The Memory Thief

by Don Donaldson

  “Up here, in a suite off the main lab. Nadine will conduct it tomorrow at nine o’clock. It’s quite an extensive test, so be prepared to spend the morning with her. It was good of you to volunteer. I believe you know the way out.”

  Chapter 8

  AFTER LEAVING Quinn’s lab, Marti returned to her office and sat at her computer, still incensed that she’d had to bargain with Quinn to get Letha Taylor the medical care she deserved. But in a way it was good he was such a jerk. If he’d been a decent guy, she might have felt remorse at hoodwinking him to get at Odessa.

  But when could she do that?

  From the research she’d done on Quinn, she’d learned that he spoke at nearly every major scientific meeting or congress there was, so he did a lot of traveling. A good place to start would be to see what meetings were coming up.

  Ten minutes’ work on the Internet located an international congress on advances in EEG technology in Atlanta on Monday and Tuesday of next week. Surely he’d be attending that. But she had to be sure. She spent another few minutes trying to find the speakers’ schedule for the conference, but the organizers apparently hadn’t posted it. However, there was a contact phone number on the site announcing the conference.

  She picked up the phone and dialed the number.

  One ring . . . Two rings . . . Three . . .

  She waited five more, then hung up. Why the devil would they post a useless phone number? That left the email address listed on the site. She hit the hot link for the address and was filling in the message when it occurred to her that the response would come back through the hospital’s e-mail system. Would a place that couldn’t arrange for the floors to be swept adequately monitor employee e-mails? Very unlikely. But it was a risk she couldn’t afford to take. So she jotted down the conference e-mail address, then navigated to her account at Hotmail and sent her inquiry through it. Now it was time to act like she was a real employee.

  She decided to visit the female ward, primarily because she wasn’t in the mood to run into either Odessa or Evensky. But whom should she interview? She got out the notes she’d made when reviewing all the files yesterday and scanned them. Two cases caught her attention: Audry Ewing and Sarah Holman. Those should be enough to finish out the morning.

  Happily, Ada Metz was in the male dayroom when Marti arrived at the nursing station, so she didn’t have to speak to her. But Bobby was there, standing by the two chart carts.

  “Back for more?” Bobby said.

  “The fun never stops.”

  Bobby gestured to the files. “What can I get you?”

  “Ewing and Holman, female ward.”

  Bobby selected the appropriate files and gave them to her. “What do you think of Odessa’s behavior earlier? He got pretty nasty with you.”

  “I think he’s a pig.”

  “I guess that’s a personal view, not a medical one.”

  “I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have said that.”

  “Doesn’t bother me.”

  “I’d appreciate it if you’d just forget my comment.”

  “What comment?”

  “You’re a good man. Now show me who these files belong to.”

  They stepped into the dayroom, and Bobby pointed at a woman with stringy gray hair who was circling the room, trailing the fingers of her left hand against the wall. “That’s Ewing. And—” He pointed to a woman with a blotchy complexion slumped in a chair, staring at the floor. “—that’s Holman.”

  “Give me a couple of minutes to reread Ewing’s file, then bring her to the interview room, would you please? Is it in the same place as on the male ward?”

  He nodded. “If you’ve seen one, you’ve seen both of ’em.”

  Audry Ewing, the only child of a prominent local family, had been in Gibson for forty years. When she was a teenager, she’d been vivacious and intelligent, but had developed a wild streak. Unable to control her, her parents had sent her to Gibson, where she’d been given a frontal lobotomy, a shameful stain on Gibson’s past.

  “Here’s Audry,” Bobby said, gently bringing her into the interview room. With nothing to fear from this patient, Marti was sitting behind the interview table, facing the door.

  “Hello, Audry. I’m Dr. Segerson. Won’t you sit down?”

  Bobby guided Audry into the wooden chair opposite Marti, then withdrew into the hallway.

  “How are you feeling today?” Marti asked.

  “Today,” Audry repeated, her eyes focused on some distant place. “Day is a snow white dove of heaven, give us this day our daily bread, don’t put off today what you can do tomorrow, tomorrow is a day that never arrives, daylight comes and me want to go home, today is the first day of the rest of your life . . .”

  “Audry, please stop that and talk to me.”

  “. . . Today, I am a man . . .”

  “Audry, focus on my face. This is not the way people talk to each other.”

  “Talk is cheap, all talk and no action, talk up a storm, just talk into the microphone, talk a blue streak, talk and I’ll go easy on you . . .”

  Okay, Marti thought. So much for helping Audry. “Bobby.”

  Bobby came into the room.

  “Would you take her back to the dayroom, please, and in about five minutes, bring Sarah in.”

  “Will do.”

  As Bobby led Audry away, she was still doing it. “Talk to the animals, talk to God, don’t talk unless you can improve on the silence . . .”

  While waiting for Sarah Holman, Marti boiled with anger at what Gibson had done to Audry. A life ruined by a misguided medical procedure. She felt ashamed to be part of the profession. It was a minute or two before she could concentrate on anything else, so she barely had time to skim Holman’s file before Bobby reappeared at the door.

  “Here’s Sarah.”

  When the woman was seated in front of her, Marti introduced herself and began this interview as she had the previous one. “So how are you feeling today?”

  “How should I be feeling? I have no friends, no family, no one cares about me.”

  “I care.”

  “Can you smell that? My feet stink horribly. I’ll bet I’ve got gangrene down there. My feet are dead and soon I will be, too.”

  “You don’t have gangrene.”

  “Or some tropical disease that makes your flesh rot. Don’t lie to me. I know what’s going on. And it’s all my fault. If I’d been a better person, this wouldn’t be happening. Will it be painful? I’m sure it will be. It’s only what I deserve.”

  “Sarah, listen to me. You are not dying.”

  “Or maybe it’s flesh-eating bacteria. You can tell me. I can handle it. God knows, I’ve had enough practice at dealing with hard times.”

  Clearly there was no point in spending any more time with this woman either. People can’t be talked out of a depression that profound. The Zoloft she was being given was obviously not doing the job.

  “Bobby.”

  “Back to the dayroom?” he asked, appearing in the doorway.

  “Please.”

  Marti wrote a change of medication order in Holman’s file, adding Depakote, a mood stabilizer, to Sarah’s Zoloft. She alerted Ada Metz to the needed adjustment, then went back to her office, where she headed directly to her computer and navigated to her Hotmail account.

  Yes. There it was—a response from the EEG conference.

  She quickly opened it and scanned the contents.

  Dr Quinn is tentatively scheduled to be part of a panel on Tuesday, but has so far not confirmed. Sorry we can’t be more help.

  Nuts. She couldn’t do anything with that information. She needed to know for sure if he’d be there.

  She sat for a few minutes trying to figure out what to do, then got up, walked down to Quinn’
s administrative office, and went inside, where she was disappointed to find his secretary’s chair empty. She was just turning to leave when the door to Quinn’s office opened, and he came out.

  “Dr. Segerson, is there something I can do for you?”

  Marti’s mind went on a wild search for an answer. Why was she there? Why? Why?

  “What time did you say I should come to your lab tomorrow?”

  “Nine o’clock.”

  “I thought that’s what you said. Sorry to bother you.”

  After Marti was gone, Quinn stood for a moment thinking about her. There was something not right about that woman. He still didn’t understand why she had wanted a job at Gibson, and that gnawed at him. He should have turned her application down and taken his chances with Nashville. Maybe he should just fire her. He could say her performance didn’t measure up. But he had no proof of that, which would create a worse mess than having not hired her at all. Better to leave her alone for now. He could be wrong about her. In any event, he’d be in a better position to assess that tomorrow.

  AFTER HER close call in Quinn’s office, Marti needed some fresh air. So instead of going back to her office, she left the hospital and drove into Linville for lunch.

  As she drove, she thought back to her conversation with Bobby Ware earlier and how she’d called Odessa a pig in Ware’s presence.

  That wasn’t smart. She needed to be more careful.

  But he was a pig . . . and worse. Lee wasn’t the only victim in the Segerson family; he’d damaged them all. Before Odessa came into their lives, her mother was the story lady at the local library. Each day of the week during the school year, she’d visit one of the five elementary schools in the district and read the children a lovely little story she’d written the week before. She’d try her stories out on Marti, and when she read, there was a sparkle in her mother’s eyes that made them look like gemstones.

  Before Odessa there would be a different African violet on the breakfast table every morning. And such violets . . . each as big as a dinner plate, six weeks between repetition of flower color. Marti loved to see the gemstones in her mother’s eyes, and she learned that she could also make them appear by complimenting her on the beauty of her violets.

  But after Lee was murdered, her mother never wrote another story, and someone else became the story lady. She lost interest in her violets; and though Marti tried to save them, she didn’t have the skill, so one by one, they died. And it seemed that with every plant taken to the trash, she lost a little more of her mother.

  Her father was a civil engineer who had once been able to design, build, and repair anything. She had always believed that if he had just tried, he could have mended her mother’s broken spirit; but after Lee’s death, he wasn’t able to reach beyond his own grief. So not only had Odessa taken her sister, he had robbed Marti of her parents as well.

  Pig? That was a charitable call.

  Marti entered the Linville town square and her mind returned to current matters. Circling the court house, she saw an appealing little café with red-and-white gingham curtains hanging in spotlessly clean windows. There were no parking places in front of it, so she had to park on the south side of the square and walk back.

  Inside, the place was jammed and noisy with Linvillians enjoying their break from work. There was no hostess and no empty tables. So, despite having apparently chosen the most popular place in town, she wasn’t going to be able to take advantage of her good judgment. But then, someone stood in the middle of the crowd and waved at her. It was Clay Hulett.

  He motioned her over.

  She made her way through the throng and approached his table, which he was sharing with an attractive brunette in a white short-sleeved knit sweater that she filled out nicely.

  “Please, join us,” Clay said, still standing.

  “I don’t want to impose.”

  “Not at all. We’d enjoy the company.”

  Clay pulled out a chair for her. As Marti sat down, she glanced at the other woman and saw an expression that suggested she wasn’t as happy with Marti’s presence as Clay was.

  Clay returned to his seat and made the introductions. The woman with him was Jackie Norman.

  “Jackie teaches English at Linville Community College,” Clay said.

  “Creative writing,” Jackie added, clarifying Clay’s description of her.

  “That’s wonderful,” Marti said. “Afraid I’m more of a left-brain person.”

  “She’s a psychiatrist at Gibson,” Clay explained.

  “Hence the brain reference,” Jackie said.

  Was that a barb? Marti thought so, but didn’t want to jump to any conclusions.

  “When psychiatrists go to lunch do they leave their specialty behind or should we worry that you’ll be dissecting everything we say?” Jackie asked.

  “If you promise not to put me in a story, I won’t give anything you say more thought than it deserves.”

  From the expression on her face, Jackie wasn’t quite sure what this meant. Sensing that it might be dangerous to let the two women continue talking, Clay jumped into the breach.

  “The special today is glazed ham. It’s always good.”

  “Characters in stories need to be multidimensional,” Jackie said.

  Clay tapped the menu. “And two vegetables . . . home cooked.”

  Marti was debating whether she should escalate the hostilities or back off when the waitress arrived. After their orders were placed, it was an ideal time for a fresh start. Deciding to take advantage of that, Marti said her next words to Clay.

  “How’d your class go this morning?”

  “I was heckled by a forty-year-old female student who thought my first exam was ‘ridiculously difficult’ and said so in front of everybody.”

  “What did you do?”

  “I told her that sometimes perception and reality aren’t the same. It all depends on where you are on the intellectual spectrum. She had no idea what I was talking about, but that was good, because she couldn’t figure out how to reply. Thus goes life at LCC.”

  “What would you have told that woman?” Jackie said to Marti.

  “Probably nothing as effective as what Clay said.”

  “I’m sure you’re just being modest.”

  “Why do you say that?”

  “Most likely it’s because I hate my mother. Isn’t that at the root of all human behavior?”

  The waitress arrived with their food, and once again there was a cease-fire. In an attempt to prolong the peace as long as possible, Clay chatted amiably all through the meal. At the earliest moment, Marti rose, thanked them for their company, and got out of there.

  On the way back to Gibson, she found herself wondering if Clay and Jackie were romantically involved. If they were, and Jackie perceived Marti as a threat to that relationship, it would explain her attitude. Having arrived at an explanation for an otherwise inexplicable experience, Marti was able to put it out of her mind.

  A few minutes after she reached her office, there was a knock at the door. She opened it and saw Mr. Tolbert, the maintenance man she’d met that morning, and a helper. They were accompanied by a flatbed cart piled with the furniture she’d picked out from storage.

  “Got your stuff,” Tolbert said.

  “Great, bring it in.”

  Feeling guilty about the reason she wanted the items they’d brought, Marti had hoped they could deliver them while drawing a minimum of attention to their destination. But the cart with its load wouldn’t fit through the door. So they had to unload each piece in the hall and bring it inside separately, prolonging the evidence of her preparations to anyone who walked by. The first item in was the long table.

  “Where do you want this?” Tolbert asked.

  “Against that wall.”
Her plan actually called for it to be in the middle of the room, but she wasn’t going to arrange any of it until just before it was needed.

  “Next time I change jobs, I need to remember not to hire on at any place that don’t have elevators,” Tolbert complained as he went back into the hall for another item.

  In three minutes they were gone, and Marti was left to think once again about Quinn and that EEG meeting. She went to her door, opened it, and looked toward Quinn’s office. It’d be very risky to try that again. If he saw her this time, what would she say?

  She paused in the doorway to devise a cover story.

  My car’s been running a little rough, and I wanted to ask your secretary if she could recommend a good mechanic.

  It wasn’t inspired, but it would have to do.

  With her heart rate shifting to alert status, she walked quickly to Quinn’s office and went inside.

  This time, his secretary was there.

  “Dr. Segerson, what can I do for you?”

  Marti glanced at Quinn’s door. If he came out in the middle of the tale she was about to spin, her cover story wouldn’t wash. So once she started, she’d be out there without a net.

  “A former teacher of mine in med school was thinking of visiting me here next week. He’s an old friend of Dr. Quinn—” Hearing the door to the hall open behind her, she froze.

  Damn it. If that’s Quinn . . .

  “Sorry, Helen,” a female voice said. “I’ll come back when you’re not busy.”

  The door closed and Marti relaxed a notch.

  “A friend of Dr. Quinn is coming . . .” the secretary said, helping Marti get back to her story.

  “Yes. But he wanted to be sure that Dr. Quinn will be here. Is he planning to attend that EEG meeting in Atlanta?”

  “He’ll be gone all day Monday and Tuesday, but back on Wednesday. Usually after a trip, he’s very busy catching up on work that piled up while he was gone. So Thursday or Friday would be the best days.”

  “Thanks. But don’t say anything to him about this. His friend wanted to surprise him.”