shut, silencing the squeak of rubber-soled shoes, the swish of starched uniforms, and 
other noises made by the busy nurses in the corridor.
  Mrs. Cain's little boy felt small, weak, sorry for himself, and terribly alone. The 
detective was still here, but his presence only aggravated Junior's sense of isolation.
  He missed Naomi. She'd always known exactly the right thing to say or do, improving his 
mood with a few words or with just her touch, when he was feeling down.
  
  Chapter 12
  THUNDER RATTLED like hoofbeats, and dapple-gray clouds drove  eastward in the 
slow-motion gallop of horses in a dream. Bright Beach  was blurred and distorted by rain 
as full of tricks as funhouse mirrors.
  While sliding toward twilight, the January afternoon seemed also to  have slipped out 
of the familiar world and into a strange dimension.
  With Joey dead beside her and the baby possibly dying in her  womb, trapped in the 
Pontiac because the doors were torqued in their frames and wedged shut, racked by pain 
from the battering she had Agnes refused to indulge in either fear or tears. She gave 
herself to prayer instead, asking for the wisdom to understand why this was happening to 
her and for the strength to cope with her pain and with her loss.
  Witnesses first to the scene, unable to open either door of the  coupe, spoke 
encouragingly to her through the broken-out windows.
  She knew some of them, not others. They were all well-meaning and concerned, some 
without rain gear and getting soaked, but their natural  curiosity lent a special shine 
to their eyes that made Agnes feel as  though she were an animal on exhibit, without 
dignity, her most private  agony exposed for the entertainment of strangers.
  When the first police arrived, followed closely by an ambulance, they discussed the 
possibility of taking Agnes out of the car through the  Missing windshield. Considering 
that the space was pinched by the crumpled roof, however, and in light of Agnes's 
pregnancy and imminent second-stage labor, the severe contortions involved in this 
extraction would be too dangerous.
  Rescuers appeared with hydraulic pry bars and metal cutting saws. Civilians were 
shepherded back to the sidewalks.

  Thunder less distant now. Around her-the crackle of police radios, the clang of tools 
being readied, the skirl of a stiffening wind. Dizzying, these sounds. She couldn't shut 
her ears against them, and when she closed her eyes, she felt as though she were spinning.
  No scent of gasoline fouled the air. Apparently, the tank had not burst. Sudden 
immolation seemed unlikely-but only an hour ago so had Joey's untimely death.
  Rescuers encouraged her to move safely away from the passenger's door, as far as 
possible, to avoid being inadvertently injured as they tried to break in to her. She 
could go nowhere but to her dead husband.
  Huddling against Joey's body, his head lolling against her shoulder, Agnes thought 
crazily of their early dates and the first years of their marriage. They had occasionally 
gone to the drive-in, sitting close, holding hands as they watched John Wayne in The 
Searchers, David Niven in Around the World in 80 Days. They were so young then, sure they 
would live forever, and they were still young now, but for one of them, forever had 
arrived.
  A rescuer instructed her to close her eyes and turn her face away from the passenger's 
door. He shoved a quilted mover's blanket through the window and arranged this protective 
padding along her right side.
  Clutching the blanket, she thought of the funerary lap robes that red the legs of the 
deceased in their caskets, for she felt sometimes cove half dead. Both feet in this 
world-yet walking beside Joey on a strange road Beyond.
  The hum, the buzz, the rattle, the grinding of machinery, power tools. Sheet steel and 
tougher structural steel snarling against the teeth of a metal-cutting saw.
  Beside her, the passenger's door barked and shrieked as though alive as though 
suffering, and these sounds were uncannily like the cries of torment that only Agnes 
could hear in the haunted chambers of her heart.
  The car shuddered, wrenched steel screamed, and a cry of triumph rose from the rescuers.
  A man with beautiful celadon eyes, his face beaded with jewels of rain, reached through 
the cut-away door and removed the blanket from Agnes.
  "You're all right, we've got you now." His soft yet reverberant voice was so unearthly 
that his words seemed to convey an assurance more profound and more comforting than their 
surface meaning.
  This saving spirit retreated, and in his place came a young paramedic in a 
black-and-yellow rain slicker over hospital whites. "Just want to be sure there's no 
spinal injury before we move you. Can you squeeze my hands?"
  Squeezing as instructed, she said, "My baby might be ... hurt."
  As though giving voice to her worst fear had made it come true, Agnes was seized by a 
contraction so painful that she cried out and clutched the paramedic's hands tightly 
enough to make him wince. She felt a peculiar swelling within, then an awful looseness, 
pressure followed at once by release.
  The gray pants of her jogging suit, speckled with rain that had blown in through the 
shattered windshield, were suddenly soaked. Her water had broken.
  Darker than water, another stain spread across the lap and down the legs of the pants. 
It was the color of port wine when filtered through the gray fabric of the jogging suit, 
but even in her semi-delirious state, she knew that she was not the vessel for a miracle 
birth, was not bringing forth a baby in a flush of wine, but in a gush of blood.
  From her reading, she knew that amniotic fluid should be clear. A few traces of blood 
in it should not necessarily be alarming, but here were more than traces. Here were thick 
red-black streams.
  "My baby," she pleaded.
  Already another contraction racked her, so intense that the pain was not limited to her 
lower back and abdomen, but seared the length of her sphic, like an electric current 
leaping vertebra to vertebra. Her breath pinched in her chest as though her lungs had 
collapsed.
  Second-stage labor was supposed to last about fifty minutes in a woman bearing her 
first child, as little as twenty if the birth was not the first, but she sensed that 
Bartholomew was not going to come into the world by the book.
  Urgency gripped the paramedics. The rescuers' equipment and the pieces of the car door 
were dragged out of the way to make a path for a gurney, its wheels clattering across 
pavement littered with debris.
  Agnes was not fully aware of how she was lifted from the car, but she remembered 
looking back and seeing Joey's body huddled in the tangled shadows of the wreckage, 
remembered reaching toward him, desperate for the anchorage that he had always given her, 
and then she was on the gurney and moving.
  Dusk had arrived, strangling the day, and the throttled sky hung low, as blue-black as 
bruises. The streetlights had come on. Gouts of red light from pulsing emergency beacons 
alchemized the rain from teardrops into showers of blood.
  The rain was colder than it had been earlier, almost as icy as sleet. Or perhaps she 
was far hotter than before and felt the chill more keenly on her fevered skin. Each