Turning on his side he struggled to right himself and climb up on his knees. But when the swoon came this time it took him down at once.
There was a sound somewhere.
A thin winding sound.
It was like a ribbon of light in the darkness, this sound.
Imagining this? Dreaming? Dying.
He had never expected death to be this quiet, this secretive, this easy. "Marchent," he whispered. "I,m sorry, so sorry!"
But there was a second siren, yes, he could hear it, a second shining ribbon in the dark. The two luminous ribbons of sound were weaving in and out, weaving and coming closer and closer. And there was a third siren, yes.
Imagine that.
The sirens were very close now, winding down, someone spooling up that shimmering luminous ribbon and, once again, the sound of breaking glass.
He drifted, feeling the tug of the darkness again. Ah, well, my friends, you are too late. It didn,t seem so horribly tragic, really. It was all too immediate and exciting, You are dying, Reuben, and he didn,t struggle, or hope.
Someone was standing over him. Beams of light were crisscrossing above him, sliding down the walls. It was actually beautiful.
"Marchent," he said. "Marchent! They got her." He couldn,t say it clearly enough. His mouth was full of fluid.
"Don,t talk, son," said the man kneeling beside him. "We,re taking care of her. We,re doing all we can."
But he knew. He knew by the quiet and the stillness that had surrounded him, and by the sad tone of the man,s voice, that for Marchent it was too late. The lovely and elegant woman he had known for less than a day was dead. She,d died right away.
"Stay with me, son," the man said. People were lifting him. Down came the plastic oxygen mask. Someone was ripping open his shirt.
He heard the snap and crackle of the walkie-talkie. He was on the stretcher. They were running.
"Marchent," he said. The glaring light inside the ambulance blinded him. He didn,t want to be taken away from her. He panicked but they held him down and then he went out.
Chapter Four
REUBEN WAS IN AND OUT of consciousness for two hours in the Mendocino emergency room; then an air ambulance took him south to San Francisco General where Dr. Grace Golding was waiting with her husband, Phil, at her side.
Reuben was struggling desperately against the restraints that bound him to the gurney. The pain and the drugs were driving him out of his mind.
"They will not tell me what happened!" he roared at his mother, who at once demanded that the police come and give him the answers he was entitled to have.
The only problem with that, said the police, was that he was too drugged to answer their questions and they had more questions than he did at this point. But yes, Marchent Nideck was dead.
It was Celeste who got on the phone with the authorities in Mendocino and came back with the details.
Marchent had been stabbed over sixteen times and any one of ten different wounds might have been fatal. She,d died within minutes, maybe seconds. If she suffered, it was very brief.
Reuben willfully closed his eyes for the first time and went to sleep.
When he woke there was a plainclothes police officer there, and in drug-slurred words, Reuben volunteered that yes, he had had intimate relations "with the deceased," and no, he did not mind if they took a DNA test. He had known the autopsy would reveal all this.
He gave the best account he could of what he remembered. No, he had not made the 911 call; he had dropped his phone, and been unable to recover it. But if the call had come from his phone, well, then, he must have done it.
("Murder, murder." That,s what he,d said over and over again? Didn,t sound like something he would have said at all.)
Celeste wanted him to stop talking. He needed an attorney. He,d never seen her so anxious, so near to tears.
"No, I don,t," Reuben insisted. "I don,t need an attorney."
"It,s the concussion," Grace said. "You,re not going to remember everything. It,s a miracle you remember as much as you do."
" ,Murder, murder,?" he whispered. "I said that?"
He so vividly recalled struggling to find the phone and not being able to do it.
Even through the haze of painkillers, Reuben could see how shaken his mother was. She was in her usual green scrubs, her red hair pinned down and flat, her blue eyes red rimmed and tired. He felt a throbbing in her hand as if she were trembling inside where people couldn,t see it.
Twenty-four hours later, when he was moved to a private room, Celeste brought the news that the killers had been Marchent,s younger brothers. She was powerfully energized by the perfectly outrageous story.
The two had driven a stolen car to the property and, wearing wigs, ski masks, and gloves, had cut off the power to the house, but not before bludgeoning an old housekeeper to death in her bed in the rear servants, quarters. Obviously wanting the attack to look like the work of random junkies, they,d bashed in the dining room window though the back doors of the house were unlocked.
They,d caught Marchent in the kitchen, just outside her office. There was a small gun found near her, with only her fingerprints on the handle. Not a single shot had been fired.
The animal that had killed the brothers was a mystery. No real tracks were found at the scene. The bites had been savage and immediately fatal to the brothers. But what the animal was, the authorities could not at this point say.
As for the locals, some were insisting it was a female mountain lion, long infamous in those parts.
Reuben said nothing. He heard those sounds again, he felt that paw against his back. A violent shock passed through him, a flash of helplessness and acceptance. I am going to die.
"These people are driving me insane on this," Grace declared. "One minute it,s the saliva of a dog, the next it,s the saliva of a wolf, and now they,re telling me maybe the bites were made by a human. Something,s happened to their lab results. They don,t want to admit it. The fact is, they didn,t test those wounds properly. Now it was no human being that made these bites on Reuben,s head and neck. And it was no mountain lion either. The idea is patently absurd!"
"But why did it stop?" Reuben asked. "Why didn,t it kill me the way it killed them?"
"If it was rabid, it was behaving erratically," Grace explained. "And even a bear can be rabid. Mountain lions, no. Maybe something distracted it. We don,t know. We only know you,re alive."
She went on mumbling about the total lack of hair or fur samples. "Now you know there had to have been fibers at that scene, animal fibers."
Reuben heard that panting breath again. Then the silence. There had been no smell of an animal, but there had been the feel of one, of hair, the long thick coat of a dog or a wolf against him. Maybe a mountain lion. But no scent of a mountain lion. Don,t mountain lions have a scent? How would they ever know?