Silent Pledge

by Hannah Alexander

  “What’s…obesity feel like?”

  “You mean being fat?” He huffed a moment. “You might as well call it what it is. All this weight on me is fat, not muscle, not big bones.”

  “So how does it feel to be fat? Mom’s been griping because she’s gaining weight lately, and I keep telling her she’s not getting fat.”

  “You’re right. She isn’t.” Mercy was perfect…even if she was gaining a little extra weight lately.

  A trail of sweat trickled from his forehead to his chin. “Tell you what, Tedi. You get your grandma’s big backpack out of her closet and fill it with bricks until it weighs as much as you do. Then wear it for a week without taking it off, not even to sleep, and buckle it tight so you can’t breathe very well. Then shave your head and paint your nose red and wear your clothes inside out so people will stare at you and laugh at you wherever you go, but you have to act like that doesn’t hurt your feelings.”

  He didn’t usually talk about his weight this much, although it was something that was always on his mind. But Tedi sat there watching him so seriously…and she was a good kid. She was easy to talk to. Just like her mother.

  He slowed the speed enough to step off the moving mat, then he switched off the machine. “I’m done for now. I’ll hit it again later, and Ivy can stand here and watch me if she wants.” Sweat was dripping down his forehead and chest and stomach. His clothes were soaked. He’d have to take a bath pretty soon if he didn’t want to run everybody out of the house. He was just glad there was a tub he could fit into—Ivy’s previous tenant had been her mother, and there were handicap bars to hold on to when he got in and out.

  Tedi slipped her feet beneath the straps on the exercise bike pedals and put her hands on the handlebars. “Doesn’t it make you mad when people whisper about you?”

  He waited a moment to catch his breath. “Yeah.” Sometimes people seemed to resent him for being alive and taking up so much space.

  “Me, too. Some of the kids at school used to make a big deal about my dad going to jail.”

  He walked slowly around the treadmill to cool down. “Now, that makes me mad. Nobody has a right to treat you like that. If I heard anybody saying anything bad about you, I’d sit on ’em.”

  Tedi laughed. “That’s okay. They don’t say much anymore. Abby started beating up on them, and she can hit hard. I think everybody needs a best friend.”

  Clarence sank onto the straight-backed chair Ivy kept in the exercise area. “Yeah.”

  She pedaled the stationary bike a few times, her face growing serious. “Sometimes I wish Abby could come and stay with me for a while.”

  He tore off a section of paper towels from a roll beside the chair and dabbed at his face and neck. “Why? You’re over here every afternoon, and you know your mom wouldn’t let you two stay at your house alone. You two’d be in trouble half the time.”

  “Yeah, but Abby would protect me.”

  Clarence dropped the towels in the trash and leaned forward, resting his elbows on his knees. He didn’t like the suddenly quiet tone in her voice. “From what, kiddo?”

  She looked down and shrugged. “Last night I saw this old brown car drive by our house a few times. One time it even stopped out in front, and I saw a shadow of a guy just sitting there, like he was watching the house for something.”

  Clarence studied her somber expression, her downcast eyes, and tried to remind himself what a good imagination she had. Sometimes, when she spent the night here, she woke up screaming from nightmares. “Does your mom know?”

  “I don’t think so. I didn’t say anything to her about it.”

  “It couldn’t be your dad, could it?”

  “Dad doesn’t have a car, and he doesn’t smoke, and this man was smoking.”

  Ivy’s voice suddenly reached them from the other room. “Tedi! Are you doing your homework?” Her voice grew louder and she came closer, and she stepped into the great room, her long salt-and-pepper hair falling around her shoulders in untidy strands. She wore old jeans and an oversized sweatshirt. She caught sight of Clarence sitting down and put her hands on her hips. “Did you already finish your exercise?”

  “Grandma,” Tedi said sternly, “you need to fill your backpack with bricks and carry it around for a while. Then you’ll see how hard it is for Clarence.”

  Lukas rummaged through the top drawer of his desk in the call room in search of the keys to his Jeep. He’d put them in there first thing this morning, as he always did. He shoved that drawer shut and opened the next one down. No key chain with the plastic praying-hands emblem.

  So what had he done with them this morning when he came in? Had he still been asleep? He hoped he hadn’t locked them in the Jeep again. That was a particularly irritating habit of his that he couldn’t seem to outgrow. At least he had the foresight to keep a key in a magnetized case under the wheel well. He would check on it later.

  He stepped out and gazed around the empty emergency room. He saw Shirley, the secretary, typing on the computer keyboard. He heard a floor nurse and the X-ray tech gossiping a little too loudly out in the empty waiting room.

  “…don’t even have any leads. It’s like the kids just disappeared. This kidnapper’s good, but I tell you—” the voice lowered to a whisper “—I still think those bikers have something to do with all this.”

  There was a short silence, then a topic change. “Still, there’s lots of dirty deeds going on around this place. Just look at Dr. Moss. He’ll probably get away with it, too.”

  “Maybe, maybe not. I’m glad Tex isn’t the judge. When it comes to men, that girl’s got no brains. She thinks he’s wonderful, and nobody can tell her any different.” Another silence. “There’s no reason for her to hang around Herald since her poor mom died, but all Dr. Moss had to do was smile at her and tell her what a good girl she was, and now she thinks he’s an angel.”

  “More like the devil,” the tech said. “Did you know that man never would look me in the eye? He always focused lower. I say if Tex won’t listen to us, let her learn the hard way.”

  “But she seems so innocent, and I don’t think Dr. Moss should get away with this—”

  “Dr. Bower, would you check these orders?” came a firm voice from behind Lukas.

  The gossipers fell silent.

  Lukas turned to find Shirley standing there, holding out a clipboard with a sheet of patient test orders.

  “I’m not sure I wrote them down right,” she explained.

  He read them and nodded. “They look good to me.”

  Shirley thanked him, then lowered her voice. “Don’t believe half of what you hear around here.”

  He heard the gossipers wander down the hallway, and he looked up at Shirley. “So what’s going on?”

  “I guess you know what happened to the doctor you replaced. He was accused of improper conduct with one of our patients. Of course, he swears he didn’t do it. Now we have a war on our hands. Most of the staff believe the patient, but Tex and some of the others are mad about his suspension. I’m staying out of the mess.”

  “I think that’s a good idea.”

  With charting caught up and signed in the medical records department, Lukas had time on his hands. This was an excellent opportunity to call and let Mercy know he was returning for an overnight visit to Knolls tomorrow after work. He needed some things from the house, and he wanted to drop by the hospital to see how the west-wing structure was coming. He also needed to talk to Mrs. Pinkley about hiring E.R. medical staff.

  And he wanted to talk to Mercy. He wanted to hear her voice up close and personal.

  He left the secretary instructions to come and get him if a patient arrived. Then he used his calling card to dial from the call-room telephone.

  “This is Dr. Richmond’s office,” came a familiar voice over the receiver. But it wasn’t familiar enough. He frowned. It wasn’t Mercy’s secretary.

  “Hello?” the voice prompted again. He recognized who it was then.
/>   “Lauren?”

  “Yes.” There was a very short silence—something rare when one was speaking with Lauren. “Dr. Bower? Is that you?”

  “I’m sorry, I was calling—”

  “Yeah, you got Dr. Mercy’s office, but Loretta and Josie went out to lunch, and Dr. Mercy’s doing rounds at the hospital. We’ve had so many calls, and you know how Dr. Mercy hates to miss anything, so I offered to take my lunch later.”

  “That’s right, you’re working there now, aren’t you?”

  Lauren laughed. Her voice had a musical sound that Lukas remembered well from the months he’d worked with her at Knolls Community Hospital. “It was my idea,” she said. “Dr. Mercy was getting killed with the influx of patients. Obviously, without an E.R. in town, we have a lot higher acuities, and Dr. Mercy tries to see them all. If the rest of the docs in this town were as dedicated as she is, she wouldn’t be working so hard. Did you know Odira and Crystal were back in the hospital? Of course, Crystal was the one who got sick, but when you get Crystal, you get Odira for the duration. If parents were as loving as Crystal’s great-grandma is, we wouldn’t have nearly as many sick kids in this office.” She went on to tell about some of the other cases they’d had since he left.

  He grinned to himself. Yep, this was Lauren, all right. She and Tex had few things in common, but one could guess they were related. The McCaffrey family had never met a stranger. In other ways, however, Lauren and Tex were as different as a cactus and a kitten.

  “So how are things going up there at the lake?” Lauren asked, pausing for breath at last.

  “Just trying to settle in. You know how it’s always awkward at first.” And the awkwardness in Herald seemed destined to outlast his stay here.

  “I wouldn’t know about that. I’ve worked in Knolls all my life except when I was training, and that was twelve years ago.”

  In spite of the disappointment of not talking to Mercy, it was good to hear a familiar, friendly voice from Knolls—or from anywhere.

  “Did you hear about our ice storm down here?” Characteristically, she didn’t wait for a reply. “I’m sure Dr. Mercy told you. It was a bad one. They’re just now chopping out, so I warned her to be extra careful on the ice. Most of the shops and businesses are closed today and the schools are out, but I bet everything will be back to normal before tonight, because it’s warming up now. Theodore Zimmerman called this morning to make sure everything was okay here and to see if Mercy made it to work safely. God sure is working wonders with that man. He’s not the same person.”

  Lukas’s attention focused on her words. “Oh, really? Theo’s doing well?”

  “He sure is. I see him at church a lot. Hey, how are you and my cousin getting along?”

  But what about Theo? Was he still struggling with his alcoholism? Were he and Mercy seeing more of each other? Was he still working at Jack’s Print shop and walking everywhere he went? “Tex is a good paramedic.” Was Theo dating someone? “Medicine seems to run in your family.”

  “Yes, it does. We have another cousin who’s a nurse in California, and another who’s an EMT in Kansas. We’ve got about thirty first cousins on our fathers’ side. Theresa’s dad and mine were brothers, and Uncle Fred started this computer software company and moved to Arizona. He made good money—I mean good money—and he’s tried to help Tex out so she won’t have to struggle through her residency, but she won’t take it. She can be so self-sufficient.”

  Lukas sighed quietly and gave up on the subject of Theo. That discussion would have to wait. “You didn’t tell me Tex was a resident.”

  “Don’t bring up that subject unless she mentions it first. She’s touchy about it. She was about to start her residency when she had to leave to take care of Aunt Beth.”

  “But she said her mother died six months ago.”

  “Right, so you’re wondering why she’s still hanging around Herald. She cleaned out the house and sold it to help pay the medical bills, but then she didn’t move on. You know what I think? I think she’s afraid she can’t do the job.”

  “She’s good. She can do it.”

  “You tell her that.” Lauren fell silent for almost half a second. “You might have noticed that Tex is a little on the outspoken side.”

  A little? “She has that tendency.”

  “Don’t take it to heart. She’s always been that way. She gets it from her mother’s side.”

  “Oh, really?” Right. And Lauren got it from the air that she breathed.

  “And that wouldn’t be so bad if it weren’t for the way she grew up. Did you know her parents were divorced?”

  “No, she didn’t say anything about it.”

  “The divorce happened when she and I were teenagers. Her mother got custody, so I didn’t see her very much after that. And then her mother got involved in this really strict religious group, and that wouldn’t have been so bad except their pastor was…well, not a very nice man. The guy treated Aunt Beth like dirt, told her she was a ruined woman because she was divorced, and that she’d just have to work her way to heaven, and then he gave her plenty of work to keep her busy. The way he treated her mother soured Tex on religion. As soon as she was old enough she quit going to church, and she hasn’t been back. She makes fun of me when I try to talk to her about the real love of God.”

  So that’s where Tex’s resentment was coming from. “I’ve been warned not to preach to her or invite her to church,” Lukas said.

  There was an un-Lauren-like pause. “I miss the way things used to be between us. We were pretty close.”

  “I’m sorry to hear that, Lauren. Maybe she’ll come around.”

  “Yeah, I hope—Oops, I’ve got another line beeping me. I’ll tell Dr. Mercy you called. We miss you. Bye!”

  “But wait…Lauren?”

  The line disconnected. Lukas hung up disappointed. He didn’t have time to dwell on it, though, because the call-room phone rang as soon as he hung up. An ambulance was three minutes out. A teenager had been hit by a train.

  Twenty miles an hour seemed almost too fast on this ice-slicked road, and Mercy was glad for the all-wheel-drive feature of her Subaru Forester. She braked delicately and turned into the small parking area in front of the apartment complex where Odira lived. It wasn’t until she actually glanced toward the doorway that she saw the bundled-up figure of a man bent over the sidewalk in front of Odira’s door.

  In his gloved hands he held a shovel, which he used to stab slowly and methodically at the salt-sprinkled ice that coated the concrete. A pile of half-inch-thick ice shards were stacked beside the building, out of the way of faltering feet. He wore green coveralls and work boots with ice grippers fastened onto the soles. His head, face and neck were covered by a ski mask, but Mercy thought she recognized the fastidious placement of each stab of the shovel as he tried to keep from cracking the concrete along with the ice. He looked up, and she saw the cool, clear blue eyes of Theodore Zimmerman.

  Last year at this time she would have been tempted to drive the car up onto the concrete and splatter him. Right now she could have hugged him for his thoughtfulness.

  She smiled and waved, parking cautiously beside the spot he had cleared. He paused and leaned against his shovel as she got out of her car. She heard the heavy force of his breathing and saw the mist of his breath.

  “In through your nose, remember,” she cautioned. “Don’t want to freezer burn your lungs in this cold, dry air.”

  He grinned. “Sure thing, Dr. Richmond.”

  “How did you know Odira needed her walk de-iced?” Mercy asked as she stepped gingerly to the rear passenger door to start carrying in the groceries in the backseat.

  “Tedi told me this morning that you were going to try to get Odira and Crystal home today. Let me guess, that food is for Odira and Crystal.” He gestured toward the bags, then leaned his shovel against the side of the building and stepped over to help, still breathing heavily.

  Mercy handed him a bag. “You talked to
Tedi this morning?”

  “Yes, well, actually, I called to talk to you, but you were in the shower, running late, according to Tedi.”

  “I’m always running late. Why aren’t you at the print shop?”

  “Jack didn’t need me until noon because business is slow right now.” Theodore turned and led the way to the door. “I thought I’d see if Tedi was out of school today because of the ice. I was hoping to take the two of you out for early lunch, but she already had plans to spend the day with her grandmother.”

  Mercy could hear the disappointment in his voice. “Don’t worry, you’re not being snubbed. Tedi has to do a story on the fire last fall, and if her teacher says it’s good enough, he’s going to try to get it published in the Knolls Review. She wants to put the article on the computer at Mom’s, so this ice storm was her big break.”

  Theo brightened a little.

  Mercy dug into her coat pocket for the key Odira had given her to the apartment, then transferred her bag of groceries into Theodore’s waiting arms. “I want to get Odira stocked up so she won’t have to go out on this ice once she gets home. She’d fall and break a leg before she would ask for help.” She unlocked the front door and carried her bag inside, then stood aside for Theo. “Put it on the counter, and I’ll snoop around and see if I can figure out where everything goes.”

  He pulled off his ski mask and reached into the paper bag. “How’s Lukas doing? I haven’t seen him in a while.”

  “As far as I know he’s doing fine. He’s up at a small town at the Lake of the Ozarks.”

  “Oh?”

  “Sounds like he’ll be there for the next ten weeks or so.” Actually, it would now be nine weeks, three days and six hours, but who was counting? “I don’t know if Estelle knows about the contract he signed, because when she finds out, I bet there’ll be another explosion at the hospital. We’re going to need him here long before his time is up. I wish he were here now.”

  “I’m sorry, Mercy.” Theo continued to empty the bags, his movements methodical. He placed each can carefully on the counter, as if he was deep in thought. “I know you two are…good friends. Tedi talks about him all the time.”