“She okay?” I hollered as I slid off the bed and under the curtain on the door side of the room.
“Think so,” I heard Rusty say as I went out into the hall. I swung my head, checking both directions. There were several possibilities. To my right, there was a tall black male orderly pushing an empty wheelchair. To my left, a black female nurse and a white male orderly were leaning on the nurses’ station, talking. There were patients and visitors walking everywhere. The corridor was crowded with people wearing white sneakers. I jogged right and caught up to the man with the wheelchair just as he turned into a room.
“Good morning, Mrs. Johnson,” he said to the large lady in the bed. His Haitian accent was unmistakable. He reached down to lock the wheels on the wheelchair. “Are you ready to go to radiology?”
“Excuse me,” I said.
He turned and looked at me expectantly. He was a large man, well over six feet tall, and somewhere in age between forty and fifty. He had a thin mustache and a small goatee.
“Were you just in room four twenty-five?”
“No. Not me. I came from Patient Relations. Must have been somebody else.” He smiled and walked over to Mrs. Johnson to help her into the chair. He was very relaxed, and he looked like he was accustomed to wearing green scrubs. “How are you feeling today, pretty lady?” he asked the white-haired woman as he pulled back the covers on her bed. I noticed he wore large silver rings on three of the five fingers of his right hand. I couldn’t make out the designs. “Let’s go, dear.”
He lifted the heavy-set woman from her bed as though she weighed next to nothing. His name tag said “Todd,” but he didn’t look like a Todd to me. As he swung the older woman around to the wheelchair, he saw I was still standing there. “Is there anything else I can help you with?” He settled the woman into the chair, then turned to look expectantly at me.
I backed out of the room. “No, thanks,” I said. I checked down the hall in the other direction, but the nurse and orderly were gone.
Rusty came charging out of room 425, and I headed back down the hall to hear what he had found. By the time I got there, he was standing nose to nose with the cop in front of the nurses’ station.
“What the hell do you mean, you didn’t see anything? Somebody was just in there.”
The female Haitian nurse who had been so kind yesterday hurried into Solange’s room.
“Is she all right?” I asked.
“She seems to be okay,” Rusty said, not taking his eyes off the other cop.
“I mean I didn’t see anything out of the ordinary,” the duty officer said.
“Maybe you were distracted by something else.” Rusty thrust his chin toward Jenna.
“People have been coming and going all day,” the officer said. “I’ve been watching. Hell, you were in there. Why didn’t you see anything?”
Rusty turned away without answering that question. No matter how he worded it, it wouldn’t sound good.
I left them arguing and tried to go into Solange’s room. The Haitian nurse waved me off, motioning me back outside. She had the blood pressure cuff on the child’s arm.
I crossed to the desk and slipped behind the counter. “Jenna, do you know a guy who works here named Todd?”
She rolled her eyes and sucked her teeth. “Yes. What did he say now?”
“Nothing really, I was just wondering, what does he look like?”
“Oh. He’s like really old, and he’s always telling people I’m his ‘honey.’ He’s too gross.”
The Todd I’d seen was no more than fifteen years older than me, but then again, that might qualify as “really old” to this girl. “Can you give me more of a description? Is he tall, short, white, black?”
“He’s like this little old retired white guy, and I think the only reason he volunteers here is to rub up against me every chance he gets. Old pervert.”
Definitely not my Todd. “Any other guys here with that name? How about an orderly, a tall Haitian guy about forty?” She shook her head so that her blond hair flew out in a golden arc, then smiled at the cop, who had turned his attention from Rusty back to Jenna. “No, nobody here like that unless he’s new,” she said to the cop, who nodded as though he understood what she’d just said.
I grabbed Rusty’s arm. “Come on.” He was striding next to me, trying to keep up without breaking into a trot to match mine.
“Where are we going?”
We rounded the corner into Mrs. Johnson’s room. She sat there alone in the wheelchair, nodding off.
“Mrs. Johnson?”
She jerked her head up, startled.
“Where’s the orderly who was just in here with you?” I asked.
“He said he’d be right back,” she assured me. “I think he might have had to go to the little boy’s room, you know. He just left real sudden, like he had to go, if you know what I mean.”
“What’s going on, Seychelle?” Rusty asked.
I stepped out into the hall and looked in both directions. “Which way did he go, Mrs. Johnson?”
“I’m sorry, dear, I wasn’t paying much attention. Is something wrong? I did think it was a little odd. I didn’t remember anything about radiology today, but you know how it is, when you come into this place, you just stop asking questions after a while.”
“That was him,” I said, and slapped my hand against my thigh.
Rusty sighed, shook his head, and started walking back to Solange’s room. I followed him. This time we were allowed back in. Solange was now on her side in a fetal position, facing the window, her back to the room. When I got to the foot of her bed, I saw her eyes were open, staring out the window. The Haitian nurse looked very troubled as she placed a moistened cloth on the child’s brow.
“How’s she doing?” I asked.
The nurse shrugged.
I turned to Rusty. “I thought you said she was okay.”
“She was just like that when I got to her,” Rusty said. “She doesn’t look hurt.”
I turned to the nurse. “What happened? What did that guy do?”
“What guy?” Rusty asked.
When I explained about seeing the feet under the curtain, Rusty’s face told me what he thought of my story. Typical cop reaction—he didn’t want to believe he’d missed something.
“She is right, that Jenna,” the nurse said. “We have many Haitians working here, but no one by that name.”
I moved in closer, next to the nurse, and asked her, “So what did he do to her? Why’s she like that?”
“It is difficult to say.”
“We heard her cry out, like he was hurting her.”
“I checked her all over, and I cannot find any injuries, no injection site, and the symptoms came on too quickly for it to be something she was given by mouth. I have called for her doctor. She will give her a more thorough examination, but I don’t think she will find anything.”
“What happened, then? Why is she like that?”
“I think . . .” She paused, as though choosing her words very carefully. “He hurt her here.” She pointed to her head. “He said something, and now it is in her mind, and it frightens her. She is from Haiti, and we are very superstitious in Haiti. Our beliefs are very different from yours.”
“Are you saying he put a curse on her?”
Her brow wrinkled. “Something like that. We must let her sleep. We hope she will be better when she wakes.”
The duty officer stepped into the room and motioned for us to follow him outside.
“Collazo’s on his way over. He said to tell you not to leave. He wants to talk to both of you.”
I pointed down to the waiting area on the far side of the nurses’ station. “I’ll be right back. I need to make a phone call.”