The Hangman's Beautiful Daughter (14 page)

Spencer nodded wearily. "I'm going to have to drive out there when I get a chance. Anything else?"

"Yeah. You're due to testify in court in twenty minutes. You'd forgotten, hadn't you?"

"Why, no, Martha," he lied. "I've been looking forward to it. It'll be the high point of my day."

There was a print of a Monet painting on the ceiling. Laura lay on her back on the steel table and stared up at the pastel blur of flowers above her head. She supposed that it was better than looking at the ceiling, since Dr. Jessup did keep his patients waiting quite a while in the examination room. Perhaps he thought that the combination of piped-in music and French art would make the wait less tedious, but Laura didn't feel that she needed any such distractions. This was only a routine monthly examination to check on the baby's progress, and she had a hundred things to think about while she waited. On her way into the Medical Arts Building, she had seen another patient from Hamelin. Tavy Annis, the old gentleman who had played the violin for Maggie Underbill's solo, had nodded solemnly to her as they passed in the hallway. He had stopped at the door of Dr. Atef, the cancer specialist. Laura felt a pang of guilt that she should be visiting a doctor for such a joyous reason, while old Mr. Annis was 219

facing death. He looked thinner than he had at Christmas, and his skin was almost transparent.

She pulled the paper sheet closer around her swollen belly, thinking a quick, silent prayer on behalf of the poor dying man. At least he was old; it would have been even sadder if some young person were facing such a death. Her thoughts returned to her own health. Her weight gain wasn't too terrible—she would worry about losing it again next summer—and her blood pressure was normal. So was the urine sample she'd had to bring them in a paper cup; that was good: It meant that she wasn't developing edema. The nurses took all the preliminary measurements before they ushered her into the examining room. Beside the steel table stood the ultrasound machine that Dr. Jessup used to take pictures of the child inside her. He had given her the first picture, and she had sent it off in a letter to Will, labeled "Our First Baby Picture." Will wrote back that the ultrasound photo looked like a weather satellite picture of a hurricane. He had teased her, saying maybe they ought to name the baby Hugo or Camille.

Laura's thoughts had strayed from baby names to a grocery list for homemade soup by the time Dr. Brian Jessup bustled in, whistling between his teeth. He was about Laura's age; still looked like a tennis player, and his manner with his patients was one of jovial optimism, which Laura found comforting. "How are you feeling?" he asked as he adjusted his stethoscope.

"Like a beached whale," said Laura, looking up at him over the curve of her belly.

"That's fine," he said. "Whales are beautiful."

She was quiet then so that he could listen, first to her heartbeat, and then, farther down on her abdomen, for the sound of the baby's heart. He moved the stethoscope several times on her side. "He's hiding out in there," he muttered, shaking his head. "Let's see what we get on ultrasound."

He squirted a cold fluid on her swollen belly, and set the machine's receiver in place above the womb.

"I sent my husband the first photo you took," Laura said, trying not to squirm. "He's in the Gulf, you know, and—"

But Dr. Jessup wasn't listening. He was frowning at the pattern of white specks on the small screen. He moved the receiver in sweeping circles across her abdomen.

"I read somewhere that ultrasound can sometimes tell if the baby is a boy or a girl," said Laura. "You know, if it's turned the right way, and I wondered ..." The coldness had crept into her heart now, but she was determined to keep up bright chatter until Brian Jessup said something like "Oh, there it is!" or "This machine is acting up again."

But Jessup said nothing. His frown deepened until a furrow appeared in his forehead. He sighed and looked away.

"What is it?" asked Laura.

"Mrs. Bruce, I'm afraid I can't find the baby's 221

heartbeat. I'm going to send you to the hospital for some further tests, but I'm afraid they'll only confirm what the ultrasound is telling me now. The baby has died."

Laura sat up. "No," she said. "The machine must be broken. I can feel it move. When I walk, the baby moves."

Jessup sat down on the stool beside the steel table. "I know it must feel like it's moving of its own accord," he said softly. "But it's gravity. Your movements cause the fetus to move in the amniotic fluid, but . . . that's all."

"But how could it die?"

"It happens. Sometimes the umbilical cord gets wrapped around the throat, cutting off the child's oxygen supply, but sometimes the death occurs for no reason that we can detect. It wasn't anything you did. Please believe that."

Laura felt nothing yet. She was having a conversation that had no personal meaning yet. "Maybe your machine is broken."

"Maybe." The weariness in his voice belied that hope. "I'll ask the nurse to call the hospital, and we'll make sure. I'm really sorry."

Laura nodded. Later, she would have to think about telling Will, about living through all the questions in the months to come, about her own sense of loss, which had not yet hit her. She must keep her mind on the immediate consequences. In her throat she could taste tears. "And then? I suppose you'll have to schedule an operation?"

Jessup looked away for a moment, and then, reluctantly, back at her. "No. That isn't the pro-222

cedure. It's better for the mother if labor is allowed to occur naturally so that the hormones readjust naturally, and so on. Artificially terminating the pregnancy is not good for the system. Your body will take care of it on its own."

Laura swallowed hard. "When?"

"We can't tell," he mumbled. "It varies."

"Tomorrow? Next week?"

"No. Probably longer than that. If you were farther along, it would occur more quickly, but as it is . . ." His voice trailed away into a mumble.

"As it is—what?"

"It could be two months."

"But the baby is dead."

"Yes. But your body doesn't quite know that yet. It will take it a while to catch on, and then you'll have a normal labor and delivery, but with an unhappy ending. At least, though, you're prepared for it."

"It will all be for nothing."

Jessup switched off the ultrasound machine. "I'll tell the hospital that you're on your way, Mrs. Bruce."

Later, when she left the Medical Arts Building, she looked around for Tavy Annis, but he was gone. She pictured herself telling him, "I'm not sorry for you anymore. We both have death inside us."

It was past two in the afternoon, but Mark Underbill was still asleep. This had become normal routine for him now. He awoke in the late afternoon and prowled the house in the hours 223

of darkness, finally falling asleep around seven in the morning. It was like living alone, Maggie thought. Their paths seldom crossed, except in the early evening hours, when he would blaze into the colorless den, switch off her television program, and talk to her with an urgency that made him oblivious to any response she made.

"We need the money, Maggie. You see that, don't you?" he would say, pacing up and down as he spoke. "It's rightfully ours, after all, now that Dad is dead."

"Yes, Mark." She had tried to discuss the matter at first, saying that she had never heard any stories about Dad having any fortune hidden away, but Mark always dismissed her objections with a sneer. "Of course there was a hidden stash of money," he would insist. "We all knew about it."

Now she simply agreed with his premise, and let him talk. He never seemed to mind her silence. Sometimes he said people in the Pentagon had given the money to Major Underhill for an arms deal that never took place, and sometimes the fortune was a cache of gold from the treasury of South Vietnam, or drug money from a Saigon heroin deal. It was half a million, two million—he was never quite sure, but it was a lot. Enough to keep them in comfort for the rest of their lives. Sometimes he would offer Maggie a trip to Paris or a sports car for her sixteenth birthday.

Mostly, though, he seemed more concerned with getting the money than with spending it. He was angry that the money was being kept 224

from them when it was rightfully theirs. At first he thought that Mr. Stuart, the attorney, was trying to swindle them out of their inheritance, but later he decided that Mr. Stuart didn't know anything about the money. It was up to them to discover where it was hidden, Mark insisted.

While Maggie slept in the hours after midnight, Mark searched his father's belongings for information about the money. He studied the bank statements, turned drawers out looking for safety-deposit-box keys, and sifted through the paperwork in Paul Underbill's desk, seeking some clue about the missing fortune. Night after night, he looked in the same places, always saying that he must have missed it when he looked before. Maggie was never asked to help in the search, and she was glad. She didn't want to touch her parents' belongings. But if Mark had told her to, she would have had no choice.

She'd had no choice about school. One day just after Christmas, Mark had announced that they weren't going back to school when the holidays were over. All the people there were phonies who hated them, anyway, he said.

"But what about graduating?" asked Maggie. "What about college?"

"We'll finish school," Mark promised. "When we get Dad's money, we'll enroll in the best private school in the country. You can buy your college wardrobe from designers in Paris, if you want to."

"But suppose there isn't any money?" she persisted.

Mark gave her a pitying smile. "Of course 225

there is, Maggie," he said gently. "Look around you. You don't think they sank it all into this place, do you?"

His logic was ironclad, impervious to her diffident arguments. In the end it was easier to acquiesce, but perhaps it had not been wise of her to do so. After she ceased to debate with him about the existence of a family fortune, Mark began to speculate on more immediate ways to retrieve the money. His searches became more determined, and his belief in the fortune was unshakable.

Maggie was sitting in the shadows of the family room, watching a game show with the sound turned down to a level that was almost inaudible. She was wearing her jeans and one of Josh's old wool sweaters, because it was cold. There was a small electric heater that her mother had used in the upstairs bathroom, and Maggie had brought it down and set it in front of the sofa, but it added very little heat to the larger room. She brought down an old bedspread and covered her legs with it to hold in her body heat. She wore lipstick only to keep her lips from chapping, and her dull hair was caught up in a ponytail at the nape of her neck. It needed washing, but because she hated the feel of wet hair in the chill of the old house, she limited shampooing to once a week, hoping each day that the next would be warmer. She was afraid of becoming ill in the cold. Mark was too absorbed in his own obsessions to care for her. If she took to her bed with a fever, he might even forget that she existed at all. 226

She watched the gyrations of the game-show contestants with drowsy indifference. The muted ding of a bell sent them into muffled squeals of delight, so low was the volume on the set. Slender, cheerful housewives with bobbed hair and pastel dresses clapped their hands and smiled triumphantly when their answers tallied with those on the announcer's card. Maggie tried to imagine what their families were like, what homes they lived in. Surely none of these well-groomed, complacent women actually needed the money.

To Maggie they looked like the officers' wives she had seen on the military bases where her father had been stationed. They would roll shopping carts through the PX with blond toddlers in tow, smiling that same vapid smile, complacent in their security and their status. Their husbands had come into the army via ROTC programs in college, so perhaps they had been cheerleaders or sorority girls in their youth. Maggie's mother had not fit in with these tanned and supple aristocrats. Her husband had joined the ranks of officers through a field promotion in Vietnam, and he had never quite made it to gentleman. She was a high school graduate with an indifferent average on the business track, neither pretty nor popular.

Janet Underhill shied away from the pretty, vivid women who formed the social organizations for wives, feeling that her existence of generic brands and polyester, her ignorance of fashion and current events, and her tongue-tied awkwardness in the presence of their sparkling 227

emptiness irrevocably barred her from their society. Paul Underhill called them the "club soda" women, all fizz and no substance. Maggie suspected that he, too, was uneasy around them. She supposed that she caught her own shyness from her parents' distrust of these pretty, outgoing people. They always made her feel shabby and slow-witted, and when she encountered such people, she always wanted to shut her eyes until they went away. Sometimes she wished she could become one of them, safe in the approval of a pack of identically pretty people, but she knew that it would never happen. She was always different, and the club soda people could sense that, smell it. Nothing, not beauty or money or wit, could fool them into accepting an outsider.

Mark appeared in the doorway; his eyes were narrowed with sleep, and his chin was a stubble of beard, indifferently grown, and shaved off when he thought of it. He yawned and stretched, peering at the clock on top of the television. He wore an army sweatshirt and jeans, but he was barefoot. Maggie didn't know why he never seemed to be cold.

"Jesus, I'm tired!" he moaned, flopping down on the sofa beside her. "I've been up for an hour, going through Dad's papers. He wasn't exactly organized."

"Are you hungry?" asked Maggie, glad of a chance for companionship. "I could fry some hamburgers."

"Whatever," shrugged Mark. "Although we 228

really ought to go out and celebrate. I guess that can wait, though, until we have the money."

Maggie looked up. "The money?"

"Yeah. I found it." He dug in the front pocket of his jeans and pulled out a folded slip of paper. "At least I know where it is, and how to find it. Look at this."

Maggie took the paper from her brother's outstretched hand. "It's a dentist's bill," she said. "Dad went to the dentist in Johnson City the week before he died."

Mark nodded gleefully. "Exactly. Don't you see, Maggie? He had to leave a clue that no one could find but us."

"But what is it?"

"The number of his Swiss bank account. He had it engraved on his tooth!"

Maggie nodded. "Yes, Mark, I see." She did not say, But we buried him, Mark. She knew that it would not matter. She must talk it over with Josh when he called. Josh would know what to do. "I'll go and start the hamburgers," she told Mark, handing back the dentist's bill. She was almost always in the kitchen when Josh called.