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Cheryl Beth felt a burning on her ears and cheeks. She said nothing.
“Why did you go to Dr. Lustig’s office that night?”
“She left word for me. I told you. She asked me to come down.”
“In the middle of the night?” Ott’s voice rose. “So you were fighting with her over Dr. Nagle?”
“No. That was over a long time ago.”
“So what did she want?”
Cheryl Beth shook her head. “I honestly don’t know.”
“Dr. Lustig was a key member of our technology committee. She was working directly with SoftChartZ to bring this hospital into the twenty-first century. Now she’s gone.”
Cheryl Beth made herself say nothing. Any words bubbling up inside her would only make things worse, especially the ones that were careening around in her head at that moment.
Stephanie stared at her. “You have charmed a lot of the physicians here. I don’t get it, but that has given you tremendous freedom. But you have never charmed me. You’re a bull in a china shop with some powerful protectors. I’m going to be watching you even more closely.” Her shoulder pads quivered. “And if this matter is not resolved quickly… I will not tolerate this.” She leaned forward. “You are not to discuss Dr. Lustig’s murder with anyone: colleagues, patients, and absolutely not the press.”
Stephanie Ott turned to her computer screen and began furiously typing. “You can leave now.”
***
Cheryl Beth left the office and walked directly to the parking garage, barely containing her angry tears. God, she hated it when she cried. It made people think she was weak. Certain people. She had to get away from the hospital for a while. This, even though the work allowed her to momentarily forget Christine and the blood, that night in the basement, the yawning canyon in her life “before” and “after.” When she was helping patients she could be herself again. She tried not to think how badly she wanted a glass of whiskey. Five minutes later, she was back home.
Cheryl Beth’s small house backed up to a thick stand of trees. Beyond that, a park fell off toward Over-the-Rhine and downtown. But the incline began in her driveway. Her old, wooden garage was lower than the house, the result being that in the cold months she often parked nearer to the street, to keep from being stranded
in the garage by an overnight ice or snowstorm. An oak stood in her small backyard, its branches overhanging the old garage. The location made her uneasy late at night. The park attracted unsavory characters, so even before Christine’s murder Cheryl Beth had avoided the tree line after dark.
So it had been days since she had pulled down the driveway. She went all the way down today and walked back through the cold, crisp air. She looked back at the house and felt centered again. She would get through this, through the horrible discovery in the basement of the hospital, and through the debris of her breakup with Gary. She would live in this house, enjoy her music and her gardening, watch the tiny perfection of birds from her porch, forget about men. No more blind dates set up by friends. No more waiting for the phone to ring. No married men, ever. She walked up the incline of the drive, admiring the flower beds that she had cleared of leaves. Even on her small city lot, she could fill dozens of bags with leaves every fall. The flower beds were the last touch. At least one thing in her life was neat, she thought, even as Stephanie Ott’s words burned inside her head. Maybe next year she would plant gardenias.
The indentations on the ground. She noticed them only on a second look, the realization that comes when the brain processes a mundane scene, one noticed a thousand times before, but this time something is subtly different.
She walked slowly back to the flower beds that stood beside the house. It was unmistakable, two footprints dug deep into the soil, just behind the hedge that stood at the corner of the house. They might as well have been the first footprints on Mars for the primal force with which they hit her. They were large footprints, fresh since she had cleared out the leaves. Someone had been standing there, easily concealed by the hedge. Since Christine had been murdered. Standing there where he could look through the large bay window into her living room.
Chapter Nine
The city rolled out beneath his feet, the bare, black trees thick on hills tumbling down to the Ohio River, the sky a dirty white blanket. Landmarks sprouted comfortingly: Carew Tower, a baby Rockefeller Center, dominating the jewel box of downtown skyscrapers, just as it had all of Will’s life, all his parents’ lives. The massive deco band-shell shape of Union Terminal stood against the Western Hills. The tower of St. Peter-in-Chains Cathedral. Closer in, the huge windows of the hospital solarium gave him a view of the crescent of tilting roofs of 150-year-old row houses, punctuated by all manner of church steeples. The vast rail yards connecting north and south ran along Mill Creek, and, beyond them, stood the old neighborhoods of the Germans and the Appalachian briars. All the green was drained out of the hills.
Down the hill was Over-the-Rhine, the old immigrant German neighborhood. The Germans were long gone and it was one of the toughest ghettos in the Midwest, a fact barely belied by its impressive architecture and dense, mystical streets. Many of the buildings had been left to rot and drug dealers ran the street corners. The mentally ill homeless roamed the sidewalks and camped in decaying Italianate landmarks. Years before, the city had stowed most of the social services in OTR. Tote up all the calls, all the cases, and Will had spent years of his career there. Main Street and a few other places were being gentrified and celebrated in the newspapers. Soon all those grand old row houses would be restored and gleaming, they said. But Will knew something the white chamber of commerce types didn’t: OTR was defiantly black territory. Lots of hardcore Over-the-Rhine residents regarded the renovations and teardowns and Saturday night bar traffic by the westside white kids as an invasion. Cross Central Parkway south and you were in the white territory of downtown. But the north side of Central Parkway was an invisible boundary.
Cincinnati was good at boundaries. Interstate 75 was the Sauerkraut Curtain: to the west lay Price Hill and, beyond, the neat houses to which the German families had moved in the 1930s and 1940s as they grew more prosperous. East, beyond downtown, ranged the once-grand neighborhoods of Mount Auburn and Walnut Hills, now decrepit and dangerous. Once-grand estates had been subdivided into a dozen rat-infested apartments, and the teenagers carried guns like white kids carried cell phones. Then, another boundary, and you slipped into the leafy affluence of the old gentry in Hyde Park and Mount Lookout and Indian Hill. It was a nice polite midwestern city on the surface. Anybody who paid attention knew better. Neighborhood was identity, and some of the neighborhoods were lethal.
The leaves were all gone. Nothing could conceal Cincinnati: half its population decamped for the suburbs or the Sunbelt, leaving lovely old buildings and trees that had lost their leaves. His best friend from high school had left last year to sell houses in Arizona. The stubborn ones stayed and loved the city. Sometimes he felt that Cincinnati was a museum that was building new stadiums, a torn and wounded city without even knowing it, old money and denial being the camouflage, the best pain drug. Will knew better. Every place he looked he remembered trouble. It was the cop’s lot. In college, he had taken a course on urban planning where the books would inevitably talk about this or that city as a “contradiction.” Cincinnati was different. It was one reinforcement laid upon another, like the levees that held back the Ohio. Yet the great river still had its way.
Still, to Will’s wonder Cincinnati looked luminous. Cindy looked luminous. He was alive. He had held her for long minutes. She was still as slender as the first day he had met her, and he could still touch his elbows with his hands when he embraced her. She kept trying to pull away gently and he knew he must smell rank, but he just held on, feeling her sharp shoulder blades, the firm warmth of her breasts. For those minutes it all went away, the hospital, the killing, the pain.
She had pulled away before he could kiss her. Now he wheeled the chair around from the big windows and faced her. She wore her new charcoal gray suit. She had come straight from work. Her blue eyes that were startling in their intensity, and her chestnut hair looked the same color as when she was twenty-two, because or in spite of those expensive trips to the salon that they had once bickered over. So much money for such a severe hairstyle. He loved her hair natural, parted in the middle, and slightly wild as it hit her shoulders. She had said she couldn’t look like a high school girl and be taken seriously at the bank. Just as she had said, after being promoted to senior vice president, that she would prefer to be known as Cynthia. He had squirmed when she wanted him to go with her to the symphony or the May Festival. Baseball bored her. It all seemed foolishly trivial now.
“You look beautiful.”
She patted his knee. He couldn’t really feel it.
“Cindy, you’ve got to get me out of here.”
“What are you talking about?”
He knew he had blurted out the words with too much desperation. He looked down, slowed his breathing. He laughed and spoke in a slower voice.
