Well, nothing was perfect.
A red light finally caught him and he pulled to a stop. As he waited, he watched Clubfoot Annie—the closest thing Monroe had to a shopping bag lady—hobble across the street in front of him. Alan had no idea of her real name; neither, so far as he knew, did anybody else. She was known to everyone simply as Clubfoot Annie.
He was struck now, as he was whenever he saw her, by how a misshapen foot that no one had bothered to correct on a child could shape the life of the adult. People like Annie always managed to get to Alan, making him want to go back in time and see to it that someone did the right thing. So simple… some serial casting on her infant equinovarus deformity would have straightened it out to normal. Who would Annie be today if she'd grown up with a normal foot? Maybe she—
Something slammed against the right front door, jolting Alan, making him jump in his seat. A ravaged caricature of a human face pressed against the passenger door window.
"You!" the face said as it rolled back and forth against the glass. "You're the one! Lemme in! Gotta talk t' ya!"
His hair and beard were long and knotted and as filthy as his clothes. The eyes shone but gave no evidence of intelligence. Whatever mind he had must have been pickled a long time ago. The man straightened up and pulled on the door handle, but it was locked. He moved along the side of the car toward the hood. He looked like a Bowery derelict. Alan could not remember ever seeing the likes of him in Monroe.
He crossed in front of the car, pointing at Alan over the hood, all the while babbling unintelligibly. Tense but secure, Alan waited until the bum was clear of the front of the car, then he gently accelerated. The bum pounded his fist once on the trunk as the car left him behind.
In the rearview mirror, Alan saw the man start running behind the car, then stop and stand in the middle of the street, staring after him, a picture of dejection and frustration as he waved his arms in the air and then let them flop down to his sides.
The episode left Alan shaken. He glanced at the passenger window and was startled to see a large oily smudge in the shape of the derelict's face. As it picked up the light of a passing streetlamp, it seemed to look at him, reminding him uncomfortably of the face from the Shroud of Turin.
He was pulling up to another red light when his beeper howled, startling him into jamming on his brakes. A female voice spoke through the static:
"Two-one-seven—please call Mrs. Nash about her son. Complains of abdominal pain and vomiting." It gave the phone number, then repeated the message.
Alan straightened in his seat. Sylvia Nash—he knew her well; a concerned parent but not an alarmist. If she was calling, it meant something was definitely wrong with Jeffy. That concerned him. Jeffy Nash had come to occupy a special place in his heart and his practice.
He drummed his fingers on the steering wheel. What to do? His usual procedure in a case like this was to meet the patient at either his office or the emergency room. His office was on the far side of town, and he didn't want to go back to the emergency room tonight unless absolutely necessary. Then it struck him: The Nash house was a short way off the road between the hospital and his own house. He could stop in on the way home.
He smiled as he accelerated through the green light. He found the thought of seeing Sylvia invigorating. And a house call—that ought to flap the unflappable Widow Nash.
He followed Main Street around to where it passed the entrance to the Monroe Yacht and Racquet Club on the west side of the harbor, then turned inland and passed through the various economic strata that made up "The Incorporated Village of Monroe." The low-rent district with its garden apartments and rooming houses clung to the downtown area, eventually giving way to the postwar tract homes surrounding the high school. From there it was up into the wooded hills where the newer custom-built homes of the better-off had sprung up in the past decade. Alan lived there, and would have continued on Hill Drive if he had been going home. But he bore right at the fork and followed Shore Drive down to Monroe's most exclusive section.
Alan shook his head at the memory of his first day in town, when he had promised Ginny that someday they would own one of the homes along the waterfront at Monroe's western end. How naive he had been then. These weren't homes— these were estates, rivaling the finest homes in Glen Cove and Lattingtown. He couldn't afford the utilities, taxes, and upkeep on one of these old monstrosities, let alone the mortgage payments.
Stone walls and tall stands of trees shielded the waterfront estates from passersby. Alan wound along the road until his headlights swept the two tall brick gateposts that flanked the entrance, illuminating the brass plaque on the left that read:
TOAD HALL
He turned in, followed a short, laurel-lined road, and came upon the Nash house—formerly the Borg mansion—standing dark among its surrounding willows under the clear, starlit spring sky as he pulled into the driveway.
There was only one window lit, the one in the upper left corner of the many-gabled structure, glowing a subdued yellow, making the place look like it belonged on the cover of a gothic novel. The front-porch light was on, almost as if he were expected.
He had driven by in the past, but had never been inside. Although, after seeing the spread The New York Times Magazine had run on it a week ago—one in a continuing series on old North Shore mansions—he felt as if he knew the place.
Alan could smell the brine and hear the gentle lap of the Long Island Sound as, black bag in hand, he stepped up to the front door and reached for the bell.
He hesitated. Maybe this wasn't such a good idea, what with Sylvia's reputation as the Merry Widow and all, and especially with the way she was always coming on to him. He knew it was mostly in fun because she liked to rattle him, yet he sensed there might be something real under the surface. That scared him most of all because he knew he responded to her. He couldn't help it. There was something about her— beyond her good looks—that appealed to him, attracted him. Like now. Was he out here to see Jeffy or see her?
This was a mistake. But too late to turn back now. He reached again for the bell…
"The Missus is expecting you?"
At the sound of the voice directly behind him, Alan jumped and spun with a sharp bark of fright, clutching at his heart, which he was sure had just gone into a brief burst of ventricular tachycardia.
"Ba!" he said, recognizing Sylvia's Vietnamese driver and handyman. "You damn near scared me to death!"
"Very sorry, Doctor. I did not recognize you from behind." In the glare of the porch light, the tall Asian's skin looked sallower, and his eyes and cheeks more sunken than usual.
The front door opened then and Alan turned to see the startled expression on Sylvia Nash's pretty, finely chiseled face through the glass of the storm door. She was dressed in a very comfortable-looking plaid flannel robe with a high cowled neck that covered her from jaw to toes. But her breasts still managed to raise an attractive swell under the soft fabric.
"Alan! I only wanted to talk to you. I didn't expect you to—"
"The house call is not entirely dead," he said. "I make them all the time. It happened that I was nearby in the car when I got the beep so I thought I'd save time and stop by and see Jeffy. But don't worry. I'll be sure to call ahead next time. Maybe then Ba won't…"
His voice trailed off as he turned. Ba was gone. Didn't that man make any sound when he moved? Then Sylvia was waving him inside.
"Come in, come in!"
He stepped into a broad, marble-floored foyer decorated in pastels, brightly lit by a huge crystal chandelier suspended from the high ceiling. Directly across from where he stood, a wide staircase wound up and away to the right.