Free The Wolf Gift by Anne Rice Page B

still.
    “May I call you Baby Boy, too?” whispered the nurse.
    An hour later Grace came in with the laboratory technicians.
    “Can you believe they have lost every single specimen they took?” She was “fit to be tied,” as she liked to say. “Now this time they’d better get it right. And we are not giving anyone another DNA sample. If they screwed that up, it’s their problem. Once was enough.”
    “Screwed it up?”
    “That’s what they’re telling me. We’re having a laboratorial crisis in Northern California!” She folded her arms and watched through cold narrow eyes as the techs drew his blood into vial after vial.
    Toward the end of the week, Grace was almost manic over his speedy recovery. He was spending most of the day walking around, or in the chair reading the newspaper accounts of the massacre, the Nideck family, the mystery of the rabid animal. He demanded his laptop. His phone was still with the police, of course, so he asked for another.
    The first person he called was his editor Billie Kale. “I don’t like being the subject of all these stories,” he said. “I want to write my own.”
    “That’s what we’re dying to have, Reuben. You e-mail it to me. We’re on.”
    His mother walked in. Yes, he could be discharged if he insisted. “My heavens, just look at you,” she said. “You do need a haircut, Baby Boy.”
    One of the other doctors, a good friend of Grace’s, had dropped by, and they stood chatting in the hall. “And can you believe they have completely screwed up the lab tests again?”
    Long hair. Reuben got out of bed to look at it in the bathroom mirror. Hmm. His hair was bushier, longer, bigger, without doubt.
    For the first time, Reuben thought of that mysterious Margon the Godless and his shoulder-length hair. He saw the distinguished gentleman of the photograph over Marchent’s library fireplace. Maybe Reuben would wear his long like the impressive Margon the Godless. Well, for a while.
    He laughed.
    As soon as he walked into the door of the house on Russian Hill, he made for his desk. He was firing up his desktop as the private-duty nurse took vitals.
    It was early afternoon, eight days since the massacre, and one of those clear sunny days in San Francisco when the bay is vibrantly blue andthe city is still white in spite of its many glass buildings. He went out on the balcony and let the cold wind sweep over him. He breathed it in as if he loved it, which frankly he never had.
    He was so glad to be back in his own room, with his own fireplace, his own desk.
    He wrote for five hours.
    By the time he hit the key to send the text by e-mail to Billie, he was happy enough with the blow-by-blow account. But he knew that the drugs were still clouding his recall and his sense of the rhythm of what he’d written. “Cut where you feel you should,” he had written. Billie would know what to do. Ironic that he, one of their most promising reporters, as they always put it, was the subject of headlines in other papers.
    In the morning, he woke up with one thought in mind. He called his lawyer, Simon Oliver. “It’s about the Nideck estate,” he said. “It’s about all the personal property up there and, most especially, the personal effects and papers of Felix Nideck. I want to make an offer on all of it.”
    Simon started to advise patience, taking things one step at a time. Reuben had never gone into his capital before. Why, Grandfather Spangler (Grace’s father) had only been dead now five years, and what would he have thought of this rash expenditure? Reuben interrupted. He wanted everything that had belonged to Felix Nideck, unless Marchent had made arrangements otherwise, and then he hung up the phone.
    Not like me to talk like that, is it, he thought. But he hadn’t been rude, really, just eager to advance the plot.
    That afternoon, after his article had gone to press at the
Observer
, he was dozing, half awake, looking out the window at the fog rolling in over