Musseled Out

by Barbara Ross

  The structure of most of the suites was the same, a waiting room off the main hallway, with the service itself in a warren of offices or labs behind. As Brittany had said, few of the waiting rooms had receptionists. Some were sleekly modern, others old and beat up. I discovered it was the run-down ones that had live phones sitting on the empty reception desks.

  The first unattended phone I discovered was in the ultrasound suite. I picked it up and got a dial tone. I called Brittany’s extension. “Can you see the number I’m calling from?”

  “Yup. 4113.”

  “Do these numbers make any geographic sense? Like do the numbers go up or down or maybe indicate a certain floor?”

  “I think they might have, years ago. Before I worked here. But the numbers have been reassigned so often, nowadays they’re totally random.”

  “Do patient rooms have the same exchange?”

  “Nope. Just the services.”

  Thank goodness. I thanked Brittany B., hung up the phone, and moved on to the next suite.

  I tried every waiting room in the hospital and moved to the annex. After three more failures, I reached the physical therapy suite. The waiting room was busier at that time of day than any of the other services, filled with people arriving for physical therapy after work. A woman in exercise clothes emerged from the inner door, called several people’s names and checked them off on her clipboard. As people entered through the open door, I glimpsed a large, windowed room that looked more like a gym than a hospital suite.

  No one took the slightest notice of me as I picked up the phone on the empty reception desk and dialed it. Brittany’s extension rang until I hung up. I was about to leave when I decided to try her one more time. Brittany answered right away. “Sorry, I was busy. You got it! 4927. Where are you?”

  “PT service. Thank you so much.”

  I looked around the PT waiting room. There were people of every age and shape, some of them nursing obvious injuries and others looking perfectly normal. I didn’t recognize a soul. But then, of course I wouldn’t. Someone had called Sonny from this room at 8:00 AM on Monday morning. It was now after six o’clock on Wednesday. Could I get Binder interested in following up, maybe asking for a list of people with Monday morning appointments? If that didn’t work, all I could do was come in the morning and hope whoever had made the call had a regular 8:00 AM therapy appointment.

  I headed back to the main hospital. I wanted to check on Mrs. Gus. As I walked, something nagged at the back of my mind. PT. PT. Yes, Bard Ramsey had told me the day before he was in physical therapy for his shoulder.

  But would Bard do such an awful thing to Sonny? And wouldn’t Sonny recognize his own father’s voice?

  Chapter 21

  Gus sat quietly at his wife’s bedside when I entered her room.

  “Hi,” I whispered. “Any change?”

  He didn’t rise to greet me, unheard of for him. “They say she’s ‘lightening up.’ Sometimes she moves her fingers, opens her eyes for a second,” he said.

  “That has to be good, right?”

  He shrugged. “Not as good as if this hadn’t happened.”

  “What did happen, Gus?”

  “One minute she was there, starting her pie crust and the next minute she was on the kitchen floor. There was an open bottle of her arthritis pills on the counter. The people from the ambulance team said to bring it with me, otherwise I would have never thought of it. She kept her pills in the kitchen, took them in the morning.”

  Mrs. Gus collapsed right after taking her arthritis medication? This was new information. “Has she ever had a reaction to her medication before, even a slight one?” I asked gently. I was there to support, not interrogate him. “Or was the medication new?”

  “She’s been taking arthritis pills forever. After I brought the pills along to the ER in the ambulance they took them off somewhere.” Gus waved a hand toward the inner depths of the hospital.

  “I’m so sorry this happened to Mrs. Gus. And to you.”

  “Thanky.” Gus reached a liver-spotted hand toward the bed and took his wife’s hand in his own. He stared at her face with naked tenderness and sighed deeply. As his curmudgeonly armor, the “Gusness” of Gus, dropped away, I thought of slipping out. But I didn’t want to leave yet, so I lingered, shifting uncomfortably from foot to foot, trapped in their private moment.

  Gus let go of his wife’s hand, pressed a misshapen knuckle under each eye, and turned back toward me. “How’s my restaurant?” he asked, his voice gravelly with emotion.

  “It’s fine,” I reassured him. Gus didn’t need anything else to worry about. “The Misses Snugg ran it this morning. I helped.”

  “The restaurant is important,” he said. “Take care of it.”

  “We will. Please don’t worry. Fee, Vee, Chris, and I will handle it. We know how important it is. You and Mrs. Gus have put your lives into it.”

  “Yes,” Gus answered, “but that’s not what I meant. The restaurant is important to the town.”

  I sat with Mrs. Gus while Gus went off to find something to eat in the cafeteria. It was strangely peaceful in her room, with the machines bonging out a mysterious rhythm. A nurse came in, checked her temperature, and adjusted the flow of her medication.

  “Are you a relative?” she asked.

  “A friend.” I wondered where Gus’s children were. He and Mrs. Gus had a son and daughter, both middle-aged and prosperous with families of their own. Both lived out of state. It would be so like Gus not to “bother” them with news of their mother’s coma. He must have been hoping it would all turn out all right and he’d never have to tell them.

  “You can talk to her,” the nurse urged.

  “Can she hear me?”

  “We don’t know,” the nurse answered. “Hearing and touch are the last senses to go and the first to come back. She may not understand what you’re saying, but it can’t hurt.”

  When she left the room, I moved closer to the bed and took Mrs. Gus’s hand. “Mrs. Gus, I’m so sorry this happened to you. Gus misses you, and so do your friends Fee and Vee. The whole town is missing your pies.” I stopped. Was I putting too much pressure on a sick woman? If I were lying unconscious, would I want someone nagging me to get up and turn out pies? I knew so little about her. Not even her real name. A woman in her seventies deserved an identity that was more than her marital state followed by her husband’s first name. “Come back to us,” I finished, “if you can.”

  I heard the masculine clap-clap of several pairs of leather-soled feet coming down the hallway, followed by a familiar voice conversing with the nurse. Lieutenant Binder entered Mrs. Gus’s room, followed by two men in sports coats.

  “Ms. Snowden.”

  I stood. “I’m staying with Mrs. Gus until Gus gets back. He’s in the cafeteria,” I explained.

  Binder nodded. “This is Special Agent Williams of the Drug Enforcement Administration and Sergeant Crisp assigned to the Maine State Drug Task Force.”

  Williams shook my hand, but Crisp merely nodded. As I tried to get my head around their presence, a white-jacketed doctor entered the room. He was about my age with black hair, parted and slicked back and the kind of dark-rimmed glasses that were so old-fashioned they looked cool. His name tag said, DR. PARK, PHARMACY.

  “Is this the daughter?” he asked the officers, as if I were a mannequin who couldn’t speak for herself.

  “No,” Binder answered for me. “We’re waiting for—”

  Gus walked into the room.

  “Mr. Farnham.” Binder spoke before Gus could react to the law enforcement officers standing around his wife’s hospital bed. “We need to talk. Perhaps we could go to the family conference room?”

  Gus kept his composure. He cocked his head in my direction and said, “I want her there.”

  “Of course,” Binder responded before the others could object.

  I followed the men down the hospital corridor, matching my stride to Gus’s. I worried about the c
onversation that was coming, and vowed to support Gus any way I could.

  We gathered around the laminate-topped table in the conference room. Binder made the introductions. Special Agent Williams and Sergeant Crisp each slid a business card toward Gus. I swept them up and put them on the table in front of him so he could remember who was who.

  The room was cheerfully decorated, but was nonetheless uncomfortable, like a cloud filled with all the bad news ever delivered there hung overhead. What kind of bad news were these officers bringing?

  Dr. Park began. “Mr. Farnham, these gentlemen are here because lab tests have confirmed your wife did not have a reaction to her medication. There was a foreign substance mixed in the capsules with the medicine.”

  He let that sink in.

  “You mean she was poisoned?” Gus’s voice shook.

  Binder spoke up, “She may have been deliberately targeted, but our current theory is she got ahold of some tainted medication manufactured outside the United States that included the substance that caused her condition.”

  Gus looked from one man to the next. Binder and Park at least appeared sympathetic. Williams and Crisp were stone-faced.

  Binder continued. “Mr. Farnham, the label on the pill bottle you brought to the hospital didn’t have your wife’s name or a pharmacy name on it. It had the generic name of the drug, the dosage and a logo that’s not registered to any pharmaceutical company known in the U.S.”

  Gus’s eyes widened. “I didn’t notice. It was a normal, brown pill container. My wife was on the kitchen floor, barely breathing. When the ambulance came, one of the EMTs told me to bring the pills along, so you’d know what she took.”

  “That was the right thing to do,” Dr. Park said.

  “Do you know where your wife got the pills?” Binder asked. Williams and Crisp sat forward.

  “I assumed they came from the big pharmacy up on Route One. Are you saying they didn’t?” Gus put his hands on the table. “She’s been taking arthritis medication forever. The truth is, my wife took care of all that stuff—prescriptions, insurance, Medicare. I don’t know anything.”

  “Have you ever known her to get her medication from somewhere other than a pharmacy?” Park asked. “Say over the Internet?”

  Gus shook his head. “The Internet? She barely uses it. Once in a while she sends an e-mail to the grandchildren. I can’t imagine she’d order drugs over the Internet. No.”

  Special Agent Williams took over. “Perhaps she had a supplier here in town? Someone with a boat?”

  Gus’s great white eyebrows shot up. “You’re suggesting my wife had a drug dealer? It was arthritis medication.”

  “Was she taking a painkiller?” I asked.

  “A non-steroidal anti-inflammatory.” Dr. Park cleared his throat. “But it was a powerful medication not sold in the U.S. and not yet approved by the FDA.”

  “But that’s not why it hurt her?” Gus was clearly bewildered.

  “Correct,” Dr. Park answered. “It wasn’t the active medicine in the capsules that caused her to become unresponsive. It was a tainted filler material that was added.”

  “Now that you know what caused her condition, will that change her treatment?” I asked.

  Park looked away from me. “I’m sorry, no. There’s nothing to do but wait.’

  Special Agent Williams said, “Mr. Farnham, we’d like to search your house for other tainted medications and any clues as to how Mrs. Farnham obtained the arthritis drugs.”

  “Search my house?”

  “It’s urgent,” Binder said gently, but forcefully. “We have to find out as much as we can, in case there are any more tainted drugs out there. We don’t want anyone else to get hurt.”

  Gus saw their logic. “Give me a minute to say good night to my wife.”

  Dr. Park left the room with Gus. Williams and Crisp bolted to the hallway to make calls on their cell phones. Binder stayed with me. “You okay?”

  “I’m shocked. Is that why all those extra people are here—the DEA, Customs—because of the bad drugs?”

  Binder looked through the glass wall at Williams and Crisp pacing in the hall outside, cell phones to their ears. “No. They’re not here because of Mrs. Gus or even because of a possible epidemic of tainted drugs. We didn’t know about this until today. They’re here because David Thwing was one of the largest smugglers of oxycodone in Maine. They’ve been on his trail for nine months.”

  We sat in the conference room while I absorbed what Binder had said. My mind was reeling. Mrs. Gus had been poisoned. She’d bought her arthritis medication from some place, not a pharmacy. Medication she didn’t have a prescription for that wasn’t even sold in the U.S.

  And David Thwing was an international smuggler of a highly addictive prescription painkiller. It cast a whole new light on what might have happened on that boat. Did this mean Peter Murray was involved in drug smuggling? Go-along, get-along Peter, who seemed like he was barely capable of planning his kid’s birthday party, much less a drug-running franchise?

  If you had asked me before that night, who, out of all the people I knew, would have been the least likely to cross paths with a drug smuggler, I might have said Mrs. Gus. It didn’t make any sense. Was there some major trade in smuggling anti-inflammatory drugs for little old ladies? I couldn’t imagine. And how was it all related to David Thwing and the oxycodone?

  One happy thought did shine through in all this. “If Thwing was a drug smuggler and the feds have been after him for nine months, that pretty much lets anyone in Busman’s Harbor out of it, right? He was probably killed by a supplier or a rival.”

  Binder shook his head. “We still have no idea what happened on that boat or why. Nobody is off the hook. Your brother-in-law is still very much in their sights. Can’t you persuade him to tell us where he was?”

  “If you believe I can, you don’t know as much about Sonny and me as you think you do.” The essence of my relationship with my brother-in-law was that neither of us could tell the other a damn thing.

  I couldn’t comprehend any of it. I didn’t know anything about drug smuggling. But I suspected—in fact, had suspected for a long time—I knew someone who did. The idea of it freaked me out, but it was finally time to have the conversation I’d put off way too long.

  Chapter 22

  I called Chris as soon as I got in my car. I managed to get one word out, “Babe?”

  “What’s wrong?” he asked. “You sound shaky. Where are you?”

  “I’m in the parking lot at the hospital. I was with Gus. A lot has happened. I’ll explain when I get to the cabin.”

  His voice morphed from concerned to alarmed. “Is Mrs. Gus okay?”

  “She’s the same.”

  “All right. Come along. You’re sure you’re okay to drive? I could come get you.”

  I nodded, then realized he couldn’t see me and said, “I’m fine.”

  When I walked through the door, Chris sat in the comfy chair in front of the fireplace, listening to the Red Sox. He jumped up, turned off the game, crossed to the kitchen, and took me in his arms. I held my face against his hard chest. I loved that place, took such comfort from it. I was terrified of where this conversation was going to take us.

  Chris spoke first. “What’s wrong?”

  “Binder, a DEA agent, and a Maine Drug Task Force guy were at the hospital. They said what happened to Mrs. Gus was because of tainted medication.” Chris put a hand on each of my shoulders and stepped back so he could see my face. I kept talking. “She didn’t have a prescription for her medication. It isn’t even approved in the U.S.” My eyes teared up. I could barely get the words out. “The DEA agent asked if she maybe had a drug supplier here in town. Someone with a boat.” I worked to keep the quiver out of my voice.

  Chris didn’t say anything.

  “Do you know anything about this?” I asked quietly. When he didn’t respond, I said more forcefully, “We have to talk about it.”

  “No. We don
’t. We have a pact about last summer. We both agreed to move on.” His voice had a sharp edge.

  “It’s not working.”

  That did it. “It would if you’d stop talking about it!” he yelled.

  “It’s not working for me.” We never talked about it, but it never went away. “There’s more. Binder told me David Thwing was a major smuggler of oxycodone.”

  Chris’s hands dropped off my shoulders, and he took another step back, doubling the distance between us. “Are you asking if I smuggled oxycodone? Is that what you think of me? Look around you, Julia.” He swept his arm, taking in the half-finished house. “If I’m a drug smuggler, where did all the money go?”

  “Well, maybe not a very good one.”

  He didn’t laugh. The tension didn’t break. We stood, breathing heavily, a few feet apart. If there’d been even one room with a door on it anywhere in the cabin, I would’ve gone there and slammed it behind me. But the only option was the first-floor powder room, and I wasn’t going to sit in there. I grabbed my keys and my tote bag. “Call me when you’re mature enough to discuss this.” I stomped toward the kitchen door.

  “Call me when you’re mature enough to let it go!” he shouted back, right before I slammed it.

  I drove down the peninsula to Mom’s house way too fast. My stomach roiled and tears cascaded down my face. I parked the Caprice next to Mom’s Mercedes in the garage and took a few minutes to pull myself together. I was furious and scared, hurt and sad.

  When I got to Mom’s house, the lights were out, but there was a clean dish, glass, and silverware in the dish rack, so I knew she was home. My note explaining about Le Roi was still on the kitchen table, but unfolded and obviously read.

  I crept up the back stairs and lingered in the hallway outside her room. The light was off, early for her, but when I pressed my ear to the door I could hear her even, slow breathing. One less thing to worry about.