Journals of Eleanor Druse, The (Digital Picture Book) (12 page)

I mulled over how to proceed. Perhaps I should just phone and express my condolences first? I could get to know Hilda and make her realize that her mom and I were friends a very long time ago, that there was obviously something important she wanted me to know. Had her mother, for instance, ever spoken about being saved by a little girl? Or a lost little girl? Or a fire?

Nobody answered at the Krugers’ and there was no answering machine or service either, so I could decide about how to proceed on that front later.

I gathered up the newspapers and took them out to my sitting room, where I could read and look out the window at the winter light sparkling in the icicles and snowdrifts.

Bobby had worked nights as usual, and I heard him coming down the back steps to the kitchen, where he foraged for his midafternoon breakfast. I heard him open the cereal cupboard, then rattle a box.

“Mum, the Kommando Krunch is all gone. Did you eat it all?”

“I didn’t touch it, Bobby. I’ve been in the hospital, remember? I don’t eat refined carbohydrates. Bleached flour is the staff of death. If you want type two diabetes, put Kommando whosit on the list. I’m going to the store this afternoon.”

I heard him set his favorite bowl on the kitchen table where I’d been working and listened to him rustling the inner wrapper of a box of something else. Probably something with sugar and cocoa as the two leading ingredients, if I knew him.

“Mum, what’s Laurel Werling’s name and phone number doing here?”

“I tried to call her. I want to ask her about the night Madeline died.”

The cereal box stopped rustling, and the silence was so conspicuous I could have hung my shawl on it.

“Bobby?”

I didn’t need to see him to know that he was sweating—familial pheromones or just plain mother’s intuition.

“What’s wrong, Bobby?”

Nothing but a long sigh, and the legs of the chair squeaking when he leaned against the back of it for support.

“Mum, Laurel Werling had some kind of nervous breakdown. She’s in the Kingdom psych ward.”

“She’s in the hospital? And you didn’t tell me? Bobby!”

I jumped out of my chair and came into the kitchen.

“One bowl of cereal is all you get! And hurry up about it!”

I ran into my bedroom, dressed in my Kingdom smock with my hospice volunteer ID, and bundled up in a wool skirt, sweater, and coat. Then I marched back into the kitchen, all but took him by the ear, dragged him out to the Volvo, and made him drive me to Kingdom Hospital.

I was a common scold all the way to the hospital. In point of fact Bobby doesn’t pay attention to anything but violent computer games called Warcraft or Bloodfest or worse. Once I found him hunched over the screen playing something called MDK. “What does that stand for?” I asked. “Murder, Death, Kill,” he said, as blasé as you please. I thought he was joking. A grown man indulging in hour upon hour of violent fantasies. No wonder he’s still single; he’s married to the vixen in Grand Theft Auto.

When I stopped him from pulling out in front of a school bus, he looked at me like it was all my fault, as if I were the one turning left in front of forty children wearing no seat belts.

“Mum, I told you that Laurel Werling got fired.”

“Something about overtime?”

“Yes,” he said. “So how was I supposed to know that you also wanted me to give you updates on her mental health and medical history? She came in a mess the other night and got a private room. Something about a break. Not a nervous breakdown, a psychological break?”

“Psychotic break,” I said.

“There you go, a psychotic break. A personal matter. Would you want me blabbing to every Nosy Parker if you had a psychosis break and checked into the booby hatch?” This gave him an even better idea. “That stuff is patient information that is privileged under my job description anyhow.”

“Quiet, Bobby. Just drive.”

We pulled through the loop drive in front of the emergency room entrance, into the parking garage, and down to the lower level, where there was a traffic arm and a big sign that read:
EMPLOYEES ONLY.
Bobby opened it with a card and we pulled into an empty space.

While we waited at the garage elevators, I noticed two LuvKraft Pest Control trucks parked discreetly in the shadows next to a Ford pickup with a snow-encrusted plow blade on it.

“Bobby, are the earthquakes still causing rodent problems?”

“Oh, yeah, Mum. You name it. Rats, mice, cockroaches, ants.”

I gasped. “Ants! Bobby, what ants? You never said a thing about ants. In the winter? The earthquakes are causing ant problems?”

“Sure, Mum. When I told you, I said vermin, didn’t I? The earthquakes make the vermin go mad. Didn’t I tell you that back in Boston?”

The elevator arrived, but I was so upset I could barely walk into it. Bobby pushed L for the lobby.

“You never said
ants,
Bobby. You said the
rats
got at the bodies. Who’s seen ants? Have you seen them?”

“Oh, sure. Otto and I found a hive of them down in an equipment storage room near the old Kingdom. Blondi runs loose down there. We found him barking at a swarm of them that had set up housekeeping in an old IBM server rack.”

“What about Madeline Kruger’s body? Was it rats or ants that got at it?”

He kept turning away from me on the elevator, and I had a good idea why: He was hiding a pouch of pipe tobacco and pipe cleaners in his coat pocket. When I saw them, I almost went to find the nearest chair and turn him over my knee.

“How would I know what got at her? I wasn’t there. I heard the rats got at her. Nobody said a thing about ants.”

“Where’s the body? Was she cremated?”

“She might still be down there. I heard the family was fighting about how to dispose of her. I told you, Mum, these are hoodoo Catholics. Some of them want her buried in a coffin in a Catholic cemetery, some want her buried at the crossroads with a stake through her heart, and the New Age heretics in the family want her cremated and her ashes sprinkled under the Tree of Life behind the Temple of the Inner Light out on Dimsdale Avenue. There’s a court fight going on about it, so I think what’s left of her is still down there in the morgue. I know old Ray wants her incinerated because it’s cheaper.”

Once we made it into the hospital proper, it took us the better part of half an hour to make it up to the psych ward, what with all the nurses and staff asking after my health, wishing me well, welcoming me back home. I made up my mind to stop by the sunshine ward because nurse Liz Hinton told me that my old sweetheart, Lenny Stillmach, was back in, maybe for the last time. His pancreatic cancer was eating him up from the inside out and his housekeeper wasn’t able to care for him anymore. He was asking for me. Dear old Lenny. He did what he said he’d do, as usual: They told him he was supposed to be dead six months ago, and he’s still here.

We stopped by Otto’s security cubicle, where Bobby took a seat in front of the monitors and got mulish on me.

“Go on up there yourself, Mum. I’m not gonna be party to disturbing the peace of some poor mental patient because you want to ask her questions about a suicide. Did it occur to you that it might be a touchy subject with her? It happened on her watch, you know.”

Actually, what Bobby wanted was to smoke his pipe in peace without having to hide it from me. It was too awkward to deal with in public. Instead, I left him to his repulsive habit and went to take the elevator to the ninth-floor psych ward. As God is my witness, I was alert and fully in command of my faculties. No daydreams, no auras, no “feelings on fire” or visions of the sort Dr. Mussolini had warned me about.

An elevator arrived with one pretty young woman in a white lab coat. She was holding a tray of syringes and stoppered blood samples and leaning against the rear wall of the car. Behind her, above faux walnut wainscoting, was a wall-sized mirror—a common design ploy to create the illusion of more space in claustrophobic confines. The other walls were the same, with brushed steel handrails below the mirrors. Otherwise the elevator was empty. The girl smiled vaguely and went back to studying a list of patients she had to see.

Two odd occurrences. First: As the elevator passed the seventh floor, the pediatric ward, I heard a child or children crying. I looked at the young woman, but she didn’t seem to notice. And the crying seemed to come from above the car, not from the other side of the doors.

The second event was more troubling. The car stopped on eight—one floor up from pediatrics, and one floor down from the psych unit on nine. The doors opened, the pretty young lab technician got out, and no one else got on, or at least I didn’t think so. I pushed my number again, even though it was already lit, the way people do out of habit. The next time I looked up, there was an elderly doctor in a clean and starched but frayed lab coat of an unusual style—quite long, with wide, starchy lapels. He was as skinny as a mummy, and his head was covered with a sterile green surgical cap, thick glasses resting on his bony nose. He had his gnarled, age-spotted hands folded in front of him over a faded old brochure that said: “Managing Warfarin (Coumadin) Anticoagulant Therapy. ”

He smiled at me and I nodded. I recognized him, but from where? I knew I had seen him before. But then he looked down at his feet the way people in elevators do, and I could not place him based on the glimpse I’d had of his face.

The doors had almost closed when
ding!
They opened again, as if someone had pushed the button just in time. A family of Somalis—mom, dad, and two toddlers—walked on, followed by that rapscallion among the interns, Elmer Traff, an unusual young man in Buddy Holly glasses who had a reputation for trouble.

When I looked over at where the old doc had been standing, he was gone.

Now, it’s conceivable that the old pantaloon was so slight and unobtrusive that he came and went without me noticing, but his disappearance unsettled me. And why would he get on, then off, on the same floor? Had he changed his mind? Or could I have been distracted because I was going over in my mind what I would have to say to get myself in to see Laurel Werling?

On nine, the elevator disgorged me into the secure waiting area outside the psych unit, where I had to wait almost ten minutes, because the nurses’ station was empty. All hands on deck out on the floors, I guessed.

Finally an elderly aide showed up, with a name tag that said,
BERTA MUELLER, PSYCH TECH.
She glanced at my Kingdom Hospital ID and opened the door for me. I confess that I massaged the truth by telling her that I was a “good friend” of Laurel Werling and wanted, if possible, to visit with her and comfort her for a few minutes. I described the spirit rather than the complex letter of our relationship, because there was no time to explain how Laurel and I had shared a horrific trauma, an experience more binding than the circumstances of most ordinary friendships. I just knew that Laurel would be happy to see me and relieved to have the ear of a fellow refugee from the ordeal of Madeline Kruger’s demise.

Berta advised me that Ms. Werling was on ward 9D, which she indicated with a nod of her head. She said I would have to wait and ask the charge nurse on evenings, Heather Howe, for permission to visit the patient. Nurse Howe was in a conference room taking report at change of shift.

Would I like a cup of coffee while I waited?

I’d already had tea, so I took a seat on a padded stool and waited. Berta stepped out into ward 9B to help a distressed young man who came to the station looking for a sheet of aluminum foil to protect his head from aliens trying to brainwash him with microwave radiation.

I looked out through the wired glass and down the hallway marked 9D, where I saw a figure that so startled me I cried out.

Midway down the hallway, in the fluorescent half-light of the interior, I saw the same old doctor I’d just seen on the elevator. The wired glass of the station wasn’t the best lens, and the reflected light interfered with my vision, but I was just sure it was him. I pressed my face to the glass and got a better look at him. This time, because of the setting, I recognized him: The “doctor” was the same old geezer who had come to the nurses’ station the night of Madeline’s death. Mr. Pigs-in-a-Litter himself, the same guy I’d just seen in glasses and a white lab coat on the elevator. Right by the same fire alarm in the same hallway.
In case of fire, break glass.
There he was, still holding the patient brochure he’d had on the elevator, walking calmly toward the station until he saw me.
Do you wanna know what love is?
Then he stopped, turned, knocked on a door, and disappeared from view when he entered that room.

The sight of him threw my heart into palpitations. I tried to stop the panic from spreading through my chest. I took a deep breath and calmly examined myself for symptoms of seizure activity. I had gone all the way off the wretched medications. I felt much better for it, but I had to consider that I might be having some kind of episode again. I wasn’t sitting in a chair daydreaming or hearing voices in an aura; I had witnessed an uncanny sequence of events in two different places extending over at least ten or fifteen minutes, not counting what I’d seen two weeks ago! How could an old codger who was walking around wearing a hospital gown, babbling Satanic sentiments about love, and eating pills two weeks ago suddenly be walking the halls in a physician’s coat and seeing patients?

I looked for the elderly aide, a nurse, anybody. No joy. Change of shift, and almost everyone in the report room.

I could open the nurses’ station door from the inside, but I’d be asking for trouble if I went out onto the ward alone. I looked back down the hallway marked 9D instead. Nothing. The patients were all in their rooms or down in the lounge area, called the dayroom, at the far end of the hall.

All I could think to do was to call Bobby. After all, Bobby had been standing right next to me when the old guy came to the nurses’ station that night. I found a telephone on the counter across the way. I went to it, dialed the hospital operator, and asked her to ring the security booth, where I got Otto, who said that Bobby was outside talking (smoking, no doubt!) with Danny and Ollie, the Castleview Rescue EMTs. I left a message telling Bobby to come to the ninth-floor psych unit, ASAP, and hung up.