Dean Koontz - Your Heart Belongs To Me

Ryan sat in bed, reading until he finished Samantha’s novel for the second time, shortly after two o’clock in the morning. He had not intended to stay up so late.

For a few minutes, he stared at the author’s photo on the back of the book jacket. No camera could do her justice.

Putting the book aside, he leaned against the mounded pillows.

In the three months immediately after the transplant, the side effects of his twenty-eight medications stressed him and, in a couple of instances, considerably worried him. But dosages were adjusted, a few drugs were replaced with others, and thereafter his recovery went so well that Dr. Hobb called him “my super-patient.”

At the one-year mark, no signs of organ rejection had appeared: no unexplained weakness, no fatigue, no fever, no chill or dizziness, no diarrhea or vomiting.

Myocardial biopsy remained the gold standard for identifying rejection. Twice in the past year, as an outpatient, Ryan submitted to the procedure. Both times, the pathologist found no indication of rejection in the tissue samples.

For exercise, he did a lot of walking, uncounted miles. In recent months, he began riding a stationary bike, as well, and lifting light weights.

He was trim, and he felt fit.

Judging by the evidence, he belonged to the fortunate and small minority in whom a stranger’s heart might be received with negative consequences hardly greater than those of a blood transfusion. The most significant medical danger he faced was increased susceptibility to disease because of the immunosuppressant drugs he relied upon.

Yet he had been waiting for the turn, the change of tides, the rotation of the current light into an unknown dark. The events that had led up to the transplant seemed to be unfinished business.

Now came the candy hearts with their simple message, which was nonetheless cryptic for its simplicity. And the figure on the south lawn, in the rain.

He dimmed the bedside lamp. Even after a year of comparative normalcy, he preferred not to sleep in absolute darkness.

Two decks served the master suite. The doors to both were three inches thick, with steel cores and two deadbolts. With the perimeter alarm set, they could not be opened without triggering a siren.

The main stairs ascended from the second floor to the penthouse landing, which was also served by the elevator. The door between that landing and the master suite was secured on this side by a blind deadbolt that had no keyway on the farther side.

Consequently, if intruders were secreted inside the house when the perimeter alarm was activated for the night, they could not gain entrance to the master suite.

In a hidden safe in his walk-in closet, Ryan had stored a 9-millimeter pistol and a box of ammunition. This evening, before bed, he loaded the pistol. It now lay in the half-open nightstand drawer.

He could make a good case against himself to the effect that his fears of conspiracy during the months leading to his transplant were not the result of mental confusion related to diminished circulation, were not caused by the side effects of prescription drugs, but were attributable to an unfortunate lifelong tendency to suspicion. When at an early age you learned not to trust your parents, distrust could become a key element of your life philosophy.

And if that self-indictment was the full truth of things, he needed to resist another descent into paranoia. Perhaps a first step in that resistance ought to be returning the pistol to the safe at once, not in the morning.

He left it in the nightstand drawer.

No unexplained rapping arose. Lying on his right side, ear to the pillow, Ryan heard the slow steady beating of his good heart.

In time he slept, and did not dream.

He woke in the late morning and, by intercom, advised Mrs. Amory that he would be taking lunch at one o’clock in the solarium.

After he showered, shaved, and dressed, he put both the pistol and the bag of candy hearts in the concealed safe.

The storm had passed the previous evening. But a new front was rolling in from the northwest, with rain expected by midafternoon.

When Penelope brought his lunch to the table in the solarium, Ryan asked if she had left candy on his pillow the evening before, though he did not describe the hearts.

In spite of whatever talent she might have for exaggerating her Englishness without once breaking character, she did not seem like a woman who could lie without a score of tics and other tells giving her away. She appeared confused by the question and then as baffled as was Ryan that someone should think it proper etiquette to treat him like a hotel guest in his own home.

After lunch, when she returned to clear the table, she said that she had mentioned the candy to Jordana and to Winston and that she was quite sure neither of them had been the party responsible for this perhaps well-meant but inexcusable occurrence. She had not spoken to Winston’s assistant, Ricardo, as he had been off work the previous day and could not have been responsible.

A service representative with the firm that maintained their heating-cooling system had been in-house and had changed filters on the third floor. And a repairman had worked on the under-counter refrigerator in the master-bedroom retreat. Mrs. Amory wished to know if she should contact them and ascertain if either had been the culprit.

The intensity of her gray-eyed stare and a certain set to her mouth suggested that she regarded this incident as a challenge to her authority and as a personal affront for which she would be pleased to pursue the miscreant to the gates of Hell, if necessary, and give him an upbraiding that he would find worse than the tortures that awaited him in the flames of damnation.

“It’s commendable of you,” Ryan said placatingly, “to be so committed to finding an explanation. But it’s not all that important, Penelope. Let’s not take this out of house. Someone must have meant it as a joke, that’s all.”

“You can rest assured, I’ll keep my eye on those gentlemen when next they’re on the premises,” she said.

“I have no doubt of it,” he said. “No doubt at all.”

Alone in the solarium, he returned to his favorite armchair and opened Samantha’s book to begin a third reading.

Rain began to fall at a quarter past two. As on the previous day, Nature was in an indolent mood, and the sky shed a languid drizzle.

From time to time, Ryan interrupted his reading to sweep the south lawn with his gaze.

He glanced up from the novel less often than he intended. Had the hooded figure returned, it could have watched him for half an hour or longer without his being aware of its presence.

The story, the characters, the prose still enchanted him, but from this third reading, he sought something more than any other work of fiction could have given him. Being in the story was being with Samantha, hearing her voice, which to him counted as both a joy and a sadness.

He also hoped to gain an understanding of why things were the way they were between them. Having completed the book the very day she learned of his transplant, Sam could not have written any part of it with the intention of explaining their estrangement to him, and anyway people didn’t write entire novels to each other in the place of a letter or a phone chat. Yet on his first reading, in only three chapters, he had sensed that this book had something to reveal to him that would explain their current relationship.

Throughout, the novel sang with Samantha’s voice, glowed with her grace, and reflected her sensibilities, but it also contained many scenes that Ryan would not have thought she could write, that sounded like Samantha…but like Samantha as she might have been if some of the experiences that shaped her life had never happened.