“Khiva.”
“Spell it.”
“K-H-I-V-A.”
“You had a patient from Khiva?”
“I’m setting the questions, Mezzanotte. Answer, or admit defeat.”
“Don’t know.”
She narrowed her eyes at him. “I think you do.”
That made him really laugh. “Why would I lie?”
“To stop the game. But you’ve missed a question and it’s your turn to ask me.”
He tugged on a strand of her hair. “If you insist. Brunei. Spelled B-R-U-N-E-I.”
“Ei is the word for egg in German.”
“That’s your answer? Brunei is a—state or principality in Germany?”
“Not an answer. It was a guess.”
“I’m feeling magnanimous. One more try.”
She tapped her forehead with one knuckle. “Wait. It’s coming to me. Brunei is a Swiss canton on the Austrian border.”
He wrestled the book out of her hands and dropped it over the side of the bed, which made her squawk.
“That’s a valuable atlas.”
“I’ve got a bigger one. Lift up.” He tugged at the hem of her chemise, caught beneath her knees.
She slapped his hands away. “No.”
“No? Why not?”
“I need a reason?”
“I’ll give you a reason,” he said, tugging harder. “I’m rewarding you for that stunning example of a bluff. There’s no Swiss canton called Brunei. Now are you going to lift up?”
“No.” She was trying not to laugh.
“Well, then.” He shrugged. “I’ll have to peel you like a banana.”
She didn’t try very hard to stop him and the buttons were no challenge at all. The thin muslin slid off her shoulders and down her arms to stop at her elbows. With her breasts looking at him cheerfully Jack said, “I’ve got an idea for a different kind of geography quiz. And this one I’m pretty sure you’ll win.”
• • •
“TELL ME,” ANNA said a half hour later, still trying to catch her breath. “Do people just stop doing this when the real heat starts next month?”
She felt him smiling, but he rolled to one side so the breeze from the window could wash over her. “Is that better?”
“I wasn’t complaining. Do people stop in hot weather?”
He said, “Don’t tell me you’ve forgotten the bathtub.”
Anna giggled, and was surprised at herself for it.
Jack lifted his head to peek at her, gave a low sound of satisfaction, and dropped it again.
“So,” he said. “You were telling me about men covering up women to ward off the interest of other men. You want me to wear a veil and robes?”
Anna took a journal from under her pillow and began to flap it like a fan. “I’m considering it.” And then: “You know the strangest thing about being married?”
He lifted his head again, one brow raised.
“The playfulness. I never anticipated that, and now it makes me sad to think I might have gone my whole life without it. Did you expect it to be like this?”
“I hoped, is the way I’d put it.”
“But how did you know to hope for it?”
“My parents,” he said. “They are affectionate with each other, and my brothers have that too, with their wives. Each in his own way.” He thought for a moment. “Some more successfully than others.”
“Is that an Italian thing, do you think?”
He wiped a trickle of sweat from his brow. “I couldn’t claim that. You remember Giacalone the tailor.”
“Now that you remind me. ‘Why did you kill your wife?’ in Sicilian.”
He grinned at her. “We are an emotional people, in all directions.”
“From the stories I think my parents were affectionate,” Anna said. She was quiet, but he could hear her thoughts spinning, and he understood.
“I have an idea.”
“Not another geography quiz.”
“Not right now. I’m wondering why you don’t write down what you want to tell me that you’re having such a hard time talking about.”
Her surprise was genuine, and it struck him again how intelligent people could be robbed of all ability to think rationally when it came to matters of the heart.
“I can try,” she said. She sat up. “Maybe today when I’m done reading the reports. You need to sleep now.”
She tried to roll out of bed, but he stopped her.
“Stay with me ten minutes,” he said.
With the light breeze from the window shifting over their damp skin, every nerve in his body still vibrating, he put his face to her scalp to draw in her scent, and fell asleep.
• • •
ANNA BEGAN TO drift off too, but five minutes later she sat straight up in bed with her hands pressed to her mouth.
“What?” Jack sat up too. “What?”
Her eyes were very round.
“Anna,” he said firmly. “What is it? A nightmare?”
“My cervical cap,” she said. “I completely forgot my cervical cap.”
Her eyes raced back and forth as if she were searching for something. Then she drew a deep breath and held it for three heartbeats.
“I think it will be all right. The timing is good.”
“Good? For what?”
“Ovulation. Or rather, the lack of it. I’m at the end of my cycle, not in the middle. Promise me we won’t lose our heads like that again.”
“Anna,” he said, brushing a curl off her damp cheek. “We’ll get carried away plenty, but I promise I’ll ask about the cervical cap first.”
She nodded, yawning. “Good,” she said. “I should get up now or you really will catch my cold.”
That made him laugh. He was still laughing when she slipped away, and left him to his dreams.
• • •
WHILE JACK SLEPT Anna read the postmortem reports, making notes and charts until she could no longer deny that there was a pattern. She had been so sure that Janine Campbell had tried to operate on herself, because she couldn’t imagine anyone, man or woman, purposefully injuring another human being in such a blatantly cruel way. She was no stranger to violence, to gunshots and stabbings, beatings and burns. Men were endlessly inventive when it came to hurting women, she understood this; and still here was the evidence that she was neither as worldly or cynical as she had believed herself to be.
It all made her miss Sophie more acutely. There was so much to miss about her cousin: the sound of her voice, the way she hummed when she went about some household chore, her dry sense of humor. Anna missed all those things, but just now, sitting with the autopsy reports spread out in front of her, she missed Sophie’s medical mind most. As diagnosticians they complemented each other, and Sophie would have had useful observations that Anna missed entirely.
• • •
IN THE AFTERNOON Jack got up to start his day, and Anna said as much to him. “As I have to do without Sophie, can I ask my cousin Amelie her opinion about the autopsies? She has more experience than Nicholas Lambert and I do, even put together. Something here might trigger a useful association.”
Jack liked the idea, so she wrote out a case-by-case summary along with her own observations, and put it all in an envelope that she addressed to her cousin.
“Ask Ned to mail it for you,” Jack had suggested.
Anna made a sound into her teacup that she hoped he would take for agreement. The truth was, she had a small plan. An innocent plan, really. One that was unlikely to turn up any new information and thus, she told herself, best kept to herself for the time being.
Except Elise came to call in the early evening, and Anna remembered there was another mind available to her. She lacked experience, but that might even work to their favor; clear-si
ghted and without prior assumptions, Elise might see something.
She debated with herself while Elise talked about what was going on at Roses: Mrs. Lee had declared the little girls to be healthy again, freeing them to bounce around the house and garden like frogs on a griddle for the entire afternoon. Margaret had predicted tears before bedtime and Aunt Quinlan had made a rude sound to that idea and called the girls to her.
“They wanted to come see you, but your aunt said they had to give you another day.”
Anna wanted to hear the stories Elise had to tell, but her mind kept turning back to the reports.
Elise was saying, “. . . reading a story by Mark Twain that had everybody laughing.” And then: “Are you tired, shall I go?”
“Not in the least. Really. How are things at the hospital?”
It was like offering water to a man in the desert. Elise told her about the surgeries she had observed in the last week, stopping to ask Anna questions and to consider the answers.
“Do you think you might want to take up surgery?”
Elise didn’t have to think about her answer. “I’m more comfortable on the other end of things, working with the patients directly. I like the challenge of . . . figuring out what’s really wrong. Diagnosis.”
Anna said, “That was the impression I had, so I’m wondering if you might find it interesting to read these postmortem reports I’ve been looking at.” She put her hand on the folder.
Elise’s whole posture changed. “I’ve never seen a postmortem.”
“That’s why I thought you might be interested.” She gestured to a chair. “Sit down, let me explain.”
• • •
ELISE TOOK AN hour to read through the reports, and then she sat looking out the window for a good while. The day hadn’t yet begun to wane, though it was already eight. People were drawn outdoors by the light and the fine weather, the silky touch of a warm breeze.
Somewhere in the city was a man who had caused the deaths of at least five women and maybe as many as eight, without anyone taking notice. He went about his business without interference because he showed an unremarkable face to the world. Unless he walked down the street with a bloody knife in his hand, he could go on just as he had started: an apple that looked solid until you bit into it to find your mouth full of worms.
She turned to look across the room. Anna was sitting in the corner of a sofa, her cheek against her hand while she read. She sensed Elise looking at her, and met her eye.
“Thoughts?”
“A few observations, but I doubt they’re significant.”
“Go on. Don’t leave anything out.”
This felt like a recitation in the lecture hall. Elise organized her thoughts and started.
“This doctor—I think he must be a doctor, given some of these details—started to perform these operations with two goals in mind. He wanted the patient to die in terrible pain, but he wanted the death itself to take place out of his sight.
“With Mrs. Campbell he was too violent, and with Mrs. Liljeström he was so fast that he damaged an artery and she hemorrhaged immediately and bled to death. So neither case satisfied him. But in the third, fourth, and fifth cases he had settled on a procedure that gave him the result he wanted, and then he was exacting. The incisions are all in the fundus between the uterine horns and spaced evenly, like tick marks on a tally sheet: one, two, three. All of them are angled to cut into the intestines to a depth of about two inches. The instrument was not sterilized, and it might even have been purposefully contaminated. That seems likely, given how quickly the infection took hold and spread.”
She looked up from the report in front of her. “Shall I go on? I have just a few more thoughts.”
Anna said, “It’s useful to hear someone else’s interpretation, so please do.”
“I was thinking of how a patient is prepared for surgery of this kind. If these women had marks on their arms and legs that indicated they had been forcibly restrained, would Dr. Lambert have noted that?”
Anna’s brows rose sharply. “Why do you ask?”
“Because if there were no restraints, he must have used anesthesia. The natural impulse would be to twist away from the pain. I’ll tell you what I think probably happened.”
She got up and walked back and forth for a moment to gather her thoughts.
“I think this person must be someone who is very well established. Or at least, has that appearance. He presents himself as a highly educated medical authority, with broad experience. He won’t be very young, and his fees will be exorbitant. Do you happen to know—”
“Yes, the fees were very high, between two hundred and three hundred dollars.”
It took a moment for Elise to make sense of such a large number.
“So these women would expect someone with a professional demeanor,” she went on, more slowly. “Someone severe, and a little frightening, but not unkind. I’m not being clear. Do you know what I mean?”
“The strict but benevolent father,” Anna said.
Elise was feeling a little more comfortable now, and she let the story come out in the way she imagined it.
“The patients will have high expectations. He must have some kind of medical office or clinic, treatment and operating rooms and the right equipment, everything in good working order and well maintained. A pleasant waiting room, and there must be an assistant or nurse, certainly. Someone to help the patients undress and dress again, and someone—maybe the same person?—to administer anesthesia.
“He does this horrible thing, but then he wants it out of his sight, because he’s feeling vulnerable, maybe, or superstitious, or just guilty. He might be worried about evidence, I suppose. To get her out of his office as quickly as possible he will have to administer a good amount of laudanum, so that she’s far away when she realizes that something is very wrong. There are other autopsy reports coming?”
“There will be,” Anna said. “By the end of the day tomorrow. Would you like to see those when Jack brings them home?”
This question felt very much like a quiz. She wondered what Anna wanted to hear and decided that it didn’t really matter. She told the truth. “I’d be very interested if I can be of help.”
“I think you can,” Anna said, and finally she produced a smile. “It’s immodest of me, but I take some pride in how quickly you’re learning to think like a doctor. And now I’m going to tell you a secret. Ready?”
“Um, yes.”
“If you feel like you’re being tested, you are. In medicine, at least. If that’s the case, don’t watch the person who asked the question, for two reasons. First, the more you look at that person for signs of approval, the less likely you are to see any facial expression at all. Second, don’t be afraid of silence. It’s an old trick to use silence as another kind of test. It’s a way to determine how confident you are of your answers. If you don’t know, say so. If you do know, say that, and stop talking.”
Elise couldn’t quite keep from smiling.
“Go on,” Anna said. “Say what you’re thinking.”
“I’m thinking you remind me of some of the nuns.”
Her mouth twitched at the corner. “Anyone in particular?”
Feeling a little light-headed, Elise stood up and walked to the door. She chanced a look at Anna, who had one brow raised.
Elise said, “Yes.” And left the room without looking back over her shoulder.
41
DRESSED TO GO to the shops, Anna told Mrs. Cabot that she would be out for an hour.
Mrs. Cabot said, “Hmmm.”
Anna said, “I’m just going to the post office.” She might have tried to show her dimples, but the housekeeper had already proved herself immune.
Mrs. Cabot said, “Ned will be by any minute. I’ll send him to the post office for you.”
Anna didn
’t need Ned along on this outing. She wasn’t entirely sure herself what she hoped to accomplish, a fact that would be immediately obvious when he started asking questions.
“I need the exercise,” Anna said in a tone that any one of her students would recognize as: enough.
“I don’t like it.” Mrs. Cabot was more like Mrs. Lee every day.
“My cold is almost completely gone,” Anna countered. “It’s seventy-two degrees with a light breeze, the sun is shining. The fresh air will do me good.”
• • •
IN FACT, THE air and the exercise did her a great deal of good. It was such a relief to be out of doors that for a few minutes Anna walked at a steady pace feeling nothing but the sun on her face and an odd contentment.
She turned onto Ninth Street and picked up her pace, picked up her skirts, and stepped around the worst of the rubbish in the street. The smell of ripe trash in the sun was unavoidable in New York in the summer. In fact, that meant summer had really arrived, in Anna’s mind.
At the next corner she stopped, fishing in her pocket for coins for an old couple, the man holding out a tin cup. He smiled up at her with such obvious pleasure that she was taken aback for a moment.
“It’s Dr. Anna.” He peered up at her from the rolling platform that did the work of his missing legs; another veteran, one who had survived the worst and was still here, managing from day to day. He elbowed the woman next to him. “Sary, it’s Dr. Anna. You looked after our grandson when his knee went bad in February. Pavel Zolowski, if you recall. Our girl Judy married a Polack, you see. You came out to tell us how things stood after you fixed Pavel up.”
“I remember,” Anna said. “Of course I remember. A very lively boy. How is he?”
“Right as right can be,” said the old woman. Her eyes scanned back and forth, sightless but still seeking.
Anna would stay and listen if they wanted to tell her about their grandson, but she asked no intrusive questions; the poor had every right to their privacy and dignity. After a moment she put coins into the old woman’s hand directly, smiled at her husband, and took her leave.
• • •