“Yes, it was Mrs. Wilde.”
“Is the baby going to live?”
“I have a witness. He says a man of your son Fritz’s build threw the bricks.”
Terror. A delicious candy bath of it. “FJ? You mean my son, FJ? Or my husband, Fritz?”
“Your son.”
“I don’t think that’s likely. I mean, he’s got a ride to Hofstra! He wouldn’t blow it for something like that… It’s just not possible! And I certainly wasn’t up in the middle of the night, playing with bricks. We don’t even have bricks! Our house is a Tudor!”
“Why do you think my witness believes he saw you and your son?”
Rhea let out breath, affected sorrow. Whisper-talked. “Do you know he’s a drug addict?”
“I’m aware he has a medical condition.”
“You might check with the pharmacy on that. Most people’s legs don’t still hurt a decade after the amputation… It can’t have been easy to see the rest of Maple Street grow up and move away while he’s been stuck. His poor parents have gotten frail. Has it occurred to you that what he saw wasn’t what he thinks? I mean, it’s strange Arlo’s song was played. What was it? ‘Achy Breaky Heart’？”
“？‘Wasted.’？” He had that same expression, like he’d caught her in a lie. But he wasn’t smart enough for that. No one was.
“Oh, I don’t know that one. Well, it’s strange, isn’t it? It makes me wonder if it was his fans. You know how people get about celebrity.”
“How do they get?”
Rhea shrugged as if to say: Look what happened to my poor child. I should know best of all: this world’s a crazy place!
Bianchi grinned a tiny grin. “I’ll leave you. Thanks for your time.”
“That’s it? You sure I can’t help with anything else?”
“You and FJ can come by tomorrow.”
“We most certainly will! We feel very badly about the Wildes. Really—an awful thing. But I have to admit, we’re filled up right now. We’re just so sad about Shelly it’s hard to think about anything else. If it’s all right by you, could you respect that? Give us peace unless you have news of her?”
He looked at her. In her eyes. Calm and piercing. “We’ll find her.”
“What do you mean? Do you have a lead?”
“Peter Benchley,” he said.
“Hm?”
“I never named him, but you knew he was the witness who spoke out against your son.”
Rhea shrugged. Their eyes stayed locked. Tense. She was afraid she’d look guilty if she looked away. “People talk on this block. Good or ill, we’re all in one another’s business. I hear everything.”
Bianchi’s eyes moved at last. They scanned the hall, which she’d neglected, she now realized. Her own bitumen shoeprints marked the edge of the carpet. He looked toward the dining room, too. Shelly’s bloody cushion in plain sight. He looked right at it and a crazy urge filled her, to bludgeon him. With a chair or the metal base of a lamp. Right there, right then. Wait till dark and dump his body down the hole. And if anybody else saw, she’d kill them, too.
“She should be well preserved in that cold water. There are people whose job is to examine every detail. We’ll know exactly who’s to blame,” he said.
He looked back at her. Locked eyes. In her mind, she saw a girl, slumped against the bathroom floor, unconscious.
Quite against her will, Rhea Schroeder gagged.
He saw that, too. Then he was walking slowly down the steps, so unassuming as to seem invisible.
Obstetrics, NYU Winthrop Hospital, Mineola, New York
Monday, July 26 Early Morning
Gertie remembered everything. The sounds. The smells. Her children’s terrified expressions. The flashing ambulance she’d had to ride alone in, that had tinted everything a worrisome red. She remembered the many bedrooms she’d grown up in as a girl. Doors knocked down. Fists in walls. One time, there’d been a man making soft noises she hadn’t been able to locate until hours later, in the dark, when she’d finally opened her own closet door. She’d remembered these things, and then everything had gone red.
In the emergency room, sonogram pictures had shown a little girl. Head and eyes and spindly limbs. A baby sea creature.
Gertie’d cried and screamed. She’d carried on, knowing it was scaring the kids and Arlo, but unable to stop herself.
The doctor had been shaking her. Then a nurse. More screaming. So red. How could she have a baby inside her? Had a bad man put it there? She was still a baby! And then a shot in her arm, and the slow, cold rush of weightlessness.