Carver found Dr. Benedict at the hospital that afternoon, seated on the sofa in the cool lobby where they’d talked the day of Linda Lapella’s death. He was reading a newspaper, but when he saw Carver approach, he glanced up and smiled.
“Our conversation shouldn’t be so tragic this time,” he said.
It hit Carver with a rush of sadness and dread: Benedict didn’t yet know about his wife’s departure.
“I was at your house this morning,” Carver said, sitting down next to Benedict. He didn’t want to tell Benedict about Leona leaving him, but neither did he think he should neglect to mention it. At some point the doctor would find out about the scene with the departing Leona and realize that Carver had known.
“Operation Alive is picketing my home,” Benedict said.
“I couldn’t help noticing,”
“That’s part of their strategy, to hound abortion doctors, not allow us any peace at work or at home, put pressure on our families. How’s Leona holding up? I told her to ignore them and stay away from the doors and windows. The heat will get to them eventually and they’ll go away.”
“I’m afraid she’s the one who went away,” Carver said.
Benedict looked puzzled, “Leona? Really? That wasn’t wise. Where was she going?”
“She, er, left,” Carver said.
“Yes, you told me that.”
“I mean . . . left for good. That’s what she said.”
Benedict set aside the paper he’d been reading. Words were becoming thoughts that were boring in, changing his life. The sports page slid from the sofa onto the lobby floor. Carver felt sorry for him. He looked as stunned as if he’d been struck with a hammer.
“I assumed you meant she left the house. But you meant she left me?” He still couldn’t quite let the idea into his mind to stay.
“When I got there, she was packing. I’m sure she’d been drinking.”
Benedict made a little back-and-forth wiping motion with his hand, as if erasing a scene on a blackboard. “No, no, Leona never drinks.”
Carver knew better than to argue with him. Secret alcoholics were among the most devious of marriage partners. “A cab came and picked her up, and she left with her luggage.”
“She didn’t say why?” Benedict was still hoping.
“She said why,” Carver told him. “It’s your work. She said she couldn’t stand the strain and the threats. Before she walked out, she handed me a stack of newspaper clippings about demonstrations and harassment of abortion doctors. You spend too much time away from her, mentally and physically. That’s more or less what she said. She thinks your cause is more important to you than your marriage.”
Benedict sat silently for a while. A nurse walked by and said hello to him, but he didn’t so much as glance up at her. He was lost in the labyrinth of this, his life’s latest tragedy, and possibly contemplating a bleak future alone.
“I thought she understood,” he said finally.
You also thought she didn’t drink. “She understands that you’ll never quit.”
“Do you think she’ll come back?”
The question surprised Carver. Why should he have any insight into the Benedict marriage? He’d merely happened to be on the scene when Leona walked from the house and took a cab. “I don’t know. She seemed sure of what she was doing. She told me it wasn’t all of a sudden, that the pressure had built over time and she’d been thinking about it.”
“And you’re sure she didn’t tell you her real reason for leaving?”
Real reason? Benedict was still resisting what had happened; he saw himself as a fighter and a winner and didn’t want to be the cause of his marriage’s failure.
“What she said seemed real to me,” Carver said. “It was the pressure of your work, what it did to your lives. That’s what she told me, anyway.” It always amazed him how a man like Benedict, who held and nurtured a grand vision, could be blind to what was going on immediately around him.
Benedict sat forward and leaned down, resting his head between his knees. It was what doctors told you to do when you felt faint. When he straightened up several seconds later, he looked sick.
“You going to be all right?” Carver asked.
“I’ll have to be,” Benedict said in a thin voice. “I have to see a patient in less than an hour.” He looked at Carver and tried to smile. “You understand that, don’t you, that I have to see a patient? You understand how important it is? Not just to me, but to her?”
Carver had gotten the message: he, Carver, understood but Leona hadn’t; every problem in the Benedict marriage stemmed from that and was her responsibility.
“If you’re ill,” Carver said, “you could cancel. Your patient could come back another day.”
“Unfortunately, there are no ‘other’ days! Too many of us have been run out of business by the radicals who are picketing my house at this moment. And I have Dr. Grimm’s patients now, the appointments he’ll never be able to keep.” He stood up from the sofa, swaying slightly, then steadied himself. Wiping his fingertips lightly across his eyes as if to correct some minor vision problem, he said, “God, what a business, what a world this is!”
“I’ve thought that, too,” Carver said, “in my business, in my world. Nobody has much choice but to keep pushing on.”
“That I can do,” Benedict said. He stood straighter and buttoned his suit coat. “That I can damned well do!”
He made a good show of walking away toward the elevators, pace steady, shoulders squared. To look at him from behind, you wouldn’t guess he had a care or a want.
But Carver knew Benedict had a want.
He was sure that right now the doctor wanted to scream.
At nine that evening, Beth returned from following Nate Posey.
Carver, sitting on the sofa and watching the light over the ocean dim beyond the cottage’s wide window, turned his head when she came in and thought immediately that she looked tired. He wouldn’t say anything to her about that, or about his having to clean up the mess in the cottage because Al had had no way of going outside to relieve himself.
“Why are you staring at me?” she asked as she set her computer case on the counter, She carried the little notebook computer almost everywhere these days.
He decided not to tell her how he thought she might still be too weak to be out shadowing players in a murder investigation. He knew she’d simply brush away his words, or possibly get angry and argue. Like him, she resented being vulnerable and having it pointed out.
“You’re a magnet to my eyes,” he said.
“Very romantic, Fred.” Her tone of voice suggested she didn’t believe him.
Looking again at the ocean and darkening sky, he waited silently while she went into the kitchen. The refrigerator door opened, altering the pattern of light and shadow on that side of the cottage, then closed.
“Too dim in here to see much of anything,” Beth said a few minutes later, sitting down in a chair opposite him. But she made no move to switch on a lamp or suggest that Carver do so. She had a glass of milk in one hand, a chocolate chip cookie in the other. After kicking off her leather sandals, she wriggled lower into the chair, scooting her rump forward, then stretched her long legs out in front of her and crossed them at the ankles.
“I was watching the ocean and sky,” Carver said. “The stars will be out soon.” When she didn’t reply, he said, “There’s been another casualty from the clinic bombing.”
“Oh?”
“The Benedicts’ marriage. Leona Benedict left the doctor this morning,” He related to her what had happened at the Benedict house.
Beth listened silently, chewing bites of cookie and occasionally taking a swig of milk.
When Carver was finished, she wiped away a milk mustache and set her glass on the floor beside the chair. “Maybe Leona can’t be blamed,” she said. “Pro-life extremist groups like Operation Alive are relentless in badgering and torturing doctors who perform abortions, and the rest of the family’s made miserable in the process. Under the kind of pressure an abortion doctor’s spouse has to endure, Leona probably wore down to her raw nerve ends, and her ability to resist left her.” She brushed crumbs from her fingers almost angrily, probably thinking about Operation Alive. “How’d Benedict take it when you told him she’d left?”
“He seemed shattered. Surprised. He couldn’t believe the pressure in their lives had resulted in her leaving. He asked me what her real reason was. I told him again why she left, but he didn’t like hearing it or believing it, even though he knew he had no choice. Then he sucked up his pain and walked away to tend to a patient who was coming in. I had to admire that.”
“Sure you did, being you. Is he considering quitting?”
“I doubt it. My guess is he’s more determined than ever to stay on the job, despite Martin Freel and Operation Alive.”
Though moonlight was filtering in from outside, the cottage’s interior was becoming too dark to see anything clearly. Carver reached over and switched on a lamp by the sofa. Beth winced at the sudden onslaught of light, looking worse than when she’d walked in.
“What about your day?” he asked. “Learn anything from following Nate Posey?”
Al, who had been awakened from a nap behind the sofa, ambled around and stretched out near Beth’s chair. He puffed himself up then let out a long sigh. She leaned down and scratched him behind the ears before answering Carver.
“Posey stayed in his apartment most of the day,” Beth said. “Left only to run a few errands. And even though he’s on vacation time, he stopped by Second Sailor and talked for a while with some employees who were working on a dry-docked yacht. After picking up supper to go at a McDonald’s, he drove home and ate it, then a little while later came out dressed in fresh clothes, looking like a dandy.”
Carver’s interest stirred. Maybe following Nate Posey might lead somewhere at that, “On his way to meet the other woman you suspect is in his life?”
“No,” she said, “I followed him to church. That big one on Shell Avenue with the huge steeple.”
Carver knew the church she meant. Despite the fact that it was constructed only a few years ago, it looked like a converted warehouse on which someone had stuck a new roof with a steeple and cross, probably because of the scarcity of windows in its plain brick walls.
“I waited outside,” Beth continued, “watching other people go into the church for what a sign said was a prayer meeting to aid world refugees. About an hour later, Posey came out, walking with a slim woman with black hair and a long neck. They went to a pizza place and Posey picked at a small salad and drank beer while she ate a pizza about the size of a saucer.”
Carver remembered now the young woman who’d been consoling Posey in the hospital cafeteria the day of the bombing. “Love interfering with appetite?”
“I’d like to think so,” Beth said, “but they didn’t act that close to each other during dinner. They talked and didn’t touch. And there was none of the body language, the unconscious imitation of gestures, you see when people are in love or lust. After dinner, Posey drove her back to the church, where she’d left her car. They didn’t embrace or kiss when they said good-bye, and she got out of his car and into hers.”
“The night was still young,” Carver pointed out.
“Not for Posey. He drove home, and I saw him outside a little later watering his geraniums, wearing shorts and a red net muscle shirt.” She leaned over and scratched Al behind the ears again. “That’s when I gave it up and came here.”
“What about tomorrow?” Carver asked, remembering that Anderson was no longer on the job.
“I’ll keep following him. If anyone other than Norton actually did the bombing, I think it’s Nate Posey. He’s the only one we’ve got with a motive we know about.”
“What about Martin Freel and Operation Alive?”
“They’ve got a motive to blow up anything and everything they want,” Beth said. “All they have to do is find the appropriate verse in the Bible, But they usually confine their activities to picketing and harassing. Slashed tires and midnight phone threats are more their speed. I don’t rule them out, but Posey is my favorite.”
“Maybe you should take Al with you tomorrow,” Carver suggested, wishing Anderson hadn’t been reassigned.
“I don’t need him.”
“He needs you. And if I’m gone all day too, there’s nobody to let him in and-more importantly-out.”
Beth looked down at Al. Al looked up at Beth. His vote was in his eyes.
“Majority rules,” Beth said, laughing and stroking Al’s scruffy neck. “Al goes.”
For good would be nice, Carver thought, but he knew better than to say it.