Dean Koontz - Your Heart Belongs To Me

After a while, the air acquired a faint alkaline taste from the dust-choked wind that relentlessly groaned and snuffled at the windows.

When eventually Ryan’s cell phone rang, the caller was not Kyra Whipset, but a woman named Wanda June Siedel, who said that she was calling on Nurse Whipset’s behalf.

“She says you want to know about Ismay Clemm.”

“Yes,” Ryan said. “She was…very kind to me at a difficult time in my life.”

“That sounds like Ismay, all right. Sure does. She and me were eight years best friends, and I don’t expect ever to know somebody sweeter.”

“Ms. Siedel, I’d very much like to talk with Nurse Clemm.”

“You call me Wanda June, son. I would sure like to talk to Ismay myself, but I’m sorry to tell you, she’s passed on.”

Gazing at the nurse’s photo on the desk, Ryan avoided for the moment his most important question. Instead he said, “What happened?”

“To be blunt, she married wrong. Her first husband, Reggie, he was a saint to hear Ismay tell it, and I expect he must have been if half her stories about him were true. But Reggie, he died when Ismay was forty. She married again seven years later, that was to Alvin, which is why she came here and I ever met her. She loved Alvin in spite of himself, but he never set well with me. They made it eight and a half years, then she fell backwards off a convenient stepladder and smashed the back of her skull bad on some convenient concrete.”

When Wanda June did not continue, Ryan said, “Convenient, huh?”

“Son, don’t take me wrong on this. I’m making no accusations, have no intention to smirch anyone’s reputation. Lord knows, I’m no policeman, never even watched them CSI shows, and there was plenty of policemen on Ismay’s case, so it’s got to be that they knew what they were doing when they called it an accident. Can’t be but crazed with grief and loneliness why Alvin took up with another woman just a month after Ismay’s gone. Crazed with grief and loneliness, crazed by the estate money and the insurance money, poor crazed and lonely Alvin.”

“She died in the fall, Wanda June?”

“No, no, son, they did some powerful surgery on her, and she had brain swelling bad for a time, didn’t know who she was, but she came around, she had fortitude and the Lord. No memory of the convenient stepladder or the convenient concrete, but she was getting back all the rest of herself, she got to be Ismay again. She was in a rehab hospital, working on some left-arm paralysis, which she was nearly shed of, when she was slammed by a convenient massive heart attack, while poor Alvin was visiting her with some friend of his, them alone in the room with Ismay and the door shut, and that was just one convenience too many for Ismay, God bless and keep her.”

“I’m sorry for your loss, Wanda June. I can hear in your voice how close you were to her.” He asked the most important question: “When did Ismay die?”

“It was three years ago this past Christmas Eve. Alvin, he was bringing her a gift, this beautiful silk scarf, which I guess was so beautiful it gave her a heart attack, which is comforting to think that beauty was what did her in, ’cause it wouldn’t have been anyway convenient if the heart attack didn’t happen and somebody then had to strangle her accidentally with the scarf.”

If Wanda June Siedel could be believed, Ismay Clemm had died twenty-one months prior to the myocardial biopsy during which Ryan had met her.

He sat listening to the angry yellow wind, the gears of his mind having ground to a halt on the thought-obstructing fact that had just been thrown into them.

Wanda June didn’t need encouragement to continue: “Ismay, she met Alvin on a Christian Internet site, which right there is some contradiction, the Internet being the devil’s playground. If Ismay hadn’t gone on the Internet, she wouldn’t ever met Alvin, she would still be out there in Denver with her sister, which means she and me never would have been friends, but I’d rather never known her than her be dead before her time.”

“ Denver,” Ryan said.

“That’s where she was born, lived as a girl, and then married to Reggie. She moved here to Newport, to Costa Mesa actually, she was forty-seven, because Alvin had a job here, such as it was, and so she got on with the hospital.”

“And her sister-she’s still alive?”

“The sister, Ismena, she didn’t marry Alvin, she doesn’t do e-mail let alone Internet, so she’s still not fallen off a stepladder or swallowed a silk scarf or anything, she’s doing fine, she’s a sweetheart like Ismay.”

Reason might have returned to the universe. If there was a sister, an explanation might exist that would comport with the world of laws and logic with which Ryan was comfortable.

“So you’ve stayed in touch with Ismena,” he said.

“Ismena Moon, that’s the maiden name, Alvin was a Clemm. Ismena and me write each other, talk on the phone some.”

“She still lives in Denver?”

“She does, she lives in the very house Ismay and Reggie owned, bought it away from Ismay once Ismay up and married the supposedly Christian Alvin, not that it’s my place to question anyone’s faith, stepladder or no stepladder.”

“Wanda June, what did Kyra Whipset tell you about me?”

“Didn’t even talk to her. She just knew somebody who knew me and knew I was friends with Ismay. They said you’d been impressed by her or something, would I call you.”

“As I said earlier, Ismay was very kind to me at a terrible time in my life. I wanted to…to repay that kindness. But I didn’t know she had passed on.”

“Son, I would love to hear that story, her kindness, what she did for you, put it in my Ismay-memory book.”

“I’ll tell you sometime, Wanda June. I promise. But right now, I was hoping you might put me in touch with her sister, Ismena.”

“Ismena misses Ismay so terrible, she would enjoy a polite young man like you with something good to say about the late lamented. I’ll give you her number.”

In the Mercedes sedan, on the return trip to the airport, George Zane drove, Cathy Sienna rode shotgun, and Ryan slouched in the back, slowly shuffling again and again through the photographs of the three women-Teresa, Lily, Ismay-each of them having been one half of a set of identical twins, each of them with a living sister.

According to Samantha, good stories had deep texture. They acquired texture in numerous ways. The texture of character faults and virtues, of intentions contrasted with actions, of personal philosophy shaped by backstory, of mannerisms and habits, of contrasts and contradictions, of mundanities and eccentricities, of points of view and styles of speech. The texture of vivid visual images, of smells that came off the page, of sounds that resonated in the mind’s ear, of metaphor and simile. She could list dozens of sources for narrative texture. Ryan couldn’t remember them all.

In the texture, you began to see patterns. Some were patterns of plot, which you could think of as like the center lines on a highway and the guardrails at its extremes, there to be sure that you got to your destination without getting lost in byways of meaningless event. Others were patterns of the obvious theme, to give the story purpose that made it meaningful, in part just as the rules of construction for a sonnet gave it meaning, in part just as the truth of human suffering in a blues song made it worth singing.

The most difficult patterns of all to understand, the most intriguing, and usually the most ominous were those that arose from subtext, not from the surface theme but from the implicit meaning of the tale. The less you thought about those patterns, the more you understood them, for they were the patterns of primal truths, some of which the modern mind rejected on a conscious level.