The Children's Ward

by Patricia Wallace

  “I’ve got it,” he said.

  “What do you mean, she won’t care?”

  “She’s not like you, Tiffany. The house is just that to her…a house.”

  “And what makes you such an expert on what Courtney is like? You weren’t even around when I brought her home from the hospital—”

  “—after she was born. I know.” He smiled grimly. “I had things to do.”

  Tiffany was silent, staring at the road.

  David was apparently content to let things rest. It bothered her that he never seemed to be wounded when she gave him the silent treatment. She was torn between the desire to make him as miserable as she felt and the exhaustion of keeping alive an old hurt.

  As they pulled into the hospital parking lot she decided to put it out of her mind. It was going to take a lot of time and energy to get the house back in shape and there was Courtney to worry about.

  “I know,” she said. “I’ll ask one of the doctors when I should tell Courtney…”

  David was already out of the car.

  Tiffany’s face began to ache from smiling.

  Courtney was looking better, she thought, although her hair was a little tangled. She would suggest to the nurse that a shower and shampoo would undoubtedly help Courtney’s frame of mind.

  If anything, Courtney was more withdrawn than usual.

  It was not a thought that Tiffany found comfortable; she seldom acknowledged that her child was politely distant.

  “Is there anything you’d like me to bring you?”

  “No.”

  “Something to read?”

  Courtney shook her head.

  Tiffany looked around for David. He had left some time before to get a cup of coffee in the hospital cafeteria. He’d been gone long enough, she thought bitterly, to fly to Colombia, pick the beans himself, and grind his own.

  It was nearing three o’clock and the end of visiting hours.

  She had insisted that they stay the full two hours today in view of Courtney’s medical crisis yesterday. David, complaining of being chilled from the rain (it had not been raining when they arrived) had taken off after about ten minutes. He would probably return in time to be told they had to leave.

  Even when she got her way, she didn’t.

  It had been a very long two hours.

  Courtney had closed her eyes.

  When the nurse said it was time to leave, Tiffany rose gratefully from her chair. David was not back and she supposed that she would have to look for him. She’d ask the doctor tomorrow.

  Fifty-seven

  “How come nobody called me earlier?” The security guard walked down the hall five feet behind the orderly who was, he felt, trying to rush him. If there was a rush, why wasn’t it two hours ago when it was first determined that the door to physical therapy was locked when it shouldn’t have been?

  “I just figured she was late coming back from lunch, and the patient had another appointment in the G.I. lab two doors down, so I took him there first. That took a couple of hours…”

  “Well, it’s three-thirty, maybe she left early after her patient didn’t show up.”

  “I checked her time card…she didn’t punch out.”

  “A lot of people forget to punch out; I forget myself once in a while.”

  They were at the door.

  The security guard rapped on the door.

  “I did that,” the orderly said.

  “So I’m doing it again.” He had no patience with civilians who felt they knew security procedures better than he did. He’d been a guard for thirteen years. He rapped harder.

  “I’m telling you, I pounded on the door for five solid minutes. If she’s in there, she would have answered.”

  “Maybe she was in the bathroom.” He glared at the orderly, noting several stains on the guy’s uniform. His own uniform was dark blue and didn’t show stains but even if he was wearing white, he’d never present such a sloppy appearance.

  “For five minutes?”

  “How the hell do I know? It’s not something you can rush.”

  “She’s not answering now,” the orderly said pointedly.

  His smile was not meant to be friendly. “Thank you for telling me…I’d never have figured that out on my own.” He took his ring of keys off the belt hitch. “By the way, where is your patient?”

  “They had to give him so much Valium to relax him for the endoscopy, he couldn’t hold his head up straight.”

  “Endoscopy? Is that where they…?”

  “Yeah…anyway, he wasn’t in any kind of shape to have therapy, physical or otherwise.”

  The security guard located the master key, inserting it into the lock. Then he pushed the door open.

  The lights were still on; it did not have the look of a department closed for the night.

  The orderly passed him going in, heading straight for the employee lounge. The guard followed.

  “Look,” the orderly said when he came into the small room. He pulled a glass decanter out of a small coffee machine. He swirled the coffee around; it was darker and thicker than fresh coffee, like it had been kept warm and some of the water evaporated off.

  “I see it.” The guard looked around the room which was cramped with the two of them in there.

  “She left it on. She wouldn’t have left it on if she’d gone home.”

  The guard shrugged, unimpressed. “She could have simply forgotten. This close to Christmas, people get a little absent-minded. It’s well documented.”

  The orderly pushed by him to get out of the door.

  He was getting more and more annoyed.

  He looked at the row of lockers, none of which were locked. That’s how much good civilians were at security measures: give them a safe place to lock up their valuables and they’d leave them hanging like so much fruit, ripe for picking.

  Sighing, he stepped closer to the lockers and opened the first one. He could hear the orderly, apparently going through desk drawers. Did he expect to find her in there?

  In the second locker he found a purse.

  Surprised, he pulled it out, letting the strap hang over two fingers.

  “This what you’re looking for?” he called out.

  The orderly came back into the lounge. “See?”

  “Yes, I see…I found it.” He reached into the purse and dug around for a wallet. Extracting the wallet, he slipped the purse strap over his shoulder, out of the reach of the orderly.

  “Let’s see.” He opened the wallet, noticing that there was a fairly thick wad of bills. He flipped to the credit card compartment, searching for a driver’s license. “Anne Beverly Rossi.”

  “That’s her. Are her car keys in the purse?”

  Without commenting, the guard returned the wallet to the purse and peered inside. He stuck his hand in and brought out a key ring.

  “Okay,” he said then. “She left her purse with money and car keys in the department. She’s somewhere on the hospital grounds. Did you think to page her?”

  For once the orderly did not seem to have an answer.

  “Why don’t you ask the operator to page her?” He spoke slowly, as if to an idiot.

  “Yeah, but…” he reached and took the keys out of the guard’s hand. “Her key to the department is here on this ring. Why would she lock herself out?”

  “Hell, I don’t know. Maybe that’s what happened. She locked herself out and…” Everyone on staff at the hospital knew that the guards had keys and so did most of the supervisors. All she had to do was go to a phone and call for someone…even housekeeping…to let her in.

  The orderly obviously realized the same thing and was smiling at him nastily.

  He grabbed the keys back and put them into the purse.

  “Then I guess I’ll notify administration that we have a missing employee.” He went to use the phone at the desk, looking around at the department. Nothing seemed to be disturbed…not like there’d been a struggle or anything. The only thing no
t in perfect order was a small puddle of water near the hydrotherapy pool.

  Waiting for the operator to answer, he frowned.

  Water on the floor was a hazard. All of the safety films that were shown to the employees during orientation stressed the danger of slick floors. Especially in patient areas.

  A stack of thick white towels were folded on a shelf only two feet away from the therapy pool.

  He narrowed his eyes. At this angle and without his glasses, it was hard to tell. But it looked like something was floating in the pool.

  Swallowing hard, he hung up the phone, and walked slowly toward the pool. When he was halfway there, he stopped.

  He had found Anne Beverly Rossi.

  Fifty-eight

  “You’ve got to be mistaken.” The coroner spoke into the mobile radio. “I’ve just come from Valley Memorial.”

  The dispatcher, in a voice that sounded as dead as many of his clients, repeated, “It’s Valley Memorial Hospital. The call was logged at 1545 hours. A drowning victim.”

  “Drowning?” He slowed the car, pulling off onto the shoulder of the road. “I’m on my way.”

  “Ten-four.”

  He had to wait for traffic to pass before he made the U-turn and headed back to the hospital.

  How could someone drown in a hospital?

  As if in answer, the rain began to pour down and he had to drive slower. The one nice thing about having bodies as clients was that they were never really in a hurry, he thought.

  “In here.” A security guard, swollen with self-importance, showed him into physical therapy. “In the pool.”

  The body of a woman floated in the water face down.

  He looked at the guard. “You didn’t pull her out.” It was not exactly a question.

  “I didn’t want to disturb the crime scene.”

  “What makes you think there’s a crime?” He nodded to his assistant who began to prepare to pull the body out of the water.

  The guard didn’t answer.

  He turned his attention back to the woman in the whirlpool. She was dressed in dark slacks, a blouse, and a white lab coat. She was wearing shoes. And a watch.

  Not what he would choose to wear to take a swim.

  When she was out of the water he squatted beside her to take a look at her hands. Nails were not broken. He slipped plastic bags over her hands and secured them with rubber bands. They would collect the nail scrapings at the morgue.

  All of the color had been bleached out of her face by the water but there were no marks to indicate that she had been beaten. The buttons on her blouse were secure, her slacks fastened, nothing was torn or in disarray.

  Her eyes were open.

  “What’s her name?” he asked, not taking his eyes from her face.

  “Anne Rossi. She works…worked here.”

  The sleeves of the lab coat were too wet to push up easily but he managed to get them up to mid-forearm. On her right wrist there were faint discolorations which somehow struck him as being too small for fingermarks.

  He looked back at her face. Water was coming from her mouth.

  He straightened up. “Okay, let’s get her out of here.” He moved to the whirlpool, staring into the water. “Drain it with filters in place. Print the outside rim, controls, whatever surface can hold a print.” He took out his notepad, wrote down her name and what he had ordered to be done. The crime scene photographer flashed pictures as accompaniment to his thoughts.

  “Suicide?”

  He turned to look at the guard who stood, arms folded across his chest, watching as they prepared to lift the body onto the stretcher.

  “Drowning in four feet of water is not one of the easier ways to go.”

  The sound of the body bag being zipped caught his attention. It was the most final sound he’d ever heard. He watched sadly as the bag closed over the woman’s face.

  “It’s well documented,” the guard intoned, “that suicides increase during the holidays.”

  “Is it?”

  “I’m surprised you wouldn’t notice when the body count goes up.”

  “I never count them.” He was aware that the tone of his voice had grown steadily colder. It was hard for him to imagine why some people were given to equating human tragedy with statistics.

  “Excuse me…I’m Dr. Harrington, the chief of staff.”

  The doctor looked exactly like a kindly old country doctor. Except for his eyes, which surveyed the room and its occupants with quick precision. “Anything you can tell me?”

  “Nothing aside from the obvious: the body of a female employee was found floating in the whirlpool, presumably a drowning victim.”

  “Presumably.”

  “That’s all I can say at this point.”

  The doctor, unlike the security guard, did not press the issue.

  When, for the second time in the space of a few hours, he left Valley Memorial Hospital, he was profoundly depressed.

  The body of Anne Beverly Rossi had been taken off to the city morgue where, tomorrow, he would perform an autopsy. The body of Lloyd Marshall was probably under the knife at the moment, assuming that the deputy coroner had started without him when the second call had come.

  They might discover something. That Marshall suffered from arteriosclerosis or was a smoker or was in the early stages of one disease or another. Things that might have cost him his life eventually, now only mildly interesting clinical findings.

  That Anne Rossi had never borne a child and never would. That she drowned in four feet of water in the middle of the day in a busy hospital.

  There might be someone’s flesh under her fingernails. There might be a brain hemorrhage from a blow to the head.

  Whatever they learned, it wouldn’t bring either of them back.

  Fifty-nine

  Abigail’s eyes opened.

  She had not moved in her sleep and she was looking out the window at the last traces of light. It was still raining.

  She yawned and stretched, turning onto her back.

  She felt very good.

  “Hey, Abigail.” Russell had one arm hooked through the trapeze and was sitting up in bed. “We thought you were going to sleep forever.”

  “Did I miss dinner? I’m hungry.”

  Tessi shook her head. “I think it’s late because of the rain.”

  “They feed us last because we’re all the way out here.” Russell grinned. “Whatever no one else will eat, they bring to us.”

  Abigail sat up in bed. “We could complain.”

  “Nobody ever listens to kids,” Tessi said.

  Abigail smiled to herself and got out of bed to go to the bathroom.

  She looked at her reflection in the mirror.

  There was so much she understood now. So much that no one else knew. Russell didn’t know, although he had used the power himself. She had felt it flow from him, weaker than her own but still enough to strike out…

  Courtney was using it but, strangely enough, only when she was asleep.

  Tessi was the only one who hadn’t demonstrated the force of her will. But she would, in time.

  Abigail tilted her head back, looking into her own eyes in the mirror.

  She was the only one who knew.

  When she went back out, dinner had arrived. Her tray was on the bedside table, silver covers still keeping in the heat.

  She was hungrier than she’d ever been in her life.

  A standard hospital meal: baked chicken, tiny boiled potatoes, string beans, a roll with butter, milk, and a square of frosted white cake for dessert.

  All else forgotten for the moment, she began to eat.

  Her sense of taste and smell were much stronger than usual, and she savored every bite of the meal. Rather than cutting the chicken with knife and fork like her grandmother had taught her, she picked it up in her fingers and sank her teeth into the meat. Chicken juice ran down her chin.

  The plates were spotless when she was finished and she pushed the tray away
. She looked across at the others; they too had eaten all of their food. Tessi, usually a fussy eater, was looking at her plate as if disappointed there wasn’t more.

  The evening nurse had cleared away the trays and was taking Russell’s blood pressure.

  Abigail did not like this nurse. She always pumped the blood pressure thing too full of air until it felt like it was going to cut off all the feeling in your hand. Likewise, taking the pulse, she pressed too hard on the inside of the wrist and held tight for an awful long time. Abigail thought it was a good thing that the hospital used digital thermometers because otherwise this particular nurse would break the old-fashioned glass type by jamming it between someone’s teeth.

  There was no expression on Russell’s face, nothing to indicate whether the nurse was hurting him.

  The nurse had better hope that Abigail didn’t see a look of discomfort on anyone’s face.

  As the only one who knew, she felt responsible for the others.

  She would take action if she had to.

  Sixty

  “Joshua, what are you still doing here?” Simon looked at his watch.

  “I might ask you the same thing.” Joshua crossed the room and sat in a chair opposite Simon’s desk.

  “Ha!” He indicated the papers strewn across the desk. “I’m being buried in incident reports.”

  “I heard…terrible. Have they any idea what happened?”

  “If they do they’re not sharing that information with me.” Simon picked up a single sheet of paper from the pile. “Days like this make me extremely grateful that I’m not the administrator and have to go through this…this garbage on a full-time basis.”

  “Speaking of Maggie, when is she due back?”

  “Next week sometime. She’ll be welcome to it, I can tell you. Why I ever volunteered to do this in her absence, I’ll never know.”

  “You’re a sucker.”

  “Thank you for those kind words.” Simon smiled, nodding. “So, what are you doing here at this time of night?”

  “Finishing charts. Medical records threatened all kinds of nasty things if I didn’t comply.”

  “I’ll tell you in the old days, medical records never had such power. It just shows you how respect for our profession is eroding.”