Chapter 30 Routine

"His godfather," I said, before Rhys had quite finished the question. "He was in the room when Felix's heart was found. You weren't, because I didn't let you be."

The vending machine hummed between us. Rhys took his eyes off the window at last.

"That's the whole answer?"

"That's the true one. I don't have a longer one for you in a hospital corridor."

He looked back at the lab. Lorenz had stood up and was holding the door for the twins, Pippa marching out first with Admiral held high, Felix after her with his hand still in Lorenz's. The three of them turned the other way down the corridor, toward the elevators, without seeing us.

"You didn't let me," Rhys said. He said it slowly, to the empty corridor, as if he were reading it off a page. Then he looked at me. "I didn't give you much reason to."

He didn't wait for an answer. He walked away toward the stairs, and I stood by the vending machine with my phone in my hand and the school's number half dialed, and forgot for a moment who I had been calling.

---

On Wednesday Lorenz sat at my desk and read the final echo report aloud to me, every line, though I had been in the room for the scan. Aortic root unchanged. No stenosis. Trivial regurgitation, unchanged. Bicuspid aortic valve, stable, no progression. Recommend routine annual follow-up.

"Routine," he said. "My favorite word in your language."

"You have a lot of favorite words in my language."

"I have a lot of favorite words in every language. This is the favorite one today."

I sent the report to Rhys myself. Lorenz offered to do it from his hospital account, and that would have been simpler and more correct, and I said no. I attached the P*F to an email and typed *Felix's echo, final report. Stable.* and read it twice and sent it before I could add anything.

The reply came back in under a minute.

*Noted.*

I closed the email. I opened a chart. I had read about half a line of it when my inbox chimed again, and I clicked back without meaning to.

*Thank you.*

Nothing else. No signature. Sent fifty-eight seconds after the first.

I read it more times than I had read the first one, enough times that Lorenz, across the desk, stopped pretending to read a journal and raised his eyebrows at me.

"Bad news?"

"No," I said, and closed it. "Routine."

Lorenz went back to his journal. He turned two pages without reading them. Then he closed it on his finger.

"He is not what I expected," he said.

"Who?"

He gave me a look over his glasses that he had been giving me since our first year at the Kantonsklinik, when I used to pretend I hadn't heard a question in rounds.

"For five years," he said, "I have had a picture of that man. You never described him. You never said one word against him, which I found worse than if you had said a hundred. So I made the picture myself. A cold man in a good coat. Something out of a bank."

"And?"

"And he is a cold man in a good coat." Lorenz tapped the journal against the desk. "Who stood against a wall in a dark room for twenty minutes trying to read his son's heart off a screen, and could not, and did not leave."

He paused. "On Monday he asked me, at the elevator, what a bicuspid valve does at forty. At sixty. What the operation is, if one day there is one. He wrote the answers in his phone."

I didn't say anything. Out the window a crane swung a red container slowly across the sky.

"I am not telling you anything," Lorenz said. "I am a cardiologist. I report findings."

"Then report them to someone else."

"There is no one else here who would understand them," he said mildly, and opened the journal again, and this time I think he actually read it.

---

We walked the harbor at dusk because the twins had been inside all day and Lorenz flew home on Friday and wanted, he said, to see the sea in this country once without a windshield in front of it.

Fog was coming in off the water in long low banks, swallowing the far shore one building at a time. The lamps along the harbor walk had come on early, each with a halo of wet light.

Lorenz carried Pippa on his shoulders. She held on to his ears and steered him.

"Left. LEFT. There's a dog. I want to see the dog."

"The dog is busy, Pippa."

"Dogs are never busy. Actually, dogs have no jobs."

"There are dogs with jobs. Police dogs. Dogs who find people in the snow."

"Those aren't jobs. Those are hobbies."

She let go of one ear to wave at the dog, hard, with her whole arm. Her red mitten, the one on the string I had sewn back on twice, came off its string at last and sailed over the railing into the dark water. It floated for a second. Then a wave took it under the pilings.

"My MITTEN!"

"Pippa, don't lean—"

"It's GONE. A shark's going to EAT it."

"There are no sharks in this harbor," I said.

"How do *you* know?"

It took Lorenz the length of the walk and a promise of hot chocolate to talk her down. Felix walked beside me holding my hand, touching every iron bollard along the edge of the walk as we passed it, counting under his breath. The ones with a rusty mooring ring set in the top he touched twice.

We stopped at the railing near the end of the walk, where the old fishing pier went out into the fog and the water slapped at the pilings below. The light was going blue. Out in the murk a buoy bell rang, slow and irregular.

Lorenz lifted Pippa down onto the railing's bottom rung and held the back of her coat. She leaned over the water, still looking for her mitten.

"Margot," Lorenz said.

I turned. He was looking out at the fog, not at me, and his face in the lamplight was more serious than I had seen it since the night in Zurich when he had shown me the first scan of a heart with two leaflets.

"There is a thing," he said, "that one ought to have said in Zurich. Before you left. Because one has thought about it every day since, and that is not a good use of a man's days, and—"

His phone rang.

It was the old ring, the shrill one he had never changed, and it went through the fog. He looked at the screen, and I watched the sentence leave his face.

"Kantonsklinik," he said. "It is half past one in the morning there. They do not call at half past one to say hello."

"Answer it."

He answered it. "Brandt." Then his voice dropped into German, quick and level, the voice I had heard across a hundred cots in the cardiac unit. He walked a few steps down the railing with one hand pressed over his other ear.

I caught numbers. I caught *nicht warten*. Someone's child, a long way away, was having a bad night.

It was six minutes. I held Pippa's hood. Felix leaned against my leg and counted something under his breath.

When Lorenz came back he put the phone in his pocket and stood for a second without saying anything. Then he pushed his glasses up his nose and gave me the old easy smile.

"A baby with a stubborn duct," he said. "She will be fine. My fellow is good. He only needed someone to tell him he was right."

"And the thing you ought to have said in Zurich?"

He looked at me. For a moment I thought he would say it. Then the moment passed, and he let it.

"I was going to say," he said lightly, "that the bread here is criminal. Someone ought to be prosecuted."

"That's what you've thought about every day since Zurich?"

"Every single day," he said, and picked Pippa back up onto his shoulders, and turned for the car.

I watched his back go into the fog. In the space where his voice had been I heard the end of a sentence he hadn't said, and I put it away fast, before I could read it.

---

The front door of 14 Netmaker Lane was open three inches.

I saw it from the car. I had parked under the streetlamp, where I always did, and the house sat there in the fog looking as it always looked, narrow and gray-shingled, the blue paint on the door flaking at the bottom where Helen had always meant to repaint it.

And the door was open. Just enough to let a line of darkness show down the side of it.

I had locked it at seven that morning. I had locked it every day since the gray truck.

"Lorenz," I said.

He was already looking.

I didn't turn off the engine. I pressed the lock button, and the four locks went down with one heavy clunk, and I took out my phone and dialed 911.

"My house has been broken into," I said, when the dispatcher answered. "Fourteen Netmaker Lane, Old Harbor. The front door's been forced. I don't know if anyone's still inside. I have two children and another adult with me in the car."

"Stay in your vehicle, ma'am. Keep the doors locked. Do not go into the house. I have a unit on the way."

"How long?"

"About eight minutes. Stay on the line with me."

I stayed on the line. In the back seat Pippa asked why we weren't getting out, and Lorenz told her, quite calmly, that we were waiting for some police officers, and that she could ask them whether their dogs had jobs. Felix said nothing. He had found my eyes in the mirror and was holding them.

The patrol car came down the lane in seven minutes, no siren, lights turning blue in the fog. Two officers got out. I unlocked my door and stepped out into the cold and told them what I knew, which was nothing, and they went up the three steps with their flashlights and their hands on their belts and pushed the door open with a foot.

I stood by the car and listened to them go through Helen's house. Footsteps. A voice calling *clear*. Another, from upstairs.

Five minutes later the older one came out onto the step.

"Nobody inside, ma'am. Back door's still locked. They came in through the front and went out the same way." He held the door. "I need you to walk through with me and tell me what's missing. Don't touch anything."

The lock plate was bent outward from the frame, the wood around it splintered pale, where something flat and strong had gone into the gap and been leaned on. I stepped past it.

Helen's front room was a mess.

Nothing was overturned. It was a careful, thorough mess. Every drawer of the old sideboard had been pulled out and emptied onto the rug.

The frames from the wall above the sofa had been taken down and the backs pried off, and the photographs lay face up and face down all over the floor: Helen at her nursing-school graduation, Helen and me on the ferry, Helen holding a fish at the market and laughing so hard her eyes had shut.

Her recipe tins, the dented red ones that lived on the kitchen shelf, had been opened and tipped out, and index cards in her slanting hand were everywhere, *Chowder* and *Mabel's Lemon Bars* and *Do NOT Use Margarine*.

On the arm of the sofa, upside down, lay her old white nursing cap, the starched one she'd kept in a box and only taken out once a year.

I picked up nothing.

I did what I would have done if they'd wheeled a man in from a pileup on the coast road. Airway first, then the next thing, then the next. Kitchen: back door locked, window intact. Bathroom. Stairs, the officer's flashlight behind me. The twins' room: their beds as they had left them, Pippa's covers on the floor where she always kicked them, Felix's lined up square. Nothing touched.

My room: nothing touched. My laptop sat on the bedside table, in plain sight. My jewelry dish, with the earrings Beatrix had given me, sat beside it.

At the foot of my bed, the cedar chest was closed, and when I lifted the lid with one knuckle my baby blanket lay folded on top where it always lay, pale yellow wool with the little gull stitched in one corner, untouched.

"Laptop's still here," the officer said behind me. "Jewelry."

"Yes."

Whoever had come had not wanted anything of mine.

I went back down the hall to the last door. Helen's room. I hadn't changed it much since I moved back. I hadn't been able to.

Her closet door stood open. Her coats hung where they had always hung, her good navy one and her rain jacket and the cardigan with the elbows gone. Her shoes were in a row on the floor.

On the shelf above the rail, where she had kept her hatboxes and her winter scarves and an old shoebox tied with string, the hatboxes had been pushed to one side and the scarves had been dragged half down.

In the middle of the shelf, in the dust, there was a clean rectangle the size and shape of a shoebox, sharp-edged, pale against the gray.

Whoever it was had walked past my laptop and my children's beds and gone straight to one shelf in a dead woman's closet.

The box with Helen's papers was gone.