Next of Kin

The form was four pages long, and Linnea read every line of it twice.

She sat on a plastic chair in the surgical waiting room at Lutheran Medical Center with an ice pack against her jaw and a borrowed hospital blanket round her shoulders, and the clipboard on her knee, and a pen that did not work. It was a quarter past eight on Sunday night. Her hands had stopped shaking an hour ago. That frightened her more than the shaking had.

Name of patient: VARGA, ANSELM I.

Relationship to patient:

There were boxes. Spouse. Parent. Child. Sibling. Other. She looked at the first one for a very long time.

Twelve months. A signature in green ink on the ninth of October, a wedding five days later, a ring she had not asked for and a clause that said, in plain English, that she was a debtor and he was a creditor and the marriage was a term of art. She had hated every word of it. She had hated it with such clean, bright, uncomplicated fury that she had almost forgotten how it felt to hate nothing.

She checked Spouse.

The pen skipped. She shook it, and pressed harder, and the ink came out green.

…

"Mrs. Varga?"

A woman in blue scrubs stood in the door, small and gray-haired, with the tired and exact face of a person who had been awake for thirty hours. She had a surgical cap in her hand. Linnea stood up so fast that the blanket slid off her shoulders.

"He's out of the OR," said the surgeon. "He's in recovery. The bullet went through the left flank, below the ribs, and broke up the ninth rib on the way. No major vessel. It nicked the spleen, and we took it out, which is not as bad as it sounds. He lost a good deal of blood, and I'd be lying if I said I liked his pressure at two, but it's coming up." She looked at Linnea, kindly. "He's very strong. And very stubborn. Twice he tried to pull the tube."

"That sounds right."

"He asked for you. Before we put him under. He said 'Tell Linnea that Clause Eleven is suspended.'" A faint line appeared at the corner of her mouth. "I assume that means something."

Linnea sat down again, because her knees had gone.

"It means," she said, "that he's going to be unbearable."

"Good. I find the unbearable ones are the ones who live."

…

They let her in at ten.

He lay in a narrow bed under a thin white blanket, a tube in his arm, a monitor ticking, his face the color of candle wax. They had shaved the stubble from his jaw. Without it he looked younger, and more tired, and entirely unlike the man who had sat opposite her in a diner and told her that she would be fine. His hair was damp. His lashes lay on his cheeks. He was breathing in long, slow, shallow draws, and every one of them was a small private miracle.

She stood in the door. She did not go in.

I can't, she thought. If I go in I will fall apart, and I am not allowed to fall apart until I've done what I came to do.

"You can sit," said a nurse, behind her.

"I'm fine."

"You have a split lip and a cracked cheekbone and two broken blood vessels in your left eye. You have not eaten since Friday. I'm not asking."

Linnea went in. She sat in the vinyl chair beside the bed. After a moment, because there was nobody to see, she put out one hand and laid it very lightly on the back of his.

He was warm.

That was all. It was a stupid, small, grotesque thing to feel, that a man could be warm. She had been so cold for so long that she had forgotten it was a quality that bodies came with. She sat in the beeping dark with her hand on his and her cut wrist throbbing, and she thought of nothing, and slowly the cold began to leave her, one degree at a time.

…

Greer came at midnight.

She came through the doors of the ICU like a small tornado, in a coat buttoned wrong and sneakers and a scarf that had once been red, and stopped dead in the corridor outside the room. Her face crumpled. She made a sound that was half a laugh and half a sob. Then she crossed the floor in four strides and wrapped both arms around Linnea so hard that the chair rocked.

"You idiot," she said into her hair.

"I know."

"You absolute, unspeakable idiot. You left a voicemail. You said 'Estoppel' and hung up."

"It worked."

"It worked. It worked. I'm going to kill you." She was crying. "I'm going to kill you, and then I'm going to write a really beautiful obituary."

"Greer. Greer. Breathe."

"I'm breathing." She wasn't. She drew back and held Linnea at arm's length, and her eyes went over the split lip, the bruise, the bloodshot eye, and stopped at the raw band round each wrist. Her mouth thinned. "Who did that?"

"A man named Wick. He's in custody."

"I know. I read the wire." She sniffed ferociously. "He asked for a lawyer. He said, quote, 'I should like it noted that I conducted myself with perfect propriety.' I hope they put it on his tombstone."

Linnea laughed. It cracked her lip and she winced, and Greer laughed too, helplessly, and for a moment the two of them clung to each other in the corridor of the ICU at midnight, laughing and weeping with the dazed, tender hilarity of survivors.

Then Greer's eyes went past her, through the glass, to the bed.

The laughter went out of her like a lamp turning down.

…

They took the cafeteria. It was open all night and empty, a long room of fluorescent light and orange plastic chairs, and they sat at the farthest table with two cups of tea that neither of them touched. A vending machine hummed. A janitor ran a floor-polisher in slow, patient arcs across the far end of the room.

Greer set her bag on the table. She unzipped it, and took out a plain black notebook, and laid it between them.

"Stahl's," she said. "Brannock's ledger. He wants you to have it."

"Not you?"

"He wants us both. He said you'd know what to do with it." She pressed her lips together. "He also gave me the rest. He gave me a lot of things, Linn. In the library, on Saturday. I need to tell you, and you aren't going to like it."

"Tell me."

She told it plainly, a word at a time, with her hands flat on the table. The garage. The stairwell. Dennis Hale and his brother-in-law, and a bundle of evidence in a grocery bag. The ledger. The other ledger. A man who had been feeding Anselm Varga's rage for two years like a gardener training a vine.

Her family is very easy to buy.

Linnea heard it without moving.

When it was over, there was a long silence. The floor-polisher droned. The vending machine clicked. She sat very straight with her hands in her lap, and felt the words go through her one at a time, like needles through cloth, and she waited for the pain, and it didn't come.

"I know," she said.

Greer blinked. "You know?"

"Not all of it. I knew he'd put my name in front of someone. I knew the memorandum had gone somewhere." She looked at the tea. "Stahl is the one who gave it to Anselm. Isn't he? That's why he came for you. That's why he rescued you at midnight, in a storm, when he could have sat in the dark and let Ruddick find you."

"He said he'd never forgive himself."

"He shouldn't."

"No."

"But I've decided I will." Linnea turned the cup a quarter turn, exactly as Stahl did. "Not today. Maybe not this year. But I read the memorandum again last week, Greer. It was good. It was better than I remembered. And if a man like Anselm Varga was moved by it, then it did what it was written to do. It reached the one person who could change the sentence." She took a breath. "I'm not grateful. But I'm not going to pretend it didn't work."

Greer looked at her for a long time.

"Okay," she said slowly. "That is the most mature thing I've ever heard you say, and I would like to throw the tea."

"Please don't."

"I won't." She picked at the lid. Then, without looking up: "Can I say the other thing?"

"You're going to."

"I'm going to." She drew a breath. "He killed people, Linn."

The words dropped into the room like stones.

"Not Brannock's men. Not the guard on the pier. Dockworkers. Two of them. Luis Ortega and Marcus Bell, on a schedule he set. It's in Stahl's second book. I read the page." Her voice shook. "He has a tally counter, Linnea. He's counted them. Six names. Four he blames on Brannock and two he blames on himself. And you went to see the widow. You went into her laundromat and told her. I know you did. Dunne told me."

"I did."

"Why?"

"Because it was true."

"And now you're sitting in a hospital with your hand on his hand, and you've got his ring on, and you look at him like—" She broke off. Her eyes were very bright. "I'm your best friend. I'm the one who's supposed to say it. You are in love with a killer."

The silence stretched.

The floor-polisher had stopped. The janitor stood at the far end of the room with his hand on the switch, looking politely at the ceiling.

Linnea sat with her hands folded. She did not look away.

"Yes," she said.

Greer's face went still.

"I'm in love with a man who killed two people. And he knows it. And he told me himself, on his own pier, in the rain, before I'd asked him a single question. He told me about Istvan and the cable and Luis Ortega and Marcus Bell, and he never once said it wasn't my fault." Her voice was very quiet. "He gave me a counter with their names on it. He didn't hide a thing. And then he put his body in front of a gun for me, and he said, with a bullet in him, Go with Stahl. Because he didn't think he had the right to ask for anything."

"Linn—"

"I don't think it makes him good. I don't think it erases it." She took a ragged breath. "I think that he's a man who did something terrible and has spent every day since counting it. And I think that's the only kind of person worth trusting. The kind who keeps the ledger."

"That's not a defense."

"It's not meant to be." She smiled, crookedly, with her cracked lip. "I'm not defending him. I'm deciding. There's a difference. My father taught me that. You don't love people because they're blameless. You love them in spite of the exhibits."

Greer put her face in her hands.

For a long moment she said nothing. Her shoulders shook. When she looked up, her eyes were red, and she wore the strained, appalled, unwilling smile of a woman who has lost an argument she very much wanted to win.

"You're going to ruin your life," she said.

"Probably."

"You're going to be so happy about it."

"I hope so."

"I'm going to hate it. I'm going to hate every second of it, and I'm going to show up at your wedding in a black dress." Greer sniffed and wiped her nose on her sleeve. "The second one. The real one. When you finally do it properly."

"There isn't going to be a second—"

"Oh, there's going to be a second." She grinned, wetly. "I know you, Linnea Calder. There's always a second."

…

The library at the Hudson Valley house was empty at five in the morning.

Ruddick had gone to the hospital at midnight, with a bouquet of white lilies, to stand in the corridor outside Anselm's room with his big hands folded and the expression of a man who is devastated. Stahl, who had sat across from him for an hour in the waiting room, had come away with a face like parchment. He wept, he'd said. He wept, Linnea. It was most convincing. I think that he may have meant it.

That's what makes it so terrible, she thought.

She stood in the dark, in the room where she had read her father's hand for the first time. Green lamplight. Ranks of leather spines. A ladder on a brass rail. The smell of old paper and beeswax. It looked exactly as she had left it, the day before the abduction, and it was a different room entirely.

Greer stood at the door, keeping watch.

She crossed to the long shelf. Third bay from the window. A row of Lloyd's Registers of Shipping, black cloth, gold-stamped, nine inches deep. She took down volume after volume and stacked them on the floor, and behind the last one, in the dead space between the shelf and the wall, where no camera could see, lay a black purser's notebook, its elastic band gone slack.

She lifted it out.

It weighed almost nothing. Twenty-four years in a man's cramped, upright, desperate hand. She had read the first entry in a sealed room in Brooklyn and a hundred more in the library, and she had the opening by heart.

Thursday, 9 October. Pier 9. A man in a camel coat. Four thousand dollars, to look the other way.

She held it against her chest.

There was a long silence. The clock on the mantel ticked. Outside, the sky was going from black to gray over the Hudson, and a single early bird was starting up in the beech tree.

"You've got it," said Greer, from the door.

"I've got it."

"What are you going to do?"

Linnea looked down at the notebook, at the worn black cloth, at her own fingers with the raw red marks at the wrist. She thought of the man in the hospital bed. She thought of his father's watch, ticking in her palm. She thought of a girl in a navy suit who'd stood on the steps of a courthouse and believed that the law was the one language in which nobody could lie.

"I'm going to take it somewhere safe," she said. "Somewhere nobody in this house can reach. Not Ruddick. Not Brannock. Not Anselm."

"Not Anselm?"

"Not yet."

Greer's eyebrows rose.

"He's been honest with me," Linnea said. "More than anyone has ever been. But the first page of this book has his father's death on it, and the last has mine. And I don't know yet which one I'm going to need to protect." She tucked the notebook inside her coat, against her ribs, where the bruises were. "I want to be the one who decides. Not the clause. Not the contract. Me."

She turned off the lamp.

In the gray light, she looked at the shelf of Lloyd's Registers, at the gap in the middle where the book had been. At the long room and the empty chairs and the window onto the cold sleeping river. It was the first time in seven months that she had walked out of this house with something that belonged to her.

"Come on," she said. "I need to see a man about a safe-deposit box."

"At five in the morning?"

"In my business," said Linnea, "it's never too early to file."