Free Bedbugs by Ben H. Winters Page B

fingers into the pocket and came out with a matchbook from the Mandarin Oriental Hotel.
    Two in the morning
, Susan thought immediately, and looked over at him in his easy slumber.
Hotel matches?
    It took her about five seconds to remember that the girl they called Blondie, the on-again-off-again girlfriend of Alex’s college friend Anton, worked at the Mandarin Oriental as a concierge. She’d occasionally gotten them theater tickets, before they had Emma and could still occasionally leave the house at night. A warm wash of relief flooded Susan—Alex had used Anton’s matches, and Anton had gotten them from Blondie, who worked at the Mandarin.
Hotel matches, indeed. Moping around like the wife in a country-western song …
    She slipped back under the covers, laughing uneasily at her own paranoia.
Jesus H. Christ
, she thought distantly, as sleepiness began to settle over her,
what is this place doing to you?
    It was very early in the morning on Saturday, September 18. Susan, Alex, and Emma Wendt had been living in Brooklyn Heights for six days.

9.
    Five hours later, Susan opened her eyes and saw a single tiny spot of blood on her pillow.
    Except it wasn’t blood. Except maybe it was. The room was dark, she was half asleep, and Susan couldn’t really tell. It looked like blood. She rolled over, blinked at the glowing red lines of the clock radio, and moaned softly: 6:36 a.m. A good twenty minutes before Emma’s usual wake-up time, and there was no reason for Susan to have woken.
    The spot on the pillowcase was a few inches from where her face had been, just below the line of her mouth; it might even have been a puddle of drool, but it was too small and too contained. A dark crescent-shaped speck, ragged at the edges, the size and rough shape of a chewed-off fingernail. Alex slept on, snoring and open-mouthed. Susan propped herself on one elbow, listening to her breath, and peered at her pillow. Now the speck looked a deep muddy gray against the lemon yellow pillowcase; now, as dead orange glimmers of day crept under the shades, it resolved itself into a dull brownish red.
    Oh
, she thought.
It’s paint. Duh
.
    Susan flicked at the speck with the nail of her pointer finger, expecting it to come right off. But the speck stayed where it was, bledinto the cloth of the pillowcase. Susan pressed at it gently with the pad of a fingertip, and the firm pillow gave way slightly under the weight of her push.
    It’s nothing. Just—it’s nothing
.
    Susan let her head drop back to the pillow and closed her eyes to the dot. She willed herself back to sleep, knowing it was futile. At last, at 7:12, Emma began to fuss over the monitor, and Susan smiled, as always, at the sound of her daughter’s sweet morning noises. The rustle of the sheets, the give of the springs as Emma shifted her weight on her thin IKEA mattress, the first purring, hushed, “Mama?”
    Susan opened her eyes, thinking maybe the tiny spot would be gone, faded like a fragment of a dream. But it was still there.
    *
    Five minutes later, Susan was crouched beside the toilet while Emma peed. She heard Alex roll out of bed, followed by a series of rustling noises and
whomps
as he made the bed and tossed the throw pillows in place. Then the noises stopped.
    “Hey, Sue?” he called. “Did you see this?”
    Crap
. If Alex had noticed the spot, even in the morning-dark of the room, even while making the bed in his inimitably hurried, that’ll-do-just-fine style, then it must be larger and more distinct—more real—than she had hoped.
    “Go ahead and flush, and wash your hands, Em.”
    In the bedroom, Alex had flicked on Susan’s bedside reading light and angled its gooseneck over the pillow, haloing the lamp’s sixty watts around the crescent-shaped stain.
    “Is it paint?”
    “Maybe. I have no idea.”
    Susan, for some reason, didn’t let on that she had seen it before, that she had already eliminated the possibility of dried paint. Alex made a little