Rose-Anne looked up.
“What about it?”
Elizabeth shrugged. “I don’t know. Ever since you mentioned it, the name has been echoing in my head, like Oz or Tara, you know?” “Nope.”
Elizabeth laughed. “I don’t either, except it’s got a kind of children’s-tale feeling to me, like a place you know about but not in real life.” Rose-Anne blinked. “It’s not make-believe. In fact, it’s where Hans was born. Little island off Puerto Rico. Big Navy base. Dave used to fly bombing practice there with his squadron.” She hesitated a moment, then continued. “They had a fertility clinic, too.” For no reason she could name, Elizabeth felt her heart speed up. “A fertility clinic?” “Dave and I had gone five years trying. God bless Dr. Wolfe, we used to say.” “Dr. Wolfe?”
“Doctor who ran the clinic. Hans owed his life to him-we owed him our happiness. All that time we had waited-it seemed to make us love the boy all the more. Though sometimes,” she added sadly, “it did seem like a one-way street. When Dave died? It didn’t seem to rattle Hans at all. Kept it all inside, I guess.” She smiled a bittersweet smile and looked off. “How’d you deal with your dad’s death?” Elizabeth gave a wary frown. She had only mentioned this once to Hans, in the middle of the night after lovemaking had left them exhausted but too happy’ to sleep. “Hans told you?” Rose-Anne nodded. “In a funny way you were like the glue between us-talking about you brought us together. You were a service brat, too, weren’t you?” “A service brat? No. I mean, my dad was in the Navy, yes, for a while. I kind of blotted out most of my childhood.” “A parent’s death can do that. And then you had your own brush with mortality, isn’t that true? You were quite a skier, Hans told me. And then, what, you had an accident?” He had talked about her so much it astonished her. She felt exposed, briefly, but then warmed, as she realized exactly what that implied. She kept her face oblique. “Yeah, an accident,” she said. “See, now you’re clamming up. Racing on skis, wasn’t it?” Did it make it worse, knowing how much he had cared about her? “Bit of bad luck. A rut in an icy track at the wrong split second-I went through the snow fence at about seventy, I guess. “Went into the trees, Hans said. Smashed your face. Horrible.” “Well,” said Elizabeth, “I was never quite Olympic caliber.” “Didn’t spook you?”
“Actually, it had the opposite effect.”
Rose-Anne laughed, and there was affection in it. “So Hans said. You like to ride things out-get to the bottom of things. And it sure didn’t ruin your looks.” “In fact,” Elizabeth admitted, “it improved them. They did a better job on my face than they did on my knee.” “Well, they must have had something good to work with. I can’t get my hair done without seeing your face in some magazine or other. She took a drink, then smiled conspiratorially. “Want to see some pictures of Hans?” Without waiting for an answer, Rose-Anne opened her purse and pulled out a sheaf of snapshots. Old pictures, mostly, in funny formats, small, long, trimmed-even a few yearbook photos. “Hans in junior high, star pitcher of the baseball team.” Elizabeth studied the picture avidly. Hans at fourteen was already Hans. “And here he is on the high school diving team. All-state two years running. A natural athlete-whatever he took up. Straight As, too- like you,” she said fondly. Elizabeth leafed through the snapshots, absently running her finger over Hans’s face, feeling again that odd sense of kinship that had haunted her from their very first meeting. She found a snapshot of him in his early twenties, standing next to a Cessna twoseater, shoulder to shoulder with a grinning, spade-bearded man twice his age. “That’s the day he soloed,” said Rose-Anne. “This his father?”
“His flight instructor. Said Hans was a natural. But then Hans seemed to do everything easily-except make real connections with people. You, I think, got closer than anybody.” Elizabeth fought back the lump in her throat and went to the next snapshot, Hans as a tiny boy. All smiles, standing on a beach holding a big red ball about his head. Without asking, she knew this was Vieques. “He looks so happy.” Rose-Anne squinted. “Hans loved Vieques. Always wanted to go back, never got around to it. He was so busy, he never had time to take a rest. Maybe he’ll rest now,” she added quietly. Her voice sounded bitter for the first time, almost angry. “So,” she changed subjects, “what’s this thing that doesn’t make sense?” Elizabeth took a deep breath, her heart taking off at a gallop. “I was talking to him,” she said, lust before the accident. Somebody did something stupid-another driver, it must’ve been-he was about to crash into him when he was cut off.” Rose-Anne blinked. “You sure about that?” she asked soberly. “That’s what it sounded like to me.”
“The police didn’t mention another car. There was only one set of tire marks.” “It’s not just that,” said Elizabeth. “I drove up there, where it happened? I found his tire tracks. He braked hard. You could see that very clearly. Then he must’ve swerved. There was a big dent in the guardrail with the same color paint on it as his car.” “He went through the rail.”
“Not there, he didn’t. He went back across the road, hit the rocks, and bounced back to the rail a second time. Rose-Anne took another sip of her drink. Elizabeth realized how hard it must be for her to hear this. “So,” the woman said, “he went through there, right?” Elizabeth checked the bartender. He was watching them in the mirror again until he noticed her looking back. Then he busied himself polishing a glass. Elizabeth leaned in closer to Rose-Anne and lowered her voice. “The tracks stopped at the edge of the cliff. The car didn’t have enough momentum to go over. You could see where the frame rested on the edge, and where the tires had sunk in after it stopped. He stopped, and then he went over the edge.” Rose-Anne looked away and finished her drink. “So, what’re you saying…?”
Elizabeth frowned. “I don’t know” She finished her drink as well but they didn’t reorder. Rose-Anne looked back at her, and Elizabeth asked, “Rose-Anne, tell me, did Hans ever mention being followed?” Rose-Anne straightened. “You really are turning into a sleuth, aren’t you?” “If that’s what it takes.”
Rose-Anne smiled as if she understood, reached out and patted Elizabeth’s hand. “Matter of fact, he talked about it all the time. Last week I visited him, he was having his house swept for bugs.” “What do you make of that?”
Rose-Anne looked at her and then laughed. “I think it shows how little Hans knew people, thinking Yvette was having him tailed. She didn’t give a damn about his affairs. He was her meal ticket, hon. Period.” Elizabeth looked at her. “Meal ticket? I thought her father-” “Was rich? Nope. Connected, sure. Used to be rich, maybe. But when it came to actual plunk-down-on-thebarrelhead cash, the family was damn near hand-to-mouth. The reason they looked rich was because their capacity for denial was as overblown as their lifestyle.” She shook her head. “Yvette was completely dependent on Hans.” “Maybe she did it for the money?”
“Maybe Hans’s estate will keep her afloat for a while, but no, Yvette will go through that faster than a cow can crap. She was dumb, but not dumb enough to kill the goose that laid the golden eggs for her every quarter.” Elizabeth sighed. “But he was so sure something was going on.” “One word for that. Paranoia.”
Elizabeth stared at the photo, Hans with the beach ball held aloft, a palm tree rising behind him, the turquoise ocean. It was as though she were expecting the picture to move, the palm to start waving in the breeze, and Hans to call out to her in a little-boy voice. She felt Rose-Anne’s hand on her arm again. “Really, Elizabeth, don’t beat up on yourself. You’ve got to take the hit and go on. That’s what I’m doing.” But she couldn’t. Somebody had made Hans crash, she felt it in her soul. But if not Yvette, who?
VIEQUES ISLAND
That Peter had survived at all was a miracle, and it brought other miracles in its wake. With the exception of a few easily repaired bleeds, his body was alive and his condition stable. Even more encouraging, early CAT scans revealed no lesions or anomalies in his brain. His autonomic functions were normal, and the reflexes in his extremities were at full strength. This implied strongly that the brain stem had survived undamaged. So far as Wolfe and his assistants could tell, all the major splices had not only held but were now transmitting neural messages bilaterally as fluently as they would in a pristine body. The brain had survived the transfer, and the body had survived the implantation. The outcome, Wolfe declared, with a bow toward Mary Shelley, was “electrifying.” Henderson continued to send flowers and champagne every day’. Wolfe had ordered the chemicals keeping Peter in his protective coma be withdrawn at the end of the first week. Within two days Peter’s higher brain waves were sending the needles of the EEG trembling into tentative bursts of activity. Barrola had recommended a Valium drip, in case there was some kind of psychic trauma hidden in the marriage between body and brain that would overwhelm Peter’s psyche once he awoke. Wolfe, however, saw no evidence of anxiety in Peter’s brain scans, and had discontinued the IV. All Peter’s cortical readings, in fact, were approaching normal. With the exception of an auxiliary oxygen tube, Peter was taken off life support. The body kept breathing on its own.