She leaned back against the front door and closed her eyes. “My father and mother are Uncle Tom and his old lady. And you,” she said, opening her eyes now and looking at him, “you had them eating out of your hands like a charlatan. You tell me you’re one kind of man and tell them you’re something else again.”

“Come to the beach with me next weekend.”

“No,” she said.

“I think you’re a very beautiful girl. But I don’t beg. Thank you for bringing me home.”

He got as far as the gate before her voice stopped him. “Spurgeon.”

The whites of her eyes gleamed in the dark on the vine-grown porch. “I don’t beg either. But come before lunch and bring a warm sweater. We’ll go for a walk.” She smiled. “I froze my fanny waiting for you on that miserable beach.”

The hospital was just as he had left it. The same smell of sick poverty hung heavy and sullen in the air. The elevator creaked and groaned as it rose slowly. On impulse he got off at the fourth floor and checked into the ward. It was understaffed, some of the nurses having come down with the same Coxsackie virus which had felled Potter and several other staff members.

“Please,” a voice said. Behind a drawn curtain the very old Polish woman, with limbs like sticks covered with suppurating sores, lay dying slowly in the terrible odors of her body wastes. He cleaned her, washed her tenderly, gave her a grain and a half of numbness, adjusted her urinary catheter, quickened the flow of her intravenous fluid and left her dying more sweetly than she had been dying before.

As he passed Silverstone’s office on the way back to the elevator the door opened.

“Spurgeon.”

“Hello, there, boss-man.”

“Come in, will you?”

He felt good again, having already forgotten the old woman whose life was ebbing and remembered the young woman whose life was ripening. “What’s the word, baby?”

“You had a patient in Emergency the other night named Mrs. Therese Donnelly?”

The riddle lady. A tiny knot of apprehension formed in his chest. “Yeah, sure. I remember the case.”

“She came back into the hospital six hours ago.”

The knot grew, tightened. “You want me to stop in and take a look at her?”

Adam’s eyes were direct and unblinking. “It might be a good idea for both of us to look over the pathologist’s shoulder in the morning,” he said.

7: Adam Silverstone

7

Adam Silverstone

In the inner world of Adam Silverstone pathologists were accorded great respect but little envy. He had done their vital job often enough to realize it required a scientist’s knowledge and a detective’s skill, but on an emotional level he had never understood why anyone would choose it as a life’s work over the practice of medicine with the living.