"We never lived anyplace we could see them, my little city mouse."
Another wrinkle of the nose so that she did, indeed, look the part. "I'm not a mouse, Mom. But if I was, I don't think I like being a city mouse anymore. I like shooting stars. What's vengeance, and why can't little girls have it?"
Timmie gave up the stats for good. Just keeping pace with this kid was dizzying. "Were, honey. If I were. And vengeance kind of means getting even. Like if Crystal Miller pulls your hair, you pull hers back. Which you can't do—"
"Because it's not for little girls. But why would the Lord pull Crystal's hair?"
Timmie laughed. "I think what the reverend meant was that if the Lord doesn't pull Crystal's hair, then neither should you."
That didn't seem to work either. "Well, if she's being mean, somebody has to. And why would the Lord pull Ellen's hair?"
"Ellen's hair?"
"They were talking about Ellen. And... uh, how she's alone. And how Cindy's glad. Is that nice, Mom?"
Timmie interrupted this little intelligence with a small swat on the butt and stood up. "You're much too nosy, little girl. Enough. I had a hard day at the sewing machine. I don't need an ethics class, too. Come up and help me dress for work."
Meghan's grin was a hundred percent imp. "Why, just so I can be bored?"
"By me?"
That got a giggle. "No, silly. By Heather. Couldn't Cindy come over? I'd rather have Cindy."
Now, that Timmie hadn't expected. She'd thought Meghan wouldn't have had time for a woman not much more mature than she was. "Really?" she asked, with a tickle for good measure. "How come?"
It took a few shrieks and wriggles for Meghan to answer. "Because it's fun scaring her with Renfield."
Ah. Some sense at last.
Timmie just picked Meghan up and carried her so she could keep her close as long as possible.
"Did you know she was locked in a herbi... herbi... snake house once?" Meghan asked, legs wrapped around Timmie's stomach. "All night, all by herself, and she had to hold very, very still so the snakes wouldn't smell her. Snakes can't smell very well, you know. Especially in the dark. When the lights went on, there were snakes curled up all around her."
"My, my."
"Yes, and her daddy had to leave when she was a little girl, too. She said it made her very sad, but he was an explorer, so she knew he was finding new places she could visit someday."
"Uh-huh."
"Do we have to go back, Mom?"
It took Timmie a while to catch that one. "Back where, baby?"
"California."
They'd reached the top of the stairs, where the books lived. Piles of them, masses, mountains. Literature, philosophy, history, tomes in English and French and Latin. A few in Gaelic, but her father had come to Irish late and had lost interest quickly.
Timmie still considered this place haunted and holy, the sum of words and ideas that had tumbled so easily from her father's brain all those years. The real Joe Leary when the other one went away, just like the explorer in Cindy's story.
But tonight Timmie didn't look. She didn't stroke old leather or visit well-known tides. She focused instead on her daughter.
"I thought you didn't like it here."
Meghan didn't quite face her. Meghan hated to admit she was wrong. "I can't have a horse in California," she whispered.
Timmie probably should have told her that she couldn't have a horse here, either. But she knew what her little girl meant. Meghan had already begun to be seduced by those quiet, dark nights and corkball games. By walking home from school and having a pony down the block she could feed apples to on her way by. And Timmie had no right taking those things away from her.
Even for the sound of sirens.
She sighed. "So you've decided to be a country mouse?"
Meghan nodded, head still tucked into Timmie's neck. "Only if my daddy could find me."
Timmie held on tighter. She fought all the old anxieties. "Your daddy knows where to find us," she assured her little girl. "As long as we're where he expects us to be, he'll find us."
Where he expects us to he.
Where he expects us to be. Why did that suddenly make her want to turn around and go back down to her statistics...
Timmie froze midthought.
Oh, God. Oh, no. She was wrong. She had to be wrong. That couldn't have been what she'd seen.
Timmie almost dropped Meghan down the stairs. She squeezed her hard, then set her on her feet. "Hang on a second, hon. I have to check something."
"Mom!"
But Timmie was already back down the stairs. Grabbing a highlighter out of the pen forest she'd been collecting in an old popcorn tin, Timmie bent back over the printout. She highlighted the names that were familiar to her. Lila Travers, Milton Preston, maybe Clara Schultz. Patients she'd personally dismissed from her ER. Added to the ER statistics as their own, as if they had come from the outside with only moments to live so they just brushed along the fringes of the hospital.
Except they hadn't come from the outside. That was what suddenly stood out to her. She had worked on the assumption that the numbers were okay because she was checking familiar ratios to see if they were wrong. ER, OR, ICU, Med/Surg. The ER numbers had been higher, but that didn't reflect on the hospital proper. The ER stood separate, individual, like an island in a larger sea. And Timmie would have seen a change in the ER. She would have heard, would have sensed or smelled.
But she'd been wrong. Not about the ER. About the ratio. It wasn't right. The ER numbers weren't honest. Timmie hadn't taken into account the patients they'd been seeing from Restcrest. The policy had changed no more than six months ago so that any Restcrest patient with a resuscitation order would be immediately transported to the ER if they needed treatment.
And if they died, they were dismissed as ER patients.
No, no, no, she wanted to say with her whole heart. It can't be that. I'll find it isn't that when I look closer.
She had to get back to that computer. She had to double-check which patients had come in from Restcrest. Because if her suspicions were true, it wasn't the ER's numbers that were going up, it was Restcrest's. And intentionally or not, the hospital's new policy was camouflaging that.
They were hiding the fact that there were more people dying in Restcrest than anybody knew.
Chapter 13
Another geek, Murphy thought with no little frustration. Another undernourished, overeducated freak of nature who seemed unable to communicate with anything but a microscope and, evidently, Alex Raymond.
No wonder these guys got into so much trouble.
Lanky and dark, Peter Davies was good-looking in an absentminded professor kind of way, with unkempt hair he kept dragging out of his eyes as he talked, deep-set hazel eyes, and a sheepish grin that probably delighted the ladies. If they wanted to put up with that six-week-old lab coat, that is, or the constant chatter about gene therapy and amyloidal plaques.
Davies's realm was much more impressive than his hygiene, anyway. Definitely high tech, gleaming white, with acres of test tubes, herds of centrifuges, walls of gleaming stainless-steel refrigerators. Light microscopes and electron microscopes and enough DNA testing equipment to staff the FBI. There was great work going on here, as reflected in the serious young faces of the research assistants and the static of excitement that permeated their conversation. Science was their god, and they were its priests facing down demon Alzheimer.