Thinner(87)

The hand. The hand on the seat. Wide gold ring on the second finger, red stone - maybe a ruby. Fine black hair growing between the second and third knuckles. Ginelli's hand.

Billy swallowed. There was an audible click in his throat.

'Just have that paper declared null and void,' he said.

'All right,' she said quickly, and then, returned obsessively to the justification: 'We only ... I only did what I thought ... Billy, you were getting so thin - talking so crazy . . .'

'Okay.'

'You sound as if you hate me,' she said, and began crying again.

'Don't be silly,' he said - which was not precisely a denial. His voice was quieter now. 'Where's Linda? Is she there?'

'No, she's gone back to Rhoda's for a few days. She's ... well, she's very upset by all of this.'

I bet, he thought. She had been at Rhoda's before, then had come home. He knew, because he had spoken to her on the phone. Now she was gone again, and something in Heidi's phrasing made him think that this time it had been Lin's idea to go. Did she find out that you and good old Mike Houston were in ' the process of getting her father declared insane, Heidi? Is that what happened? But it didn't really matter. Linda was gone, that was the important thing.

His eyes strayed to the pie, which he had placed on top of the TV in his Northeast Harbor motel room. The crust still pulsed slowly up and down, like a loathsome heart. It was important that his daughter got nowhere near that thing. It was dangerous.

'It would be best for her to stay there until we have our problems worked out,' he said.

On the other end of the line, Heidi burst into loud sobs. Billy asked her what was wrong.

'You're wrong - you sound so cold.'

'I'll warm up,' he said. 'Don't worry.'

There was a moment when he could hear her swallowing back the sobs and trying to get herself under control. He waited for this to happen with neither patience nor impatience; he really felt nothing at all. The blast of horror which had swept through him when he realized the thing on the seat was Ginelli's hand -that was really the last strong emotion he had felt tonight. Except for the queer laughing fit that had come on him a bit later, of course.

'What kind of shape are you in?' she asked finally.

'There's been some improvement. I'm up to a hundred and twenty-two.'

She drew in her breath. 'That's six pounds less than you weighed when you left!'

'It's also six pounds more than when I weighed myself yesterday morning,' he said mildly.

'Billy ... I want you to know that we can work all of this out. Really, we can. The most important thing is to get you well, and then we'll talk. If we have to talk with someone else ... someone like a marriage counselor ... well, I'm game if you are. It's just that we ... we. . .'

Oh, Christ, she's going to start bawling again, he thought, and was shocked and amused - both in a very dim sort of way -at his own callousness. And then she said something that struck him as peculiarly touching, and for just a moment he regained a sense of the old Heidi ... and with it, the old Billy Halleck.

'I'll give up smoking, if you want,' she said.

Billy looked at the pie on the TV. Its crust pulsed slowly. Up and down, up and down. He thought about how dark it had been when the old Gypsy man slit it open. About the half-disclosed lumps that might have been all the physical woes of mankind or just strawberries. He thought about his blood, pouring out of the wound in his hand and into the pie. He thought about Ginelli. The moment of warmth passed.

'You better not,' he said. 'When you quit smoking, you get fat.'

Later, he lay on top of the made bed with his hands crossed behind his neck, looking up into the darkness. It was a quarter to one in the morning, but he had never felt less like sleeping. It was only now, in the dark, that some disjointed memory of the time between finding Ginelli's hand on the seat of the Nova and finding himself in this room and on the phone to his wife began to come back to him.

There was a sound in the darkened room.

No.

But there was. A sound like breathing.

No, it's your imagination.

But it wasn't imagination; that was Heidi's scripture, not William Halleck's. He knew better than to believe some things were just his imagination. If he hadn't before he did now. The crust moved, like a rind of white skin over living flesh; and even now, six hours after Lemke had given it to him, he knew that if he touched the aluminum plate, he would find it was warm.

'purpurfargade ansiktet,' he murmured in the dark, and the sound was like an incantation.

When he saw the hand, he only saw it. When he realized half a second later what he was looking at, he screamed and lurched away from it. The movement caused the hand to rock first one way and then the other - it looked as if Billy had asked how it was and it was replying with a comme ci, comme !pa gesture. Two of the ball bearings slipped out of it and rolled down to the crack between the bench and the back of the seat.

Billy screamed again, palms shoved against the shelf of jaw under his chin, fingernails pressed into his lower lip, eyes huge and wet. His heart set up a large weak clamor in his chest, and he realized that the pie was tipping to the right. It was within an ace of falling to the Nova's floorboards and shattering.

He grabbed it and righted it. The arrhythmia in his chest eased; he could breathe again. And that coldness Heidi would later hear in his voice began to steal over him. Ginelli was probably dead - no, on second thought, strike the probably. What had he said? If she ever sees me again before I see her, William, I ain't never going to have to change my shirt again.