With the Scrabble board on the coffee table by the couch, Patty and Will took turns arranging and rearranging the tiles.
“Look,” she said. “E TEMB R.”
“September!”
“Or November, or December-even October if he’s holding back a couple of Os.”
Will shuffled around the remaining tiles, searching for the suggestion of a word, then shrugged and shook his head.
“The mother’s birthday?”
“Maybe. What about remember?”
Patty spelled out REME BR, then lined up the T, C, N, and N.
“Remember somebody.”
“That may be it. If it is, it’s not nearly as obscure as I would have guessed.”
“Whatever it is, there still seem to be a lot of missing letters.”
“That’s a frightening thought.”
“We-I mean, they have a cryptographer working on the letters. There are ten of them now. He should be able to come up with some serious possibilities.”
“Here’s some more,” Will said. “Let’s see you solve this puzzle.”
He placed tiles spelling KI S ME across a triple word.
“Let’s see now. .”
Patty used the K and put AN DO beneath it. She slid her hands behind Will’s neck and drew him close.
“I never really liked Scrabble before,” he said.
“That’s because you never played it with me.”
At that instant, the phone began ringing. Once. . twice. .
“It’s him!”
Three times. . four. .
Reluctantly, Will pulled away and hit the speaker button on his phone.
“Yes?”
Anticipating the frightening electronic voice, he squeezed Patty’s hand.
“Will Grant? Micelli here. Augie Micelli.”
Patty and Will sagged in unison.
“Hey, this is a surprise,” Will said.
“Believe me, it is to me, too. Listen, I sure as hell hope you’ve been staying in shape during your time off, because you’ve got a long, tough road ahead of you. I’ve decided to take your case and do whatever I can to help you out of the mess you’re in.”
Will listened for the slurring that would suggest Micelli was in his cups, but the Law Doctor sounded sharp and focused.
“That’s wonderful,” he said.
“I’m assuming you didn’t take any fentanyl. If you’re lying to me about that, we’re not going to be friends anymore.”
“I didn’t take anything.”
“Good. That part of things is settled. I spoke to a pal of mine in the DA’s office. They’re still of a mind to prosecute you for attempted manslaughter or something, but I don’t think it will take much of a breakthrough on our part for them to change their position.”
“Let’s get to it, then.”
“The first thing we’ve got to do is somehow get them to back off and give us some time and space. Then we’ve got to get your license and staff privileges restored. We’re not going to take this lying down.”
“Just show me where to push,” Will said.
“Our first, second, and third priorities are to figure out how a drug got into your body when you never took it. After we know how, we can start working on who and why. Put your thinking cap on and give me a call. I’ll be in the office after eight tomorrow.”
“Should I ask why you’ve decided to do this?”
“No,” Micelli replied sharply. “I should be asking why I decided to do this.”
Will listened to the dial tone for a few seconds, then shut off the speaker.
“Hey,” Patty said, “that’s great. You’ve got yourself a lawyer.”
“I’ll bet he’s very together when he’s sober.”
“Well, hopefully dealing with you will help give him religion as far as that goes. Now you’ve got a team on your side-him and me.”
“That’s some team.”
“Your new barrister did make one small error, though.”
“He did?”
“Yes.” She pushed him onto his back and settled gently on top of him. “He said we weren’t going to take this lying down.”
CHAPTER 19
It was just after eleven when Will entered the busy lobby of Fredrickston General Hospital. From what he could recall, not even his first visit back home after the separation from Maxine felt this strange. Less than two weeks ago he had entered the hospital as a widely respected surgeon prepared to perform a difficult case. By that day’s end, he had been vilified as a narcotic addict, signed himself out of the intensive-care unit against medical advice, and gone home with a warning from the hospital president not to return to the place until the allegations against him had been resolved. Now, here he was back at FGH again but, like the Monopoly square, just visiting.
Balanced against the uneasy tension of his return to the hospital were the feelings and sensations lingering from the night just past. He and Patty had made exquisite love, then slept and loved again, and finally dozed off until almost dawn. She was at once caring and patient, sensual and passionate. She was witty and quick, gentle and edgy, absolutely cynical yet surprisingly naive and vulnerable. And physically she was as pleasing, comfortable, and imaginative as he would ever need a woman to be.
Although Mark Davis was the one who had picked eleven as the time to meet at the ICU, Will knew the hour was about as good for him as it could be. Morning rounds were over for most of the docs, and many of those who weren’t in the OR were back in their offices. In addition to his partners, he certainly had friends on the staff whom he wouldn’t mind running into, but the majority he would be just as happy avoiding. Even with the favorable hour, his return to the corridors of FGH wasn’t pleasant. By the time he reached the unit, he had passed four physicians and three nurses. Although prior to the incident, he was cordial enough with all of them, none greeted him with any warmth or tried to extend their brief encounter into a conversation, and one of the docs pointedly ignored him. Will wasn’t surprised.
Over the years, beginning with a truncated med-school course on alcoholism and other addictions, he had been to half a dozen or more AA meetings. From the patterns of the stories shared at the meetings and the scientific studies discussed in the courses, he had no doubt that alcoholism, like addiction to other drugs, was a medical illness-a psychological, genetic, and biochemical disease, as opposed to the moral issue so many made it out to be. Unfortunately, many other caregivers did not share that opinion. Doctors and nurses caught in the nightmare of drug and alcohol dependence too often found themselves deprived in their colleagues’ minds of the right to be ill and the chance to recover, simply because they were health-care professionals and should have known better. The pervasive prejudice made Will terribly sad even before he himself became a victim of it.
Mark Davis, wearing a gray turtleneck and tweed sport coat, was waiting just outside the door to the unit. He was an angular, intense man, who sounded over the phone this morning as if he were still reserving judgment as to whether Will had or had not gone into the operating room stoned on narcotics.
“They just brought her back from getting an X-ray and they’re washing her up right now,” he said. “The nurse said it would be twenty minutes.”
“Fine. Do you know who her nurse is?”
“Anne something.”
“Hajjar. She’s excellent, one of the very best.”
“That’s good to know. Visiting Grace like this is very kind of you. We don’t have much family, and her mother is too frail to make the trip up from New York.”
“Nonsense. We do go back quite a ways. What she went through yesterday must have been absolutely terrifying. I’m anxious to see her and also to translate medicalspeak if you need me to. Mark, listen, there are a couple of things I’d like to do around the hospital while I have the chance. Why don’t I meet you back here in twenty minutes?”