“I’ve been calling you all day,” her mother said.
“I’ve only this minute got in from work,” Lynn said, shorter-tempered than she’d intended.
“I tried the station once. The line was busy.”
“I’m not surprised. It’s the holidays, we’re more understrength than usual. And you know there’s a girl gone missing.”
Most often, any such remark would have brought forth from her mother a warning about being extra careful, bolting the door top and bottom, checking the window locks before going to bed; to her mother, any city bigger than Norwich was a place of constant danger, the worst she’d read about New York and New Orleans combined. But now there was nothing, a dull silence. Then, out in the courtyard, the sound, muffled, of a car starting up, misfiring. Lynn wondered if she could excuse herself a moment, pour the tea, bring it back to the phone.
“Lynnie, I think you should come home.”
“Mum …”
“I need you here.”
“I was there just a couple of days ago.”
“I’m at my wits’ end.”
Lynn suppressed most of a sigh.
“It’s your dad.”
“Oh, Mum …”
“You know he was going to the hospital …”
“That’s tomorrow.”
“It was changed, the appointment was changed. They rang to tell him. He’s been already. Yesterday.”
“And?”
In the hesitation she heard the worst, then heard it again in her mother’s words. “He’s got to go back. Another test.” I don’t want to know this, Lynn thought. “To check, that’s all it is, the doctor explained. Only to make sure that he hasn’t got … well, what they thought, you know, he’d got, he …”
“Mum.”
“They thought, all this trouble he was having, his eating, going to the lavatory and that, it might be a growth, there, you know, in the, the bowel.”
“And it’s not?”
“What?”
“It’s not a growth, is that what they’re saying? Or are they still not sure?”
“That’s why he’s got to go back.”
“So they’re not sure?”
“Lynnie, I don’t know what to do.”
“There’s nothing you can do. Not until we know for sure.”
“Can’t you come?”
“What do you mean? You mean now?”
“Lynnie, he won’t sit, he won’t eat, he won’t as much as look me in the eye. At least if you were here …”
“Mum, I was there. Just days ago. He hardly spoke to me either.”
“You won’t come then?”
“I don’t see how I can.”
“He needs you, Lynnie. I need you.”
“Mum, I’m sorry, but it’s a difficult time.”
“You think this is easy?”
“I didn’t say that.”
“Your poor dad’s not important enough, that’s what you said.” She was close to tears, Lynn knew.
“You know that’s not true,” Lynn said.
“Then go with him to the hospital.”
Lynn rested the top of the receiver against her forehead.
“Lynnie …?”
“I’ll see if I can. I promise. But you know what hospitals are like, that won’t be for ages yet.”
“No, it’s soon. The man your dad saw, the consultant, he said he wanted him in as soon as possible. The next few days.”
Then it is serious, Lynn thought. “This consultant,” she said, “you can’t remember his name, I suppose?”
“It’ll be written down somewhere, I don’t know, I’ll just see if I can find it if you’ll …”
She heard her mother scrabbling about among all the scraps of paper that were kept by the phone. “Mum, call me back, okay? When you’ve found it? All right. Talk to you in a minute. Bye.”
The skin along the tops of Lynn’s arms was cold and her face was unusually drained of color. The small medical primer she kept with her dictionary and handful of paperbacks almost fell open at the page she wanted: the alternative name for cancer of the bowel was colorectal cancer. Its highest incidence was in males in the sixty to seventy-nine age group. Fifty percent of colorectal cancers are in the rectum. She let the book fall from her fingers to the floor. In the kitchen, she tipped away the remains of a carton of milk that smelled sour and struggled to open another without splashing too much over her hands. She put one spoonful of sugar in the mug and then another. Stirred. Two sips and she carried the mug back to the telephone.
When her mother rang back, she was crying at the other end of the line.
Lynn let her sob a little and then asked her if she’d found the name. She got her to repeat it twice, spelling it out as she wrote it down.
“Is Dad there?” Lynn said.
“Yes.”
“Let me talk to him.”
“He’s out in the sheds.”
“Call him in.”
There was a clunk as the phone was set awkwardly down; Lynn drank her tea and listened to the voices of youths in the street at the rear of the flat, raised half-heartedly in anger. One of her neighbors was listening to opera, a young man who wore black turtlenecks and ignored her when they passed on the stairs.
“I can’t get him to come in,” her mother said.
“Did you tell him it was me?”
“Of course I did.”
Her upstairs neighbor was not only singing along, now he was stamping his feet in time with the chorus. “I’m going to get in touch with this consultant,” Lynn said, “see if I can find out when Dad’s likely to be in. Then I’ll see if I can get leave. Okay?”
She listened to her mother a few minutes more, reassuring her as much as she could. She tipped away what was left of her tea and poured herself a second cup. Turning on the hot tap in the bathroom, she sprinkled some herbal bubble bath into the stream of water. Only when she lowered herself into the steamy warmth did she begin to relax and the pictures she had begun to conjure up of her father begin to fade, at least for the time being, from her mind.
Twenty-three
Resnick had fed the cats, made himself coffee, squeezed half a lemon on to a piece of chicken he’d rubbed with garlic, and set it under the grill. While that was cooking, he’d opened a bottle of Czech pilsner and drank half of it in the living room, reading an obituary of Bob Crosby. One of the 78s his uncle the tailor had prized had been “Big Noise from Winnetka” by the Bobcats. Bob Haggart and Ray Bauduc, bass and drums and a lot of whistling. If Graham Millington ever came across it, the whole station would be in peril.
Back in the kitchen he turned the chicken and poured some of the juice back over it with a spoon. The last half of a beef tomato he cut into chunks and added to some wilting spinach and a piece of chicory on its last legs; these he tipped into a bowl and dressed with a trickle of raspberry vinegar and a teaspoon of tarragon mustard, a liberal splash of olive oil.
He ate at the kitchen table, feeding Bud with oddments of the chicken, washing it all down with the rest of the beer. There was something nagging at him, the impression he had got of Robin Hidden that afternoon, and the idea of a man attractive and lively enough for Nancy Phelan to take willingly to her bed-two sides of a puzzle that refused to come together.
He cut the last of the chicken into two and shared them with the cat; licking his fingers, he went towards the phone.
“Hello, is that Dana Matthieson?” Hearing the voice, Resnick remembered a biggish woman, lots of hair, round faced. Not unlike Lynn, he supposed, but more so. Colorful clothes. “Yes, this is Inspector Resnick. We talked … I was just wondering, if you’re not too busy, if you could spare me a little of your time? Say, half an hour? … Yes, okay, thanks. Yes, I know where it is … Yes, bye.”
Dana had been ironing some several-days-old laundry until she had got bored and now blouses and cotton tops and brightly colored trousers lay across the backs and arms of chairs and in a loose pile on the ironing board. The television was on with the sound at a whisper, a film with James Belushi, a great many car chases, and at least one large dog. All five attempts at writing her letter of resignation to Andrew Clarke and Associates, Architects, had been torn in half and half again and were now spread, unfinished, over the glass-topped table.