Ishue took in a deep breath and nodded. “How scary! Like Helen Keller.”
“Yeah. I didn’t know it was temporary. I was kinda scared but they had me so drugged I don’t really think I cared all that much.”
“Then what?” Ishue was hanging on the edge of her chair, literally.
“The next morning - Monday morning was it? - I wake up, I can hear again. Doctor Morris assures me the blindness is temporary too.” Claire considered the roundish face smiling softly down at her; the straight-cut bangs, the too-red lipstick; the brown, almond eyes so dark she couldn’t tell where the irises stopped or started. The suit jacket was neat, but a little small at the hips, a tiny bit too long in the sleeves.
“You’re very young,” Claire said. Asian, or maybe Eskimo.
Ishue smiled broadly. “Thank you, not really. I’m 35.”
“If I say off the record, how can I know you’ll respect it?”
“Because word of a dishonest reporter gets out, pretty soon no one will talk to them. Puts that reporter out of business.”
“If I tell you something and it gets to print, they’ll say I’m crazy.”
“Honest, it won’t.”
Claire let out a deep breath. “Sure I’m upset about mom, but she was very old and very sick. Her quality of life had…I don’t know, run out I guess you could say. I knew she wouldn’t be coming home from the hospital this time. What’s really bothering me now is this dream…daydream…I keep having, ever since I woke up here. It’s always the same… or almost the same. One minute I’m wide awake, here in this bed, watching TV, looking out the window…I can feel it coming, I start to get panicky, flushed, my heart starts racing…I try and shake it off…but it always gets me. It’s so weird. I can’t tell for sure whether I’m dreaming or not because I’m still here, right here in this bed. There’s no clear transition, if you know what I mean. So then this doctor - or orderly - comes in and he’s talking to me but his lips aren’t moving. His head is bobbing and he’s gesturing to me, but his lips aren’t moving.”
“That’s when you know for sure you’re dreaming, right?”
“Yeah, but I can’t do anything about it. I’ve tried biting my lip, and it hurts, but the dream doesn’t stop.”
Ishue noticed the wound on her lower-right lip. “That’s spooky. Can you hear what the man is saying?”
“I hear but I can’t understand him. It’s so weird; the words are words, English words, clear, loud enough, I’m sure, but I just can’t figure them out. Do…do you understand?”
Ishue screwed up her face as if to say she almost understood.
Claire pursed her lips. “Yeah. So this man’s walking towards me, but he isn’t getting any closer, and he’s trying hard to make me understand something…but I’m just not getting it.”
As Ishue listened attentively, nodding and ‘uh-huhing,’ she found irony in Claire’s demand not to use this in a story. ‘Woman experiences nightmares after mother dies in mysterious hospital fire.’ A non-starter.
“Then, poof, he’s gone. I’m back here, wide awake.” She sighed loudly.
“Hey, it’s okay. You’ve been through a terrible ordeal, Claire. And they’ve got you on some pretty heavy drugs…”
“It’s not the drugs,” Claire moaned. “It’s something more. Why won’t anyone believe me?” Claire crossed her arms and settled into her pillows, exhausted, frustrated.
“I do believe you, Claire. But it is a dream…” Ishue was intrigued, not because she could use any of this in a story…rather because of a vague sense of continuity between her account and others she’d interviewed. “What did this orderly guy look like?”
“An older man, bald, short and kinda fat, glasses, white labcoat, and on his left pocket I see letters…three letters: ‘UCD.”’
That was a coincidence. Short, fat, bald guy in a labcoat with lettering. Neither Mayton County nor Manzanita Hospital coats had any lettering.
Just then an elderly woman in baggy red sweats entered the white curtain. She reeked of cigarettes. “Claire Honey,” she rasped.
Claire perked up. “Bernie! I’m so glad you came! How are my babies?”
Bernie threw herself onto the bed for a hug. “I just came from your house, hon. Dorothy and Toto are completely fine but they told me to tell you to come home right now this minute! Here’s mail call.” Bernie tossed a plastic supermarket bag next to Claire. “Who are you?” she asked abruptly at Ishue in a gravelly voice.
“Forgive my manners,” Claire said. “I’m a little out of it, you know, they’re keeping me pretty stoned here. This is Ilene Ishue from the Enterprise.”
Bernie moved to the foot of the bed, checking Claire’s chart. “Valium, huh? Got any extra?”
“Get out of here,” Claire scolded playfully.
“My doctor won’t give me Valium; says I have an addictive personality…the prick,” Bernie announced. Then sideways to Ishue: “You doin’ an article on my buddy here?”
“Uh, no,” Ishue said. “Claire says no.”
“Claire, honey. Don’t you want to be in the goddamned newspapers?”
Ishue was up and headed out. “I’ll call you.” As she stepped through the curtain, her reporter’s instinct told her to pause for a moment, which she did beside the bed of the adjoining patient, an elderly man who appeared to be sleeping, but was not.
“Are you a doctor?” the man asked feebly.
“Yes,” Ishue said, disguising her voice and flipping her clipboard open.
“I didn’t want to say anything with that reporter in here,” Bernie’s voice whispered from beyond the closed curtain. “But your house – the place gives me the creepy jeepies.”
“How do you mean?”
“God, I don’t know,” Bernie said thoughtfully. “I’ve been in that house a thousand times before, but now...I break into a cold sweat when I go in to feed Dorothy and Toto. The animals sense it too. They’re real skittish, hiding under furniture, zipping around, meowing all crazy-like.”
Claire looked around suspiciously, as if about to tell a deep secret. “It’s mom,” she whispered.
“What about her, honey?”
“There’s this man. I think he knows what happened to her.”
Bernie stared incredulously “What man?”
“A doctor. The UCD man.”
“Hon, you’re not making any sense.”
Claire settled back. “I know I’m not. I can’t explain it. I just know mom’s not dead, not in the sense we think of as dead. She’s confused…and afraid…and she doesn’t know how to reach me...”
“Claire honey, look, you’ve had one hell of a week…”
“I know how it sounds,” she sobbed. “And I’m scared.” When Bernie didn’t respond, Claire pleaded: “What about my house? You felt it! Explain to me about my house.”
“Maybe the air conditioning’s broken, or maybe there’s a gas leak.” Bernie had already been working on explanations.
“You believe that?”
Bernie shook her head. “I don’t know. But I’ll give you this: there’s definitely something wrong in that house.”
Ishue listened to the Claire interview tape twice on the drive home. She didn’t see any opportunity to wring a story out of it, but a couple of things gnawed at her.
First, of course, was the lack of a corpse - no trace of Constance McCormack’s body. This mystery made it impossible for the coroner – in spite of radiology department records - to positively confirm she had actually been there. “Death Certificate Still Pending in Hospital Fire Investigation,” Ishue said out loud.
Second was Bernie’s aversion to entering the McCormack’s house. “Hospital Fire Victim’s House Haunted.” It was on the way. Why not swing by and take a look.
The house was in a tract of modest homes built in the early 1970s. Thoroughly Southern California: stucco exteriors with touches of wood trim, aluminum sliding windows, double entry doors. Bicycles, skateboards, evidence of young families
littering the generally well kept front yards. Boats and RVs in abundance.
The house where Claire and her mother had lived for the last seventeen years stood in the middle of a block in the middle of this neighborhood. It was a good-sized two-story in need of a paint-job, the front yard a little more overgrown than the houses around it. An untrimmed willow dominated the street-side view.
Ishue wheeled her aging Toyota Corolla onto the pitted asphalt driveway and climbed out, clipboard in hand. She headed immediately for a side gate, and finding it unlocked, pushed her way past a dense row of oleander into the back yard. Instinctively she reached for the patio door and jerked it open. Two cats bolted out across the lawn, disappearing in a thick hedge along the rear yard wall.
Ishue jumped back with a start. “Oh no! Toto! Dorothy! Come back here you stupid...” Her words trailed off as she noticed the heavy drape bowing outward from the open door, moving gently in a breeze coming from within. She pushed the drape aside and ducked through.
It was noticeably cooler inside the house than outside; Ishue surmised the air conditioning must have been left on by accident. “Brrr. I see why you stupid cats didn’t want to be in here,” she said out loud, feeling stranger than normal for talking to herself, as if someone might be listening from the shadows.
Her eyes scanned the walls for a light switch or thermostat, and locating the former, clicked it on. Now she could see that the wall to her left was covered in gold-veined mirror tiles - and her reflection gave her another start. “Christ,” she blurted out, immediately feeling self-conscious again. Finding the thermostat, she attempted to slide the control back and forth. “Broken. Ah ha!” Again, the spasm of self-consciousness. She tried to shake it off. Is there someone else in here?
The interior was as ordinary as the exterior. Off-white walls, 20-year old furniture, Tasteless wallpaper, two-tone, brown and beige, hi-lo carpet, slightly worn, slightly cluttered with ordinary things. There was no death certificate on the old woman yet. If she wasn’t in that MRI then where the hell was she?
“Constance McCormack?” Ishue called upstairs in her best ‘law enforcement official’ voice. She ascended the squeaky steps cautiously. “We know you’re here, Mrs. McCormack. Let’s save myself and Manzanita PD a whole lot of trouble.”
At the top of the stairs Ishue blew into her cupped hands. She could see her chilled breath. All the bedroom doors were closed, the hall dark, eerie, dank-smelling. Her stomach tightened, not just from nerves, rather more like she’d eaten something bad. But she hadn’t eaten at all since breakfast. Yeah, that was it. Hunger. “Constance McCormack? You come out NOW!”
Ishue surprised herself with these words. Her stomach was knotting up and in spite of the cold, she felt flushed. Was she feeling this way because she was trespassing? “But I’m a reporter. I do this kind of shit all the time.”
It must be some sort of elaborate hoax - perhaps an insurance scam. The McCormack woman was never even at the hospital. That must be it! Constance McCormack was hiding in this house, behind one of these doors, mapping out her wrongful death lawsuit. Ishue felt for a doorknob with her right hand.
The doorknob didn’t turn. Was it locked? She withdrew her hand. No place for a key. It couldn’t be locked – except from inside! “Open up,” she demanded, tightening her grip and turning until the brass squealed against her palm. Could someone be holding the knob on the other side? How long had she been trying to open the door?
The air in the hallway seemed to be growing progressively heavier, more humid, harder to breathe. And colder. Her right biceps ached from her effort against the doorknob. “What is wrong with this goddamned knob,” she shouted, but the sound trailed off - as if far away, down the hall, which appeared much longer than only a moment before. Her right arm, too, felt far away, and the ache in it was somewhere else now, across the room, no longer a part of her own body. A sudden fear swept her. Above, the hall ceiling was disappearing, fading into a black night sky filled with stars.
Ishue wheeled and bolted for the front door. “Just get me out of here,” she begged in a kind a running prayer, her legs churning down the stairs. A moment later she was standing in the driveway, panting under the light of a streetlamp.
Streetlamp? She pulled her wristwatch up into the light. It was ten to six. “Oh, this can’t be right.” Hadn’t she arrived here at around… 5:00? It seemed to her she’d only left her car ten minutes ago. Fifteen tops. Her mind churned through the numbers. “I must have fainted or something,” she said out loud. “Yeah, that must be it.” Still shaking, Ishue climbed into her Corolla and headed back to the office.
Except for managing editor Hawthorne, the Enterprise office was deserted when she got back. Ed Hawthorne was pulling a late shift doing page layouts, his narrow face buried in his computer screen.
“I guess you don’t have anything for me,” He said without looking up.
There was a story she could file, but it would take the better part of an hour to finish it, and she was hardly in the mood. “It depends on how desperate you are.”
“I’m so desperate,” he began, still not looking away from his screen, “I may even go home to the wife tonight.” He laughed heartily, as he always did at his own jokes.
“I’ve got to talk to someone,” Ishue said. “I’m really buggin’.”
“Really buggin’? I’m sure glad you don’t use that kind of language in your stories.”
“Ed. I mean it.”
Now he turned from the screen. “What’s up, kid?”
Ishue attempted to explain the events of the day as best she could, and for his part, Hawthorne listened as attentively as his hyperactive personality allowed, every few seconds returning compulsively to his keyboard for another keystroke or two. Still, he heard every word.
He looked up at her “You want a couple days off?” he asked sincerely.
“No! I need to stay on this.” She looked hurt at the implication.
Hawthorne stretched his thin shoulders, working the kinks in his neck. “This is a real newspaper, kid, not a tabloid. We won’t be running any goddamn ghost stories in the Enterprise.” He paused and directed his full attention to his reporter. “Having said that, I must admit I am intrigued. So. I am going to keep you on it. And you’ve got new stuff for tomorrow. The coroner finally wrote a death certificate on Constance McCormack…couple hours ago. Seems they found something in the debris convincing enough to make it official.”
Ishue waited for the punchline. “C’mon, Ed. What?”
Ed Hawthorne paused for dramatic effect. “No hint of any DNA in the room, nothing to match to the McCormack woman. But they did find a plastic hip socket. Surgically implanted thing. Pretty much undamaged too. Turns out it was hers, installed in 2003. They got a match on the serial numbers.”
Day 18
Wednesday
Federal Building,
San Francisco, California
Water droplets accumulated on the west-side windows, forming into crooked little trails which worked their way down the 19-story glass tower slowly and unevenly, stopping and starting, sometimes joining together, sometimes dividing. The complexity of this meteorological phenomenon distracted Warren Vardell from finishing a report on deep Uranium deposits in and around Beatty, Nevada. The foul weather meant Louise would probably not be taking Tyler this weekend after all. Good!
He pushed the half-full cup of coffee forward across his desk without taking his eyes off his 11th floor window. Fog too thick to even see the ground from here. He moaned dolefully at his overindulgence in the caustic, chocolate-colored beverage.
This a.m. Warren would be dividing his consciousness more or less equally between four tasks: writing the Beatty report; watching the rain run down the aluminum-sashed window; calculating the liquid volume of coffee he’d consumed since Monday; and keeping an eye on a second computer engaged in automated word searches. I hope she doesn’t try and take Tyler anyway. Two gallons? Was that possible? God, I hate bouncing
the poor kid back and forth like that. Mandatory Radon tests conducted per local disclosure law during routine property title transfers reveal a disturbing pattern of elevated non-random sample levels in sectors four through nine inclusive… Reveals or reveal? God that’s a bad sentence. What ever happened to maternal instincts? Radioactive?
Something had caught his eye on the other screen. The computer was cycling through a Justice Department information network called the “Trigger,” a compilation of active and unsolved investigations by local law enforcement, fire, environmental health and miscellaneous other public agencies across the country. Perusing the Trigger, other government agency databases, and news media websites was part of Warren’s weekly duties as a GS-15 Analyst II for the Environmental Protection Agency, SFO-western region.
The computer had been scanning the Trigger for key words like “spill,” “accident,” “hazardous,” “toxic,” and 315 others, and was now frozen on the word “radioactive,” highlighted in electric lime. Warren scrolled backwards and traced the file to the Mayton County Fire Department down in Southern California.
I remember that from the news. The story had gone national for one day because of a seriously injured technician and a missing patient. Very mysterious.
Finding no other files about the Manzanita thing in any of the current EPA investigation logs, Warren felt a twinge of excitement. Could it be virgin territory? If he were the first to open the Special Investigation File, the field work would almost surely go to him. That was the rule here. Finders keepers. Opening an SIF meant getting out of town, a rental car, expense account. He saved the Beatty Uranium Deposits file so he could use both computers at once, then clicked on a newspaper distribution index to learn which papers operated in the Manzanita area.
Warren had tucked one of his business cards in the corner of his main monitor, in between the glass and plastic bezel. It was blocking some copy from the Los Angeles Daily News website, so he gingerly removed the card, fingering the sharp edges. In spite of what it said - Analyst II/Field Investigator - Warren spent most of his time here, in this small office. An office has four walls and a door. This is a cubicle. “Field.” He said the word softly, savoring the irony.
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