His handwriting was neat and easy to read. The first time he entered a person’s name, he wrote it in full. After that, he used initials or a shortened version of the name. I supposed the ones who were referred to with initials from the beginning of January were people first noted in other years. Those weren’t necessarily harder to figure out. Context usually provided hints. “C.” clearly stood for Claire, “R.H.” for Roland Hill. Others remained beyond my ability to decipher.

The calendar was a gold mine, and I knew Claire was right-Ben never would have handed it over to a reporter.

Ben Watterson was a man who spent much of his life in meetings or on the phone. Reading it might have become utterly boring were it not for his occasional commentaries, brief but remarkably straightforward.

“Dull fund-raiser except for question re M.H.’s evening gown,”one read.“If placed on a cow, would effect reverse and make bovine look human?”

The majority of his notations were about events and conversations I either didn’t care about or couldn’t make use of, owing to my promise to Claire. He was handling only the biggest decisions by 1977, but he noted the work of underlings as well. Business and social life mixed.“Opera with C. and Chaffees,” one January entry read.“Horrid evening, but C. charmed them. He agreed to move accts to BLP.”

I called Claire at one point, giving her a list of some names and initials I wanted to verify-especially those in Moffett’s dinner party. By that time I had reached the February entries. I had noticed a pattern that had great possibilities, so I asked for and received her permission to pull one other story out of the calendar: the one that would ensure that Allan Moffett would not return to city hall.

I was writing notes for that story when the dogs suddenly came to attention and moved toward the front door. They knew the sound of Frank’s Volvo and could hear it before it was halfway down the street.

I heard him open the front door and stood up. Four things happened at once.

A scrap of paper fell out of the calendar and onto the floor.

The phone rang.

Frank asked, “What happened to your window?”

My beeper started dancing across the kitchen counter, humming as it went along.

28

CODY GLEEFULLY POUNCEDon the note, and knowing his abilities as a hunter and shredder of paper, I made its retrieval my first priority.

“Could you get the phone?” I asked Frank, bending to snatch Cody’s prize from him.

Cody was ready for me, transforming himself into a gyrating gray razorball. I managed to snatch the note from the floor while he was distracted with attacking my hand and arm with teeth and claws. I swore at him, managed to shake the little dervish loose from my arm, and looked up to see Frank motioning me to silence. He was listening intently, saying, “Just a moment.”

I glanced at the paper, saw that it had been torn from something typewritten, but not much more, because Frank was calling me to the phone, I was bleeding from the cat attack, and the pager had moved up against a glass bowl and was ringing it like the closing bell at the New York Stock Exchange. That made the dogs bark.

“Could she call you right back?” I heard Frank say as I picked up the glass bowl and set the note beneath it-out of Cody’s reach-then shut off the pager. As the dogs settled down, I heard him say, “Oh.” I looked up to see him holding a hand over the mouthpiece, extending the receiver toward me, a kind of concerned apprehension in his eyes that made me forget everything else that had just happened, even the stinging on my arm. “It’s your friend the doctor,” he said.

“Becky?”

He nodded, and I moved around the counter, somehow seeing on his face that I didn’t want the counter between us when I took this call.

“This is Irene.”

“Irene, Becky Freedman. They brought Roberta into our emergency department a couple of hours ago.”

“Roberta? Why?”

“Head trauma. Someone attacked her in her office. She’s been in and out of consciousness. I did all I could, but I’m not sure she’ll make it,” Becky said, her voice breaking.

“You mean you were on duty when they brought her in?”

“Yes. The neurosurgeon’s working on her now. No neck or spine injury, but the head trauma…” She paused. “I’m off duty now, but…I guess it’s just now sinking in.”

“Oh, Becky-”

“Ivy’s here. Can you come down here, too?”

FRANK INSISTED WE DELAYonly long enough to wash off my arm. As he tenderly put an antibiotic ointment on it, he frowned. “Nothing too deep, thank God. That damn cat is a menace.” He looked up into my face, read my look of alarm, and said, “Oh, come on, you know I’m too attached to him for that.”

Jack came over just as we were leaving, offering to pet-sit while we were at the hospital. “No rush,” Jack said. “I’ve got no plans this evening.”

Frank lifted my arm, covered with bright red marks. “Watch out for Cody.”

We went in the Volvo. He drove. Becky was an emergency physician at Las Piernas General Hospital, which was on the other side of town. I spent most of the ride thinking about Roberta.

In spite of the minor incidents of irritation between us, I admired her. She was tireless, someone who gave of herself in a time when that sort of generosity was treated with suspicion. She had put up with being called a do-gooder, a chump. More than once, she had been forced to listen to the same people who referred derisively to “psychobabble” tell her in the next breath that she must be working off guilt. As if the alternative-being as greedy as possible-was a superior way to live.

“You never told me what happened to your car window,” Frank said, drawing me out of my thoughts. I told him about the Karmann Ghia.

“Do you think it was Two Toes?” he asked.

“No. Did Reed Collins tell you about that?”

“What doyou think?”

“That fink. I should have known.”

“You should have known better than to park in an isolated place-let alone an alley-especially when you knew this guy was looking for you.”

“Not now, Frank. You want to yell at me later, fine. You want to talk to me like I’m five years oldafter we get back home, great. But right now, I’ve got other things on my mind.”

He was angry, but he didn’t say anything more. I looked down at my arm. Didn’t smart as much as Frank’s absolute silence.

When we pulled into the hospital parking lot, I said, “I’m sorry. Didn’t mean to snap. I know you just want me to be safe.”

He just held on to the steering wheel, not looking at me, but he sighed, which could be construed as encouragement. My eyes went to his hands on the wheel, the place where his starched white dress shirt cuffs contrasted with his tanned hands. There was something about that place where his wrists met his cuffs that made me wish my eyes were a camera, that I could somehow hold the image forever in my mind, and for a very brief moment there were no injured friends, no wrongs to be made right, no unanswered pagers or notes left unread on kitchen counters. It was a purely selfish moment.

When I looked back at his face, he was watching me, and I knew he had caught me, knew he knew exactly where I had been looking. The angry expression was gone. He smiled a little and reached up to stroke my hair. “I’m sorry, too,” he said, and sighed again, just as softly, but this was a completely different sigh.

I understood it, glanced anxiously at the hospital buildings, and quickly said, “We’d better not.”

He laughed and opened the car door. “Let’s go, Catholic girl.”

BECKY WAS SITTINGon a bench in a hallway, head in hands. She was dressed in street clothes. Ivy Vines was sitting next to her, talking in a low voice. When Becky looked up at us, I saw her eyes were red-rimmed. I introduced Frank, and we moved to a set of chairs where we could all sit down together.