‘I’m sorry, French, but I had to pee.’
‘It’s not French, it’s Amy.’
I whipped off the compress, instantly alert. ‘Amy! My God, I’ve been so worried!’
Amy dipped the flannel in water, calmly wrung it out. ‘I can see that. But you needn’t have made yourself sick over it.’
‘Where…? How…?’
‘All in good time. You need to rest now.’ She concentrated on my hands, working the cloth between each of my fingers. ‘I’m sorry I wasn’t here when you needed me, Hannah.’
‘How long have I been out of it? I’ve lost all track of time.’
‘Just two days.’
‘Two?’
‘Uh huh. French told me they sent for the doctor. You’re such a troublemaker.’
‘I’m sorry.’
‘You should be. If you hadn’t been such a damn fool, your fever might have broken earlier.’
‘I had to pee,’ I explained again. I didn’t mention her missing iPhone.
‘The doctor came to see you again last night,’ Amy said. ‘Your blood sample was normal, he said. Best guess, you’ve got a bad case of flu. Wait a minute, I wrote it down.’ She reached into her pocket for a slip of paper, squinted as if trying to decipher the handwriting. ‘CDC H3N3,’ she read. ‘Ah, the Center for Disease Control says you had the H3N2 virus that’s making the rounds.’
‘The doctor came again?’ I had no recollection of that. I remembered dreams, weird and disjointed. Amy. Alex. Paul and the Phantom of the Opera duking it out.
‘You don’t remember?’
‘I had a long discussion with René Descartes about the existence of God and the immortality of the soul.’ I raised the arm she had just washed and pointed. ‘He sat right there at the foot of the bed and explained it all to me. What’s more amazing, is that I understood every word.’
‘Ah, that explains the French.’ Amy said, dropping the flannel back into the basin. ‘Je pense donc je suis. How’s your head?’
‘Better.’ Amy looked skeptical, so I said, ‘Really.’
‘I’m going to fetch you some broth. Are you up for that?’
‘Only if you promise to sit down next to the bed and tell me what’s been going on.’
‘First you eat.’
When Amy returned a few minutes later holding a tray, I asked, worried, ‘Is Derek in the room? Chad?’
‘No,’ Amy said. ‘Everyone’s off to see a production of The Beggar’s Opera in the Annapolis Summer Garden Theatre building down by the docks.’ She fluffed up my pillows and propped me up against them. She handed me a cup of yellow liquid with specks of green floating on top.
I took a cautious sip, ‘Bleah! It’s cold!’
‘It’s supposed to be cold. Pretend it’s vichyssoise.’
‘That’s a stretch.’ I took another sip and swallowed. ‘But I think it’s going to stay down.’
‘Good.’ Amy scooted the straight back chair closer to my bed and sat down on it. ‘So, where to start?’
‘At the beginning,’ I said. ‘At St Anne’s. In the restroom.’
‘I never even got to the restroom,’ Amy told me. ‘When I entered the vestibule, Drew was already there, waiting, thumbing through the brochures on the tract rack. He saw me, literally scooped me up, and the next thing I know, we’re in the back seat of a cab speeding out of town on Rowe Boulevard, heading straight for the airport.’
‘Where was he taking you?’
‘To the Four Points Sheraton at first, and then South America. Argentina, to be exact, in Flores, which is a yuppyfied barrio in the heart of Buenos Aires, or so I gather. You can get lost among thirteen million people, he says. Drew had it all laid on. False passports. A private plane. A suitcase of clothes for me, all bought for cash at Macy’s.’ She blushed. ‘He even remembered my size.’
‘So how come you aren’t in Argentina?’
Amy gave me a look.
Oh, I got it. First things first. The hotel. Sex.
‘But thank God for that,’ Amy continued, ‘because it gave me time to negotiate.’
‘Successfully, apparently.’
She nodded. ‘But it wasn’t easy.’
‘So, what future is there in it for you, Amy? Some sort of Do-it-Yourself Witness Protection Program?’
‘You could say that. In a few months, the Navy will declare Drew officially dead. I’m to collect the $100,000 survivor benefit and cash in his $450,000 life insurance policy. Then I join him. He’s arranged passports, as I said. New identities. He had training as an accountant, so he even got somebody to dummy up a convincing work history for him. Low-level jobs at large corporations where nobody will ever bother to check.’ She smiled grimly. ‘I was once a teacher. Ditto on my new résumé.
‘Drew is fluent in five languages, but I don’t even speak Spanish, so what kind of work can I do in Argentina? “You can learn,” he said. Ha! Honestly, Hannah, I married the man for better or for worse, and this is definitely for worse. He probably wants to keep me at home, barefoot and pregnant.
‘He looked different,’ she rattled on. ‘Sunburned, bleached, brittle, so… hard.’
‘It was pitch dark the night he visited me in your room. I never saw him, Amy.’
‘His hair is long now, tied back in a ponytail. It was always kind of dirty blond, but it’s been bleached almost white by the sun. And he’s no longer Drew, by the way. His name is Donald. I hate the name Donald.’
I had to agree. ‘I had an evil boss once named Donald. We amused ourselves by inventing devious ways to kill him. And there’s always Donald Duck.’
Amy laughed mirthlessly.
‘Drew knew how much staying on the show meant to you because I told him. Why did he risk getting you kicked off the show by taking you away?’
‘In a way, it’s the show that saved me, Hannah. He was going on about living in luxury for the rest of our lives. I let him think I was on board with it, too, but dammit, I don’t want to live life on the run. I’m not particularly close to my mother, but I have a sister, and a niece and a nephew, and I don’t want never to see them again. Besides, it’s been ten months. I have new friends now.’
‘New friends,’ I repeated. ‘Like Alex.’
Amy fell back against the chair. ‘You noticed?’
‘I stumbled across the two of you in the service staircase one day.’
‘Shit.’
‘He’s been worried sick about you, Amy.’
‘Oh, Hannah, what am I going to do about Alex? I’m sweet on him, sure, but now that Drew’s back in the picture…’ She leaned forward, grabbed my hand. ‘Alex doesn’t know about Drew, and if Drew finds out about Alex, I hate to think what might happen!’
‘Maybe you need to let Alex down gently,’ I suggested.
‘Alex is such a sweet, gentle spirit,’ Amy said, ‘while Drew…’
‘Doesn’t Drew have family?’ I asked. ‘Other than you, I mean.’
‘His father was killed in Vietnam, in the final days during the fall of Saigon. His mother died of cancer when Drew was only twelve. Drew’s grandmother raised him, but when she died…’ Amy shrugged. ‘I’m the only family he has. Everything Drew loves goes away.’
‘If he wanted you to stay with him so badly, Amy, how on earth did you escape?’
Amy shrugged. ‘I gave him some of the best sex he’s ever had, and in the afterglow, I put him off. I pointed out something that should have occurred to him in the first place if he hadn’t been thinking with his… you know. It would only attract attention if I disappeared from the show in midstream. 60 Minutes and 48 Hours would be all over it.’ Amy held an imaginary microphone to her mouth, stared at me intently and said, ‘Why would the young widow of a Navy SEAL run away from the set of a major television show? Where is she hiding? And why? Stay tuned. We’ll be right back.