by Chaz McGee
Chapter 18
I knew where Tyler Matthews was, but I was alone in my knowledge. I had no choice but to keep following Maggie—she was my best hope of getting through. I told myself that the child was safe for now, that the man he was with had good inside him—I had felt it—and that Tyler’s innocence would be enough to keep that good alive for at least a little longer. But I had to find a way of letting Maggie know where he was. I did not think the kidnapper could hold out forever, not with the other man egging him on. The unseen man’s voice had been more than evil; it had celebrated evil. I knew he must be hiding behind a cloak of respectability if he had sent another to do his dirty work in the park. What was his endgame? Whatever it was, it could not be good for the boy. I had to let Maggie know.
I try to control my baser human emotions. I really do. I know they won’t be the ones to get me into heaven, if such a place exists. But I admit to feeling relief when Maggie bypassed the emergency room, where the sainted Dr. Christian Fletcher worked, and headed for pediatric oncology, where Fletcher’s wife served as chief. It was a good move on Maggie’s part. If you want to get the dirt on someone, ask a soon-to-be-ex-spouse.
Word had gotten out among the nurses about Maggie’s last visit. I saw the curious looks as she passed by and the troubled frowns as they remembered that one of their own had been lost. Maggie noticed none of this. Her concentration was focused solely on the task ahead. I felt relief at this, too. Her mind was back on the case.
The pediatric oncology ward was in one of the newer wings in the hospital. It was painted in cheery primary colors and the walls were lined with scenes from fairy tales. I don’t think the patients noticed, though, at least not the ones I could see. Most were pale and wan, bald from chemotherapy and radiation treatments, and far too drained to do much more than lie in bed, eyes closed, as they tried to escape the pain. Their heads looked so small against their pillows. It did not seem fair that they should be here, suffering such intense physical pain before their lives had barely begun, when others who were much older, who had abused their bodies with drugs and alcohol and bad food for decades, thrived without consequence.
A tall doctor with long blonde hair pulled back in an elegant ponytail passed Maggie. She was trailed by a group of expensively dressed women who left a cloud of perfume in their wake. It had to be the other Dr. Fletcher, courting donors and donors’ wives. She was extolling the virtues of the new ward with the ease of a tour guide, unaware that some of her guests were fighting back tears at the sight of so many young patients. This Dr. Fletcher did not give Maggie a single glance; she swept past her with the dismissive air of one who is used to being the most important person in the room.
Maggie reached the nurse’s station and showed her badge to the plump black woman behind the counter. “Was that Dr. Fletcher?” she asked.
“She’s Dr. Holman, now,” the nurse explained, her eyes lingering on Maggie’s credentials. “She’s gone back to her maiden name.”
“What’s her full name?” Maggie asked, using her warm-up tone, the one that lets people know she represents authority and she’s just getting started with the questions.
“Serena Holman,” the nurse answered quickly.
“You keep her schedule?” Maggie asked.
The woman looked surprised. “Me? No. Dr. Holman keeps her own schedule.”
“We’re not competent enough, don’t you know?” a nurse with short black hair broke in. She had one of those long, expressive mouths that signals her interior motives—but only when she wanted it to. She was smiling in a bitter, practiced way that made me think she had to defer to Dr. Holman far too often for her taste.
“Dr. Holman is tough on the nurses?” Maggie asked. She was doing that chameleon thing she does so well, where she can fit in with anyone at their level, becoming one of the boys just as easily as one of the girls, putting rich people at ease just as effortlessly as the poor.
“That’s one way of putting it,” the second nurse said. She snapped a file shut and handed it to the first nurse. “No change at all,” she told her. “And I’m going to let you be the one to tell Dr. Holman that.”
The first nurse looked terrified, and I wondered just how hard Dr. Holman was on the nurses.
“How long has she been separated from her husband?” Maggie asked them.
They stared at each other, trying to decide how much to say. The second nurse looked up at Maggie. “You’re the detective looking into Fiona’s murder, right?”
“Right,” Maggie confirmed.
That was good enough for her. “Dr. Holman went back to her maiden name about a month ago. I heard they’re still living together, though. Neither one of them wants to be the first to move out of their house because of legal reasons.”
“It’s a really nice house,” the first nurse interjected. “Waterfront.”
“You hear why they decided to separate?” Maggie asked. Both women shook their heads and cast anxious glances down the hall, where Serena Holman was still leading her wealthy parade through the ward.
“Did you ever see Fiona Harker with Dr. Holman’s husband?” Maggie asked abruptly, hoping to shock one of them into an answer.
The first nurse looked at the second one and her lips clamped down in a tight line, as if she was trying to hold words back. Boy, you could tell a lot from people’s body language. I’d have been a better detective if I’d paid attention to that while alive.
“It’s important,” Maggie said quietly.
With another glance toward Serena Holman, the second nurse told Maggie that, yes, she’d seen Fiona Harker having coffee with Christian Fletcher a week or so before her death, upstairs in the hospital cafeteria. A lot of people had seen them.
“What did they look like?” Maggie asked. “How were they sitting?”
The second nurse looked perplexed at first, but paused, remembering. “They were at a table for four and sitting across from each other,” she recalled. “He looked tired.”
“He always looks tired,” the first nurse interrupted. “He works like a dog.”
“Fiona looked like, I don’t know, something,” the second nurse added.
“Something?” Maggie asked.
“Anxious. Maybe a little angry. That could be too strong of a word. I’d say Fiona looked anxious for sure.”
“Thanks,” Maggie said. “I appreciate it.” She glanced down the hall. “Where can I wait for Dr. Holman?” she asked. “Give me a place where she can’t possibly overlook me or make an easy escape.”
They liked that, both of them.
“In there,” the first nurse suggested, pointing toward a large door painted yellow next to the nurse’s station. “She’ll be going in there next to check on some of the kids. The ones who feel well enough to get out of bed go in there to play and socialize.”
“Thanks,” Maggie told them as she headed toward the room to wait. I followed, but not before noticing that the second nurse had picked up the telephone the moment Maggie’s back was turned.
The room was a paradise for kids, but I wasn’t sure the half dozen or so patients playing in it were in a position to appreciate the bright yellow walls, the smooth white floor dotted with colorful rugs, plush reading chairs beside shelves of books, or even the large-screen TV that dominated one wall and had dozens of family-friendly DVDs stored below it. Most of the kids had opted for quieter pursuits and were sitting at tables putting together jigsaw puzzles, coloring, or reading elaborate books about pirates and ancient Egypt. Two were even working on home-work, I guessed, as they had math books open before them and were concentrating on equations they had scrawled on notebook paper. I hoped they would have the chance to ace their next math tests. The energy in the room was barely perceptible; it seemed impossible that six human beings, even this young, could survive on so little energy.
I wondered suddenly how many patients got to leave this ward to go home again.
Maggie took a seat on the couch, where she had a good vi
ew of the door. The moment Serena Holman entered, I figured she’d move and block the exit to gain a psychological advantage.
I sat at one of the empty tables on the other side of the room and watched the children, tracing the pain that flowed from them to the places in their tiny bodies where their cancers lived, pulsing darkly. I wished there was something I could do for them.
“Is that your little boy?”
A girl about eight years old stood in front of me. She was wearing a pink hospital gown and had fuzzy slippers on her feet. Her huge eyes were rimmed with dark shadows. I had seen her before. She had hopped with me on the colorful route lines painted on the hospital hall floors. She looked even more tired than she had yesterday as she stared at me patiently, waiting for my answer.
My little boy? Why had she asked if I had a little boy? I looked over and there he was: my little otherworldly friend, sitting at the table with me, hands folded precisely as if he were waiting for his teacher to begin a lesson.
“Not exactly,” I told her. “You can hear me?”
“Of course I can hear you,” she said, rolling her eyes at me. “I’m not deaf. I’ve just got acute lymphocytic leukemia. I saw you before. Remember?”
I smiled. “I remember.” I was not as thrown as I might have been that she could see me. I had been seen by a child once before, albeit one as sick as she clearly was. My guess was that children, so open to possibilities adults have long since blocked, were closer to my world in general—and that those who were close to death sometimes had the power to see through to my side.
The girl was carrying a pad of drawing paper and a box of new crayons. “Want me to draw him a picture?” she offered, and sat down before I could reply.
My little companion smiled at the young girl agreeably, as if to say, “Sure.”
Looking at his face closely for the first time, I noticed a strange blankness in his eyes. He seemed a bit off to me; he was not quite like me.
No one else in the room noticed our exchange. To them, I suppose, it seemed as if the little girl were simply talking to herself. Maggie was flipping back over her notes, making notations in the margins. The other kids had just enough energy to support what they were doing. Playing with anyone else—or even noticing anyone else—seemed beyond them.
The little girl was drawing a picture of what I thought was a horse, or maybe it was a cow. The four-legged beast taking shape among enthusiastic blades of green grass on her art pad could have been anything from an Appaloosa to a zebra. My little otherworldly friend liked it, though. He beamed at her in encouragement.
“You’re pretty good at that,” I told the little girl.
“I know,” she said confidently. Her arm was dotted with bruises where blood had been drawn and intravenous tubes inserted. “I’m going to be an artist when I grow up.”
I hoped she was right.
“Here.” She slid the completed drawing across the table to my friend. He smiled down at it. She looked up at me. “Your turn. What do you want me to draw you?”
Oh my god. Of course.
“Draw a lake,” I said at once, with a glance toward Maggie. She had stopped reading her notes and was eyeing the sick children with a combination of sadness and frustration that there was nothing she could do to help.
“Like this?” the little girl asked, drawing a big, blue oval in the center of the page.
“Like that,” I agreed, thinking hard. What shape had the reservoir been? “Only this end is longer and curves,” I explained. “Like a dog’s leg. It sticks down. Yes. Like that.”
As she furiously colored in waves within the shape of the lake, I tried to place the house where I had discovered the little boy in context. If only I had paid more attention to the neighborhood when I was alive. I would not be able to attempt a real map of it, there were too many winding streets, and it would quickly become a confusing series of random lines. I’d have to keep it simple.
“What next?” the little girl asked agreeably, once the lake was finished.
“Put a boulevard there,” I said, pointing to the bottom of the page.
“What’s a boulevard?’ she asked. “I’ve never drawn one before.”
“A big road,” I explained. “This one has six lanes. Three in each direction, with bushes in between the two directions.”
She meticulously completed the boulevard, her concentration intense.
“Can you draw a road around the edge of the lake, too?” I asked. “Just a regular two-lane road?”
“Sure,” she said confidently. “That’s easy.”
When she was done with the road, I had her draw a shorter road coming off the shoreline drive and then a cul-de-sac to the right off it. She finished the scene with a depiction of a house at the top of the cul-de-sac, then filled it in with small, brown squares to represent cedar shingles. It was surrounded by scribbly bushes and colorful flowers. Two plainer houses were arranged on each side of it.
“Now draw a little boy,” I told her. “He lives in the house.”
“Him?” she asked, staring at my little friend, who seemed fascinated by the way she held her crayons and drew colors across the white page.
“Like him,” I agreed. “Only with curly hair.”
She created a stick-legged little boy with a huge head of brown curls and obediently colored his pants blue at my suggestion. The T-shirt with dinosaurs printed on it was beyond her, but she enthusiastically decorated the upper half of the boy with a few blobs that had heads on them and pronounced them dinosaurs. It didn’t look a bit like Tyler Matthews, but it was good enough to represent him.
“Not bad at all,” she said when she was done. “It might be my best ever.”
If only she knew, I thought. “Can you do me one more favor? Can you give the drawing to the lady over there?” I pointed to Maggie.
“Sure,” she said, with the aplomb of one who has conquered far worse fears than approaching a stranger. “Is she your wife?”
“No.” I smiled. “But I wish she was.”
“Should I tell her it’s from you?”
“No, just tell her the little boy she is looking for lives in that house and that it’s by the lake where we used to get our drinking water.”
The little girl looked puzzled by this, but hopped from her chair and marched across the room, drawing in hand, willing to approach Maggie.
Unfortunately, Serena Holman chose that moment to enter the room in search of her patients. She spotted the girl and beckoned her over. “You were supposed to be in radiation ten minutes ago,” she admonished the child. “We had a deal.”
A nurse had followed Dr. Holman into the room. She looked terrified but risked a comment. “I just thought it would do her good to—”
“Thank you,” Dr. Holman said abruptly. “When I want an opinion from you, I’ll be sure to ask you for it.”
She turned her back on the nurse and reached for the little girl, but the child twisted away and darted over to where Maggie was standing and thrust the drawing at her.
“I drew this for you,” she said. “A little boy who’s lost lives in the house and drinks water from the lake.”
“How nice,” Maggie said uncertainly as she stared at the drawing. She placed the drawing on top of her briefcase, her attention already elsewhere. I had lost my chance.
Serena Holman was examining Maggie suspiciously, having noticed her for the first time. Maggie took the hint. “Maggie Gunn,” she said, showing her badge. “I’d like to ask you a few questions.”
“I’m assuming this is about Fiona Harker?” the doctor asked with distaste. Emotions roiled in her—Fiona had definitely pushed some of her buttons, but I could not separate them out. This was one tightly coiled lady.
“Yes. It is.” Maggie looked over at the children, wondering if they could overhear.
“Take her to radiation,” Dr. Holman said, dismissing the little girl and nurse with a wave of her hand. “We can talk over here.” Her voice was cold. Gone was the w
arm and caring doctor of the donor tour. It appeared the lady had two faces and the nurses, who seemed to loathe her, saw only one of them.
She led Maggie to the same table where I had been sitting. My little friend was gone. The doctor did not sit, but stood by the table, glancing impatiently at her watch.
“I just need a few moments,” Maggie assured her. “Did you know Fiona Harker?”
“In passing,” Holman said. “Our paths seldom crossed. She worked in the emergency room with my husband. Ex-husband,” she corrected herself.
“Were they friends?” Maggie asked.
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“Were they friends?” Maggie repeated, more sharply. Uh-oh. Her personal feelings were creeping back in. She did not like Serena Holman.
“I suppose.” The doctor glanced at her watch again. “If you consider coworkers friends. My husband—exhusband —has no friends. He has his work and people he knows from work. Otherwise, I’d hardly call him a social animal.”
Translation: He hated going to all those hospital charity benefits that I dragged him to and, worse, failed to appreciate my utter divineness when I wore my designer ball gowns and showed off my boney shoulder blades. Others worshipped me, why not him? And by the way, I am really pissed that I married this brilliant med student only to find out he’d rather work in an emergency room than become chief of staff at Johns Hopkins.
Oh, yes, I had run into Serena Holman’s type before. And I now understood why Christian Fletcher chose to work all the time. Still, he was the one who had married her. If he had not been smart enough to see beyond her expensive good looks to her self-centeredness, then he had gotten exactly what he deserved.
Maggie was blatantly sizing the doctor up. Holman was returning the favor.
“Oh, don’t tell me you’ve fallen for his noble-doctor act, too,” Serena Holman finally said, breaking the silence.
“I beg your pardon?” Maggie sounded extremely professional. She was going to ice this lady’s wings but good.