She tilted her face up to the winter sunlight, as if recalling that interrogation. I had always thought her ageless, but there were lines etched around her mouth, and the seemingly tireless Sara Holmes had shadows under her eyes.
“Adler returned to DC during that delay,” she went on in a soft voice. “Apparently, she had installed a secret passage that allowed her to visit her office the following night, when she extracted a great deal of cash. She used the money to charter a private plane for parts unknown. A woman with a talent for foresight and planning out multiple outcomes. I could almost admire her.”
I didn’t give a rat’s ass about Adler’s talents and said so.
At that Sara laughed. “I agree. However. Back to the story. My chief believes Adler fled to Costa Rica. That is plausible. What I find less plausible is the apathy about having her extradited to face charges. Purely politics, my chief assures me, but I find it troubling.”
“Do you think it’s a conspiracy? That seems a bit . . .” I choked back the rest of my reply. Stupid? No, that would only provoke her. Ditto obsessed and tunnel-visioned. I went with the next-best word. “Um, far-fetched?”
Sara’s mouth tilted in a smile as if she had guessed the track of my thoughts. “Perhaps I am a bit obsessed. Aren’t you?”
Ouch. Point taken.
Luckily, I didn’t need to answer. We had reached the diner with the best damned omelets in DC. Frederica’s Finest was the name, displayed in blue neon script. Christmas lights bordered the windows and door, and the outside of the diner was covered in corrugated tin, polished to a bright silver.
“I have a few questions,” I told Sara. “About what you told me.”
She shrugged. “I have any number of questions myself. But the time for telling stories is over, my love. Let us eat, drink, and be merry.”
She gestured toward the door and we went inside.
***
We spent the next three hours in Frederica’s, eating omelets and drinking coffee and pretending to have an ordinary conversation. Sara did ask me about my progress with Lazarus, and about the hospital in general. She listened and nodded in all the right places, but I had the impression she was listening to the newsfeeds from in her earbuds and was recording my words for later—TiVo for the high-tech world.
But I had not forgotten her comment about watchers, so I went along with her game. I described an amusing incident with Sydney’s cat. I talked about hospital politics and how I needed to find a suitable subject for an abstract. Her attention perked up only briefly when I mentioned Hernandez and the M & M stats.
At four P.M., I’d had enough. “Thank you for breakfast. I should be going.”
Sara’s smile was brief and distracted. “Will you be home for dinner?”
“Maybe. I don’t know.”
She nodded, still distracted. I hesitated a moment, then left.
Outside, the sun was sinking toward the horizon and the light had dimmed to almost twilight. I didn’t want to go home, not yet. I had an urge to walk past Adanna’s bookstore, but I knew that was a terrible idea.
So, so, so. What about that abstract?
The air had taken on a raw damp edge. I flagged down a cab and was soon walking through the wide front doors of Georgetown University Hospital. Weekends were nothing but busy, and on this late Saturday afternoon, the front reception area was crowded. I threaded my way past to the employee-only region, where I swiped my badge.
The third floor was quiet. Any surgeons who had offices here would be with their patients, or in the theater or waiting on call in the cafeteria. I pressed my (one good) thumb to the bio-lock and retreated into my office.
My good intentions faded at the sight of my all-too-stark office. No family photo cubes, no books, no decorations. Just my medical certificates.
I should go shopping, buy a few knickknacks. God knows, I have the time.
With a sigh, I adjusted the brightness of my overhead lights, then logged in to my workstation. My personal dashboard showed a dozen new messages, which I ignored. Instead I called up Georgetown’s array of research portals, with connections to internal and public databases.
But those were all about someone else’s ideas, someone else’s research. If I wanted to impress Hernandez, I’d need an idea all my own. Something . . . compelling.
Death is pretty damned compelling, I’d say.
I extracted the data from Hernandez’s workspace and called up the data analysis tool that Georgetown had acquired a couple months ago. A few taps on the keyboard, and the numbers sorted themselves by cause of death. I tapped the option to chart the data. That produced a scatter of data points all over the screen—not helpful. I tried sorting by date of admission. Now I got a chart that made more sense, though it didn’t tell me anything new. We already knew these were deaths that had taken place within the last month.
So tell me something new.
My workstation waited, infinitely patient, for me to continue.
Almost patiently. Within ten minutes the screen saver would begin its graceful dance, and after another fifteen minutes, the workstation would shift over to its sleep mode.
Death. Death by discharge? Death by statistics?
More was at stake than my own medical career. The patients who trusted us for their care. The hospital itself, which depended on government funding for research and other expenses, such as this very data analysis tool. It was all about money and politics, as Navarette had said.
My attention wandered from death, to politics, then back to Sara Holmes. Her odd behavior—odd even for Sara—bothered me. Oh, sure, her explanation for barging into the restaurant last night made sense, but why say anything about Adler and her not-a-death? And when she did, why give me only part of the truth? Because it was obvious to me that she’d picked out which interesting bits to reveal. If we were friends, she’d tell me all the truth.
I very much need my friends to be honest with me.
Oh. Right. Thanks, memory, for the sucker punch.
My screen had shifted into sleep mode. I touched the virtual keyboard, and the screen came to life. Statistics, I told myself. There had to be a topic somewhere in all those numbers.
March 20.
Dear Jesus, black or white. Has it really been three weeks since my last journal entry? *checks dates* So it has. Damn. Next time I complain about not having enough to do, please smack me upside the head.
So what’s been going on these last 2.87 weeks? Let’s go with the ever-popular list style:
Three official one-on-ones with my interns. Both of them full of spit and vinegar these days. Maybe I was wrong about Bekker. He turned in that essay I assigned, then went and started caring about his patients. Damn, I’m glad.
One very long, very unofficial meeting with Anna Chong, where we talked about all the expectations life threw at us. Families. Culture. History, as dictated by the ruling gender. (And class, let’s not forget that.) We both got a bit maudlin over our hospital cafeteria coffee. I talked about my time in the service. She talked about her patients and her girlfriend. I think Dr. Chong will do just fine.
Six new impossibly complicated drills for my device.
Three new epiphanies with Faith Bellaume. Collect $200 and pass go.
Zero abstracts written, though I glimpsed the shadow of an idea. We’ll see.
Another long walk through NW DC with Sara. She didn’t share any more secrets with me—not by spoken word, that is—but I’ve learned how to read Sara’s moods these past seven months. Frustration bubbled and seethed just below that all-too-calm face. One of these days she’ll tell me. Or not. She might regret that rash confession back in February. Me, I almost regret telling her she was obsessed with Nadine Adler. It might be true, but it will only encourage her.
Three more evaluations with Sydney. Two official, one anything but.
Okay, that last needs more than just numbers and nouns. Time for a detailed entry. So. My next OT appointment, the one after I first opened up those bodies, came on
Tuesday. Nothing special, just the usual drills. I showed Sydney that I could braid my hair, play the keyboard, and knit one, purl two. If you can manage the commonplace, she told me, you can manage the rest.
Same as she always said.
But.
Thursday, I walk into that ten-by-twelve workroom, with Ono the cat giving me the stank eye from her corner, and Sydney doing much the same behind her table. Go for it, Sydney tells me.
Go for what? I say.
Whatever you think you should.
Goddamn mysteries, I mutter.
But I settle down. I run through the finger exercises one by one. I demonstrate my control with the pressure-sensitive board. I’ve just taken up the comb to braid my hair when she stops me.
Let’s try another test, she says.
She presses a button on her virtual keyboard. A moment later, an orderly wheels a body into the room.
Unannounced evaluation, Sydney says. You have to be ready all the time, not just when the world gives you a heads-up.
She’s right, dammit.
To my relief, this evaluation is a replay of the first. I was to open the abdomen, extract the organs one by one, then replace them and close up the body. Lazarus and I do well, I think. There are only one or two moments when my ghost hand moves faster than my metal one.
Good thing, because Sydney springs another surprise at our next session. Our patient, the late Jonathon Benjamin Franklin, has died from heart failure. An infarction undetected by the primary care physician and the admitting surgeon, both. My task is to examine the patient’s heart with my micro-surgical implements. Simply a means to confirm what we already knew, she says.
A means to confirm my understanding with my device.
Use whatever micro-programming seems appropriate, Sydney tells me.
I do. From the micro-scanning device, which records everything to the hospital data storage, to the more general imaging that connects to Georgetown’s image matching and analysis subsystem.
That third eval, though . . .
Another surprise, and this one harder than all the rest. No sooner do I sit down behind that worktable than Sydney announces I’m to run through all my drills, even the newest ones I’ve only learned the day before. Sydney times me with a stopwatch, while Ono the cat watches me, slit-eyed, from her corner. I have no idea how well I did. I just know I wanted to collapse into a corner after I was done.
She tells me I’ve won. I want to laugh, but I’m too wiped to care.
What else? Let’s see. Hernandez assigned me to yet another committee. I assigned myself the task of observing a surgery at least once a week. And Carter—yes, Carter—suggested I shadow the night shift on the weekends. A good suggestion, both practical and political.
Speaking of practical and political, Hernandez announced a new policy the other day. From now on, all our higher-risk patients would be monitored after discharge, even those not discharged early. No more expensive home health care visits. Unless a patient objected—and that would lead to a longer hospital stay—we’d install medical implants that would transmit patient data to a wrist unit. Any sudden change for the worse, and the wrist unit would sound an alarm. Other cases might require implants with slow-release medications, such as antibiotics or blood pressure medicine. In both cases, the implant would dissolve within a few weeks.
Ain’t modern medicine grand?
And that’s all for now.
Okay, that’s not all for now. Three more items for my list:
One text written but not sent to Adanna Jones.
Three times I stopped myself from walking past her bookstore. Stalking is not my style. (Does thinking about her count?)
Six more nights without any sleep. Something is happening, I just don’t know what.
8
April 4. Saturday afternoon. Back in the olden days, before my sister and I were born, today would have been a genuine spring afternoon, the air warm as fresh toast, the Mall ripe with cherry blossoms. Even when Grace and I were kids, flying a kite in that pocket field between our house and the Mall, we could tell the difference between winter and almost spring.
Those were the olden days, for good or bad. Nowadays, March and April liked to shake things up weather-wise.
And they used to say climate change was a left-wing fantasy.
I shrugged on my fleece jacket, zipped up the front, and surveyed the skies from the sidewalk of GU Hospital. They were clear at least. The temps had climbed up from the subzero range of last week, and with the recent warm spell, all that damned snow had melted away. I closed my eyes for a moment, felt a breath of warmth against my cheeks. A hint of rain was in the air, soft and clean, with the barest trace of green growing things from the nearby parkway. Oh, yes.
Several cabs zipped past, most with drivers, a few more of the new driverless kind. One of them actually slowed down—a first for me—but I waved it on. God knows, I wanted to ride home today, but I’d checked my bank account, and I wasn’t happy with the answer. I’d gotten into a bad habit these past couple months, flinging cash around. I still had those student loans to pay off, never mind my parents had taught me better.
So I turned away from temptation and set off along Reservoir Road. Forty minutes would see me home, and the fresh air would do me good. Between my regular duties, such as they were, and a full night shadowing the on-call residents, I hadn’t seen the outside of the hospital for almost thirty hours.
At the corner of Reservoir and Thirty-Fourth, I paused to catch my breath. Adanna Jones and her bookstore were a few blocks south. I felt a tug deep inside me, as though I were being called home. But just as I had discarded those emails unsent, I simply shook my head.
It’s not the end of the world, she’d said.
A breeze kicked up, sharp and cold. Time to get home. I could make me a pot of that expensive new tisane Sara had acquired. Blood orange and lemongrass, according to the label. After I drank the whole pot, I would wrap myself in blankets and sleep until Sunday afternoon.
I crossed over Wisconsin and angled through the side streets to Q. Several of my neighbors were out, walking their dogs. One of them even smiled and mentioned the weather. I smiled back, and she didn’t flinch. Progress, of a sort. Or maybe they just needed to get used to me.
The apartment lobby was blessedly warm and quiet. It was always quiet, always private here. Residents kept to themselves. Part of the charm, according to Hudson Realty.
I ran up the stairs and unlocked the door to 2B.
“Sara,” I said. “I’m home. Did you miss me?”
No answer, but I hadn’t really expected one. I stripped off my gloves and hung up my coat, thinking about that tisane. But as I turned the corner around the parlor, I stopped.
That parlor had been a mess Friday morning. Sara had left behind a heap of newsfeed prints all over the table, along with two empty wine bottles and a full ashtray. Sara herself had left a note that said, DO NOT TOUCH, PLEASE.
All the mess had vanished—the printouts, the bottles, even the note itself. The bare table gleamed bright with polish, and the faint scent of wood soap lingered, as though the air itself had been scrubbed clean. The cleaning service, I told myself, but still my nerves hummed with sudden apprehension. It was too clean, too quiet in this apartment.
“Sara?” I called out.
No answer. Again, nothing to be alarmed about. Sara popped in and out like a genie these days. Even so, I had a strong impression that something was wrong. A glance toward the kitchen showed everything neat and ordered. A second glance told me that Sara’s herb garden was missing.
I remembered once, back in Suitland, my parents and Grace and I walked into our tiny house to find the television missing. I was twelve, Grace was eight going on nine. We both stared at the empty, dusty hole our cheap thirteen-inch TV had once occupied. My first thought had been, Why did Mom and Dad move the TV?
And like then, I stared stupidly at the empty counters a moment before I stopped running throug
h reasonable explanations.
Thieves? No, not with the government spies keeping watch. Besides, what kind of thief stole an herb garden and left behind that fancy microwave, the even fancier coffeemaker?
I walked slowly down the hallway to our bedrooms.
All the doors were wide open—linen closets, bathroom, and both bedrooms.
My breath stopped in my throat. It took me a moment before I could speak.
“Hello?”
No answer.
I swallowed hard and walked into Sara’s bedroom. That was when I understood that I wasn’t dealing with a simple robbery.
The piano and bed remained. But all of Sara’s expensive paintings, the ones that hid electronic screens in plain sight, had vanished. The floor gleamed bright in the late-morning sun, with no sign that anyone had occupied this room, and the walls themselves retained no screw holes or patches of brighter paint, to show where the paintings once hung.
Moving very slowly, I checked each closet one by one.
Empty. All of them.
When I came to the last and largest closet, I ran my fingers over the back wall. Once, this had housed a secret passageway. Now? I stared hard at the smooth plaster wall. Perhaps the stairway and underground passageway still existed, but you would never have known it.
I sniffed. No trace of fresh plaster or paint. Another sniff, directed at the room at large. Just a whiff of wood polish and cinnamon. Sara Holmes had simply vanished, as completely as her possessions.
A loud clanging broke the silence. I dropped to the floor, heart pounding. It was Alton, Illinois, all over again. The blare of the siren. The thunder of an airplane swooping low as its guns rattled . . .
I gulped down a breath. Realized the siren was the landline telephone. I was safe in Washington, DC.
The phone kept ringing, a loud insistent jangling guaranteed to rattle my nerves. Still shivering, I stood up and hurried into the parlor. Jenna Hudson had explained the presence of the landline to us when Sara and I signed our lease. She had described it as “as a favor to our more traditional clients.” Until today, it had never rung.
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