Royal Pains
Page 1
Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright Page
Acknowledgements
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Chapter 45
Chapter 46
Chapter 47
Chapter 48
THE BLANKING BRIDE
“Nicole?”
No response.
I touched her arm and again called her name.
She looked at me. Blankly.
“Are you okay?” I asked.
“Who are you?” she asked.
“Hank. Dr. Lawson. We met earlier.”
She stared at me for a beat but said nothing.
“I’m your grandmother’s doctor. Remember?”
No response. She glanced at Jill and then turned her eyes back toward me. “Why are you here?”
Now I was getting concerned. “Your party.”
“Party?” Her gaze again rose to the night sky.
I grabbed her arm and gave it a shake. “Nicole?”
She looked at me, her face expressionless, her pupils slightly dilated but no more so than would be expected in the dim light that filtered down from the patio.
“Who are you?”
Other Books by D. P. Lyle
NONFICTION
Murder and Mayhem: A Doctor Answers Medical and Forensic Questions for Mystery Writers
Forensics for Dummies
Forensics and Fiction: Clever, Intriguing, and Downright Odd Questions from Crime Writers
Howdunnit: Forensics: A Guide for Writers
FICTION
Stress Fracture
(A Dub Walker Thriller)
Hot Lights, Cold Steel
(A Dub Walker Thriller)
Devil’s Playground
(A Samantha Cody Thriller)
Double Blind
(A Samantha Cody Thriller)
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First published by Obsidian, an imprint of New American Library, a division of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.
First Printing, June
Copyright © Universal Studios Licensing LLC, 2011. Royal Pains © Universal Network Television, LLC. Licensed by NBCUniversal Television Consumer Products Group. All rights reserved
eISBN : 978-1-101-52898-3
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PUBLISHER’S NOTE
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
There are many people who made this book possible and I wish to thank each of them.
Lee Goldberg, who suggested me as the author for this series and introduced me to the world of tie-in novels.
Andrew Lenchewski and John P. Rogers for creating the Royal Pains TV show and the wonderful characters that populate the series.
My wonderful agent, Kimberley Cameron of Kimberley Cameron and Associates.
My equally wonderful editors, Sandra Harding and Elizabeth Bistrow, who offered needed advice and criticism.
All the great folks at Penguin, including the publisher of New American Library, Kara Welsh.
The Hamptons: Exile or Refuge?
Life is funny. Just when you think you have it figured out, a curveball comes your way. For me, it came down to a single word: triage.
An odd word, for sure. But then we got it from the French, so what do you expect?
In a medical setting, it saves lives. Most of the time.
To the French, triage means “selecting,” or “sorting.” In medicine, it means to prioritize patients by need.
Every busy emergency department has a triage system. The one I had worked at did. A physician or nurse performs a quick cursory exam of each patient who comes through the door, and rather than rushing everyone into a treatment or trauma room on a first-come basis, the ones in the most precarious situations jump to the front of the line. Just common sense and good medicine.
Such a system becomes critical when the ER is overrun. Like when the Friday-night knife and gun club kicks into gear. You know, too much to drink, someone looks at someone the wrong way or hits on the wrong woman, and the weapons are hauled out. Soon the ER is smothered with the dead and the dying, the bleeding and the screaming, the angry and the frightened.
Seen it a hundred times.
So triage is your friend. Right up until it isn’t.
That’s what happened to me. Triage bit my butt.
I’m Hank Lawson. Dr. Hank Lawson. I now run a concierge p
ractice in the Hamptons, but not long ago I ran an ER. A very busy ER.
One day we got hit. Hard. I was working on several patients at once, focusing on the most needy. Two in particular: a teenager who had suffered a cardiac arrest and an elderly man with an evolving heart attack—an acute MI to those of us in the profession. I moved both to the front of the line. The kid’s CPR was successful and I managed to stabilize the MI patient.
So far, so good. Or so I thought.
In medical emergencies, stable is a relative thing. Often temporary. It can change in a heartbeat. Literally. A patient spiraling downhill toward death can be yanked back from the brink, while another that seemed to have weathered some crisis suddenly begins the death spiral.
The kid was the most fragile, the most likely to take a turn, the one that most needed my attention. He got it. His life was saved. While I was doing that, the MI guy wasn’t so lucky. His condition headed south and ultimately he died. It happens. An MI kills someone every minute of every day. Even in hospitals.
The real problem? Mr. MI was Mr. Clayton Gardner. A very important man. A pillar of the hospital. A billion-dollar bank account and huge hospital donations will do that.
The next thing I knew, I was in front of a hospital review board, defending my “mistake.” The board’s take on it. To me it was a judgment call, and those can sometimes go wrong. I did it. I’d do it the same way again. The board thought differently and I was fired.
For the first time in my life I didn’t have a job or school or somewhere to be or something to do.
Scary.
Things got worse from there.
No jobs opened. The word was out. I was blackballed from medicine in a way that only big money, huge money, could do. No ER work, no hospital privileges, and nothing on the horizon.
Even my fiancée decided I was a loser. She took off, leaving me a chair, a TV, and not much else.
Welcome to depression city. I slept. I brooded. I drank. I became addicted to the convenience and avoidance of social interaction supplied by frozen pizza. I sat in my one chair and watched reruns of, well, everything. Over and over. God, Lucy was funny.
My younger brother, Evan, a piece of work in the purest sense of the phrase, coerced me into a trip to the Hamptons for Memorial Day weekend. He said I needed to meet new people. I said Lucy and Ethel were enough. He said I needed a change of scenery. I said channel hopping and reruns were fine. He said I had no money and a pile of bills to pay. I didn’t have a response to that. So I said okay, but just the weekend. No more.
Amazing how plans change.
During a party one night I saved a young woman’s life. At the estate of a very wealthy middle-aged, mysterious dude named Boris. His full name, I later learned, was Boris Kuester von Jurgens-Ratenicz. A mouthful and a half, so everyone simply called him Boris.
Grateful for my help, and my discretion, Boris offered to pay me. I refused. He refused my refusal, so as Evan and I drove away from Boris’s estate, Evan noticed a metallic briefcase in the backseat. Like a scene from Pulp Fiction, when he popped it open, a glittering gold bar stared back. Not coins or medallions or even pieces of eight, but a bar of pure gold. I never knew those actually existed except at Fort Knox and in movies. I remember James Bond’s nemesis Auric Goldfinger being in love with them.
Ultimately, Boris fired his old concierge doc and I became his personal physician, and he my first true Hamptons patient. He even installed Evan and me in his guesthouse. Some guesthouse. In Middle America it would have gone for two hundred K easily and on the California coast ten times that. Here in the Hamptons? If you have to ask, move on up the road. Made the house Evan and I grew up in look shabby.
Soon, word spread, people began calling, and my concierge practice was born.
So here I was ensconced in the Hamptons. A place I never thought I’d be. A place I never wanted to be. But that old curveball changed everything.
Chapter 1
The Wentworth estate, a castle among castles, had three gray stone stories and too many rooms to count beneath its copper mansard roof, patinaed to a rich green by age and weather. It overlooked a tranquil cove and beyond to the Atlantic, today churned into whitecaps by a stiff breeze. Typical June in the Hamptons. Could be hot and sweltering or cold and drizzly. Today it was warm and breezy.
The estate, also known as Westwood Manor—seemed all the estates in the Hamptons had names—housed a dozen people: Mrs. Eleanor Louise Parker Wentworth and her staff of eleven. Mrs. Wentworth—or Ellie, as she demanded everyone, including me, call her—along with her husband, the late Walter Wentworth, had purchased the property some two decades earlier, when they hauled all their oil, land, and cattle money north from Texas. Walter died two years later, leaving Ellie the matriarch of the estate.
I wheeled my trusty aged green Saab convertible up the gentle S of Westwood Manor’s treelined drive and parked in the circular parking area that fronted the humble abode of Ellie Wentworth.
As I was retrieving my portable EKG machine and medical bag from the trunk of my car, one of the two massive oak front doors swung open, revealing Sam, Ellie’s butler. It was as if he had been standing by the door waiting. He probably had been since Ellie had called twenty minutes earlier.
Sam was maybe sixty, short, and round, with a trimmed collar of white hair circling his bald crown. He wore his usual pinstripe gray suit, crisp white shirt, navy vest, and red bow tie.
“Sam,” I said as I approached.
Sam and I were on a first-name basis. At least I was. Sam was much too formal for that. I had been here dozens of times. Sometimes twice a week. Sam and I went way back. A year anyway.
“Dr. Lawson.” He gave a half bow. “Thanks for coming.”
“How’s Ellie doing?” I asked.
“The usual, sir. Worried about everything. I made her tea, but it helped very little. So here you are.” He smiled.
Though Ellie had legitimate medical problems, her typical complaints were stress, anxiety, and panic attacks, often more imagined than real.
“Where is she?”
“In the parlor.” He held the door until I passed, and eased it closed soundlessly. “Would you care for coffee or tea?”
“No, thanks.”
The parlor dwarfed most homes. Non-Hampton homes anyway. High ceilings, ankle-deep custom-sculpted carpets, and Louis-the-whatever furnishings. I wouldn’t be surprised if one of the real Louises had actually planted his silk-covered butt in one or more of the chairs and sofas. The room also had a wall of glass that overlooked Ellie’s prized garden and the gray Atlantic waters beyond.
“Hank,” she said as I came in. “Please, sit.” She patted the sofa next to her.
I placed my bag and the EKG machine on the floor and sat, wondering which Louis had rested there before me.
Ellie didn’t look ill. Or stressed. Or even concerned. She wore a silk robe and slippers, and a gold necklace and bracelet gorged with stones worth more than my entire family had earned in a lifetime.
Here is the thing about a concierge practice: Your patients hire you to be available to them and to give them that personal service. That includes house calls, hand-holding, reassurance, and occasionally a real medical problem.
Ellie was one of my favorite patients. The fact that this visit would be more social than medical didn’t bother me at all. Concierge medicine is filled with such visits.
“What’s the problem?” I asked.
She sighed. “This wedding is going to do me in. I’ll be glad when it’s over.”
Ellie’s blood relatives were down to two. A daughter, Jackie, and a granddaughter, Nicole. I’d never met either but had seen pictures of them. Blond, blue-eyed, and gorgeous, they each resembled the photos I’d seen of Ellie when she was a young woman.
Ellie had told me a month or so ago that Nicole was getting married at the estate. Since that time, her stress had mounted and my visits had become more frequent. With the event now looming only two weeks away, she was
having almost daily symptoms. Most I could handle with a reassuring phone call; others required that I visit. Like today.
Ellie never did anything halfway and the wedding promised to be one of her famous productions. I had nursed her through two other such events in the last year. One for her friends in the equestrian world and the other for one of the many international charities she supported. Both events were over-the-top.
Cracking the Hamptons’ social nut was no easy task. Only old money, New York money, maybe Newport money, sometimes Connecticut or New Jersey money, need apply. Ellie and Walter had arrived with Texas money. Gazillions from what I heard. If the gazillions were big enough, the door could be pried open, but it was Ellie’s theme parties that sealed the deal for the Wentworths. Always the talk of the town. A Renaissance Faire, a Texas BBQ, a masquerade ball, and even Camelot had been themes. The latter required dismantling the elaborate gazebo that sat along one side of the garden so that a jousting track could be constructed. After the party, the track disappeared and the gazebo was reborn.
“You said your heart was acting up?” I asked.
“Those awful flutters. They’ve been rattling around in there all morning. Worse than last week when you were here.”
I took her hand and felt for her pulse. Mostly regular and strong, a few skips.
“There,” she said. “That was another one.”
I smiled. “Probably PVCs from your mitral prolapse.”
“That’s what you always say.” She had a mischievous twinkle in her eye.
“Because that’s what it always is. I think you just want me to come over and hold your hand.”
“That’s true. At my age getting a handsome young man to pay attention is good medicine.”
“That’s what I’m here for.” I lifted the EKG machine. “Let me get a tracing and see what’s going on.”
“Is that necessary?”
“No. But it’ll make me feel better.”
“I shouldn’t take you away from your other patients, though. Not for my silly stuff.”