Between (6 page)

Work was a welcome relief, normal, something that helped her focus on reality.

Normal, but far from easy. On the examining table behind her, a woman was slowly suffocating from the secretions in her own lungs, cumulative damage of thirty years of tobacco. She’d never taken a puff in her life—all of the smoking had been done by the man who sat in the chair beside her, holding her hand, looking a good ten years younger than his age and in perfect health.

No rhyme nor reason to anything in this world.

“Dr. Maylor—”

Roxie stood in the doorway, lower lip trapped between her teeth. Vivian jerked paper towels out of the holder and used them to turn off the faucet. “What is it?”

“We’ve got a bit of a situation; you’d better come out, if you can.”

A bit of a situation
could mean anything from a difficult patient to a staff dispute about what toppings should go on a pizza. Not an emergency per se. Although if it was the question of pizza, that sometimes came damned close.

“One minute,” Vivian said. She turned back to the couple behind her. “Now, Mr. and Mrs. Anderson, you both understand there must be absolutely no more smoke in the house, yes?”

“I’ll quit,” Carl said. “It’s time.”

Alexis patted his hand. She pulled aside the oxygen mask to speak, but before she could get a word out a paroxysm of coughing shook her. Carl supported her thin shoulders, his face marked with helplessness and the sure and certain knowledge of loss.

“I’d like to admit you to the unit,” Vivian said, when the coughing had eased. “We can treat the pneumonia better here—”

The woman shook her head, looking to her husband to speak for her.

“Stubborn. Says she’s spent enough time in the hospital and she’s not staying,” Carl said. “There’s no point wasting your breath.”

No one spoke for a minute, the significance of the cliché punctuated by the labored breathing of the woman on the bed.

“Keep the oxygen on,” Vivian said, finally. “Use the inhalers the way I showed you. A nurse will be coming out to check on you and give you IV antibiotics. I’ll send a referral to hospice.”

She slipped out of the room, away from the love and loss and guilt that filled it so thickly it stifled her own breath. Staff had gathered in a little clump behind the desk, their voices subdued for confidentiality, but hands were emphatically waving and nobody looked happy.

Not a pizza problem this time.

“What’s up?”

They turned to face her, all of them, huddled into a flock. Max licked his lips, his eyes feverish. “Brett’s in six,” he said.

Vivian stared at them, absorbing.

Six was a code of sorts. It was the bay at the end of the hall, the place they put patients who might disturb the rest of the public. Psychiatric emergencies, the loud and intoxicated.

“Brett who?”

They stared back, eyes wide, faces tense and pale.

“Flynne.” Shelly looked ready to cry. Her hands trembled visibly and Vivian understood. Deputy Brett Flynne, who was on duty the night Arden died. Who had been investigating things down at the Finger. He’d been a deputy when most of the staff were still in high school. Dependable, reliable, a community fixture. And now they’d put him in six.

“What’s going on?”

“Raving,” Roxie said. “And cold. Brody’s in there with him.”

“Explain.”

“Hypothermic. Temp is ninety-five. And—he’s talking about penguins. I already put warm blankets on him and ordered the IV warmer from central.”

Vivian bit back a surge of panic. Her job, somehow, to calm and organize, to appear sane and together even when she felt like she was flying apart. “Look, guys—something caused this, something will fix it. We deal with it like we always do. Follow the protocols. The second the warmer gets here, start a bag of normal saline. Shelly, call the lab and get them to draw blood stat. Max, get Mrs. Anderson discharged, will you? She doesn’t need to be here for this.”

Everybody scattered to assigned tasks, and Vivian let her feet carry her down the hall.
Squeak, squeak.
Damn it, she’d totally forgotten to get different shoes. She paused for a moment outside the door, half-expecting another dream fragment.

But there was no flash of dream, no déjà vu. When she entered, Brett was huddled under a pile of blankets, shivering hard enough to shake the examination table. The skin of his hands and face looked dead white; his lips, blue tinged, moved in an endless recitation she couldn’t quite hear.

Deputy Brody stood at a small distance, eyes averted, face flushed, shoulders rounded with embarrassment. His hands made a gesture of invocation when he saw her, then returned to the security of his belt and the array of defensive tools he carried. Pepper spray, Taser, sidearm, handcuffs.

Brett didn’t react to her entrance; his eyes remained focused on a far corner of the room.

“What happened?” She crossed the room, put her hand on his forehead. So cold. She picked up one of his hands and pressed the nail bed, checking for circulation. Not good. Respirations shallow and slow.

“We were down at the Finger—he wanted to go over the evidence for the murders again. So he’s over there by the stone looking at bloodstains, and all of a sudden he shouts, ‘Look out! Penguins!’ And then he starts shaking like he’s got the plague. That’s not it, is it? The plague? Some sort of chemical weapon or whatever?”

“I very much doubt that, but we can check you over if you want.”

Brett’s hand clenched hers, squeezing her fingers to the point of pain. His eyes focused on hers, staring, intent. “The penguins are coming,” he whispered, as though it were the most important message in the world.

She kept her voice low, as calm as she could make it. “I don’t understand, Brett. We’re not seeing any penguins, Brody and I.”

He released her, his hands fumbling aimlessly at his breast. His muttering grew louder; she could understand the words, meaningless. “The penguins are coming, full of grease. Lord, deliver us from ice. The penguins are coming, full of grease, Lord deliver us from ice. The penguins are coming…”

She couldn’t find a pulse in his wrist. Placing the stethoscope on his chest she heard his heart, slow and weak. An oral temperature read ninety-three degrees. Roxie’s initial reading had been ninety-five. He was getting colder.

Hypothermia.

It made no sense. At today’s temperature you’d have to
be outside for hours without a coat to get this cold. Still searching for the rational explanation, she asked Brody, “Was he wearing a coat? How did he get so cold?”

“Regular uniform, same as me. There was a wind off the river, but nothing extreme, you know? Sun was shining. He was fine, and then he wasn’t. That’s all I can tell you.”

Goddamn it. She’d had one patient burn up on her table. She wasn’t about to let another one freeze to death. Hypothermia should be easy enough to treat, but he was getting worse, not better, and she had absolutely no idea what was causing the problem. This time she wasn’t going to mess around. She’d get him stabilized as much as possible and airlift him to Spokane. Maybe the doctors at Sacred Heart could see what she was missing.

Roxie half-ran through the door with an IV, the warmer, and another armful of warm blankets. Working together without a word, they laid him back and wrapped the warmed blankets around him. Brett lay as they’d placed him, drowsy now, his eyes closed, fingers twitching. His lips still moved, fitfully, but Vivian couldn’t make out any words.

“Max called for airlift,” Roxie said. She’d managed, somehow, to find a vein, and was filling tubes for the lab before hooking up the warmed IV. Vivian moved the blankets long enough to slap pads on his chest and hook up the EKG, wrapping him up again at once.

Vivian looked up at Brody. “You could track down his wife and ask her some questions—any history of mental illness? Any drug use? That sort of thing.”

“Look, I’ve been his partner for five years. If you’re suggesting—”

“I’m not suggesting anything. We just don’t want to neglect any possible leads. Okay?”

“All right. It’s just—”

Vivian gentled her voice. “I know. We’re doing everything we can for him. Okay?”

Brody nodded and stalked out. She’d given him something comprehensible to do and hoped it would help him. There wasn’t much chance he would turn up anything of use.

At least Brett’s temperature had stopped dropping, but he wasn’t warming. And he should be. He was a healthy man with no history of serious disease. Frankly, she couldn’t think of a disease or a drug that would cause what she was seeing here.

Which forced her, at last, to confront what she’d been avoiding. Arden, and the way her dreams lingered long after waking. The strange conversation she’d had today with a man she had dreamed before she met him.

Her hand went to the pendant, seeking comfort from the cool stone that had been with her for years. She had almost managed to erase her memory of the day it was given to her, could go days and months with it buried deep in her subconscious. It was a day that didn’t fit with the rest of her life, didn’t fit with anything. She had almost persuaded herself over the years that the events of that day never really happened, were only dream.

But there was the pendant, and she had no other story to explain its existence.

She’d been seven years old that summer. Old enough to begin to question Isobel’s version of reality and struggle with her own. Other kids were amazingly casual about dreams. Sometimes they were frightened by nightmares, but they laughed away their fear. Their dreams seemed to fit in the same category as Santa Claus and the tooth fairy, beings Vivian had always known did not exist.

They talked about all of these things in a casual banter that astonished Vivian, whose experience was so far different, and so she kept her own vivid dreams to herself.

As she did her home life.

Her classmates, for the most part, had two parents, brothers and sisters, maybe even aunts and uncles and grandparents. Sometimes they all lived together; sometimes they didn’t. They talked about these people in terms that had no connection to anything Vivian knew. Parents cooked,
cleaned, and bought groceries. Had jobs. Watched over homework. Read bedtime stories.

Vivian’s mother did none of these things. She had no father. She’d asked about him once.

“He’s a prince,” Isobel said, her voice far away and her eyes looking into Dreamworld.

“That’s not true,” Vivian said, bossy. “I’m too old for fairy stories.”

“Who says fairy stories aren’t true? We fell in love long, long ago—”

Vivian knew all about where babies came from and was having none of this. “Isobel. I am seven. If you were with some fairy-tale prince that many years ago, then where did I come from?”

Her mother’s eyes focused, just for a minute, and Vivian shivered a little with happiness and a touch of fear, to have her mother look at her and really see her. “I found him in a dream. At least I think it was a dream. So real, darling.” All at once Isobel began to weep, wrenching sobs that frightened Vivian more than the cutting and the blood. She knew what to do about blood; tears were something else altogether. You couldn’t call an ambulance for tears.

Almost two years before, when she was five, a neighbor showed her how to dial 911. Gave her instructions for when it was okay to call: If your mother isn’t talking or eating and can’t get out of bed. If she has an accident with something sharp and is bleeding. If she takes too many pills. There were no instructions about tears.

Knives and scissors were a problem. And razor blades. Vivian did her best to keep them away from her mother, but she was little and had to go to school. Things happened. Sometimes this meant trips to the emergency room and stitches. Sometimes it meant the 911 number and an ambulance, all sirens and flashing lights.

Once, her mother stayed at some mysterious hospital for days, and then weeks. Vivian was not allowed to visit and was made to stay with an aunt and uncle in a house full of
stray kids. Only they weren’t her aunt and uncle—they knew it and she knew it—but they made her play that strange game of pretend.

Ever since Isobel had come home, a social worker, Beth, came in regularly to check on things. She was easily lied to. Isobel hated the hospital; Vivian hated the uncle and aunt. Together they colluded to pretend things were okay.

Mostly, they managed.

On this particular morning, Vivian had fixed herself cereal and was eating it alone at the table when Isobel entered the kitchen. She was dressed to go out, in a fitted black suit jacket and skirt. Her lips were red and she smelled of perfume and hair spray.

“Get dressed,” she said.

“I
am
dressed.”

“Something nicer.”

Vivian shook her head. Dresses hindered her, kept her from climbing trees and rolling in the grass. They were also hard to wash. Recently she had learned to operate the washing machine and did both her own laundry and her mother’s when Isobel was too busy with imaginary friends.

“I suppose I’ll have to take you like that. Put your shoes on.”

“Where are we going?”

“To visit your grandfather.”

“I have a grandfather? Where does he live? How come I haven’t met him?”