Too Much Blood

by Jane Bennett Munro

  Who did we know that was likely to have syringes of Lovenox lying about the house?

  I could only think of one: Ruthie Brooks.

  But how would she get it into Jay without leaving a puncture mark?

  Did she also shoot Kathleen and her family full of Lovenox? Is that why they were bleeding? How the hell would Ruthie get two adults and five kids to stand still for multiple shots in the belly? Because it would have to be more than one shot to make them bleed like that.

  Too bad there wasn’t an oral form of heparin that Ruthie could sneak into their food. That would explain it.

  Or was there?

  Thursday, December 18

  Chapter 17

  What other dungeon is as dark as one’s own heart?

  What jailer is so inexorable as one’s self!

  —Nathaniel Hawthorne

  Last night I’d added a third item to my list: to get on the Internet and try to find out if an oral form of heparin existed. Things had been so crazy that I hadn’t had time. So when I got up Thursday morning I had every intention of crossing all three items off my list. Maybe then things would make more sense.

  It was a good thing I’d made a list and left it at work, because otherwise I’d have forgotten all about it in light of subsequent events.

  Hal got a phone call at seven o’clock Thursday morning and wouldn’t tell me who it was from. All he would tell me was that he had to be at the college that night, so he wouldn’t be home that evening.

  I objected. “You’re on vacation. The college is closed for the holidays. What do you have to go to the college for?”

  But he just shook his head and said he couldn’t tell me.

  “Was it Bambi?” I persisted.

  He got mad. “Toni, goddamnit, knock it off! You’ll know soon enough.”

  I got mad too. “Fuck you, asshole,” I snapped. I grabbed my purse and coat and slammed out of the house to go to work.

  I’ll know soon enough—yeah, right, I raged to myself. He’s going to meet up with Bambi the bimbo, is what he’s going to do.

  My walk down Montana Street in the crisp, cold air cleared my head and calmed me down enough to get into a work mode. After all, it was again my turn to do frozen sections.

  I got hammered. I got a colon cancer case in which the tumor had become so large that it formed a palpable mass, large enough to be felt on abdominal examination. Multiple loops of small bowel were stuck to it and covered with tumor implants. Several large, involved mesenteric lymph nodes were visible.

  I also diagnosed two new cases of breast cancer by frozen section. One of the patients was only twenty-eight years old.

  This was followed by two modified radical mastectomies on two additional patients, a gangrenous bowel, and a leg amputation for gangrene from a patient who was, no doubt, diabetic. Merry Friggin’ Christmas.

  Plus, there was all the usual small stuff: a truckload of biopsies from the gastrointestinal tract, several gallbladders, appendixes, skin lesions, tonsils, hernia sacs, and the like, and the odd hysterectomy or thyroidectomy. Not too many frozens, but a shitload of work for a thoroughly exhausting day.

  By five o’clock, I was so tired I was nearly in tears. When I considered what I had to go home to, the last vestiges of strength I still had vanished. I put my head down on my desk and let the tears come. Luckily, nobody was around to see or hear me.

  After a while, I felt marginally better, but I was not ready to go home to an empty house. So I got back on the computer. I found out that Jeannie had not had a pregnancy test—at least not one that had been done here. I also found an oral form of heparin.

  It was called rivaroxaban and was a small-molecule, oral, direct Factor Xa inhibitor that was still in clinical development, having entered phase three, or clinical trials. This meant that it wasn’t on the market yet because it wasn’t FDA approved, but it probably would be if the clinical trials went well and the drug didn’t have prohibitive side effects.

  Patients who sign up for clinical trials are put on drug protocols and get their drugs for free, which can be very attractive to patients who can’t afford insurance. The downside is that for every patient who gets the drug, there’s a similar patient who gets a placebo, and nobody wants to be that patient. On the other hand, if the drug turns out to have deleterious side effects, the placebo patient doesn’t get them.

  I wondered if any of our patients were in clinical trials, but I didn’t know exactly how to go about finding that out. I didn’t know if there was a database in our electronic medical record program that listed patients on clinical trials, or if the trials were listed by drug. Maybe I’d have to look up everybody connected with this case and see what drugs they were on. If I found somebody on rivaroxaban, would that be enough to accuse that person of poisoning the Burkes with it?

  By now it was nearly six o’clock, and I knew that even if there was nobody home, the dogs would need to be let out and possibly fed, although Hal had probably done that already. In any case, it was too late to do anything about the other item on my list: calling Dave McClure’s office in Sun Valley to check his alibi.

  So I turned off the computer, dragged myself out of my chair, and went home.

  When I got home, I found Hal and my mother having tea and crumpets in the kitchen.

  I really should work harder at putting my brain in gear before running my mouth, as my mother reminded me with asperity when I said, without thinking, “What the hell is going on here?”

  She stood and drew herself up to her full height of five foot one. “Antoinette. It so happens that your husband called me and asked me to come. The least you can do is make me feel welcome, and that is most decidedly not the way to do it. Have I taught you nothing? Must I put you over my knee?”

  I had to laugh. She looked so fierce. “Mum,” I pointed out, “I’m bigger than you.”

  Mum was shorter than me by two inches, but heavier. As a young woman, she had worn her curly red hair like Susan Hayward, and she had never seen any reason to change her style, even though she was now sixty and mostly gray.

  “I don’t care how big you are, Antoinette. I’m still your mother.” She grabbed me by an earlobe, ignoring the fact that there was an earring in it, dragged me over to the kitchen table, and more or less threw me into a chair, just as she had when I was a child. “Sit,” she commanded. “I’m going to fix you a nice buttery crumpet with marmalade, and milk tea, just the way you like it, and you’re going to eat it.”

  “Mum,” I sighed. “I haven’t used milk in my tea for years. It’s fattening.”

  “Bollocks,” she snapped. “You’re practically skin and bones.”

  I looked at Hal. He was leaning back in his chair, arms folded, chuckling.

  “You’re no help,” I snapped at him. He only chuckled harder. My mother rather resembled a tsunami when she got angry. One just had to go along with her until she ran out of momentum, which wouldn’t be any time soon, by the looks of it. If I knew my mother, she was just building up a head of steam.

  I winced as she slammed a plate with my crumpet—actually an English muffin—down in front of me, followed by a mug full of milky tea, which slopped onto the tablecloth, and then plopped herself back into her chair. “Eat,” she commanded.

  Was I in a time warp or what? It was oddly comforting. Maybe Hal was onto something here. I thought about that while I sipped my milky tea. I’d forgotten how good it tasted, especially when I was little and didn’t feel good. The “crumpet” was delicious. Melted butter ran down my wrist, and I licked it up, along with the sticky marmalade on my fingers.

  Mum shook her head. “Really, Antoinette, your manners. Use a napkin.”

  To my dismay, I found myself protesting, “Aw, Mum,” just as I had as a child.

  For a moment I was transported back to those days
when I knew that no matter what I did, no matter how naughty I was, no matter how angry my mother got, I had absolutely no doubt that I was unconditionally loved. Why couldn’t Hal love me like that? Why did he have to go play with Bambi the bimbo?

  Damn. Why did I have to think of that? Suddenly I came back to the unwelcome present and the knowledge that Hal did not love me like that, not anymore. Maybe he never had. What did I know? One day he’s all distant and preoccupied, and the next he’s swearing that he loves me and only me, and then the next day he gets all secretive on me. What was I supposed to think? Which Hal was the real Hal?

  My eyes filled with tears, and I turned away so that he and Mum couldn’t see them, but it was no use. I couldn’t fool Mum. When I felt her arms go around me and heard her softly murmur, “Oh, my baby,” I burst into racking sobs. As she rocked me gently, pressing my wet face into her plump shoulder, I heard Hal say, “See?”

  It was just that one word, and he didn’t add “what I have to put up with,” but that’s what I heard, and I lost my temper. I completely forgot who’d gotten Mum up here in the first place. Pulling out of her arms, I jumped to my feet and faced him. “Fuck you, Hal. Why don’t you just go live with your precious Bambi if I’m such a burden to you? I don’t need this, and I don’t need you!”

  Hal sat motionless, staring at me, looking as stunned as if I had slapped him. Mum, shocked, exclaimed, “Kitten, you don’t mean that. Tell Hal you don’t mean that, at once. Hal, love, you know she doesn’t mean that.”

  I stared back, tears running down my face, unable to speak. At that moment, I meant every word of it. Hal stood up, dropped his napkin on the table, and said quietly, “I think she does.” Before either of us could make a move to stop him, he had gone out the kitchen door into the garage.

  Mum shook me fiercely. “Go after him,” she hissed.

  Stubbornly, I didn’t move. I sat, arms crossed, and listened to the sounds of the car door slamming, the engine roaring to life, the garage door going up and back down, and the crunch of the tires on the snow in the driveway.

  As the sounds died away, Mum glared at me. “You bloody little idiot.”

  Resolutely I shook my head. “He doesn’t love me anymore, Mum. He’s got a girlfriend. He barely tolerates me anymore. Well, now he doesn’t have to tolerate me at all!”

  “You don’t know what you’re talking about,” she snapped. “He’s told me all about this Bambi person. She’s just a student with a crush on him. Students get crushes on him all the time. Didn’t you tell me that once? Fairly bragging about it, you were. My handsome husband, all the girls lust after him, you said, and he’s old enough to be their father. And don’t tell me you’ve forgotten the crush you had on that biology professor at Long Beach State—what was his name, Tillotson or something?”

  “Tillett,” I corrected her. “I haven’t thought about him in years.”

  “Right, then. But you cried for him night after night and swore that you’d never love another man …”

  “I did not!”

  “Yes, kitten, you did. I heard you. But at least you had the good sense not to tell him that. That would have been embarrassing in the extreme.” She sniffed. “Thank heaven I brought you up better than that!”

  She had a point there. Especially since my next crush was the chemistry professor that I ended up marrying—the one who didn’t love me anymore. But she wasn’t through with me yet.

  “And while we’re on the subject, what about you, young lady?”

  “Huh?”

  “What about this Bernie Kincaid that Hal caught you with? That doesn’t exactly make you the innocent, injured party here, now does it?”

  I sighed. “Bernie Kincaid is a cop. He’s working on a case that I’m involved in. He invited me to lunch. That’s all, I swear to God.” I didn’t really want to tell my mother about the kiss, but I should have known she’d worm it out of me.

  Mum cocked her head and looked at me, assessing. “Methinks you protest too much, my love. Why do you need to swear?”

  Like I said before, Mum could see right through me. I looked right into her green eyes, trying to stare her down, but it was no use. “Come, now, darling, there’s something you’re not telling me. I can see it in your eyes. Now, what is it?”

  I gave up. “Okay, okay, I’ll tell you. He wants to … uh, have sex with me.” I started to say “fuck my brains out” but remembered just in time that I was talking to my mother.

  “And you want it too, don’t you?”

  Oh God, did I ever. I summoned up all the false bravado I could. “Are you kidding? I don’t even like Bernie Kincaid. Don’t you remember? He was the one who wanted to arrest me, for God’s sake!”

  My mother nodded. “Mmm-hmm. He’s not exactly being nasty to you now, is he, dear, taking you to lunch and all that. Why did you go if you don’t even like him?”

  I put my elbows on the table and my face in my hands. “Oh, Mum, I’m so confused.”

  My mother put her arms around me, and I put my head on her shoulder. She rocked me gently. “Kitten, you and Hal aren’t so different. Looking at it from the outside, as I’m doing right now, you both have exactly the same problem. You love each other, I’ve no doubt. But you both have someone else distracting you. It happens. Now you each have to decide how to handle it.”

  “Well, I know how Hal’s going to handle it,” I mumbled into her shoulder. “He’s probably fucking her right now.”

  “Antoinette!” exclaimed my mother, aghast. “Your language!”

  I raised my head and looked at her. She was frowning, but there was a smile in her eyes. “Well?” I retorted defensively. “Don’t you think that’s where he went? Where else would he go?”

  “Perhaps. Perhaps not. He’s only a man, isn’t he?”

  “So why is it okay for him and not for me?”

  “I didn’t say that, now, did I?” Mum argued. “Kitten, our religion and practically everyone else’s teaches that sex outside of marriage is wrong. Obviously not everybody believes that, or it wouldn’t keep happening, what? The problem comes afterward, with unwanted pregnancies or diseases—or what if you actually fall in love with that person and want to leave your marriage?”

  “Maybe I do,” I retorted with a flash of anger. “Hal’s been shitty to me lately. Who needs it? I have enough problems at work with doctors being shitty to me. I don’t need to come home to the same thing.”

  “Wait a minute, kitten,” my mother said reprovingly. “Who was shitty to whom, just now?”

  Hal’s mother had nothing on mine when it came to dumping guilt, I reflected. It didn’t help that she was absolutely right.

  “Mum, what am I going to do?”

  “I’m sure you’ll figure that out in time, love, but one thing you’re not going to do is sit around here moping.”

  I challenged her. “How about if I go find Bernie Kincaid and get fucked? Huh? How about that? Then I won’t be sitting around here moping.”

  Mum shook her head. “You’re a big girl now, Antoinette, and I can’t tell you what to do and what not to do, but that would be the absolute wrong thing for you to do right now.”

  “Mum, you don’t understand. You haven’t had sex in years!” I protested and then clapped my hand over my mouth, aghast at what I had just said.

  “You shouldn’t make assumptions, kitten,” my mother said, her green eyes twinkling. “I may be sixty, but I’m not dead, don’t you know.”

  I stared at her, speechless. The mere thought of my mother having sex … oh my God … blew my mind. And with whom? Surely she was just pulling my chain. She changed the subject.

  “What are your friends doing tonight?” she inquired. “We could all go out to dinner—on me. How about it?”

  “Okay, I’ll give Jodi a call.”

  “Bef
ore you do that, do you suppose you ought to try to call Hal?” Mum suggested.

  “You mean interrupt him in mid-fuck?”

  “Antoinette!”

  “I’m sorry, Mum, but aren’t you the one who’s always telling me that if you love someone and you let him go and he comes back, then he’s truly yours? Well, I feel like that’s what I should do with Hal. Let him come back in his own good time. Then I’ll know if he’s truly mine. If he doesn’t come back, then I’ll know he never was mine, and I can divorce him and move on. Don’t you agree?”

  “Darling,” she said, “you’re absolutely right. I did say that. Now call Jodi.”

  I did so. “Fiona’s here? Cool!” Jodi said. “We’re gonna order pizza. Come on over.”

  Elliott answered the door, hugged Mum, took our coats, and led us into the family room, where a fire crackled merrily in the fireplace. Their family room was much larger than ours, but then it needed to be with five kids. On the couch, Julie and Renee sprawled with books, while the boys lay on the floor in front of the TV playing a video game.

  “Where’s Hal?” Jodi asked.

  I wasn’t ready to get into that in front of all these people. “He had to go over to the college for something,” I said vaguely, hoping she wouldn’t pursue it, and she didn’t. For one thing, the pizza arrived just then, which caused a mass exodus to the dining room, where the boxes could be spread out on the table with the paper plates and plastic utensils, and everybody could just help themselves.

  The kids vanished once dinner was over, either to bed or to their own activities elsewhere. “I talked to Kathleen today,” Jodi said. “They’re all going to be released tomorrow.”

  “Oh, good,” I said. “I’m glad they’re all okay.”

  “I’m not sure how okay they are,” Jodi said. “But at least they’re not bleeding anymore. Dr. Marshall scoped Kathleen and did upper GI X-rays on the kids and didn’t find any obvious bleeding points, so there’s no reason to keep them in the hospital.”

  “How come Tiffany isn’t here?” I asked. “Is she sick too?”