I shook my head. "You're the only physician in the county?"
"The glorious state of Mississippi paid my way through med school in exchange for a few years of indentured servitude. Before I came, all patients had to be transported to Memphis. A lot of the heart-attack and stroke victims didn't survive the trip. The poor folks couldn't afford to go to Memphis, so they had no access to prenatal care or ongoing therapy. My staff and I do the best we can." He gave me a smile meant to be downright dazzling. "Let's make the odds two to one."
"Let's do," I said as left. I may have paused in the hall to remind myself of the purpose of my presence, but I resolutely returned to the ICU and found Estelle outside the door.
"That nurse has a mighty high opinion of herself," she muttered. "To listen to her, you'd think she hung the moon and most of the stars. She shooed me out like I was a hen and said no visiting until this afternoon. What'd you find out?"
"Not much," I said as we went outside. I gave her the high points of my conversation with Dr. Deweese, stressing his confidence without quoting actual odds. "Shall we go back to the hotel for a proper breakfast?"
"How can you eat at a time like this?"
"At a time like this, Estelle," I said, "I'd like to buy a gallon of chocolate ice cream, a two-pound package of Oreo cookies, and find a nice, quiet place where no one can disturb me. So which is it-the restaurant at the hotel or a grocery store?"
Her sulky silence was answer enough. I drove toward The Luck of the Draw, for the first time seeing the bleak landscape scattered with shacks, abandoned gas stations, sickly trees that would never become mighty oaks, and litter attesting to the previous night's festivities.
"Tell me about the woman who committed suicide," I said, to take my mind off Ruby Bee.
Estelle was unable to resist the chance to make it clear she knew more about some things than I did. "Her name was Stormy Zimmerman, and she said she was an entertainer. I don't know exactly what she meant by that, but from the way she behaved, I doubt she was referring to singing in a church choir."
"Is that all you know about her?"
"No, it ain't. She said she had a tattoo. Now it's none of my business if a girl wants to have something like that done, but I don't see any reason to announce it in mixed company. Then she had the gall to make all kinds of vulgar remarks about Elvis, even though she should have known the whole reason for the tour was to see the most important sites in his life and pay respect for everything he accomplished in his forty-two years with us. It was like she was trashing kin. Even Cherri Lucinda started getting peeved at that point."
I turned onto the road back to the hotel. "You know, Estelle, there's something about Cherri Lucinda that seems familiar. I feel as though I've met her, but I have no idea when or where. It's been bothering me since I first saw her in the hall this morning."
"Me, too," said Estelle, nodding, "but I can't quite put my finger on it. When we were driving to Memphis, I noticed Ruby Bee giving her a funny look, like she was thinking the same thing. I wish I'd gotten around to asking her, but with one thing and another, it plum slipped my mind. I guess it's too late now."
"She's going to be fine." I parked between a Lincoln Continental and a Volkswagen Beetle, cut off the ignition, and grabbed my purse. "If you want to sit there and work on your eulogy, it's your business. I'm going inside to have some breakfast." Scowling like Genghis Khan on a bad hair day, I climbed out of the car, slammed the door, and hurried toward the entrance.
"Keep your tail in the water," Estelle said as she caught up with me. "Of course she's gonna be fine, Arly. She sounded like her old self this morning, complaining about how she'd wasted all the money for the tour and would miss seeing the Elvis impersonators tonight. I'll ask Baggins if you can use her ticket to the show."
"No, thanks," I said curtly.
"Well, if you feel that way about it, forget I ever mentioned it-even though you might be missing a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to see El Vez hisself."
I slowed down as I noticed two police cars parked at the end of the building. "I guess they haven't finished the investigation," I said to Estelle. "We'd better go up to the room. It's possible they'll want to question you."
"Me?" she said. "How should I know anything? Once I got back from the hospital, I called you and then got some pretzels and a ginger ale from the vending machines at the end of the hall. I was too worried about Ruby Bee to so much as stick my nose out the door after that until we left this morning."
"So that's what you'll tell them," I said.
The lobby was a good deal busier than it had been at three in the morning. Lines had formed for the optimists who wanted to check in and the disillusioned who needed to check out. Bellmen wheeled luggage carts in the appropriate directions. A mountain of suitcases indicated the arrival of a group on a much larger scale than that of C'Mon Tours.
"It was right crazy when we got here yesterday," Estelle said as we went down the corridor to the elevators. "I kept trying to spot Ruby Bee, but there were so many folks and all these loud announcements and…"
"And what?" I prompted her.
She sucked on her lower lip. "Maybe I was seeing things," she said at last. "Remember when Tiphini Buchanon kept telling everybody about how she'd seen glowing purple aliens at the foot of her bed? She could describe them from the antennas on their heads right down to the peculiarities of their privates. She never quit believing it, even when her pa had her carted off to one of those sanitariums."
"I must have missed that," I said as I nudged her into the elevator and pushed the button for the eighth floor.
"Lottie Estes had a time with her in home ec, let me tell you. It got to be where every kitchen utensil reminded Tiphini of something else about her aliens. Now I could see how a turkey baster or an oven thermometer might lead to certain ideas, but a spatula? If you ask me, the girl just wanted attention."
Instead of engaging in a conversation fraught with Freudian overtones (and having a hard time making the leap to spatulas, myself), I said, "What are the visiting hours at the hospital this afternoon?"
"Two to four. Remind me to take Ruby Bee her bag so she'll have her toothbrush and nightie. Those hospital gowns might as well be made of wax paper."
"Is it in the room?" I asked. "I didn't see it."
"It's in the closet. When the ambulance fellows were loading her onto a gurney, Stormy offered to take Ruby Bee's and mine to our room as soon as Baggins got us registered. It's a good thing she did. I was so upset I would have left both of them setting in the hall."
When the elevator doors slid open on the eighth floor, we found ourselves facing a pear-shaped police officer. "You staying on this floor?" he said.
Estelle snorted. "Do you think we just came up to admire the view?"
I elbowed her aside and told him our names and the room number, then said, "Miss Oppers and my mother were both part of the same tour as the woman who fell."
"Yeah, then go to your room and stay there. The chief'll get around to talking to you before too long."
"He'd better not be all day," Estelle said. "I'm real sorry about poor Stormy, but we're not going to spend the day inside the room just because she committed suicide."
"That ain't what the chief thinks," said the cop.
8
Cherri Lucinda was no longer in our hotel room, which was the good news. The bad news was about to materialize with all the subtlety of an eruption of swamp gas. Estelle mumbled something about her slapdash makeup job and went into the bathroom to transform herself into a redheaded version of the redneck queen of mascara, Tammy Faye Bakker. I continued onto the balcony and looked out at the bleached flatness that stretched as far as I could see. Ruby Bee had lived all her life in the mountains; she would be disconcerted when she was confined to a bed in a room without a view.