Bloody cows!
She pressed again.
The silence of her room became a rushing noise in her ears. The moon outside her window shone unusually bright. It hurt her eyes to look at it, yet the darkness closed in on her, immune to illumination.
She pushed the call button over and over.
It mustn’t be working, she thought, tugging on the end that looped past the head of her bed to where it attached to the wall.
It came freely as she pulled, until the plug itself lay in her hand. Staring at it, she had to make a massive mental effort to realize it wasn’t hooked up anymore. Her thoughts all at once shattered into fragments, and she couldn’t thread them together.
“Help!” she screamed. “Help me!”
No response.
“Come and help me.”
Still nothing.
That’s right, she remembered, her mind working again. People shrieked and yelled all night on this ward, yet no one paid them any heed.
With great effort she kicked off her covers.
The shivering increased, and she could feel her limbs twitch in the cold. Somehow she managed to get them over the edge of the bed.
Now to sit up.
Her vision dimmed, and she became locked in the black confines of her own skull. Then tiny explosions of light, like stars scintillating in space, invaded the darkness. These stars grew taller and wider, becoming squares of white, each encroaching on the night and peeling it away in strips. The experience seemed vaguely familiar, but her mind couldn’t piece her symptoms into a diagnosis. Neither could she see where to plug in the disconnected wire.
She pushed herself erect until she perched on the side of the mattress, her bare feet brushing against the floor, her thinking reduced to shreds of instinct until she felt only the impulse to launch herself forward and walk.
She levered herself off onto the cold tiles and took a step, flailing ahead with her arms like a blind person.
She took another step, and flailed some more, seeking something to lean on.
But she found nothing.
She tottered forward.
And slapped her palms against a wall.
Her thinking cleared enough to remember where the door should be and, feeling her way along, she lurched toward it. When her fingers found the handle she steadied herself, took a deep breath, and pulled it open. “Help me!” she cried, barely able to keep herself upright. “Help me! Help me! Help me!”
Her voice blended in with the howls and shrieks of the senile old crones on the ward, the ones whom a phenothiazine cocktail never seemed to knock out and whose pleas to go home reverberated ceaselessly up and down the halls.
She felt certain that their calls sounded louder tonight. How could she have ignored such cries before, the way the nurses did?
She tried again to make herself heard, yelling as she sank to the floor, half-in, half-out of her room. Her mind vacillated between lucid seconds of frantically attempting to figure out what could be happening to her and timelessly floating through a searing light that she still found familiar – something some patients had once described to her, yet she couldn’t quite remember their disease.
The plaintive wailing grew in volume, closed in and swallowed her.
Chapter 5
Wednesday, November 7, 2:30 P.M.
Hampton Junction
“Dr. Roper, you said my arthritic knees would be better by now. Look at them. They’re the size of cauliflowers.”
“What I said, Nell, was that the pills would make the pain better, not that they’d take away your arthritis.”
“But the pain came back.”
“Are you still taking those pills the way I told you?”
“The prescription ran out. I figured you only wanted me to take ‘em for a month. That’s all the time your father ever needed to get me better.”
She’d also been a quarter century younger back then. Mark turned to wash his hands at the sink in his examining room, not wanting the feisty octogenarian to see his grin. Nell had been coming to him about her knees for seven years, ever since he’d reopened his father’s practice, and she’d argued her way through each visit. The idea that a prescription must be refilled and the medication taken longer than a month had never taken root beneath her frizzy white hair. It had nothing to do with poor memory or a lack of confidence in him. She resisted growing old and the idea she could no longer shake off what ailed her. She still lived independently, her mountain cabin twenty miles north of town on an isolated road overlooking the Hudson River Valley. The only reason she’d recently agreed to let a local handyman cut the twelve cords of firewood she used every winter was that he had four kids to feed and obviously needed the money. But Nell herself wasn’t isolated. Known for her prize-winning recipes at the fall fair – her peach cobbler had taken home the blue ribbon seven years running – her kitchen was a much-visited mecca for anyone caring to pick up her pearls of culinary wisdom. She also reigned as the unofficial queen of the town’s gossip network, a function she dutifully filled by welcoming all visitors and spending hours on the phone. The acquired information made her one of the most sought-after guests for Sunday suppers, afternoon bridge parties, and socials at each of the town’s two churches, neither clergyman willing to yield her soul to the other side, or go without her contribution of cobbler.
Slowly wiping his hands with a paper towel, Mark laboriously explained yet again that she must ask Timmy Madden, the pharmacist, to refill her prescription when she ran out.
Nell sighed, having endured his lecture while tugging her well-stretched pair of elastic stockings over varicose veins as thick as quarter-inch ropes. “And how are you doing, Doctor?” she said. “It must have been a shock, pulling the bones of Kelly McShane out of the mud. Who do you think killed her?”
Now he understood the real reason she’d bothered to come and see him. “I don’t think anything, yet, Nell, and I couldn’t tell you if I did.”
“Oh, come on. Was it that rotten husband of hers?”
“Is that what everyone around here has decided? That Chaz Braden murdered her?”
“You betcha’!”
“Anybody got any proof?”
“He’s mean and was known to get drunk on more than one Saturday night. It’s a bad mix.”
Street justice in rural America could be just as arbitrary as its urban counterpart. In the countryside, though, it tended to be unanimous. “And that’s enough to make you sure it’s him?”
“Yeah. Now tell me what you think.”
Mark chuckled. “My lips are officially sealed, Nell. Besides, you and your friends have probably already snooped out everything there is to know.”
She gave him a no-harm-in-trying shrug, then cocked her head and slipped him a sly jack-o’-lantern smile, missing tooth and all.
A reminder of another argument he’d lost – getting her to wear the partial plate a Sarasota dentist made her.
“You still seeing that pretty veterinarian from New York?” she asked.
Reason number two for the visit.
Nell had always been uncommonly interested in the women who’d occasionally visited him. From the very first day of his return she seemed to have elected herself the local record keeper of his private life. “We keep in touch, Nell,” he said, helping her off the table.
Little wonder she chose now to get an update, especially if she and her friends really had exhausted all they could say about a twenty-seven-year-old murder. While Halloween and Thanksgiving provided lots of gossip – who was shooing away the kids, who intended to run the Christmas pageant, what couples were taking separate holidays – the weeks in between yielded few topics for discussion.
“Not much to interest a young woman around here these days, I guess. Only us old folks left,” she continued, sitting down to put on her shoes – Nike air pumps that she’d sworn more than once did more for her arthritis than anything he’d ever given her.