I felt increasingly guilty and predatory and generally evil. I had violated her in a fundamental way, I felt. By responding to her every unspoken desire, I had in a terrible sense manipulated her, engaged in a reprehensible dishonesty.
I felt shitty.
“Yeah,” I said. “That was great.”
Our wedding was held on the grounds of a lovely old estate outside Boston. The day is still a blur. I remember bustling around, looking for my cummerbund and studs and a pair of half-decent black socks to wear.
Shortly before the ceremony began, Hal Sinclair caught hold of my elbow. In his tuxedo he was even more distinguished-looking than when I first met him: his white hair glowed against his tanned, long, narrow, handsome face. He had a cleft chin, thin lips, laugh lines around the eyes and mouth.
He seemed angry, but I quickly realized he was being stern, and I’d never seen him stern before.
“You take care of my daughter,” he said.
I looked at him, expecting him to crack a joke, but his mien was unrelievedly somber.
“You hear me?”
I said I did. Of course I will.
“You take care of her.”
And it suddenly hit me, like a punch to the solar plexus. Of course! My last wife had been killed. Hal would never, ever say it, but were it not for my failure to follow correct procedures, Laura would be alive. Were it not for my bungling.
You killed your first wife, Ben, he seemed to be saying. Don’t kill your second one.
My face flushed hotly. I wanted to tell him to go fuck himself. But not my future father-in-law, not on the day of my wedding.
I replied, as warmly as I could, “Don’t you worry about it, Hal. I will.”
“I’ve got a client, Mol,” I said later as we drank vodka and tonics at the kitchen table. “A normal, totally sane guy-”
“What was he doing at Putnam & Stearns?” She took a sip from the icy glass. “Excellent. Lot of lime, the way I like it.”
I chuckled. “So this client who seems totally on the level, asked me if I believed in the possibility of extrasensory perception.”
“ESP.”
“So this client insisted he can, in a way, pick up on the thoughts of others. Sort of ‘read’ them.”
“Okay, Ben. What’s your point?”
“So, he tried it on me, and I’m convinced. I guess, what I want to know is, do you accept the possibility?”
“No. Yes. How the hell do I know? What are you getting at?”
“You ever hear of such a thing?”
“Sure. On The Twilight Zone, I think there might have been some episode like that. A kid in a Stephen King book, too. But listen, Ben-I-we need to talk.”
“All right,” I said warily.
“A guy accosted me at the hospital today.”
“What guy?”
“‘What guy?’” she echoed sardonically. “You know damned well what guy.”
“Molly, what are you talking about?”
“This afternoon. At the hospital. He said you told him where to find me.”
I put down my drink. “What?”
“You didn’t talk to him?”
“I promise you, I have no idea what this is all about. Someone ‘accosted’ you?”
“Not ‘accosted,’ I don’t mean that. There was this guy, you know, a guy sitting outside the NICU, in the waiting area, and I guess he’d sent in word for someone to get me. I didn’t recognize him. He had that sort of official look-the gray suit and the blue tie and all that.”
“Who was he?”
“Well, that’s the thing. I don’t know.”
“You don’t-”
“Listen,” she said sharply. “Listen to me. He asked if I was Martha Sinclair, the daughter of Harrison Sinclair. I said yes, who was he? but he asked if he could talk to me for a couple of minutes, and I said all right.”
She looked at me, her eyes red-rimmed and bloodshot, and continued. “He said he’d just talked to you, that he was a friend of my father’s. I assumed that meant he was an Agency employee, since he sort of had that look, and he wanted to talk to me for a couple of minutes, and I said okay.”
“What’d he want?”
“He asked if I knew anything about an account my father had opened before his death. Something about an access code or something. I didn’t know what the hell he was talking about.”
“What?”
“He didn’t talk to you, did he?” she said, failing to suppress a sob. “Ben, it’s a lie, it has to be.”
“You didn’t get his name?”
“I was in a state of shock! I could barely talk.”
“What did he look like?”
“Tall. Very light skin, almost an albino. Light blond hair. Strong-looking, but somehow, I don’t know, feminine. Epicene. He said he was doing security work for the Central Intelligence Agency,” she said in a small, thin voice. “He said they were investigating-what he called Dad’s ‘alleged embezzlement,’ and he wanted to know whether my father had left me any papers, gave me any information. Left any access codes. Anything.”
“You told him they have their heads up their collective asses, didn’t you?”
“I told him there was some horrible mistake, you know, what kind of proof did they have, all that. And the guy just said something like, I’ll be in touch again, but in the meantime, think very hard about anything your father might have told you. And then he said-”
Her voice cracked, and she covered her eyes with one cupped hand.
“Go on, Molly.”
“He said the embezzlement was, in all likelihood, connected to my father’s murder. He knew about the photo of-” She closed her eyes.
“Go ahead.”
“He said there was a lot of pressure from the Agency to make these allegations public, release them to the news media, and I said, but they couldn’t do that, it was a lie, you’d ruin his reputation. And he said, We’d hate to do that, Ms. Sinclair. All we want, he said, is your cooperation.”
“Oh, my God,” I moaned.
“Does this have anything to do with the Corporation, Ben? With whatever you’re doing for Alex Truslow?”
“Yes,” I said. “Yes, I think it does.”
SEVENTEEN
Early the next morning-and it had to have been early, because Molly had not yet gotten up to go to work-I opened my eyes, looked around the room as I habitually do, and saw from the digital clock-radio that it was not even six o’clock.
Molly was asleep next to me, curled into the fetal position, her hands clasped to her chest. I like looking at her asleep: I like the little-girl vulnerability and seeing her hair mussed up and her makeup off. She has the ability to sleep far more deeply than I. Sometimes I think she enjoys sleep more than sex. And indeed, she inevitably awakes in a buoyant mood, happy and refreshed, as if she’d just returned from a wonderful though brief vacation.
Whereas I awake dyspeptic, dazed, grumpy. I got out of the bed, walked across the cold wooden floor, and went to the john, hoping the noise would wake her up. But she couldn’t be lured away from whatever she was dreaming. Then I approached her side of the bed, sat down on the edge of it, and leaned my head down toward hers.
I was startled to “hear” something.
It was nothing coherent, none of the brief snatches of ordered thought that I’d been able to pick up the day before.
I heard bits and pieces of sounds almost musical, tonal, that didn’t sound like any language I’d ever heard. It was as if I were dialing a radio’s tuning knob in some foreign country. And then-a cluster of words that made perfect sense. Computer, I heard, and then something that sounded like fox and then, clearly a hospital dream now, monitor, and then, suddenly, Ben, and then more of the musical nonsense phrases.