“Uh, oh; my bad. I wasn’t supposed to say anything, but… Well, don’t you think it was awfully generous of this place to give you two weeks off, paid, to recuperate from your loss? It’s just about impossible to get one week off, even unpaid and for family emergencies. I think they found some inconsistencies with the Jane Doe you looked after last week; something about some stolen goods or something. But you didn’t hear it from me, girlfriend. Oh, and nice catch on the man,” Neal added, then bent over to Leah’s ear and whispered, “He looks like a keeper.”
“Thanks,” she replied, “I agree. And thanks for the intel, too. Come on, James. It’s time for scrubs and a mask for you, too.
Leah casually walked into the break room, as if she belonged there. Well, she did, she thought. Her conscience was clear about any wrongdoing with taking home her mother’s belongings, or as far as they had been told, her relative’s clothing and smartphone. Nurse Gata had made sure everything was done correctly—she was a stickler for paperwork.
“Oh, shit,” she said softly. She never signed any release forms for the goods Nurse Gata had given her. It probably looked like she had stolen them.
“What’s wrong?” James asked. She was acting spooky and extra quiet again. “And am I supposed to be in here?”
“No, you’re not,” she said, changing her mind about involving him. “Go ahead and wait over there by the snack machine, if you would. Ergh! Nurse Gata gave me my mother’s personal belongings the day after she disappeared because I had told her that we were related. She never asked me her name, and she didn’t have me sign any paperwork for it, either. I don’t know if she was setting me up or not—probably not—but now she’s made it look like I stole the smartphone and dress. No one cares about the dress, but… Dang! She’s not going to admit she screwed up. She’d rather see me fry. Piss on her, I mean, I don’t want to think about that right now. In the long run, it won’t make any difference since we won’t be around. But right now, I’m going to do a little reconnaissance. I need to put on some camouflage. If I am potentially in trouble, I’d better not compound it with having you in a restricted access area.”
James left the room, but rather than stay put in the coin-operated food court, he decided to do a little snooping on his own. He smelled a rat, even over the prevailing aroma of cleansers and disinfectants.
Leah donned the green scrubs and put the booties on over her sandals. There wasn’t any doubt in her mind about whether the Jane Doe was Bibb or not—she knew in her gut it was her. But she wanted to have a look at the chart before she went peeking through doorways to find the woman, though.
She was in luck. Or rather, God was with her right now. She had stopped believing in luck a long time ago. It was Vanessa at the nurses’ station. She was bright enough, but could also be led down whichever path of thought Leah or anyone else wanted her to go. It was time for a little investigation and diversion.
“Vanessa, how’s it going today? I didn’t know they’d scheduled you over here. Anything interesting going on that I should know about before I take over?”
Leah was blatantly lying and knew that she would be found out soon enough. Hopefully though, she would leave with some valuable information before her ruse was discovered. It wasn’t even near time for a shift change. Hmm, maybe she could say that someone called her in to take over because she or he had an appointment or had taken ill? She’d have to figure out who was already working so she could flesh out her fabrication.
“I didn’t know you were back to work already,” Vanessa said in a harsh whisper, as if it was a great secret. Leah shrugged her shoulders like it was no big deal. Well, it couldn’t be very hush-hush if the first two people she talked to told her about her suspension within seconds of seeing her.
“Well, if you’re going to be working, then you need to know about the Jane Doe in 313. She’s a little old lady who came in beat to a pulp. She didn’t fall down some stairs or nothin’, no matter what they said. She has two black eyes and—God, this is so gross—it looks like someone burned her with cigarette, all over her arms and then her feet, too. She has a specialist in there with her right now. He’s a new doctor. I’ve never seen him before, but… Hey, where are you goin’? I didn’t get to tell you about the other little old lady. Audie?”
Audie Leah Madigan ran down the hall as fast she possibly could in her green baggies-covered sandals. She turned to look behind her and almost overshot the room. She reached out her right hand, grabbed the doorframe, and swung into the room, ready for action.
“What the hell do you think you’re doing?” she barked at the suspicious man beside the bed. It was obvious that the lanky male wasn’t a doctor—or any other kind of medical personnel. For one thing, his arms were filthy under the scrubs, and she could smell him eight-feet away. She also saw that she had arrived just in time to prevent him from injecting a syringe into Bibb’s IV.
The startled man with scraggly beard and oily hair spun around, inadvertently banging into Bibb’s bed. He pushed it and her aside in fear. The bed crashed into the wall, shaking and rattling all the cords, tubes, and other paraphernalia attached to it. Bibb didn’t move or make a sound with all the jarring and banging of being shoved around—and that scared Leah.
“Put it down, mister. I’m not messing around here,” Leah growled, holding back the urge to yell at him. “Now, dude!” she demanded, as she neared him cautiously, trying to cut off his exit. All of a sudden, there were too many creeps in this town, and they all seemed to look the same and wind up in her face.
The greasy, angular man ran toward the doorway. Leah shifted to her left to block him, not knowing what she could actually do to stop him. She was moving by reflex—her maternal protection mode kicking in for her future mother-in-law.
The pony-tailed intruder made one more feint, then threw the syringe at Leah. She jumped aside, trying to avoid it, and unintentionally gave him the opening he needed. He shoved her against the wall, out of his way. Her neck snapped backwards and her head smacked the drywall. She rebounded and fell forward, inert, to the floor. Her assailant hopped over her, grabbed the door jamb to regain his balance, and sprinted down the hallway, looking back briefly to make sure she wasn’t following him.
ӁӁ
James waited in the little chapel alcove across the hall, out of sight of others, but with a partial view of the room he knew held his biological mother and Leah. Suddenly, a scrub-clad man wearing dirty, untied athletic shoes ran out of the room, clutching at the wall to keep on his feet. It didn’t take a genius to see he had just done something wrong and was leaving the scene in a hurry. Damn! Flash decision—should he stop the man’s escape or check on his ladies. James bolted out of the vestibule before he could make a conscious choice. He moved by gut reaction and performed a flying tackle from behind, clipping his target, knocking him face forward onto the hard, tiled floor.
Thud, crack, “ugh…”
James scrambled to his feet and stood over his quarry. The mangy man, his arms outstretched like he was praying to Mecca—stunned and at least partially incapacitated by the blow—cautiously turned his face sideways. Blood dribbled from his nose as his tongue moved gingerly around his cheek. He spat out a chunk of rotted enamel and began to rise, his fingers clutching the cool, bare floor in front of him.
James planted his foot in the middle of the prone figure’s back. “Freeze,” he ordered.
The body responded by relaxing back into the floor, a fart escaping in an almost comedic conclusion to the dramatic episode.
James was no longer alone in the hall with the assailant. Billy had arrived—dressed in more than a towel, he was glad to see—sporting a Hawaiian shirt, shorts, his badge, and a tough cop’s attitude.
Billy was directing the staff to stay back while he cuffed the intruder. James didn’t wait for him to finish the bracelet job; he knew his help wasn’t needed. In half a heartbeat, he was in the ICU room, tending to Leah.
“Crap,” he said, and pull
ed the syringe out of her shoulder. “What the hell is this?” Leah was unconscious and, he noticed as he looked up at the bed shoved against the wall, so was Bibb.
“A little help in here, please,” he yelled through the doorway, not wanting to leave Leah to find a doctor or nurse. He didn’t know how seriously she was hurt, but at least she was breathing. “I’ll be right back, don’t go anywhere, okay, sweetheart?” he said softly as he patted her uninjured shoulder, trying to lighten his own frightened mood with the lame joke. She was unconscious and couldn’t contribute her own witty remark, so he’d say it for her.
“Help her, help them, Lord,” he prayed quickly, his request for both of his ladies. He looked around the small room. He got up and went to the side of Bibb’s bed and pulled it back to its original location. She had gauze bandages covering both arms, and her feet were wrapped, too. He couldn’t even guess what had happened to them, but they couldn’t possibly look as horrible as what he could. Her face was barely recognizable. He knew it was Bibb, but her nose was three times its normal size—probably broken, he thought—both of her eyes blackened and swollen to mere slits. Hmm, the dual black eyes meant the nose was most certainly broken. Yes, even though her face was red and purple and puffy, pushed out of shape, out of kilter like a lump of clay that had been tossed against the wall a couple of times, he could tell it was her. Her long silver hair was loosed over her shoulders. She had plastic tubes up her nose, but still had a regal bearing. She wasn’t of noble birth, but if what Billy had recalled of the news stories was true, she had established herself as a respectable lady in this town with her actions and integrity. Not many single women could pull that off now, and especially not thirty years ago.
James didn’t know much about medicine, but the little blips on the monitor were jiggling up and down, and that was a good thing. He had seen enough dramatizations of ‘flat lining’ to know that a calm stream of electronic lines meant bad news. “Keep bouncing,” he whispered.
Help came into the room, the scrub-attired characters now poring over Leah. “Here, I pulled this out of her shoulder.” He handed the syringe to the man who looked to be in charge: Dr. Savikko, his badge said.
The composed, country-doctor-looking older man took it, turned it over, and sniffed it. “That creep threw it at her,” James said. “I saw her try to dodge it and thought she had. She fell when he knocked her down on his way out the door, but I think it injected something into her first. She shouldn’t be unconscious from the short fall to the ground. I think she interrupted him trying to put it into Bibb’s IV.”
Dr. Savikko and his emerald-clad minions looked down their noses at James, asking without words, ‘Who are you?’
“Hey, I was across the hall, waiting for a chance to come in and see her. That’s my mother,” he said, nodding toward the bed-bound patient, “Bibb Stephens.” The group let out a collective sigh of relief at his valid explanation of who he was and why he was involved with the two women.
“Take this down to the lab and see what it is. Get her into a bed, stat. Get her vitals, blood work, stat, and contact her next of kin. Did I miss anything, crew?”
“I’m her next of kin. She’s my fiancée,” James said, not wanting to explain being handfast to the little group. “She’s an orphan and we’re all we have. Well, except for him,” James said, nodding to acknowledge Billy who was now standing in the doorway.
“Excuse me, sir,” the orderly said, as he waited for the police officer in beach clothes to step aside.
“Where are they taking her?” Billy asked for the both of them as they automatically gravitated toward each other, drawn together by their concern and love for Leah.
“She’s going to the emergency room. You can wait in the waiting room,” the doctor said. “Believe me, she’ll get the best possible care—she’s one of our own.”
“Come on, James,” Billy said, putting his hand on the frowning man’s shoulder.
“No, you go. I’m going to stay here for a minute,” James said, then paused, reflecting on the words, “and see my mother.”
“Well, okay. I’ll wait outside for you. It’ll be a while before they let us see Leah. I’ll make a few calls and see what I can find out about this for you.”
“Thanks, I appreciate it.”
James walked in and stood beside the middle-aged nurse now overseeing Bibb’s needs. He had never seen her before, but she looked competent. At least, she was frowning and twisting the knobs on the oxygen-feed like she knew what she was doing. She smiled at James and stepped aside, making room for him to move closer to the bed.
“No more than ten minutes at a time, okay,” she stated rather than asked. She moved around to the other side of the bed and looked underneath, her hands barely touching the tubes as she made sure there weren’t any cuts, kinks, or breaks in her patient’s lifelines.
James didn’t know what to do. He had only spoken briefly to Bibb, and that hadn’t ended well. He had found out that rather than the American businesswoman who had invited him to purchase her little mill, she was really his unacknowledged mother, that his grandfather was really his biological father—and that his whole familial history was fabrication, that he had been lied to his entire life.
All he knew about her personally was the little bit of history she had revealed the day they met. She loved his father, she said. Evidently enough to let him take their baby away to England for him to rear. Well, maybe she just wanted the child out of the way. A baby wasn’t conducive to starting or building a business. But, looking down at this woman tenaciously holding onto life, he would rather think that this ‘tough old broad’ was generous, too. He knew how much his real father had loved him. If she knew how much he had wanted another son, then biology and tradition be damned—she’d give him one.
He brushed aside a few stray hairs from her forehead, “Thanks for giving me to him,” he said softly.
Her eyes fluttered at his words. He wasn’t sure, it could be the lighting, but it looked as if she was trying to smile at him.
“Hey,” the nurse said, “whatever you’re doing, keep it up. Her blood pressure was too low, but it’s getting into the safe range now. She’s your mother, right?”
“Yes, she is,” James replied with pride. “She certainly is.”
“Well, I get the impression that failure isn’t an option for her. I can only allow you in here for a few more minutes. Hospital policy and all, you know.”
“Okay, thank you.”
James spent the next few allotted minutes telling his semi-comatose mother a few stories from his youth, the little anecdotes that might not have been shared by his father. “And then the wheels fell off and I skidded nose first into the rose bushes. I didn’t think I’d ever get all those prickers out,” he said, then laughed softly, telling her about his little escapade as a four-year-old Grand Prix racer in a little red wagon.
“It’s time to leave,” the nurse whispered.
He got up to leave. Nurses: so tough when needed, but also equipped with a gentleness soft enough to brush the wings of a butterfly without allowing a touch of color to be removed. Hopefully, his own iron butterfly was awake now and ready to go home. He had only known Leah for a week, but couldn’t imagine life without her now.
James followed the signs to the emergency room waiting area and found Billy pacing the floor, smartphone to his ear, listening, then softly barking orders to the person on the other end of the line. “No, he does not need a doctor or a dentist! Just give him an ice bag and to hell with saving the tooth.” He looked up and saw James and cut the call short. “That’s all I’m going to say about it. No, no, on second thought, tell him I said, ‘tough shit,’ that he shouldn’t have attacked a woman in the first place.”
Billy turned off the phone and put it in his shirt pocket. “No word yet, but hey, they now have the hospital records of one Vivian Rita Stephens. And guess what? She had a baby boy right here in this very hospital just over 28 years ago. Imagine that. A little
boy she named Ignatius James Melbourne.”
“You mean James Ignatius Melbourne,” James corrected.
“Nope, you’re an Iggy, dude.” Billy laughed, trying to contain his hilarity, but not succeeding. Each little snort that escaped just made James redder and angrier. Finally, Billy got himself under control. “Nah, not really; you’re just another James,” he said, and thumped him on the back in an affectionate manner. “I couldn’t resist.”
“Wait a minute,” James said, stopping Billy’s chortling with his seriousness. “That means I have a birth certificate, a North Carolina birth certificate, and I can marry Leah. Hey, if she’s up to it, we can do it tonight! Thank you, Lord, and hallelujah!”
“Since when did you get religion?” Billy asked, shocked but happy at seeing his friend’s unbridled joy.
“How would you know whether I already had it or just found it?” James asked brightly. Something deep inside him told him that everything was going to be all right, even though the doctor hadn’t come out yet to speak with either of them about Leah.
“I’m a detective, remember?” Billy said, toying with him. “No, really, you just look too happy—like you just found out there really was a Santa Claus. Well, that’s putting the real Big Man in the wrong class, but that glow a person gets when he first finds out who’s really in charge, is unmistakable. And yes, I have that wonderful feeling that Leah—and Leah and you—will be fine. And don’t forget who’s going to be your best man. Hey, here comes someone now.”
This time, it was a tall, good-looking man in crisp-pressed blue scrubs who came out to greet them. He looked like a college athlete who had used his scholarship well, was James’s first impression. He glanced at Billy to make sure he saw the medic coming over to talk to them.
He saw him all right. The look on Billy’s face wasn’t what he expected, though. Instead of eagerness to hear the good news about their woman, there was thinly veiled disgust at the approaching doctor.
“Are you two here for Audie Madigan?” he asked, looking first at Billy with a single raised eyebrow, then at James with genuine curiosity.
Aye, I am a Fairy Page 33
