CounterProbe

by Carole Nelson Douglas

  Chapter Twenty-five

  * * *

  Jane Doe lay sleeping in her hospital bed. A rack beside her trailed thin plastic tubing to her arm, silently dripping some clear substance into her veins. Her arms lay at her sides, the fingers loosely curled into her palms.

  A large mirror on the opposite wall reflected a white- uniformed nurse who fussed at the other side of the bed, but Jane didn’t stir. Her eyes were almost closed, and her rough-cut hair fanned on the pillow, looking as coarse as a horse’s trimmed mane.

  Silence occupied the room with her, and a sense of waiting, a certain somber anticipation usually found in funeral homes and hospitals. The only prop missing was the obligatory vase of flowers.

  Turner stared down at her for a minute more, basking in the satisfaction of the successful hunter, then left the room.

  The hall beyond w^as quiet, too. No public address system rasped out summonses. No one paged Drs. Kildare, Casey, Welby or Craig. No one paged any doctors, because there was only one doctor to page, and no one at all to do it.

  Turner cracked a nondescript door next to the one he’d left and stepped into a room. Through a glass darkly, he glimpsed Jane Doe still lying in the same position, still… dormant. It was an odd word to use, but that was how he thought of her now.

  Hunched over on a folding chair the color of tepid cocoa, Dr. Eric Nordstrom sat drawn up to the looking glass that was a window for him, a reflection for anyone in Jane Doe’s room. The rooms had been prepared—Turner almost thought of it as setting a stage—to Nordstrom’s exact specifications days before. No one had ever doubted that Jane Doe would be found.

  Turner waited, struck by the scene’s unconscious symbolic power: Nordstrom—a watchful human eyepiece of an inhuman microscope focusing all its faculties on the room beyond.

  So Nordstrom hoped to probe the brain of the woman in the bed. So he hoped to steal from chamber to chamber and up the spiral staircase of her memory and oversee the unfolding of her reputed abilities. The man was an earwig, Turner suddenly perceived, drilling through the brain on a relentlessly linear path, razor-straight from ear to ear. “Have a chair, Mr. Turner; the show hasn’t started yet.” Turner grunted and went to stand over Nordstrom. “We don’t have a lot of time.”

  “Why not?”

  “Blake can’t be kept on ice forever.”

  “Blake! He’s redundant—and knows it.”

  “Washington waits for no man.”

  “it’ll wait for this. You can’t rush… certain things.”

  “What do you plan to do?” Turner asked at last, roweled by curiosity.

  Nordstrom braced an elbow on his knee and tapped his lips with his fingers. “Watch. Wait. Manipulate.”

  “Is her condition that serious that you have to wait?”

  “Her condition? Her condition is marvelous. So… fresh. You’d think she was a slab of salmon just dropped by air from Scotland. The moment I got her body-wrapped in blankets, her temperature began to rise—steadily—to a perfect ninety-eight-point-six. Her vital signs are textbook —on the nose for her age and weight.”

  “Odd about her weight—”

  “What do you mean?”

  “She looks drastically thinner than I expected from the Myerson sketch. How on earth could she have lost so much weight in just a day or so on her own?”

  Nordstrom shrugged. “Water retention and depletion, maybe. Women lose weight easily.”

  “Not to hear my wife tell it.”

  Nordstrom squinted over his shoulder at Turner. “You have a wife. How interesting. I never associate you government types with such accouterments,”

  “I don’t have a dog,” Turner said, tightening his jaw, “so don’t get your hopes up. What does she weigh exactly?”

  In the ensuing pause, Turner observed the quarter-sized bald spot at the center of Nordstrom’s skull. He wondered what he would find if he drilled right through that spot into the psychiatrist’s skull. Probably dry ice.

  “What does she weigh?” he repeated.

  “A hundred-something.” Nordstrom shrugged.

  “So do I.”

  “A hundred-and-two and three-quarter pounds, all right?”

  “That’s about what she weighed when she was first found. Blake’s records indicated he didn’t much like that weight. She was up to a hundred and twenty-five when she left the hospital.”

  “Blake has proletarian tastes,” Nordstrom sneered. “Blowsy, bloated females. She’s perfectly healthy, believe me. You should be so lucky—no fillings, no visual impairment—”

  Nordstrom’s strange indifference to his patient’s physical frailty irritated Turner enough to unloose a taunt. “And no hymen anymore, I’d guess, from reading between the lines of her and Blake’s little odyssey. Or didn’t you check that out?”

  Nordstrom’s shoulders stiffened. “That… intimate an examination wasn’t necessary. What do you take me for?”

  “I don’t know. I imagine I’ll find out. I’m your official baby-sitter.”

  “I don’t need anybody!”

  “Liaison. This is a top-security, top-secret government site, Dr. Nordstrom. Any personnel on duty here have been checked out from birth to the next solar eclipse. We are very careful whom we let in. And out.”

  “Where are we, anyway?”

  “You don’t have to know.”

  “It’s hardly top secret. We drove for two or three hours, northwest I’d say. We’re in rural Minnesota, somewhere. And this building—” Nordstrom looked up, as if envisioning much more than he saw. “It was dark when we arrived, but the structure was huge, rambling. Almost… Gothic, were one inclined to a romantic turn of thought. Therefore —it’s some… factory. I’d say. Some deserted factory. You must have set up this hospital stuff in a small corner of it.”

  “Not bad. I thought you were all wrapped up in your patient back in the ambulance, but you didn’t miss much.”

  “I generally don’t. You don’t like this assignment.”

  “I don’t like most of my assignments.”

  “Duty-driven. Obsessive-compulsive. A lot of self-hate. Authoritarian father, but you need it. Hence, Uncle Sam.”

  “I never asked you for a self analysis, Nordstrom.” Turner remained amused while the shrink scraped his chair closer to the two-way glass. He ignored the jibe.

  “We don’t have a lot of time,” Turner repeated. Then he left.

  Nordstrom’s figure remained hummocked near the window. He moved finally, furtively in the empty room. His briefcase sat by his feet. He lifted it to his knees, tipped it open. More manila folders fanned agape inside. Satisfied they were there, he put down the briefcase and went into the room next door.

  The “nurse”—and so she had been, at one time—had long gone.

  Nordstrom checked the IV. The clear thin liquid dripped implacably. Turner, he thought, like most laymen, probably took the substance for some kind of sustenance—sugar water. In this case it was saline solution only. Pure unadulterated salt water.

  Nordstrom looked down at Jane Doe’s flat form. She’d undoubtedly… perform… better on an empty stomach. His fingers twitched. Turner’s jibe rubbed like a burr at the base of his skull. Suddenly he was breathing heavily, furiously. He stripped the top sheet off Jane Doe.

  Her deep, shallow respiration continued unaltered. A fragment of overhead light glimmered in the slits of her eyes. Nordstrom’s left hand reached out and his fingers clenched the hem of her short hospital gown. His eyes studied her knees—marvels of articulated bone.

  Donne had been right, Nordstrom thought, what did it come down to—always—but “a bracelet of bright hair about the bone.” And what Eliot had said of Donne was right on, too: “He knew the anguish of the marrow/The ague of the skeleton; No contact possible to flesh /Allayed the fever of the bone.”

  No one saw such things anymore. No one knew how to be metaphysical. A crude line of prose flashed across the poetry of Nordstrom’s thoughts. Turner and his i
nsinuations! His obscene insinuations. Insinuation was too fine a word for it.

  Nordstrom’s eyelids flickered. His fingers clenched and unclenched on the rolled gown hem. The fabric’s texture reminded Nordstrom of the coarse, thin and invariably white dishcloths the maids in his parents’ house had used. In time, the towels became spotted with faint clots of yellow, remnants of forgotten stains. Nordstrom had sickened at the sight, at seeing the dusky-skinned maids wiping—laughing and chattering in alien tongues—and wiping the dishes the family ate their food from with cloths caked with old stains.

  Soon he had grown too old to wander into the kitchen, but he never forgot the stains. Now, Turner had spoiled the surgical precision of his preparations by mentioning the unmentionable.

  His fingers jerked up the gown, brushed a nimbus of yet unseen fleece. Should he check? Prove Turner a liar? Or prove that once again the sheets were soiled, the dishcloths filthy, the linens sticky and warm…

  No, he would not debase himself to rut and probe like the rawest schoolboy. He had never debased himself. He would assume the best. Jane Doe was a blank slate, and he held the chalky bone to write upon it with. His fingers trembled and released the gown. Wrinkled, it fell back over the lean lines of her thighs.

  Nordstrom checked her eyes—finding his heart pounding again like a guilty schoolboy’s. They remained the same… ail but shut, a pearly bone-white glimmer shining through the thick hairs of her dark lashes. The coarseness of these features—ocular matter, flesh, hair—disgusted him, and he left the room, shutting the door very carefully, as if someone might hear him.

  Someone did,

  * * *

  Jane’s eyes flick open on his departure—wide, alarmed. She has been dreaming. Her thoughts hover over the word, the concept. Dreaming. She somehow knows what that means, but has never associated that particular state with herself. At least not consciously.

  She blinks. In that instant, it is as if the camera that is her eyes has frozen every detail of the place on some undeveloped film behind her eyes. For an instant light and dark reverse in her mind. The bed is black, as are the walls, her skin…

  The window—she glances to the mirror and peers into another room—the window is wider than it is tall, just as it had been in the other hospital room where she had wakened once before. For the first time.

  She sits up and gets out of bed. Alongside her, something jolts, then comes jerking after , as if a leash has been pulled, Jane does not recognize leashes. She feels the tape pulling at the fine hairs on the outside of her elbow but ignores it and goes to the window.

  So does the other room’s occupant, pulling closer. Jane pushes her face to the glass, feels the cold surface flatten the tip of her nose, sees her vision cross. She backs away. So does her.,. Her reflection.

  Jane touches a hand to her face. She seems different than before. Shrunken. Colder to the touch. Was this how she had looked in the University of Minnesota Hospitals? Kevin had said she was gaining weight, later. He’d sounded pleased, and had let her look in a mirror.

  She steps away from the startled image of herself. Kevin had said… But it is confused. She is confused. Why is she back in the hospital again? Where is Kevin? What had been the last thing she remembered, besides dark and cold and something very large pressing down upon her… ? And voices, buzzing,

  Jane glances at the mirror. Her troubled self still stands there, and suddenly, from some distorted corner of her mind, an image flies into the picture like a glossy black crow cawing for attention.

  A man. There is a man in the mirror with her—behind the mirror! Jane steps back as the man’s image grows more concrete. The crow spreads rustling wings, its caws come soft and certain, like the ticking of a clock. A shadow forms behind the Jane in the mirror, engulfs her, walks out of the mirror.

  Jane retreats, hearing the distant rattle of something falling, feeling a quick, burning pull at her elbow. She sits back on the bed, one foot folded under her. Beside her the IV tower crashes to the floor.

  And then… then she is reliving it all again. The past, or a dream, or something she had been told had happened and now did.

  The man is coming at her, spewing words, anger. Matusek, he is shouting hoarsely. How did you get Matusek? Jane can’t discern his features, but his voice is perfectly familiar, and her brain even produces a name for him. Kellehay. She has seen him before, just like this. But—

  The onrushing image is armed with a soft white shield it presses against her face, against her wildly disoriented brain. Déjà vu, Jane thinks, falling back on the bed. The girls in the dorm TV lounge had called such things a “rerun.”

  “Oh, they running that old thing again?”

  This, rerun of Kellehay looks and sounds and seems as real as the unremembered original. Jane feels she dangles upside down with a pillow as cold as snow pressed over her face, sucking the breath from her mouth and nostrils.

  Then she is lying on an ice-cold bed of drifts. Gasping for breath, for memory, Jane feels herself lifted off the snowy sheets, feels her body lighten and rise like a bubble. Inside a buoyant translucent cocoon of self-distance, Jane gazes down on… herself.

  This self is stripped, naked. She looks colder than the snow surrounding her bloodless body. Her eyes are shut, her lips slightly parted on a pearly bone-white glimmer. Snow drifts over her limbs, washing watered silk patterns across the alabaster skin, patterns that change even as Jane watches.

  Jane there, Jane… dead. Jane here… Jane alive but… disconnected from herself. Or connected to someone, something else? The past—or present? A memory, like Kellehay, made flesh? Or an unforgettable episode of amnesia?

  Then Jane is plummeting into that frozen image of herself, her senses merging with its senseless form. Ice numbs her brain and runs cold talons down her nervous system. Snow, light and lethal as a feather pillow, shifts over her mind, her body, smothering, smothering—silent, soft smothering… In the distance, she hears voices.

  Jane screams at the enveloping blankness of her brain and pushes off reality in shadow form. No, no, no!

  The whiteness evaporates. A shadow is catapulting backward, away from her, growing smaller and dimmer. It is still large enough to crash right through the mirror/ window. Glass shatters with the shriek of wind chimes. The silver ice of its surface blackens to jagged starshapes made by something falling through. Kellehay is gone. The pillow of cold death is gone. Her helpless vision of herself is gone. Only Jane remains.

  Jane huddles on the bed, her feet ice-cold, her fingers numb. The last time a similar shock had disoriented her, she had retreated into the warm inner circle of herself. Now she isn’t sure that self is to be trusted.

  Now she doesn’t retreat.

  Jane rises, slowly, and patters barefoot over the floor to the hole in the mirror. Her reflection does not advance to meet her this time. She peers through the cavity into a darkened room occupied only by an empty folding chair.

  Chapter Twenty-six

  * * *

  God, Kandy, I wish you’d sent my folks back home to Elk River instead of here,” Kevin said.

  “What was I going to do? Lie? I have enough trouble lying to my own parents.” Martin Kandinsky shaped his elastic form to the molded chair’s rigid curves and eyed the “contact” visitors’ room.

  “Boy, they sure don’t go upscale on décor around here. You catch that orange they painted the waiting room walls? Guaranteed to induce severe psychosis in a catatonic. Haven’t these folks ever heard of Nonaggressive Pink paint?”

  “You should see where they keep me,” Kevin answered. “Makes a Kafka film set look like Palm Beach modeme.”

  “You have a private cell?” Alvin Ruderman asked.

  Kevin glanced to the earnest-looking guy in a T-shirt sitting beside his friend. Like Kandy, Ruderman sported enough long curly hair to coif an Assyrian king. But Kandy’s lawyer knew the territory. He’d gotten Kandy in for a “contact” visit—no Plexiglas barrier, no phone—by calling him
a paralegal.

  “Dormitory,” Kevin said.

  Ruderman winced. “Ouch. Can’t be fun for a guy like you.”

  “I’m okay. What I’m worried about is Jane.”

  “Your… missing client,” Ruderman put in.

  Kevin glanced at Kandy, then started laughing.

  “My missing client. Delicately put. You could say that.” He slid his elbows across the table and lowered his voice. “I’ve, uh, had some good news today. From my parents.”

  “See?” Kandy beamed. “It wasn’t a total loss.”

  Kevin quieted him with a glance and spoke even more softly. “They saw Jane Thursday night. At my place. My… old place, I guess you’d say. Anyway, at least I know that she hasn’t been caught yet. That makes all this worth it.”

  Kandy scratched his scraggly sideburns.

  “What’s the matter?”

  “Your place. I tool on by every now and then—okay, I’m curious. The thing is, Kevin, I’ve seen this big van parked there—brand-new and all enclosed. No funny little bubble windows and not a speck of custom paint. It’s there all the time. Smells like the feds are watching your place.”

  “My parents came and went okay!”

  “Your parents aren’t important, apparently,” Ruderman said. “To anyone except you.”

  “But Jane was all right! My parents saw her there. From what they said, she was fine.”

  “Thursday night.” Ruderman proved himself a realist. “This is Saturday. They could have picked her up as she left, and your parents would have known nothing about it.”

  “Shit!”

  “Sorry, man.” Kandy looked it. Even his woolly queue seemed to droop down his back.

  “They could have missed her, too.” Ruderman pushed his black-framed glasses over the pimple perching on the bridge of his nose. “It’s possible. If they did get her, there’d be no police record, though, not like yours. Clandestine, that’s how the buggers would handle it.”

  Kevin washed his face with his palms. Worry made his skin feel like corrugated cardboard—and his fingers were cold, a sign of anxiety.