After a long while the nurse lumbered in again (her thick-soled shoes all worn down on the outer edge) to give Harriet a shot. Harriet, who was rolling her head around, and talking to herself a bit, struggled to pull away from her worries. With effort, she turned her attention to the nurse. She had a jolly weatherbeaten face with wrinkled cheeks, thick ankles and a rolling, off-centered walk. Except for her nurse’s uniform, she might have been the captain of a sailing ship, striding across decks. Her nametag said Gladys Coots.
“Now, I’m going to get this over with as quick as I can,” she was saying.
Harriet—too weak and too worried to put up her customary resistance—rolled on her stomach and grimaced as the needle slid into her hip. She hated shots, and—when younger—had screamed and cried and fought to escape, to such a degree that Edie (who knew how to give injections) had on several occasions impatiently rolled up her sleeves right in the doctor’s office and taken over with the needle.
“Where’s my grandmother?” she asked as she rolled over, rubbing the stung place on her bottom.
“Mercy! Aint nobody told you?”
“What?” cried Harriet, scrabbling back in the bed like a crab. “What happened? Where is she?”
“Sssh. Calm down!” Energetically, the nurse began to plump up the pillows. “She had to go downtown for a while, is all. Is all,” she repeated, when Harriet looked at her doubtfully. “Now lie on back and make yourself comfortable.”
Never, never again in her life would Harriet know such a long day. Pain pulsed and spangled merciless in her temples; a parallelogram of sun shimmered motionless on the wall. Nurse Coots, swaying in and out with the bedpan, was a rarity: a white elephant, much heralded, returning every century or so. In the course of the interminable morning she drew blood, administered eye-drops, brought Harriet iced water, ginger ale, a dish of green gelatin which Harriet tasted and pushed aside, cutlery clattering fretful on her bright plastic tray.
Fearfully, she sat upright in bed and listened. The corridor was a sedate net of echoes: talk at the desk, occasional laughter, the tap of canes and the scrape of walkers as gray convalescents from Physical Therapy drifted up and down the hall. Every so often, a woman’s voice came on the intercom, calling out strings of numbers, obscure commands, Carla, step into the hallway, orderly on two, orderly on two.…
As if counting out sums, Harriet worked out what she knew on her fingers, muttering under her breath, not caring if she looked like a crazy person. The preacher didn’t know about the tower. He’d said nothing to indicate he knew Danny was up there (or dead). But all that might change if the doctor figured out that bad water was what had made Harriet sick. The Trans Am was parked far enough from the tower that probably no one had thought to look up there—and if they hadn’t already, who knows, maybe they wouldn’t.
But maybe they would. And then there was her father’s gun. Why hadn’t she picked it up, how could she have forgotten? Of course, she hadn’t actually shot anybody; but the gun had been shot, they’d know that, and the fact that it was at the base of the tower would surely be enough to make somebody go up and look in the tower.
And Hely. All his cheerful questions: had she been arrested, was a policeman on guard. It would be immensely entertaining for Hely if she was arrested: not a consoling thought.
Then a horrible idea occurred to her. What if policemen were watching the Trans Am? Wasn’t the car a crime scene, like on television? Wouldn’t cops and photographers be standing around it, keeping guard? And sure, the car was parked a good bit away from the tower—but would Hely have the sense to avoid a crowd, if he saw it? For that matter—would he be able to get near the tower at all? There were the warehouses, sure, closer to where the car was parked, and probably they’d look there first. But eventually they’d spread out toward the tower, wouldn’t they? She cursed herself for not warning him to be careful. If there were a lot of people, he’d have no choice but to turn around and come home.
Around midmorning, the doctor interrupted these worries. He was Harriet’s regular doctor, who saw her when she had red throat or tonsillitis, but Harriet didn’t like him much. He was young, with a heavy drab face and prematurely heavy jowls; his features were stiff and his manner cold and sarcastic. His name was Dr. Breedlove but—partly because of the steep prices he charged—Edie had given him the nickname (grown popular locally) of “Dr. Greedy.” His unfriendliness, it was said, had kept him from a more desirable post in a better town—but he was so very curt that Harriet didn’t feel she had to keep up a false front of chumminess and smiles as she did with most adults, and for this reason she respected him grudgingly in spite of everything.
As Dr. Greedy circled her bed, he and Harriet avoided each other’s eyes like two hostile cats. Coolly he surveyed her. He looked at her chart. Presently he demanded: “Do you eat a lot of lettuce?”
“Yes,” said Harriet, although she did no such thing.
“Do you soak it in salt water?”
“No,” said Harriet, as soon as she saw that no was the answer expected of her.
He muttered something about dysentery, and unwashed lettuce from Mexico, and—after a brooding pause—he hung her chart back on the foot of her bed with a clang and turned and left.
Suddenly the telephone rang. Harriet—heedless of the IV in her arm—grabbed for it before the first ring was done.
“Hey!” It was Hely. In the background, gymnasium echoes. The high-school orchestra practiced in folding chairs on the basketball court. Harriet could hear a whole zoo of tuning-up noises: honks and chirps, clarinet squeaks and trumpet blatts.
“Wait,” said Harriet, when he started talking without interruption, “no, stop a second.” The pay phone in the school gymnasium was in a high-traffic area, no place to have a private conversation. “Just answer yes or no. Did you get it?”
“Yes, sir.” He was talking in a voice which didn’t sound at all like James Bond, but which Harriet recognized as his James Bond voice. “I retrieved the weapon.”
“Did you throw it where I told you?”
Hely crowed. “Q,” he cried, “have I ever let you down?”
In the small, sour pause that followed, Harriet became aware of noise in the background, jostles and whispers.
“Hely,” she said, sitting up straighter, “who’s there with you?”
“Nobody,” said Hely, a little too fast. But she could hear the bump in his voice as he said it, like he was knocking some kid with his elbow.
Whispers. Somebody giggled: a girl. Anger flashed through Harriet like a jolt of electricity.
“Hely,” she said, “you’d better not have anybody there with you, no,” she said, above Hely’s protestations, “listen to me. Because—”
“Hey!” Was he laughing? “What’s your problem?”
“Because,” said Harriet, raising her voice as far as she dared, “your fingerprints are on the gun.”