Mallets Aforethought (21 page)

Which was what that caviar had been: Will’s gift to us. But it was the money talk that reminded me of another matter.

“I’ll get the check to you tomorrow,” I told Clarissa. Her retainer, I meant; it was a cinch Ellie wasn’t going to be able to pay it.

Meanwhile Tommy had cottoned onto the profit possibilities of caviar. “Man, if you could smuggle in a couple of those fish, you could raise ’em and make . . .”

Will cut in. “Hey, wait a minute. That kind of thing will get you in big trouble. Stick to what’s realistic.
And
legal.”

“Just make sure whatever you come up with doesn’t put George more behind the eight ball than he already is,” Clarissa instructed me, and seemed ready to say more. But Wade interrupted us. He came up the back steps, worry plainly visible on his face.

“Clarissa,” he asked, “you heard anything from the jail?”

As he spoke, her beeper whirred and she went to take the call in the phone alcove without answering him.

Wade shrugged his jacket off. “Heard it on the scanner just now when I was coming home,” he told me. “Call for EMT service down to the county jail, code blue.”

The scanner in Wade’s truck was always on and code blue was the highest summons level for the ambulance. Clarissa returned from the phone alcove, her expression so alarming it made my heart pump icewater.

“What is it?” Ellie wanted to know. “I heard you talking on the phone about . . .”

Sam and Will came too, Tommy behind them. “What’s going on?”

Clarissa answered. “There’s been an incident. George has been injured. They’re transferring him now up to the Calais hospital. Your ex-husband’s on his way there,” she added to me.

“You mean because Victor’s on call,” I said evenly. “At the hospital, for emergency room admissions. Not because . . .”

Not because he’s a brain surgeon; please,
I thought.

“Someone hit George with something. Part of a bed frame, they think. Something heavy,” Clarissa said.

“Oh, my God!” Ellie swayed. Will caught her and led her to the kitchen, helping her to a chair. I heard him talking calmly to her, his low voice a steadying rumble.

I couldn’t believe it. “Why? Who attacked? Is George all right?”

“I don’t know, some local guy, and he’s unconscious.” Typically, she answered my questions in the order I’d asked them. “They don’t know yet the extent of his injury. I’m going up there and if he comes to, I’ll try to get a victim statement.”

“Won’t the county prosecutor do that?” I asked her.

“Yeah, the D.A.’s sure going to rush up to Calais on account of maybe one jailbird cracked another one’s skull open.”

She stopped. “Sorry, I didn’t mean that the way it sounded. Anyway, I’ll keep you posted,” she finished, and went out.

Something in the stars must have shone a troubled light on a lot of people that night. Will Bonnet needed to go home and get his aunt settled, so Wade, Ellie, and I drove up to the hospital.

But after we pulled into the lot surrounding the sprawling low building and went inside, I saw Ginger Tolliver being helped painfully toward the orthopedics clinic by the woman who’d been driving the white sedan earlier at Ginger’s trailer.

Ginger’s face was twisted in some fresh anguish, overlaying her regular misery. The health aide, or I guessed anyway that’s what she was, grabbed a wheelchair from the row of them near the entry and wheeled Ginger toward the ER treatment area. Then at the corridor leading to the pediatrics area we ran into Maria and Jimmy Condon with Porter, whose cheeks were even redder than when I’d seen him last; the little boy wept fretfully with fever.

No one stopped to talk. All of us were too intent on our own grim errands for conversation. But I saw Jimmy give Ginger a familiar wave as if perhaps they’d met here before.

“Busy night,” I remarked as Victor led us in.

“Not really,” he replied. “You might be surprised how many of your friends and neighbors wind up here in the evening.” He gestured back toward the lobby as he spoke. “Pain gets worse at night, kids get sick. Condon kid’s been in a lot lately. Only place in a hundred miles for medical care at night. Anyway, here we are.”

George’s room was the nearest to the nursing desk so he could be observed constantly. A guard stood silently by the door. Ellie gasped when she saw George, his chest rising and falling with the cycling of the respirator. Half his head had been shaved, and a thin tube emerged from a patch of adhesive tape on his scalp, connected to a monitoring device.

And I’d been a brain surgeon’s wife long enough to know what it all meant. If the trip from the jail to the hospital had been much longer, George wouldn’t be here at all.

Ellie gripped his hand. It didn’t grip back. “He’s sedated,” Victor explained. “He had a subdural hematoma.”

Rough translation: after the injury George had developed a sort of blood blister on his brain.

Ellie had gone very white. Now she braced herself and said, “Will he be all right?”

“There is every possibility of full recovery,” he replied. “I have evacuated the hematoma and stabilized his ICP.”

Intra-cranial pressure. It’s amazing how much you can pick up just by listening to people. Back when I still thought he walked on water, Victor would describe his surgical procedures, complete with every single retractor, sponge, and hemostat.

I took him aside as a nurse with a glass syringe went in to draw some of George’s blood. “What’s the deal?” I asked.

“I’m not sure. Smack to the skull. Couple of neurological signs I’m not too keen about.” He looked unhappy.

“Brain damage? You mean permanent brain damage?”

He angled his head to where Ellie still stood by the bed. “I don’t see why. But the truth is that I just left the ICP monitor in as a precaution. He should be waking up by now, only he isn’t. He’s fully comatose and has been since right after the injury.”

“Oh, God.” It was another thing I’d learned when I was with Victor; sometimes for reasons that no one has been able to figure out, comatose people don’t wake up.

“What are you going to do?” I asked. “Wait and see, or . . .”

Will Bonnet came down the corridor with Tommy right behind him.

“CAT-scan him again later,” Victor replied. “In twenty-four hours I’ll reassess. If I were anyone else I’d be transferring him.”

To a bigger hospital with better specialists, he meant. But Victor was the better specialist. And he’d furnished the Calais hospital with enough gear and trained so many of its nurses that if brain transplants could be performed anywhere, he could have done them here.

“What happened?” I asked the guard posted by George’s door when Victor had gone. “Was there a fight?”

“No, ma’am.” The guard shook his head. “Way I heard, another fellow clobbered him. Ready to hit him again when a supervisor ran in, broke it up. Guy by the name of Daigle.”

Perry Daigle. Tommy’s uncle. My jaw must have dropped a foot. And the look on Tommy’s own face was dreadful as Ellie and Wade came out.

Will went to Ellie’s side immediately. “He’ll be fine,” Will said. “George’s a hard-headed little son of a bitch, Ellie, you know that. He’ll be just fine.”

He offered his arm. “Come on, I’ll take you home.”

“No!” She looked alarmed. “I’m going to stay here. He,” she insisted, her voice breaking, “wouldn’t leave me.”

Fortunately, Victor returned at that moment and stepped in. “Ellie.” He seized her hands. “I’m going to take care of him. And there is absolutely nothing in this world that I won’t do to make this come out right.”

His eyes held hers. “Do you believe me?”

She nodded shakily; of course she did. When he wanted to, Victor could persuade the stars down out of the sky.

“Now, what do you think he would say if he knew you and the baby were here, worrying and getting exhausted, maybe even making yourself sick?” he asked her.

She bit her lip. When she spoke it trembled. “He’d be angry, wouldn’t he?”

“That’s right.” He let her hands go. “Now, I won’t be going anywhere. If anything changes, anything at all, I’ll call Jake up and she’ll call you. All right?”

Reluctantly, she nodded at him. “All right.”

Thanks,
I mouthed at him. Victor may be the world’s biggest jerk most of the time, but he’s magic with patients and their families.

Will had wandered gloomily away; now he returned. “I guess I don’t need to go in again,” he said. Then another thought struck him.

“Listen, maybe I should get the locks changed on Harlequin House. What do you think? It’s kind of after the fact, but right now everyone in the historical society’s got a key and . . . I don’t know. It’s just, who knows what else’ll happen?”

It was a good idea. After agreeing to take care of it he turned back to Ellie. “Now let’s get you home.”

Another excellent plan; Wade’s truck would be a tight squeeze for the three of us. “You two go on,” I said. “I’m going to make sure the charge nurse has all our phone numbers.”

Ellie’s eyes yearned back into George’s room. But in the end she went, Tommy remaining stubbornly just outside George’s door.

At the nursing desk I recognized Therese Chamberlain, the nurse from Victor’s CPR class. Wearing a rumpled uniform, her hair messily pulled back from her pale, picked-at face and fastened with bobby pins, my partner in rubber-doll resuscitation looked even more washed-out and exhausted than the last time I’d seen her.

“Long night?” I asked.

She shrugged dispiritedly. “We rotate shifts. I drew short straw for the night shift, I guess. No one asks, they just stick me wherever there’s a hole in the schedule.”

She frowned at what I’d had her write. “Isn’t he the one they think did the murder last Friday night?”

Near the main door on the far side of the lobby, Will was helping Ellie put her coat on. Ginger Tolliver passed them on her way out, as the Condons attempted to wrestle a screaming Porter back into his jacket.

Will looked back over his shoulder at me, flashed me a grim thumbs-up sign, and guided Ellie through the heavy glass doors exiting to the parking lot.

“Yes, George is the one,” I said guardedly. Maybe she didn’t like taking care of accused murderers. I didn’t need a nurse with a chip on her shoulder to contend with, too.

But that wasn’t it. She glanced around to be sure no one else was near enough to hear. “And you’re the ones. You and her.”

She angled her head minutely toward the doors Ellie had just exited. “I’ve seen your pictures in the paper. You’re the ones who are so . . .”

“Nosy,” I finished for her. “Is there something you wanted to say to us? Or me? We will of course keep whatever you want to tell us confidential.”

If we can,
I added silently. All’s fair, and all that.

Therese looked down at her bitten fingernails. “Yes. That he couldn’t have done it.”

“Well, of course not. George wouldn’t hurt a—”

“No, I mean I
know
he couldn’t.”

My heart thudded. “How? You mean you actually . . .”

Her look of fright cut me off. “No more here.” She glanced at Tommy, so still and silent outside the door to George’s room that I had completely forgotten about him.

He turned away, hands stuffed into his pockets, as Therese pushed a bit of paper at me. “This is my number. Call me before noon tomorrow. After that I sleep. You won’t be able to wake me.”

Wade came back in, giving me a brief glimpse of the parking area and of Ellie and Will. The darkness outside made the glass opaque, their faces a near-subliminal flash against something dark blue that I couldn’t quite distinguish. Then they were gone.

Tommy shuffled unhappily over to stand with Wade as I took the scribbled paper from Therese. “But can’t you . . .”

“No. And don’t tell anyone.” With that, she strode into the conference room behind the nursing desk and closed the door.

“Oh,” I said to the empty air. “All right.”

But it wasn’t. For an instant I debated going in there and dragging Therese Chamberlain out by her unkempt hair.

Instead, I crossed the lobby to join Wade, leaving George with his chest slowly rising and falling mechanically, his heart drawing a thin green line on the cardiac monitor screen, glowing in the dark.

The next morning Wade lured me into riding the Deer Island ferry with him by telling me we needed some time together to work on our relationship.

“You’ve been browsing those magazines at the beauty parlor again,” I accused him. The haircutting place we both favored was unisex but its reading material wasn’t.

“Ayuh,” he replied as we drove down Water Street toward the ferry. But I could tell he had some other reason for wanting to talk with me alone.

Downtown, it hit me for the first time how suddenly summer had ended. Under the grey sky the shops had a shuttered look. Most were already closed for the season. The few bright banners remaining hung woebegone over deserted sidewalks, and cars with Maine plates were the only ones around the diner and Post Office.

There was something I wanted to talk over in privacy too. “Wade, do you think Tommy’s acting . . . I don’t know. Strange?”

“Sure.” Wade pulled the truck down the ramp to the parking area at Halpert’s Cove. A granite cliff rose straight up from the water opposite a dock piled high with hundreds of lobster traps.

“He’s worried as hell. We all are,” Wade continued as we got out of the truck.

“I guess. He’d do anything for George.”

The
Island Hopper
was already waiting, diesels idling, her flat rectangular deck damp with spray. Because it was early and not in tourist season anymore, we were the only two passengers aboard when the vessel cast off.

“I don’t know, though,” I told Wade. “I’ve seen Tommy in a lot of moods. One way and another that kid’s had plenty to contend with in his life. But I’ve never seen him look . . . secretive. As if his conscience were bothering him.”

We leaned together against the rail, a light chop slapping and the wind seeming to blow right through me. The streets full of houses rising behind the waterfront diminished swiftly to picture-postcard size, the breeze freshening as we got out into open water. Land seemed suddenly far away.