I pick out half a dozen books and lug them to the checkout counter. The act of carrying the texts to the counter is enough to make me gasp for breath. Wow, really pathetic. When is the last time I’ve been to a gym? Oh well, no time for that now. I’ll get in shape again after residency is over.
The girl ahead of me in the checkout line reminds me a lot of Holly from college. She’s tall—long blond hair loose down her back, great tits, great ass. This is the sort of girl my parents would have wanted me to bring home—someone who wouldn’t embarrass me.
I hadn’t even realized I was staring at her until she catches me. I feel my face get hot and I quickly look back down at my stack of books.
“Got anything to read?” the girl asks me teasingly, gesturing at the two foot stack.
She’s interested. Go for it, Howard!
“I’ve got an anatomy exam coming up,” I explain, flashing a broad smile.
She glances down at the titles of the books. “You’re in med school?”
“My first year,” I confirm.
“I’m April,” she says.
Oh yeah, she’s really interested.
“I’m Mason,” I reply.
“So what kind of doctor are you going to be?” April asks me. Am I imagining it or did April’s chest just get bigger?
“A surgeon.”
“Really?” April says. “Very impressive. I’ve heard it’s pretty competitive to become a surgeon.”
“I’m not too worried,” I say. I grin at her. “How about you? Are you in school?”
“I’m a junior in college,” April says.
“What’s your major?”
I bet anything it’s something completely useless. April looks like the kind of girl who expects to get married and have her husband support her for the rest of her life.
“Art history.” Bingo.
“Sounds really interesting,” I lie.
My mother would love this girl. They could have a blast discussing Monet or some crap like that.
I’m trying to decide if I should ask her out when she reaches out and touches my arm, “So when are you going to ask me for my number, Doctor?”
“Um,” I say. Wow. I’m really not used to girls being quite so forward. I force a grin. “Can I have your number, April?”
April scribbles her digits on a blank page in one of the textbooks I’m buying, and I think to myself how perfect she is. She’s beautiful, tall, reasonably articulate, and I bet anything she’s really easy. This is the kind of girl any guy would be thrilled to have a date with.
So why can’t I stop thinking about Ginny? What is wrong with me?
_____
My life is still mostly studying. I got the highest grade in the class on the first exam and I want to make a similarly strong showing on this one. My only regret is that I can’t break my own record. I go to the library every day after class and stay there until I can barely keep my eyes open.
Ginny continues to keep me company in my corner of the library. We still talk and she still brings me coffee when she goes to get herself a cup, but we haven’t had sex since the dinner with my parents.
“Black, no sugar,” she says as she places the cup in front of me.
“Thanks, Ginny,” I say. “You’re the best.”
“Am I?”
I always have to bite my tongue to keep from asking her if she wants to go to the locker room with me. I figure if I ask, she’ll probably say no. I pretty much blew that aspect of our relationship, and I can’t admit to her how desperately I miss it. I made a huge mistake that night at my parents’ house. But I’m glad that I at least have her company during the lonely nights in the library.
A few days before the test is scheduled, I’m sitting in the back of the library studying the muscles of mastication when I hear a voice from over my shoulder: “Holy shit… anatomy. Whenever I think my life is the worst it could possibly be, I remember that class and I feel a little better.”
I look up and see a tall guy with a shaved head, wearing green scrubs and a long white coat. The nametag hanging from his lapel proclaims him to be “Resident, Department of General Surgery.” He has his arms crossed and is shaking his head in amusement.
“You a first year?” he asks me.
“That’s right,” I say. I look the guy up and down, “You a resident?”
“Bingo.” He holds out his hand, “The name’s Norm. I’m a surgery resident.”
That will be me someday. Except at Yale. I take Norm’s hand, “I’m Mason.”
“So is Conlon still torturing you guys?” Norm asks, dragging a chair over so he can sit down.
“He’s not that bad,” I say.
“He got nicer,” Norm says, rubbing his bald head. “You don’t know what he was like his first year teaching—that was the year Brett Shelton killed himself. You know, the first of the suicides.”
I raise my eyebrows. “That was your class?”
Norm nods. “Oh yeah. It was a mess. You wouldn’t believe it.” He leans forward in his chair. “You know the story, right?”
I shake my head no. All I know is that six years ago, Brett Shelton hung himself in his room. With a belt.
“Brett was failing anatomy,” Norm says, grinning like he has a great piece of gossip. Which I guess he does. “And he was a rich shit, so he wasn’t willing to take it lying down. His parents and some lawyer started putting a lot of pressure on the university to get him a passing grade. Conlon was pissed. The two of them got in a huge shouting match outside of class one day.”
“Conlon was in a shouting match?” I can’t picture it. He’s way too laid back for that.
Norm nods vigorously. “Brett started it, but Conlon really let him have it. Told him he was a spoiled brat. That he’d never get anywhere in life. Then he failed him.”
“Whoa,” I breathe.
“Next day, Brett hung himself,” Norm says, leaning back in his chair, satisfied that he’d blown my mind.
“Wow,” I say. “Conlon must have felt awful about that.”
Norm shrugs. “You’d think. But the truth is, if Brett hadn’t killed himself, Conlon was facing a lawsuit. That suicide got him out of a load of trouble.” He lowers his voice. “There was a rumor in our class that he killed Brett himself and made it look like a suicide.”
All of a sudden, I get this tight feeling in my chest like I can hardly breathe.
“Of course,” Norm says, “he couldn’t have, right? I mean, look at the guy. He can barely walk. He couldn’t have overpowered Brett.”
That’s true. Dr. Conlon’s disability lets him off as a murder suspect.
Then again, what’s wrong with him anyway? It’s not really clear from looking at him and he’s never shared it with anyone in the class. Maybe it’s all an act. Like in that movie with Kevin Spacey. Maybe he’s using that cane as his alibi.
“Hey man, you okay?” Norm says. He’s frowning. “Sorry, did I freak you out?”
“I’m fine,” I say quickly. “I think I need to get more sleep.”
“I hear that,” Norm says, grinning. “Anyway, it’s been nice meeting you. Maybe I’ll see you in your third-year surgery clerkship. It’s loads of fun.”
I barely manage a distracted goodbye.
I close my anatomy text and rub my fingers into my temples. I have always believed I’ve got good intuition and my intuition is screaming out that there’s something fishy going on with Dr. Matthew Conlon. I know I have to focus on my upcoming exam, but all I can think of is those six suicides. Six suicides and one murder.
Or is it more than one murder?
The look in Dr. Conlon’s eyes when I started questioning him about Frank’s cause of death was chilling. I asked an innocent question and he jumped down my throat. Seems really suspicious, if you ask me. For some reason, there’s a dead cop in our anatomy lab and I have no idea why.
I stand up so fast that my chair falls over behind me. I feel my heart pounding in my chest. I look around the libr
ary and see that it is almost completely empty now—even Ginny has gone home for the night. It’s so empty that nobody even noticed when my chair fell to the floor. I wipe my brow with the back of my hand and it comes away wet with sweat.
An anatomy professor has got to have some connections to the local morgue, right? Maybe there are strings he can pull to get a body to come to him rather than risking an autopsy. And once a body gets ripped apart in anatomy lab, there’s no chance of finding out the real cause of death.
Unless there’s a med student in the class who gets too curious.
But Conlon would never allow that to happen.
I back away from the table, my hands trembling. My breaths are coming quickly, too quickly. I’m hyperventilating. I recently learned that during hyperventilation, the lungs blow off too much carbon dioxide. As the amount of carbon dioxide in the bloodstream goes down, the blood vessels going to the brain constrict, cutting off the brain’s oxygen supply.
I’ve got to calm down.
This is crazy. My anatomy professor isn’t a murderer. He’s just a nice, dorky guy who wears bowties to class every day. He’s not murdering students and hiding bodies in the cadaver lab. Stuff like that doesn’t happen in real life.
And that’s when I hear that deep voice again:
Think about it. What sorts of things can kill a man but won’t show up on a routine anatomy lab dissection?
“Shut-up!” I whisper.
The sound of my own voice startles me, but it seems to put a stop to my racing thoughts. My thumping heart slows down and I suddenly feel completely exhausted. Maybe four hours of sleep every night really isn’t enough. I have to start taking better care of myself before I blow everything I’ve worked so hard for.
Chapter 24
I had hoped that a night of sleep would clear my mind, but the next day I wake up feeling just as uneasy as the night before. I wish Abe were around because I want to talk this out with someone, try to get someone else’s perspective. But it seems like I haven’t seen Abe around the apartment in days. Where the hell is he anyway?
When I get to school, I check my watch and see that I still have twenty minutes before my first class. When I arrive early, I usually make a stop in the cafeteria for some much needed breakfast and a strong cup of coffee. However, this morning I make a beeline for Dr. Conlon’s secretary’s office, which is right next to his.
Dr. Conlon’s secretary, Anita, looks like a grandma. She’s short and chubby with poufy white hair and is always offering us “sweets.” I’ve talked to her a handful of times and she’s always real nice to me.
“Hello, Mason!” Anita says when I walk through her open door.
I flash my most charming smile. Old women always love me. “Hi, Anita. How are you?”
“Mason, Mason…” Anita leans forward across her desk. “You don’t have a girlfriend, do you? Oh, I’m sure you do…”
“Actually, I don’t,” I say.
“Oh?” She raises an eyebrow. “Well, I don’t know if you’d be interested, but my niece is a very sweet girl. She’s about your age. I think you’d really like her.”
I hate it when older women tried to set me up with their daughters, nieces, and granddaughters. But I force a smile, “Sure, give me her number.”
Anita’s face lights up and she pulls out a sticky note to write out the number of some girl named Margo.
“You’ll love her, Mason,” Anita gushes. “She’s such a cute girl. And so funny! And smart too… oh, but you boys don’t like smart girls, do you? Don’t worry, I’m sure she’s not smarter than you are. After all, you’re a—”
“Anita,” I interrupt, unable to tolerate another second of hearing about this girl I’ll never call. “I was wondering if you could look up some information on our cadaver.”
Anita looks confused. “Oh? What information?”
“I was just curious if you have the cause of death listed,” I say. My stomach flips as I wait for her response.
“Well, we should,” Anita says thoughtfully. “I mean, we have to know that so that there’s no chance of the person having a communicable disease.”
“So, um…” I bite my lip. “Could you look it up for me?”
Anita is about to respond, when Dr. Conlon limps into the office. He looks surprised to see me standing there. I swear silently to myself.
“Hi, Mason,” Dr. Conlon says with a friendly smile, “what are you doing here? Anything I can help you with?”
I look down at my hands and see they’re trembling. I’m about to reply when Anita speaks up, “Mason is just trying to find out some information about his cadaver.”
The smile disappears instantly from Conlon’s face. His eyes darken the same way they did before. He looks like he wants to reach out and strangle me. Or maybe hang me.
“Mason,” he says quietly. “Didn’t I tell you before that all cadaver information is confidential?”
“Well, I was trying to—”
“Don’t you have a biochemistry test tomorrow?” Dr. Conlon raises an eyebrow.
“Yes.”
Dr. Conlon looks over at Anita, “Any information on the cadavers in the lab is strictly confidential. Nobody is to receive that information.” He looks back up at me, “Is that clear?”
My stomach feels like lead.
“Yes,” I say. “It’s clear.”
Dr. Conlon is still staring at me in way that is pretty terrifying. All I know is that one student has to die this year, and at this point, it very well might be me.
But I won’t go down without a fight.
_____
I’ve been watching Dr. Conlon very carefully recently.
Right now, Abe and Heather are hunched over Frank’s split-open skull, reviewing the cranial nerves, while Ginny reads from the lab manual. I’m at the other end of the cadaver, flipping through the anatomy atlas, but my mind is somewhere else. Our second midterm in anatomy is in a few days, but I already know the material cold. That’s not my biggest worry anymore.
Dr. Conlon is dressed in blue scrubs, and he makes his usual rounds from cadaver to cadaver, gripping his cane in his left hand. His cane is cumbersome—made of dull metal and ending in four prongs arranged in a square formation. The fact that he relies on that cane makes him seem really impaired, and I have to wonder if that’s the idea. If he visited a store to find a cane that would enhance his story that he can’t walk very well and isn’t capable of harming a fly, that’s probably the cane he’d end up with.
See, I’m about 95% sure at this point that Dr. Conlon isn’t really disabled at all.
For starters, if you watch him walk, it’s clear he’s faking—he alternates which leg he limps on. Sometimes it’s his right, sometimes his left. I’m pretty sure of that. And the pretense that his right hand isn’t functional is equally bullshit. In his short-sleeved scrub top, it’s clear that all the muscles in his right arm are intact. I admit, he holds his hand in a way that makes it look impaired, but if I bend my wrist as far as it will go and curl up my fingers, it doesn’t look so different from his hand.
Of course, I can’t actually prove anything. I followed Conlon out to his car a few times, hoping to catch him in the act—like, tossing his cane aside and walking without it. I had my phone ready to snap photos the second he did it. But he’s really dedicated to the illusion of appearing disabled or else he sensed someone was watching, and he never abandoned that cane. He’s even got handicapped plates on his car—not that those are hard to get. My father says half his cardiac patients have them.
“Dr. Conlon!” Ginny flags down our professor as he “limps” by our table.
Dr. Conlon stops and smiles at Ginny. Lately, everything about Dr. Conlon seems ominous to me, even his smile. “Yes, Dr. Zaleski?”
Ginny launches into a question about the Circle of Willis, and my stomach clenches as I notice how close Dr. Conlon is standing to her. He needs to back up at least a foot, seriously. Ginny seems pleased by the attention, but she d
oesn’t get it. Dr. Conlon’s attention is not something she wants. If he takes an interest in her, she may as well draw a target on her chest. And Ginny is so small and sweet and vulnerable.
If he touches a hair on Ginny’s head, I swear to God, I will kill him.
Chapter 25
I didn’t even realize I drifted asleep until the ringing of my phone jogs me awake. I’m sitting up in bed, my laptop resting on my legs, still in the clothes I had been wearing last night. I recall a dream I had been having about Frank, although I can’t remember the details. I fumble for the phone and hold it to my ear.
“Hello?” I mumble.
“Mason? It’s April. Where are you?”
April… shit! I completely forgot we were supposed to get together for an early lunch today at a coffee shop a few blocks from my dorm. I look at my watch and realize I’m fifteen minutes late.
“I’m sorry, I…” I try to come up with an excuse and my mind goes blank. “I’ll be there in five minutes, okay?”
April reluctantly agrees and I quickly shove my feet into my shoes. No time to change clothes. I pull on a light jacket as I hurry out the door, since the weather has started to get pretty nippy lately. I can’t believe I managed to stand up my first real date since starting med school. Lately, I’m finding it increasingly difficult to focus.
When I pull up to the coffee shop, I see April through the window, sitting in a booth and glancing down at her watch as she pouts. This is not a girl who is used to being stood up. I again search my brain for a plausible excuse for not showing up. I can’t think of one. And I can’t exactly tell her I forgot all about her.
I yank the door open and nearly trip over a chair hurrying over to her table.
“Hi, April,” I say breathlessly. “Sorry I’m late…”
She looks up at me, obviously ready to give me a piece of her mind, but her jaw falls open slightly when she sees me. I didn’t look in a mirror before leaving the apartment and now I’m sorry—I probably look like a mess. I self-consciously run a hand through my hair in a halfhearted effort to comb it out.
Suicide Med Page 13