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dark shadows, monitoring her every move, listening to her every conversation? Were they waiting for an opportunity? Did they plan to eliminate her, as they had apparently done to so many others associated with the assassination?
    It was a beautiful clear day, cheerful under ordinary circumstances. But then November 22, 1963, had started out the same way. Margaret couldn’t remember the last time she’d felt anything even close to cheer. It seemed like a part of someone else’s life, a long time ago. She didn’t want to thinkabout it anymore. She had done what had to be done; whatever happened now was out of her control.
    She took one last look around, then hailed a cab and disappeared into the afternoon traffic.

1
    PARKLAND HOSPITAL
    Present day
    IT WAS NOTHING but a waiting game now, a cruel and macabre waiting game.
    Sheila Baker watched her mother’s face, framed within the hospital pillow. The eyes, reduced to sunken orbs covered by parchment skin, had been closed for a while now. Her nose and mouth were trapped inside the oxygen mask, clear plastic with pale-green straps. Her breathing was erratic, as it had been for the last two days. A drip bag hung nearby, filled with fluid that streamed into her ravaged body, and a mile of gauze ran around her wrist to hold the needle in place. The room was kept immaculately clean by the hospital staff, the sheets changed daily. Yet the reek of death hung heavy in the air. The clinical-looking clock on the wall held no relevance; time was measured in here by the rhythmic hiss of the respirator. For Margaret Baker, who had turned seventy-eight nine weeks earlier, this room was her universe now, her gateway from this world into the next.
    She had smoked for years, a habit she’d first picked up in the 1950s, when smoking was considered safe and fashionable and people puffed away in airplanes, offices, restaurants, andelevators. The idea that you could die from it was as distant as the notion of committing gradual suicide from the sustained consumption of fried foods, the use of dirty needles, or living down the street from certain types of power plants. By the time academics started publishing their studies proving otherwise, she was hooked. When she finally mustered the willpower to break free of its grip, the cancer had already set up shop. Doctors were summoned, friends rallied round, and a spirit of cautious hopefulness arose. But lung cancer was almost always a nonrefundable ticket to the grave, and the light of optimism first dimmed and then flickered out. Margaret had accepted the truth and, with characteristic courage, focused not on fighting a losing battle but rather on making the final stage of her journey as uncomplicated as possible.
    She’d been a patient at Parkland twenty-six times over the last three years. The first few visits were overnight stays for observation and an endless litany of tests. Then they became longer   —two days, four, six . . . Names and faces of the hospital staff became familiar. The need to stop at the information desk faded. One of the nurses in the oncology section, it turned out, had been a year behind Sheila in high school. People from the past came to visit in a depressing revival of This Is Your Life   —the owner of the pharmacy in downtown Addison, several church friends, a former coworker, a few others. But no relatives. Sheila was Margaret’s only child, and her husband had passed away in ’98.
    Sheila was pleased they finally moved her mother to a private room. She’d had roommates in the last three, all in worse shape. Each one was an elderly woman, and they were all deceased now. The first had been clearheaded for a few weeks, the other two in various states of delirium. Sheila was haunted by one in particular, who stared maniacally atthe ceiling and produced an endless stream of glossolalia. It wasn’t her deteriorated mental state that affected Sheila so deeply but rather the fact that no one came to see her.