Hedging (A Smith and Wetzon Mystery)

and by the end of the session, she was beginning to be able to understand what he was saying.
    “What about the noise I keep hearing?” she asked.
    “Is it static noise?”
    “I can’t make it out.”
    “It’s the result of the blow on your head. Is it less than it was?”
    “Yes.”
    “It will go away.”
    Detective Hogan was waiting in her room when they got back, staring out the window at the snow.
    “She needs some rest,” Barbara Bullard said.
    “I won’t be long. You’re looking a bit better. How are you doing?”
    “I’m tired. They just tested my eyes and my hearing.” Hogan was a blur. “I can’t see you clearly because of the drops.” She lay on the bed, exhausted from the morning’s activities.
    Bullard pulled the blanket over her. “You have to stay warm.”
    “Did you look at the missing persons stuff?”
    “Nothing that fits your description through yesterday. I’ll check again this afternoon.”
    “I have a dog. I remembered that. She needs me. Who’s going to feed her?”
    Hogan made a note in her notepad. “I’ll send a notice to the Twentieth and the Two-four precincts on the Upper West Side to be alert for a barking or howling dog. We’ll find her.”
    “My clothes. The blood.” Sleep was beginning a slow drip to her veins.
    “Your dress had a Donna Karan label. That’s high-end designer merchandise.”
    “Which means ... I have money—or a rich lover.” Her words were squashy to her ear. She was holding on, but barely. “The blood?”
    “Not yours. Not just one person’s either.”
    “I’m Candy Pandolfi,” the woman said, a half-eaten tuna fish sandwich in her hand. “You’re the one who’s got amnesia.” It was a statement, not a question, and it came from the woman with the bandages on her wrists. “Sit here.” She pointed to the chair next to her. “The tuna is passable, forget the rest.”
    She didn’t want to sit with the woman, but she didn’t want to offend her either. It was a question of living in the same area, and who knew how long that might be? The only other person in the dining room was the man she’d seen wandering around yesterday, or the day before, in pajama bottoms. He was muttering to himself.
    Sandwiches were stacked near the coffee urn. She picked out one that was labeled tuna, then filled a coffee cup, picked up a plastic spoon—no forks or knives in psychiatric—and brought it all back to the table, where Candy was leafing through People Magazine.
    Candy rolled up the magazine and slipped it under her sweater and into the waistband of her slacks.
    Watching, Jane shivered, thought, someone’s walking over my grave. The eerie sensation was gone in a moment but a shadow remained.
    “There’s ice cream in the cold tub, and sodas.”
    “I’m okay.” Tuna on white bread. She hated white bread. Institutional food for the institutionalized. She peeled back the bread and used the spoon to eat the tuna.
    “That’s why you’re so thin.” Candy got up and took two cups of ice cream from the tub. “One for you and one for me.”
    “Thank you.” It was chocolate. She liked chocolate. If only she could stand back dispassionately and watch the onion as it unpeeled. She had money, she wore good clothes, she had a dog, she was a dancer, she lived on the Upper West Side, liked coffee, bagels, and chocolate, and didn’t like white bread. And something terrible had happened to her.
    “I’m a real estate broker,” Candy said. “I guess you don’t know what you do.” She got up and took another cup of ice cream. “Want seconds?”
    “No to more ice cream and I don’t know to what I do.”
    “My husband left me for the babysitter.”
    “I’m sorry.”
    “Oh, that’s all right. He was a putz anyway. No loss except to him. I’m going to make him pay through the nose. They’ll never live together happy.”
    “You have children?”
    “Two. My mother has them.” She took a photograph from her pocket. “See.” Pressing her lips together, she said, “We’ll be all right.” The picture showed a more attractive Candy Pandolfi with two dark-haired, laughing little boys.
    She thought, I don’t have any children.
    “Okay, who wants to go to the library?” Barbara Bullard came into the dining room and helped herself to some coffee.
    “I do,” Candy said.
    Temporary Jane stood up. She threw the detritus of her lunch in the trash bin.
    They took the elevator downstairs and went through the tunnel to the