by J. A. Jance
When Sister Anselm turned into the hospital entrance, it may not have been snowy, but it was bitterly cold. Patches of black ice covered the paved parking lot, making her grateful that she had been directed to go into the underground garage, where a space had been coned off for her. After being buzzed into the building, Sister Anselm made her way to the front desk, where a bleary-eyed overnight receptionist directed her to the fourth-floor maternity ward.
Stepping out of the elevator, Sister Anselm was greeted warmly by an energetic young woman who hurried out of the nurses’ station to welcome her. “I’m Nurse Mandy, the charge nurse. You must be Sister Anselm.”
“Yes, I am. How are my patients?”
“The baby is premature—critical but stable. She also has a broken arm, which has been set and placed in a soft cast. She was having some breathing difficulties when they brought her in, but she’s doing better now. As for the mother? She’s critical, too, and still in surgery. When she comes out of the recovery room, by rights they should take her to the surgical recovery floor, but given the circumstances, her doctors have agreed to send her here instead. That way she’ll be closer to her baby.”
“Has there been any progress on identifying her?”
Nurse Mandy shook her head. “Not so far. Her clothing and belongings are all under lock and key, but I’ve been authorized to allow you access to them in case that will aid you in sorting out who she is.”
“Isn’t the sheriff’s department working on that?” Sister Anselm asked.
“Yes, but they’re not making much progress. They’ve checked statewide missing persons reports, but so far nothing has turned up that matches our victim. The investigation into the accident itself is still ongoing, but it’s most likely going to be termed unavoidable. In other words, no wrongdoing on the driver’s part. Apparently, she darted into the road in front of him. Had it been a hit-and-run, that would be a different story, but the driver stayed around long enough to help her and give a statement to police. A witness from a nearby gas station backed up his story.”
Sister Anselm understood that had the incident been ruled a hit-and-run, there would have been far more urgency on the part of some law enforcement agency to identify the victim.
“By the way,” Nurse Mandy added, “the young man who hit her is just down the hall in the waiting room. He claims not to know her. Nevertheless, he’s beyond distraught. I tried to tell him he should go home—that there’s nothing more he can do here. Even so, he’s adamant about staying.”
“Do you think he knows her and is pretending not to?”
“Maybe,” Nurse Mandy said. “I’ve certainly seen that happen before, especially in instances of domestic violence. The assailant sits there and pretends ignorance while the helpless victim is unconscious and unable to say otherwise.”
“Why don’t I go speak to him,” Sister Anselm said. “After that I’d like to take a look at the victim’s personal effects; maybe I’ll find a clue that will help us identify her.”
She walked down the hall to a small waiting room. This was a part of the job she liked the least, approaching supposedly grieving loved ones and trying to suss out who was lying and who was telling the truth.
On one side of the room was a long window that allowed waiting room visitors to see inside the nursery. Several separate seating areas with chairs and love seats would have accommodated a fair number of visitors. At this hour of the morning, there was only one—a young man in jeans, hiking boots, and a Northern Arizona University Lumberjack sweatshirt. He jumped to his feet as Sister Anselm walked toward him.
“Are you the chaplain?” he asked anxiously.
“No,” she said. “I’m not the chaplain.”
“Is she dead?”
The anguish on his face seemed genuine enough. “No one has died,” Sister Anselm assured him. “My name is Sister Anselm. I’m a Sister of Providence. I’m also what’s called a patient advocate. I’m usually summoned when someone is hospitalized with no apparent next of kin and no way of communicating his or her wishes to medical practitioners. Part of my job is to help locate next of kin for, in this case, two patients rather than one.”
“Two?” he asked. “That means they’re both still alive?”
Sister Anselm nodded. “So far,” she said, “but would that be you, then? Are you their next of kin?”
“No,” the young man said. “Not at all.” His face, which had brightened momentarily, turned somber again. His shoulders drooped. “I’m the guy who hit them.”
Sister Anselm trusted her people skills. The young man’s anxiety could easily have been faked, but the naked relief that had flashed across his face at learning that both patients were still alive was absolutely genuine.
He sat back down, hard, shaking his head in obvious relief. “I’m so glad to hear they’re both still alive. When she told me her baby was coming, I thought, ‘Oh, no, I’ve killed them both.’ ”
“Well, you didn’t,” Sister Anselm said, taking a seat next to him. “Now, you know my name. What’s yours?”
“David,” he said. “David Upton. I’m a junior here at NAU.”
“I’ve heard only the barest outlines of what happened. I’d appreciate it if you could tell me your side of the story. I understand you were driving the car that hit . . . we’ll call her Jane Doe for right now. I also was told that the victim isn’t someone you know.”
David nodded. “That’s right. She’s a complete stranger. I’d never seen her before when she ran out into the road right in front of me. There was no time for me to stop. She was just there. I’ll never forget the sound of the thump when I hit her. She went flying through the air like a little rag doll. It was awful.”
David shuddered at the memory, and Sister Anselm gave his knee a consoling pat. “How about starting at the beginning,” she suggested. “Where did this happen, and where were you going?”
“I was on my way to Vermillion Cliffs,” he said. “Some of my friends go to school at BYU. We were going to meet up there for some rock climbing. It’s more fun to do that before the weather gets warm and all the warm-weather tourists show up. I’m studying chemical engineering. My big lab days are Tuesdays and Thursdays. I figured I could spend tomorrow climbing and then be back in time for classes on Thursday.
“That’s why I left so late in the afternoon. I have an afternoon lab, and then I had to do some other stuff before I could leave town. There’s a little gas station on Highway 89 about twenty miles from here. It closes around ten o’clock, so it’s sort of the last place for a pit stop and coffee when you’re headed north late at night. That’s what I was going to do—stop and get some coffee.
“I was starting to slow down when she ran across the road directly in front of me. All I saw was someone wrapped in an Indian blanket running into the beams of my headlights. There was nothing I could do. I tried to stop but there wasn’t time. I hit her dead-on.”
He paused and shook his head, as though the very memory of the incident was enough to leave him shaken all over again.
Finally he continued. “I got out of my vehicle and ran over to her. She was just a kid. She may have been wearing an Indian blanket, but she wasn’t an Indian. I don’t know any blond-haired Indians. She was lying there on the pavement so still that I thought for sure I’d killed her. There was blood coming from the back of her head. I didn’t dare move her for fear of doing more damage.
“I kept calling to her, hoping to get her to wake up, and finally she did. It was so cold, and all she was wearing was this lightweight jacket kind of thing. I had seen the blanket go flying when I hit her. I found it, brought it back, and used that to cover her. The whole time I had been with her, I had been so focused on her face that I didn’t notice anything else. It wasn’t until I came back with the blanket that I realized she was pregnant. She said something like, ‘don’t let them send me back, and don’t l
et them send my baby back, either.’ Call me stupid, but that was the first I realized she was expecting.”
He paused again and took a deep breath. “And that’s about the time her water broke. I mean it was like a flood. The next thing I knew, she was soaked and so was I. By then other people had turned up. The clerk from the gas station came out and started putting up flares because we were both still in the middle of the road. Somebody else called for an aid car and notified the cops. I don’t know how long it took for the ambulance to get to us. It felt like forever.”
“She spoke to you, then?” Sister Anselm asked.
David nodded.
“Did she say anything about who she was—what her name is or where she’s from?”
“I asked what her name was. She tried to tell me, but she was having a hard time talking. It sounded like something that started with an E—Edith maybe? She didn’t mention a last name. There was a lot of confusion when the EMTs got there. For a while, they must have thought I was her husband. That’s why, when they cut her hair off so they could deal with the wound on the back of her head, they gave me these.”
An athletic bag was stationed at his feet. He reached down into it and pulled out a clear Ziploc plastic bag. When he handed it over to Sister Anselm, she saw it contained long coils of braided and blood-soaked blond hair. The braids had been clipped off close to the scalp, but whoever had cut them off had first secured the top of each braid with a rubber band just below the cut line.
As Sister Anselm studied the braids, she was thrown back in time, thinking of another girl, years earlier, one who had also worn her long blond hair in braids just like this. Drawing a deep breath and forcing the memory aside, she turned back to the distraught young man seated next to her.
“She was unconscious by the time they cut off her braids?” Sister Anselm asked.
David nodded.
“Presumably, then,” Sister Anselm concluded, “the EMT was an Indian.”
David gave her a puzzled look. “I’m pretty sure she was, but how did you know that?”
“This is probably waist-long hair when it isn’t braided,” Sister Anselm explained. “When Indians used to be shipped off to boarding schools, the matrons cut their hair off first thing, whether they wanted it cut or not. Keeping the victim’s hair from being lost was an act of kindness on the EMT’s part.”
“It’s covered with blood,” David pointed out. “I probably should have given it to the cops when they showed up, but they started giving me the third degree, and I forgot all about it. The cops didn’t get there until after the ambulance had pulled away. They took the position initially that I was at fault—that I was someone who knew the girl and had run her down deliberately. Either that, or else I was drunk as a skunk. They gave me a Breathalyzer and were blown away when they saw the results, because I don’t drink, not at all, except for too much coffee.
“Anyway, after hassling me for the better part of two hours, they finally let me go, but they impounded my car. They said that since this might turn into a fatality, they had to confiscate my vehicle until their investigation was complete. There was no way I could go on up to Vermillion Cliffs to meet my friends without my car, so I caught a ride with some of the people who had stopped to help and came here.”
“To the hospital?”
He nodded.
“There’s more than one hospital here in town. How did you know which one?”
“The EMT who gave me the braids told me. At the time, I think she still thought I was the husband.”
“And you came here because?”
David shrugged and rubbed his eyes, bleary with fatigue. “Because I needed to know if she and the baby were okay. It wasn’t my fault, but still, I’m the one who hit them. The problem is, nobody here will tell me anything. They asked me if I was her next of kin. When I told them no, they said there was some law that made it impossible for them to give out any information.”
“HIPAA,” Sister Anselm murmured.
“What?”
“That’s the name of the law,” she explained. “It’s called the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act. One of the requirements prevents health-care providers from giving out a patient’s information to anyone other than an individual the patient has designated to receive it.”
“So being here is pretty much useless,” David said despairingly, “because they’re not going to tell me anything anyway.” He paused. “She’s just a kid, Sister, probably still in high school. What was she doing out there on her own, alone in the middle of the night in the middle of nowhere? And what about the jerk who knocked her up? Where’s he? The father must be some kind of a bad guy, because that’s what she said to me out there on the road. She begged me to keep anyone from taking either her or her baby back—wherever the hell back is!”
Sister Anselm studied the distraught young man and heard the outrage in his voice. As a patient advocate, she had taken a vow of confidentiality—one that had come long before the mid-1990s when someone in Washington, DC, had made HIPAA the law of the land. But this young man, related or not, was the only one here—the only one taking responsibility for and caring about what had happened. Depending on the seriousness of Jane Doe’s injuries, for now and perhaps for the rest of her young life, David Upton was the closest thing she had to a next of kin. Sister Anselm was still holding the braids.
“Now,” she asked, “do you want these back or should I put them with the rest of her effects?”
“With her effects, of course,” he agreed at once. “I’m sure they shouldn’t have been given to me in the first place.”
“I believe that, for whatever reason, they were given to exactly the right person. Now then, Mr. Upton,” Sister Anselm said, standing up, “you should go home. Try to get some rest. How far do you live from here?”
“Not far, just a few blocks off campus. I can walk. But what if something bad happens?” David asked. “What if she doesn’t make it? I won’t even know.”
“Give me your phone number,” Sister Anselm said, pulling her own iPhone out of her pocket. “I promise, if her condition changes, I’ll keep you apprised of what’s going on.”
“But I already told you,” David countered. “I’m not . . . you know . . . any kind of relative.”
“You are now,” Sister Anselm said with a smile as she finished keying his number into her phone. “Because I said so.”
“You can do that? Didn’t you just say that giving me any information about her is against the law?”
“Yes, that is what I said,” Sister Anselm conceded, “but I can also give you the information if I deem it necessary. As of this moment and as far as I’m concerned, you are my patients’ only known next of kin. That goes for both of them.”
David nodded. “Thank you,” he said, “although I’m not sure how you can get away with it.”
Sister Anselm patted the gold crucifix that dangled from the gold chain around her neck. “You might say, Mr. Upton,” she told him with a conspiratorial wink, “that I’ve been granted a waiver in that regard by someone much higher up the chain of command.”
10
At half past ten the next morning, Ali stumbled into the kitchen in search of her first cup of coffee. She had obviously slept too late to suit Bella, who was already curled up in a ball on the small round dog bed next to the kitchen counter near where Leland stood rolling out rounds of dough for pasties. He smiled a good morning and then nodded in the direction of Ali’s cell phone.
“When I came into the house this morning and realized that Sister Anselm had decamped overnight,” he said, “it occurred to me that you’d probably had a less than restful night. I took the liberty of coming into your room, liberating your cell phone from its charger, turning off the ringer on your bedside phone, and taking Bella along with me.”
“Thank you,” Ali said, pouring a cup o
f coffee that wasn’t nearly as fresh as it would have been had she awakened at her usual time. “Sister Anselm was called out to look after someone up in Flagstaff. Once she left the house, I took advantage of being awake that early and had a leisurely conversation with B.”
“I trust all is well with him.”
Ali nodded. “He’s hoping you’ll make meat loaf for dinner when he’s home for the weekend.”
“Always a pleasure,” Leland said. “By the way, there’ve been a couple of calls already this morning—one from Stuart Ramey and the other from Sister Anselm. I told them both that you’d call back.”
“I will,” Ali answered, “but not until I’ve had some coffee and gotten my head screwed on straight.”
She took her coffee over to the kitchen window and stared out at a landscape made unfamiliar by snow. The sky was blue overhead, but the temperatures were still cold enough that the sun had yet to melt the five inches or so of snow that had fallen. Across the valley, the bright red cliffs were made all the brighter by being framed in white.
Slipping onto one of the kitchen chairs, she glanced at the small television set that was built into a cabinet slot just above the microwave. It was tuned to a news channel with the local weatherman standing in front of a map featuring lots of blue that designated frigid weather in places not generally accustomed to it.
“I’m afraid it’s been all weather all the time this morning,” Leland explained. “The storm that came through here last night dropped measurable snow in Phoenix for the first time since 2006. The time before that was 1937. Now that same storm is causing trouble in southern New Mexico and on into Texas.”