The doctor turned back to his suitcoat and took a small stack of papers from the breast pocket. He walked toward her, clutching them, but stopped several feet from her, his arm extended. Her eyes darted to his offering, and she froze. The papers in his hands were obituaries. Her obituaries. The ones she made for all the unknowns.
“I’ve startled you, haven’t I?” he asked. “I’m sorry.” He pulled the papers back and fixed the spectacles on his nose, as if he were preparing to remind her of the words she’d written.
“These are just my favorites, but I’ve read them all. For years now, I’ve read them all. And I’ve wondered about you.” He read a few out loud, and she remembered each one. He’d taken them from her dead.
“It seems we both have a fondness for Dickinson. So witty. So droll. I think she must be like us. ‘I’m nobody, who are you? Are you a nobody too?’” he quoted. “This place is a home for the nobodies, isn’t it? But you and I, we take our work very seriously. We make the nobodies into somebodies.” He smiled and shook his head. “You name them all and give them lives. It’s delightful.”
“I don’t know what you want,” she whispered. “Or why you would take those from the dead. They have nothing, and you took even the little I could give them.”
“And you still don’t know who I am?”
She hesitated.
“Ah . . . I thought so.” He waggled a finger at her. “You shouldn’t lie about such things. Names are important.”
“Are you Francis Sweeney?” she said. “Is that your name?”
“Yes. Francis Sweeney. But my friends call me Frank. Dr. Frank. You may call me Frank too. That’s what your mother called me.” He added in a conspiratorial whisper, “And I called her Nettie.”
He waved one of the white obituaries in the air, and his voice resumed a jovial tone. “Just like the other Nettie. The one wrapped in a quilt. I took her, you know. I couldn’t resist when I saw her name, though she was already dead.”
“You . . . took Nettie?”
“Yes. Months ago. I left her for Eliot, but it seems I hid her too well. So . . . I had to put her somewhere he could find her.” He shook his head indulgently. “I leave him so many clues . . . but he never understands them. But you understood them, didn’t you, Daniela? You understand me.”
She didn’t answer. She didn’t understand him at all.
He smiled and put the stack of obituaries back in the pocket of his trousers.
“You helped them find me. You told them who I was. I would have left you alone to do your work. Why couldn’t you leave me alone to do mine?”
Malone had just pulled into the driveway at five on Wednesday afternoon when Molly came rushing from the front door, waving her arms and calling his name.
“Thank God you’re home early. She’s been calling all day. All day. And I haven’t known what to tell her. She’s on the line now.”
He stepped out of the car and slammed the door. “Who, Molly?”
“It’s an old woman. She’s asking for Michael Malone. I didn’t know whether to admit I even know who that is, but she’s insistent.”
He followed Molly into the house, an odd weightlessness in his chest, a cold heaviness in his gut. He picked up the receiver and placed it to his ear.
“Hello?”
“Mr. Malone?”
“Lenka?”
“No, Michael. It is Zuzana.”
Zuzana was calling him. And she’d called him Michael. He hardly knew what to make of that, but in a millisecond his mind tripped over the possibilities. She would beg him to come back. She would tell him to never come back. She would call him a cad. An Irish dog. A miserable fool.
But she did none of those things.
“Mr. Malone . . . Daniela is gone. And we don’t know where.”
He couldn’t douse his terror, and speed didn’t help. He drove straight through, from Chicago to Cleveland, stopping once for fuel and crowding the poor attendant who couldn’t pump the gasoline any faster than he was. He threw a wad of cash at him and pulled away a mere five minutes after he’d stopped, frothing at the mouth and unable to feel anything but the fear that soaked his shirt and dried his mouth.
He couldn’t even think about her without his hands slipping from the wheel and sweat dripping in his eyes. By the time he pulled into the driveway at 5054 Broadway, it was nearing midnight, and he had half convinced himself that she would be there waiting, simply because he could bear no other thought.