Silent Pledge

by Hannah Alexander

  Her attention focused once more on the Psalm Twenty-Three plaque. “If you’re looking for a church in Herald, I can’t help you. The only one I attended closed its doors after they kicked out all the jerks and hypocrites and there was only one person left.”

  Lukas didn’t respond for a moment. He resisted the urge to point out the fact that she had invaded his home—and an intimate telephone conversation—and plopped down on his sofa without an invitation. He became aware that she was watching him closely, waiting in unaccustomed silence for a reply. But what was he supposed to say?

  “Who was the one person left?”

  She leaned forward, arms crossed over her chest, gaze locked with his. “My mother.”

  The obvious wound in her voice spoke volumes through those two words. He had heard the stories before. There were multitudes of people he had met over the years who no longer attended church—who had even turned away from God—because someone who proclaimed Christianity had hurt them.

  “You know what church is?” she asked. The wound was obviously still raw. Without waiting for an answer, she continued. “It’s a place where Satan sends his best people.” The intense bitterness blared through the room, and then she caught her breath softly and had the grace to grimace. She glanced down at her fists clenched in her lap. “Sorry, Dr. Bower, I’m not talking about you.”

  Lukas paused, then asked, “Does your mother still live around here?”

  For a moment she didn’t answer. Finally she said quietly, “My mother died six months ago.” There was a sparkle of tears in her eyes, which she fiercely sniffed back. “Renal failure. She didn’t quality for a transplant, so I came home and took care of her.”

  “Your family didn’t help you?”

  “My relatives visited a couple of times, but nobody could afford to take off work and stay with us. Besides, I was here.” The forceful independence was obvious in her tone. “You know those people she used to go to church with? They never bothered to check on her. They never even knew she was sick until after she died.”

  Lukas wished there were a gentle way to tell her that Christians didn’t read minds any better than non-Christians. “I’m sorry, Tex. I can’t imagine how that would have felt.”

  She sat looking at the floor for a moment, then looked up at him. “So just a warning—don’t go trying to preach to me or invite me to your church.” She pulled the sides of her pea-green jacket together, zipped up the front and gave him a half salute as she let herself out.

  Lukas noticed she left mud tracks all the way across the hardwood floor.

  Chapter Ten

  Wednesday morning Lukas pulled out the last set of scrubs from the bottom of his locker and tossed them on the bed as he kicked off his shoes and unbuckled his belt. He’d come in five minutes late to find the night-shift doc already gone and a patient waiting. Three more had come in before he could take time to come to the call room. He’d lost his electricity at home sometime this morning. No lights, no clock, no time to stop at the Dinner Bucket for breakfast and coffee and catch up on the latest tidbits of community opinion about the missing baby and the other missing children. If he hadn’t happened to wake up and look at his watch, he wouldn’t be here yet.

  He picked up the scrub pants and shook them to unfold. They remained folded. He gave them another shake and then caught a glimpse of something little and shiny in the material. He held them up to the light.

  Someone had stapled the scrubs. There were at least twenty staples in the thin material, as if some angry child had punched the staple head with rhythmic intensity until the machine had run out of ammunition. What sane adult would do something like this?

  He threw the worthless bundle back onto the bed and grabbed his jeans again. He didn’t have any other scrubs. The hospital agreement was that they would supply uniforms, and his part of the agreement was that he would present himself in a professional demeanor. He would just have to appear unprofessional today, and if he lost this temporary job because of appearance, so much the better. The next time he signed a contract he would check the place a little more thoroughly beforehand. A guided tour of the E.R. and a handshake with a fast-talking administrative secretary wouldn’t fool him again.

  He reached for his belt, and that was when he saw the envelope on the pillow with Dr. Bower typed on the front. “Now what?” he muttered as he snatched the envelope and ripped to open.

  The memo was from Mr. Amos, the hospital administrator, reminding him that, in the future, he was to go through proper channels before he ordered an ambulance transfer. Lukas tore the page in half and shoved it into the overflowing trash can.

  Thick clouds built a rampart against the sun long after daybreak should have touched Knolls Wednesday morning. Those same clouds had brought rain during the night, which froze as soon as it hit the trees, houses and streets. Ozark winters were notorious for ice storms, because the temperature, like a dark jokester, had a tendency to hover just below thirty-two degrees. The precipitation didn’t know whether to fall as snow or rain, so it just froze. That was Mercy’s theory, anyway. This morning at the clinic when the phone rang she was too sleepy and preoccupied to come up with a better explanation.

  Since no one else had arrived yet, Mercy punched the button for line one and picked up the receiver. “Good morning, Richmond Clinic.”

  There was a short pause, an exhalation of breath. “Yeah, could I talk to Dr. Richmond?” It was a deep male voice, slurred and hoarse, and it made her uncomfortable before she even recognized the speaker. For a moment she didn’t reply.

  “Yeah, anybody there?” he asked.

  “Yes.” Identification came quickly as she recalled the angry voice in the hospital Sunday morning. Still, she wanted him to identify himself. “May I ask who is calling?”

  “Uh…this is Abner Bell, but if you tell her she won’t come to the phone.” He sounded hesitant, not angry as he had been Sunday. He took a breath and released it with a burst of wind over the telephone line. “Just ask the doctor if she’s heard anything about my wife, okay?”

  Mercy didn’t even try to keep the curtness from her own reply. “Abner, this is Dr. Richmond. I don’t understand why you continue to insist that Delphi would be in touch with me, but I have no idea where she is.” And he’d be the last person to hear from her if she did. She hoped Delphi was well out of the area, although where would that be? She had no family, which was probably why she’d endured Abner’s abuse as long as she had. Mercy could only guess at the circumstances that would drive the poor woman out into the January cold. If that was what happened. There were other possibilities that continued to nag her.

  He took two more audible breaths, then said, “I tried callin’ the girls at the café, but she ain’t showed up for work. She’s gotta be somewhere.” Today, unlike Sunday, the man sounded more worried than threatening, and his voice was coarse, as if he’d been up all night. “I really miss her, Dr. Mercy. I know we’ve got some problems, but I know we could work ’em out if she’d just come back and give it another try.”

  Mercy resisted the tiny thread of compassion that would automatically surface in a situation like this—a young husband searching for his lost wife. This wife needed to stay lost. Mercy remembered the unearthly glitter in Abner’s eyes Sunday, the brooding malevolence she’d felt emanating from him and the anger it had stirred in her. She’d had a taste of that malevolence when her father was stumbling through the darkness of his alcoholism, or when Theo was drunk and angry with her. That kind of antagonism had nearly killed Tedi last spring.

  “If somebody there at your office hears from her, could you call me?” Abner asked.

  Mercy bit her lip to control her own anger brought on by specters from the past. Like a poisonous snake, Abner needed to be treated with caution. “I haven’t heard from her, Abner.” She disconnected abruptly, took a deep breath and went to unlock the clinic.

  She paused before she unlocked the door and tried to will away the tension that ti
ghtened her breathing and clenched her stomach into a pit of ice as hard as the frozen ground outside. Lord, please keep Delphi safe, wherever she is.

  The telephone rang again. It was the first patient cancellation of the day. Mercy expected many more to follow.

  Midmorning Wednesday Theodore Zimmerman saw the official-looking envelope through the tiny window of his post office box before he stuck the key into the lock. He recognized the medical emblem, and he knew who it was from. He took the envelope out quickly and ripped it open. He shoved the introductory letter to the back of the sheath of papers so he could study the actual lab test results.

  HIV…negative. He felt weak with relief as he shuffled to the next page. Until he had begun spending more time with Mercy and Tedi, he’d never considered the possibility that his former lifestyle could come back to haunt him—not until he’d considered the very real, very sweet possibility that he might be able to regain his family. That idea had become a dream and now was a concrete goal. Mercy and Tedi would need more time to get used to the idea, but it was one he couldn’t stop thinking about. To have his family back…

  Chlamydia…negative. Gonorrhea…negative. Herpes…negative. Syphilis…negative.

  “Thank You, God!” he murmured as he closed his eyes and momentarily leaned against the heavy marble table in the quiet post office. For a week now, he’d worried about the possible results of the blood test he’d had in Springfield last Thursday. He had dated a lot of women in the past six years—since before his separation and divorce from Mercy, much to his regret and shame. That lifestyle continued to haunt him, in spite of the reassurances from so many people that he was forgiven by God.

  He uncovered the final page, and his attention suddenly caught on the word positive like a dart in the center of a red target. He scanned the line and read “Hepatitis B,” and his fingers weakened and nearly dropped the sheets.

  He shuffled back to the letter, which he knew he should have read in the first place. It was merely introductory, with the news that they had attempted to call him and had received no reply. He didn’t have an answering machine. He should have given them his work number, but he didn’t want anyone to know about the tests. With the instructions to call their office for a consult and an appointment for retesting, the letter ended.

  He stuffed everything back into the envelope and rushed from the post office. Retesting. That meant the results could all be a big mistake. A misreading. It was probably nothing.

  At Herald Hospital E.R., there was a knock at the threshold of the open call room door, and Lukas glanced over his shoulder to see Tex McCaffrey—all one hundred eighty pounds of muscle and wayward blond hair—striding in without his invitation. Typical Tex.

  “Dr. Bower, got a couple of kids in room two. Mom’s worried ’cause they’re groggy. Both of ’em are snoring like a zooful of lions and tigers and bears. Want to check them out?”

  Moments later he was listening with concern to Angela Jack’s story. Her thin face was etched with worry as she held her three-year-old little boy on her lap. His eyes were shut, his head falling against her right shoulder. “I just can’t wake them up, Dr. Bower.” She darted a glance at her four-year-old girl, who lay slack on the bed, drooling onto the pillow, her blond curls splayed out around her. “I tried to get them up this morning like usual, and they went right back to bed. Usually they’re up running all over the place trying to make me late for work. Something’s wrong.”

  Lukas turned the bell of his stethoscope to the smaller pediatric side and placed it against the little girl’s chest. Her breathing was normal. Heart sounded fine. She stirred for a moment, yawned and burrowed deeper into the pillow.

  Tex came through the curtained entrance. “Dr. Bower, there’s a man out in the waiting room who cut himself with an X-Acto knife.” She frowned, leaned over the little girl and studied her face, then shook her head and straightened to look at Lukas. “Wants to know if you’ll just look at his cut real quick and see if it needs stitches. That way if he doesn’t have to, he won’t check in and get billed for it.”

  “Did you examine it?”

  “Yeah, it’s not bleeding much and doesn’t look too deep, but you’re the doctor.”

  Lukas sighed heavily and shook his head at Tex, feeling again the frustration of government red tape in the form of COBRA. “You know I can’t legally go out and lay eyes on him without checking him in.”

  “He’s paying cash.”

  “What would you do if you were the doctor on this case, Tex?”

  “I’d make sure he had an updated tetanus, then tell him to go on home and clean it up and bandage it.”

  “I trust your judgment.”

  She blinked at him, smiled, shook her head. “But I’m not the doc. I’m the paramedic.”

  Lukas wrapped his stethoscope back around his neck and turned to talk with Mrs. Jack. “The children don’t have a fever, and to the best of your knowledge they haven’t been nauseated? Are there any medications they might have found around your home?”

  Mrs. Jack shook her head. “I keep everything up high in the cabinets, and there wasn’t anything out of place this morning. I checked.”

  “They don’t have any symptoms besides the fact that they’re very sleepy.”

  Tex put a hand on his shoulder. “Hold it a minute, Dr. Bower. I just remembered something. I saw a kid in here a couple of weeks ago with the same kind of problem, only it was on an evening shift.” She put her hands on her hips and bent down to make eye contact with the mother. “Angela, who’s babysitting for you now?”

  The harried mother did not meet Tex’s gaze. “Mrs. Ramey down the street from us.”

  “Ramey!” Tex exclaimed. “That drunk!” She straightened from her work. “Dr. Bower, she was in charge when that little girl disappeared from the park the other day.”

  “Oh, come on, Tex,” Angela protested. “She was more upset about what happened than anybody. She’s been out looking for the kid all week when she’s not babysitting.”

  “Sure she is,” Tex said. “She’s got to cover her hide because Sandra smelled whisky on her breath when they showed up to search. And furthermore, Dr. Bower, she got fired from the ambulance service six months ago. She was a part-time dispatcher, and she also kept the books, and she was padding the bills. Besides that, she’s an alcoholic.”

  Angela’s mouth tightened in a defensive line. “I never smelled alcohol on her breath, and she’s cheap.”

  “Sure she’s cheap.” Tex’s voice deepened with growing annoyance. “She’s not licensed, and she’s probably keeping ten kids, from babies on up.”

  “She’s…she’s good with the kids. They like her.”

  “Do you want them to grow up to be just like her? Doesn’t Johnson’s pay better than that?” Tex shook her head and crossed her arms over her chest. “How do you think she keeps them corralled? Were your kids groggy when you picked them up after work last night?”

  Angela looked down. “I worked late last night at the plant. Had an extra load of chickens we had to process, so the kids were already asleep when I picked them up.”

  Tex waved her hand in the air in a there-you-go gesture. “Come on, Angela, you’ve heard the rumors. Everybody has. She gives them Benadryl when they get on her nerves. A friend of mine heard her talking about it at the store one day.”

  “Oh, Tex, just lay off,” Angela snapped. “I’m trying to find another sitter, anyway. She said she’s quitting soon, leaving town and everything.”

  The little girl on the bed stirred and grimaced, then her eyes came open halfway. “Mama?”

  As Angela turned to her daughter, Tex leaned toward Lukas and lowered her voice. “Dr. Bower, I just betcha if you checked for—”

  “Call lab and order a urine triage and an acetaminophen and aspirin level. Then do a quantitative toxicology screen.” Lukas glanced at the children again. “If this really was a drug overdose and it happened last night, it’s too late to pump their stomachs. We’ll
want to keep them here and watch them until they recover.”

  Tex nodded. “I’ll bet that’s what it is.” She jotted down her notes, then turned back to the monitor. “I think you should have a little talk with the police, Angela.”

  “About what? Nobody can prove anything, and I don’t have time for all this. The police aren’t worth shootin’ around here, anyway. They’re like little boys playing with guns.”

  Lukas slipped out of the exam room and casually sauntered toward the desk at the window that looked into the waiting room. Behind him he heard Mrs. Jack complaining to Tex that she was going to lose her job if she missed another day of work, and he wondered about a poultry processing plant that expected the employees to work late into the night, then threatened to fire those same employees when they had to take their sick children to the hospital. Since the plant supplied the majority of jobs in the town of Herald, most people didn’t seem inclined to do much about the situation.

  Lukas caught sight of a solitary man sitting in the waiting room. His hand was bandaged with gauze, and as Lukas stepped to the check-in window, the man caught sight of him. Lukas nodded to him, and the man nodded back, watching him closely.

  It was frustrating that the very laws that had been written to protect emergency patients from greedy hospitals and health-maintenance organizations could now cost that man at least two hundred dollars just to come in here and be told, possibly, that he didn’t need stitches. And he was a cash patient. No insurance company or Medicare or Medicaid card would take care of his bill. Unfortunately, without the laws, some emergency rooms in this country could turn away people who were in dire need and could not pay. It was a question of ethics. So what was new?

  The man—a carpenter by the appearance of his canvas coveralls and the sawdust sprinkled across his denim shirt—unwrapped the cloth from around his hand. He looked up at Lukas and held his gaze. Even from this distance, Lukas could see that the cut was not bad. It didn’t seem to be actively bleeding and wasn’t in a spot of high stress.