Chapter 8
Hickok—Peter had presumed to call her “Miss Hickok” and was quickly disabused of the notion—met him at the hospital the following morning. She went through it like a conquering army.
She compared his bed to the one in the picture and concluded they were identical.
She interviewed nurses and doctors, extracting information about his coma, Beatrix’s devotion and the WA’s efforts to wrest him away.
She browbeat the hospital’s public-relations man into making the chief executive available, then browbeat him into admitting that yes, he did find it odd that the WA would take the action it did.
He hesitated on the street outside the hospital, his eye caught by a payphone.
Inside the booth, he flipped through the telephone book and found the right listing: Martinelli, Timothy and Mae. The line connected on the second ring.
“Hello?”
“Mrs. Martinelli?” he asked.
“Yes?”
“This is Peter Blackwell. I—I worked with your husband for years, and—”
She began to sob, and he realized his mistake. He’d thought she would be sad, but not despondent—she’d left her husband, after all. But perhaps that simply made it worse.
“I’m so sorry—I shouldn’t have bothered you,” he said, feeling terrible. “I only wanted to tell you how horrified I was to learn that—anyway, I’m very sorry, and I’ll let you go.”
“No! No, don’t hang up! I want to talk about him, but no one …” She again lapsed into sobs.
He pressed his forehead against the cool glass, wishing he knew what to say.
“I will get myself under control,” Mrs. Martinelli said shakily. “I swear I will. Would you come see me—please?”
“Yes,” he said numbly, and took down the address.
Two trains and one bus later, he arrived at the house. It was at the end of a cul-de-sac, a home clearly meant for the children the Martinellis had tried so hard to have. Mrs. Martinelli opened the door, a small figure in the airy hallway, wisps of dark hair escaping her bun.
“Thank you for coming,” she whispered, and led him to a sitting room decorated with fine antiques. He looked around, trying and failing to connect it with the perpetually rumpled Martinelli.
“Won’t you have a seat?” she asked.
He perched on an uncomfortable chair, gripping his cane with both hands. She sat across from him on an ornate couch.
“We met at a Pentagram dinner,” she said.
He nodded. “I’m surprised you remember that. It must have been at least two years ago.”
“He was always talking about you, so I—” Her lips turned up in what was almost a smile. “I was curious to see what ‘the whippersnapper’ looked like.”
She surprised a small huff of laughter out of him. Then he recollected that he would never hear Martinelli call him that again.
Neither of them said a word for what was probably thirty seconds but felt ten times as long.
She broke the silence with a question: “Do you know what happened to my husband?”
He shook his head, hoping to God his fears on that score were wrong.
Her eyes welled, but she did not sob. “Neither do I. It was at work, and they’ve told me nothing—nothing except that there was a ‘regrettable accident’”—he could hear the quotation marks around the phrase—“and that I should take comfort in knowing he was serving his country.” She pulled in a shaky breath.
“He was a scientist, not a soldier! What on earth could he have been doing that would kill him? Could you tell me that?”
His hands were trembling. He gripped his cane harder. “Our work was highly classified. But you understand that it involved weapons?”
Her eyes widened. “He never told me that. Oh, Tim.”
Peter breathed in and out, working up the courage to ask the question that prodded him to call her in the first place. “When did it happen?” As long as the answer wasn’t January 26—
“Last month.” She closed her eyes. “The 26th of January.”
Even in this moment of horror, he knew it should not be a shock. Of course it was the weapon. Of course.
And that was his fault, as surely as if he himself had set it off. For all his bluster to Beatrix about Miss Draden, he’d invented the weapon. He’d stowed it in Ellicott Mills. He’d allowed Miss Draden to find out about it through his own carelessness.
Mrs. Martinelli wrapped her arms around herself. “They c-couldn’t even give me his b-body!”
No. There wouldn’t have been anything left.
They sat in silence for a moment, both of them lost in their own misery. Then she took a deep breath. “When did you hear about Tim?”
“Just this weekend.” His voice cracked. “I’ve missed the funeral, haven’t I?”
She nodded. “I’m sorry. He liked you a great deal, and I did want to tell you, but I didn’t know where you were. He said you’d moved to a small town, but if he told me the name, it went right out of my head. I tried and tried to remember …”
“Please don’t feel bad—I was hospitalized the last four weeks,” Peter said. “I wouldn’t have been able to come regardless.”
She stared at him. “Were you—that is, was it the same accident—” She put her hands over her eyes. “No, you’ve been gone from the Pentagram for months! I’m not thinking.”
He tried and failed to come up with something to say. It was in fact the same accident, and he would have given anything at that moment to switch places with Martinelli.
“It was a very nice funeral,” she murmured, looking at the floor. “Beautiful and proper.” She made a sound that was neither a laugh nor a sob. “He would have hated it.”
Peter opened his mouth, could think of nothing to say to that, either, and closed it.
“He despised doing things for show,” she said.
“He couldn’t stand small talk and dinner parties with important people you don’t like and—and this room and—oh, I was such a fool!
” The pain on her face was hard to look at.
“He told me it didn’t matter that I couldn’t have a child.
I should have believed him. I shouldn’t have listened to them. ”
“Who?”
“The wives,” she said heavily. “The other wizard wives.”
It was difficult to concentrate on anything but the weapon and his culpability, but he tried. “What did they say?”
“‘Oh, darling, that’s really too awful,’” she said in a high-pitched, saccharine tone.
“‘You know how deeply wizards care about passing on their unique talents—why, Jenny Heller’s husband left her only last year because she was barren, did you hear? What was the point of a barren wife, that was what he said! So sad. And Hildy Jones’ husband took a mistress and made her raise the results while he cavorted with the other woman.
Can you imagine how she felt? But really, we do have a weighty responsibility to the country! ’”
She shuddered. He did, too, sickened.
“I shouldn’t have left. I should have had more faith in Tim,” she said.
“But you can’t understand how hard it is—to have nothing useful to do—to sit in an empty home you can’t fill, these words repeating in your head over and over and over.
You men have your work, and those wives have their children, but I have nothing.
” Her breath came out in gasps. “And now I sit here, really and truly alone, and think … what if … what if my leaving made him distracted and careless, and—”
“No!”
She looked at him, startled.
“No,” he said, quietly but even more firmly. “You had nothing to do with this. He visited me the day before. He was as clear-headed as always.”
“Oh,” she murmured. “You saw him?”
“Yes. He told me he loved you. He hadn’t given up hope.”
Her face twisted. Tears slid down her cheeks. He shouldn’t have said it.
He cleared his throat awkwardly. “Please forgive me for—”
“I wasted the time we had,” she said. “I will always regret that. But I can’t tell you what a comfort it is that his last thoughts of me were … were kind.” She rose. “Thank you, Wizard Blackwell. Thank you from the bottom of my heart.”
He struggled to his feet and took her outstretched hand, unable to speak. Her gratitude—that was worst of all.
Are you all right?
There were many other questions she wanted to ask, but that was simplest. She passed the paper to Peter, sitting next to her on the couch after dinner, Rosemarie chaperoning from the nearby chair—as if there were anything to keep an eye on.
They were a perfectly respectable foot apart. He wasn’t so much as holding her hand.
He hesitated before taking the pen and writing a one-word answer: Tired.
That was not the way she would have described how he looked. Beaten down, more like. Miserable, even. She took the paper back, contemplated what to say, and settled on a question that hinted at their newest problem: Did you sleep OK?
He seemed to rouse himself at that. Yes. No dreams. I’m concerned.
She swallowed. Gone, you think?
He gave a helpless shrug before putting pen to paper. If the coma kept the link in place when it otherwise would have snapped …
He didn’t finish the thought, but he didn’t have to. If the coma was the key to why dreamside inexplicably outlived the Vows, it ceased to exist the instant he recovered.
For something so irrational as tandem dreaming they could control, that explanation made a certain amount of unfortunate sense.
She stared at their spare conversation on the page.
No way to talk to him in person. No way, it now seemed, to talk to him in dreams. And they shouldn’t even be writing to each other like this—a wizard could have slipped into the house, using no spells in town, and they would never know.
A wizard could be standing next to the couch and looking over Peter’s shoulder this very instant.
She jumped to her feet, ran to the bathroom and burned the paper, stomach clenching at the thought of the dangerously revealing things she’d written in this house before his coma. They couldn’t afford any more mistakes.