But it came too freely. There mustn’t be anything on the other end. How could he get to her? Or maybe she wasn’t even in there-
It snapped taut, and he could barely haul it up any farther.
“Oh, God no.” He choked back a sob, tightened his grip, and strained to pull as hard as he could. But his hold kept slipping on an icy film that had coated the water-soaked nylon. He looped the rope around his hands, only to have it bite into his skin and cut off the circulation. Yet he raised the load, hand over hand, the effort making his head spin. Every few seconds he glanced over to the building for any sign of the man who had run off. He kept tabs on the whereabouts of the bleeder by his shrieks, though they were growing weaker.
His forearms vibrated as he taxed the limits of their strength, and he whispered, “Lucy!” over and over, as if calling her name could coax her to him, until the trembling stopped and he managed to pull some more.
Her body broke the surface with an echoing splash and the clink of chains. He didn’t dare get close enough to the edge to see her for fear of losing his footing and sliding in himself. He tugged all the harder, but managed only another four or five feet before the weight overpowered him. “Lucy!” he sobbed, irrational with fright, knowing she’d never answer. The noise of water streaming back into the well sounded like a dozen running faucets.
Without buoyancy to help him, he could barely hold her. His finger joints locked with the cold; his arms shook from the extreme effort. The rope started to slip from his grasp.
“No!” he screamed, twisting it yet another time around his arms. Even his feet slid as he tried to get traction to support the weight.
He quickly looked around for something to anchor her to. One of the medium-sized trees stood about twenty feet away. Feeding the rope through his palms, he managed to make his way over to the trunk and, using it like a winch, circled it three times, then tied off on it without letting her drop any lower.
In seconds he was back at the well, peering over the edge with his light. His knees buckled at the sight. She hung by her heels below him, her arms bound, her head trailing lifelessly a foot above the water, her hair pooled on the surface like black seaweed.
With no thought but to reach her, he straddled the rope with his back to the well, grabbed it with both hands, and let himself over the edge. He intended to rappel down the stone lining, but with the ice he slid most of the way, scraping the walls, abrading his palms, then ricocheting off her legs before plunging into the frigid water. He bellowed at the shock of the cold, but the water closed over him, swallowing the sound.
He had the presence of mind to clamp a hand over his headlamp so it wouldn’t come off, and quickly fought his way back to the surface. The beam never so much as flickered. Immediately he saw her face above him, upside down, covered in a silver glaze. He reached up to it, and at his touch thin flakes of ice fell off her like scales. Underneath, her skin taut with the gray-white pallor of a corpse, her eyes looked made of glass and stared off to one side, lifeless as they glistened through the remaining film of frost.
His sobs, unstoppable now, broke from deep within him, like retching, and racked him from head to toe. “Oh, God, please no” he cried, his mind hurtling between praying for a miracle and knowing she was dead.
With one hand he grabbed on to the chain that dangled from her heels into the water. At its lower end, a few feet under the surface, he felt the anchor they’d used as a weight and knelt on its flanges, bringing his head level to hers. With his free arm he clutched her to him. The meaty horror of what he held blasted all rational thought out of his brain, and his thinking collapsed in on itself like an imploding star. Yet a fragment of him still rebelled, refused against all logic to accept the clammy reality in his arms. He summoned enough of his training to slip his fingertips along the side of her neck and push them into skin that had the consistency of cold Plasticine. The vessels within lay lifeless as he counted off the seconds. Just hours earlier he’d felt them pump with excitement as he’d explored every dimple and depression of her with his mouth.
He slammed his fist into the middle of her chest three times, then palpated over the carotid again. Sometimes the impact of a “chest thump” could restart a fibrillating heart.
He knew it to be a useless gesture, but had to try. The desperate ploy extended hope by a few more seconds and kept him in a universe where she might be alive just a little longer.
He’d reached twelve when he felt a solitary impulse.
Could his mind have imagined the absent beat? Perhaps it had been a twitch or throb of an artery in his own finger.
He swallowed his cries, stilled his breathing, and waited, once again counting seconds, the spaces between each number stretching to an eternity.
Another beat.
He waited for a third.
Again a sluggish rise pushed up against his fingers.
Instantly he had his lips on hers. They felt like wet clay, but he molded his to form a seal, and blew. The resistance of her lungs made air squeak out the side of his mouth, but he saw her chest rise. As he continued to give her breaths, he mentally ticked off everything he could remember about hypothermia.
People had survived up to an hour submerged in ice water. He’d no idea how long she’d been under.
That she’d recovered a pulse at all was better than a full-out cardiac arrest. The slow rate might even be protective, reducing her heart’s oxygen requirements. And cold could lower the metabolism of her other vital organs so that they might survive the subsequent reduction in blood flow. As for her lungs, her airway ought to have protected them from filling with water, seizing shut at the first influx of liquid, the same reflex that kept fluid out of the lungs in the womb.
His mind raced, dredging up every hopeful scrap he could summon, then clung to the science of it. His teeth chattered, and he shook with such force that all his muscles, including those in his vocal cords, snapped into spasm. Each time he exhaled into her lungs, a plaintive, tremulous moan issued from his throat, the mournful sound filling her chest, then echoing toward the pale, barely visible opening above their heads. He listened for the staccato noise of helicopter blades or the wail of police sirens over his own pathetic keening, but to no avail.
Yet he continued to deliver air to her, puff after puff, settling into the rhythm despite being half-submerged and clinging to the chains with one hand, supporting her head with the other, all the while precariously perched on the anchor.
He paused between breaths to quickly shine his beam of light into her pupils. From the middle of her deathlike stare came a slow sluggish constriction. Yes! She still had life in her brain.
He even went so far as to lay out a treatment plan for when the air ambulance arrived: Intubate and ventilate her. Slowly warm her body core with heated oxygen and warm IVs. Raise her temperature no more than two degrees Fahrenheit an hour as per protocol. Visualizing this ritual made it seem closer at hand. And at the hospital, if need be, they could even put her on a heart-lung machine to warm her blood directly.
I can bring her back, he told himself. She can survive this.
Such were the mental games he played to keep despair at bay and blot out his more objective clinical voice that told him nothing would work.
And I’ll protect her from overeager residents, he continued in the same vein, filling his mind with anything to avoid thinking she was finished.
Keep them from loading her up with adrenaline and atropine, that’ll be the trick – He stopped in midthought.
The water crept up his chest, and the top of her head edged closer to the surface.
They were sinking.
Their weight was stretching the nylon rope.
His panic surged.
Within seconds he felt the icy water at his neck and watched it inch past her hairline toward her eyes.
He got off his knees and crouched on the flanges, then pulled her to him, trying to bend her at the waist so her back was on his lap and she’d be fa
ceup. That way he could keep her head above water and still give her mouth-to-mouth ventilation. He moved her into position, but her entire body, already stiff with cold, wouldn’t flex properly. When he bent down to deliver another lungful of air, the waterline lapped over her face.
Where was Dan?
What if the pilots couldn’t fly because of the storm, or took too long, or couldn’t find this godforsaken place?
Rapidly losing strength, his teeth chattered so fiercely now that they clicked against hers. He tried to recall what his textbooks said about survival times in frigid water as far as staying conscious, but his memory no longer functioned that well, a sign that his body heat was quickly dropping.
Choking, he pulled her higher onto his thighs.
Again he scanned the pale circle and strained to hear the sounds of rotors or approaching sirens.
Nothing – only smaller circles of snow reeling and floating in total silence.
Come soon, he prayed, and filled her lungs yet again.
The ghostly opening peered down on them, offering no more hope than a malevolent, empty eye.
5:15 A.M.
New York City Hospital
Earl had to escape. The one person he couldn’t defend himself against was Melanie Collins.
He tried to call Janet. If anything happened to him, he wanted someone to know the truth. But he found his phone line dead.
He immediately summoned his nurse.
“Dr. Collins’s latest orders are for complete rest,” Mrs. White, his cherry-cheeked angel informed him, delivering the news with an emphatic stare over the top of her tiny square-rimmed spectacles. “She phoned at midnight to check how you were doing. When she learned you’d been making late-night calls and complaining about palpitations, she read the riot act. No ingoing or outgoing communications, period.”
“Now wait a minute-”
“Told us she’d put you out and intubate you if she had to, just so you’d get some rest.”
“No way!”
“Talk it over with her. She’ll be here at seven for morning rounds – you can set your clock by her.”
She turned to leave.
And if he told this red-cheeked minder that Melanie Collins might be trying to kill him?
What makes you think a crazy thing like that? she would ask.
Because Melanie Collins may have killed Kelly McShane.
And why would she have done such a thing?
Because as Melanie basked in the adulation she garnered for nailing hard-to-diagnose illnesses, Kelly must have sensed the same all-about-me afterglow she’d seen her mother exude when people gushed over her for taking care of Kelly’s mysterious diseases.
“So?”
So Kelly realized Melanie made patients sick for the purpose of playing the hero later.
At which point Mrs. White would report he’d gone paranoid, giving Melanie the perfect opportunity to shoot him full of major tranquilizers and summon six big orderlies to tie him down if he protested.
Better he just walk out the door, then sort out the details once he got beyond her power.
He sat on the side of the bed and gingerly tested his legs.
They wobbled as he stood, but held him.
He took a few trial steps, and they nearly buckled.
No matter.
He turned off the alarms on the monitor, shut it down, and disconnected himself. How long would it take the night nurses to see his screen on their central console had gone blank? A while, he hoped.
Next he ripped out the needles in his arm, the IV bag being almost empty. Hoping he’d received enough potassium to at least stabilize his heart, he pressed on the puncture site with his thumb to staunch the flow of blood and hesitantly walked over to the bureau where they’d put his clothes. He started to dress, first pulling on his socks.
“Going somewhere, Dr. Garnet?” said a man’s voice at the door, and Charles Braden III stepped into his room.
Primed on adrenaline, pain, and no sleep, Earl reacted like a cornered animal. “What the hell are you doing here?” he demanded. He backed up to the bed and slid his hand under the covers, his fingers closing around the fistful of syringes he’d planted, needle first, into the mattress. His revelation about Melanie might change some of his ideas about how the Bradens fitted in the picture, but not enough that he suddenly felt safe around them.
Charles started toward him.
“I’d stay where you are!” Earl said.
The man stopped in midstride. “Why, I just intended to sit down-”
“Tell me what you want.”
In the dim light, the steel-brush silver of Charles’s hair made him seem more formidable, as if he were bristling with quills. “All right, but perhaps you better sit down. What I’m going to say will come as a bit of a shock, and you don’t look so good.”
Earl stayed leaning against the bed, his hand still clutched around his makeshift weapon. “I’m fine where I am.”
Braden shrugged, and sank his hands deep into the pockets of the white coat he wore over his suit as if he were still a practicing doctor. “I’m here to inform you that late yesterday afternoon Dr. Tommy Leannis approached my son with the news that you were the man who went off with Kelly in a taxi the night before her disappearance. Is this true?”
Earl felt the blood drain from his head.
He’d end up being handed to the cops for Kelly’s murder after all – by Charles and Chaz Braden, goddamn it. Exotic theories about Melanie Collins wouldn’t protect him now, especially since he had no proof other than a used IV bag with bicarb in it and a bunch of false-normal potassium readings. The rest was all just speculation.
Instinctively he tried to bluff. “What are you talking about-”
“Don’t play with me. I’ve already heard your denials. Leannis gave my son a tape of a conversation in which you went on at length about it not being true.”
Earl swallowed, his mouth going drier by the second, his heart giving the inside of his ribs another going over. Like a man just shot who tries to fathom the damage, he cast about in his mind for what he’d said to that weasel Leannis, dreading he may have let something slip that would incriminate himself.
“Sure you don’t want to sit down?” Braden said. “You’re starting to look worse than when I came in.”
“No, I’m fine, except I can’t seriously believe you’d take what Leannis said-”
“I also heard the same allegation from the biggest gossip in the hospital, Lena Downie in medical records.”
Earl’s face grew warm. If that woman was blabbing about it, he’d be the talk of NYCH in no time. Whether the police believed the story or not, his credibility, especially now when he needed it most, would be toast. “Oh, my God.”
“What’s even more interesting is who told her.”
Earl felt another surge of pain shoot through his gut. He fought to stay on his feet, a prickle of cold sweat sticking his hospital gown to his skin. “Told her?”
“Yeah. Turns out it’s the same person who gave the notion to Tommy Leannis.”
“But you said Melanie Collins did that.”
“Right. She picked him because, as everyone in the hospital knows, Leannis is a brown-nosing fool. He’d try anything to curry favor with our family in the hope our influence might throw some fresh meat to that cut-and-tuck business he has the nerve to call the practice of medicine. She probably figured he’d come running to us in some sleazy manner with the news, and he didn’t disappoint. Telling Lena Downie as well would be Melanie’s way of assuring a more general distribution.”
“You mean-”
“Melanie Collins is setting you up to take the blame for Kelly’s murder. Not that I figure she intends to let you live long enough to go to trial. Smear you by innuendo as the killer, I suspect, is her plan, then you conveniently die of some apparent complication from your infection, and the case is closed. Nobody’s going to look too closely at loose ends when the prime suspect is dead, especially i
n a twenty-seven-year-old murder.”
Earl wasn’t sure he’d heard correctly.
“Setting me up? You mean you don’t believe I did it. And you know what she’s doing to me?”
“How she specifically intends to make you die, no. But I’ve been through enough of her charts in the last few days to get a pretty good idea of her repertoire. She’s a regular alchemist when it comes to fiddling with drugs and eliciting their side effects, altering sugars, playing with acid-base balance, shifting potassium and sodium levels up and down like elevators-”
“Wait a minute. You make it sound like there’s been a lot more cases than the two Kelly discovered.”
“The woman’s been setting up her ‘triumphs’ for a couple of decades. Glory-kills, I suppose you could call the ones who didn’t make it. Deaths didn’t really matter to her, as long as she got kudos for nailing the diagnosis.”
“My God. But how did you get onto her?”
“I started with the same two charts you did, and saw the same patterns. I also had access to her student evaluations. I remembered she had been something less than a star during her rotation in obstetrics. My staff nicknamed her ‘Fumbles’ they were so afraid she’d drop a baby. I also looked up the other departmental assessments of her. Borderline. So how does someone so mediocre get so good? I asked myself.”
Earl listened with a mixture of relief and wariness. “And what about the rest of the story?” he asked. Braden seemed about to clear him, but would he help Kelly’s lover, or make him pay?
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