by Madelyn Alt
She was looking at me as though she thought I’d done it on purpose, to steal her thunder. “Well, I didn’t exactly mean to do it, Mel. Jeez.” I explained briefly how it had happened.
Mel sighed. “Leave it to you to try to be healthy and hurt yourself in the process.”
Steff evidently thought this was the perfect time for her to exit, before things got even less pretty. She leaned down and gave me a kiss on the cheek. “Don’t let ’em get you down,” she whispered into my ear. Straightening again, she waved.
“See you, Mrs. O’Neill. Mel. Cute babies, by the way.”
My mother waited until she had left the room before telling Mel, “She always was a pretty girl. A little too much for her own good, I think.”
“She could be so much prettier if she straightened that curly hair of hers.” Mel jumped in with her two cents. “Maybe add some blond highlights. And losing a few pounds wouldn’t hurt, either.”
That did it. Mel was officially, certifiably crazy. Steff’s hair was gorgeous and unique and didn’t need to be a cookie-cutter copy of every desperate housewife out there in Stony Mill Suburbia. And her petite figure was curvalicious, yes, but only in the best way possible. We should all be so lucky. So either Mel had gone off the deep end at long last, or maybe it was just the tidal wave of postbaby hormones—one could always hope.
“Never mind that now. We have bigger fish to fry,” Mom said prosaically. “I suppose we could make room in Grandpa’s efficiency apartment.”
“For what?” That was me, clueless as usual.
She raised her eyebrows at me. “Well, you can’t exactly get around your apartment in that cast, can you? All those stairs down? One misstep and you could be lying there at the bottom in a heap for the good Lord to watch over in good faith, waiting for someone to come along and find you. And who knows how long that could take?”
I stared at her. She couldn’t be serious. “Grandpa doesn’t have space for a roomie.”
Mel was no help at all. She was too busy smirking down at the baby in her arms and waiting for the explosion. So much for the nice moment the two of us had shared this morning. And it had been so convincing, too.
“We can always make room for family and people in need.”
How about people in need of a new personality, like Mel? Did that count?
Eh, probably not.
“Excuse me, I have to go check in with work,” I said, already wheeling myself toward the door. I knocked over a stack of magazines in the process, but there was no help for it. They went sliding half under the bed. “Oops, sorry, didn’t mean to do that.”
Thank goodness the door to the hall was propped open, or I would have been in real trouble. Managing a wheelchair wasn’t as hard as it looked, but it did have its tricks. I was just grateful I only had to use it until I was able to get crutches, or have someone bring a pair to me. To Do Numero Uno on my agenda.
Well, maybe Numero Dos. First I really needed to figure out how I was going to live with this monstrosity on my leg.
Down in the family waiting room for the second time in two days, I plugged in my cell phone charger, which Steff had been so kind as to retrieve for me from my car before she left, and powered up. Several text messages popped up as soon as I turned it back on:
#1: Hey, guess you’re not up yet, Minnie woke me up with a tongue in my ear. Sexy.
#2: Still sleeping? Lucky u. :) Be gone most of day. Txt when u can, can’t guarantee reception. Have to go help Unc Lou wl load
of—The message cut off. Well, at least he wasn’t hanging by the phone, wondering where the heck I was and why I hadn’t called.
#3: Oh my goodness, your friend Stephanie just told me the news. I’m so sorry, ducks. What can I do to help? Liss for that one. Of course.
#4: Maggie! Oh! Ow! Feel better! Classic Evie. Carpenter, that is. Sweet as ever. She’d been helping out at Enchantments until recently when the Stony Mill Gazette (via Margo Dickerson-Craig, I strongly suspected) spilled the beans about Liss and her paranormal proclivities. Evie’s mom had yanked her out of her after-school job at the store without so much as a by-your-leave. But Evie still somehow managed to be around on an almost-daily basis. Funny how that worked.
#5: Ooooooooh, ouch! Busted! Literally! Sorry, bad pun. ROFLMAO. And, classic Tara, who never let a chance for a demonstration of her renowned sarcastic wit pass her by. Good thing she had Evie’s influence to temper her tendency to walk the fence between light and dark.
#6: Tara got ahold of me, Maggie-sweet, we’re on our way back. Don’t worry, we’ll figure things out. Sigh. Marcus again, just minutes ago. I texted back to let him know that I was okay, not to risk life or limb hurrying back, and that I would call or text if or when I knew where I would be later on. When he sent me back a quickie text in reply a moment later that promised to kiss it and make it all better, I had to smile. Big time.
I phoned Liss first.
“Enchantments Antiques and Fine—”
“You have no idea how much I wish I had just gone into work this morning as usual,” I interjected before she could complete the usual greeting. “No idea.”
“Maggie! Darling! How’s the ankle? Oh, you poor thing. It must be absolutely excruciating.”
“I don’t feel a thing,” I told her breezily. “They gave me a shot of something that took it all away. Now, I don’t know how long that’s going to last, so I’m enjoying it while I can.” I sighed. “I feel so guilty, being away from the store today. I know we have a million things going on.”
“All of which will be going on tomorrow and the next day and the day after that and the day after that . . .”
“I get the picture. Are you telling me don’t worry?”
“Precisely.”
“Hm. Well, I’ll try.”
“The girls have promised to come in after school to help out. Including Evie.” Liss laughed. “It seems our little psychic angel is far more rebellious than she has been given credit for. It is always the quiet ones, it seems. Is there anything I can do for you, darling?”
“Well . . . that just so happens to be one of the reasons I’m calling. The other being to keep myself sane while being mired in the trenches with my mother and sister.”
“I heard about the babies. I really must be getting old. I didn’t remember that your sister was having twins.”
“Neither did I. But that’s a story for another day.”
Liss chuckled. “Wonderful. I do love a good story.”
I had a feeling we were both going to love this one. And I would tell it, just as soon as I had all of the details myself, straight from the source. To Do Number Three.
“Okay,” I said, getting back down to business. “It seems that one of the minor annoyances of having a broken ankle is having this massive, weighty lump on the end of your leg. It’s called . . . a cast.”
“I have actually heard of that, yes.” Her humor crackled over the airwaves.
“Yes, well, it occurs to me that I live in a basement apartment. Down a dirty concrete stairwell that catches lawn debris every time it storms, and I will be on crutches.”
“Hm. I think I see your predicament.”
“And it’s a doozy.”
“It doesn’t have to be, you know.”
“My mother wants me to move into the garage with my grandfather,” I told her. “I love my grandpa, but living anywhere near my mother after having worked so hard to get out from under her thumb does not sound like my idea of moving forward in my life.”
“I knew I should have insisted that Geoffrey install an elevator at the house when we built it,” Liss remarked, referring to her late husband. “Of course, he thought I was being dramatic. It would certainly solve your current dilemma.”
Too bad for me. Sigh. Living at Liss’s for a time would have been heaven compared to Ye Olde Homestead.
“Don’t give up too soon,” Liss said soothingly. “I’m sure we’ll be able to find a solution if we put our heads togethe
r, and of course you’re welcome to sleep on one of the sofas downstairs as a last resort. Let me do a bit of calling around and I’ll ring you back.”
I wanted to believe that an acceptable solution could be found, but I had a sinking feeling that tomorrow I would find myself waking up on the creaky old fold-out bed back home, listening to my mother plan her day around her church activities, Grandpa G, and Mel, while Grandpa G acted up with gusto and my father and I shrank into the fading wallpaper, hoping not to be noticed. It was either that or learn how to get really good on crutches really fast and hope that my mother’s prediction of a tumble was just her usual pessimism run amok. I’d rather stay in this unpadded wheelchair in a dark corner of Mel’s hospital room for the duration of her stay than to move back home for any length of time.
I wondered if anyone would notice a woman with a bright yellow lump of a cast?
Hm. Perhaps I should have gone with basic black after all.
Chapter 11
Another text message came in as I held my phone in my hand, weighing my next move. Distracted, I clicked through the screens:
Mags, I did a little digging for you. There were 2 deaths at hospital last night. Call when you get off the phone. Steff, digging? I had to call.
Locating a set of crutches was going to have to wait while I gave in to curiosity. I dialed Steff’s cell phone.
“Two?” I asked, just as soon as she answered. Two, the same night Mel’s twins were born. Two for two. I shook my head at the irony.
“Two,” she confirmed. “Now it could be nothing, coincidence, nothing more. And it probably is just that. But in light of what you overheard, I just thought I’d do a little quick check with a friend of mine who handles the paperwork for the morgue. And our hospital’s so small and all of the truly complicated things usually go to the big hospitals in the city, and two separate deaths on the same night . . . well, it just doesn’t happen too often.”
Two. Could it be? I wondered. Could one of them actually be related to the now infamous-in-my-mind elevator conversation? And, I hated to even think it, but I didn’t know if Jordan Everett’s death had been accidental or suspicious. It couldn’t be related, could it? Was there a killer on the loose? I shivered.
“Do you know the situations?” I asked her. “I mean, the deaths occurred in the hospital. There was nothing about what I overheard that could guarantee that whatever it was that they intended to do would happen at the hospital itself, so they might not even be connected.”
“One was in the ER. Heart failure, I think, with a possibility of it being drug related. The other was a woman on my floor who’d been sick quite a while with cancer. You’re right, they don’t sound incredibly suspicious. One sudden, one lingering. And with the possible drug-related one, well . . . I don’t know, Maggie. I don’t think they’re what you’re looking for, but I thought I’d mention it anyway.”
After my initial excitement—not that two people had died (never that!), but that perhaps I was not merely imagining things due to the stress of the situation—I felt my optimism slip.
Steff went on. “Well, it was a thought, anyway. Maggie . . . you don’t think there was any way that you could have been hearing . . . spirit voices, do you? Not real, live people?”
“I’m positive,” I told her firmly. I mean, give me a little credit to understand the difference between daydreams and reality, please. “They were definitely not of the otherworldly variety.” Even if they were hollow sounding and faraway and . . . Oy, continue on that line of thinking and I’d start to wonder myself!
“Okay. I’ll keep my ears to the ground,” Steff assured me. “Just in case.”
“All right. You’ll tell me what you find out?”
“Well . . . actually no.”
I frowned into thin air. “What do you mean?”
“I’ve got to be careful, Maggie. In this day and age of patient confidentiality? I’m not supposed to be digging at all because I have no legal right to the information and no sanctioned need to know.”
She was right about that much at least, and I knew it. “I don’t want you to get into trouble over this.”
“That doesn’t mean I can’t look into it a little more. Just in case. Rachel down at the morgue does owe me for the time I caught her smoking, um, shall we say ‘Martian cigarettes’ down there. Not that I would use that against her, really, but these things do come in handy sometimes.” She paused delicately. “However, what that does mean is that I am absolutely not going to be telling you anything specific.”
A little exasperated, I asked, “Well, could you blink once for yes, twice for no? Put a lantern in the window? Anything?” I was the one who overheard the conversation in the first place. It seemed only fair.
“If there is anything suspicious about either death, anything at all in the coroner’s report, someone in the appropriate channels will hear about it, Maggie. I promise you that. But that’s all I can promise.” She cleared her throat. “And by the way? That does not include Danny, so please don’t be mentioning anything about this to him.”
Keeping something from Dan? That didn’t sound like Steff.
“I don’t like keeping secrets from him,” she said, echoing my thoughts, “but he’s too close to finishing his residency. I absolutely will not risk his involvement in any way.”
Her lioness approach to preserving Dan’s integrity was nothing short of vintage Steff, champion of the underdog, in the same way that she had always protected the nerdy kid on the playground when someone threatened to break his glasses. “Okay, not a problem,” I promised. “Danny won’t hear a thing from me.”
“Thank you.”
“Oh, by the way,” I said, wanting to change the subject to something a little less touchy, “my mom is trying to make me move in with them while my ankle heals. I may need you to kill me before she can take me home. Nothing fancy or dramatic. A simple, old-fashioned draught of poison in my tea will suffice.”
Steff laughed, which is exactly the reaction I was hoping for. “Self-fulfillment of a death prophecy is not allowed, Mags. That’s kind of, you know, cheating.”
“Ha-ha.”
“Well, when Danny breaks up with me, you can always move in with me,” she said, gloomy again.
“He’s most definitely not going to break up with you, silly girl. And you’re on the third floor. How is that supposed to help?”
She laughed, too. “I guess you’re right. About that at least.”
We hung up then with a promise from Steff to check in with me soon . . . just to be sure I hadn’t rolled my wheelchair off the most convenient cliff face. Which wasn’t even an option, since we live in flat-ass Indiana. Presumably that meant I was screwed, if Liss’s secret notion didn’t work out. I was afraid to cross my fingers for fear of jinxing the whole deal. Ol’ Murphy had been riding my tail far too close for comfort lately. I was going to have to do something about that.
I tried to reach Marcus but instead received the canned message that the cell phone user could not be reached at this time, please try your call again later. Wherever he’d gone with Uncle Lou, he must be in and out of service areas. As an afterthought, I took a picture of my cast with my cell phone and sent it through as a photo text with the caption, “Ow.”
Sighing, I reached over to unplug my cell phone charger from the wall. It wasn’t easy. The cast weighed about five hundred pounds (my mother wasn’t the only one who liked to get her hyperbole on when the situation called for it) and wouldn’t cooperate. I was forced to roll halfway over in the chair, wrangle one knee up beneath me on the collapsible seat, and try to stretch that way. Admittedly, this probably wasn’t the safest posture, but without anyone to do my reaching for me, and without any way of wheeling the chair closer to the wall, I did what I had to do.
Everything would have been all right if the weight on my ankle hadn’t suddenly shifted sideways, throwing me completely off balance. I caught myself from falling entirely, thank goodness—ow—but coul
dn’t figure out how to get myself back upright.
This was going to take some maneuvering.
The door to the waiting room opened. In scuffed a young woman in a fluffy pink bathrobe, her rounded tummy suggesting that she was a recent maternity patient. She saw me leaning over the arm of my wheelchair and froze.
“Oh my goodness. Are you all right?”
She hurried over, her flip-flops flapping, concern written on her brow and in her dark eyes. Or at least it looked like concern. It was kind of hard to tell from my upside-down vantage point. Heck, I was lucky I even took the time to register they were brown.
“Uh, hi,” I said.
“Can I help you with that? Here, let me get you up.”
She extended a hand, waiting until I took it and allowed her to pull me upright.
Her long dark hair had fallen forward into her face, a straight, thick sheaf of it. It was the kind of hair I’d always dreamed of, a wish made more poignant by the fact that it was a style my light brown waves could never in a million years emulate. Only after years of tears and drama had I at long last come to terms with that sad truth.
“Thanks,” I told her, a little embarrassed. “I wasn’t quite sure how I was going to get myself out of that one. I was just trying to unplug my charger. Guess this thing is going to take some getting used to.” Wryly, I reached down and rapped my knuckles on my lovely new boon companion.
“Oh, did you just break it?” she asked.
I nodded. “I was here with my sister, Melanie. She just had twins.”
“Oh, she’s the one!” the young woman exclaimed. “I had my son right before her, I guess. And I’m right down the hall from her. I heard her little ones crying just a little while ago. She’s got her hands full with two.”