Part 5 (1/2)

A loud and terrible noise is filling my room, a shrieking and violent eruption of sound rus.h.i.+ng into the darkness, and I'm sitting up and I'm screaming. It's here, I'm not ready, my heart is exploding in my chest because it's here, it's early, it's happening now.

But it's just my phone. The shrieking, the horrendous noise, it's just the landline. I'm sweating, my hand clutched to my chest, s.h.i.+vering on my thin mattress on the floor that I call a bed.

It's just my stupid phone.

”Yeah. h.e.l.lo?”

”Hank? What are you doing?”

”What am I doing?” I look at the clock. It's 4:45 a.m. ”I'm sleeping. I was dreaming.”

”I'm sorry. I'm sorry. But I need your help, I really do, Henny.”

I breathe deeply, sweat cooling on my forehead, my shock and confusion rapidly fading into irritation. Of course. My sister is the only person who would be calling me at five o'clock in the morning, and she's also the only person who still calls me Henny, a miserable childhood nickname. It sounds like a vaudeville comedian or a small addled bird.

”Where are you, Nico?” I ask, my voice gruff with sleep. ”Are you okay?”

”I'm at home. I'm flipping out.” Home means the house where we grew up, where Nico still lives, our grandfather's renovated redbrick farmhouse, on one and a half rolling acres on Little Pond Road. I'm cycling through the litany of reasons my sister would be calling with such urgency at this unG.o.dly hour. Rent money. A ride. Plane ticket, groceries. Last time, her bicycle had been ”stolen,” loaned to a friend of a friend at a party and never returned.

”So, what's going on?”

”It's Derek. He didn't come home last night.”

I hang up, throw the phone on the ground, and try to fall back asleep.

What I'd been dreaming about was my high-school sweetheart, Alison Koechner.

In the dream, Alison and I are strolling with linked arms through the lovely downtown area of Portland, Maine, gazing through the window of a used-book store. And Alison's leaning gently on my arm, her wild bouquet of orchid-red curls tickling into my neck. We're eating ice cream, laughing at a private joke, deciding what movie to see.

It's the kind of dream that's hard to get back into, even if you can fall back asleep, and I can't.

At seven-forty it is bright and clear and cold and I am winding my way through Pill Hill, the upscale West Concord neighborhood that wraps around the hospital, where its surgeons and administrators and attending physicians live in tasteful colonials. These days a lot of these homes are patrolled by private-duty security guards, gun bulges under their winter coats, as if all of a sudden this is a Third World capital. There's no guard, though, at 14 Thayer Pond Road, just a wide lawn blanketed with snow so perfect and vivid in its new-fallen whiteness I almost feel bad tromping across it in my Timberlands to get to the front door.

But Sophia Littlejohn is not at home. She had to rush out early to perform an emergency delivery at Concord Hospital, a turn of events for which her husband is profusely apologetic. He meets me on the stoop wearing khaki slacks and a turtleneck, a gentle man with a trim golden beard carrying a mug of fragrant tea, explaining how Sophia often has irregular hours, especially now that most of the other midwives in her practice have quit.

”Not her, though. She's determined to do right by her patients, right up to the end. And believe it or not, there are plenty of new patients. My name is Erik, by the way. Would you care to come inside anyway?”

He looks slightly surprised when I say yes, says, ”Oh, okay ... great,” steps back into the living room, and gestures me inside. The thing is, I've been up and dressed for two hours, waiting to learn more about Peter Zell, and his brother-in-law is bound to know something. Littlejohn leads me inside, takes my coat and hangs it on a hook.

”Can I offer you a cup of tea?”

”No, thanks. I won't take but a few minutes of your time.”

”Well, good, because that's about what I have available,” he says, and tips me a friendly little wink, makes sure I know his diffidence is playful. ”I need to walk our son to school and myself to the hospital for nine o'clock.”

He gestures me into an armchair and sits down himself, crossing his legs, relaxing. He has a broad gracious face, a wide and friendly mouth. There's something powerful but unthreatening about the man, like he's a friendly cartoon lion, the genial overseer of his pride.

”These must be difficult times to be a policeman.”

”Yes, sir. You work at the hospital?”

”Yes. I've been there about nine years. I'm the director of Spiritual Services.”

”Oh. And what is that, exactly?”

”Ah.” Littlejohn leans forward, laces his fingers, clearly pleased with the question. ”Anyone who walks through the doors of a hospital has needs beyond the strictly physical. I'm referring to the patients, of course, but also family members, friends, and, yes, even the doctors and nurses themselves.” All this he presents in a smooth, confident disquisition, rapid and unfaltering. ”It is my job to minister to such needs, however they might manifest themselves. I am, as you can imagine, rather busy these days.”

His warm smile is unwavering, but I can hear the echoes in the single word, busy, see it in the big expressive eyes: the exhaustion, the long nights and wearying hours, trying to offer comfort to the perplexed and the terrified and the ill.

From the corner of my eye I'm catching flashes of my interrupted dream, pretty Alison Koechner as if she were sitting next to me, gazing out the window at the snow-frosted dogwoods and black tupelo.

”But-” Littlejohn clears his throat abruptly, looking significantly at my blue book and pen, which I have out and balanced on my lap. ”You're here to ask about Peter.”

”Yes, sir.”

Before I can pose a specific question, Littlejohn sets in, speaking in the same tone, rapid and composed. He tells me how his wife and her brother had grown up here, in West Concord, not far from where we're sitting. Their mother is dead of cancer, twelve years ago, and the father is at Pleasant View Retirement with a host of physical problems, plus the early stages of dementia-very sad, very sad, but G.o.d's plans are for G.o.d alone to divine.

Peter and Sophia, he explains, have never been terribly close, not even as children. She was tomboyish, outgoing; he was nervous, inward, shy. Now that they both had careers, and Sophia her family, they socialized only rarely.

”We reached out to him once or twice, of course, when all this began, but without much success. He was in rather a bad place.”

I look up, raise one finger to pause Littlejohn's onrus.h.i.+ng tide of narrative.

”What do you mean, 'a bad place'?”

He takes a deep breath, as if weighing whether it's fair to say what he's about to, and I lean forward, pen poised above my book.

”Well, look. I have to tell you that he was extremely disturbed.”

I tilt my head. ”He was depressed, or disturbed?”

”What did I say?”

”You said disturbed.”

”I meant depressed,” says Littlejohn. ”Would you excuse me a quick second?”

He rises before I can answer and walks to the far side of the room, allowing me a view into a bright and well-loved kitchen: a row of hanging pots, a gleaming refrigerator adorned with alphabet magnets, report cards, and school pictures.

Littlejohn is at the foot of the stairs, gathering together a navy blue backpack and a pair of child-size hockey skates from where they're slung over the banister. ”Are we brus.h.i.+ng teeth up there, Kyle?” he shouts. ”We're at T-minus nine minutes, here.”

A hollered ”okay, dad” echoes down the steps, followed by the rattle of footsteps, a faucet going on, a door slamming open. The framed picture on Zell's dresser, the clumsily smiling lad. The Concord School District, I know, has remained open. A feature had run in the Monitor: the dedicated staff, learning for the sake of learning. Even in the newspaper pictures, you could see that the cla.s.srooms were half full. A quarter, even.

Littlejohn settles back in his chair, runs a hand through his hair. He's got the skates cradled in his lap. ”Kid can play. He's ten years old, skates like Messier, no kidding. He'll play in the NHL one day, make me a millionaire.” He smiles softly. ”Alternate universe. Where were we?”

”You were describing your brother-in-law's mental state.”