Unless she hadn't loved him.
  The paramedic pumped the inflation cuff of the sphygmomanometer, and Junior's blood 
pressure was most likely high enough to induce a stroke, driven skyward by the thought 
that Naomi's love had been a lie.
  Maybe she had just married him for his ... No, that was a dead end. He didn't have any 
money.
  She had loved him, all right. She had adored him. Worshiped would not be too strong a 
word.
  Now that the possibility of treachery had occurred to Junior, however, he couldn't rid 
himself of suspicion. Good Naomi, who gave immeasurably more to everyone than she took, 
would forevermore stand in a shadow of doubt in his memory.
  After all, you could never really know anyone, not really know every last corner of 
someone's mind or heart. No human being was perfect.
  Even someone of saintly habits and selfless behavior might be a monster in his heart, 
filled with unspeakable desires, which he might act upon only once or never.
  He was all but certain that he himself, for example, would not kill another wife. For 
one thing, considering that his marriage to Naomi was now stained by the most terrible of 
doubts, he couldn't imagine how he might ever again trust anyone sufficiently to take the 
wedding vows.
  Junior closed his weary eyes and gratefully submitted as the paramedic wiped his greasy 
face and his crusted lips with a cool, damp cloth.
  Naomi's beautiful countenance rose in his mind, and she looked beautific for a moment, 
but then he thought he saw a certain slyness in her angelic smile, a disturbing glint of 
calculation in her once loving eyes.
  Losing his cherished wife was devastating, a wound beyond all hope of healing, but this 
was even worse: having his bright image of her stained by suspicion. Naomi was no longer 
present to provide comfort and consolation, and now Junior didn't even have untainted 
memories of her to sustain him. As always, it was not the action that troubled him, but 
the aftermath.
  This soiling of Naomi's memory was a sadness so poignant, so terrible, that he wondered 
if he could endure it. He felt his mouth tremble and go soft, not with the urge to throw 
up again, but with something like grief if not grief itself. His eyes filled with tears.
  Perhaps the paramedic had given him an injection, a sedative. the howling ambulance 
rocked along on this most momentous day, Junior Cain wept profoundly but quietly-and 
achieved temporary peace in a dreamless sleep.
  
  When he woke, he was in a hospital bed, his upper body slightly elevated. The only 
illumination was provided by a single window: an ashen light too dreary to be called a 
glow, trimmed into drab ribbons by the tilted blades of a venetian blind. Most of the 
room lay in shadows.
  He still had a sour taste in his mouth, although it was not as disgusting as it had 
been. All the odors were wonderfully clean and bracing-antiseptics, floor wax, freshly 
laundered bedsheets-without a whiff of bodily fluids.
  He was immensely weary, limp. He felt oppressed, as though a great weight were piled on 
him. Even keeping his eyes open was tiring.
  An IV rack stood beside the bed, dripping fluid into his vein, replacing the 
electrolytes that he had lost through vomiting, most likely medicating him with an 
antiemetic as well. His right arm was securely strapped to a supporting board, to prevent 
him from bending his elbow and accidentally tearing out the needle.
  This was a two-bed unit. The second bed was empty.
  Junior thought he was alone, but just when he felt capable of summoning the energy to 
shift to a more comfortable position, he heard a man clear his throat. The phlegmy sound 
had come from beyond the foot of the bed, from the right corner of the room.
  Instinctively, Junior knew that anyone watching over him in the dark could not be a 
person of the best intentions. Doctors and nurses wouldn't monitor their patients with 
the lights off.
  He was relieved that he hadn't moved his head or made a sound. He wanted to understand 
as much of the situation as possible before revealing that he was awake.
  Because the upper part of the hospital bed was somewhat raised, he didn't have to lift 
his head from the pillow to study the corner where the phantom waited. He peered beyond 
the IV rack, past the foot of the adjacent bed.
  Junior was lying in the darkest end of the room, farthest from the window, but the 
comer in question was almost equally shrouded in gloom. He stared for a long time, until 
his eyes began to ache, before he was at last able to make out the vague, angular lines 
of an armchair. And in the chair: a shape as lacking in detail as that of the robed and 
hooded gondolier on the Styx.
  He was uncomfortable, achy, thirsty, but he remained utterly still and observant. After 
a while, he realized that the sense of oppression with which he'd awakened was not 
entirely a psychological symptom: Something heavy lay across his abdomen. And it was 
cold-so cold, in fact, that it had numbed his middle to the extent that he hadn't 
immediately felt the chill of it. Shivers coursed through him. He clenched his jaws to 
prevent his teeth from chattering and thereby alerting the man in the chair. Although he 
never took his eyes off the comer, Junior became preoccupied with trying to puzzle out 
what was draped across his midsection. The mysterious observer made him sufficiently 
nervous that he couldn't order his thoughts as well as usual, and the effort to prevent 
the shivers from shaking a sound out of him only further interfered with his ability to 
reason. The longer that he was unable to identify the frigid object, the more alarmed he 
became. He almost cried out when into his mind oozed an image of Naomi's dead body, now 
past the whitest shade of pale, as gray as the faint light at the window and turning pale 
green in a few places, and cold, all the heat of life gone from her flesh, which was not 
yet simmering with any of the heat of decomposition that would soon enliven it again.
  No. Ridiculous. Naomi wasn't slumped across him. He wasn't sharing his bed with a 
corpse. That was E.C. Comics stuff, something from a yellowed issue of Tales from the 
Crypt.
  And it wasn't Naomi sitting in the chair, either, not Naomi come to him from the morgue 
to wreak vengeance. The dead don't live again, neither here nor in some world beyond. 
Nonsense.
  Even if such ignorant superstitions could be true, the visitor was far too quiet and 
too patient to be the living-dead incarnation of a murdered wife. This was a predatory 
silence, an animal cunning, not a supernatural hush. This was the elegant stillness of a 
panther in the brush, the coiled tension of a snake too vicious to give a warning rattle.
  Suddenly Junior intuited the identity of the man in the chair. Beyond question, this 
was the plainclothes police officer with the birthmark.
  The salt-and-pepper, brush-cut hair. The pan-flat face. The thick neck.
  Instantly to Junior's memory came the eye floating in the port-wine stain, the hard 
gray iris like a nail in the bloody palm of a crucified man.
  Draped across his midsection, the terrible cold weight had chilled his flesh; but now 
his bone marrow prickled with ice at the thought of the birthmarked detective sitting 
silently in the dark, watching. Junior would have preferred dealing with Naomi, dead and 
risen and seriously pissed, rather than with this dangerously patient man.