“It’s very beautiful,” Jack says. “But I think everything here is beautiful.”
“Judy really likes this view. Whenever we go over to Arden on a decent day, she has to stop here and get out of the car, relax and look around for a while. You know, sort of store up on the important things before getting back into the grind. Me, sometimes I get impatient and think, Come on, you’ve seen that view a thousand times, I have to get back to work, but I’m a guy, right? So every time we turn in here and sit down for a few minutes, I realize my wife knows more than I do and I should just listen to what she says.”
Jack smiles and sits down at the bench, waiting for the rest of it. Since picking him up, Fred Marshall has spoken only two or three sentences of gratitude, but it is clear that he has chosen this place to get something off his chest.
“I went over to the hospital this morning, and she—well, she’s different. To look at her, to talk to her, you’d have to say she’s in much better shape than yesterday. Even though she’s still worried sick about Tyler, it’s different. Do you think that could be due to the medication? I don’t even know what they’re giving her.”
“Can you have a normal conversation with her?”
“From time to time, yeah. For instance, this morning she was telling me about a story in yesterday’s paper on a little girl from La Riviere who nearly took third place in the statewide spelling bee, except she couldn’t spell this crazy word nobody ever heard of. Popoplax, or something like that.”
“Opopanax,” Jack says. He sounds like he has a fishbone caught in his throat.
“You saw that story, too? That’s interesting, you both picking up on that word. Kind of gave her a kick. She asked the nurses to find out what it meant, and one of them looked it up in a couple of dictionaries. Couldn’t find it.”
Jack had found the word in his Concise Oxford Dictionary; its literal meaning was unimportant. “That’s probably the definition of opopanax,” Jack says. “ ‘1. A word not to be found in the dictionary. 2. A fearful mystery.’ ”
“Hah!” Fred Marshall has been moving nervously around the lookout area, and now he stations himself beside Jack, whose upward glance finds the other man surveying the long panorama. “Maybe that is what it means.” Fred’s eyes remain fixed on the landscape. He is still not quite ready, but he is making progress. “It was great to see her interested in something like that, a tiny little item in the Herald . . .”
He wipes tears from his eyes and takes a step toward the horizon. When he turns around, he looks directly at Jack. “Uh, before you meet Judy, I want to tell you a few things about her. Trouble is, I don’t know how this is going to sound to you. Even to me, it sounds . . . I don’t know.”
“Give it a try,” Jack says.
Fred says, “Okay,” knits his fingers together, and bows his head. Then he looks up again, and his eyes are as vulnerable as a baby’s. “Ahhh . . . I don’t know how to put this. Okay, I’ll just say it. With part of my brain, I think Judy knows something. Anyhow, I want to think that. On the other hand, I don’t want to fool myself into believing that just because she seems to be better, she can’t be crazy anymore. But I do want to believe that. Boy oh boy, do I ever.”
“Believe that she knows something.” The eerie feeling aroused by opopanax diminishes before this validation of his theory.
“Something that isn’t even real clear to her,” Fred says. “But do you remember? She knew Ty was gone even before I told her.”
He gives Jack an anguished look and steps away. He knocks his fists together and stares at the ground. Another internal barrier topples before his need to explain his dilemma.
“Okay, look. This is what you have to understand about Judy. She’s a special person. All right, a lot of guys would say their wives are special, but Judy’s special in a special way. First of all, she’s sort of amazingly beautiful, but that’s not even what I’m talking about. And she’s tremendously brave, but that’s not it, either. It’s like she’s connected to something the rest of us can’t even begin to understand. But can that be real? How crazy is that? Maybe when you’re going crazy, at first you put up a big fight and get hysterical, and then you’re too crazy to fight anymore and you get all calm and accepting. I have to talk to her doctor, because this is tearing me apart.”
“What kinds of things does she say? Does she explain why she’s so much calmer?”
Fred Marshall’s eyes burn into Jack’s. “Well, for one thing, Judy seems to think that Ty is still alive, and that you’re the only person who can find him.”
“All right,” Jack says, unwilling to say more until after he can speak to Judy. “Tell me, does Judy ever mention someone she used to know—or a cousin of hers, or an old boyfriend—she thinks might have taken him?” His theory seems less convincing than it had in Henry Leyden’s ultrarational, thoroughly bizarre kitchen; Fred Marshall’s response weakens it further.
“Not unless he’s named the Crimson King, or Gorg, or Abbalah. All I can tell you is, Judy thinks she sees something, and even though it makes no sense, I sure as hell hope it’s there.”
A sudden vision of the world where he found a boy’s Brewers cap pierces Jack Sawyer like a steel-tipped lance. “And that’s where Tyler is.”
“If part of me didn’t think that might just possibly be true, I’d go out of my mind right here and now,” Fred says. “Unless I’m already out of my gourd.”
“Let’s go talk to your wife,” Jack says.
From the outside, French County Lutheran Hospital resembles a nineteenth-century madhouse in the north of England: dirty red-brick walls with blackened buttresses and lancet arches, a peaked roof with finial-capped pinnacles, swollen turrets, miserly windows, and all of the long facade stippled black with ancient filth. Set within a walled parkland dense with oaks on Arden’s western boundary, the enormous building, Gothic without the grandeur, looks punitive, devoid of mercy. Jack half-expects to hear the shrieking organ music from a Vincent Price movie.
They pass through a narrow, peaked wooden door and enter a reassuringly familiar lobby. A bored, uniformed man at a central desk directs visitors to the elevators; stuffed animals and sprays of flowers fill the gift shop’s window; bathrobed patients tethered to I.V. poles occupy randomly placed tables with their families, and other patients perch on the chairs lined against the side walls; two white-coated doctors confer in a corner. Far overhead, two dusty, ornate chandeliers distribute a soft ocher light that momentarily seems to gild the luxurious heads of the lilies arrayed in tall vases beside the entrance of the gift shop.
“Wow, it sure looks better on the inside,” Jack says.
“Most of it does,” Fred says.
They approach the man behind the desk, and Fred says, “Ward D.” With a mild flicker of interest, the man gives them two rectangular cards stamped VISITOR and waves them through. The elevator clanks down and admits them to a wood-paneled enclosure the size of a broom closet. Fred Marshall pushes the button marked 5, and the elevator shudders upward. The same soft, golden light pervades the comically tiny interior. Ten years ago, an elevator remarkably similar to this, though situated in a grand Paris hotel, had held Jack and a UCLA art-history graduate student named Iliana Tedesco captive for two and a half hours, in the course of which Ms. Tedesco announced that their relationship had reached its final destination, thank you, despite her gratitude for what had been at least until that moment a rewarding journey together. After thinking it over, Jack decides not to trouble Fred Marshall with this information.
Better behaved than its French cousin, the elevator trembles to a stop and with only a slight display of resistance slides open its door and releases Jack Sawyer and Fred Marshall to the fifth floor, where the beautiful light seems a touch darker than in both the elevator and the lobby. “Unfortunately, it’s way over on the other side,” Fred tells Jack. An apparently endless corridor yawns like an exercise in perspective off to their left, and Fred points the way with his finger.
They go through two big sets of double doors, past the corridor to Ward B, past two vast rooms lined with curtained cubicles, turn left again at the closed entrance to Gerontology, down a long, long hallway lined with bulletin boards, past the opening to Ward C, then take an abrupt right at the men’s and women’s bathrooms, pass Ambulatory Ophthalmology and Records Annex, and at last come to a corridor marked WARD D. As they proceed, the light seems progressively to darken, the walls to contract, the windows to shrink. Shadows lurk in the corridor to Ward D, and a small pool of water glimmers on the floor.