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His eyes opened, and he looked around wildly.
“Tanner! Tanner!”
The phone was slippery. It squirted from her hand, landing on his chest, bouncing to the floor, skittering against the knife. She snatched it up, and the knife flipped away, its blood-covered blade leaving a trail of red on the commercial-grade gray carpet. London Fog. She’d picked the color out herself.
“Dee,” Tanner said dully, staring at nothing.
“Oh, Tanner. Right here. Right here. I’m calling nine-one-one. . . What happened? Oh, God, what happened?”
“Dee?”
“I’m right here. I’m—”
“Nine-one-one. What is the nature of your emergency?” The voice broke in on the telephone.
“My . . . my husband’s been stabbed in the chest at his clinic.” She had a blank moment, then rattled off the address. “Dr. Tanner Stahd. The Stahd Clinic in West Knoll.”
“Dee?”
“I’m right here,” she said to Tanner again, her voice shaking. She loved him. She loved him. She did. She always had.
But it was a hollow thought, one that made her feel like the fraud she was. She listened to the operator’s questions and directions in a kind of rote trance.
Three minutes, and then the ambulance
was there, and the EMTs were rushing in, tending to Tanner, who’d lapsed into unconsciousness again.
Delta stood back, spent. The drinks she’d had earlier didn’t help the fuzzy, out-of-sync surreal quality she felt. Her legs were quivering. She staggered into the waiting room and collapsed into a chair before she could fall onto the carpet.
The police arrived.
Bob “Quin” Quintar.
Not Bailey.
Her eyes closed, and she began silently crying.
“Delta.”
A new voice. One she recognized even though they hadn’t spoken since high school.
She opened her eyes into the cool blue ones of Chris McCrae.
“Oh, it’s you,” she said.
Bailey wasn’t the only one who’d gone through the police academy. McCrae had chosen to become a police officer as well. Tonight, he was sans the beard she remembered him sporting at the reunion, and he was dressed in a pair of jeans and a gray shirt, open at the throat. She recalled his washboard stomach from the pig roast. He looked in as good shape now as then, fifteen years past graduation, but the bloodless pallor of his skin spoke of his reaction to finding his old classmate on the floor, stabbed a dozen times or so.
She saw the unspoken question in his eyes and realized she was holding the knife.
“I didn’t do it. I loved him. I didn’t do it. We . . . we loved each other. Always.”
That was her first lie. He’d loved Amanda too, hadn’t he?
Delta was numb. While McCrae bagged the knife, she told him about the locked back door, which Tanner normally left open for her. He ordered her to stay back with the EMTs while he and Quin searched the clinic in case the attacker was still around. By the time they returned, the ambulance had taken Tanner away, and she’d found her way to one of the waiting-room chairs. There was a smear of blood on the hem of her dress, red against the white fabric and black piping.
“It’s all clear,” McCrae said of the clinic.
Quin said, “I’ll close the place down and get a team in here tomorrow.”
