Page:The Keeper of the Bees.pdf/362

 “I have made a mistake,” he said. “They’ve given me the wrong number. This isn’t my wife.”

The nurse stepped over and from the contents of a drawer picked up a marriage certificate that he had seen before.

“James Lewis MacFarlane,” she read from it and replaced it in the drawer.

Jamie took a grip on the foot of the bed and leaned over. The girl lying on it was not a girl he ever had seen, not a girl who, by the wildest stretch of possibility, could have been the Storm Girl. Jamie gripped the insensate wood harder and bent lower and stared wide-eyed. What did it mean? How could this have happened? Why should this girl have in her possession the certificate which symbolized the marriage that he had entered into with the Storm Girl?

He made his way to the side of the bed and looked intently at the left hand lying nerveless on the coverlet. There was the ring that he had bought, on the third finger, the cheap little wedding ring. He picked up the hand and examined the ring until he made sure. He knew that both the doctor and the nurse were watching him.

The doctor spoke. “How long has it been since you’ve seen your wife?”

Jamie opened his lips to say that never in all his life had he seen the woman before him and stopped with the words unsaid.

If he said what he was thinking, if he repudiated her