I sighed in the dark room, rolled off the bed, clicked on the light, and scouted the bookshelves for reading materials. No way. Not unless I wanted to read my nephew’s high school algebra book or any number of his books on football.
I decided to just sit up and worry. After all, I’d been tossing and turning and worrying, so I might as well just go with the flow. Worry is like that, sometimes you just have to sit with it awhile.
So, what I was mostly worried about right then was that Judge Parker had reserved ruling on Dan’s motion to be appointed Willette’s guardian, and he’d also escaped my plan to snare him into signing the order at Demetrious’s barn. Tomorrow, if he didn’t sign that order, I’d have to figure out another social setting to just happen to pounce on him—with that spare copy of the order handy, of course.
And so, here we were, I thought, letting the worry out of the worry box to study on it, still without any one of us having a clear-cut legal right to act on Willette’s part, the weirdly territorial Dr. Weinstein still in charge and still overmedicating Willette and still absent from my sight, and the question of what to do with Willette legally still hovering, waiting for Demetrious to interview her when she stopped being comatose and psychotic. Had I missed anything? Oh yeah, global warming. When the ice caps all melted and the sea levels rose, Sarasota would be under water and my house would be worth exactly squat times squat.
Okay, sitting in my nephew’s bedroom with my worry was suffocating. The outside world seemed to be calling me.
Bobby, being a teenager and all, could sleep through Armageddon, and Patti and Dan were at the hospital sitting up all night with Willette, so I could bang around if I wanted to. Thinking about fresh air and moonlight and stars, I slipped out to the front porch, and sat down on the glider. The cool early-dawn air settled on me, damp and clean, and I inhaled and exhaled, doing my alternate-nostril yoga breathing, and thinking I was getting behind on my exercise and ought to take a long run.
Which is where I was when a blond teenage girl came tiptoeing out the front door and about choked when she saw me.
“Oh, my gosh,” she said, by way of hello.
“I’m Lilly, Bobby’s aunt,” I said, sizing her up immediately as the girlfriend I’d heard mention of and not, say, a hardened criminal intent upon killing us all.
“Becky,” she said, and quickly composed herself, offering me her dainty hand. “I’m so pleased to meet you. Bobby just loves you.”
I shook her hand, and looked into her face. Just too cute to be real, I thought, plus quick and light on her feet.
“I’m, er, visiting, I mean, Bobby and I were studying, and I, see, I just fell asleep.”
“I’m not a hall monitor, or a parent,” I said, and smiled. Hell, when I was her age, I was living with a guy and growing marijuana for a living. I try real hard in my life not to pitch that first stone.
Becky smiled back at me, a little cautiously but not in an unfriendly way.
It didn’t take long for me to get the story, though we had to work through a few more creative plot lines first. Becky had told her mom she was spending the night with a girlfriend—I mean, really, don’t mothers remember these tricks from their own youth? Now Becky had to hotfoot it to her friend’s house in time for the girlfriend’s mother to feed her breakfast and report to Becky’s own mother that her darling daughter was indeed where she was supposed to be.
I promised to keep Becky’s secret, and resolved to have my own version of the Safe-Sex Chat with Bobby. But I wasn’t going to report Becky and Bobby to either’s parents. I wasn’t a tattletale.
And I was all for young love.
chapter 19
Life has this nasty way of following moments of pure sweetness with moments of utter hell. I’ve decided that aside from the natural yin-and-yang thing, this is all about the cosmic forces wanting us to—no, demanding that we—take nothing for granted. And, too, that we must stay vigilant and be ready.
So, yeah, I should have been more ready. Here I was, all smiley with the thoughts of Bobby and Becky, teenagers in love, and just how incredibly cute they were. I stood and stretched in the early-morning mist, and decided that rather than jog through the town in the predawn gloom, I’d give that borrowed bed one more chance.
Truly, the bed felt warm and toasty when I crawled back into it. A little drowsy weight started pulling the lids down at the corners of my eyes.
Another minute, I might have nodded off, except I looked at the end of the bed and I saw a ghost standing on the wood floor and staring straight at me.
And not just any ghost. But the ghost of my grandmother.
I closed my eyes. Sometimes stress makes me see things.
After I counted to ten, I opened my eyes.
My grandmother still stood before me. As plain as the pattern of deer on the flannel sheets.
I sat up in the bed, staring at her, my heart banging against my rib cage so hard it seemed to be ricocheting in my head. On a cool fall morning, sweat trickled into my eyes and burned so I had to blink.
My grandmother wouldn’t have journeyed over that line we all draw but rarely cross unless something scary was afoot in the small town of Bugfest.
It’s one thing that my long-dead grandmother talks to me. But to appear before me, dressed in a flowery housedress, so real I could almost smell the Avon talcum on her, meant something really big was up.
Really big.
“What?” I said.
No sense messing around with niceties when something like that happens.
“Go over to the hospital. Right now. Go. Your momma needs you.”
Poof. Grandmom was gone.
I hopped up, tangled up in the sheets, and fell flat on my butt on the floor. From the floor, I scrambled up and dressed in the first clothes my hands touched. I ran out the door, my heart beating like I had drunk two gallons of coffee.
Or like I’d seen a ghost.
I broke a few speed limits on the short trip to the hospital, literally ran past the nurses’ station, and dashed past a tiny, ancient man in uniform snoring in a chair outside Willette’s room, no doubt the Otis Lee of the Bugfest Police Department’s night shift.
I didn’t pause to wake him, but shoved open the door to Willette’s room.
No one was in the room except Willette. Who, I noted with some relief, seemed to be fine. From the doorway, I watched her chest rise and fall.
I exhaled.
Then I noticed something—a trail of movement around her, on the bed, on her. Dashing into the room, I got to her bedside, and looked closer at Willette, and screamed. I pushed the call button, and then frantically I began to brush her bedding, her face, her body. She and the bed were covered in ants. Fire ants. Red ants. One of the great curses of life in Deep Dixie.
“Help,” I screamed, more articulate this time.
Then, for good measure, I belted out a long screech no one could ignore, and I stopped my frantic brushing to pick up the phone and hit 911. I shouted “Tell Demetrious to get to Willette’s room now!” and dropped the phone. In a town this small, the 911 operator would know exactly what I meant.
Otis Lee was in the room with me now, and he said a quick, “Lord, have mercy,” and set to work brushing bugs off Willette with his fast, thin arms. Then I poured the bedside pitcher of water over her face and, using the edge of a now-wet sheet, tried to wash the ants off her face and arms. I felt something sticky on her, but was too busy knocking fire ants into kingdom come to stop and analyze it.
In a minute or two, or maybe an hour, there were nurses and other people in the room, and after that, things moved fast. They had Willette physically out of the bed, and stripped down naked, and I have to say Otis Lee showed good manners and stepped out of the room while Willette was undressed. Using washcloths and hands, the nurses washed Willette clean of the fire ants, and a doctor was there, and filled her full of antihistamines.
In nothing flat, it seemed like a whole covey of nurses had prodded, tested, c
hecked her blood pressure, and all such things.
“She doesn’t have that many bites,” a woman who appeared to be the alpha nurse said.
“One bite is too many,” I snapped. “She’s frail, and she’s—”
“Let’s move her to the ICU, then, for a precaution,” the doctor said, eyeing me sideways, no doubt for my reaction.
While the nurses were bundling Willette up for her transfer to intensive care, Simon rushed in with the second round of the official help wagon, swinging those long arms, and he slipped up beside me, and took my hand, squeezed it tightly with his big hands. “Your mother will be fine, just fine. Just, really, fine.”
Oh, not the right tactic.
“What the hell kind of hospital do you run here?” I shouted at him, and snatched my hand back. Also, I wondered who had called him this early.
“Now, Lilly, don’t be rude,” he said. “I know you are upset but—”
“Rude, my ass, you people have about killed my mother, not once but twice. I’m a lawyer and I’m going to sue the whole lot of you, and I’m transferring her out to a decent hospital, and I will file every complaint known to mankind until I close this rat hole, and I will sue you personally for gross negligence.”
And then I stopped. Not because I was acting like a plaintiff. Not because I was running out of steam. But because in the middle of my outrage, I remembered something.
Negligence does, in fact, tend to repeat itself within the same confines; this, being a malpractice defense attorney, I knew for a fact. So, on the one hand, it made perfect sense that a hospital that would allow a patient to practically OD right there in its ER would also allow the same patient to be consumed by an army of small, dangerous insects.
And, yes, bad things happen in threes, so there was yet another shoe to drop.
So, yeah, this could have been just another stupid screwup.
But it wasn’t. I knew this as surely as my grandmomma had sent me to save Willette from a terrible death.
Because what I remembered was this: The widespread publicity about the death of a woman in a Florida (naturally) nursing home, from fire-ant bites. The ants had crawled in from a window, and the woman had been too weak to brush them off, and no one heard her cries for help, and she died from hundreds of bites. I hadn’t been able to sleep for nights after I’d read that story.
Of course, there was a big lawsuit. Of course, her family won. Of course, there was national publicity.
Given that publicity, a lot of people would know about the case of the old woman killed by fire ants. Anyone who read the newspaper articles, or saw a blurb on TV, would know how easy it was to kill someone as frail as Willette with something that seemed natural, like hundreds of tiny, toxic bugs. I added this up with the bruises around Willette’s jaw, and the near-fatal OD, and I shook loose of Simon’s grip again—can you believe that man dared to grab my hand a second time? I looked Demetrious in the eyes as he dashed toward me. “Thank you for coming in so quickly,” I said, my voice low and controlled. “Someone is trying to kill my mother.”
A chorus of voices poked at me, Simon’s dominating. “It’s the cake crumbs. They’re all over the place. The ants—”
“The ants are deliberate,” I said. “Someone got the idea from the nursing home case, where the red ants killed an old woman.”
Everyone started talking at once. Except for me. I didn’t need to talk now.
Finally, I was calm. I knew exactly what to do: find out who was trying to kill my mother, and why, and see to it he or she roasted slowly and forever in hell.
chapter 20
Yeah, yeah, yeah, but I didn’t care that nobody could figure out the mechanics of my theory. I mean, as everyone from Simon to the nurses was pointing out to me, murder by fire ants would be a tad tricky. How did the killer-wannabe get hundreds of fire ants into a hospital bed?
“Easy enough,” I had snapped. “You go into any yard, any field, any peach orchard, and you dig them up.”
“Then where is the dirt? If somebody dug up the ants, then the red dirt of the ant beds would still be with them, and look for yourself, Lilly, there’s no dirt,” Demetrious said, his voice steady and sensible, and, therefore, irritating.
“The bedding, did anybody check the bedding for dirt?” I asked, an octave or two above normal, polite levels.
“Honey, we were so busy getting that woman out of the bed, and getting the beddings changed, didn’t none of us look for dirt,” said alpha nurse, her voice equally steady and sensible and irritating.
“It’s the damn cake crumbs,” Simon said, for about the four hundredth time. “The ants came from around the window—you know they can get in cracks we can’t even see—and were attracted by the crumbs. You know what happens if you leave crumbs, especially sweet crumbs. Especially, very, very sweet crumbs.”
“Then where is the trail? Do any of you see a trail of ants from the window to the bed?”
“Honey, we were all so busy saving your mamma, didn’t none of us look for no trail of ants,” alpha nurse said.
“And why in hell is she so doped up she can’t even brush off fire ants, or scream? Look at her. She’s like a dead woman.”
Everybody turned and looked at Willette. In truth, she did look pitiful and nearly dead. Shallow breathing, and red welts and bites covered in white cream.
“She was sedated,” the doctor said. “We’ve been over this and—”
“Then stop sedating her,” I said to the doctor. “And who exactly are you?”
“Dr. Weinstein.” He offered a hand and I took it out of reflex, but used the moment to actually focus on him. Short, stocky, trying to hide the balding process by spiking and dying the tufts of hair he had left, but still the man projected a lot of personal energy about him. With a good voice. And a strong handshake.
Okay, Lilly, I told myself, stop evaluating the man like he is your next potential client. Having thus chastised myself, I glared at the doctor as if all of this were his fault, then concluded that some of it—the overmedication, for example—was his fault.
“We gave her a good deal of antihistamines to counteract the poison from the bites. That will make her sleepy too,” Dr. Weinstein said. “And we can’t just stop her other medicines cold-turkey, we need to taper off and—”
“Then taper off. She shouldn’t be so doped up she can’t even tell she’s being eaten alive by fire ants.”
“Her dosage is a matter of careful medical deliberation,” Dr. Weinstein said.
But what I heard in his patronizingly snide tone was: “What medical school did you go to?”
“I do not need a medical degree to know this woman is oversedated. She needs to come out of this and eat and talk and—”
“Yes, you’ve made your viewpoint well known,” Dr. Weinstein said. “But first, let’s get her to ICU and make sure she is stable. Then we will look at reducing her sedation.”
Yes, yes, yes, everybody was so very accommodating.
I was being handled, placated, reasoned with, and humored.
But nobody had changed my mind.
I didn’t know how the soulless person who had done this had gotten hundreds of ants to crawl in bed with Willette, but I knew as sure as I could spell res ipsa loquitur that someone had tried to murder my mother.
“There was something sticky on her,” I said. “What if the killer put honey on her hands, arms, and face, and stuck her hand in a bucket filled with red ants? Wouldn’t the ants naturally crawl out all over her to follow the honey?”
“Oh my Gawd, honey, I can sure promise you that some of us would’ve noticed if someone carrying a bucket of ants and a jar of honey passed us at the nurses’ station,” the alpha-nurse spokeswoman said.
“Well, that’s how the Apaches did it in all those B-movie Westerns from the fifties, that is, stake out their victim and pour honey over him,” Simon said, thoughtfully, and maybe, perhaps, beginning to lean a little in my favor.
“I always did wond
er this, now where did the Apaches get honey in an Arizona desert?” Demetrious asked, and we all turned to look at him a minute.
I noticed that Otis Lee, who had come back unbidden into Willette’s hospital room, didn’t say anything. No doubt he knew he’d screwed up by falling asleep and was hoping if he kept quiet maybe nobody would fuss at him for that small dereliction of duty. A little bit of malfeasance that might have allowed a person armed with fire ants to glide quietly into Willette’s room.
“Honey,” I said, turning back to Alpha Nurse and hoping my sarcasm registered in my tone, “it was a long night. Don’t tell me y’all didn’t take a nap, or visit the john, or all gather around the coffeepot in that little room you hide the food in. Somebody watching with patience could have gotten by you when the desk was deserted.” And here, I turned and stared at Otis Lee, who hung his head but maintained his silence.
“That desk is never completely empty,” Simon said, and eyed the nurses. “And the nurses do not sleep on duty.”
“Right,” Alpha Nurse said.
“Right,” another nurse said.
“Right,” the nurse’s aide said.
“My ass,” I said.
The three women sucked in their breath at my words. I ignored them.
“Demetrious,” I said, my own voice now a model of steady and sensible, “if you would be so kind as to see to it that my mother continues to have round-the-clock police protection, perhaps with shorter shifts so they can stay awake, until I can get her transferred out, I’d be ever so grateful.”
He nodded.
“I’ll see to getting her transferred as soon as possible, to Sarasota, so that there will not be an undue burden on any of you,” I said. “Dr. Weinstein, when will it be medically safe to move her?”
“It depends—” was as far as the doc got before the chief of police asserted his authority.
“There’s a matter of…jurisdiction,” Demetrious said. “She’s still in police custody.”
“Well, then do whatever you have to do to transfer her to my custody,” I snapped.
Sweetheart Deal Page 12
