A Teeny Bit of Trouble (19 page)

“Go ahead, laugh,” he said. “See if I care.”

He moved toward me, and Sir cut in front of him, showing his teeth. All the hairs on the dog’s back stood up.

Son leaped back. “Talk about a delayed reaction. Jesus, what’d I do?”

“I warned you.”

“Here, puppy.” Son clapped his hands.

The bulldog pounced on Son’s ankle and bit into the beige trousers. “Jesus, get him off.”

I rushed over to Sir and worked the fabric out of his teeth. Just last month, I’d taken him to a canine training class, and I tried out a command. “Leave it!”

Sir’s broad head stopping sawing from side to side and he spat out the trouser. I patted his head. “Good Sir. Good boy.”

Son rubbed his ankle. “Shit, it’s stinging. Why’d he attack all of a sudden?”

“He’s never done it before. He must’ve smelled the badness on you.”

“I love it when you sweet-talk me.” Son winked.

“Thanks. Did he break the skin?”

“Nah, I’m okay.” He lifted his trouser and ran his finger over raised, pink marks. “But I’ve got bad news about your little friend.”

“Kendall?” I dug my fingernails into my palm. She was dead. I just knew it.

“She didn’t make it, Boots. I’m sorry.”

I’d been expecting the worst, but hearing the words made me slump over. I gripped the side of the table to steady myself. “It’s not right for young people to die. It’s just not right.”

“No, it’s not.” Son put his hand on my shoulder.

The bulldog lunged again. I dropped to the floor, grabbed Sir’s collar, and pulled him against me. His fur stood up like stiff, white threads. I wanted to hear about Kendall, but I’d have to put Sir in the bedroom. And I didn’t trust myself to be alone with Son. The summer he’d worked at the orchard, he’d seduced me in ten minutes. But that was a long time ago. Now I could handle him, right?

I stroked Sir’s head. “If I put up my dog, will you stop flirting?”

“I’m not flirting, Boots. I’m just trying to feed you.”

My gaze passed over Son’s Gucci loafers, up to his hands, then I studied his face. His ponytail was caught in a leather strip, and the blond curls fell down his shoulder. I swallowed. Big feet, big hands. Big …

Don’t think about the rest of him.

I pulled Sir into my arms, grunting, and toted him to my defiled bedroom. I set him on the floor and walked around the room, gathering up my old chocolate supply. I put it in the top of my closet. When I was satisfied that the room was dog-proofed, I tossed him a stuffed duck. He looked away, disgusted.

“I do not feel sorry for you.” I shook my finger. “Try to behave.”

I went to the kitchen and found a wine opener in a drawer. In another drawer I found a Band-Aid and a crumpled tube of Neosporin. From the parlor, I heard Billie Holliday singing “Lover, Come Back to Me.”

I frowned. Son was making himself at home. I stepped into the dining room just as he returned from the parlor.

“Your hi-fi is a relic,” he said.

“Whatever.” I handed him the Neosporin and the Band-Aid. He dabbed ointment on the bite marks and watched me fill our glasses with merlot.

“To the Georgia Bulldogs.” He raised his cup. “And your bulldog. Even though he’s a biter.”

I raised my cup higher. “To all dogs.”

“You’ll love the food,” he said. “It’s upscale Southern.”

It did smell ambrosial, so I didn’t need prodding. I sat at the far end of the table, near the kitchen door in case he pulled anything. We ate in silence, forking up the delicacies, while in the background, Billie sang about tangled love.

I’d just polished off the chicken nuggets when the kitchen phone rang. I moved slowly, weighted down by grease and carbohydrates. Thanks to my shortness, there’s no margin for diet errors and nowhere to go but sideways. In my next life, I hoped I was tall with a fast metabolism, but until that happened, I would have to unbutton my skirt.

When I lifted the receiver, no one was there. I heard a crackle. I hung up and walked toward the dining room. The phone trilled again. I skated back into the kitchen and snatched the receiver.

Silence.

If I’d been alone, I would have been alarmed, but Son and his food had left me stuffed and serene. I dropped the receiver into a drawer and hurried back to the dining room. He put down a half-eaten green tomato slider. “Who keeps calling? Cooter or Mama Cooter?”

“Wrong number,” I said.

“From the wrong guy.” Son speared a triangle of pastry and held it out. “Try the Guinness turnover.”

I took the fork out of his hand and raked my teeth over the tines. The turnover was sweeter than I’d expected, almost as good as a fried Twinkie, with a salty aftertaste.

“Do that again,” he said. “That thing with your teeth.”

I dropped the fork and it clunked against the table.

“Aw, don’t be offended, Boots. I love a woman who knows how to eat.” He opened another carton. Inside was a luscious sponge cake, vanilla pudding oozing from the center onto fresh strawberries.

After we finished dessert, I felt more sociable. I undid the second button on my skirt and took another sip of merlot. “Okay,” I said. “We’ve had dinner. Tell me about Kendall.”

“Her X-rays were negative.” He leaned back in his chair and stretched his arms over his head. “No skull fracture. CT was normal. No bleeding. No brain swelling.”

“But I saw her car. Blood was everywhere.”

“She had a scalp wound, and those things gush. She probably had a concussion.”

“Are they fatal?”

“Not unless she had an occult bleed. That means hidden.”

While I gathered plates and empty cartons, Son went to his car and fetched the medical charts. He came back and set them on the table. I sat across from him.

“You can come closer,” he said. “I won’t bite.”

“But I could.”

“I’ve had my shots. Come on, Boots. It’s easier to explain the medical information if you aren’t sitting way over yonder.”

He was playing with me, using the charts as bait. “I can see fine,” I said. “Let’s get started. The O’Malleys are expecting me.”

He crossed the room in two steps. Before I could run away, he lifted me from the chair and slung me over his shoulder. Blood rushed into my face. A burning-hot pulse drilled against the top of my head.

“You’re a Cro-Magnon!” I clawed the back of his shirt, but my fingers hit solid muscle. I raised up, my hair streaming into my face, and slapped his arm. He set me in a chair. Then he moved behind the chair and leaned over me, clamping his arms against my arms. Using his legs, he pushed my chair closer to the edge of the table. His hard, ropy muscles twitched, and I felt a pulsebeat throb against my flesh.

He pressed his lips against my ear. “Remember how it used to be, Teeny?”

No, I didn’t want to remember anything. I pushed down an image of him standing in the barn, pulling down his tattered jeans. I thought of Oleander Pudding, Arsenic Apple Turnovers, and Sausage-Stuffed Death Cap Mushrooms.

“Finnegan, if you don’t back off, I’ll kick your ass.”

“Keep talking dirty.” His breath kicked up my hair. “I swiped confidential charts just for you. I broke the law, Boots.”

“It was your idea.” My chest sawed in and out. “Not mine.”

“Don’t hyperventilate. The charts are from my office.”

“If you don’t let me go I’ll take out an ad in the Bonaventure
Gazette.
It’ll say, ‘Son Finnegan stole hospital property.’”

“So? I’ll rent a billboard. It’ll say, ‘Son Finnegan loves Teeny Templeton.’”

I stopped squirming. He released one of my arms and slid the folders in front of me. He opened the first chart and flipped back the cover.

“Ingrid Robertson. Twenty-two years old. Breast augmentation. No complications during surgery. No post-op complications. Private pay, so no insurance company was screaming at me to discharge her. Third day post-op, the night nurse found her cold and unresponsive. A Code Blue was called, and the trauma team responded. I arrived ten minutes later and took over. Couldn’t get a pulse. I called the code after forty-five minutes—that’s a long time, Boots. But she was so damn young.”

“What was the cause of death?”

“I wasn’t sure what happened. The clinical cause of death agrees with the autopsy about half the time. We don’t always know why people die. But the coroner thought that Ingrid had gone into cardiac arrest, secondary to PVCs.”

“PVCs? What’s that?”

“Premature ventricular contractions. It means the lower chamber of the heart, the ventricle, contracts before it should. PVCs can be deadly.”

He closed the chart and lifted the next one, going out of his way to rub against my arm.

“Valerie Atwood. Age thirty-two. Liposuction. Normally this is an outpatient surgery, but I admitted her because she had difficulty urinating post-op. She wasn’t on a cardiac monitor. Someone from dietary brought her lunch tray and found Ms. Atwood unconscious. A Code Blue was called, but we lost her.”

“More PVCs?” I asked.

“Probably. Nothing turned up on the autopsy. No pulmonary emboli. No abnormalities. The official cause of death was cardiac arrhythmia. But nothing in the nurse’s notes supported this theory. Her pulse had been regular.”

He opened the third chart. “Brianna Connors. Age forty-eight. Tummy tuck. Expired second day post-op. Autopsy revealed nothing, but the coroner suspected a fat embolism. The review board agreed with the path report. But if I have any more unexplained deaths, the medical staff might start to question my abilities.”

“Maybe they already have.” I tried to push his arms away, but he hemmed me in tighter.

“I may not look it, but I’m a conscientious doc. Even so, the mortality rate in plastic surgery is one in one hundred thousand. I’ve had three deaths in six months. That’s high. Statistically, this shouldn’t be happening.”

“Have other doctors lost patients?”

“Sure. Including Cooter’s daddy. Last month, Dr. O’Malley admitted a twenty-six-year-old man for a third-degree burn on his arm. I was brought in to do a skin graft. The patient recovered and was scheduled to be discharged. When the nurse came to get him, the patient had expired.”

“All these patients were young and healthy,” I said.

Son tucked my hair behind my ear. “After I saw you today, I did some checking. Bonaventure Regional’s mortality rate is higher than it was last year.”

“Wouldn’t this alert someone to investigate?” I asked.

“Only if the death rate climbs.” Son’s hand moved to my neck. “I’ve got some theories about these deaths. One, act of God. Two, nursing error. The wrong medication or too much medication. Three, Angel of Death.”

“Someone at the hospital could be killing patients?”

“More likely, it’s a combination of God plus one overworked nurse. Most nurses are as smart as the docs. I bet two-thirds are smarter. But they can’t be everywhere at once.”

“True.” The air between us crackled, and a jolt moved up my arms, into my breasts. I wondered if he kissed the same way, if he still had that little trick where he blew on the belly button.

I leaned away from him. It was wrong to be attracted to another man. It was wrong to feel this way when Kendall was dead.

From the hi-fi, Def Leppard sang “Pour Some Sugar on Me.” When Mama had been at her craziest, she’d paired this song with Judges 9:11 and a recipe for candied violets.

“Don’t move away from me, Boots,” Son whispered against my neck. “Don’t you remember how good it was? I love you. And I never stopped.”

My throat felt tight and full, as if I’d swallowed the Savannah River. He started to kiss me. I turned my head, and his lips glanced off my cheek.

“You’re wasting your time with Little Deuce Coup,” he said. “You know his problem, don’t you? He can’t resist a woman in distress. It’s his kryptonite. The minute he realizes how strong you are, he’ll be gone.” He got in my face. “The least you could have done was respond to my letters.”

I frowned. “What letters?”

“The ones I wrote after your aunt ninja’d us. Did your aunt throw away the letters?”

“What letters? She didn’t throw away any letters.” But maybe she had. To get me away from Son, she’d sent me to Chamor Island, a tiny island off the Georgia coast. It was shaped like a bear claw pastry, but it smelled of sulfur. Wild horses ran down the empty beach, crocodiles bellowed from the swamp, and mosquitoes drank my blood. Inside the brown wooden house, Aunt Bunny played with her Ouija board, and my cousin Ira built talking Jesus dolls. But Ira made up sacrilegious things for Jesus to say:
Thou shalt eat oysters during an R month. Thou shalt not kill doodle bugs. Thou shalt not spit on the floor.

“I tried to find you, but I didn’t know where you’d gone,” Son said. “I had to go back to med school in September. But I wrote you letters. I used a fake return address. I used an alias, Parker MacArthur. I named it after that song you loved. ‘MacArthur Park.’ I mailed the letters from Atlanta. I bet your aunt burned them.”

Now my throat felt bigger than the Atlantic Ocean. Yes, I’d been fond of Son, I wasn’t denying it, but now, everything was different.
I
was different.

From the bedroom, my bulldog howled. Son bent closer and brushed his lips against my ear. “You may think you love him, but he’s wrong for you. I speak your dialect. We’re country people, you and me. We don’t put on airs. We don’t try to be something we’re not.”

I couldn’t argue with him. These same worries rang in my head all the time, a warning sound like a buoy in a storm.

“I’ll always be waiting for you, Teeny. And if there’s one chance in hell that I can be with you, I’m taking it.”

Behind me, the floor creaked. Then a familiar voice said, “What’s going on?”

eighteen

Coop stood in the doorway, his arms loaded with flowers and a sheaf of papers. Son and I broke apart. A burning, scalding pain spurted out the top of my skull. “I didn’t hear you come in,” I said, rubbing my forehead.

“Who can hear anything over Def Leppard?” Son said.

I introduced the men, but they ignored me and glared at each other. A muscle jerked in Coop’s jaw. He set down the bouquet and the papers, which looked like mail. He turned his blue, bottomless gaze on me. “Why didn’t you go to my folks’ house? What’s
he
doing here?”