The Night Parade(37)

“She’s probably out foraging for food,” he said. “I bet she’ll be back tonight.”

“She didn’t come back last night,” said Ellie. “Or the night before that.”

“Maybe she came when you were asleep.”

She turned, studied his face. A vertical line formed between her eyebrows. “I wasn’t,” she said, quite matter-of-factly. “I was awake.”

“Well, come on,” he said. “Dinnertime.” He paused in the doorway, then turned back. “Did you do something to upset your mother today?”

Ellie climbed down off the chair. “Nope,” she said.

“You’re sure? Mom seems angry.”

“She’s been like that since she came home from work yesterday.”

Had she? David hadn’t noticed.

In the living room, David switched on the stereo and inserted a Dave Brubeck album into the disc player. Once the music started, he adjusted the volume, then joined Ellie and Kathy in the kitchen.

“I’m feeling some wine,” he said, going to the breakfront. He selected a bottle of cheap merlot. “You want some?”

“Sure,” said Ellie.

“Ha,” David said, retrieving two wineglasses from the shelf.

“No, thanks,” Kathy said.

“Have some anyway,” David said.

Kathy hardly spoke a word throughout dinner. David was thankful that Ellie was there to keep the conversation going. David did his best to keep things lively and ask questions of Ellie about summer vacation and her friends, but he kept glancing at Kathy across from him at the table. There were dark grooves beneath Kathy’s eyes. Her mouth looked tight and drawn. Once, when she caught him staring at her, she didn’t smile or even acknowledge him; she merely kept staring at him until it was he who looked away, an inexplicable feeling of shame causing his face to grow hot, as if he’d been caught spying on her doing something in private.

After dinner, Ellie went out back to play in the yard before it was fully dark. She said she wanted to look for more birds, in the event that those three abandoned eggs might need a surrogate.

“Where does she come up with this stuff?” he said, dumping the dirty paper plates into the trash. Kathy remained at the table. When he looked over his shoulder at her, he saw that she was refilling her wineglass.

He came up behind her, rubbed her back. “Tell me,” he said. “What’d I do? If I’m going to sleep in the doghouse tonight, I’d at least like to know what I did that put me there.”

She slid a hand up her shoulder and rested it atop one of his. “It isn’t you,” she said. Her voice was flat.

“Then tell me,” he said. He pulled out the chair next to her and sat down. “What’s wrong?”

“Three of the women in my office have gotten sick,” Kathy said. She held the wineglass up in front of her face and stared at the bloodred wine as if she could discern some prophetic insight from it. “Two are already dead.”

“Oh God . . .”

“And eleven patients.”

“Jesus. Dead? Eleven? Was it—”

“Yes.” She practically spat the word at him, exasperated. “What else would it be? Of course it’s . . .” She didn’t need to say it. Instead, she fluttered a hand at him.

“Are you worried you might be sick, too?”

She said nothing.

“Then make a doctor’s appointment, Kath. Go see Bahethi. You can do it first thing on Monday.”

“There’s no need,” Kathy said.

“Why?” He didn’t like the defeat in her voice.

“The hospital has mandated that all remaining employees get blood tests to see who else might be infected.”

He had heard about this on the news, but he wasn’t sure how foolproof the blood tests were. It seemed the CDC didn’t even know what they were dealing with yet, so how reliable could a blood test be?

“Okay,” he said, digesting all of this. “Okay. Then get your blood test and you’ll see. You’ll see that everything’s okay.”

“I’m scared.” She turned to him, her face pale, her eyes searching his.

“It’s going to be all right,” he said. He brought her close to him, hugged her.

She pushed him away and straightened up. “Have you seen the news? Have you read a newspaper? Jesus, David, they’ve started printing maps with all the cities where . . . where . . .” She shook her head, her thoughts too weighty for them to be spoken. “I don’t know,” she whispered, more to herself than to him, he thought. “I just don’t know.”

“There haven’t been that many cases here,” he said. “Not in Maryland. Not in this area.”

She made a noise that sounded like part-laugh, part-cough. “Are you serious? Deke Carmody just down the street—”

“There was no proof he was sick.”

“Of course he was! You said yourself you saw all that blood in his bathroom. The way he was acting, was talking . . . Don’t you remember how worried you were about him when you came home that night? And then he sets fire to his own house . . .”

“That doesn’t mean he had the disease,” David said. Yet he knew right then and there that he was fighting a losing battle, and not just with Kathy, but with himself, too. Of course Deke had been sick. And not just Deke: All too clearly he was thinking of the ice cream man again, so long ago now, and so early in the game that none of them even knew about the illness that everyone was now calling Wanderer’s Folly—a silly, almost innocuous name, which somehow also made it all the more terrifying.