"You should have come home with me," he finally said. She had been counting the seconds.
"If I follow that logic, I shouldn't come out of the house, period," she replied.
"Okay, okay. What about meeting for a quick dinner, then? I'll even eat in the hospital cafeteria with you."
"I have to meet with the district attorney about then. He's coming to the hospital."
"Will Dennis? Why?"
"He wants to talk to me about the situation I confronted last night, Curt," she said. She realized half truths made it all even stranger. Curt was far from dense when it came to things like this, she thought. He was silent for a moment.
"Why?" he demanded. "Were there signs of foul play?"
"The woman was totally naked and probably raped."
"What?" He thought a moment. "I don't like the sound of any of this, and I especially don't like you talking to Will Dennis without my being present," he said.
"Huh?" She smiled and froze a laugh. "Why not?"
"I just don't like it. First, maybe an undercover detective, maybe not, and now this."
"You're sounding a little paranoid, aren't you?" she quipped.
"It's my job to be that way, especially when it comes to law enforcement officers who look for the easiest way out, and," he added before she could comment, "who are political creatures."
She stifled any reply. Was he right?
"I have to speak to him, Curt. It would look worse if I didn't. I'll call you right afterward."
"No, you won't, but I'll call you," he said. "Maybe you should have become a paramedic."
"Maybe you should have become a court stenographer," she retorted.
"Right," he said, his voice full of controlled anger. She flipped the phone closed and concentrated on what she knew she had at the office, hoping she would be able to do just that: focus on her patients, but news of any death in the township traveled fast, even before it made the local radio news.
"Did you hear about Kristin Martin?" Elaine Wolf asked Terri the moment she entered the lobby.
Apparently Elaine Wolf, her one-woman news team, did not have much detail yet and didn't even know Terri's involvement. Will Dennis was keeping the lid tight on this one for as long as he could, she thought, but she knew Elaine would feel betrayed if Terri didn't tell her something.
"I came upon the scene last night and attended her myself," she replied.
"Oh. I didn't hear that. My God, poor you. Well, what happened to her? All I heard was she had a heart attack. A girl that young?"
"We'll have to wait to see," Terri said quickly, trying to make it seem as routine as possible. Before Elaine could ask anything else, Terri continued into the offices. She went directly to Hyman's.
He was on the phone talking to the radiologist at the hospital about Marvin Kaplan's fractured femur. The sixty-year-old plumber had fallen from a ladder in his own home, screaming how he could crawl through sewers, swing on rafters, and lug two hundred pound pipes and not get hurt, but do something for himself.... Hyman had his hands full with him when he was brought to the office and then sent on to the hospital.
"We'll have to chain him to the bed," he concluded after hearing the full report.
"That man hasn't taken a day off for forty-five years. Weekends to him just mean time and a half."
Hyman nodded at Terri and held up his hand for her to wait.
"Thanks, Fred. I'll see you at two thirty."
He hung up and turned his chair around.
"One of my spies at the hospital called me ten minutes ago and told me something on the Q.T. It seems we have another very bizarre fatality in the county."
She sank into the chair in front of his desk.
"You don't know that I was the attending physician on the scene last night?" He sat back, his mouth slightly open, his eyebrows raised.
"You're kidding."
"Believe me, I wish I was," she said and reviewed what she had discovered and what she had done. "It all happened so fast," she concluded. "You know how rapid and dramatic the response to flooding doses of thiamine hydrochloride in patients suffering with wet beriberi can be. A diuresis starts between 4 and 48
hours with visible resolution of most of the edema within four to eight hours. It's all gone in two days!" she added with frustration turning her eyes into PingPong balls.
"I'm beginning to sound like a broken record, but I've never seen this serious a case of wet beriberi, even during my internship. No trace of thiamine in the blood!" He paused and considered her. "No one could possibly blame you in any way."
She shook her head.
"I'm not even thinking about that," she said. "We didn't have time to get her to the hospital for blood tests so we could start a protocol." He nodded and leaned forward, putting his elbows on the desk and pressing his two forefingers into the bottom of his jaw, a habitual posture for him.
"It's a maddening sort of deja vu."
He nodded.
"Yes, but I would even go as far as saying there are some diseases so rare in the modern world, many physicians wouldn't recognize them or consider their possibility when they confronted the symptoms," he said. She knew he was just trying to help her feel better about it.
"I really considered that diagnosis, Hyman, but I shook it out of my head. I was concentrating on an allergy," she said, hating the sound of her voice, the whining. "The policeman got me thinking about a bee sting."
"Logical. You had the hyperventilating, the racing heartbeat, edema."
"I also smelled alcohol on her breath and a whole series of other possibilities flew by."
"A-huh," Hyman said. "Well, I can't tell you any of it makes sense to me."
"The district attorney feels the same way."
"Oh? How do you know that?"
"He was my first call this morning. He wants to see me so much he's coming to the hospital to meet me in the cafeteria before I begin my rounds."
"Oh." Hyman's forehead went into folds. "Why? He has his own medical experts to call upon. No offense, but I would think he would contact an expert on nutrition, not a family physician still green around the gills."
"I agree, and I think Curt does too, although I didn't tell Curt about Kristin's beriberi. Will Dennis wants it kept as quiet as possible for now."
"Oh?"
"Dennis's request to see me confused Curt or worried him. He was upset about it and chided me for agreeing to talk to Dennis like this, but I was the attending physician on both cases, Hyman, and for some reason Will Dennis thinks I might know something or help him understand the deaths of these two women. Kristin Martin, like Paige Thorndyke, was in no condition to provide valuable details. She mouthed something, but I made no sense of it." He stared at her for a moment and then sat back shaking his head.
"I admit Curt has me feeling a little paranoid," she confessed.
"This is all just coincidence," Hyman said. "We live in a small town. There's no reason to make any more of it."
"I hope so," she replied. "I hope that's the way the district attorney sees it, too."
"Well," he said starting to laugh, "what else could it be? You're not some sort of medical serial killer, are you?"
It was on the tip of her tongue to tell him it was some mystical or fated force at work, a dark force that had decided to attach itself to her, something her grandmother would believe as strongly as she believed in the Evil Eye, but Hyman would call that a bubbe meise, an old-wives' tale. He was reading it in her eyes.
"You're not going to go all funny on me now, are you, Terri?" he asked, halfjesting, "and talk about Fate and some curse or something. Are you?"
"No," she said rising. "But please, give me colds, allergies, even diabetes today and leave the bizarre outside our door."
He laughed and she went to set up for her first patient of the day.