Cited to Death

by Meg Perry

  Oh my God. Pete had almost died. I couldn’t make a sound, but I thrashed around a little bit. He got my meaning and shook his head. “It’s okay. It went through my deltoid muscle, near the skin, didn’t even hit any bone.”

  It most definitely wasn’t okay, but we’d have to discuss it later. I blinked once.

  “They've arrested Wray for the murder of Dan and the attempted murder of you, me, and Ben."

  Ben was okay? I needed to communicate. I made a writing motion.

  "Uh - okay, hang on." Pete stuck his head out of the curtain and asked for a pen and paper. He came back with it and handed it to me. I was at a weird angle to write, but I managed to spell out “Ben’s okay?”

  “Yeah. He’s got a concussion and lost a good bit of blood, but he’ll be fine.”

  I wrote, “Wray confessed?”

  “No. She’s lawyered up, and Andy still isn’t talking. But since we’re all alive and well, she has no chance of getting away with anything.”

  I blinked once and laid down the paper. The burst of adrenaline that had shot through me when I saw Pete was already failing me. Pete started to say something else, but Melissa came back in. “Sorry, guys, but I’ve got to limit you to ten minutes per hour.”

  “Okay.” Pete kissed my forehead. “I’ll see you later. Don’t go anywhere.”

  I’d have stuck my tongue out at him if I could.

  I must have dozed back off, because the next thing I knew, my dad was in the room. "Hey, you." He reached over and squeezed my hand. "How are you feeling?"

  I made a see-saw motion with my hand and pantomimed pulling the breathing tube out.

  My dad nodded. "Yeah - your doctor stuck his head in a little while ago and said he'd be back. I think he's planning to do that."

  I picked up the paper and pen from where they’d fallen on my lap. “What time is it?”

  “It’s 1:30. You went back to sleep for a while.”

  Jeez. I did more than doze off, then. I wrote, “Any confessions?”

  “Nope, not yet. Although Kevin figures they can get the young guy to agree to a deal. His parents are leaning on him pretty hard to do that.”

  The curtain parted, and Dr. Weikal strode in. "There he is, wide awake! How are you feeling?"

  I made the same see-saw motion and pointed at the tube.

  "Yes. First I need to take a look at your oxygenation..." He pressed a button on one of the machines to my right, and a strip of paper printed out. He looked it over. "Very good. You've been at more than 90% saturation for several hours now." He moved to my side. "Okay, here's what I'm going to do. I'm going to unhook the ventilator, and listen to your lungs while you've still got the tube in. If it sounds good, we'll take it out." He unfastened the tube and moved it to the side. I took in a breath on my own. My rib muscles were pretty sore. It felt a bit strange to not have the machine kick in. I'd gotten that used to it in such a short time.

  "Okay, sit forward a little for me." I did. Dr. Weikal put his stethoscope in his ears and placed the flat piece on my back. "Take a deep breath, in and out."

  I breathed several times. He moved the stethoscope around, listening closely, then stepped back and pulled the earpieces out. "Sounds good. Does it feel all right?"

  I nodded.

  "Okay, then, let's get that thing out." He slowly and gently pulled all the tape loose from my face, deflated the little balloon that was hanging from the tube, and got a firm grip on the tube itself. "Now, take in another breath - now breathe out." As I breathed out, he pulled. Ugh. It felt as bad as I had imagined, but it was over quickly. I had a coughing fit, and Dr. Weikal poured me a glass of water. "Okay?"

  I drank, handed the glass back, and managed to croak out, "Okay." It hurt to talk.

  "Your throat and voice are going to be a little scratchy for a while, but that should clear up pretty quickly. We’ll keep you on liquids for today - milkshakes, soup, ice cream. If everything goes well for the rest of the day, you can go to a regular room in the morning."

  “Not home?”

  “Not tomorrow. You were in severe status asthmaticus. If everything still looks good tomorrow, you can go home Monday. Stay hydrated. Respiratory therapy will be around with a nebulizer treatment soon.”

  I leaned back against the pillows. "Awesome."

  He grinned. "Great. The nurse will come in a few minutes to take this away-" he patted the ventilator - "and hook up a tube to give you some oxygen flow through your nose. I'll come back and check on you this evening." He waved at us and left.

  Nurse Melissa came to collect the ventilator and my dad. I spent the next several hours getting nebulizers, drinking water, and eating ice cream. I hadn’t thought about peeing until I’d been awake a few hours, at which point Pete helpfully pointed out that I had a catheter in. Great – another tube that would have to be pulled out.

  That happened the next morning – yeowch! – and then I was transferred to a regular room. I was still getting nebulizers but didn’t have to use the oxygen any more. My oxygenation had dropped back into the 80s after the ventilator tube came out, but never got lower than that. And I did get to go home on Monday morning.

  I went home to Pete’s long enough to pack, then went home with my dad to Oceanside. I spent the next week there, breathing in the clean sea air and helping my dad in the garden. Pete came down on Wednesday after SMC’s graduation. The following Monday, June 18, we went home for good.

  Almost four weeks after the fire, Kevin and Abby moved back in to our apartment. I kept paying my third of the rent so they could afford to stay in our apartment until the lease was up. It worked out okay since Pete didn't have a mortgage for me to help out with.

  Alana Wray maintained her innocence for about a week. Then, under pressure from his parents, Andy Mitchell gave in and told the police that Alana had hired him to sabotage my computer and trash my office. It turned out that Alana’s older sister, Andy’s mother, had been estranged from Alana for years, and Andy’s dad hated Alana’s guts. They weren’t about to let their son take the rap for his aunt.

  Better than that, Andy knew the identity of "Ed," who had beaten me up and, as it turned out, had been following me from the time I requested the Welsh article. He’d also been the one who had slashed my tires at Cedars. "Ed" was a cousin of Alana's, Wayne Edward Sobrowski. The police found him easily enough. He refused to talk until he found out that Alana was going to blame him for everything, then he spilled the whole story. Andy didn't get jail time, but he did get two years' probation and lost his job. Sobrowski pled guilty to conspiracy to commit aggravated arson and was sentenced to twelve years. Mauro Politano, who'd broken in to the apartment and condo, was sentenced to eight years in prison for the two first degree burglaries and another eight years for felony arson.

  Once Alana learned that both Andy and Wayne had admitted everything and were prepared to testify against her, she pled guilty to the first degree murder of Dan Christensen and the attempted murders of Ben, Pete, and me. She was sentenced to life without parole and shipped off to Chowchilla.

  Diane DeLong did lose her job in the public schools. Liz heard through the grapevine that she’d gotten hired at a private high school in Riverside and had moved to the Inland Empire. Liz also heard that Diane had dyed her Mohawk light blue.

  Life settled back down into a routine of sorts, even though it was a new routine. Most mornings, Pete and I went for a run, down to the beach and along the beach to the pier and back, sometimes farther. Instead of walking to work, I rode the bus. We still spent most of our Saturdays hiking. Pete cooked, I cleaned. Life was good.

  I went back to work on a Thursday. I was sorting through two weeks of accumulated mail – again! – when Ben Goldstein showed up at my office. He'd sent me a get-well card, but I hadn't seen him since.

  I stood up to greet him. "Hey, how are you? Come in." We shook hands and I offered him a seat.

  "I'm fine, thanks." He looked around my office at the walls lined with books and photos.
"This is nice."

  "Thanks, I like it. What brings you here?"

  "I wanted to touch base. See how you were doing and what had happened with the case."

  I filled him in on the outcome. "And I'm fine, thanks." I smiled at him. "How are you doing?"

  "Oh, okay, I guess. Now that it's all over, it's finally settling in on me that Dan's gone." He looked at his feet. "I really miss him."

  "Yeah. I can't imagine."

  Ben looked up at me, sideways. “He told me that you and he were involved.”

  "Very briefly. Years ago. When I got his letter, it had been three years since I'd seen him."

  He nodded. "He said he was a different person before he met me."

  "Yeah. I - um - I was in his office after he died and saw the picture of the two of you. Looked like you were on an island, somewhere? He looked different in that picture from when I'd known him."

  Ben smiled sadly. "That was a great trip. That was where we really came together as a couple." He sighed and looked out my office door into the distance. "I still can't believe what happened."

  "Yeah. Me either."

  He looked back at me. "I'm leaving town."

  "You are? I guess that's a good idea?"

  "Yeah, it is. The lab is finished, obviously, and I've kind of lost my taste for research." He laughed grimly. “Word has gotten around here about what happened, and even though there's no speculation that I was involved at all, everyone knows I'm innocent, I just think it would be better for me to make a clean start somewhere else."

  "I guess you're right...where are you going?"

  "Baltimore. I'm actually going to practice OB-GYN. Deliver babies and all that." He smiled, a little self-consciously.

  "That's great." I smiled back. "LA's loss will be Baltimore's gain. I hear it's nice there."

  "Yeah. It's on the water, near DC, not far from New York where I have family. Lots of advantages."

  "Well, that's great." I wasn't sure what else to say.

  He looked down and rubbed the carpet with his toe. "I also wanted to thank you for carrying out Dan's request. I don't think I said that before. I know he didn't involve me from the start because he was trying to protect me. And if there wasn't anything to his suspicions, then he wouldn't have had to ever say anything to me about it."

  I considered that. "So he didn't know about the plagiarism already?"

  "No. He suspected it, but he hadn't been able to get the Welsh article in its entirety, so he didn't know for sure. He did know that the calculations in our article didn't add up; he'd gotten that far.” He grimaced. “I went to see Alana before her sentencing. She knew Dan was sniffing around, because she knew that he'd tried to access the Welsh article, and she didn't want to let him get far enough to alert me. And she wasn't sure that he hadn't."

  "So he left you the information that he'd gathered to that point."

  "Yes. And he wrote you the letter, because he was paranoid, but also because he was determined to get to the bottom of it. And he trusted you to do that."

  I was taken aback. "Really?"

  "Yes." Ben smiled, sadly. "He did. I know you and he didn't end well, but he was impressed with your professionalism. Your librarianship, he called it. He said that you were working on his 'problem,' as he called it, and I should talk to you. That I should trust you."

  "Wow." Once again, Dan had surprised me. "I had no idea that he thought of me in any positive terms whatsoever."

  Ben laughed a little. "Yeah, I'm sure you didn't. Dan kept his feelings close to the vest. But that’s what he told me. And there's one thing that Dan was not, and that was a liar."

  "That's very true."

  Ben stood up. “Well, I don’t want to keep you. I’m leaving town tomorrow, and I didn’t want to leave without saying goodbye, and thank you.”

  I stood up too. “Thank you. And good luck. If there’s ever anything I can do for you, let me know.”

  Ben nodded. “I will. And tell Pete goodbye for me as well.”

  I said I would, and Ben left. I glanced at the clock. 12:45 – almost time for my reference shift. I hit the coffee shop for a mochaccino, then met Liz at the desk.

  It wasn’t too busy, now that summer had started. I was working on some research for a faculty member when Clinton appeared.

  “Hi, Clinton.”

  “The word for the day is exultation.” He bowed, and straightened back up.

  Then he winked at me.

  Acknowledgements

  I couldn’t have done this without my fellow members of the Faculty Fiction Writing Group: Becca, Michelle, the two Michael F.’s, and Trey, who all read the first three chapters and gave me great feedback. Thanks, guys! Enormous thanks, as well, to Dustin and Cheryl, who read the entire book and also gave me invaluable feedback. This is a much better book, thanks to them. And extra, special, awesome thanks to Chris, who must have read this four times, and found something to fix every time.

  And thank you to Stephanie Reppas at October Design Co. for the fabulous cover.

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