Better in the Dark (5 page)

But Natalie was busy when their coffee break came, as if she did not want to go to the cafeteria so soon after Chisholm’s death. “There’s two more kids down on the eighth floor. I want to check them out while I have the chance,” she said when he asked her to join him.

“And flirt with Mark while you’re at it?” he teased, and was surprised at her vehement “No!”

“Sorry, Nat. I didn’t mean anything by that.”

“I’m on edge,” she muttered. “Just leave me alone for a while, Gil, please. Please.”

“If you say so. But you might tell me what this is all about.”

She did not answer. She walked down the hall to the elevator and took it to the eighth floor.

The two girls turned out to be battered children. Natalie watched with pity as Ian Parkenson prepared the younger of the two for surgery. Both legs of the older girl were bruised, open wounds draining on her left shin. But the younger had been so badly beaten that broken shards of her tibias poked through her skin smeared with marrow.

Ian cursed softly as he worked, his square carpenter’s hands moving delicately to assess the damage.

“Parents,” he said as he finished the younger girl and turned his head away. “But what can you expect? Six kids living in three rooms. The wonder is that there aren’t more of them.”

“How do you mean, Ian?” Natalie asked, keeping out of the way of his paramedic and surgical nurse.

“You know about frustration and overcrowding as well as I do, Natalie. We see the results of it every day. Psychiatric is as full as it can hold of people who can’t take the pressure any longer. Beatings, sexual assault, all the terrible violence we clean up after. It’s a product of the way we live. Take those kids. You know how lucky they are to get to a hospital? Any hospital? There are at least one hundred cases like this which go unreported and unattended for every one we see. And quite likely there are more. It’s worse than rape.” He turned his attention to the older girl, to a large bruise swelling on the back of her neck. “This isn’t good.”

Without being asked, Natalie began to monitor the display board for Ian.

“The old way was kinder, Natalie,” he said as he worked. “Even if you lost them in childhood, at least you didn’t kill them with your own hands.”

“Oh, Ian, you don’t believe that,” she murmured, making a note on the printout. “Temperature anomaly on the skin. You’ve got some nerve trouble there, it looks like.”

“No,” he said, lowering the girl back onto the table and pressing her lids closed over unequally dilated pupils. “We aren’t going to save her. She’s been hemorrhaging too long.”

“Isn’t there anything you can do?” Even as she asked it she knew from the display that there was little or nothing that would save the child. And if they kept her alive, it would be as a vegetable. There was brain damage, and the printout showed it was spreading.

“She’ll live a few more hours yet. The sister may make it, but there’s no way we’re going to keep that right leg. I think we can save the left, but not the right. Maxim or Angela will amputate as soon as there’s an OR free on twelve or fourteen.”

“Ian, I’m sorry...”

“So am I, Natalie.” He signaled for his paramedic and retired to a chair next to the emergency unit. “God, I’m tired.”

“Ian,” Natalie began when the gurney had been removed, “did you know that Edward Chisholm is dead?”

“Chisholm? No, I didn’t. I’m sorry to hear it. I knew he was having trouble of some kind. It was his heart, wasn’t it? I understood it was heart trouble.” He rubbed at his eyes as if trying to banish his fatigue.

“His wife didn’t think it was heart trouble.”

“Wives. They never agree with doctors.”

“She was a nurse once, Ian. She knows what heart trouble looks like.”

“Christ.” He glared at his paramedic who was standing nearby, moving nervously. “What is it?”

“There won’t be OR space until four, Doctor.”

Ian grabbed at his face, pulling the skin forward. He looked more like an out-of-work clown than a surgeon. “Call those bastards on nine and ask them if we can use an orthopedics emergency unit. It’s got enough equipment for an amputation. Get Maxim on it.”

“Yes, sir,” the paramedic said before she sprinted away.

“About Isobel Chisholm,” Natalie persisted as Ian stared after the paramedic. “What if she’s right?” She discovered she had been pleating her lab coat, and she smoothed the wrinkles carefully.

“If Isobel Chisholm thinks that there was some irregularity in her husband’s death, she knows enough to report it to the medical authorities. If not, she should not go around exciting young and inexperienced doctors who don’t know enough to keep their own council. How’s Mark’s famous Project doing? He told me he and the Statistical Department are getting some results at last.”

“We don’t talk about it much. We don’t see each other very often.” She took the rebuff as well as she could. “Would it make a difference if I’d been here longer, Ian?”

“Sure it would. You’d know when to interfere and when to get involved. And it would help if you hadn’t been in trouble with administration before. You should have stayed out of that battered-child case.”

She turned on him then. “You can say that, after those two girls? You can honestly tell me that I should have let those kids go back to their father? You saw them when they were admitted. Remember the fracture on the boy’s skull? Remember pulling all those lead splinters out of it?” She stared at him, waiting for an answer.

“Peter Justin made the only decision he could. And it put you in a very bad position, Natalie. Look,” he said, his words more kindly than they had been, “I know how you feel. But we can’t afford to stick our necks out on every case. We have to be careful. There are times when we know we can make a difference, and those are the times when we should take a stand. When the question is obviously crucial. But in cases like that one, when Justin had to decide on the matter of word... You didn’t have a chance. Justin doesn’t have the authority to take the matter to court without more than your testimony against that of the children’s parents.”

“But they had been beaten with electric cords. You said so yourself.” Natalie felt this was not happening, that Ian could not be saying this to her. He had always taken the part of the unprotected child, and now he was telling her she should not have tried to save the three Swanson children.

“Sure. And it was true. They had been beaten with electric cords and lead-weighted thongs. You had no proof that the parents had done it. Even if the kids wouldn’t talk, they knew who had beaten them. And we were right, Natalie. You know we were right.”

“Yes,” she said somberly. “We were right. They were dead within six months of their release.”

“But we can’t prove that the parents did it,” Ian said patiently.

“Who else, then? The milkman?” She spat the words at him, very angry now. “Don’t kid yourself, Ian.”

“I may be,” he said, pulling himself out of his chair. “But if I were you, unless I caught someone in the act, I wouldn’t bring any kind of complaint against anyone for a while. The administration doesn’t like embarrassments like the Swanson case. Take my advice, Natalie, and keep a low profile. Otherwise you’re going to land in big trouble.”

She studied his lined, sensitive face, knowing that his advice was meant to help her, and that she should listen to him. “Come on, Natalie,” he said, “there’s lots of years yet. Get in here a little more solidly, and then you can take on the administration, maybe even make a change in the Battered Child laws. That’s important, and you’d be good at it. But you’re not up to that fight yet. Remember that.”

“I’ll remember,” she said truthfully. “Thanks, Ian. I don’t agree with you, but thanks.”

As she got into the elevator, Natalie noticed the other woman waiting for the car. This made her hesitate. She badly wanted the chance to be alone with her thoughts. The other woman was plainly upset, and would probably start to talk to her as soon as the doors closed. Natalie studied her as she pressed the “hold” button. She was an angular woman without being thin, her graying hair was in disorder, and when she spoke, it was in jerky, breathless phrases. Natalie made up her mind and entered the elevator, and as she had expected, the strange woman began to speak to her as soon as the doors were shut.

“Are you a doctor? You look too young. But it says
doctor
. Your name badge says
doctor
.”

“I am,” Natalie said as the elevator moved.

There was a moment of silence, and then the other woman made up her mind. “You tell me, then: what kind of place is this? Can’t any of you keep track of anything here?”

“The hospital is very efficient,” Natalie said, somewhat defensively. “What’s the matter?”

“It’s my boy. Why can’t you tell me where he is? Anybody should be able to tell me. But they don’t. They say he’s transferred. They’re giving him intensive care, but not here. Somewhere else. On another floor. But I’ve been all the places they’ve told me to go, and he isn’t here. They won’t let me see him or talk to him.”

Fear washed over Natalie more strongly than ever. She made an effort to soothe the woman. “When did you bring him to the hospital?”

“Last night, early. He was real sick. He had this rash on him, real bad, big sores, almost like something’d been biting him. He’s never had one like this before. When I brought him in they said it was an allergy. They said they’d keepr him for obversation and run tests on him.” Her voice rose. “Some observation, when they can’t even find him.”

“Mrs. ...”

“Verrcy. Laura Verrcy. My boy is David. His father is Hugh.”

“Mrs. Verrcy, if you’ll give the desk your name and address and a number where you can be reached and your phone-service hours, I’ll try to find out what I can about this. It’s certainly not usual for the hospital to withhold information from parents about their children,” she said, thinking grimly that it was becoming usual. “Do you happen to remember the name of the doctor who examined your son? Or what floor they sent him to? It could help me trace him if you remember.”

The angry, frightened eyes regarded her with unveiled suspicion. “What can you do the others can’t?”

“I can ask a few questions. It’s worth a try, isn’t it?”

“I don’t know. They tried to make out that his being sick was our fault. Maybe they want to blame us for his being sick. Maybe that’s what you’re planning to do.”

“Mrs. Verrcy, please. I know what you’ve gone through with this staff. But, truly, I think I can help you if you’ll let me.” Natalie hoped that this was a simple matter of administrative foul-up and not another child lost.

“The doctor’s name was Braemoore.”

Jim Braemoore. That wasn’t good, Natalie knew. He was one of the most firmly established of the staff doctors and adhered to hospital policy as if it were dogma.

“He’s going to be okay, isn’t he?” Laura Verrcy asked as she saw Natalie’s face. “That isn’t bad, is it? Doctor Braemoore is okay, isn’t he?”

“Jim Braemoore is one of the most respected doctors on the pediatric staff,” she answered, comforting herself with the thought that this was true. “But he’s off duty right now. You don’t have to worry about your son David if Jim Braemoore is taking care of him. Ask anyone on the staff about him, and they’ll say the same thing.” She hated herself for closing ranks this way, supporting a toady like Braemoore so that this confused woman would not ask the wrong question.

The elevator stopped. “Well, I get off here,” said Mrs. Verrcy.

“Look,” Natalie said impulsively, “I’ll check up on your boy. Don’t worry about him. I’ll let you know what I find out. Just be sure to leave your name and address at the desk. Tell them that it’s for Doctor Lebbreau.”

“Dr. Lebbreau,” she repeated. “I will. If you think...” The door closed on the rest of what she was going to say.

Natalie rode up to her floor with troubled thoughts.

“What’s the matter with you?” Gil demanded with none of the easy banter he generally used with Natalie when she was upset. Their rounds had been tense and now he was getting angry.

She motioned him away from the patient they were checking. “I’ve been finding out things, Gil, and they scare me. I know it sounds crazy, but there is something really wrong around here.”

“Not
that
again.” Even his eyes were scornful.

“I found out about a kid who had smallpox.”

“Aw, Nat, come on. You’re overdoing it. Nobody gets smallpox any more, and you know it.”

“Listen to me, Gil,” she pleaded as her eyes narrowed and she looked cautiously down the hall. “There’s something wrong here. And I’ll go on saying it until someone listens to me. Someone has to listen.”

“You said it yourself, Nat: it’s crazy.” He put his hands on her shoulders, but she shrugged them away. “Maybe it is,” she said softly. “Will you give me a chance to prove it, one way or the other?”

He stared at her. “How?”

“I’ll tell you that when I’m through.” For a moment he felt like getting angry and telling Natalie to get back to her job and forget her ridiculous theories. But he knew her well enough to know that she would not let the thing rest until she had resolved it. “All right. Take your time with it. But don’t blame me if you get caught. Or fired.”

Her expression was enigmatic. “Thanks, Gil.

You’re a prince.”

It was after midnight when Natalie went back to Mark’s test-tube domain on the seventh floor. The rooms were deserted and even the officious clerk had gone for the night. Her passkey had worked, to her surprise and relief. Still, she moved on tiptoe, seeking the coldroom where all the vaccines were kept. She hoped that this would be quick, that she would find she was mistaken after all and would have to bear with Gil’s teasing. It would be so much easier to face Gil’s ridicule than what would happen to them all if she was right. For a moment she hesitated, wanting to turn back. But she had come too far.

She turned on her flashlight and removed the throat attachment that had directed the beam to pencil fineness, then played the full force of the light over the orderly shelves where the neatly labeled bottles stood in military precision. It took very little time to find what she sought, and she took all she would need with her to the lab station. Setting her flashlight aside, she set up the scanners and began to work.