Harvest (28 page)

The maitre d' swept past, escorting a flamboyantly-dressed woman to a nearby table, where she was greeted with a noisy chorus of"There you are, darling," and'love your dress!"Their high-pitched gaiety at that particular moment struck Abby as vulgar. Even obscene. She wished she and Mark had stayed home. But he had wanted to eat out. They had so few free evenings together, and they hadn't properly celebrated their engagement. He had ordered wine, had made the toast, and now he was finishing off the bottle -something he seemed to be doing more and more these days. She watched him drain the last of the wine, and she thought: All the stress of my legal problems is affecting Mark as well.

"Why didn't you ever tell me about them?" she asked.

"It never came up."

"I would think someone would mention them. Especially after Aaron died. The team loses three colleagues in six years, and no one says a thing. It's almost as if you're all afraid to talk about it."

"It's a pretty depressing thing to talk about. We try not to bring up the subject, especially around Marilee. She knew Hennessy's wife. She even arranged her baby shower."

"The baby who died?"

Mark nodded. "It was a shock when it happened. A whole family, just like that. Marilee went a little hysterical when she heard about it ."

"It was definitely an accident?"

"They'd bought the house a few months before. They never got the chance to replace the old furnace. Yes, it was an accident."

"But Kunstler's death wasn't."

Mark sighed. "No. Larry's was not an accident."

"Why do you think he did it?"

"Why did Aaron do it?Why does anyone commit suicide?We can come up with half a dozen possible reasons, but the truth is, Abby, we don't know. We never know. And we never understand. We look at the big picture and say, things get better. They always get better. Somehow, Larry lost that perspective. He couldn't see the long range any more. And that's when people fall apart. When they lose all sight of the future." He took a sip of wine, then another, but he seemed to have lost any enjoyment in its taste. Or in the food.

They skipped dessert and left the restaurant, both of them silent and depressed.

Mark drove through thickening fog and intermittent rain. The whisk of the windshield wipers filled in for conversation. That's when people fall apart, Mark had said. When they lose all sight of the future.

Staring at the mist, she thought: I'm reaching that point. I can't see it any more. I can't see zohat's going to happen to me. Or to us.

Mark said, softly: "I want to show you something, Abby. I want to know what you think about it. Maybe you'll think I'm just crazy.

Or maybe you'll be wild about the idea."

"What idea?"

"It's something I've been dreaming about. For a long time, now." They drove north, out of Boston, kept driving through Revere and Lynn and Swampscott. At Marblehead Marina, he parked the car and said, "She's right there. At the end of the pier."

She was a yacht.

Abby stood shivering and bewildered on the dock as Mark paced up and down the boat's length. His voice was animated now, more animated than it had been all evening, his arms gesturing with enthusiasm.

"She's a cruiser," he said. "Forty-eight feet, fully equipped, everything we'd need. Brand new sails, new nav equipment. Hell, she's hardly been used. She could take us anywhere we'd want to go. The Caribbean. The Pacific. You're looking at freedom, Abby!" He stood on the dock, arm raised as if in salute to the boat. "Absolute freedom!"

She shook her head. "I don't understand."

"It's a way out! Fuck the city. Fuck the hospital. We buy this boat. Then we bail out of here and go."

"Where?"

"Anywhere."

"I don't want to go anywhere."

"There's no reason to stay. Not now."

"Yes there is. For me there is. I can't just pack up and leave! I've got three years left, Mark. I have to finish them now, or I'll never be a surgeon."

"I am one, Abby. I'm what you want to be. What you think you want to be. And I'm telling you, it's not worth it."

"I've worked so hard. I'm not going to give up now."

"What about me?"

She stared at him. And realized that, of course, this was all about him. The boat, the escape to freedom. The soon-to-be-married man, suddenly seized with the urge to run away from home. It was a metaphor that perhaps even he did not understand.

"I want to do this, Abby," he said. He went to her, his eyes glittering. Feverish. "I put in an offer, on this boat. That's why I got home so late. I was meeting with the broker."

"You made an offer without telling me?Without even calling me?"

"I know it sounds crazy--'

"How can we afford this thing? I'm way over my head in debt! It'll take me years to pay back my student loans. And you're buying a boat?"

"We can take out a mortgage. It's like buying a second home."

"This isn't a home."

"It's still an investment."

"It's not what I'd invest my money in."

"I'm not spending your money."

She took a step back and stared at him. "You're right," she said quietly. "It's not my money at all."

"Abby." He groaned. "Jesus, Abby--'

The rain was starting to fall again, cold and numbing against her face. She walked back to the car and climbed inside.

He got into the car as well. For a moment, neither one of them spoke. The only sound was the rain on the roof. He said, quietly, "I'll withdraw the offer."

"That's not what I want."

"What do you want?"

"I thought we'd be sharing more. I don't mean the money. I don't care about that. What hurts is that you think of it as your money. Is that how it's going to be?Yours or mine? Should we call in the lawyers now and draw up the prenuptial agreement? Divide up the furniture and the kids?"

"You don't understand," he said, and she heard a strange and unexpected note of desperation in his voice. He started the car.

HARVEST

They drove halfway home without speaking.

Then Abby said: "Maybe we should rethink the engagement.

Maybe getting married isn't really what you want, Mark."

"Is it what you want?"

She looked out the window and sighed. "I don't know," she murmured. "I don't know any more."

It was the truth. She didn't.

Tragedy Claims Family of Three While Dr. Hennessy and his family slept through the night, a killer was creeping up the basement steps. Deadly carbon monoxide gas, produced by a faulty furnace, is blamed for the NewYear's Day deaths of 34-year-old Hennessy, his wife Gail, 33, and their 6-month-old daughter Linda. Their bodies were discovered late that afternoon by friends who'd been invited to the house for dinner...

Abby repositioned the microfiche, and photos of Hennessy and his wife appeared on the screen, his face pudgy and serious, hers seemingly snapped in mid-laugh. There was no photo of the baby. Perhaps the Globe thought all six-month-old babies looked alike anyway.

Abby changed micro-riches to a date three and a half years before the Hennessy deaths. She found the article she was looking for on the front page of the Metro section.

Body of Missing Physician Recovered from Inner Harbor.

A body found floating Tuesday in Boston Harbor was identified today as Dr. Lawrence Kunstler, a local thoracic surgeon. Dr. Kunstler's car was found abandoned last week in the southbound Tobin Bridge breakdown lane. Police are speculating that his death was a suicide. No witnesses, however, have come forward, and the investigation remains open...

Abby centred Kunstler's photograph on the microfilm screen. It was a blandly formal pose, complete with white coat and stethoscope, Dr. Kunstler gazing directly at the camera.

And now, directly at her.

Why did you do it? Why did you jump? she wondered. And she couldn't suppress the afterthought: Or did you?

The one advantage of being relieved of ward duties was that Abby could skip out for the whole afternoon, and no one at Bayside would notice, or even care. So when she walked out of the Boston Public Library, and into the bustle of Copley Square, she felt a sense of both emptiness and relief that she didn't have to return to the hospital. The afternoon, if she so desired, was hers.

She decided to drive to Elaine's house.

For the past few days, she'd been asking around for Elaine's new phone number. Neither Marflee Archer nor any of the other transplant team wives had even known that Elaine's number had been changed.

Now, with the images of Kunstler and Hennessy still painfully sharp in her mind, she headed west on Route 9, to Newton. Talking to Elaine was not something she looked forward to, but over the last few days, whenever she thought about Kunstler and Hennessy, she couldn't help thinking about Aaron as well. She remembered the day of his funeral, and how no one had even mentioned the two previous deaths. Any other group of people would have found it an unavoidable topic. Someone would normally have remarked, This makes number three. Or Why is Bayside so unlucky? Or Do you think there's a common factor here? But no one had said a thing. Not even Elaine, who must have known about Kunstler and Hennessy. Not even Mark.

If he kept this from me, what else hasn't he told me?

She pulled into Elaine's driveway and sat there for a moment, her head in her hands, trying to shake off her depression. But the pall remained. It's all falling apart for me, she thought. My job. And now I'm losing Mark. The worst part about it is, I don't have any idea why it's happening.

Ever since the night she'd brought up the subject of Kunstler and Hennessy, everything had changed between her and Mark. They lived in the same house and slept in the same bed, but their interactions had become purely automatic. Like the sex. In the dark, with her eyes closed, she could have been making love to anyone.

She looked up at the house. And thought: Maybe Elaine knows something.

She got out of the car and climbed the steps to the front door. There she noticed the newspapers, two of them, still rolled up and lying on the porch. They were a week old and already yellowed. Why hadn't Elaine picked them up?

She rang the doorbell.When no one answered, she tried knocking, then rang again. And again. She could hear the bell echoing inside the house, followed by silence. No footsteps, no voices. She looked down at the two newspapers and knew that something was wrong.

The front door was locked; she left the porch and circled around the side of the house, to the back garden. A stone path trailed off into curving beds of well-tended azaleas and hydrangeas. The lawn looked recently mown, the hedges clipped, but the flagstone patio seemed disconcertingly empty. Then she remembered the furniture, the umbrella table and chairs that she'd seen here the afternoon of the funeral. They were gone.

The kitchen door was locked, but just off the patio was a sliding glass door that hadn't been latched. Abby gave it a tug and it glided open. She called: "Elaine?" and stepped inside.

The room was vacant. Furniture, rugs - it was all gone, even the pictures. She stared in bewilderment at the blank walls, at the floor where the missing rug had left a darker rectangle on the sun-faded wood. She went into the living room, her footsteps echoing in the bare rooms. The house was swept clean, vacant except for a few advertisement postcards lying just inside the front door mail slot. She picked one up and saw it was addressed to Occupant.

She went into the kitchen. Even the refrigerator was empty, the surfaces wiped down and smelling of disinfectant. The wall telephone had no dial tone.

She walked outside and stood in the driveway, feeling completely disorientated. Only two weeks ago she had been inside this very house. She had sat on the living-room couch and eaten canap6s and eyed the Levi family photos over the fireplace. Now she wondered if she'd hallucinated the whole scene.

Still in a daze, she got in her car and backed out of the driveway. She drove on automatic pilot, scarcely paying attention to the road, her mind focused on Elaine's bizarre disappearance. Where would she go? To uproot her life so abruptly after Aaron's death didn't seem rational. Rather, it seemed like something one did out of panic.

Suddenly uneasy, she glanced in the rearview mirror. She'd made it a habit to check the mirror, ever since Saturday, when she'd first glimpsed the maroon van.

There was a dark greenVolvo driving behind her. Hadn't it been parked outside Elaine's house? She couldn't be sure. She hadn't really been paying attention.

The Volvo blinked its lights on and off. She accelerated. The Volvo did too.

She turned right, onto a major thoroughfare. Ahead stretched a suburban strip of gas stations and mini-malls. Witnesses. Lots of witnesses. Yet the Volvo was still right behind her, still blinking its lights.

She'd had enough of being pursued, enough of being frightened. To hell with this. If he wanted to harass her, she'd turn the tables and confront him.

She swerved into the parking lot of a shopping mall. He followed her. One glance outside told her there were plenty of people around, shoppers pushing carts, drivers searching for parking spots. Here was the place to do it.

She slammed on the brakes.

The Volvo screeched to a halt inches from her rear bumper.

She scrambled out of her car and ran back to the Volvo. Furiously she rapped at the driver's window. "Open up, damn you! Open up.t'

The driver rolled down his window and looked out at her. Then he removed his sunglasses. "Dr. DiMatteo?" said Bernard Katzka. "I thought it was you."

"Why have you been following me?"

"I saw you drive away from the house."

"No, before. Why did you follow me before?" 'when?"

"Saturday. The van."

He shook his head. "I don't know about any van."

She backed away. "Forget it. Just quit tailing me, OK?"

"I was trying to get you to pull over. Didn't you see me flash my lights?"

"I didn't know it was you."

"Mind telling me what you were doing at Dr. Levi's house?"

'! stopped by to see Elaine. I didn't know she'd moved."