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leaning on his cane.
    “I’ll have the duty nurse tell you what room Beth’s going to be in. Check back in a few hours and you can go up and see her.”
    “Have they found out anything about the explosion at the clinic?” Carver asked.
    Dr. Galt shrugged. “I don’t know anything about it other than that it was lethal. Two dead, two injured. We’re going to have to amputate the other injured woman’s lower right leg. She’ll lose her foot and most of her ankle.”
    “We should count our blessings, is that the message?”
    “We really should do that, Mr. Carver. Every day.”
    “Beth didn’t even have to be in that clinic.”
    Dr. Galt held the door open for him. “Usually none of us really has to be anywhere.” He shook his head sadly. “Still, things happen to us.”

5
    T HE ONLY THING IN the hospital cafeteria that looked remotely edible was the salad. Carver used tongs to place some in his plastic bowl, got a cup of coffee from a nearby self-service urn, then paid the cashier. He found a table off by itself near the single row of windows that ran the length of the cafeteria.
    He wasn’t really hungry, but he knew he had to eat, both to keep up his strength in case there wouldn’t be a chance later today, and to pass the time. So he dutifully chewed forkfuls of lettuce and sipped coffee between bites. A group of women were clustered around the table closest to him, apparently employees chatting about hospital gossip on their lunch hour. Beyond them sat two men in white uniforms—nurses, Carver assumed. They were eating quietly. One of them was studiously reading a folded newspaper. Most of the other tables were occupied by one or two people, friends or relatives of patients, reading paperback books or staring pensively at nothing while they ate, wondering and worrying. At the far end of the cafeteria, on the other side of a low railing, sat several doctors in suits and ties. Carver recognized one of them from earlier that day when the man was wearing a surgeon’s green gown.
    As Carver returned his attention to his food, he noticed the gangly young man from the Emergency Department waiting room. He was seated at a table near the wall opposite from where Carver sat. There was no food on the table, only two cans of soda and two white foam cups. Sitting across from the gangly youth was a slim woman with short, curly black hair, a ballerina’s long neck, and dark eyes. She was wearing white shorts and a white blouse, what in other surroundings might have passed for a tennis outfit. She probably hadn’t seen thirty and had a very sweet, oval face of the sort seen in cheap religious paintings. Her expression was one of compassion, and she seemed to be trying to console the young man, leaning toward him and talking earnestly, once even patting his hand.
    The man suddenly seemed to sense Carver staring at him and glared over at him. Carver quickly looked away and concentrated on his salad. It embarrassed him to intrude on someone else’s grief, to the point where it was sometimes even awkward for him to express sympathy. He was a private person and didn’t like his own emotions trespassed upon. “Out of touch with his feelings,” a female friend had once said of him. But he knew it wasn’t that at all; he simply assimilated grief and other powerful emotions gradually as he adjusted to them—perhaps because he was more sensitive than his friend the amateur analyst.
    When he chanced another look at the table where the man and woman had been talking, they were gone.
    After lunch he sat for a while trying to kill time by reading a Del Moray Gazette-Dispatch. But it was too early for any news of the Women’s Light Clinic explosion, and he couldn’t concentrate or remember what he’d read ten seconds after his eyes had passed over it. He gave up on the news, set the paper aside, then went back to emergency and asked the nurse at the desk if Beth had been transferred yet to a regular room. The nurse checked