Dean Koontz - (2000)

by From The Corner Of His Eye(Lit)

  Vanadium's hunch-more accurately, his sick obsession-was not sufficient reason for any court to issue a search warrant. Unfortunately, some judges were pushovers in such matters, if not to say corrupt. And Vanadium, fancying himself an avenging angel, was surely capable of lying to the court to finesse a warrant where none was justified. "I don't ... don't understand." Blinking sleepily, pretending to be still thickheaded from tranquilizers and whatever other drugs they were dripping into his veins, Junior was pleased by the note of perplexity in his hoarse voice, although he knew that even an Oscar-caliber performance would not win over this critic. Knuckle over knuckle, snared in the web of thumb and forefinger, vanishing into the purse of the palm, secretly traversing the hand, reappearing, knuckle over knuckle, the coin glimmered as it turned. "Do you have insurance?" asked Vanadium. "Sure. Blue Shield," Junior answered at once. A dry laugh escaped the detective, but it had none of the warmth of most people's laughter. "You're not bad, Enoch. You're just not as good as you think you are." "Excuse me?" "I meant life insurance, as you well know." "Well ... I have a small policy. It's a benefit that comes with my job at the rehab hospital. Why? What on earth is this about?" "One of the things I was searching for in your house was a life insurance policy on your wife. I didn't find one. Didn't find any canceled checks for the premium, either." Hoping to play at befuddlement awhile longer, Junior wiped his face with one hand, as if pulling off cobwebs. "Did you say you were in my house?" "Did you know your wife kept a diary?" "Yeah, sure. A new one every year. Since she was just ten years old." "Did you ever read it?" "Of course not." This was absolutely true, which allowed Junior to meet Vanadium's eyes forthrightly and to swell with righteousness as he answered the question. not?" "That would be wrong. A diary's private." He supposed that to a detective nothing was sacred, but he was nonetheless a little shocked that Vanadium needed to ask that question. Rising from the chair and approaching the bed, the detective kept turning the quarter without hesitation. "She was a very sweet girl. Very romantic. Her diary's full of rhapsodies about married life, about you. She thought you were the finest man she'd ever known and the perfect husband." Junior Cain felt as if his heart had been lanced by a needle so thin that the muscle still contracted rhythmically but painfully around it. She did? She. . . she wrote that?" "Sometimes she wrote little paragraphs to God, very touching and humble notes of gratitude, thanking Him for bringing you into her life." Although Junior was free of the superstitions that Naomi, in her innocence and sentimentality, had embraced, he wept without pretense. He was filled with bitter remorse for having suspected Naomi of poisoning his cheese sandwich or his apricots. She-had in fact adored him, as he had always believed. She would never have lifted a hand against him, never. Dear Naomi would have died for him. In fact, she had. The coin stopped turning, pinched flat between the knuckles of the cops middle and ring fingers. He retrieved a box of Kleenex from the nightstand and offered it to his suspect. "Here." Because Junior's right arm was encumbered by the bracing board and the intravenous needle, he tugged a mass of tissues from the box with his left hand. After the detective returned the box to the nightstand, the coin began to turn again. As Junior blew his nose and blotted his eyes, Vanadium said, "I believe YOU actually loved her in some strange way." "Loved her? Of course I loved her. Naomi was beautiful and so kind ... and funny. She was the best ... the best thing that ever happened to me." Vanadium flipped the quarter into the air, caught it in his left hand, and proceeded to turn it across his knuckles as swiftly and smoothly as be bad with his right hand. This ambidextrous display sent a chill through Junior for reasons that he could not entirely analyze. Any amateur magician-indeed, anyone willing to practice enough hours, magician or not-could master this trick. It was mere skill, not sorcery. "What was your motive, Enoch?" "My what?" "You appear not to have had one. But there's always a motive, some self-interest being served. If there's an insurance policy, we'll track it down, and you'll fry like bacon on a hot skillet." As usual, the cops voice was flat, a drone; he had delivered not an emotional threat, but a quiet promise. Widening his eyes in calculated surprise, Junior said, "Are you a police officer?" The detective smiled. This was an anaconda smile, inspired by the contemplation of merciless strangulation. "Before you woke, you were dreaming. Weren't you? A nightmare, apparently. This sudden turn in the interrogation unnerved Junior. Vanadium had a talent for keeping a suspect off balance. A conversation with him was like a scene out of a movie about Robin Hood: a battle with cudgels on a slippery log bridge over a river. "Yes. I ... I'm still soaked with sweat." "What were you dreaming about, Enoch?" No one could put him in prison because of his dreams. "I can't remember. Those are the worst, when you're not able to remember them-don't you think? They're always so silly when you can recall the details. When you draw a blank ... they seem more threatening." "You spoke a name in your sleep." More likely than not, this was a lie, and the detective was, setting him up. Suddenly Junior wished that he had denied dreaming. Vanadium said, "Bartholomew." Junior blinked and dared not speak, because he didn't know any Bartholomew, and now he was certain the cop was weaving an elaborate web of deceit, setting a trap. Why would he have spoken a name that meant nothing to him? "Who is Bartholomew?" Vanadium asked. Junior shook his head. "You spoke that name twice." "I don't know anyone named Bartholomew." He decided that the truth, in this instance, could not harm him. "You sounded as though you were in a lot of distress. You were frightened of this Bartholomew."

  The ball of sodden Kleenex was gripped so tightly in Junior's left hand that had its carbon content been higher, it would have been compacted into a diamond. He saw Vanadium staring at his clenched fist and sharp white knuckles. He tried to ease up on the wad of Kleenex, but he wasn't able to relent. Inexplicably, each repetition of Bartholomew heightened Junior's anxiety. The name resonated not just in his ear, but in his blood and bones, in body and mind, as if he were a great bronze bell and Bartholomew the clapper. "Maybe he's a character I saw in a movie or read in a novel. I'm a member of the Book-of-the-Month Club. I'm always reading one thing or another. I don't remember a character named B-Bartholomew, but maybe I read the book years ago." Junior realized he was on the verge of babbling, and with an effort, he silenced himself. Rising slowly like the blade in the hands of an ax murderer as deliberate as an accountant, Thomas Vanadium's gaze arced from Junior's clenched fist to his face. The port-wine birthmark appeared to be darker than before and differently mottled than he remembered it. If the policeman's gray eyes had earlier been as hard as nailheads, they were now points, and behind them was willpower strong enough to drive spikes through stone. "My God," Junior said, pretending that his befuddlement had faded and that his mind had just now clarified, "you think Naomi was murdered, don't you?" Instead of engaging in the confrontation for which he had been pressing ever since his first visit, Vanadium surprised Junior by breaking eye contact, turning from the bed, and crossing the room to the door. "It's even worse," Junior rasped, convinced that he was losing some indefinable advantage if the cop left without playing out this moment as it would usually unfold in an intellectual television crime drama like Perry Mason or Peter Gunn. Stopping at the door without opening it, Vanadium turned to stare at Junior, but said nothing. Leavening his tortured voice as best he could with shock and hurt, as though deeply wounded by the need to speak these words, Junior Cain said, "You ... you think I killed her, don't you? That's crazy."

  The detective raised both hands, palms toward Junior, fingers spread. After a pause, he showed the backs o f his hands-and then the palms once more. For a moment, Junior was mystified. Vanadium's movements had the quality of ritual, vaguely reminiscent of a priest raising high the Eucharist. Mystification slowly gave way to understanding. The quarter was gone. Junior hadn't noticed when the detective stopped turning the coin across his knuckles. "Perhaps you could pull it from your ear," Thomas Vanadium suggested. Junior actually raised his trembling left hand to his ear, expecting to find the quarter tucked in the auditory canal, held between th
e tragus and the antitragus, waiting to be plucked with a flourish. His ear was empty. "Wrong hand," Vanadium advised. Strapped to the bracing board, semi-immobilized to prevent the accidental dislodgement of the intravenous feed, Junior's right arm felt half numb, stiff from disuse. The supplicant hand seemed not to be a part of him. As pale and exotic as a sea anemone, the long fingers curled as tentacles curl artfully around an anemone's mouth, poised to snare, lazily but relentlessly, any passing prize. Like a disc fish with silvery scales, the coin lay in the cup of Junior's palm. Directly over his life line. Disbelieving his eyes, Junior reached across his body with his left hand and picked up the quarter. Although it had been lying in his right palm, it was cold. Icy. Miracles being nonexistent, the materialization of the quarter in his hand was nevertheless impossible. Vanadium had stood only at the left side of the bed. He had never leaned over Junior or reached across him. Yet the coin was as real as dead Naomi broken on the stony ridge at the foot of the fire tower. In a state of wonderment that was laced with dread rather than delight, he looked up from the quarter, seeking an explanation from Vanadium, expecting to see that anaconda smile. The door was falling shut. With no more sound than the day makes when it turns to night, the detective had gone.

  Chapter 18 SERAPHIM AETHIONEMA WHITE was nothing whatsoever like her name, except that she had as kind a heart and as good a soul as any among the hosts in Heaven. She did not have wings, as did the angels after which she had been named, and she couldn't sing as sweetly as the seraphim, either, for she had been blessed with a throaty voice and far too much humility to be a performer. Aethionema were delicate flowers, either pale-or rose-pink, and while this girl, just sixteen, was beautiful by any standard, she was not a delicate soul but a strong one, not likely to be shaken apart in even the highest wind. Those who had just met her and those who were overly charmed by eccentricity called her Seraphim, her name complete. Her teachers, neighbors, and casual acquaintances called her Sera. Those who knew her best and loved her the most deeply--like her sister, Celestina called her Phimie. From the moment the girl was admitted on the evening of January 5, the nurses at St. Mary's Hospital in San Francisco called her Phimie, too, not because they knew her well enough to love her, but because that was the name they heard Celestina use. Phimie shared Room 724 with an eighty-six-year-old woman Nella Lombardi-who had been deep in a stroke-induced coma for eight days and who had been recently moved out of the ICU when her condition stabilized. Her white hair was radiant, but the face that it framed was as gray as pumice, her skin utterly without luster. Mrs. Lombardi had no visitors. She was alone in the world, her two children and her husband having passed away long ago. During the following day, January 6, as Phimie was wheeled around the hospital for tests in various departments, Celestina remained in 724, working on her portfolio for a class in advanced portraiture. She was a Junior at the Academy of Art College. She had put aside a half-finished pencil portrait of Phimie to develop several of Nella Lombardi. In spite of the ravages of illness and age, beauty remained in the old woman's face. Her bone structure was superb. In youth, she must have been stunning. Celestina intended to capture Nella as she was now, head at rest upon the pillow of, perhaps, her deathbed, eyes closed and mouth slack, face ashen but serene. Then she would draw four more portraits, using bone structure and other physiological evidence to imagine how the woman had looked at sixty, forty, twenty, and ten. Ordinarily, when Celestina was troubled, her art was a perfect sanctuary from all woes. When she was planning, composing, and rendering, time had no meaning for her, and life had no sting. On this momentous day, however, drawing provided no solace. Frequently, her hands shook, and she could not control the pencil. During those spells when she was too shaky to draw, she stood at the window, gazing at the storied city. The singular beauty of San Francisco and the exquisite patina of its colorful history spoke to her heart and kindled in her such an unreasonable passion that she sometimes wondered, at least half seriously, if she had spent other lives here. Often, streets were wondrously familiar to her the first time that she set foot on them. Certain great houses, dating from the late 1800s and early 1900s, inspired her to imagine elegant parties thrown there in more genteel and gilded ages, and her flights of imagination sometimes acquired such vivid detail that they were eerily like memories. This time, even San Francisco, under a Chinese-blue sky stippled with a cloisonne of silver-and-gold clouds, couldn't provide solace or calm Celestina's nerves. Her sister's dilemma wasn't as easily put out of mind as any problem of her own might have been-and she herself had never been in such an awful situation as Phimie was now. Nine months ago, Phimie had been raped. Ashamed and scared, she told no one. Although a victim, she blamed herself, and the prospect of being exposed to ridicule so horrified her that despair got the better of good judgment.

  When she discovered she was pregnant, Phimie dealt with this new trauma as other naive fifteen-year-olds had done before her: She sought to avoid the scorn and the reproach that she imagined would be heaped upon her for having failed to reveal the rape at the time it occurred. With no serious thought to long-term consequences, focused solely on the looming moment, in a state of denial, she made plans to conceal her condition as long as possible. In her campaign to keep her weight gain to a minimum, anorexia was her ally. She learned to find pleasure in hunger pangs. When she did eat, she touched only nutritious food, a more well balanced diet than at any time in her life. Even as she desperately avoided contemplation of the childbirth that inevitably approached, she was trying her best to ensure the health of the baby while still remaining slim enough to avoid suspicion. Through nine months of quiet panic, however, Phimie grew less rational week by week, resorting to reckless measures that endangered her own health and the baby's even as she avoided junk food and took a daily multivitamin. To conceal the changes in her physique, she wore loose clothes and wrapped her abdomen with Ace bandages. Later she used girdles to achieve more dramatic compression. Because she had suffered a leg injury six weeks before being raped, and had undergone subsequent tendon surgery, Phimie was able to claim lingering symptoms, avoiding gym class-and the discovery of her condition-since the start of school in September. By the last week of pregnancy, the average woman has gained twenty-eight pounds. Typically, seven to eight pounds of this is the fetus. The placenta and the amniotic fluid weigh three pounds. The remaining eighteen are due to water retention and fat stores. Phimie gained less than twelve pounds. Her pregnancy might have gone undetected even without the girdle. The day previous to her admission to St. Mary's, she awakened with an unremitting headache, nausea, and dizziness. Fierce abdominal pain afflicted her, too, like nothing she had known before, though not the telltale contractions of labor. Worse, she was plagued with frightening eye problems. At first, mere blurring. Followed by phantom fireflies flickering at the periphery of her vision. Then a sudden, half-minute blindness that left her in state of terror even though it passed quickly.

  In spite of this crisis, and though she was aware that she was within a week or ten days of delivery, Phimie still could not find the courage to tell her father and mother. Reverend Harrison White, their dad, was a good Baptist and a good man, neither judgmental nor hard of heart. Their mother, Grace, was in every way suited to her name. Phimie was loath to reveal her pregnancy not because she feared her parents' wrath, but because she dreaded seeing disappointment in their eyes, and because she would rather have died than bring shame upon them. When a second and longer spell of blindness struck her that same day, she was home alone. She crawled from her bedroom, along the hall, and felt her way to the phone in her parents' bedroom. Celestina was in her tiny studio apartment, working happily on a cubistic self-portrait, when her sister called. Judging by Phimie's hyste ria and initial incoherence, Celestina thought that Mom or Dad---or both-had died. Her heart was broken almost as completely by the actual facts as it would have been if she had, indeed, lost a parent. The thought Of her precious sister being violated made her half sick with sorrow and rage. Horrified by th
e girl's nine months of self-imposed emotional isola tion and by her physical suffering, Celestina was eager to reach her mother and father. When the Whites stood together as a family, their shine could hold back the darkest night. Although Phimie regained her sight while talking to her big sister, she didn't recover her reason. She begged Celestina not to tr ack down Mom or Dad long-distance, not to call the doctor, but to come home and be with her when she divulged her terrible secret. Against her better judgment, Celestina made the promise Phimie wanted. She trusted the instincts of the heart as much as logic, and the tearful entreaty of a beloved sister was a powerful restraint on common sense. She didn't take time to pack; miraculously, an hour later she was on a plane to Spruce Hills, Oregon, by way of Eugene. Three hours after receiving the call, she was at her sister's side. In the living room of the parsonage, under the gaze of Jesus and John F. Kennedy, whose portraits hung side by side, the girl revealed to their mom and dad what had been done to her and also what, in her despair and confusion, she had done to herself Phimie received the all-enfolding, unconditional love that she had needed for nine months, that pure love of which she had foolishly be lieved herself undeserving. Although the embrace of family and the relief of revelation had a bracing effect, bringing her more to her proper senses than she'd been in a long time, Phimie refused to reveal the identity of the man who raped her. He'd threatened to kill her and her folks if she bore witness against him, and she believed his threat was sincere. "Child," the reverend said, "he will never touch you again. Both the Lord and I will make sure of that, and though neither the Lord nor I will resort to a gun, we have the police for guns." The rapist had so terrorized the girl, so indelibly imprinted his threat in her mind, that she would not be reasoned into making this one last disclosure. With gentle persistence, her mother appealed to her sense of moral responsibility. If this man was not arrested, tried, and convicted, he would sooner or later assault another innocent girl. Phimie wouldn't budge. "He's crazy. Sick. He's evil." She shuddered. "He'll do it, he'll kill us all, and he won't care if he dies in a shootout with the police or if he gets sent to the electric chair. None of you will be safe if I tell." The consensus, among Celestina and her parents, was that Phimie would be convinced in this matter after the child had been born. She was too fragile and too ridden by anxiety to do the right thing just yet, and there was no point in pressing her at this time. Abortion was illegal, and their folks would have been reluctant, as a matter of faith, to consider it even under worse circumstances. Besides, with Phimie so close to term, and considering the injury she might have sustained from prolonged hunger and from the diligent application of the girdle, abortion might be a dangerous option. She would have to get medical attention immediately. The child would be put up for adoption with people who would be able to love it and who would not forever see in it the image of its hateful father. "I won't have the baby here," Phimie insisted. "If he realizes he made a baby with me, it'll make him crazier. I know it will." She wanted to go to San Francisco with Celestina, to have the baby in the city, where the father-and not incidentally her friends and Reverend White's parishioners-would never know she'd given birth. The more her parents and sister argued against this plan, the more agitated Phimie became, until they worried that they would jeopardize her health and mental stability if they didn't do as she wished. The symptoms that terrified Phimie-the headache, crippling abdominal pain, dizziness, vision problems-had entirely relented. Possibly they had been more psychological than physical in nature. A delay of a few hours, before getting her under a physician's care, might still be risky. But so was forcing her into a local hospital to endure the mortification she desperately wanted to avoid. By invoking the word emergency, Celestina was able quickly to reach her own physician in San Francisco. He agreed to treat Phimie and to have her admitted to St. Mary's upon her arrival from Oregon. The reverend couldn't easily escape church obligations on such short notice, but Grace wanted to be with her daughters. Phimie, however, pleaded that only Celestina accompany her. Although the girl was unable to articulate why she preferred not to have her mother at her side, they all understood the tumult in. her heart. She couldn't bear to subject her gentle and proper mother to the shame and embarrassment that she herself felt so keenly and that she imagined would grow intolerably worse in the hours or days ahead, until and even after the birth. Grace, of course, was a strong woman for whom faith was an armor against far worse than embarrassment. Celestina knew that Mom would suffer immeasurably more heartache by remaining in Oregon than what pain she might experience at her daughter's side, but Phimie was too young, too naive, and too frightened to grasp that in this matter, as in all others, her mother was a pillar, not a reed. The tenderness with which Grace acceded to Phimie's desire, at the expense of her own peace of mind, filled Celestina with emotion. She'd always admired and loved her mother to an extent that no words-or work of art-could adequately describe, but never more than now. With the same surprising ease that she had gotten a plane out of San Francisco on a one-hour notice, Celestina booked two return seats on an early-evening flight from Oregon, as though she had a supernatural travel agent. Airborne, Phimie complained of ringing in her ears, which might have been related to the flight. She also suffered an episode of double vision and, in the airport after landing, a nosebleed, which appeared to be related to her previous symptoms. The sight of her sister's blood and the persistence of the flow made Celestina weak with apprehension. She was afraid she had done the wrong thing by delaying hospitalization. Then from San Francisco International, through the fog-shrouded streets of the night city, to St. Mary's, to Room 724. And to the discovery that Phimie's blood pressure was so high-210 over 126-that she was in a hypertensive crisis, at risk of a stroke, renal failure, and other life-threatening complications. Antihypertensive drugs were administered intravenously, and Phimie was confined to bed, attached to a heart monitor. Dr. Leland Daines, Celestina's internist, arrived directly from dinner at the Ritz-Carlton. Although Dairies had receding white hair and a seamed face, time had been kind enough to make him look not so much old as dignified. Long in practice, he was nevertheless free of arrogance, soft-spoken and with a bottomless supply of patience. After examining Phimie, who was nauseous, Daines prescribed an anticonvulsant, an antiemetic, and a sedative, all intravenously. The sedative was mild, but Phimie was asleep in mere minutes. She was exhausted by her long ordeal and by her recent lack of sleep. Dr. Daines spoke with Celestina in the corridor, outside the door to 724. Some of the passing nurses were nuns in wimples and full-length habits, drifting like spirits along the hallway. "She's got preeclampsia. It's a condition that occurs in about five percent of pregnancies, virtually always after the twenty-fourth week, and usually it can be treated successfully. But I'm not going to sugarcoat this, Celestina. In her case, it's more serious. She hasn't been seeing a doctor, no prenatal care, and here she is in the middle of her thirtyeighth week, about ten days from delivery." Because they knew the date of the rape, and because that attack had been Phimie's sole sexual experience, the day of impregnation could be fixed, delivery calculated with more precision than usual. "As she comes closer to full term," said Dairies, "she's at great risk of preeclampsia developing into full eclampsia." "What could happen then?" Celestina asked, dreading the answer. "Possible complications include cerebral hemorrage, pulmonary edema, kidney failure, necrosis of the liver, coma-to name a few." "I should have gotten her into the hospital back home." He placed a hand on her shoulder. "Don't beat up on yourself She's come this far. And though I don't know the hospital in Oregon, I doubt the level of care would equal what she'll receive here." Now that efforts were being made to control the preeclampsia, Dr. Daines had scheduled a series of tests for the following day. He expected to recommend a cesarean section as soon as Phimie's e's blood pressure was reduced and stabilized, but he didn't want to risk this surgery before determining what complications might have resulted from her restricted diet and the compression of her abdomen. Although she already knew that the
answer could not be cheerily optimistic, Celestina wondered, "Is the baby likely to be . . . normal?" "I hope it will," the physician said, but his emphasis vas too solidly on the word hope. In Room 724, standing alone at her sister's bedside, watching the girl sleep, Celestina told herself that she was coping well. She could handle this unnerving development without calling in either of her parents. Then her breath caught repeatedly in her breast as her throat tightened against the influx of air. One particularly difficult inhalation dissolved into a sob, and she wept. She was four years older than Phimie. They hadn't i;.mn a great deal of each other during the past three years, since Celestina had come to San Francisco. Although distance and time, the press of her studies, and the busyness of daily life had not made her forget that she loved Phimie, she had forgotten the purity and the power of love. Rediscovering it now, she was shaken so badly that she had to pull a chair to the side of the bed and sit down. She hung her head, covered her face with her chilled hands, and wondered how her mother could sustain faith in God when such terrible things could happen to someone as innocent as Phimie. Near midnight, she return ed to her apartment. Lights out, in bed, staring at the ceiling, she was unable to sleep. The blinds were raised, the windows bare. Usually, she liked the smoky, reddish-gold glow of the city at night, but this once it made her uneasy. She was overcome by the odd notion that if she rose from the bed and went to the nearest window, she would discover the buildings of the metropolis dark, every streetlamp extinguished. This eerie light would he rising, instead, from drainage grates in the street and out of open manholes, not from the city, but from a netherworld below. The inner eye of the artist, which she could never close even when she slept, ceaselessly sought form and design and meaning, as it did in the ceiling above the bed. In the play of light and shadow across the hand-troweled plaster, she saw the solemn faces of babies-deformed, peering beseechingly--and images of death. Nineteen hours following Phimie's admission to St. Mary's, while the girl was undergoing the final tests ordered by Dr. Daines, the beetled sky grew sullen in the early twilight, and the city once more arrayed itself in the red gesso and gold leaf that had indirectly illuminated Celestina's apartment ceiling the previous night. After a day of work, the pencil portrait of Nella Lombardi was finished. The second piece in the series-an extrapolation of her appearance at age sixty-was begun. Although Celestina had not slept in almost thirty-six hours, she was clearheaded with anxiety. At the moment, her hands weren't shaking; lines and shading flowed smoothly from her pencil, as words might stream from the pen of a medium in a trance. As she sat in a chair by the window, near Nella's bed, drawing on an angled lapboard, she conducted a quiet, one-sided conversation with the comatose woman. She recounted stories about growing up with Phimie and was amazed by what a trove she had. Sometimes Nella seemed to be listening, although her eyes never opened and though she never moved. The silently bouncing green light of the electrocardiograph maintained a steady pattern. Shortly before dinner, an orderly and a nurse wheeled Phimie into the room. They carefully transferred her into bed. The girl looked better than Celestina expected. Though tired, she was quick to smile, and her huge brown eyes were clear. Phimie wanted to see the finished portrait of Nella and the one herself that was half complete. "You'll be famous one day, Celie." "No one is famous in the next world, nor glamorous, nor titled, nor proud," she said, smiling as she quoted one of their father's most familiar sermons, "nor powerful-" -nor cruel, nor hateful, nor envious, nor mean," Phimie recited, "for all these are sicknesses of this fallen world-" -and now when the offering plate passes among you-" "--give as if you are already an enlightened citizen of the next life-" "-and not a hypocritical, pitiful-" "-penny-pinching-" "--possessive--" "--Pecksniff of this sorry world." They laughed and held hands. For the first time since Phimie's panicked phone call from Oregon, Celestina felt that everything would eventually be all right again. Minutes later, once more in a corridor conference with Dr. Daines, she was forced to temper her new optimism. Phimie's stubbornly high blood pressure, the presence of protein in her urine, and other symptoms indicated her preeclampsia wasn't a recent development; she was at increased risk of eclampsia. Her hypertension was gradually coming under control-but only by resort to more aggressive drug therapy than the physician preferred to use. "In addition," Daines said, "her pelvis is small, which would present problems of delivery even in an ordinary pregnancy. And the muscle fibers in the central canal of her cervix, which ought to be softening in anticipation of labor, are still tough. I don't believe the cervix will dilate well enough to facilitate birth." "The baby?" "There's no clear evidence of birth defects, but a couple tests reveal some worrisome anomalies. We'll know when we see the child." A stab of horror punctured Celestina as she failed to repress a mental image of a carnival-sideshow monster, half dragon and half insect, coiled in her sister's womb. She hated the rapist's child but was appalled by her hatred, for the baby was blameless. "If her blood pressure stabilizes through the night," Dr. Daines continued, "I want her to undergo a cesarean at seven in the morning. The danger of eclampsia passes entirely after birth. I'd like to refer Phimie to Dr. Aaron Kaltenbach. He's a superb obstetrician." "Of course."