Chance of a Ghost (55 page)

The document, really the copy of the document, was not nearly as official and final a piece of paper as you’d expect. It looked very much like an innkeeper’s license (my own point of reference) or a certificate of divorce (see above). At the bottom was the signature of the attending physician, Dr. P. Wells. The cause of death was listed as cancer. That plain and that simple.

I could have saved myself the trouble; there wasn’t anything especially helpful here. I searched through the envelope again, saw nothing else, then got up and walked back to the records department and to Roberta’s station. She glanced up, looking puzzled.

“I really appreciate your help,” I said. “Just one thing: There’s no autopsy report in the folder.”

She looked at me for a moment, trying to assess exactly how stupid this woman in front of her might be. “That’s right,” she said. “There was no autopsy.”

“No?”

Roberta shook her head. “Of course not. The attending physician was present in the hospital room at the time of death. There was no sign of foul play. The police weren’t called. The cause of death was known. Unless you or another family member had requested it, there was no reason for an autopsy.”

I thanked Roberta again, mentally rejecting the idea of trying to give her a tip, and left the hospital, once again wrapping myself up in the nineteen layers of clothing that felt like they added a half ton to my overall weight. I walked to the parking lot and got into the Volvo, which was probably thrilled with the weather, a reminder of its childhood in Sweden.

But before I drove away, I texted Mom, “Get Maxie to check up on Dr. Wells.”

Twenty-five

The records office at Freehold Area Memorial Hospital
(a name which doesn’t make sense to me at all—What’s it memorializing? Are we supposed to remember the Freehold area?) was the same kind of bureaucratic room you’ll find in government buildings, impersonal to a maddening degree and bland almost to the point of a style statement.

That blandness made it even weirder that I was so on edge I thought my head would explode.

Granted, this was the first time I’d been to the hospital since Dad died, and shockingly enough, the place did not hold pleasant memories.

The overall effect was not improved by the fact that the hospital was crawling with ghosts. Many spirits, I’ve discovered, are at least semiconfined to the physical space in which they died. And a hospital, no matter how well its staff and physicians perform, is by definition a place where a good number of people pass away. Even the room I was standing in, behind the inevitable counter separating the in
crowd (staff) from the uncool types (patients or, in this case, me), had at least twenty ghosts hovering about its ceiling, passing through its workstations and just generally hanging around like in a cosmic waiting room without any good magazines. One ghost in particular, with slicked-back hair and a gunshot wound in his chest, was giving me the same grin I remembered from when The Swine and I were dating.

It made me wonder how Mom, who’s been seeing ghosts all her life, must have felt when Dad was a patient here. Did she start looking for him in the ceilings as soon as Dr. Wells gave her the worst news she’d ever gotten?

It was, I’ll admit, a little unnerving. I found myself tapping my right foot in what appeared to be impatience but was really anxiety.

Roberta, the middle-aged woman standing behind the counter and in front of the workstations, who was indeed alive, misread my unease. “It’s been a busy morning,” she said as an excuse even before I asked for anything.

I smiled to show camaraderie. “I’m sure,” I said. “I’m wondering if you can help me find the records from a few years ago. My father passed away here, and I need to see some of the paperwork.”

Without changing facial expression, she said, “I’m sorry for your loss.” It was probably something she would say if the phone rang at three in the morning. “What do you need?”

“I’d like to see the records of his stay here and the death certificate,” I answered. I gave her the date Dad died, and his name. “Would you still have those?”

“Oh, we have them, all right,” Roberta said. “But I’d have to pull them up and make copies. And you’ll have to pay for the copies, a dollar a page.” That seemed pretty pricey for something run off on an office copier, but the hospital, as they often do, had me over a barrel.

“Not a problem,” I said. “How long will it take?”

“Give me a half hour,” Roberta said. “Busy morning.” I
didn’t tell her that was quicker than I’d expected. Somehow it seemed she would have been disappointed if I was actually impressed by the hospital’s efficiency. Since I didn’t want to damage her worldview, I nodded grudgingly and headed through the maze that is the modern palace of healing to the food court, which is an odd concept for a hospital. It was next to the gift shop, which is an even odder one.

Once there, I texted Mom. After my consultation with Lawrence, I’d alerted her that he was in a more reasonable mood and might venture by. But I’d also asked if she would go to the guesthouse and find Paul, so she could text back his replies. Ghosts can’t be heard over the phone. Hey, I don’t make up the rules. Frankly, I’m not clear on who does, but whoever it is has an odd sense of order. At times I think the afterlife is run by an eight-year-old with ADHD.

After ordering a hot chocolate and a small salad, I texted Mom, “Ask Paul if Maxie’s found anything about the Viagra ring yet.”

Lawrence Laurentz had been oddly reluctant to tell stories out of school, but after insisting that he’d never even looked into the possibility of a pipeline to Viagra pills because he had suffered a heart attack ten years earlier and was not a candidate for the drug, he admitted he’d heard rumors that they were obtainable through people in the New Old Thespians.

“I wasn’t asking about it because I couldn’t use it, but I heard about it from Jerry and from Barney Lester at the Thespians,” he’d told me.

“Was Jerry asking like he had some prescriptions and was offering them to you?” I’d asked. That was the implication I’d gotten from Officer Warrell.

Lawrence shook his head. “No, it was more like he knew about this great thing and he wanted to show off how in-the-know he was,” he said. “The man is a moronic boor.”

Barney Lester, I recalled, had passed away before Lawrence, of natural causes, his wife had said. “Did something
happen with the Viagra that caused his heart problem?” I’d asked Lawrence.

He shrugged. “I was out of the group when he died.”

“But not when he got sick,” I’d reminded him.

“He was one of the ones not talking to me. But I don’t remember anyone who
was
talking to me saying it was anything but his heart.”

That hadn’t been much help. Sitting now at a table with my salad and warm chocolate (“hot” would have been an overstatement), I was considering my options when my phone buzzed, and I read the text from Mom: “nthng n vgr bt pl wnts rprt.”

Of course.

Muttering to myself about reintroducing my mother to vowels, I texted back a very clear “WHAT?” and waited.

I recalled a time when people could simply talk to each other over items we called “telephones” and get our answers almost immediately. It took me a moment to ponder this, after which the phone buzzed again, and I got Mom’s latest missive: “Nothing on Viagra, but Paul wants a report.”

Now, was that so hard, really?

I really would have given in and called Mom myself, but the idea of the interminable delays during which Paul would relay a message to Mom, then me to Mom, then Mom to Paul, then Paul to Mom…was more than my brain could handle this afternoon, and the room was noisy, which would have necessitated my shouting questions about Viagra and murder into my phone. I sighed and texted back as much as I’d learned from Lawrence. By the time I’d deciphered four or five more of Mom’s texts, which appeared to be in Estonian even when she deigned to throw in the occasional vowel, I’d eaten half the salad, finished all the tepid chocolate and was heading back to the records department, where my buddy Roberta was plying her trade with a gentleman ahead of me and the leering gunshot victim had apparently left the room.

Roberta’s client moved on, and she waved me over. “I got the records,” she said. She handed me an envelope on which had been printed, “NO CHARGE” in block letters. I looked at her. She pursed her lips a little and chewed on her gum a bit. “You shouldn’t have to pay for that,” she said, and turned back toward her computer screen.

You can’t ever figure people.

I took the envelope and walked into the corridor. There was a waiting room a few doors down, so I ducked inside to sit and examine the records. An older woman, transparent and dressed from the 1970s, was hovering over the only available seat in the room. I walked over to her and waited, but she didn’t move.

Putting my hand over my mouth as if to stifle a cough, I said quietly, “May I?” The ghost looked displeased but rose up out of the way and through the ceiling. Two other ghosts in the room, noticing, glanced disapprovingly in my direction. Apparently I was being rude. Ghost etiquette. I suppose I could have sat down in the middle of the older lady, but that did not seem a considerably more polite alternative.

The envelope contained many documents I vaguely recalled having seen before. Much of it was medical mumbo jumbo I couldn’t possibly decode, but there were a few things that came from Dr. Peter Wells, which was what I was looking for right now. There were orders for various tests and medications, MRI and CAT scans, which told me nothing, and the certificate of death itself. I’d probably gotten a copy five years before, or Mom had, but I’d never had the strength to really look at it.

Knowing that Dad was potentially at the other end of this search, I took in a deep breath and steeled myself. It wasn’t like I wasn’t aware he was dead; it was more the idea of mentally bringing back those last days that I dreaded. But this was necessary.

I promise I’ll try as hard as I can, but you have to promise to take care of Mom. Okay?

The document, really the copy of the document, was not nearly as official and final a piece of paper as you’d expect. It looked very much like an innkeeper’s license (my own point of reference) or a certificate of divorce (see above). At the bottom was the signature of the attending physician, Dr. P. Wells. The cause of death was listed as cancer. That plain and that simple.

I could have saved myself the trouble; there wasn’t anything especially helpful here. I searched through the envelope again, saw nothing else, then got up and walked back to the records department and to Roberta’s station. She glanced up, looking puzzled.

“I really appreciate your help,” I said. “Just one thing: There’s no autopsy report in the folder.”

She looked at me for a moment, trying to assess exactly how stupid this woman in front of her might be. “That’s right,” she said. “There was no autopsy.”

“No?”

Roberta shook her head. “Of course not. The attending physician was present in the hospital room at the time of death. There was no sign of foul play. The police weren’t called. The cause of death was known. Unless you or another family member had requested it, there was no reason for an autopsy.”

I thanked Roberta again, mentally rejecting the idea of trying to give her a tip, and left the hospital, once again wrapping myself up in the nineteen layers of clothing that felt like they added a half ton to my overall weight. I walked to the parking lot and got into the Volvo, which was probably thrilled with the weather, a reminder of its childhood in Sweden.

But before I drove away, I texted Mom, “Get Maxie to check up on Dr. Wells.”

Twenty-six

I picked Melissa up at school and drove home, a place I
felt like I hadn’t been in a very long time. We found Mom there with Paul and Maxie in the kitchen. My mother was already cooking, despite my having said I’d make dinner tonight for the large contingency coming to the show. Mom had seen me struggle with cooking before and was making a preemptive strike.

I had spent the drive home on the phone with Murray Feldner, who once again seemed not to understand why he shouldn’t be paid for something he hadn’t done. When I suggested I would be happy to pay him for not plowing my sidewalk if he would agree not to charge me when he did, he did not find the humor in my suggestion.