Mom’s finances caused a lot of friction between Tobi and Reuben, since Tobi had insisted their mother go back to work and that they should supplement her income, not replace it. But Reuben had promised their father on his death bed that he would take care of Mom, and he interpreted that to mean she should be supported entirely. He resented Tobi for not bleeding money at her like he did. Maybe it was because he did not have children of his own, but he had no clue how hard it was to be a single parent with a mortgage worth of student loans and no family support, even for childcare. It seemed they had always ended up fighting over their parents’ financial needs, so that there were fewer and fewer visits and they drifted further and further apart. Ben had barely known his uncle.
How she wished she could talk to the old Reuben now and tell him she was in trouble. That ominous things were happening that she did not understand. There was no question in her mind that he could have figured it all out, and that her safety would have overridden their family disagreements. She needed him so much right then, it hurt.
She spent the entire shift in a fog, terrified by some amorphous phantom she could not quite grasp.
Chapter 45
At 5:45 p.m., Troy drove his rented Jeep Grand Cherokee slowly through the parking lot of the urgent care office. He tried to get a look inside through the front window, but there was traffic behind him, so he moved on. He pulled in behind the office, where there were only three cars parked. No windows back here, but he identified what must be the back door of the clinic. One of the cars was an Outback with MD plates on it. In New York, the specialty plates also had the caduceus, so they were unmistakable. That had to be Tobi’s car.
He parked the truck thirty feet from the nearest car and turned off the engine, but he couldn’t bring himself to go in. How could he just walk into her office and disrupt her day like this? If she welcomed his communication, she would have answered him. His heart was pounding, and he had to remind himself several times that he was here because she could be in danger and he needed to see this through.
It was dark already, and to his right, he could just see the full moon rising over the buildings in the east. There was patchy ice on the ground and last week’s snow still lingered against the perimeter of the lot. From where he sat, he could see the back door and the side of the building, so he decided to just wait for her to get off work.
He sat back and focused on his breathing to calm down. He would have dozed off if not for the cold, but he didn’t want to leave the engine running for two hours. His legs were stiff and the windows started to fog, and he was contemplating going somewhere for a hot cup of coffee when a dark red Mercedes Benz GLS 550 drove very slowly into the mostly deserted parking lot. It stopped in front of the car with the MD plates.
A man got out of the SUV and skulked over to the Subaru. That was really the only way to describe it. He moved stealthily, looking all around every couple of seconds. The moon was full and high in the clear sky, and Troy studied him. He was about five foot ten and fat, had to be nearly three hundred pounds. He was carrying some kind of tool in his hand. He got to the Subaru and put his hands just under the front of the hood, looking for the catch.
Instinctively, Troy got out of his car. He slammed the door loudly and started walking toward the Outback, and the guy nearly jumped out of his skin. He quickly put his tool in his pocket and turned around like he was going to sit on the hood, then realized that wasn’t such a good idea. He started in two different directions until he ran back to his car, whose engine was still running. The tires screeched as he peeled out of the parking lot.
Troy stared at the car as it left, trying to catch the plate number. He never had understood why anyone would spend nearly a hundred thousand dollars on a car, but anyone who could afford a Mercedes GLS wasn’t messing with Tobi’s SUV on a whim. Troy pulled his jacket around him. The air was clear and crisp, nineteen degrees and dropping, with wind at five mph, but he barely felt it. He was pumped up on adrenaline. But after fifteen minutes, his nose began to feel numb and he started to feel silly standing in the freezing cold guarding her car. And if someone wanted to get him out of the way, he was making himself an easy target.
He got back in his car and ran the heater for a half hour, then turned off the engine and waited. A few minutes after eight, he saw her. It had to be her. She was walking toward him with a heavy coat and scarf, keys dangling from her gloved hands.
In the shadow, she hadn’t changed much. He recognized her by her walk and her profile in the moonlight, and he found himself holding his breath while his heart bounced in his chest. Her dark hair drifted out after her as she turned to look behind her several times. Did she know she was in danger? She had her phone out and was punching on it with her gloves just as she passed his car and did not seem to notice it wasn’t empty.
Tobi, Tobi, Troy whispered to himself as she walked past his Jeep. You have got to be more alert to what is going on around you.
She stopped a few paces from her own car, as if she had heard him, turned around and looked toward his Jeep and then up and down the street again.
Tobi looked inside her car before unlocking it and getting inside. Then, she started her engine but she did not pull away. After a minute, she got out, looking in all directions again, and came around to the hood, opened it and peered at the engine. She studied it for a moment with a light from her phone then slammed it shut, looking around again carefully, before getting back in the car and locking the door.
“That’s a girl,” Troy said to himself. Either the man had managed to pop the hood or she just felt something was wrong. She always had been a bit psychic.
Tobi drove carefully out of the icy parking lot, and Troy waited a moment before following her. Before Troy made the left turn onto the street, he noticed the maroon Mercedes GLS had pulled into the lane just behind her. In the light of the street lamps, he could just barely see the face of the swarthy-looking fat man before he turned in behind them both. There was snow and ice on the Mercedes’s license plate and he could only make out the first three letters.
Troy could barely keep up with them without drawing attention to himself. Tobi seemed in a rush to get home, maybe spooked by her hood being open, and the Mercedes kept pace. They all exited the LIE and, in another mile, Tobi turned into a gated community. The Mercedes tried to follow, but after speaking to the guard, it was turned away.
Troy hung back and waited, then followed the car as it parked down the road on a side street. The fat man got out and started walking back to Tobi’s community.
Troy waited a few minutes after he parked his Jeep. He put his gloves back on and followed the fat man, easily catching up with him but staying back a hundred paces. The fat man hesitated before he got to the guard station, then slunk into the trees on the outgoing side of the gatehouse and slipped past.
Troy considered telling the guard there was an intruder, but then he would certainly be prevented from following—he was an intruder too. He slipped into the same shrubbery on the outgoing side of traffic.
They were thick evergreens covered with ice, and the ground was frozen over, with old snow still lining the curb. The ice from the brush rubbed off and into Troy’s jacket, where it melted against the skin on his neck. He made it past the guard and headed up the block until it forked.
Which way had the fat man gone? Standing against a tree in the shadows, he looked up and down and saw nothing. There were soft yellow lights every three or four houses, and with the moon up, he should have been able to see him.
Of course, he’s not going to parade leisurely down the street, Troy thought. He himself walked along the road more openly, hoping that anyone he met would assume he’d gotten in legitimately through the gate or that he belonged there. It was too cold for anyone to be going for an evening stroll, anyway. He started looking at cars in the driveways, searching for the Outback with the MD plates, and hoping Tobi had not put
it in her garage.
All at once, Troy saw him, at the top of the hill. The fat man was walking around the side of a house about a hundred feet away, looking at the windows and pushing on them tentatively. How he would get himself through one of those windows was beyond comprehension. Troy started to run, slid and skidded on a strip of black ice, wrenching his back, but recovered and followed him around to the rear of the house just as the man was trying to jimmy the sliding glass door on Tobi’s deck.
“Hey!” Troy yelled out at him. “Get away from there!”
The man jumped, then turned and peered at him as Troy ran toward him. Did this guy recognize him from the parking lot? The fat man put his hand in his jacket and pulled out what looked like a pair of wire cutters just as Troy got closer, and Troy felt it smack his head just as he twisted the man around, kicked him hard on the side of his left knee, and pushed him toward the ground.
The guy was huge this close up. He made an “oof” sound, tripping over his own feet as he stumbled sideways, but he caught himself on the railing of the deck. Troy’s left eye was immediately full of blood, obscuring his vision. He wiped his face, prepared to fight, but the fat man was half running, half hobbling across the lawn and down the street, moving faster than Troy would have thought possible for someone his size.
He was about to pursue him when another man appeared on the road, walking a collie and a springer spaniel. Troy was suddenly aware of how inappropriate it was for him to be there at all, even to call 911. He himself was an intruder, and he didn’t even know the address of this house. How would he explain to Tobi or her neighbors that he was in her backyard when the police came?
He pressed his glove against his forehead and waited for the dog walker to pass. The dogs sniffed in his direction and the spaniel barked continuously at someone down the block, probably the fat man, but the neighbor checked the leash and told him to be quiet. Sleepy community, Troy thought, with no suspicions of foul play, feeling protected by the guard at the gatehouse.
He slowly walked around to the front of the house. The blood was starting to freeze on his gray Gore-Tex gloves but was still oozing from his face. As he rang the bell, he considered how this was definitely not the way he had pictured seeing Tobi again.
Chapter 46
Tobi peered through the peephole, expecting to see one of her neighbors. Instead she saw a vaguely familiar face covered in blood. She froze for a second, but she soon realized he wasn’t going away. She wavered. She hadn’t answered Troy for good reason; she had no interest in communication. But here he was, and obviously injured, and although facial lacerations bled like crazy, she had no idea how bad the trauma was. The jilted woman and the doctor battled inside her for a long minute. Finally, the doctor won. She opened the door.
“What the hell! What are you doing here? How did you get in? What happened to you?”
Troy shook his head and shrugged helplessly. He didn’t speak.
Tobi opened the door wider for him to come inside. It was too cold to leave the door open. She closed it behind him.
“I’m sorry,” he finally said, “this wasn’t the entrance I wanted to make.”
“I didn’t want you to make any entrance! Oh—geez, sit and let me get you some bandages to stop the bleeding.” He sat just inside the door on her brown faux leather ottoman. The contrast of sub-freezing temperatures to heat seemed to make him weak at the knees and he had nearly collapsed. “I hope you have an exceptionally good reason for being here.”
She went upstairs and grabbed gauze, alcohol, gloves, and mupirocin cream for starts. She glanced at her old suture set, but she wasn’t sure he would need it, and it was years since it had been properly sterilized—no one used autoclaves anymore. Everything at B. Healthy was disposable, but she preferred the higher quality instruments she used to use. She grabbed a disposable stapler and some skin glue instead and went back down. Troy was sitting in the exact same position as when she had left, and he was avoiding touching anything, including the walls, which was a good thing, since he was covered in blood.
“Come in the kitchen. Here, take off your shoes and coat first.” Tobi handed him a piece of gauze to press against his head and helped him take off his coat and bloody gloves and put his wet shoes at the door. She hung his coat on the rack. “What, did you get yourself injured so I’d feel bad and open the door for you? What happened?” She ushered him into the kitchen, where his blood wouldn’t stain anything.
“Tobi,” Troy nearly brushed aside the gauze. “You’re in danger. This guy—the guy who just did this to me, I just stopped him from breaking into your house. He was on your deck in the back, trying to force open the door.”
Tobi stopped with her hands in midair, one glove on and one off. She looked at the door and then turned back and stared at him.
“That’s crazy.” A terrible sensation came over her, reigniting the premonition she’d been having all day. “But … the hood of my car was unlatched tonight when I got out of work. It spooked me. And then I felt like I was being followed all the way home.” As she spoke, she raised the blinds on the sliding glass door in the kitchen, looked outside, and checked the lock. She lowered the blinds.
“You were. This guy followed you and I followed him,” Troy said. “I’m sorry, but I’ve been trying to reach you, and I came back because I felt you were in danger. Now I know I was right. He was messing with the hood of your car, but he drove away when he saw me get out of the Jeep.”
“Did you see who it was?”
“He was a big fat guy, darkish skin, beard, drove a maroon Mercedes Benz GLS.”
Tobi’s jaw dropped. “Ismar? Ismar Rufini?”
“I have no idea what his name is,” Troy said, catching a drop of blood on some gauze as it dripped down his face. “I tried to get the license plate number, but it was full of ice. All I got were the first three letters, SLZ. We need to call the police.”
“Okay … let me look at your face first. You’re bleeding all over the place.”
Tobi wet the gauze and gently washed the blood off Troy’s face and washed out the wound as he sat at her kitchen table. It felt surreal, having him sitting in front of her, and she grasped for the skills of detachment she used when treating her patients. She needed to keep herself distant, but she couldn’t help but smell his skin, like a favorite spice from long ago, evoking memories of love and joy and wonder, mixed with the smell of blood, his shampoo, cologne, and his sweat all at once. She avoided his eyes, those deep blue-green hazel eyes that threatened to wash her away like being drawn out to sea.
The laceration was actually just inside his hairline on his left forehead, so the scar wouldn’t show. His blonde hair was graying but still thick, parted in the middle, and nearly shoulder length. As she stood over him, she glimpsed a wisp of gray chest hair poking out from his button down shirt and charcoal gray sweater. It contrasted with his deep tan, so out of place in New York in the winter. How is this actually happening, she wondered. She felt a wave of vertigo and forced herself to focus on the wound.
“So, why are you here? Just turned up on cue to save a damsel in distress?”
Troy turned in his chair and put his hands on her forearms and drawing them away from his head. He gaze pierced her eyes and Tobi really did need to sit down.
“Tobi. It’s Reuben. He died.”
After a twelve-hour shift, fear and paranoia, and seeing him after so long covered in blood, the stress was too much. Tobi burst into hysterical laughter. “That’s what—that’s what you came to tell me?” The tension definitely got the best of her, and she laughed so hard, she felt she would never stop. She could hardly speak, her chest hurt, and still the laughter came.
“News flash—Reuben died!” she said between guffaws. “Hey, Troy, if you came to offer condolences, you’re nineteen years too late! I guess you never got the memo ….” Tobi nearly fell on the floor, she was laughing so
hard, but the laughter quickly turned to tears and gasps, and she couldn’t get control of herself. She managed to put the bloody gauze down on the glass tabletop before she completely lost it. I’ve got to get a grip, she thought.
Troy looked sheepish. “Yes, I know … I know what you thought. But … Reuben died six weeks ago, not nineteen years ago.”
She sobered up abruptly. “What—what are you talking about?”
“I mean …” he stuttered and took a deep breath. “I mean, he was alive until six weeks ago. He was in Port Douglas, Australia.”
Tobi stared at him, her breath stuck in her throat. She searched his eyes for the joke and found none. Troy had never been much of a liar. A minute passed, and another, until she started to believe him.
“How …? What hap—I don’t understand. Why would he pretend he was dead? Why didn’t he tell me? Why didn’t you tell me?” She felt a fury growing inside her. “Do you mean he just ran away? Do you know how long I’ve imagined that he just ran away? Do you have any idea? I would have been fine with him running away. Hell! I did. I just stayed in the same country, and I didn’t lie about it!”
Troy put an awkward hand on her arm, and Tobi exploded. She screamed at him and pounded her fists on his chest, as she started to believe what he’d said.
“He was ALIVE? All this time, he was alive! And you didn’t tell me? How could you have kept that from me? I mourned him. I never got to make peace with him. You stole that from me, how could you? You said you loved me! Do you even know what love means?”
Her fists battered at him as she screamed and he crumpled to the floor, bent over. He didn’t raise an arm to protect himself as she hammered at him relentlessly. The bleeding started again from his scalp and puddled on the kitchen floor. She screamed until she had no voice, and then she backed away and started striking herself on both sides of her own head. “NO, NO, NO …. We were in Australia! We were in Cairns, we could have found him, we could have found him ….” Her voice trailed off and she sunk to her knees and leaned back against the kitchen wall.
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