Chloroform, like ether, had extreme volatility, vaporized rapidly, and practically poured into the bloodstream when inhaled into the lungs. Which meant if she didn't get out of this puddle, ground zero for the fumes, she'd be sleeping in it. And so would the baby.
She unsteadily got back on her feet, blood now dripping from the perforations in her gloves, and, in a wide stance as if walking on ice, began to teeter back toward the offices she'd just left.
Once there, the fumes wouldn't be too bad. She'd call for help on the phone. Just don't breathe in. Only a few seconds more.
She feared most for the baby. A single exposure to chloroform, if it reached high enough concentrations in his blood, could harm the kidneys and liver.
She felt a wave of nausea.
Oh, God, no. The stuff had definitely hit her circulation. That meant it would be in his.
The floor felt less slippery, and she started to run toward where it should be safe. But it surprised her at how concentrated the fumes still were as they continued to burn her eyes, the inside of her nose, the back of her throat. The guy must have dropped a gallon of the liquid.
Her vision began to dim.
No, she mustn't pass out.
She staggered.
She had to make the nearest door.
The heavy wooden monstrosity seemed to hang at the center of a black funnel. It had an electric lock, like all the doors in pathology. Would her card work?
She fished it out of her pocket, inserted it into the slot, and pulled the stainless-steel handle, which reminded her of the one on her mother's old refrigerator.
It opened.
Cold air flowed over her and she gasped it into her lungs.
The ubiquitous fumes that had followed her down the hall filled her chest as well, and she felt as if she'd inhaled fire.
Her head swam.
She managed a step forward, into the morgue, and marveled at her silver breath while she sank to her knees and slid into darkness.
But she could still hear.
A loud click sounded behind her.
Just like her mother's fridge door when it swung shut.
7:00 p.m.
Earl glanced at his watch and swore. He'd planned to be out of here a half hour ago. But when he returned from Hurst's office, a dozen files awaited him on his desk along with a note from Michael Popovitch.
Can you believe this shit? it had said.
And no, he could not.
In each case a resident had committed what could have been a major error- in all, five missed fractures, three unrecognized pneumonias, four failures to correctly interpret an abnormal electrocardiogram. Fortunately, Michael had caught them all in time.
July jitters. Earl signed off on the twelve incident reports. But in the morning he'd ask Thomas to set up appropriate teaching seminars and patch up the holes in the newcomers' knowledge base.
He reached for the phone and called home, expecting to hear a very impatient Janet wanting him there pronto.
The housekeeper said she hadn't heard from her.
Strange.
"Hi, Daddy," Brendan said when she put him on. "When are you going to be here?"
"Twenty minutes."
"Promise?"
"Promise."
Janet must have gotten stuck in the case room. He dialed the extension, knowing it by heart.
"Sorry, Dr. Garnet. She's not here. Haven't seen her in hours."
He called the operator.
"We've been paging her for the last twenty minutes, Dr. Garnet. One of her patients is expecting her up on the floor."
Very strange.
"Do you want us to have her call you if we reach her?" the operator asked.
"Yes, please."
Now where could she be?
He got up from his chair, stretched, and grabbed his briefcase. Maybe she'd already started to drive home, though he doubted she'd forget a patient.
Nevertheless, he dialed her cellular.
"The person you have dialed is unable to come to the phone-"
He hung up. The recording meant she still had it turned off and probably hadn't left the hospital yet.
Well, no point in them both hanging around here.
He switched the light off and left his office. God, his back and legs felt tired. The burden of being hot and cooped up in double layers of clothing all day while breathing stale air through a mask took its toll physically.
"Any sign of Michael?" he asked, poking his head into the nursing station on his way out. He wanted to thank his astute friend for saving the day twelve times over.
No one had seen him for about an hour.
"Christ, everyone's doing a disappearing act," he muttered.
Earl found him in his office, scowling over what, from a distance, looked like a death certificate. "Hey, Michael, go home. Enough paperwork. Your wife and son are far more important." Donna, a fun lady five years older than he, and Terry, a dynamo kid six months younger than Brendan, were the anchor to this man who could be so obsessed with work. He doted on both of them.
Michael's eyes creased at the corners, the effect of what must have been an attempt to smile, but his morose gaze made a liar out of it. He also not very subtly slid his arm over the top of the paper he'd been filling out.
"Are you okay, Michael?"
"Sure. What's up?"
"You don't look okay."
"Nothing a little more sleep won't cure."
He sounded as convincing as one of their street junkie regulars promising to go straight.
Earl studied him. Michael had steadfastly denied anything was wrong, no matter how often Earl asked. Whatever had been getting him down lately, Michael either kept it to himself or blamed it on the additional stress of the SARS epidemic. Which of course it could be. Except Earl knew his friend would rather have a root canal than admit to a personal problem. Like most doctors, while inviting everyone to bring him their sick and needy, he viewed asking for help as his own defeat.
"Christ, Michael, will you cut the crap and tell me what's wrong?"
"What are you talking about?"
"Oh, Jesus."
"Jesus?"
"Goddamn it, you are one stubborn idiot. Oh, and by the way, thanks for saving the department from the first-year residents, for about the millionth time."
Michael's eyes creased at the corners again, a bit more convincingly this time, and a chuckle rumbled out of his barrel chest. "You're welcome."
"But like they say in the song, 'You got to tell somebody.'"
Michael picked up a book and threatened to throw it at him.
"Okay, okay!" Earl closed the door and hurried out the triage entrance. What could be wrong with Michael? Had he reached his limit to seeing human beings reduced to flesh, blood, and a wet mess? That tipping point crept up on all doctors who worked the pit, one case at a time. Earl had counseled enough former colleagues through it to know. But burnout victims possessed a haunted look, as if they couldn't shut out the images of what they'd witnessed and were consumed by them. Michael had something else, a wariness about him, a watchfulness, as if on the lookout for something. And why would he conceal what he'd been writing on a death certificate?
At the exit Earl peeled off his protective gear, dumped it in the disposal bin, and stepped outside, where a cool summer breeze carried the fresh scent of open water from Lake Erie. The usual release of having shed pounds of sweaty clothing flooded through him. It felt as if he'd burst free of a dead skin.
He wheeled his car out of the lot and saw Janet's green Mazda convertible, a vintage 1990 model that she drove during the summer, still resting in its spot. A surge of disappointment destroyed his brief euphoria. Not for the first time he raged against the tyranny of obstetrics, but, long resigned to it and determined that Brendan would have at least one parent to tuck him in tonight, he sped toward home.
The cold woke her.
She forced herself to blink, but the absolute darkness remained.
S
he fought to crawl out of the sleep that still had a hold on her.
No change. Everything remained as black as if her eyelids were clamped shut.
Except they felt open. She also became aware that her head ached, and an acrid burning at the back of her throat made her want to gag.
The chloroform!
Plus something else.
Smells flooded through her head, and she remembered.
She leapt to her feet, swayed heavily, and immediately regretted the sudden move. Reaching into the darkness, hoping to find a place to lean on, her left hand landed on the wooden contours of an open mouth, nose, and cheeks, easily recognizable to the touch under the crinkling plastic of a body bag.
"Shit!" she yelled, but held on to the face to stop from tumbling into something worse.
The spiraling in her head settled, and she turned toward the corpse, intending to feel her way along the shelf it rested on until she reached the door.
How long had she been in here? And why did the stench of chloroform remain so strong? It seemed to be making her woozy afresh, yet the morgue door should have kept much of it out-
The fall!
She'd soaked her protective clothing in the stuff. The cooler temperature in here must have slowed the evaporation enough that there weren't the fumes to keep her unconscious, but she'd have to strip and shower, wash the volatile fluid off her entirely, or the baby might-
The urgency of getting out overwhelmed her.
Bodies be damned. She palpated herself past the top of what felt like a skull with its crown cut open, crossed over a gap, found a pair of feet, and worked up the legs. The torso, neck, and head led her to another pair of feet.
She stopped.
It couldn't be this far to the door. She must have headed deeper into the locker. Muttering more curses and trying to take shallow breaths, she reversed course and worked her way back over the dubious landmarks.
In seconds she reached a wall.
A step left and she felt the door frame. A second later she found the handle and pressed down.
It didn't budge.
Shit!
She tried again.
Nothing.
How could it be locked?
She threw all her weight behind it.
Same result.
This can't be happening, she told herself, trying to remain calm, growing colder by the second, and the contents of her skull once more looping through sickening swirls of an anesthetic haze. Any meat locker she'd ever been in had a round metal disc that released the door, to prevent anyone from being trapped inside. Surely it couldn't be different here. But feeling around, she found no metal disc or any other escape mechanism.
She stood back and forced herself to settle down, trying to think clearly. Hard to do with a mind still half sodden in chloroform. First she had to get rid of the fumes. And find a light.
More waves of nausea swept up to the base of her tongue.
Take care of the fumes first.
She shed her outer gown, blouse, and skirt, throwing them toward the inner recesses of the long, narrow room, figuring the farther away the better. Finding her underclothing to be dry, she quickly pulled her slip over her shoulders and balled it up over her mask, instantly cutting the noxious scent in half.
Now for light.
With her free hand she rapidly patted down the walls where the switch ought to be, but found nothing.
Must be just missing it, she thought, and, dropping her slip, used two hands, methodically sliding them over the surface, checking a square foot at a time.
But immediately the fumes in that closed space began to work on her nose, eyes, and head again.
Time to get rid of that chloroform wick once and for all. Bunching up her slip as before, she went down on her hands and knees and felt her way along the floor toward the rear of the chamber until she came to her discarded clothing. She then stood up, reached sideways to where she figured the nearest body lay, and inched toward it, her hand outstretched.
Her fingers brushed against the plastic cover and made a rustling sound. She pressed down and felt the telltale struts of a rib cage against her palm. She palpated her way toward the head, past the jagged ends of bones where the sternum had been sawed out, and found the tab of the zipper for the body bag. Pulling it open, she released a swell of the sickeningly sweet decay that, until now, had been but a lingering background odor. The legacy of all the sugar in a body's juices, she thought, trying to objectify the odor by breaking down the science of it, a mind game she sometimes used in the case room to lessen the impact of any foul stench. She also swallowed a lot, her usual technique to keep from throwing up, and stuffed the soaked clothing inside. "Sorry," she said to her unwitting host before yanking the tab closed. It sounded like shutting the front flap on Brendan's play tent.
By the time she worked her way back to the door, she could breathe without using her slip as a filter, and she resumed her search for the switch.
She'd almost given up hope when her hand slid over a flat, slightly raised rectangle. But it had no protruding toggle, which is why she must have passed over it initially. "Please work," she muttered, and pressed it with her fingers. It pivoted slightly, and light flooded the room.
The racks of glistening gray forms in semiopaque body bags, their features partly visible, almost made her prefer the darkness.
No time to be squeamish, she told herself, and returned to the door, searching for some kind of release mechanism.
She saw it in an instant. Not the disc she'd been looking for. Another electronic lock with a slot for her card.
The card she'd left in the outside slot.
The first real flickers of panic began to stir in the pit of her stomach.
If a card is forgotten in a lock at St. Paul's, the security system deactivates the magnetic strip after a few minutes and seals the mechanism to ensure that no unauthorized person who happens on the scene can get in or acquire a functioning key.
The frigid air grew clammy, and a pressure built inside the center of her chest, expanding outward until she thought it would burst.
She couldn't end up stuck here. Not her. Not Dr. Janet Graceton, thirty-five weeks pregnant. No way she'd end up freezing to death in the goddamn morgue of her own hospital.
Yet unless she came up with something soon, that's exactly where things were headed.
She started to shiver.
A phone! Check for a phone. She'd left her cellular in her car, as always, but maybe they had a wall unit somewhere behind one of these racks, for people stupid enough to get locked in.
A quick search found none.
But at the back of the room she spotted what looked like a thermostat. If she jacked up the temperature, would an alarm sound somewhere? On closer inspection, the device seemed only to monitor the degrees, and she could see no way to reset it. Still, somewhere, there might be an alert should the room get too warm.
Whipping off her mask, she used it along with her slip to create an insulated nest around the device. Then, cupping her hands to her mouth, she blew into it. The digital readout jumped ten degrees.
She kept blowing, watching the numbers bounce up and down with each breath, until she felt light-headed again, this time from hyperventilating. As for being out of her mask, she doubted anyone in here would sneeze or cough on her anytime soon.
She frantically continued to exhale, determined to succeed, driven more to save her unborn son than herself.
Her pale swollen abdomen, in which he lay, glistened with moisture in the cold.
And her fury built at the idiot who did this to her… to him.
"That asshole knew," she kept saying, muttering aloud to keep her teeth from chattering. "Heard me yell, yet just ran off. If I get out of here, so help me, whoever it is will pay."
7:45 p.m.
Susanne Roberts met Earl at the ambulance entrance to ER, handing him a full set of protective clothing. "Mrs. Quint and I s me I led the fumes as we were coming dow
n the elevator from a nursing department meeting. She said it reminded her of ether, from the old days, when she'd worked summers in her hometown hospital as a candy striper."
"And you're sure Janet's okay?" he asked, hurriedly pulling on the surgical wear.
"Apart from being as furious as I've ever seen her. She insists whoever dropped the jar deliberately left her down there."
His innards, already knotted, yanked themselves tighter.
"She did sustain some superficial cuts on her palms, though the trail of blood she left and the handprint on the morgue door probably saved her life…"
He pulled on gloves and rushed through the triage area, tying his mask as Susanne continued to explain. He'd gotten her phone call about ten minutes after arriving home. The return trip had taken seven, plus a ten-second tirade at the cop who'd pulled him over, then provided an escort the rest of the way, siren blazing.
He heard Janet the second they entered the inner doors.
"I'm fine, damn it!"
He arrived in a resuscitation room full of people, at the center of which his wife sat on a stretcher, arms defiantly crossed, eyes flashing over the top of her mask, and raising holy hell when anyone tried to touch her.
He relaxed a notch and took in the rest of the scene.
Susanne must have paged everyone she could think of. The inner circle clustered around Janet included an anesthetist and three staff obstetricians, one of them packing up a portable Doppler machine. Outside this group stood Stewart Deloram and Michael. Next was a ring of residents, all offering to draw blood or run batteries of tests, their usual response when they hadn't a clue what to do. To his credit, Thomas stood quietly behind this bunch and attempted to rein in their well-meant enthusiasm. Even Paul Hurst had showed up. He hovered nearby, his gloved fingers held in a pyramid tapping nervously against his mask. Probably afraid of bad publicity, Earl thought, pushing through the crowd.
She saw him. "Earl! Thank God. Now tell these people to let me out of here."
"Of course," he said, grabbing her outstretched hand. "As soon as the doctors looking after you say it's okay."
Immediately the residents fell silent, his authority over them well established. Looks of relief swept through the eyes of her colleagues. Michael gave him a wink, and the anesthetist's shoulders relaxed. At last, they all seemed to say, an adult to take charge. Even Stewart approved, giving a covert thumbs-up signal.
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