head told Jennifer he couldn’t even see the fine afternoon sunlight. His hands quivered and his lip twitched with Parkinson’s-like symptoms. His hair was completely white now, and the fitness that he’d once relied upon had faded. His arms were like sticks, his thin legs jumped nervously. He was cadaverously underweight, and he hadn’t been shaved, so gray stubble marked his sunken cheeks and chin. His eyes were cloudy.
If he recognized Jennifer there was no way for her to tell it.
She found a chair and pulled it up next to the old professor. The first thing she said was, “I’m going to get straight A’s in my major—no,
our
major, professor. And next year will be the same. I will keep at it however long it takes, and whatever you started I will finish, I promise.”
She had worked on this speech in her head for some days. She had not told him this before. Mostly, she had been preoccupied with simpler things to tell him about, such as how she had finished high school and getting into college and then what courses she was taking and what she thought of the teachers who had once been his colleagues. She sometimes talked about a new boyfriend or something as mundane as her mother’s new job and how she seemed to have recovered from exiting her relationship with Scott West.
But mostly she read him poetry. She had become quite good at inflections, rhythms, and language, finding the subtleties in the verses and capturing them for the old man—even if she knew he could no longer hear or understand anything she said. It was, Jennifer knew, the
saying of it
that was important.
Jennifer reached out and took his hand. It seemed paper-thin.
She had done her research and confirmed it with conversations with the rehabilitation center staff. Professor Thomas was simply and inexorably sliding into death. There was nothing anyone could do about the torture, except hope that as his brain functioning had evaporated he wasn’t in terrible pain.
Except she knew he was.
She smiled at the man who had saved her. “I thought maybe a little Lewis Carroll today professor. Would you like that?”
A small stream of spittle appeared at the corner of his mouth. Jennifer took a tissue and carefully wiped it away. She thought he had been through much near-death, the disease and the wounds from the shootout that should have killed him, but didn’t, although they had left him crippled. It did not seem fair.
She reached down to her backpack and removed a book of poems. She took a quick glance around. A few other patients were being wheeled through the nearby garden, admiring the flowers laid out in rows, but on the patio the two of them were alone. Jennifer thought she would not have a better moment to read to the professor.
She opened the book but the first lines came from memory: “
’Twas brillig, and the slithy toves did gyre and gimble in the wabe…
”
The poetry book was thick—a compilation of generations of English and American poets—and she had slid a small syringe between the pages. The syringe had been lifted during a visit to campus health services six months earlier, a bit of sleight of hand while coughing with a faked case of bronchitis.
The syringe was filled with a mixture of Fentanyl and cocaine. The cocaine had been easily obtained from one of the many students “working” their way through college. The Fentanyl was harder to acquire. It was a powerful cancer drug, a narcotic used to mask the harshness of chemotherapy. It had taken her a few months to befriend a girl who lived down the hallway from her and whose mother was suffering from breast cancer. On a weekend visit to the girl’s house in Boston, Jennifer had managed to steal half a dozen tablets from a medicine cabinet. This was more than a lethal dose. It would stop his heart within a few seconds. She had felt bad about the theft and betraying the confidence of her new friend, but it couldn’t be helped.
She kept reciting as she rolled back the professor’s shirtsleeve.
“Beware the Jabberwock, my son! The jaws that bite, the claws that catch!”
Jennifer took a final glance around to make sure no one was watching what she was doing.
“One, two! One, two! And through and through the vorpal blade went snicker-snack!”
She had no experience giving injections but she doubted this would make a difference. The professor didn’t flinch as the needle penetrated his flesh and found a vein. She plunged the concoction home.
Nothing remained of Adrian’s imagination save a dull gray. He could see diffuse light, hear some sounds, understood that words resonated inside a part of him hidden by disease. But all the sheaves that, bound together, had made him into who he was were now scattered and broken. And yet suddenly all the opaque waters within him seemed to come together like a wave, and he managed to lift his head just a little bit and see figures in the distance, beckoning to him. Illness and age dropped aside and Adrian ran forward. He was laughing.
“And has thou slain the Jabberwock? Come to my arms, my beamish boy! O frabjous day! Callooh! Callay!”
Jennifer watched carefully, her hand on the old man’s pulse as it faded away. Then, when she was absolutely certain that she had set him as free as he had set her, she closed the book of poetry. She bent down, kissed him on the forehead, and quietly repeated, “O frabjous day! Callooh! Callay!”
She replaced the syringe and the poetry book in her backpack and then wheeled the professor into a bright spot on the patio and left him there. She believed he looked peaceful.
On the way out, she told the nurse on duty “Professor Thomas fell asleep in the sun. I didn’t want to disturb him.”
It was, she thought, the least she could do.
TWO STRANGERS, TWO FEARS.
FOR HIM, IT’S LOSING HIS MIND.
FOR HER, IT’S LOSING HER LIFE.
Retired psychology professor Adrian Thomas has spent a lifetime delving into other people’s disturbed minds. Now he’s been diagnosed with degenerative dementia, and all his thoughts are of ending his own life while he still can.
But his clouded mind clears when he witnesses a kidnapping: a teenage girl, snatched off the street and bundled into a white van. The police dismiss him as a confused old man. But Adrian knows what he saw. And he knows he might be this young girl’s only hope for rescue.
His search will lead him into the chilling world of online pornography, and the elite community who subscribe to the website What Comes Next. A website where the viewers decide what happens to their on-screen hostage. A website that is about to feature a new star: a frightened teenage girl known only as Victim Number Four...
“A fiendish story… A gripping plot… This is an exceptional novel.” —
Washington Post
John Katzenbach is a bestselling author of psychological thrillers. His work has been published in more than 25 languages. Four of his books have been turned into films. He won the
Grand Prix de Littérature Policière
for his novel
The Analyst
. He lives in Western Massachusetts.