Ten Little Bloodhounds (20 page)

“Hi,” I said. I was testing my voice. It sounded okay to my ears.

Jasmine looked momentarily startled, then she gave
me a wonderful smile and moved to my side. My mouth was dry.

“Could I have some water?”

I needed to lubricate my throat before I could ask questions and answer the many I knew she would ask. I was also stalling for time. I might not want to know the answer to some of them.

“You’re in Dunston County Hospital and it’s four-thirty
P.M.
on Thursday, October the twelfth, and I’m really relieved to see those dark brown eyes staring up at me.”

I frowned. Her eyes were bright with unshed tears. I drew in a shaky breath. The last I could remember was standing on the back porch with her early Tuesday morning waiting for someone to arrive. But first things first.

“Water?”

“Oh,” she breathed and turned from me.

I strained to remember more, and only succeeded in increasing the crashing cymbals thumping in my ears. I made myself relax. I’d hear the answers soon enough.

Jasmine was holding a glass of water with a bent paper straw. I sucked down the liquid too fast. I fought nausea by closing my eyes and taking shallow breaths.

When I lifted my lids, I stared into her eyes.

“I’m afraid to stretch. Are all my moving parts still working? Fingers? Toes? Arms and legs? You know, just the essentials, I’ll worry about breaks and fractures later.”

Jasmine gave a nervous giggle. “You’ll be cracking jokes at your funeral. You are completely intact, but be careful when you try everything out. Your left leg is going to be very painful, I imagine. It’s not broken, but it’s bruised and swollen.”

“Let me see,” I demanded.

When she mentioned
funeral
, I had seen a misty, rainy scene flash into my mind. I had been attending a funeral recently, and somehow I knew it was mine. I groaned.

Jasmine had pushed a button and the head of the bed was raising me into a sitting position. She had carefully lifted the sheet and uncovered my left leg.

“It looks much worse than it is,” she said quickly, squeezing my shoulder. “It will work and shouldn’t take long for the swelling to go down, honest.”

She thought my groan on catching a glimpse of my funeral had been for my leg. I stared at it, and sucked in a sharp breath. From above my knee to the sole of my foot was three feet of swollen, colored eggplant and as large as a bushy foxtail in winter. I groaned again, and this time it
was
for the leg.

“I’m not about to move that sucker,” I stated grimly.

I rubbed my temples with both hands. The pain was reclaiming my attention.

“Why does my head hurt so?” I asked querulously.

Jasmine had a guilty look. I bet she had saved the bad news for last.

“Let me get Dr. Sellers for you. He can explain it much better than I.”

I grabbed her hand quickly, before she could leave.

“I’d rather hear you tell me now than waiting for them to locate Dr. Sam. You know that could take hours. Spill it.”

“When you fell, you landed on your right side. You hit your head on a small cypress tree, right here.”

She pointed behind my right ear, and I raised a hand
and gingerly traced the outline of the swollen lump. It was tender and sore, but the skin wasn’t broken.

“This caused a concussion. Not serious,” she hastened to add, “but it did cause your brain to swell a little. That’s why you can’t remember some things, but Dr. Sellers will assure you the memory loss is only temporary. All your memory should return in a few days.”

I grimaced. “Been there, done that,” I uttered. “Remember when Bubba forced my van off the Tom’s Creek Bridge?”

“Those memories never came back,” Jasmine added softly. “Don’t let it worry you, it’s only two days this time, and Evan can tell you every detail.”

I felt uneasy, and I might as well bite the bullet and tell her while I was hurting. Maybe she would forgive me faster, knowing that I was ill.

“I have a confession to make, Jasmine. I did remember it was Bubba in just a few days, but I had a good reason for not telling anyone. I had rather he dreaded my memory returning than admitting I remembered, and lose the case in court. You know how lawyers can twist things around. Forgive me?”

“You let me silently worry and stew for months on end about your lost memory, and didn’t tell me you remembered it all? How could you!”

“Don’t yell,” I said, making my voice quiver. “Oh, my head!” I moaned.

She wasn’t buying it. “More than your
head
will be hurting before I’m through with you!”

“Jasmine, I didn’t know you were worrying about me, you should have told me and I would have enlightened you.”

“Now it’s my fault that I suffered?”

“You’re beginning to sound just like Susan,” I murmured waspishly. “Did you know that she wore a
red
dress to my funeral?” I’d had another flash on my interment.

Jasmine’s voice softened and she gave me a false smile of forgiveness.

“Forget what I said, I was just kidding.” She thought I was babbling nonsense.

“Thanks,” I weakly agreed. Peace had been restored.

“Who is Evan? Oh, you mean the pilot from Moody? He’s the one I was waiting for on Tuesday, wasn’t he?”

“Yes.” She breathed with relief that my mind was now functioning correctly. “You’re remembering!”

“I’m still on the porch last Tuesday morning. I just recognized the name from him apologizing for his colonel’s rudeness over the phone to me on Monday. All the rest of Tuesday is a blank. Care to fill me in?”

“Evan’s sitting in the waiting room right now. He could give you more detail than I can. He also came yesterday. He’s been very worried about you.”

“I’d rather hear it from you.”

“He could do it better.”

“Jasmine, you know I have a rather large ego. What if I screwed up sometime Tuesday? I want to know the facts so I can have a rebuttal in place, if I did.”

“According to Evan you behaved admirably,
he
was the one who screwed up.”

“You tell it, please?”

“I will, after I call a nurse to see if you can have something for your headache. You’re almost cross-eyed with pain. I can tell by the way you’re scrunching your eyes.”

“Won’t happen, but you might get the ball rolling.
He hasn’t penciled in pain medication orders on my chart because I’ve been unconscious. Now that I’m conscious, he’ll have to have more tests before he’ll prescribe anything, either an X ray of my cranium or a blood test, or a personal inspection of my eyeballs.”

“How do you know?”

“Trust me. I’m an expert on hospital procedures. Ask me anything. I’ve been down this road many times.”

“It won’t hurt to ask.”

“Fire away.”

She picked up the phone and asked for the nurses’ station for the second floor.

I inspected the IV stand, and the length of tubing running from bottom of the saline solution bag and into my arm, in relation to the distance to the bathroom. I had to pee, but I would just tighten the puckering strings. It was either unplug the IV machine and listen to a constant irritating beep until a nurse strolled in and adjusted it, or a bedpan. I didn’t fancy either choice.

“Jo Beth Sidden is awake and needs something for her pain. She’s in Room Two-ten. … Thank you.”

“She’s checking my chart,” I said.

“Do you have any idea when he’ll come?” Jasmine asked, sounding subdued. Then she said, “Thank you.”

“I have to wait for Dr. Sam when he makes his evening rounds. He usually makes them between five and six-thirty. He has to eyeball me personally, right?” I shot her a triumphant glance.

“I shouldn’t have bothered,” she said, nodding. “How about food, are you hungry? I might be able to order you a tray. I see they eat supper here real early, they are delivering trays now and it’s only five!”

“They’re running late, usually you’re fed at four-thirty. To get a hot meal for supper, the order has to be in the kitchen before three-thirty. After the order is written that I can have food, and it trickles down the chain of command, I’ll be lucky if I get a cold sandwich or maybe some crackers and milk by eight
P.M.
”

“I’ll take your word for it this time,” she said.

“Drag up a chair, and tell me a story.”

It took Jasmine twenty minutes to relate what had transpired up until I shot the gator. I interrupted her.

“Did you see him? How long was he? I sure would have liked to save the hide. I could have had it stretched on a big board. Have you seen one made like that? They take these slender new nails, and place them real close together, and leave them in the board. Looks real neat. I bet y’all didn’t give it a thought, did you, about saving it?”

“Sure we did,” Jasmine muttered sarcastically. “All the time that the medics were working on you so you could be medevacked out by helicopter, all of us discussed the pros and cons of field-skinning your gator. We finally decided we’d save you!”

I assumed a hangdog look. “Forget I mentioned it.”

“Certainly,” she breathed, with fire in her eyes.

She resumed the tale.

“Evan couldn’t raise me after you were in the land of nod, so he systematically began putting out a mayday on every channel whether he received an answer or not. After about six tries, he lucked out and tuned into the Georgia Highway Patrol’s emergency channel. They told him to keep the channel open, and called Hank. Hank called Moody and requested a chopper with medics. They couldn’t refuse, especially after they discovered that one of the victims was theirs and you both
were searching for their downed aircraft. Hank called me and Circe and I stepped into the helicopter when it landed by the kennel, just like we had been doing it all of our lives. It was the first airlift for both of us. It was really scary for me. Circe took to flying like a duck to water. It wasn’t too hard to find the van because Hank was there and had the area lit up, but finding you two was a doozie. They insisted on flying a twenty-mile grid, not five miles, like Hank and I suggested. They didn’t believe that you couldn’t walk twenty miles on land using a trailing dog, much less through the Okefenokee. You only carry three night flares. After Tuesday night, I think you ought to carry ten. Evan had fired the third one before we spotted the glow.

“Anyway, by the time you were loaded and on board and we were out of there, it was midnight.”

“Thanks, Jasmine. I owe you.”

“Just promise me one thing, and we’re even.”

I had a suspicion about what she wanted me to promise. I quickly slipped both hands out of sight under the sheet.

“Just ask,” I vowed.

“Don’t ever lie to me again.”

“You’ve got it,” I promised, crossing my fingers.

“I want to see both hands in clear sight when you repeat that,” she demanded.

“God, Jasmine, you wound me!”

I looked her straight in the eye, and said the words again. I had hooked one toe over the other on my right foot but the left was too sore to cooperate. One toe cross should be enough for little white lies that were for her own good, shouldn’t it?

I
sat with my gimpy leg propped on an upside-down trash basket with a pillow on top. The small side chair was rigid and uncomfortable.
Hospitals suck!
I gave a disgusted look at the lump that was supposed to be a cushion to support my injured leg.

In the five days I’d been an unwilling visitor, I had experienced a new marvel of hygienic efficiency, the disposable pillow. It was disposable waste they couldn’t find any other way to dispose of, encased in a paper and plastic cover. After two hours of trying to sleep on it and plump it up, it lumps and clumps and is unrecognizable as a bed pillow. Obviously they had an inexhaustible supply. I had one under my leg, and three on the bed. I had been told they had to leave with me, whether I wanted them or not.

Then there was the large five-inch-thick slab of blue
foam. It was rolled up and awaiting disposal, and I was the designated disposee. It was as bulky as a bale of hay, and just as ungainly. Sitting on the floor near the door was a book bag, a shopping bag, my overnight case, three potted plants, and two half-dead bouquets. I tried to picture Jasmine and me rolling down the hallways with the wheelchair and a teetering mountain of baggage.

I picked up the phone. It still held the residual warmth from my hand in making prior calls. I hesitated. I had called her twice already … I dialed the number.

“Hello.”

“You haven’t left yet? It’s almost ten!”

I heard Jasmine’s patient sigh.

“Has Dr. Sellers been in?”

“Not yet, but he’s due here any second!”

“Then when he’s examined you, and deduced that you’re able to leave, he’ll then continue his rounds and when he finishes them, he’ll sit down within the nurses’ station area and write up all the orders, for medication and possible discharges, right?”

“Yes … but …” I could see where this conversation was headed.

“Then the nurse comes in and says you’re free to go home, and sends for an attendant and a wheelchair to escort you to the curb, which usually takes thirty minutes from request to fruition. I’m ten minutes away from your room. Fifteen minutes after the request is when to
call me, right?
”

“Right.”

I listened to the dial tone. Jasmine was getting testier every day. She had been just as anxious to get home
when she was in here with a broken leg. How quickly they forget! I reached for my address book and looked up Sheriff Beaman’s number, again. He sure worked bankers’hours. I’d been trying to reach him since seven damn
A.M.
After holding a long while, I finally heard his voice.

“Sheriff Beaman, this is Jo Beth Sidden calling. You’re hard to reach!”

“Sometimes,” he answered cryptically. “I was informed of your four prior calls, Miz Sidden, but I’ve had a busy morning. Now that we are connected, what can I do for you?”

“We are still speaking to each other, aren’t we? You’re not dodging my calls, by any chance?”