The Witching Hour Read online

  It was the same infallible sense she'd had that day out on the ocean when she'd hoisted the drowned man, Michael Curry, onto the deck with the winch, and touched his cold gray flesh. Yes, there is life in there. Bring him back.

  The drowned man. Michael Curry. That was it, of course, that was what she had made a note to remember. Call Curry's doctor, Curry's doctor had left a message for her both at the hospital and on her machine at home.

  It had been over three months since that bitter cold evening in May, with the fog blanketing the distant city so that not a single light was visible, and the drowned man on the deck of the Sweet Christine had looked as dead as any corpse she'd ever seen.

  She stubbed out the cigarette. "Good night, Doctors," she said rising. "Monday, eight o'clock," she said to the interns. "No, don't stand up."

  Dr. Larkin caught her sleeve between two fingers. When she tried to pull loose, he held tight.

  "Don't take that boat out alone, Rowan."

  "Come on, Chief." She tried to free herself. Didn't work. "I've been taking that boat out alone since I was sixteen."

  "Bad news, Rowan, bad news," he said. "Suppose you hit your head out there, fall overboard."

  She gave a soft polite laugh, though she was in fact irritated by this talk, and then she was out the door, heading past the elevators--too slow--and towards the concrete stairs.

  Maybe she should take one last look at the three patients in Intensive Care before she made her exit; and suddenly the thought of leaving at all oppressed her. The thought of not coming back until Monday was even worse.

  Shoving her hands in her pockets, she hurried up the two flights of stairs to the fourth floor.

  The gleaming upper corridors were so quiet, so removed from the mayhem inevitably going on in Emergency. A lone woman slept on the couch in the darkly carpeted waiting room. The old nurse at the ward station only waved as Rowan passed by. There had been times in her harried intern days when, on call, she had strolled these corridors in the middle of the night rather than try to sleep. Back and forth she'd walked, covering the length of one floor after another, in the belly of the giant submarine, lulled by the faint whisper of countless machines.

  Too bad the chief knew about the Sweet Christine, she thought now, too bad that desperate and frightened, she'd brought him home with her the afternoon of her adoptive mother's funeral, and taken him out to sit on the deck, drinking wine beneath a blue Tiburon sky. Too bad that in those hollow and metallic moments, she had confessed to Lark that she didn't want to be in the house anymore, that she lived on the boat, and sometimes lived for it, taking it out alone after every shift, no matter how long she'd been on, no matter how tired she was.

  Telling people--did it ever make things better? Lark had piled cliche upon cliche as he tried to comfort her. And from then on everybody at the hospital knew about the Sweet Christine. And she wasn't just Rowan the silent one, but Rowan the adopted one, the one whose family had died out in less than half a year, who went to sea in the big boat all alone. She had also become Rowan who would not accept Lark's invitations to dinner, when any other single female doctor on the staff might have done so in an instant.

  If only they knew the rest of it, she thought, how very mysterious she really was, even unto herself. And what would they have said about the men she liked, the stalwart officers of the law, and the heroes of the fire brigade hook and ladder trucks whom she hunted in noisy wholesome neighborhood bars, picking her partners as much for their roughened hands and their roughened voices as for their heavy chests and powerful arms. Yes, what about that, what about all those couplings in the lower cabin of the Sweet Christine with the police-issue .38 revolver in its black leather holster slung over the hook on the wall.

  And the conversations after--no, call them monologues--in which these men with the desperate need so similar to that of the neurosurgeon's relived their moments of danger and achievement, of moxie and dexterity. Scent of courage on their pressed uniform shirts. Sing a song of life and death.

  Why that kind of man? Graham had once demanded. "You look for them to be dumb, uneducated, thick-necked? What if one of them puts his meaty fist into your face?"

  "But that's just it," she'd said coldly, not even bothering to look at him. "They don't do that. They save lives, and that's why I like them. I like heroes."

  "That sounds like a fool of a fourteen-year-old girl talking," Graham had replied acidly.

  "You've got it wrong," Rowan had answered. "When I was fourteen I thought lawyers like you were the heroes."

  Bitter flash of his eyes as he'd turned away from her. Bitter flash of Graham now, over a year after Graham's death. Taste of Graham, smell of Graham, Graham in her bed finally, because Graham would have left before Ellie's death if she hadn't done it.

  "Don't tell me you haven't always wanted it," he'd said to her in the deep feather mattress in the bunk of the Sweet Christine. "Damn your fire fighters; damn your cops."

  Stop arguing with him. Stop thinking about him. Ellie never knew you went to bed with him, or why you thought you had to. So much that Ellie never knew. And you are not in Ellie's house. You're not even on the boat Graham gave you. You're still safe here in the antiseptic quiet of your world, and Graham is dead and buried in the little graveyard in northern California. And never mind how he died, because nobody knows the story on that, either. Don't let him be there in spirit, as they say, when you put the key into the ignition of his car, which you ought to have sold long ago, or when you walk into the damp chilly rooms of his house.

  Yet she still talked to him, still carried on the endless case for the defense. His death had prevented forever any real resolution. And so a ghost of him had been created by her hatred and her rage. It was fading, yet it still stalked her, even here in the safe hallways of her own domain.

  I'll take the other ones any day, she had wanted so to say to him, I'll take them with their ego and their rambunctiousness, and their ignorance and their rollicking sense of humor; I'll take their roughness, their heated and simple love of women and fear of women, I'll even take their talk, yes, their endless talk, and thank God that, unlike the neurosurgeons, they don't want me to say anything back to them, they don't even want to know who I am or what I am, might as well say rocket scientist, master spy, magician, as say neurosurgeon. "You don't mean you operate on people's brains!"

  What did it matter, all this?

  The fact is, Rowan understood "the man question" a little better now than in those days when Graham argued with her. She understood the connection between herself and her uniformed heroes--that going into the Operating Room, and slipping on those sterile gloves, and lifting the microcoagulator and the microscalpel, was like going into a burning building, was like going into a family fight with a gun to save the wife and the child.

  How many times had she heard neurosurgeons compared to fire fighters? And then the slick criticism, but it's different because your life is not at stake. The hell it isn't. Because if you failed in there, if you failed horribly enough and often enough, you'd be destroyed as surely as if the burning roof had come down on you. You survived by being brilliant and courageous and perfect, because there was simply no other way to survive, and every moment in the Operating Room was a mortal test.

  Yes, the same courage, the same love of stress and love of danger for a good reason that she saw in the crude men she loved to kiss and stroke and suckle; the men she liked to have on top of her; the men who didn't need for her to talk.

  But what was the use of understanding, when it had been months--almost half a year--since she'd invited anyone into her bed. What did the Sweet Christine think about it? she sometimes wondered. Was it whispering to her in the dark: "Rowan, where are our men?"

  Chase, the yellow-haired olive-skinned palomino cop from Marin, still left messages for her on the answering machine. But she had no time to call him. And he was such a sweet guy, and he did read books, too, and they had talked once, a real conversation, in fact, w
hen she'd made some offhand remark about the Emergency Room, and the woman who'd been shot by her husband. He'd latched onto that at once with his string of shootings and stabbings and pretty soon they were going at them all from two sides. Maybe that was why she hadn't called him back? A possibility.

  But on the face of it, the neurosurgeon had for the moment subsumed the woman quite completely, so much so that she wasn't sure why she was even thinking about those men tonight. Unless it was because she wasn't all that tired, or because the last beautiful male she'd lusted after had been Michael Curry, the gorgeous drowned man, gorgeous even when he lay there, wet and pale, black hair plastered to his head, on the deck of her boat.

  Yes. He was, in the old school-girl parlance, to die for, a hunk--just an out-and-out adorable guy and her kind of adorable guy completely. His had not been one of those California gymnasium bodies with overdeveloped muscles and phony tans, topped off with dyed hair, but a powerful proletarian specimen, rendered all the more irresistible by the blue eyes and the freckles across his cheeks which made her, in retrospect, want to kiss them.

  What an irony to fish from the sea, in a state of tragic helplessness, such a perfect example of the only kind of man she had ever desired.

  She stopped. She had reached the doors of the Intensive Care Unit. Entering quietly, she stood still for a moment, surveying this strange, icy-still world of fish tank rooms with emaciated sleepers on display beneath oxygen tent plastic, their fragile limbs and torsos hooked to beeping monitors, amid endless cables and dials.

  A switch was suddenly thrown in Rowan's head. Nothing existed outside this ward any more than anything existed outside of an Operating Room.

  She approached the desk, her hand out to very lightly touch the shoulder of the nurse who sat hunched over a mass of papers beneath the low fluorescent light.

  "Good evening, Laurel," Rowan whispered.

  The woman was startled. Then recognizing Rowan, she brightened. "Dr. Mayfair, you're still here."

  "Just another look around."

  Rowan's manner with nurses was far gentler than ever it was with doctors. She had from the very beginning of her internship courted nurses, going out of her way to alleviate their proverbial resentment of women doctors, and to elicit from them as much enthusiasm as she could. It was a science with her, calculated and refined to the point of ruthlessness, yet as profoundly sincere as any incision made into the tissues of a patient's brain.

  As she entered the first room now, pausing beside the high gleaming metal bed--a monstrous rack on wheels, it seemed--she heard the nurse coming behind her, waiting on her, so to speak. The nurse moved to lift the chart from its place at the foot of the bed. Rowan shook her head, no.

  Blanched, seemingly lifeless, lay the day's last car crash victim, head enormous in a turban of white bandages, a thin colorless tube running into her nose. The machines evinced the only vitality with their tiny monotonous beeps and jagged neon lines. The glucose flowed through the tiny needle fixed into the pinioned wrist.

  Like a corpse coming back to life on an embalming table, the woman beneath the layers of bleached bed linen slowly opened her eyes. "Dr. Mayfair," she whispered.

  A lovely ripple of relief passed through Rowan. Again she and the nurse exchanged glances. Rowan smiled. "I'm here, Mrs. Trent," she said softly. "You're doing well." Gently, she folded her fingers around the woman's right hand. Yes, very well.

  The woman's eyes closed so slowly they were like flowers closing. No change in the faint song of the machines that surrounded them. Rowan retreated as soundlessly as she had come.

  Through the windows of the second room, she gazed at another seemingly unconscious figure, that of an olive-skinned boy, a weed of a kid, actually, who had gone blind suddenly, staggering off the platform into the path of a commuter train.

  For four hours she had worked on this one, suturing with the tiny needle the hemorrhaging vessel that had caused his blindness, then repairing the damaged skull. In Recovery he had joked with the circle of doctors around him.

  Now, her eyes narrow, her body still, Rowan studied his subtle movements in sleep, the way that his right knee shifted under the covers, the way his hand curled, palm up, as he moved his head to the side. His tongue darted over his dry lips, and he whispered to himself like a man talking to someone in his dreams.

  "Doing just fine, Doctor," the nurse whispered beside her.

  Rowan nodded. But she knew that within weeks, he would suffer seizures. They would use Dilantin to control it, but he would be an epileptic for the rest of his life. Better than death and blindness surely. She would wait and watch before predicting or explaining. After all, there was always the chance she was wrong.

  "And Mrs. Kelly?" she asked. She turned to look into the nurse's eyes, forcing herself to see the woman clearly and completely. This was an efficient and compassionate nurse, a woman she rather liked.

  "Mrs. Kelly thinks it's funny that she still has two bullets in her head. 'I feel like a loaded gun,' she told me. She won't let her daughter leave. She wants to know what happened to that 'street punk' that shot her. She wants another pillow. She wants a television and a phone."

  Rowan gave the obligatory soft appreciative laugh. Barely a sound in the humming silence. "Well, tomorrow, perhaps," she said.

  From where she stood, she could see the spirited Mrs. Kelly through the last pair of windows at the end of the ward. Unable to lift her head from the pillow, Mrs. Kelly gestured easily with her right hand as she talked to her grown daughter, a thin and obviously exhausted woman with drooping eyelids who nevertheless nodded repeatedly as she hung upon her mother's every word.

  "She's good for her mother," Rowan whispered. "Let her stay as long as she likes."

  The nurse nodded.

  "I'm off till Monday, Laurel," said Rowan. "I don't know if I like this new schedule."

  The nurse gave a soft laugh. "You deserve the rest, Dr. Mayfair."

  "Do I?" Rowan murmured. "Dr. Simmons will call me if there's a problem. You can always ask him to call me, Laurel. You understand?"

  Rowan went out the double doors, letting them swish shut softly behind her. Yes, a good day it had been.

  And there really was no excuse for staying here any longer, except to make a few notes in the private diary she kept in her office and to check her personal machine for calls. Maybe she would rest for a while on the leather couch. It was so much more luxurious, the office of the official Attending, than the cramped and shabby on-call rooms in which she'd dozed for years.

  But she ought to go home, she knew it. Ought to let the shades of Graham and Ellie come and go as they pleased.

  And what about Michael Curry? Why, she had forgotten again about Michael Curry, and now it was almost ten o'clock. She had to call Dr. Morris as soon as she, could.

  Now don't let your heart skip beats over Curry, she thought, as she took her time padding softly down the linoleumed hallway, choosing the cement stairway again rather than the elevator, and plotting a jagged route through the giant slumbering hospital that would take her only eventually to her office door.

  But she was eager to hear what Morris had to say, eager for news of the only man in her life at this moment, a man she didn't know and had not seen since that violent interlude of desperate effort and crazed, accidental accomplishment on the turbulent sea almost four months before ...

  She'd been in a near daze that night from exhaustion. A routine shift during the last month of her residency had yielded thirty-six hours of duty on call, during which she'd slept perhaps an hour. But that was fine until she'd spotted a drowned man in the water.

  The Sweet Christine had been crawling through the rough ocean under the heavy, leaden sky, the wind roaring against the windows of the wheelhouse. No small-craft warnings mattered to this forty-foot twin-engined Dutch-built steel cruiser, her heavy full-displacement hull moving smoothly though slowly without the slightest rise through the choppy waves. She was, strictly speaking, too much f
or a singlehander. But Rowan had been operating her alone since she was sixteen.

  Getting such a boat in and out of the dock is really the tricky part, where another crew member is required. And Rowan had her own channel, dug deep and wide, beside her home in Tiburon, and her own pier and her own slow and methodic system. Once the Sweet Christine had been backed out and turned towards San Francisco, one woman on the bridge who knew and understood all the boat's complex electronic whistles and bells was really quite enough.

  The Sweet Christine was built not for speed but for endurance. She was equipped that day as she always was, for a voyage around the world.

  The overcast sky had been killing the daylight that May afternoon even when Rowan passed under the Golden Gate. By the time she was out of sight of it, the long twilight had faded completely.

  Darkness was falling with a pure metallic monotony to it; the ocean was merging with the sky. And so cold it was that Rowan wore her woolen gloves and watch cap even in the wheelhouse, drinking cup after cup of steaming coffee, which never fazed her immense exhaustion. Her eyes were focused as always on the shifting sea.

  Then came Michael Curry, that speck out there--could that possibly be a man?

  On his face in the waves, his arms out loosely, hands floating near his head, and the black hair a mass against the shining gray water, the rest just clothes ballooning ever so slightly over the limp and shapeless form. A belted raincoat, brown heels. Dead-looking.

  All that she could tell in those first few moments was that this was no decomposed corpse. Pale as the hands were, they were not waterlogged. He could have fallen overboard from some large vessel only moments before, or hours. The crucial thing was to signal "Pan Pan" immediately and to give her coordinates, and then to try to get him aboard.

  As luck would have it the Coast Guard boats were miles from her location; the helicopter rescue teams were completely engaged. There were virtually no small craft in the area on account of the warnings. And the fog was rolling in. Assistance would come as soon as possible and no one could say when that was.