Out of the Picture

by Tracy Gardner

  In the foyer below, three paramedics entered, along with equipment and a rolling stretcher.

  “This is ridiculous,” Caroline said. “I’m not riding on that thing. Help me up.” She reached for Lauren, bracing one hand on Savanna’s knee.

  Lauren shook her head, hands on her hips and a worried expression painting her features.

  “Brad!” Sydney exclaimed, trotting down the steps and giving one of the men a quick hug. Savanna was surprised, and then remembered that firefighters were often the first responders to medical emergencies as well. Sydney turned and pointed at Caroline. “Tell her to be still, would you?”

  Sydney’s suitor from the other night grinned at Syd. “Are you stalking me? You could have just called, you know. Kel”—he turned to his coworker, a petite woman with two long blond braids, and handed her a red canvas bag—“vitals first, then we move.”

  Sydney punched him in the shoulder, which she was about eye level with. His coworker was already on her way up the steps with the bag, reassuring Caroline that she must let them help her, for her own safety.

  Outside in the driveway, Lauren followed the gurney into the ambulance. She leaned forward as Brad was packing up the equipment, addressing Savanna, Sydney, and Dr. Gallager. “Thank you so much. Grandmother fired me for the weekend. She wouldn’t listen, no matter how much I told her I don’t mind helping her. She thinks I need a break. You know what I was doing when you called?” She turned to Caroline behind her. “I was folding laundry. Laundry waits, Grandmother. You need to stop being so stubborn. You could have been really hurt.”

  Caroline moved around on the stretcher, sitting up with some difficulty, her face pinched in pain as she did. “That’s enough, Lauren. You couldn’t have prevented this. That railing wasn’t attached correctly.”

  “Right. But I’d have gone upstairs to get your outfit for you, and you wouldn’t have fallen.” Caroline opened her mouth to argue further, and Lauren held up a hand, sounding very serious. “Grandmother! You are eighty-nine years old, and I want you around to see ninety! So please, just hush and let people help you. You’re not allowed to fire me anymore.”

  Caroline sighed. “You’re right. I’m sorry, to all of you.” She looked past Lauren to Savanna, Skylar, and Aidan standing around the open ambulance doors. She took Lauren’s hand and Lauren covered it with her other one.

  “Thank you,” Lauren said again to the trio in the driveway, tears in her eyes. “This could have been so much worse.”

  “Is there anyone else we should call? I work with Jack and I have his number. I’m sure he could let his mother know,” Savanna offered.

  “No,” Lauren said quickly. “There’s some… Well, it’s a little stressful right now, that part of the family. No need to call them. I’m sure she’ll be fine.”

  “Of course. Good luck, we’ll be thinking of you, Caroline,” she called. She hoped everything was all right where Jack was concerned; in just a few weeks, she’d already grown to like him.

  “I’ll be right behind you.” Aidan nodded to the crew in the ambulance before they closed the doors.

  As the ambulance departed, lights and sirens off at Caroline’s request, Savanna replayed her words, the same ones she herself had said to Caroline. Today really could have been terrible, with Caroline seriously injured, or worse. “I’ve got to pack up my supplies.” She looked at Aidan and her sister, wanting an excuse to go back into the house.

  “I should take care of the dogs in case they’re gone a while,” Syd added, heading back inside.

  “I’m glad you called me,” Aidan said. “She’s stubborn, but that’s part of why she manages so well.”

  “Do you think her ankle is broken?” Savanna self-consciously tucked one long curl behind her ear, now noticing Aidan looked like total Saturday Dad: navy athletic pants, gray hoodie, and Van’s sneakers. He’d obviously dropped what he was doing and come right over when they’d called. Savanna imagined him at a barbecue grill, cooking burgers…standing in green grass, pushing Mollie on a swing set… Wait, where was Mollie?

  “It’s hard to say. If not, it’s a bad sprain.”

  “Where’s Mollie today? We didn’t even ask what plans we were interrupting.”

  “Mollie’s at soccer practice with her grandpa.” He glanced at his watch. “Or maybe she’s having ice cream by now. Don’t worry. I’m always here for Caroline.”

  “Thank you,” Savanna said. “I know she’s in good hands.”

  Aidan slung his black bag over one shoulder, fishing his car keys out of his pocket. “I’m going to meet the ambulance. You know, see that she doesn’t give them too much trouble in the E.R.” He grinned.

  Savanna laughed. “Yeah, you’d better. She’ll convince them to let her hobble out of there without an X-ray, knowing Caroline. Sydney and I will lock up here, and then I think we’ll come up to check on her.”

  Aidan reached out and gave Savanna’s upper arm a light, brief squeeze. “She’ll appreciate that. You and your sisters mean a lot to her.”

  Savanna watched Aidan climb into his dark gray SUV and pull out of the drive. Back inside, instead of heading to the parlor to pack up from the day spent painting, Savanna climbed the staircase.

  She’d noticed the railing that morning because Bill had just finished putting it back up. It had looked fine. She ran her fingers over the cracked and broken drywall where the railing had detached. A whole chunk of hardened drywall mud lay on the step directly below where the railing was attached. Savanna picked at the wall, finding the tract where two of the screws had been. She could see, from the one long screw still hanging in the bracket on the handrail, that they’d gone not just into the drywall, but into the plaster behind it. She picked up a screw and tried fitting it into the hole. It slid around loosely.

  “Syd!” Sydney would tell her if she was seeing connections where there were none.

  “What!” Her sister’s voice came from the back of the house.

  “Come here!”

  “I’m feeding the dogs. Hold on!”

  Savanna sat down on the step, pushing the hand railing back up against the wall. The metal bracket wouldn’t line up now.

  Sydney appeared at the foot of the stairs. “What’s up?”

  “I don’t know. Don’t you think that was weird?”

  “What’s weird?”

  “The railing. The handrail coming off and almost killing Caroline.”

  “Oh. I don’t know.” Sydney climbed the steps and bent to check out the hole in the wall where the railing had come loose. She knocked on the wall around it. “I mean, it’s an old house.”

  “But this shouldn’t have happened,” Savanna said, moving down the stairs to the next bracket and giving it a tug, and then the next one. “These are all fine. It’s just the top bracket that gave way.”

  Syd tipped her head at Savanna. “Maybe that Bill guy isn’t as good as Caroline thinks.”

  Savanna was quiet.

  “Or, maybe he was trying to hurt her? Maybe he sabotaged his own work?”

  Savanna frowned at Sydney. “When you say it like that, it sounds ridiculous.”

  “Well, why would anyone want to hurt Caroline?” Sydney gathered her hair into a long red ponytail, securing it with a hair tie from her wrist. “It was probably just the handyman rushing the job.”

  “Okay, but then if you add what happened to Eleanor…”

  Now Sydney was quiet.

  “You said yourself that the woman was tough. She walked to Fancy Tails every day.” Defensiveness crept into Savanna’s voice. “So, how did she just suddenly have a heart attack?”

  “Savvy…I know what I said. Eleanor’s death does seem strange. And this…” Sydney gestured to the handrail. “This is strange, too, since everything was just put back together and the rest of it seems secure. But I don’t see how the two things c
ould possibly be related.”

  Savanna shook her head. “I guess I don’t, either. It just strikes me as odd. Do you want to come to the hospital with me? I’d like to make sure Caroline’s okay.”

  “I should, but I think it’s better if I take Princess and Duke back to the salon. Who knows if they’re going to send her home tonight. They can’t stay here alone. Give her my love.”

  Savanna pulled on her jacket. “I will. Can you just drop me at the hospital and then you can take all the dogs home? I’ll find a way home later, or maybe Dad can pick me up.”

  “Sure. I need to stop at Mom and Dad’s later. It’s my turn for dinner tomorrow night and I need to see if they have a couple ingredients I need. And,” Sydney added, “I want to find out if they know much about Bill Lyle. I think Maggie and Bill have lived next door to Caroline since we were kids.”

  Chapter Eight

  Caroline’s laughter carried down the hallway as the emergency department nurse escorted Savanna to her room. Anderson Memorial was a small, recently updated two-story hospital, adequate for the small town of Carson. Anything Anderson couldn’t handle was transferred to the gigantic Ingham County Medical Center an hour away in Lansing. Most of Carson had visited for one thing or another at some point in their lives. Savanna did a double take as she passed Aidan on a framed poster, looking very doctorly in lab coat and serious expression. The caption underneath read Put Your Trust in Anderson Memorial, Home of Renowned Cardiothoracic Surgeon Dr. Aidan Gallager.

  The E.R. nurse glanced at the group in the small holding room with Caroline and muttered something about having too many visitors. Aidan, Lauren, and Lauren’s father stood around Caroline’s bed, laughing at a great joke or something Savanna must have just missed.

  “No worries,” Aidan spoke, following the nurse into the hallway. “We’ll clear out soon. Just keeping her company while she waits for the X-ray.”

  “Sure, Dr. Gallager, it’s fine.” The nurse softened.

  “Maybe you could check on when that might be?” His hospital name badge was clipped to his hoodie, making his Saturday Dad outfit look slightly professional.

  “I’ll call radiology right now,” she said, moving to the nurse’s station in the center of the block of rooms.

  Lauren made introductions. Savanna remembered Caroline’s son, Thomas. As a child, he’d seemed old to her. Now that she was older, he seemed less so; she knew he and her dad were friends from childhood. He had to have been around Harlan’s age, in his late fifties. Thomas was Jack’s uncle, and Savanna could see the family resemblance.

  Caroline held a hand out, and Savanna took it. “Dear girl, you needn’t have come. I’m fine. In fact, it’s feeling a little better.” She gestured at her puffy, purple ankle. “I’m sure it’s only sprained.”

  “Looks like we’re about to find out,” Aidan said, as a tech in green scrubs appeared in the doorway.

  “There’s a short wait,” the man said, “but we can head down to radiology. One family member can go with her.”

  “They’ll both be coming with me,” Caroline said firmly, looking at Lauren and her father.

  The tech’s gaze went to Aidan, who shrugged, nodding.

  “Choose your battles,” he said to Savanna once they’d left the room, the tech pushing the gurney followed by Lauren and Thomas. “Some things aren’t worth arguing with her over.”

  “Oh, I know,” she said. “I’m surprised she’s letting you check her heart with that monitor you’ve got at the house.”

  “She’s stubborn, but she isn’t reckless. She knows it’s important. Like the X-ray she doesn’t think she needs. This will take a little while,” he said. “Do you have time to grab a cup of coffee with me?”

  She walked with him to the cafeteria. The cashier waved them through, smiling at Dr. Gallager.

  “Free coffee, nice.” Savanna set her cup on the table by the window Aidan found for them.

  “Yes.” he agreed. “It’s the real reason I keep coming here.”

  Savanna closed her hands around her steaming coffee. She couldn’t stop thinking about the strange happenings at Caroline’s house. Should she get Aidan’s opinion? What if he thought she was a weirdo? She stirred her coffee, thinking.

  “Hey.” He leaned on the table. “Don’t worry. She’ll be fine.”

  “Oh! No…I’m not worried. Well, not too much. I was just thinking. About the accident.”

  Aidan tipped his head, curious. “What do you mean?”

  “Caroline’s neighbor had just stained and glazed the handrail. He’d painted and patched the entire stairway wall, and he reattached the railing just last night. I noticed it this morning. I thought he’d done a good job.”

  “Well, I’m sure it looked like he did, but it’s a very old house. Maybe the screws just pulled loose.”

  “Maybe,” Savanna said. “Sydney and I went back and looked at the spot where it came out of the wall.”

  Aidan’s eyebrows went up. “Did you notice anything out of the ordinary?”

  “There were large pieces of crumbled plaster lying on the steps, and a few of the screws seemed not to fit well where they’d been secured. It doesn’t make sense.”

  “Hmmm.” He sat back, looking at her. “Well, to put it in perspective, two ambulances at her house in two weeks doesn’t make sense, either. First Eleanor, then Caroline.”

  Savanna stared at him. “Do you suspect foul play?”

  He met her eyes. “Do you?”

  “I’m not sure,” she admitted.

  “But who would want to hurt Caroline? What would the neighbor—or anyone else—have against her?”

  Savanna shook her head. “I have no idea. Everyone loves her; the whole town knows her family.”

  “She does seem to be well loved,” Aiden said. “But…I’m sure the Carson estate is worth quite a lot. Money can make people do crazy things sometimes. So, what do we really know, after today’s unfortunate accident?”

  “We know the hand rail looked to be installed properly, but it wasn’t. Oh! And we know that Bill’s wife Maggie is the one who convinced Caroline to hire him, and Maggie was pretty irritated with Bill this morning over something.” What had that argument been about? “And we know that Caroline could have been much more seriously hurt. Or worse. She could have wound up like Eleanor.”

  “But, to be fair, Eleanor collapsed,” Aidan said. “Her heart stopped. Caroline was the victim of faulty hardware.”

  “Faulty installation of hardware.”

  “By the neighbor, Caroline’s handyman,” Aidan said, lowering his voice.

  “Well, the handrail failing doesn’t have anything to do with Eleanor’s heart stopping,” Savanna admitted.

  “True. But…I still don’t have an explanation for how that happened. Nothing was consistent with a typical cardiac arrest, not the EKG, not her cardiac enzymes. I listed sudden cardiac death for the legal record—the death certificate. But it doesn’t make any sense, medically. I can’t betray patient confidentiality,” he added quickly.

  Savanna smiled at him, remembering the conversation with Skylar. “Of course. I’d never ask you to.”

  “I wouldn’t,” he said seriously. “But now I’m wondering if the rest of Eleanor’s pathology is back yet. It can take two to three weeks.”

  “What, like more lab work?”

  Aidan hesitated, pensive. “An autopsy is done routinely on anyone who dies before reaching the hospital. The pathology report can include a variety of things, from a tox screen looking for foreign substances, to gastrointestinal contents, to tissue samples, dental findings, other stuff. It just depends on what we run. In a case like Eleanor’s, the attending physician might check for substances in the system that don’t belong there, something that might have contributed to sudden cardiac arrest.”

  “I see,” Savanna said. “So,
you’re still waiting to receive Eleanor’s report?”

  “To be honest, I’d been watching for it. I’m still bothered by how she died. But I haven’t checked in a few days.”

  “Well, Sydney swears Eleanor was super healthy. She walked her dog a whole mile every day, round trip, just to pick up dog treats from Fancy Tails. How could someone like that just keel over?”

  “It’s possible, though not likely,” Aidan said, frowning. “Did she eat or drink anything out of the ordinary that night? Anything that you two didn’t have?”

  Savanna began to shake her head again, and then stopped. “The claret. The red wine that Lauren brought.”

  “Lauren? You don’t think that she—”

  “No! No…not now. But I did wonder something.” Savanna took a long swallow of her coffee. The hospital’s French vanilla creamer was pretty good.

  “You’re killing me with suspense,” Aidan joked.

  “I’m sorry.” She looked at him. “I always thought it was weird how Lauren called after she’d left that night. She was so surprised that I was still here, and then she immediately asked if Caroline was all right. I remember thinking that was odd. Why wouldn’t Caroline be all right?”

  “Okay, but what about the red wine?”

  “Lauren offered to get us each a drink before she left. Me, Caroline, and Eleanor. Caroline told Lauren to choose what to serve. Eleanor was the only one who actually drank the wine.”

  Aidan stared at her. “Red wine…what kind? Did you see the bottle?”

  “No. But I wondered if maybe Lauren had…” Savanna felt foolish now, giving voice to her thoughts. “I wondered if Lauren had possibly tried to hurt Caroline. It’s such a stupid idea, I know.” She glanced at Aidan, rushing on. “And I don’t believe it. She loves her. You saw her today in the ambulance. She was terrified something could have happened to her grandmother. Lauren isn’t capable of hurting anyone,” Savanna said firmly.

  Aidan shook his head. “It doesn’t seem like it. She’s very devoted.”

  “But the claret came from Happy Family. That’s why Lauren chose it. She said the delivery had included a fancy-looking bottle that she thought Caroline would like to try.”