"Probably not." Not unless his father's ownership of the hotel had something to do with the first Blue Rose murders, I thought, and dismissed the idea.
"I still wish the old man had held out until the city turned around," said Ransom. "An academic salary doesn't go very far. Especially an Arkham College salary."
"April must have more than compensated for that," I said.
He shook his head. "April's money is hers, not mine. I never wanted to have the feeling that I could just dip into the money she made on her own."
Ransom smiled at some memory, and the sunlight softened the unhappiness in his face.
"I have an old Pontiac I bought secondhand for when I have to drive somewhere. April's car is a Mercedes 500SL. She worked hard—spent all night in her office sometimes. It was her money, all right."
"Is there a lot of it?"
He gave me a grim look. "If she dies, I'll be a well-off widower. But the money didn't have anything to do with who she really was."
"It could look like a motive to people who don't understand your marriage."
"Like the wonderful Millhaven police department?" He laughed—a short, ugly bark. "That's just another reason for us to learn Blue Rose's name. As if we needed one."
9
WE came around the bend past the third-floor patients' lounge, and a short, aggressive-looking policeman in his twenties lounged out of one of the doorways. His name tag read MANGILOTTI. He checked his watch, then gave Ransom what he thought was a hard look. I got a hard look, too.
"Did she say anything, officer?" Ransom asked.
"Who's this?" The little policeman moved in front of me, as if to keep me from entering the room. The top of his uniform hat came up to my chin.
"I'm just a friend," I said.
Ransom had already stepped into the room, and the policeman turned his head to follow him. Then he tilted his head and gave me another glare. Both of us heard a woman inside the hospital room say that Mrs. Ransom had not spoken yet.
The cop backed away and turned around and went into the room to make sure he didn't miss anything. I followed him into the sunny white room. Sprays of flowers in vases covered every flat surface—vases filled with lilies and roses and peonies crowded the long windowsill. The odor of the lilies filled the room. John Ransom and an efficient-looking woman in a white uniform stood on the far side of the bed. The curtains around the bed had been pushed back and were bunched against the wall on both sides of the patient's head. April Ransom lay in a complex tangle of wires, tubes, and cords that stretched from the bed to a bank of machines and monitors. A clear bag on a pole dripped glucose into her veins. Thin white tubes had been fed into her nose, and electrodes were fastened to her neck and the sides of her head with white stars of tape. The sheet over her body covered a catheter and other tubes. Her head lay flat on the bed, and her eyes were closed. The left side of her face was a single enormous blue-purple bruise, and another long blue bruise covered her right jaw. Wedges of hair had been shaved back from her forehead, making it look even broader and whiter. Fine lines lay across it, and two nearly invisible lines bracketed her wide mouth. Her lips had no color. She looked as if several layers of skin had been peeled from the sections of her face left unbruised. She had only the smallest resemblance to the woman in the newspaper photograph.
"You brought company today," said the nurse.
John Ransom spoke our names, Eliza Morgan, Tim Underhill, and we nodded at each other across the bed. The policeman walked to the back of the room and sat down beneath the row of windows. "Tim is going to stay with me for a while, Eliza," John said.
"It'll be nice for you to have some company," said the nurse. She looked at me from the other side of the bed, letting me adjust to the sight of April Ransom.
Ransom said, "You've heard me speak about Tim Underhill, April. He's here to visit you, too. Are you feeling any better today?" He moved a section of the sheet aside and closed his hand around hers. I saw a flash of white bandage pads and even whiter tape around her upper arm. "Pretty soon you'll be strong enough to come home again."
He looked up at me. "She looked a lot worse last Wednesday, when they finally let me see her. I really thought she was going to die that day, but she pulled through, didn't she, Eliza?"
"She sure did," the nurse said. "Been fighting ever since."
Ransom leaned over the bed and began speaking to his wife in a steady, comforting voice. I moved away from the bed. The policeman seated beneath the row of bright windows straightened up in his chair and looked at me brightly and aggressively. His left hand wandered toward the bulge of the notebook in his shirt pocket.
"The patients' lounge is usually empty around this time," the nurse said, and smiled at me.
I walked down the curving hallway to the entrance of a large room lined with green couches and chairs, some of them arranged around plain polished wooden tables. Two overweight women in T-shirts that adhered to their bodies smoked and played cards in a litter of splayed magazines and paper bags at a table in the far corner. They had pulled one of the curtains across the nearest window. An elderly woman in a gray suit occupied a chair eight feet from them with her back to an uncovered window, reading a Barbara Pym novel as if her life depended on it. I moved toward the windows in the left-hand corner of the room, and the old woman glanced up from her book and stabbed me with a look fiercer than anything Officer Mangelotti could have produced.
I heard footsteps behind me and turned around to see April Ransom's private duty nurse carrying a pouchy black handbag into the lounge. The old woman glared at her, too. Eliza Morgan plopped her bag onto one of the tables near the entrance and motioned me toward her. She fished around in the big handbag and pulled out a pack of cigarettes and looked at me apologetically. "This is the only place in this whole wing of the hospital where smoking is allowed," she said in a voice not far above a whisper. She lit the cigarette with a match, tossed the match into a blackened copper ashtray, blew out a white feather of smoke, and sat down. "I know it's a filthy habit, but I'm cutting way down. I have one an hour during my shift here, and one after dinner, and that's it. Well, that's almost the truth. Right at the start of my shift, I sit in here and smoke three or four of the darned things; otherwise I'd never make it through the first hour." She leaned forward and lowered her voice again. "If Mrs. Rollins gave you a dirty look when you came in, it's because she was afraid you were going to start polluting the place. I distress her no end, because she doesn't think nurses should smoke at all— probably they shouldn't!"
I smiled at her—she was a nice looking woman a few years older than I was. Her short black hair looked clean and silky, and her brisk friendliness stopped far short of being intrusive.
"I suppose you've been here ever since Mrs. Ransom was put into the hospital," I said.
She nodded, exhaling another vigorous plume of smoke. "Mr. Ransom hired me as soon as he heard."
She put her hand on her bag. "You're staying with him?"
I nodded.
"Just get him to talk—he's an interesting man, but he doesn't know half of what's going on inside him. It'd be terrible if he started to fall apart."
"Tell me," I said. "Does his wife have a chance? Do you think she'll come out of her coma?"
She leaned across the table. "You just be there to help him, if you're a friend of his." She made sure that I had heard this and then straightened her back and snubbed out the cigarette, having said all she intended to say.
"I guess that's an answer," I said, and we both stood up.
"Who ever said there were answers?"