Page 135 of Life and Death

I wasn’t sure what my face was doing, but she suddenly broke off again.

“How are you feeling?” she asked.

“I’m good—what happened next?”

She half-smiled at my intensity, then turned back down the hall, pulling me with her.

“Come on, then,” she said. “I’ll show you.”

16. CARINE

SHE LED ME BACK TO THE ROOM THAT SHE’D POINTED OUT ASCarine’s office. She paused outside the door for a second.

“Come in,” Carine called from inside.

Edythe opened the door to a tall room with long windows that stretched the entire height of the walls. The room was lined by bookshelves reaching to the ceiling and holding more books than I’d ever seen outside a library.

Carine sat behind a huge desk; she was just placing a bookmark in the pages of the book she held. The room was how I’d always imagined a college dean’s would look—only Carine looked too young to fit the part.

Knowing what she’d been through—having just watched it all in my imagination while knowing that my imagination wasn’t up to the job and it was probably much worse than I’d pictured it—made me look at her differently.

“What can I do for you?” she asked with a smile, rising from her seat.

“I wanted to show Beau some of our history,” Edythe said. “Well, your history, actually.”

“We didn’t mean to disturb you,” I apologized.

“Not at all,” she said to me, and then to Edythe, “Where are you going to start?”

“The Waggoner,” Edythe said. She pulled me around in a circle, so that we were facing the door we’d just walked through.

This wall was different from the others. Instead of bookshelves, it was covered by dozens and dozens of framed paintings. They were all different sizes and styles, some dull, some blazing with color. I scanned quickly, looking for some kind of logic, something they all had in common, but I couldn’t find any link.

Edythe pulled me to the far left side, then put both her hands on my arms and positioned me directly in front of one of the paintings. My heart reacted the way it always did when she touched me—even in the most casual way. It was more embarrassing knowing Carine would hear it, too.

The painting she wanted me to look at was a small square canvas in a plain wooden frame; it did not stand out among the bigger and brighter pieces. Painted in different shades of brown, it showed a miniature city full of steeply slanted roofs. A river filled the foreground, crossed by a bridge covered with structures that looked like tiny cathedrals.

“London in the sixteen-fifties,” Edythe said.

“The London of my youth,” Carine added from a few feet behind us. I jumped a little—I hadn’t heard her approach. Edythe took my hand and squeezed it lightly.

“Will you tell the story?” Edythe asked. I turned to see Carine’s reaction.

She met my glance and smiled. “I would, but I’m actually running a bit late. The hospital called this morning—Dr. Snow is taking a sick day. But Beau won’t miss anything.” She smiled at Edythe now. “You know the stories as well as I do.”

It was a strange combination to absorb—the everyday life of a small-town doctor mixed up with a discussion of her early days in seventeenth-century London.

It was also kind of unsettling to realize that she probably was only speaking out loud for my benefit.

With another warm smile, Carine left the room.

I stared at the picture of her hometown for a long minute.

“What came next?” I asked again. “When she knew what had happened to her?”

She nudged me over a half-step, her eyes on a bigger landscape. It was done in dull fall colors and showed an empty meadow in a gloomy forest, a black mountain peak in the distance.

“When she knew what she had become,” Edythe said quietly, “she despaired . . . and then rebelled. She tried to destroy herself. But that’s not easily done.”