Journals of Eleanor Druse, The (Digital Picture Book) (14 page)

Dr. Massingale said it was already hard to get a place on the new ward because of the pent-up demand for quality neurological care in the region. And there I was!

Again, I had moments when I was ready to believe the doctors, but what did it matter? I was old and getting older. The medicine sapped me of the vigor I needed to find out what really happened. Without any proof, I was in no position to fight them. I wouldn’t be the first person to leave this world with a truth that couldn’t be told.

Then I had some visitors.

Castleview Rescue provides emergency medical transportation services for Androscoggin County. Two of the emergency medical technicians, Danny Odmark and Ollie Svingen, came to visit me in my room and brought me a lovely little balloon bouquet from the gift shop. Nice boys, and Bobby must have tipped them off about how fond I am of stargazer lilies, because Ollie gave me one in a slender bud vase.

I’d met Danny and Ollie several times because Bobby used to work with them in the Kingdom ER, where EMTs spend half their shifts. But Bobby likes a job where the mistakes are fixable and the worries forgettable. Looking after fresh trauma victims and heart attacks in progress was too much stress for him, so he asked for a transfer out of ER. Bobby was punctual, with good attendance, and he passed all the drug tests, so the hospital offered him a job as an orderly providing routine patient transport instead.

Still, Bobby was always hanging out in Otto’s security cubicle just off the ER, so we saw a lot of Ollie and Danny. They could be crass at times, because their callings brought them so close to grisly mortality, but their humor was always in self-defense, never malicious. Everybody at the Kingdom loved Ollie and Danny’s stories—told in the acronyms and colorful argot of veteran EMTs—in which mythological deities called the Trauma Gods caused most serious accidents and decided who lived and died. Where emergency or accident fiascoes were known as goat rodeos, old people died of TMB (Too Many Birthdays), the rougher class of patients were summed up using a TTR number (Tattoo-to-Tooth Ratio), and motorcycles were known as donor cycles.

Danny carried the balloons and put them on my nightstand. They’d even tucked a card in there—not something men usually remember to do. “Get well, Mrs. D.,” was written in Danny’s hand if the signatures were any indication, with a loopy “Ollie” added underneath. As usual, Danny appeared to be in charge. Bobby said that when the boys were running hot with a patient on board who was CTD (Circling the Drain) or FTD (Fixing to Die), Danny was usually in the back, running lines and pumping the ambu bag, because his technical skills and medical experience were superior, even excellent for Central Maine. Ollie was the better driver, but also had the “greater cranial air pressure,” as Dr. Hook put it, “a pneumo-cephalic”—his way of saying that Ollie was what my long-departed German Jewish grandmother called a luftmensch, an airhead.

Ollie also had a preoccupation, an inordinate fascination—some would say an obsession—with death, especially the eyes of dead people. According to Bobby, he and Otto could be on the radio with Castleview Rescue, and Danny could be describing several FORDs (not cars, but people Found on Road Dead) over the radio: beheaded corpses ejected through windshields and impaled on tree limbs, body parts wrapped around camshafts, torsos smeared along the guardrails, brains splattered like bread pudding and road chili on crumpled panel trucks. And Ollie would interrupt with “Yeah, and you should have seen the eyes in that head. One was looking off into the yonder blue, and the other was full of clotted blood and wide open like the last thing that guy saw was Satan serving him damnification papers.”

The way Danny told it, if the two of them got let in by the landlady to find a goner sitting up in bed with an unfinished burrito in his fist and the sports page open in his lap, Ollie would go into a kind of trance, set his equipment down, and stare into the old guy’s eyes. Danny knew better than to touch the body. If he started cleaning up the corpse or preparing to transport, Ollie, without breaking eye contact with the dead guy, would say, “Let him be a minute, Danny.” Then Ollie would stare into those eyes, and carefully examine the dead body. As if a fresh corpse was always a spiritual or metaphysical crime scene calling for strict protocol and proper forensic procedures. As if Ollie had to take special precautions, just in case he could still see God or Satan’s reflection in the dead person’s eyes. Or better, in case Ollie could peer through those glassy black pupils darkly and see the person’s last thought before he shed the pelt of life and slipped away into the beyond.

If the body’s eyes were closed, Ollie seemed vaguely disappointed, like a pathologist denied an autopsy or a collector deprived of a rare specimen.

Danny said he’d like to open a Roth IRA and put a dollar in it every time Ollie said, “Look at his eyes, Danny.”

I thought the boys were just being nice by bringing me flowers, but they closed my door, pulled up chairs, and sat down for a visit.

“Mrs. D.,” said Danny, “we wanna talk.” He stirred his hand in the space between the three of us, meaning that whatever we discussed should stay right here.

“We heard all about you and the Rat Doctor, Mrs. D.,” said Ollie, “and we think the cops and the Kingdom brass disrespected you in the deal.”

“Well, I wasn’t exactly hailed as a material witness,” I said. “Just a foolish old coot with brain damage.”

“Mrs. D.,” said Danny, “we’re just like you. We can’t prove nothing, but—” He looked at Ollie.

“What? Tell me, boys.”

“Go on, Ol,” said Danny. “Tell her.”

“Well,” said Ollie, “you know there’s that Nozz-A-La soda machine right outside the staff room in the west wing corridor on one?”

“Yes,” I said.

“It’s got a chrome strip running down one side, and housekeeping polishes it so much that I can usually check my hair in there before I drop coins into the slot. Well, I was doing just that the other night, and I was by myself, almost sure of that. And all of the sudden there’s a hand on my shoulder.”

I could see the skin on Ollie’s arm turn to plucked-chicken flesh, and he stammered with emotion, so I knew he wasn’t fooling.

“I mention the chrome strip because there wasn’t nobody else’s reflection in that polished chrome, ma’am. But when I look around, there’s an old guy, probably seventy or eighty, with wispy white hair. He’s wearing an old brown suit coat and tie and a funny-looking antique shirt collar, and he’s got this big black bag with rusty hinges on it. I’m thinking there is something off-kilter about this old coffin-dodger. His lips are almost white, his skin is like paraffin, he’s scarecrow skinny and looks more like a mortician than a doctor.”

“That’s him!” I said.

“Tell her what he said, Ol,” said Danny.

“He looks at me and says, ‘Can you tell me where they took the children?’”

Ollie shivered. “Brr. I didn’t like the look in his eye when he said that, ma’am. So I says, ‘I don’t work here, but pedes is on seven.’ And he looks at me, like, huh? And he says, ‘Pedes?’ And I’m, like, ‘Pediatrics,’ and I look down at his cracked old bag—I’m thinking he’s a doctor or used to be—and I say, ‘That’s a real antique, huh?’ He looks down at it. Maybe. Maybe not. Then he says, ‘Seventh floor, thank you,’ and wanders off.

“I turned around and got busy with the soda machine because I don’t want to see this guy anymore. I just want him to go away. I can hear his footsteps echoing on the marble down there. I push the Nozz-A-La button. And those footsteps fade away too fast. So I turn around real fast, and the corridor is…empty.”

“Has anyone else seen him?” I asked. “Has he spoken to anyone else? Has he ever used names? Dates? Is there a security camera in that hallway?”

Ollie and Danny looked at each other.

“I don’t think he’ll show up on film, Mrs. D.,” said Danny. “We’ll check with Otto, but if Ollie can’t see his reflection in the chrome of the machine, then I’m guessing he don’t stick to film either. But the point is, he’s
there
somehow.”

“He had black caves for eye sockets,” said Ollie, “and pupils like two snake heads.”

“Were you boys here the night Madeline Kruger died?”

“Were we here!” said Ollie. “We brought her in. She was paws up dead on the kitchen floor, but Danny got her jumpstarted again.”

Danny looked sheepish. “I hate doing that to a Fail-to-Fly who misses the Oregon Express, but when the cops are standing right there and it’s in my job description, I gotta do it.”

“What’s the odds ofthat one, Danny? You turn on the gas and stick your head in the oven, and five minutes later the gas man from Maine Natural shows up to check the meter. If you put it in a movie, nobody would believe it.”

“Did you see the note she left?” I asked.

“Note?”

Ollie looked at Danny. Danny looked at Ollie.

“She didn’t leave a note,” said Ollie. “Unless the gas man swiped it? No, what for?”

“The cops didn’t say nothing about a note, either,” said Danny.

“I was told she left a note,” I said.

“With everything going on that night, she could have left the Dead Sea scrolls,” Danny said, “and we wouldn’t have had time to read them.”

“Full moon, Friday the thirteenth,” said Ollie. “The night that girl from the cath lab died. That’s the night it all started.”

“What started?” I asked. I knew the boys hadn’t been upstairs when I found Madeline’s body.

“You name it,” said Danny. “That little girl died and it set everything off. The earthquakes. They had a kitchen fire when ajar of grease cracked and a pilot light got it going. Mrs. Kruger was found dead up there. Then you went DFO.”

“DFO?” I asked.

“Done Fell Out,” said Ollie. “The rats went berserk in the basement.”

“Bobby didn’t tell me about any kitchen fire,” I said. “I’ve got to get back investigating these things.”

“You don’t have to investigate,” said Ollie. “It’s happening in plain sight. And it’s getting worse.”

“Laurel Werling and the Rat Doctor,” said Danny.

“And look what happened to Dr. Egas,” said Ollie.

“Dr. Egas? That’s the doctor who took drugs,” I said, “the one who killed the little girl? Bobby told me about that, and I saw it in the paper. ”

“That’s him,” said Danny. “Now he’s upstairs in the expensive care unit SFJ. “

I looked at Ollie.

“Screaming for Jesus.”

“That’s what I mean, Mrs. D.,” said Danny, “everything, including the Rat Doctor, seems to go back to the night the little girl died. That’s when the earthquakes started.”

“Why is Dr. Egas, er, screaming in the intensive care unit?”

“I’m getting there,” said Danny. “The earthquake damaged the fluoroscopy unit in the cardiac cath lab. The same lab where Egas killed the little girl. The vibrations cracked the shielding and the lead casing around the X-ray tube of the fluoroscopy unit. So the next time Egas comes in and turns the thing on to do a heart X-ray, he gets blasted with a maximum unshielded, unfiltered dose of radiation to the tune of six rads per minute for the duralion of the procedure, for a total dose of a hundred and twenty rads, and at those levels,
rad
doesn’t stand for radiation absorbed dose.”

“Nope,” said Ollie, “it stands for ‘Right about dead.’”

“And listen to this, Mrs. D.,” Danny said. He leaned forward and took my hand in his, he was so excited. “The techs, the nurses, the patient, nobody else in that cath lab got fried by that busted cathode ray tube. Just Egas. The misfired beam was aimed right at his neck. Right about where his lead apron ended and his coked-up head began.”

“Now he’s upstairs doing the Chernobyl,” said Ollie. “He’s got no hair, bleeding internally, AGMI.”

I looked at Danny.

“Ain’t Gonna Make It.”

“Boys, I thank you so much for this. Really I do,” I said.

“There’s something going on around here,” said Ollie.

“Administration is trying to hide it, Mrs. D.,” said Danny. “It wasn’t right what they did to you. Pretending you were the only one seeing the strangeness going on.”

“Danny,” I said, “would you please hand me my notebooks? I’m going to make some careful notes and get right back to work on this.”

Danny and Ollie’s visit charged my batteries like nothing else in my otherwise quiet, somewhat pedantic career as an esoteric psychologist. I had confirmation from at least one reasonably objective source that something else was happening at Kingdom Hospital besides my own alleged seizure disorders. Admittedly, the only eyewitness to anything strange was Ollie, the one with the greater cranial air pressure, but Danny seemed to believe him. I got so excited that I did a bad thing—actually a number of bad things. One bad thing can often be rectified or overlooked, but several of them can sometimes coalesce into a compound disaster that sprouts tentacles and develops a self-directed will of its own, the kind of thing my dear old dad used to call a cluster fudge bar.

I had research to do now, and no time or patience for medicated downtime. I didn’t have the heart to tell Dr. Massingale, so I went ahead and let them bring me the pills every day, and then I cheeked them and flushed them down the toilet at night. Bad girl. I chased the dregs of the pharmaceuticals from my system with moonlight, sage aromatherapy, and some deep meditation aided by my favorite healing window crystal. I felt energy returning to my tired bones. I was able to take my walks again and go out and explore the hallways of the Kingdom, using my pendulum to look for disturbances and harmonic convergences.

I phoned the Ladd Library at the Faust campus and ordered copies of the microfiches of the newspaper accounts of the 1939 old hospital fire. It was going to take some doing, they said, but they thought it could be done.

Next, a tactical error. I should have listened to Bobby, but I didn’t. Madeline’s note, or the absence of it, was troubling me. She must have left it somewhere in the house before committing the final felony upon herself. I couldn’t bear not being able to see the note in its entirety’. The woman was a writer, for the love of Godfrey, and I could tell by the passages her son, Ray, had copied down that the note was really a carefully formulated, well-written letter:
I will not disturb her peace with cruel remembrance. Sally forgot her scars. My wounds still fester. I
wanted to see the whole document. Here in the hospital, the caller ID on the Krugers’ phone would not alert Hilda or anybody else that it was Sally Druse calling, so I held my breath and made the call.