Death of a Lovable Geek

by Maria Hudgins

  “How many gears does this thing have?” I looked at the shift diagram incised into the knob. I’d never seen one quite like it before.

  “Five, I think, but I only use a few of them.”

  “Five forward gears, plus reverse?”

  “Yes, but I only use reverse when I need to back up.”

  We wound down a few miles of back roads and turned left onto Highway A86. From rolling hills, we passed into high hills and then mountains. This was the first time since our plane trip over that Lettie and I had really talked.

  She told me that her son and his new wife were too busy career-building to start a family, so she had prepared herself for a few years’ wait before grandmotherhood. Her daughter, Lindsay, had finished med school and was looking forward to her first year of residency. “And with any luck, Ollie will be able to retire in three more years,” she said.

  “I don’t want Ollie to retire,” I said. “If he retires, you may not want to travel with me anymore. What would I do without my traveling buddy?”

  “Fear not. When Ollie retires, he won’t want to go any farther than the nearest river. He’ll spend all his time fishing.”

  “And you? Will you go fishing with him?”

  “Occasionally, but fishing goes on for hours, you know,” Lettie said, yanking the steering wheel to the right, to avoid hitting the left ditch. “I get antsy sitting around all day, waiting for a bite.”

  Of all the people I knew, Ollie and Lettie Osgood had the most stable marriage. They never questioned their total devotion to each other, and neither seemed to have anything to prove, so there was room in their marriage for both of them to be completely themselves. I was envious; not because my marriage had ended while hers endured, but because, even at my age, I still had no idea how to achieve such a relationship. Chet and I had never accepted each other as we were. At least, he never accepted me; I had always felt I had to prove myself worthy of him.

  Lettie must have known in what direction my mind had wandered, because when I next tuned in to her, she was saying, “Are you going out with anyone, Dotsy? I mean, are you having any fun? You work so hard at your teaching.”

  “I’m having fun. My teaching is hard work, but it’s fun, too.”

  “What about that sexy policeman you had in Italy last summer?”

  “Marco?” I felt the blood rush to my face. “I didn’t have him in Italy last summer. When you say it that way, it sounds like I had him for dinner.”

  Lettie giggled and reached for her map, which had fallen under the seat. I leaned over and retrieved it for her. A gradual increase in the density of road signs hinted that we were approaching something. On our left loomed a cloud-shrouded Ben Nevis, tallest mountain in Scotland, and ahead of 4us, the town of Fort William, on the banks of Loch Linnhe.

  Lettie asked me to figure out how far we were from the junction with A82 and added, “You still haven’t told me if you’ve heard from Marco since we were in Italy.”

  “He called me … and we exchanged Christmas cards.” I didn’t tell her how many times he’d called me.

  I shook out the map and refolded it, centered on the Fort William area.

  “Lettie, I have a horrible feeling about John Sinclair. Did I tell you what he said about ‘If anything happens to me’ the last time I talked to him? That was no more than an hour before the dinner where we all got sick. I felt strongly that he was saying ‘Something will happen to me,’ not ‘if something happens.’”

  “Are you saying the mushroom soup was deliberately poisoned?”

  “I’m not saying that at all. I don’t know what I’m saying.” It made no sense; that someone would poison a whole houseful of people just to kill one of them. Too cruel to even consider. How could the poisoner know who would die and who would recover?

  “Did you know that John and Fallon had a child?” Lettie asked.

  “No, where did you hear that?”

  “From Maisie. She told me that they had a little boy who died when he was eighteen months old. It was horrible. John, according to Maisie, gets so tied up in his work, he forgets about everything else.

  “They’d been trying for a long time to have a baby, so when this little boy was born, Fallon was over the moon. They’d been married almost ten years. Anyway, John took the baby with him to a dig somewhere and left him in the car while he talked to some reporters. They even filmed an interview. It was on a local news show in Brighton that evening.” Lettie shivered. “It was a hot summer day, and, while John was talking to the camera, the little boy was in the car, dying from the heat. It was so awful, Maisie said, because the TV crew left with their tape and took it back to the station before the child’s body was found. So they showed it on TV that evening, like everything was all roses, but by the time it hit the air, everyone who knew John and Fallon knew the baby was dead.”

  I felt a knot forming in my chest. How many times have I, myself, come close to doing something that could have proven fatal to one of my children? How many nightmares have I awoken from, bathed in cold sweat? How fragile life is, especially babies’ lives; it seems way too reckless of God to let us have them.

  “Does Fallon blame John?” I asked.

  “Maisie says Fallon doesn’t act like she blames him. Fallon never talks about it, but you can’t tell, can you?”

  “Slow down, Lettie. That sign said ‘A82, one mile.’”

  Lettie pulled her purse from under her seat and scratched through it. “I have to find those directions to the hospital. I wrote them in my notepad.” A pencil flipped out of the purse. Lettie stuck it in her mouth and continued her search with one hand while the other clutched the wheel. “Oh, dear, we’ve got a roundabout coming up. I hate these things,” she said, the pencil bobbing between her teeth. “We have some back home, but you go around them to the right. Here, it’s the opposite way. In fact, everything here is opposite. So I try to think of what seems like the right thing to do and then reveraisiJt.”

  To push the clutch pedal down, Lettie had to straighten her leg and point her toes. She slowed for the roundabout, downshifted, and turned right. A truck grill ballooned ahead, filling our whole windshield with the glint of metal. I heard a horn, saw a radiator cap, felt a tremendous bump. My head hit the roof as I heard a thud-crunch. The horn faded. Tires squealed behind us.

  I caught my breath and looked around. We had hit a metal signpost. Lettie, apparently, had swerved to the left in time to miss the truck, driven across the curb, and onto the grass in the center of the roundabout. Our rear wheels were still on the pavement. I tested my neck and found it still turned both ways. Then I looked at Lettie.

  “Ohmigod!” I said.

  “Sorry abou tha,” Lettie said. The pencil she had stuck in her mouth dangled out of it now, flopping against her lower lip. Blood was oozing out around it. “Wha are you ooking a’?”

  “The pencil, Lettie! You’ve impaled yourself!”

  Lettie leaned over far enough to see herself in the rear view mirror. “Aaaaghh!” she yelled. She started to grab the pencil and pull it out, but I remembered reading somewhere that you should leave any impaling object where it is and get a doctor. I grabbed her hand and pulled it away from her mouth.

  “We need to get you to a hospital, right away.”

  “Ucky us, ass where we’re headed, anyhow.”

  Cars in the roundabout were slowing to veer around us, but at any moment, one could hit us. Should I drive us to the hospital or could Lettie do it? If she isn’t in shock, Lettie could do it better, because she’s used to this car and she wrote the instructions for finding the hospital.

  The decision was taken out of my hands by a policeman. He tapped on Lettie’s window, took a look at her, and winced. By now, blood covered her chin and dripped onto her blouse. Lettie rolled her window down, but I did the talking. “We’re awfully sorry, officer. We’re visitors here, but I think my friend needs to get to a doctor.”

  The policeman shuttled Lettie into his squad car qu
ickly and called back over his shoulder, “You follow us. Your car will still run; you’ve only damaged the bonnet. Do you have the keys?”

  I nodded, but I didn’t have a chance to tell him that I probably couldn’t drive this car. He had already backed his squad car off the grass and pulled out, turning right, into the clockwise-circling traffic. To the right. To the right. To the right, I repeated over and over to myself as I started the motor, lest I make the same mistake Lettie had made.

  The policeman drove slowly and kept his blue light blinking, making it easy for me to follow him. The hospital was close by, but a maze of one-way streets kept us from going straight to it. I made the whole trip in first gear.

  Chapter Eighteen

  They took Lettie straight into an examination room within minutes of our arrival at the hospital’s emergency room. I suspect they shifted her to the head of the waiting list because she made such a ghoulish sight, what with the blood and the pencil, and several youngsters were sitting there, getting traumatized. On o:>buried his face in his mother’s sweater.

  I tried to deal with the insurance difficulties while Lettie was being treated. She had left me her purse, and I found the relevant cards in her wallet, but navigating the arcane world of health insurance proved too much for me. The ER would give us a bunch of paperwork that Lettie could take to her company back home for reimbursement. The intake nurse sighed and looked pointedly at the wall clock. I had to leave several questions unanswered for Lettie to deal with later. Meanwhile, I located the intensive care station and asked about Dr. John Sinclair. A nurse told me that only his wife was being allowed in to see him.

  “Can you tell me how he’s doing? I’m a friend and … co-worker of his.” Co-worker didn’t sound quite right, but it would do.

  “He had dialysis treatment last evening.” The nurse clicked through a couple of screens on her computer monitor and glanced at another nurse, as if for confirmation. “You can talk to his wife when she comes out.”

  At a loss for what to do next, I found a ladies’ room and scrubbed a few blood spots off my shirt. I didn’t want to leave the bag of toiletries with the nurses but if I couldn’t find Fallon or get into the room to see them, I might have to. Perhaps, if I took the bag to the nurses and gave them a long, complicated message to deliver to Fallon, they might call her out to talk to me. I tucked my shirt into my waistband and checked in the mirror to see how obvious the wet spots were.

  A row of plastic seats ran right in front of the door to the ladies’ room. As I came out, my hand still on the door, I saw Fallon Sinclair and Tony Marsh sitting there side by side. They were facing away from me, Fallon’s hand on the back of Tony’s neck. I stepped backward and let the door close half way.

  From my hiding spot behind the bathroom door, I heard Fallon say, “We have to decide. There’s no sense putting it off.”

  “This is neither the time nor the place, Fallon. John needs you. When he comes round, he’ll need you.”

  “He won’t come round. He won’t!”

  “Then we have other decisions to make. What do I do with the dig for the rest of the season? We have twenty-five kids who’ve paid tuition. Most of them have sub-let their rooms at college, they have to get the credits they’ve applied for, and I don’t know if we’ll lose our funding.”

  “Bugger the funding!” Fallon spat out the words. “Bugger the dig!”

  I opened the ladies’ room door and walked out with what I hoped looked like surprise to see them plastered across my face.

  “Fallon, there you are. How is John?” I gave her the bag of toiletries sent by Maisie and quickly explained why Lettie wasn’t with me.

  “John’s kidneys and liver have both failed. They did a lot of tests yesterday and a doctor came in a few minutes ago with the lab results. It doesn’t look promising.” Fallon’s face was a sickly gray and her eyes sagged.

  “Is he in pain?”

  “No, thank God. He’s been unconscious since last evening.”

  “Do they know what’s caused this?” I asked.

  “No. Of course, he had that stomachache, but we all got that.”

  Tony walked around the row of chairs and joined us. “I asked the doctor about kidney or liver transplants. I thought that if those functions don’t return, maybe transplants would be the answer, but he said John is too sick to even think of a transplant. First, he would have to get better.”

  “And a transplant is probably out of the question anyway. They’d have to do a tissue match,” Fallon said.

  “William is his closest kin,” I said. “He’d be the one most likely to be a good match.”

  “William, like most of us, is Rh positive,” Fallon said. “John is Rh negative. He can’t get an organ or even a transfusion from an Rh positive donor.” She stepped over to the nurses’ station while Tony and I waited.

  “John’s not going to make it, Dotsy. I saw him,” Tony whispered.

  When Fallon returned, she took me by the arm. “Nurse says it’s all right if I take you in to see him for a little minute. Will you wait here for us, Tony?”

  * * * * *

  I had to take their word for it that the man in the bed was alive. His eyes had sunken into a jaundiced face. The skin was stretched over his bloated arms, and his feet, protruding from the bottom of a sheet, looked like those of a water-logged corpse. They had him plugged into a maze of tubes and wires.

  Fallon must have read the shock on my face. “Shall we rejoin Tony?” was all she said.

  Tony was standing with a white-coated doctor when we came out. “No change?” Tony asked.

  The question required no answer.

  “As I was telling …” The doctor paused. Apparently he didn’t know Tony’s name. “I was saying that we would like to move Dr. Sinclair to the hospital in Inverness. It’s a larger facility. We’re primarily an acute care hospital here. Most of our business comes from skiers and hikers who take the short way down from Ben Nevis.”

  It was inappropriate, but a laugh slipped out of me when I pictured the “short way down from Ben Nevis.”

  “But we can’t move him in his current condition,” the doctor added.

  “Do you have any idea what caused this?” Tony asked.

  “None. The lab tests are clear that the liver and kidneys are not functioning, but why they’ve ceased to function at this particular time, we don’t know.” The doctor turned to Fallon. “Is he a heavy drinker, Mrs. Sinclair?”

  “Yes. I’ve been telling him for years to cut down.”

  “The liver was probably in a weakened state already, and then perhaps a virus, something he ate, something happened, and it started a chain reaction. A snowball effect.”

  Lettie pushed through a stairwell door and waved to me. As she approached, the doctor took his leave of us and retreated down the corridor. I needed to talk to him. I tossed a quick “back in a minute” in Lettie’s direction and scurried off, chasing the white coat.

  “Excuse me, doctor.” I tugged at his sleeve. “Is it possible that Dr. Sinclair is suffering from mushroom poisoning?”

  The doctor stopped dead in his tracks and stared at me. He had sparkly brown eyes and a lively face. “Why? Do /y. ou suspect mushrooms?”

  “We all had mushroom soup for dinner on Thursday evening.” I explained who “we all” was. “The rest of us were sick that night and part of the next day, but Dr. Sinclair never did seem to come out of it. Of course, we can’t be sure it was the mushrooms that made us sick, but I know some of them had been picked in the wild by the castle’s handyman, and the illness seems to have affected only those who ate the soup.”

  “What were your symptoms?”

  “Stomach cramps, vomiting, nausea.”

  “I know very little about mushroom poisoning, Mrs …”

  “Lamb. Dotsy Lamb.” I smiled and he smiled back. He had the most charming dimple on one side of his mouth.

  “Aye. Do you have a minute? Come to my office. It’s down the hall.” He
ushered me into a cluttered office and ran his hand along a row of hefty medical books. He pulled out one with a title that included the word “Toxicology,” laid it on his desk, and turned to the index. I stood behind him awkwardly while he read. He hadn’t offered me a seat, and I thought it might be presumptuous of me to take one.

  “This is going to take me a while,” he said, “but I can see that, with mushrooms, you could be talking about several different toxins as well as some psychoactive chemicals.”

  “You mean hallucinogens?”

  “Aye. Magic mushrooms, they call them.” He looked up from the book and winked at me. “The problem is that, within a few hours or a day, the liver will have altered most of these chemicals into various metabolites, that is, various break-down products. But the lab may be able to find these break-down products for us. I’ll put them to work on it.”

  “Will it make any difference in the outcome for Dr. Sinclair?”

  He led me to the door. “I fear it won’t, at this stage. After two and a half days, what’s done is done.”

  I went back to Lettie, Tony, and Fallon. I still didn’t know the doctor’s name.

  * * * * *

  “You have to drive home, Dotsy,” Lettie told me on our way out. “They gave me a pain killer and made me sign a paper saying I wouldn’t drive for eight hours.”

  “How do you feel?”

  “Fine. They had to stitch me up, and they said I was lucky I hadn’t driven the pencil completely through the roof of my mouth. It could have gone right into my brain!”

  “That beats damaging something you use.”

  Lettie gave me a playful jab. “What happened to that nice policeman?”

  We were in the parking lot by this time, and I hadn’t the vaguest recollection of where I had left the car. I sniffed the air for the smell of burning clutch, and spotted the little car under a tree, straddling two parking spaces. “Oh, right. What did happen to him? He should have at least written us a ticket. Shouldn’t we pay for the sign we trashed?”