Ashes To Ashes

by Gwen Hunter

  "Jack was no better and no worse than any other man. He was a rich man, with a rich man’s opportunities and a rich man’s temptations. But in his own way, he loved you and Jas. Whatever you discover as you go along, remember that much." I thought of the pictures of Jack and Robyn in his desk drawer, and wondered if Nana had known or guessed about the affair.

  "Now. If there are any illegalities involved with Jack’s problems, you’ll need help dealing with them. Wallace’s half-brother Macon has both the time and the resources, and he has no financial involvement in any of Jack’s developments so he’ll be totally impartial, unlike that self serving little weasel Rolland Randall the Third." The way Nana said it, the name sounded slimy. Rolland was Jack’s attorney, a very wealthy Charlotte lawyer. A man with his fingers in everyone’s pie. A man who knew everyone and everything and made a fortune bending his knowledge to self-serving ends. The kind of man Nana hated on sight and let him know it, much in the same way she had let Vance Waldrop know her opinion of his politics and ethics.

  I smiled slightly and bit into a chocolate chip cookie. The chips were gooey and sweet. With my mouth full, and managing to sound innocent, I said, "And while I’m at it, I’ll be redirecting the family fortunes, sending both financial and moral support back to the Chadwicks."

  Nana looked at me hard. "Macon may not be as close as Wallace, but he’s still a Chadwick. And the Chadwicks stick together. Period."

  I took another bite and said meekly, "Yes, ma’am." Nana nodded and pushed away from the table. Moments later the John Deere roared to life, leaving me in silence.

  Family. Black, white, male, female, right or wrong, good or bad, the Chadwicks had stuck together for two hundred, forty years, sharing land, food, fortunes, and opportunity. And ever since Growling Jim Chadwick married his half-black cousin and former slave just after the Civil War ended, they had openly shared genetic heritage. The marriage ended eight years later with the threats of the KKK and the burning of a particularly fine cross on Growling Jim’s front lawn.

  Jim Chadwick left his wife and their six children, deeding them two hundred acres of the county’s best bottom land and married a more socially acceptable white woman in Dorsey City. Shortly thereafter, the KKK came under attack, with the so-called secret society members returning from raids to find their barns torched and their livestock run off, their homes burned and their children without a roof over their heads.

  Before Growling Jim died in 1923, he had run the last known KKK member out of the county, fathered four children on his new wife, two more on his former wife, and enriched the coffers of both families considerably. For some reason, Jim was always the first to know when a KKK member was ready to sell out and move on. He would appear, cash in hand, to buy the drastically devalued farm, often while smoke was still curling up from the charred timbers of the family home. Growling Jim Chadwick was no saint, but he believed in family and justice.

  I had grown up knowing my black cousins, swimming in the same ponds each summer while the city pools were still segregated. Together we built snowmen in winter when school was out, sharing books and toys and play time. I had always known the story of Joanetta and Pap and Wallace, but considered it for the first time from the vantage of a widow left to deal with problems. I wasn’t sure I would have had the courage to do what Nana had done and welcome my husband’s child and lover into the embrace of family. I wasn’t sure I was strong enough to do the right thing in the face of public censure and gossip.

  I had grown up with Wallace, my half-black second cousin . . . or was it third? As a child I had admired the bronzed young man, looking up to his greater intellect and admiring his perfect features, while simultaneously pulling practical jokes on him at every opportunity. Now, Wallace Chadwick, MD was the second in command in the emergency room and acting Chief of Staff of Dawkins County Hospital. Most weeks, the family tradition continued as the two branches worked together to save lives.

  The family tradition continued in other ways as well. Nana and Aunt Mosetta, Jonetta’s mother, now lived together in the big, remodeled Chadwick farmhouse half a mile away, ruling the multiracial family with two pairs of iron hands in matching velvet gloves. Wallace’s daughter and mine were best friends, Topaz and Jasmine, inseparable since they were children. All because Nana had been a strong woman. Which I wasn’t, Nana’s declarations notwithstanding.

  Putting the glasses in the dishwasher, I looked up the number for Chadwick, Gaston and Chadwick, Attorneys at Law, and dialed it before I had time to reconsider. Half an hour later, I had a new lawyer who was willing to see me through probate and oversee the paperwork involved in restructuring the corporations now that Jack was no longer around to run them, or handle a sale should I decide I didn’t want to be a businesswoman. He would even handle the appointment of Peter Howell to the position of overall supervisor out at Davenport Hills.

  And he agreed to handle any improprieties he might uncover in Jack’s office. Such a kind word, improprieties. I was grateful to Macon for choosing it. He had a gentle, deep voice, one I instantly trusted. The relief to be doing something about the problems I had uncovered in Jack’s office was intense and fulfilling. A sweet satisfaction. It felt good to make a decision.

  Maybe this was what had seen Nana through all the gossip and innuendoes so many years ago. This kind of satisfaction. As she had always maintained, there was something healing in dealing with family. Something uplifting, like being wrapped in a warm, protective blanket and held out of harm’s way. By the time I hung up the phone I was calmer than I had been at any time since Jack died. My last recollection of Macon was of a boy with big greenish eyes and short-cropped hair, standing hip-deep in the back pond where the farm kids cavorted on hot summer days. He was all grown up now, yet I knew that Macon Chadwick would help me, and the thought of a Chadwick in that position was deeply reassuring, even though he was a Chadwick I hadn’t seen in years.

  Carrying the newfound sense of calm with me, I returned to the fields. There was still a good bit of manure to be wheeled out to the front pasture. Hard work. Work that would keep my mind and body busy and tired.

  A letter came in the mail before I left for work at eleven, no return address, unsigned. The grammar was perfect, the tone educated and menacing, the message succinct and to the point.

  You have the samples, the reports, the permits, the files, the evidence. Safeguard them.

  Protect them from exposure. You are vulnerable, Ashlee Davenport. Take great care.

  What file? What permits?

  Someone somewhere was trying to get a reaction out of me. Bill? Had he mailed this? Or was it Vance? Or Bret?

  "Damn you," I whispered to Jack. Just damn you. Furious, I tore the letter to shreds and threw it in the dumpster beside the back door. My hands still shook and I had to force my feet to move slowly as I re-entered the house.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  By nine-fifteen that night, we had seen forty-seven patients in the emergency room, responding to everything from terminal cancer patients and accident victims with major traumas, to headaches, minor cuts, and GOMERS. GOMERS—from Get Out of My ER—were patients endured by every emergency room in the country. They were people complaining of pain of unknown origin, mental patients with problems too minor to merit the attention of the state mental hospital, hypochondriacs, the lonely, and those seeking attention not given in their everyday lives, and drug addicts looking for a free hit.

  We had also seen a dozen regulars, patients with chronic health problems so severe that they made the ER their second home. Patients we knew by name as well as disease or condition.

  Mattie Lou White was a regular with diabetes and high blood pressure who, two or three times a year, refused to take her medication. She wasn’t exactly noncompliant, she was simply healed by every passing tent revivalist. Each time a man of God laid on the Hands of Healing, Mattie Lou flushed her medications into the county sewer system.

  This time her blood sugar was over nine hundred,
about nine times above the medically acceptable norm, and her blood pressure was two-forty over one-thirty-five. Stroke territory. She was admitted to the Intensive Care Unit. Again. And because Mattie Lou didn’t have private health insurance, the government would pay the price of her faith. As usual.

  Ronellen Williams came in with a migraine, her face puffy and tear stained, sporting a black eye and multiple abrasions. Her husband, crude, insolent and hostile as usual, sat by her bed as she was seen. He’d kill her one of these days. We had all told her so, but she loved him and wouldn’t even consider legal help. She had migraines every time he beat her, depending on the hospital for compassion and tenderness.

  Olajawan Thomas, a three year old black child with sickle cell, was carried through the doors in a crisis. Curled into a fetal position, he was moaning softly as his joints swelled and stiffened and his abnormally shaped red cells sliced into his joints and internal organs with brutal efficiency. Olajawan’s mother knew her son didn’t have long to live unless a new medication or treatment was discovered soon. We did what we could for the boy, and gave his mother the compassion she needed to make it through another day of watching her only child slowly die.

  A seventeen year old came in with a fork stuck in his thigh. It quivered when he walked, pulling the denim of his jeans tight. Food still graced the tines, rice and English peas. At least it was a balanced diet.

  Three fourteen year old boys with the clap tried to get treatment, hoping for an end to their misery. All three were sent home without medication. In South Carolina, a fourteen year old can’t be seen by a doctor without his parent’s consent unless it is an emergency. And the clap isn’t an emergency, although it may feel like it.

  A cardiac patient took up an hour. He was a triple bypass with angina—pain with no apparent physiological cause.

  And then there were the bloody patients. A shooting victim was still in surgery having his spleen removed and his intestines temporarily rerouted. People in Dawkins County had yet to understand that the human digestive tract was never designed to withstand the effects of double-ought buckshot delivered from two feet away. They kept having to learn the lesson over and over again, and the latest one would be lucky to survive. The victim’s family was out in the waiting room, drunk on beer hidden in a cooler in their car and plotting vengeance on the assailant.

  An accident victim spent hours up in X-ray having his bones zapped before a surgeon could sew up his buttocks. According to his story, he had two beers—two quart sized beers at least, judging from his blood alcohol level—and then decided to test his coordination and balance by standing on the open tailgate of his best friend’s old Chevy truck. At seventy miles an hour. Once on his feet, he failed his own test and slipped from the relative safety of the truck bed to the asphalt. The landing tore a hole the size of a man’s fist in the patient’s backside, a fact the EMTs had a few tension relieving laughs over once they got the bleeding stopped.

  One of the Dover boys came in with his scalp all cut up. The cuts were almost perfectly circular, the diameter of a beer bottle bottom. Bo Dover had neglected to display the proper amount of jealousy when his girlfriend of the moment stopped to talk to a good-looking stranger at the neighborhood bar and back-room poker joint. She had banged an empty against the wall, knocking out the bottom, and stabbed his head repeatedly with the broken end.

  When Bo came to, lying in a pool of sticky blood, he got up, walked down the street to the pay phone and called an ambulance. Then he returned to the site of the attack and lay back down in the blood to await help, pretending to be unconscious. All within the sight of witnesses. Bo wasn’t real bright, even before his girlfriend rattled his brains.

  Wallace Chadwick, MD, finished suturing up the last patient at about the same time that I finished giving a shot to a four year old with an earache, and JoEllen, the only other RN on duty, finished with a twelve year old girl. JoEllen’s patient was a sexually active child with abdominal pain who turned out to be pregnant. As a group, the patients gathered at the desk to sign the medical forms. The mother of the four year old was relieved, while the mother of the twelve year old was furious, stalking through the automatic doors as if the emergency room personnel were personally responsible for the fetus growing in her daughter’s belly.

  Moving slowly, Wallace, JoEllen and I gathered at the desk, watching the last three patients and their families depart, sharing the sudden silence and the sense of space in the vacated rooms. Wallace shook his head. "I need coffee," he said wearily, resting his elbows on the desk and his head on his arms. "I need coffee bad."

  JoEllen grimaced and glanced at the clock. "The last time I saw a bathroom was six hours ago. If I don’t go soon we’re going to need an ark." Neither of them moved.

  There was nothing I wanted except for my feet to stop throbbing. The pain radiated up my legs and nestled into the small of my back. Acetaminophen would have been nice, but like my friends, I was content to let the desk hold up my weight, relishing the moment of inactivity and quiet. Forty-seven patients in ten hours was an unbelievable horde in an ER as small as this one.

  From down the hall came a steady soft squeaking, the sound growing progressively louder. "If that’s another patient, I’ll strangle him myself," JoEllen said.

  "I’ll help," I murmured. "You want to use gauze, an ace bandage, or your bare hands?"

  "An ace would be nice. I don’t want to damage my nails."

  Wallace made a breathy, laughing sound into the cavern of his arms. "And I’ll pronounce him. All for one and one for all. We can share a prison cell."

  Tricia, the nursing supervisor, who certainly had better things to do this time of night, came around the corner from X-ray, pushing a lightweight utility cart. In a hospital the size of Dawkins County—one hundred twenty beds plus outpatient and same day surgery facilities—the shift nursing supervisor was often only a highly educated, glorified, gofer, referee, and receptionist. Her position was largely administrative, even on weekends and night shifts, a job that meant settling disputes between exhausted doctors and equally tired nurses, investigating employee accidents and filling out incident reports, listening to dissatisfied patients, and making repeated trips to the pharmacy for narcotics and antibiotics, trips to linen for sheets and towels, and trips to general supply for fluids and nursing supplies. And that was just for starters. But tonight, the supply cart she pushed wasn’t laden with linens or replacement IV fluids or any of the other usual paraphernalia. It was, however, overflowing with at least three dozen long stemmed red roses in a cut crystal vase. The roses waved delicately with the forward motion of the cart.

  To the left of Tricia was a patient on crutches. A man, about six feet two inches tall and very slender, wearing a pair of paisley silk pajamas and a navy silk robe. The clothes were surprising; most patients who could afford it went to Charlotte or Columbia when health problems forced them to a hospital. However, seeing Tricia with a man was not surprising at all.

  JoEllen snorted delicately, sharing that thought. Tricia, who was single but still looking, was smiling broadly, her brows arched almost up into her artfully highlighted hair. "Look-y whaaaat I got," she sang, her voice echoing teasingly down the hallway.

  "I don’t know what you had to do to get them, but it couldn’t have been legal," JoEllen said, glancing from the roses to the man hobbling beside the supply cart.

  "Don’t let my wife see all that," Wallace said, pushing away from the desk and stepping into the break room. "She might start getting ideas. Coffee fresh?"

  No one answered. The squeaky cart came to a stop at the desk and the man, pale and wan, stopped beside it, transferring the crutches to one hand. He was good-looking, though too pale to be healthy, and was somewhere in his forties—that wonderful age for a man when he has all the wisdom and discipline and culture of an older man, but still with the looks and power of a younger man. Too bad women don’t have a stage of life like that.

  "Actually," Tricia said, lifting the
heavy vase and placing it on the desk with a soft thud, "I’ve just been enjoying them all evening waiting for things to slow down in here. I was afraid I’d have to take them home, ya’ll have been so busy." She didn’t sound as if that would have been so great a burden, and smiled back at the man beside her. It was the flirtatious smile she used on any available male in visual range, not the professional smile she used on fractious patients.

  I glanced at the man to gauge his response to Tricia’s words, but there wasn’t one. He was looking at me. A sober, steady gaze that brought a sudden flush to my cheeks just as Tricia finished up her little speech with the words, "Unfortunately, the roses aren’t for me. They’re for Ashlee."

  JoEllen’s mouth dropped open. Wallace, listening from the break room, laughed softly. He always did have a wicked sense of humor. I said nothing. I was looking into the quiet gray eyes of the blond man at the desk. He had a healing laceration above one pale brow and a small scabbed-over abrasion on his jaw. He was balanced on one leg as if the other pained him.

  "Alan Mathison," I said softly.

  "Ashlee Davenport," he said in the same tone. We both smiled, a bit uncertainly.

  "The guy from the wreck?" JoEllen blurted out. "The one whose wife—" she stopped, embarrassed. I had seldom seen JoEllen make a blunder with a patient. It must have been the roses. The scent of the magnificent blooms was filling up the ER, erasing the smell of old blood, unwashed bodies, and disinfectant.

  "I’m sorry about Margie," I said. Alan’s wife had died shortly after she arrived at Carolina’s Medical Center, her internal injuries too severe to survive. "I lost my husband last month and I know—" I stopped and swallowed down the words I had been about to say. I know what? The scenes from a dozen photographs flashed through my mind. Jack and Robyn. . . . After a moment I continued. "I know how hard it is."