The Children's Ward Page 10

  Regardless, stealing the keys was, if nothing else, a symbolic act on her part.

  She returned them to the envelope.

  She turned and went back to the bed, sitting on the edge, her hand resting inches from the telephone. Another attempt to call him might only serve to frustrate her but she’d never get through if she didn’t try.

  Or…she could call the regular office number and leave a message with his secretary. She was a client, after all, and she needed his advice.

  He didn’t like her to leave messages, implying that his secretary, an efficient but dowdy woman, was not above adding drama to her own life by reporting to Howard’s wife. Frequent calls, cryptic messages, a too-personal reference—all would be mentioned to Mrs. Kraft.

  Alicia was not concerned about Mrs. Kraft; a woman who was unable to keep her husband satisfied (James was a different matter) was not worth bothering about. If she found out about them, the most likely result was a divorce.

  Besides, this was an unusual situation. She needed to act before her ex-husband returned to the ranch and discovered the absence of his keys.

  She had not memorized the office line and she had to look it up in her address book. Then, taking a deep breath, she began to dial.

  “Howard Kraft.”

  His voice was such a surprise that she was momentarily flustered. “Howard?”

  “Yes?”

  She was positive that he recognized her voice. “It’s Alicia.”

  “Mrs. Vincent…how nice to hear from you.”

  Someone was obviously listening to his side of the conversation. “I need to talk to you. I’ve…taken the first step.”

  “Really?” From the tone of his voice she knew that he was not pleased.

  “I’ve gotten the keys to his kingdom and I want you to hire a photographer…”

  “I’m sorry, Mrs. Vincent, I only have a minute. I’m due back in court.”

  “Just find someone you trust and have them meet me. I’m flying into Santa Fe on Saturday, arriving at noon…”

  “Yes, well, good to talk to you and I’m glad to hear that things are going so well for you.”

  “At the airport…Saturday at noon.”

  “Goodbye.”

  The phone clicked in her ear.

  Forty-seven

  “Would you like to tell me what happened?” Joshua found it difficult to believe, looking at Russell’s face, that the boy had refused to answer Quinn’s questions.

  “I told Dr. Logan,” Russell said, “I just passed out.” His blue eyes held no hint of evasiveness.

  “And you don’t remember how it happened. What caused it?”

  “How would I know what caused it? I’m not a doctor.”

  Joshua smiled in spite of himself. “Yes, well. . . as a doctor, I can tell you that most patients have some indications—dizziness or sudden weakness or they’re light-headed—before they pass out. In most cases, if they recognize the symptoms, they have enough time to call out or even lie down before they lose consciousness.”

  “I guess I’m not most cases.”

  “The nurse’s notes indicate that you had breakfast before you went to therapy…”

  “Yes.”

  “All of your blood work is normal, including the blood glucose level. It wasn’t a hypoglycemic episode…”

  Russell waited for him to continue.

  “You hadn’t been medicated, your blood pressure was normal…it wasn’t a hypotensive or orthostatic hypotensive incident…I’m at a loss to explain what happened to you.”

  “Does it matter? I mean, do you have to have a name for it? It just happened.”

  “Doctors are funny that way. I like to know what’s going on with my patients.”

  Russell shrugged. “I’d tell you if I knew.” His gaze was steady and open.

  “Are these all of the videotapes?” Joshua asked, picking up the stack of six tapes.

  “No, Dr. Logan has a couple more.” Mary Aguilar finished writing her notation on Russell’s chart and looked up at Joshua. “I don’t envy you, having to look through all those tapes.”

  “The scan’s pretty fast. It shouldn’t take too long.”

  “That sounds suspiciously like wishful thinking to me.”

  “You know me too well.”

  She smiled and nodded. “I read you like an open book…by the way, where is Dr. Logan?”

  “With any luck she’s starting to review the tapes.” He looked questioningly at Mary. “What is that look for?”

  “What look?”

  “Your eyes are full of mischief like…oh, I see. You think that Quinn and I…”

  “An open book,” Mary said.

  Forty-eight

  Quinn inserted the videotape into the player/ recorder and pushed the rewind button. According to the label, the first tape covered three hours beginning at 10 a.m. on Wednesday. An incident sheet completed by the nurses recorded their comments or observations for each three-hour period.

  While the tape was rewinding she checked the connections from the first video machine to the second and then inserted a blank tape into the second machine. Using two recorders would allow her to make a condensed version of what she judged to be significant events. The second tape, then, would be reviewed by Joshua.

  When her preparations were completed, she pushed the scan button on the first machine and sat back to watch. With no sound and at fast speed, the black and white tape reminded her of a silent movie.

  If any of the children were aware of the closed-circuit camera, they gave no indication of it. Russell was not on the tape—he was in ICU by the time the recorder was installed—but Tessi in particular seemed oblivious to the watching eye. With her stuffed animals around her, she rubbed her stomach in a circular motion, over and over again. Was she in pain? Impossible to determine, but her face was fierce with concentration.

  Courtney might have been dead for all the animation she displayed. Already beginning to run a temperature, according to the nurse’s notes, Courtney exhibited none of the restlessness that might be expected in a febrile state.

  Abigail had returned to the ward after having the MR scan—which Joshua hadn’t shown Quinn yet—and appeared to have fallen asleep. Facing out the window, her back to the camera, she was as motionless as Courtney.

  “All right, then,” Quinn said to the screen, settling in for what promised to be a long morning.

  “How’s it going?”

  Quinn turned her head slightly, keeping her eyes on the screen. “Come see for yourself.”

  Joshua came up beside her, pulling a chair with him, and sat down. Without commenting, he handed her the six videotapes.

  Stifling a groan, she took them and placed them with the second tape; the stack loomed, forbidding.

  “Kids eating lunch,” he said after a minute had passed. “Not much action.”

  “Are you kidding? This is a veritable frenzy of activity compared to the rest of the tape.”

  “Oh my God…”

  Quinn leaned forward in her chair. “What? What happened?”

  “Look at Tessi…she’s putting ketchup on her mashed potatoes.”

  Quinn laughed. “I gather you’ve never watched many kids eat.”

  “I don’t have the stomach for it; that’s also the reason I’m not a surgeon, by the way.”

  “Besides, I’m pretty sure that those aren’t mashed potatoes.”

  “What is it then?”

  “I think it’s tapioca.”

  “No wonder her stomach hurts.” He leaned forward and pushed the stop button on the video player, then turned to face Quinn. “I talked to Russell just now.”

  “And?”

  “He says he doesn’t know what happened.”

  “Do you believe him?”

  “I guess I have to. He’s obviously the only one who knows what might have caused him to black out. I think it would be counterproductive to make an issue out of it at this point.”

  Quinn was s
ilent for a moment. “You’re right,” she conceded. “Maybe I made too much of it.” Frowning, she ran a hand through her dark hair. “It’s just…”

  “What?”

  Her eyes searched his face. “He didn’t seem to put much importance on the fact that he could have died.”

  “Kids aren’t as big on ‘could haves’ as adults are,” Joshua observed.

  “But…he wouldn’t even look at me.”

  “That’s hard to understand.”

  Quinn paused, unsure what his meaning was.

  “Anyway, I felt that he was hiding something.”

  “That doesn’t sound like Russell.”

  “I don’t know him as well as you do,” Quinn said, “but I thought he wasn’t himself…sorry, I’m ranting again and it’s probably just an over-reaction.”

  “Don’t worry about it,” he said, reaching over and taking her hand in his. “I’m not sure I’d trust a doctor who didn’t rant once in awhile.”

  After Joshua left she remembered that she had not seen Abigail’s MR scans. She contemplated the stack of videotapes, knowing full well that she should continue her review of them, then put down the clipboard of the nurse’s incident reports.

  The tapes could wait.

  Having been warned by Joshua, she left her pager at the radiology department front desk with instructions to call her in the MR room if needed.

  The room was like something out of a space fantasy: the scanner like an antiseptic monolith of some future world. A portal to another dimension?

  She crossed to the control room, past the lurking machine.

  Inside the control room, feet up on the counter, the tech sat reading the local newspaper. His concentration was such that he did not hear her approach and she stood, waiting for him to look up.

  “Excuse me,” she said after a minute had passed. She looked at his name tag: Tucker Smith. “I’m Dr. Logan.”

  Tucker Smith stood quickly, the newspaper falling forgotten to the floor.

  “Ah…can I help you?”

  “I’d like to look at Abigail Ballard’s scans.”

  “Ballard…yes. I’ll get those for you.” In his haste he managed to catch the hem of his knee length lab coat on the back of his chair. He fumbled to get it free, the back of his neck flushing a dark red.

  Quinn waited patiently.

  When he had freed himself, he hurried to a filing cabinet and began to look for the folder containing Abigail’s records.

  “You’re not doing scans today?” A plastic dust-cover was over the computer console.

  “No…engineering is coming down to put in an intercom system.” He located the chart and closed the drawer. “Here you go…Abigail Ballard.”

  She took the records and went over to the viewing screen. “Thank you,” she said, and then turned to look at the films.

  Forty-nine

  Abigail kept her eyes fixed on the wind chimes while she listened to them talk.

  “One time when I got sick in Los Angeles, the nurse who took my blood forgot to take off that thing they tie around your arm.”

  “Tourniquet,” Russell offered.

  “Yeah…she just pulled out the needle and bent my arm up like they do. Then she went out of the room and I straightened my arm to look at it, and blood was just pouring out.” Tessi’s voice quavered only slightly. “It was dripping on the floor.”

  “Did you take the tourniquet off?” Courtney spoke in a whisper.

  “I was afraid to.”

  “What happened?”

  “Well, the doctor came in and saw the blood dripping all over everything and he untied the thing and put a big thick pad of cotton over the hole and held it real hard. I heard this sound— like you hear in a seashell—in my ears and got real sick at my stomach. He told me to put my head between my knees but every time I did, I saw the blood…my blood…and it made me even sicker.”

  “Then what?”

  “Then they held this thing under my nose—”

  “Ammonia,” Russell said.

  “Whatever it was, it smelled terrible and made me cough. Then they made me lie down and gave me a glass of water. And then I heard the doctor yelling at the nurse.”

  “The first time I got an I.V.,” Courtney said in her soft voice, “it took them five tries to get it in the vein.”

  “Them?”

  “Two nurses and finally a doctor. They just kept sticking me and then moving the needle around under the skin…”

  “Ouch.”

  “Finally they wound up putting it in the back of my hand.”

  “I’ve had one there,” Russell said.

  “My arm was black and blue; I could hardly move it. Then the I.V. got blood in it and they had to take it out…” her voice trailed off.

  “Did they put in another one?” Tessi asked.

  “Don’t they always put in another one?” Courtney sounded resigned. “What about you, Russell?”

  “There’ve been so many things.” He hesitated, sighing. “The thing that bothered me the most was the night I…fell. The medics put me on a back board and strapped me in, with sandbags on either side of my head. They kept saying ‘Don’t try to move…keep your body still.’ So I was very still, lying with my eyes closed, and they were talking about me. They weren’t talking loud, and the siren was going, so I couldn’t hear everything they said, but…they said I’d probably broken my back.”

  Abigail, facing away from them, could feel Russell’s pain.

  “When I got to the hospital, everyone was prodding me, could I feel this, could I feel that, don’t move, be still…then this male nurse comes in and starts to take my clothes off, for the x-rays, and he’s very rough, tugging on my jeans and it hurts and I’m not supposed to move at all but he’s moving me. Then he looks at me and I guess I was crying and he makes a face and says ‘This isn’t the worst thing that’s going to happen to you tonight…save your tears.’ “

  “How mean,” Tessi said.

  “Then they take the x-rays and I’m alone in the room, and all I can think about is that I wasn’t supposed to move. When Dr. Fuller came, I’d lost most of the feeling in my legs…so they put me in traction and took me to ICU.” His voice took on a different tone. “I had a lot of time to think about it, and I think I would have been all right if that nurse hadn’t moved me.”

  They lapsed into silence.

  Abigail closed her eyes, allowing her anger to grow.

  Fifty

  “I hate this job, I hate it, I quit.”

  Marci looked over at Nadine. “What’s your problem?”

  “This computer.” Nadine smacked the side of the computer console.

  “You’d better not let anyone see you do that,” Marci warned. “Administration thinks the sun rises and sets in these things.”

  “Well, administration can have them and I even have an idea where they can put them…”

  “Wow, you are upset. What in the world happened?”

  Nadine, despite department policy prohibiting smoking at the desks, lit up a cigarette and took a deep drag. “I’ve spent all morning entering those God-damned DRG codes in for the November discharges, so utilization can have their stinking statistics. All day,” she emphasized, “and it’s gone.”

  “Gone?”

  “Gone. Like, poof!”

  “How could that be?”

  “You tell me how could that be. I don’t know.”

  “You must have hit the delete key by accident.”

  Nadine shook her head. “No way.”

  “Well, you must have done something…”

  “I didn’t do anything. I didn’t hit the delete key, I didn’t read it into another file, I didn’t look at the stupid screen cross-eyed. But my file is gone.”

  “Gone.”

  “Poof.” Nadine exhaled a cloud of smoke. “And I don’t care.”

  “What does that mean, you don’t care?”

  “I’m not going to spend another four hours inputting, t
hat’s what. I don’t care whether utilization gets their statistics or not.”

  Marci frowned. “I think you’d better start another file.”

  “Why? To feed this monster?” She swatted at the computer.

  “Well, it’s your ass,” Marci said, returning her attention to her VDT. “But if I were you, I’d get started on that data before you get in trouble.”

  Nadine stared serenely at the ceiling.

  “I still think you must have hit the delete key,” Marci said, fingers flying over the keyboard.

  Nadine did not answer, but blew smoke in the air.

  “Hey,” Marci said after a few minutes had passed. “Hey!” she said louder.

  “What?”

  “My file…it ate my file!” Her expression was outraged.

  “You must have hit the delete key,” Nadine said, smiling sweetly.

  Fifty-one

  Betty Jo tried to concentrate on reading the nursing progress notes on Mr. Calhoun. It was a hard thing to do with sweat dripping down the middle of her back.

  “Did you call engineering to turn down the thermostats?” she asked the unit secretary.

  The secretary did not look up from her reading. “Yes, I did,” she said in a sing-song voice. “An hour ago.”

  “What did they say?”

  “They said they’d take care of it.”

  “Did they say when they would take care of it?”

  “Not exactly.”

  “Either they said when or they didn’t,” Betty Jo said, displaying what she thought was a mountain of patience when what she wanted to do was conduct exploratory surgery to see if she could locate the secretary’s brain.

  “They said sometime today,” the secretary smiled. “They did not say the precise minute it would be done.”

  “Great,” Betty Jo said. She got up from the desk, flipped the patient chart closed, and walked toward the nurses’ lounge.

  It wasn’t much cooler in the lounge, but she got a soft drink out of the refrigerator and sat down to put up her feet.