The Doctor's Guardian

by Marie Ferrarella

  “I know all that,” she insisted. “But I had this gut feeling—”

  “A gut feeling,” he repeated. By now, he was whispering the words into her ear because there were too many people around.

  “Yes.” She said the word defiantly, waiting for him to make fun of it and her. Instead, she was aware of him nodding his head. And acutely aware of the way his breath touched the side of her face. She could feel her stomach muscles contracting.

  “I’ve always had the utmost respect for gut feelings,” he told her.

  Nika struggled to keep the sound of his voice from completely blotting out everything else.

  Had to be the effect of riding in a crowded elevator, she silently insisted.

  Or hoped.

  Chapter 8

  Taking the long, slender hand in both of his, Cole stood on one side of his grandmother’s hospital bed and asked, “How are you today, G?”

  Though it was muted, it was difficult to miss the affection in his voice. Difficult, too, to miss the disappointment that washed over his features when he realized that his grandmother was looking at him blankly, as if she was trying to place who he was.

  And then the fog must have lifted from her brain, because in the next moment Ericka Baker smiled at her grandson, however fleetingly.

  It took longer for the detective’s features to relax. His grandmother’s dance with dementia, however temporary those moments were, was hitting him hard, even though he said nothing.

  These two were people, Nika guessed, who were part of a world where affection wasn’t demonstrated, it was simply a given. And understood.

  “Restless,” his grandmother replied to his question. “How else would I be, sitting around and waiting?” The older woman looked at Nika. “How much longer do I have to stay here?”

  “You’re going to make me feel that you don’t like my company, Mrs. Baker,” Nika said as she secured the blood pressure cuff on the woman’s arm. Assured it was fastened, she began to inflate it.

  “I have a life to get back to,” Ericka responded sharply. She looked pointedly at her grandson, obviously seeking an ally. “And I’ve got canasta games waiting to be played. God knows the maid probably stripped the entire house and sold everything by now.”

  “You have a maid?” Nika watched as the arrow on the gauge kept rising. “I’m impressed.”

  “It’s a housecleaning service,” Cole told her. “Matilda comes by every two weeks to clean. She’s been doing that for the last ten years,” he said, trying to make his grandmother admit that the woman was incredibly trustworthy.

  “She has nothing to clean,” Mrs. Baker told her proudly. “I keep a spotless house. You’re wasting your money, Coleman.”

  This was an old argument. “I wouldn’t be if you let her do her job and stop trying to outdo her, G,” he replied patiently.

  Ericka raised her chin. She was nothing if not a woman of old-fashioned values. “A woman who can’t clean her own house doesn’t deserve one.”

  “You really should let Matilda do her job,” Nika advised, deflating the cuff again. “It’ll make your grandson feel as if he’s finally able to help you, for a change. You know, paying you back for all the times you were there for him.”

  Ericka Baker looked from her attending physician to her grandson. Had there been no noise, Nika was fairly certain she would have been able to hear the wheels turning in the woman’s head. And grinding to an abrupt halt.

  Her eyebrows touched as she narrowed her eyes. “You’ve been telling her about us, boy?”

  “I’m your attending physician, Mrs. Baker,” Nika reminded her before Cole had a chance to say anything. “I ask questions, he answers. It’s all confidential,” she assured the woman. “Meant strictly for patient history.”

  Ericka tossed her head. “I’m the patient. Talk to me about my history,” she instructed.

  Nika shook her head with a laugh. “You are a pistol, Mrs. Baker.”

  “And she doesn’t shoot blanks,” Cole warned with just a hint of a smile. He noticed that his grandmother seemed to preen at the warning.

  Despite the conversation, his grandmother didn’t lose sight of what was really important to her. “So? How is it?” the older woman wanted to know. “My blood pressure. Is it low enough for you yet?”

  Nika replaced the cuff where it belonged. “Not yet, but we’re getting closer.”

  Ericka scowled. “How much are they paying you to keep my body in this bed?” she wanted to know.

  Nika bit her lower lip to keep from laughing. She knew Ericka would take offense. “Not nearly enough, trust me. And if you’re curious, your blood pressure is 146 over 95.”

  Ericka tilted her head, weighing the numbers. “It’s been higher. Isn’t that low enough for you?” she demanded.

  Nika knew the woman was trying to intimidate her. Sorry, Mrs. Baker, I cut my teeth on Ella Silverman. And Mama. “I’m afraid it has to be lower.” Her tone was firm.

  Mrs. Baker frowned and looked up at her grandson. “You had to get me a stubborn doctor? You couldn’t pull a more easygoing one out of the elevator?” she asked.

  Nika laughed at the question. “Luck of the draw, I’m afraid. I was the only one in the elevator at the time.” When she glanced in his direction, she saw that the detective was studying her. Their eyes met for the briefest of moments. Tiny shivers raced up and down her spine.

  “I think she’s very good for you, G,” Cole told his grandmother, his voice low, patient. “She’s not afraid of you. That’s a plus.”

  Ericka sighed and then waved him out. “Go, do your police work. Be a detective. I don’t need you here if you’re not going to back me up.”

  He laughed and kissed Ericka’s forehead. Nika found that the sound seemed to burrow right into her. She was going to have to find a way to block that. She was far too old to be reacting like a teenage girl with her first major crush.

  “See you later, G,” Cole promised.

  “You bet you will,” she called after him. “They’ll probably shackle me to the bed next!”

  Nika left the room with him, easing the door closed behind her. The sound of his grandmother’s voice followed them out.

  “How much longer do you think it’ll be before she can have that biopsy?” he asked once they were outside in the corridor.

  The blood pressure readings were going down, but not fast enough to suit any of them, Nika thought. She fully sympathized with their frustration. “At this rate, hopefully a week.”

  The news didn’t please him. “That long? Will her insurance cover her staying here for that amount of time?”

  “With the right reports filed and the extenuating circumstances spelled out, yes.” She knew how iffy the health insurance world was. Apparently, so did he. “If not, Patience Memorial has provisions for senior citizens and people who don’t have any health insurance to begin with.” She flashed him an encouraging smile. “Don’t worry, it’ll be taken care of,” she promised him. And then she remembered what they had talked about prior to going to Ericka’s room. “Meanwhile, I need to get you that list.”

  At the moment, Cole had several cases pending. With his partner down and out with the flu—it had hit the man late yesterday, according to the phone call he’d gotten this morning—it felt as if his work had suddenly tripled on him rather than just doubled.

  “You don’t have to get it this second,” he told her. “Why don’t I pick it up when I swing by to see my grandmother tonight?”

  That sounded good to her. So did seeing him again. God, she really was acting like an adolescent, she thought, even as she nodded.

  “It’s a date—” Nika stopped abruptly, realizing what she’d just said. “I mean…” Her voice trailed off as she hunted for a way to gracefully backtrack from the slip.

  She kind of looked cute, flustered like that, he thought. Taking pity, he came to her rescue. “I know what you mean, Doctor,” he said, getting her off the hook. “Besides,” he added, “
that isn’t an entirely bad idea.”

  He wasn’t sure which of them was more surprised to hear that, her or him. The words had just slipped out.

  Nika stared at him. Was the detective actually asking her out? Had she missed something just now? “It’s not?”

  He liked the way her eyes widened when she was surprised. Liked, he found himself admitting, the whole package that comprised the young, eager doctor. After all, he wasn’t made of stone. Only his heart was. But he found he did just fine without involving it, in the scheme of things.

  “No law says that there can’t be food around when you give me your input about the deceased patients,” he told her. “I’m assuming that the patients were your patients.”

  “The last few were, yes. Before that I was just helping out on the floor whenever I had the chance.” She could see by the puzzled look on his face that she was going to have to explain that. “Initially, they had me working in the E.R. when I came here. They break everyone in on the E.R. The thinking behind that is that if you don’t run screaming into the night after a rotation in the E.R., you have at least some of what it takes to become a dedicated doctor.”

  And she was dedicated, he noticed. It was evident in everything she did. It also meant that his grandmother was in good hands.

  Glancing at his watch, he realized he had to be getting back. “All right, I’ll meet you here after six.” It occurred to him that he was making assumptions. “Will you be off by then?”

  She nodded. “Barring an act of God, yes.”

  “Let’s hope God’s busy with something else, then,” Cole commented just before he took his leave.

  He didn’t realize he was smiling until he caught his reflection in a dormant monitor as he passed it. Cole pulled his features into a somber expression.

  “Why Geriatrics?”

  Cole tendered the question over a house salad and sesame-flecked breadsticks as he and his grandmother’s incredibly enthusiastic physician waited for their main course.

  Mt. Vesuvius was a small restaurant that had been part of the neighborhood for the last three decades. It barely accommodated the fourteen tables that were vying for space on the sawdust-covered floor. But the aroma, comprised of a host of different herbs and spices, that filled the area was the stuff that dreams and expanding waistlines were made of.

  “I like hearing stories,” she told him frankly.

  Cole tried to make sense of her answer in the present context and couldn’t. “Excuse me?”

  Nika broke off a piece of the breadstick and popped it into her mouth, then explained. “Old people are filled with experiences, with stories they’re dying to share with someone. Most of their families are too busy earning a living or trying to squeeze the last drop of life out of their existences. They don’t have the time to listen to them.”

  “And you have time?” he questioned with only the smallest sliver of sarcasm. She was a doctor, one of the busiest, most demanding professions on the planet—outside of homicide detective. His guess was that time was not a commodity that she had in great supply.

  “I can multitask very efficiently,” Nika said with a grin. “And most of the time, my ears aren’t doing anything except hanging around anyway. So I listen to them, and get just as much as I give—sometimes more. There’s a lot of untapped wisdom to be gotten from those old people,” she assured him.

  He watched her polish off the rest of the breadstick. “I can see why my grandmother likes you.”

  Nika was surprised by his comment. And pleased. “She told you that?”

  “No, not in so many words,” he admitted. “But I know her. I can see it in her eyes, in the way she talks to you. In the way she talks about you. When I visit her, she doesn’t spend the entire time telling me everything you did wrong, which she would if she didn’t like you.”

  Nika laughed. “Now you’re going to give me performance anxiety.”

  He watched her for a long moment. So long that her stomach had time to tighten and then flutter restlessly not once, but twice. “I’m sure you perform very well,” he told her, his voice low.

  After a beat, Nika realized that she had to tell herself to breathe.

  She was relieved when she saw the waitress approaching with their orders. “Dinner’s here,” she told him needlessly.

  They spent the next forty-five minutes discussing the list she’d given him and deliberately ignoring the electricity that had shown up and taken a seat at the table between them. The electricity that crackled sharply and unexpectedly not once, but several times during the course of the meal and the dessert that followed.

  The electricity, she thought, that would wind up tripping her up. If she was going to fall hard for somebody—and so far she hadn’t in all her thirty years—Cole Baker was the wrong man to pick. He was good to his grandmother and handy to have around when elevators died, but she had a feeling that he would neither want nor know what to do with a woman’s heart if it was offered to him.

  “The odd thing was,” Nika continued as the busboy cleared away their plates, “I didn’t realize until I reviewed the names on the list that there were several patients who lived in either a nursing home or in an assisted living facility. They were the patients who either had no family or whose families felt that, by setting them up in these homes, their obligation to show up in their lives from time to time was rescinded.

  “Those are the people, who don’t understand the meaning of the phrase, ‘the ties that bind,’” she continued, unaware that her voice was swelling with passion. “They just want to appease their consciences.”

  He looked down the list, which he had placed next to his plate. “What about the other names? Anything strike you as similar there as well?”

  “Yes,” she said grimly. Something else had occurred to her after she’d printed the list up. “Every one of them had a disease that was not about to be cured.”

  He made the natural assumption. “They were terminal, then?”

  “They were terminal,” she echoed. “Some of them were in the late stages of cancer, of leukemia, of Parkinson’s disease. The sad thing is,” she continued, “for the most part, the cancer patients could have been cured if they’d only come in sooner. But for one reason or another, they had hoped that their symptoms would just go away and that they’d be all right again.”

  She sighed. It was such a waste. “It doesn’t work like that. And, in this day and age, it seems a shame that these people don’t take advantage of all the advances that medicine has made.” She gave him an example. “One of the patients, a Mrs. Ida Jones, was too embarrassed to tell her doctor that she was having pains around her pelvic area.” Reaching over to the paper, she tapped the fourth line. “She’s the fourth name on the list.”

  Cole looked down at the printout. She had included the addresses, as well as thumbnail descriptions of the initial complaint that the patients had come in with, and the presumed cause of death that had ultimately seen them out. At first glance, it all appeared perfectly acceptable to him.

  But obviously it wasn’t. Not if one of Patience Memorial’s own attending physicians was suspicious that something more was going on than readily met the eye.

  Cole scanned the names again. “You said that some of these patients had no families.”

  “Right. Most of the ones who were brought in from the local nursing homes had no next of kin to contact,” she repeated. “When they died, the hospital notified the head administrator at the homes.” She hated how sad that sounded.

  Since the records were all here, in the interest of time he decided to attempt a shortcut. “Do you think you can get me the names of the next of kin for the others?”

  Mrs. Silverman would probably have her head—and her job—if she found out. But Silverman was not her concern. These former patients were.

  “No problem,” she assured him. The man in Records owed her a favor. “I take it you want to talk to them.”

  He nodded. While they’d been having
dinner, one of the waiters had approached each table and lit the thick, chunky candles that were in the center. The candlelight seemed to love her. It took him a second to get his mind back on her question.

  “I thought I’d see if there were any unusual life insurance policies involved.”

  She hadn’t thought of that. That made it so callous. “You think this is about money?”

  At this point, he didn’t know. He was casting out lines to see if he could get a nibble.

  “Stranger things have happened,” he told her. “There was a case several years ago where two retired schoolteachers were taking out large insurance polices on homeless vagrants in the area. They’d get them to sign the papers in exchange for a hot meal and some clean clothes. After a certain amount of time had passed, they would run the poor sap down in their car and kill him in order to collect the money. They took turns,” he added, shaking his head.

  Nika stared at him, numbed by the blatant horror of what he was telling her. “You’re kidding,” she whispered incredulously.

  “That’s not the kind of headline that jokes are made about,” he told her.

  It made him sick to his stomach to recall the case. The retired schoolteachers had been in their early seventies. Schoolteachers, for God sakes. They were the very ones involved in helping to mold the nation’s children and their moral character.

  “My point,” he continued, “is that maybe someone is taking out polices on these people, then killing them off so that they can collect.”

  Put that way, she supposed that it did sound plausible. “The M.E. found a small puncture wound in Mr. Mayer’s neck,” she said, repeating what they both knew, then extrapolating on it. “If that’s the method of killing them off, and it is pretty simple and very effective—no muss, no fuss, not even any drugs to get and possibly leave a trail—then I’m guessing the same person would be paying a “visit” to all the other patients just before they died.”

  “Sounds right.” He leaned forward, watching her. Watching the way light played off the soft contours of her face. “What are you driving at?”