The Fever (2 page)

beer. His body moved carelessly, as if he were proud of being tall ... or proud of being Smith Lewis. Most girls found the proud walk sexy. Duffy found it aiTogant.

*Why don't you like him?" Duffy's best friend, Jane Sabatini had asked once when Smith, the top down on his black sports car, passed them in the mall parking lot.

"I didn't say I don't like him. I said I couldn't possibly Uke him as much as he likes him."

She had heard that he was given to practical jokes, which should have endeared him to her, since she had pulled a few pranks herself. But he talked too loudly, drove too fast, and grinned too easily, as if he were saying, "You think I'm adorable, right? Me, too." Every time she saw him, he was with a different girl. It was hard to imagine that someone like Smith Lewis could ever settle down to a medical education and career, which was what someone had told her he planned.

And whether she ate or not wasn't any of his business.

Duffy scowled at him. "I don't need an orderly. Amy's helping me."

Smith shook his head. "Eating hasn't improved your disposition, I see. Too bad. Didn't any of the nurses tell you that being nice to people isn't a bad idea when you look like something washed up on the beach?"

Duffy felt herself flushing and knew it had nothing to do with body temperature. Obnoxious though he was, she knew Smith was right. Her hair felt

like an oil slick and she had no makeup on. And although the sponge baths given daily by the nurses were better than nothing, she yearned fiercely for a long, hot shower.

"Leave her alone," Amy told Smith, but she smiled sweetly as she said it. "She*s sick. Quit picking on her."

"I just came to get the extra bed," Smith said, ambling over to stand behind the item in question. "You're not using it, and they need it in Pediatrics."

Duffy glanced over at the bed, remembering the night sounds she'd heard. The bed stared back at her. You were hearing things, it seemed to accuse. Can't you see that Fm empty? There was no one here last night but you.

"Amy," she asked slowly, "that bed's been empty ever since I came in, right?"

Amy nodded. "Sure. You'd remember if you had a roommate, Duffy. The hospital is filling up, though. A lot of flu in town. That's probably what you've got." She grimaced, her round, pink cheeks sliding up under her blue eyes. "There's an awful lot to do. And not enough nurses. They've put some of the volunteers on extra hours to help out. I've got band practice, so I can't do it, but Cynthia and a few of the others are helping out." Cynthia Boon was Amy's best friend.

Smith pushed the wheeled bed to the door. "Try to swallow something with sugar in it," he teased Duffy. "A sour female is a sad sight to behold. Take it easy, Duffy Quinn." And he left the room, laughing.

U

"Pig!" Duffy said heatedly. "A sour female? I should have thrown a pillow at him."

Amy laughed. "Oh, Smith's okay, Duffy. He told me once that his mother named him Smith because it was her last name. She'd always hated having such a boring last name, but thought it would be interesting as a first name. Smith has that same twisted sense of humor. He stole a skeleton from the lab a couple of weeks ago and stashed it in one of the empty beds. That little nurse from the third floor, the one with braids, found it. I guess she almost had a stroke."

Duffy swallowed a laugh. The stunt appealed to her. It was the kind of thing she'd love doing herself. But Smith had said she looked like beach debris. **What a stupid, childish thing to do," she announced primly.

Amy grinned. "Who are you kidding, Duffy? Everyone at school still talks about how you and Kit Rappaport and Jane stole the bust of Walt Whitman from Mrs. Toggle's English room and hung it from the flagpole."

Ignoring that, Duffy asked, "Why didn't Smith get fired? I know the head of the hospital. Dr. Crow-der. He doesn't look like he'd have a sense of humor."

Amy shrugged. "Smith did get a lecture. But he told Dr. Crowder it was an experiment. Said he wanted to study the physiological effects of shock." Amy laughed. "Can you believe it? I don't think Dr. Crowder fell for it, but he didn't fire Smith."

Duffy was annoyed with Amy for laughing. She

knew it was only because Amy, usually too stiff-necked to find any humor in rule-breaking, thought Smith was cute. Smith was probably the sort of person who got away with murder, just because of his looks. She hated that. It was so unfair.

"I'd think the nurses would all hate him, he's so obnoxious," she said hopefully.

Amy slid off the bed and picked up Duffy's tray. "Nope. Just the opposite. He's a real hard worker. Sometimes he stays late when he doesn't have to, to help out. He's always hanging around the hospital. The nurses appreciate that, especially right

now."

"Amy ..." Duffy hesitated, not sure how to phrase her question. "Are you absolutely sure there wasn't anybody in that other bed last night? I mean, I was so out of it yesterday.... Maybe they brought someone in while I was sleeping, but she got better during the night and went home this morning before I woke up and you came on duty."

Amy frowned. "Duffy, this isn't a hotel. People don't just check in for a few hours. The patient in that bed was discharged last week and it's been empty ever since." Tray in hand, Amy fixed round blue eyes on Duffy. "This is the second time you've asked me about that bed. What's up?"

Duffy shook her head. "Nothing. Only . . . never mind. Forget it." How could she explain what she'd heard when she didn't know what she'd heard? She wasn't even sure, in broad daylight, that she'd heard anything. Amy would think brain-rot was setting in.

Maybe it was.

"Look, I've got to go," Amy said. "I'll bring you some magazines later, okay? Is Jane coming this afternoon? Kit?" After Jane, Christopher "Kit" Rappaport was Duffy's closest friend.

"I hope so." What Duffy hated most about being in the hospital, even more than the ugliness, the grinmess, and the smell, was the horrible sense of isolation. She missed her friends, her family, her normal routine. This was Saturday. If it weren't for this stupid fever, she'd be home planning a trip to the mall, maybe a movie after dinner. . . . Real life was going on outside these moldy stone walls, and she was no longer a part of it. She hated that.

Nodding, Amy turned and hurried out of the room, the skirt of her crisp blue uniform swaying stiffly after her. "(Jet some rest," she called over her shoulder as she reached the door. "Dr. Morgan says that's the best cure."

Then Duffy was alone in the stuffy silence of her small, dreary prison. She knew Amy was right. Dr. Morgan had said, "Rest and quiet, that's the ticket. Sleep restores the body like nothing else can, so get plenty of it and you'll be out of here in no time."

Duffy settled down among the scratchy, yellowed bedding. Of course. Dr. Morgan hadn't added that getting plenty of sleep in a hospital wasn't easy, when nurses and volunteers and orderlies were forever taking your temperature or your blood and giving you baths and emptying your wastebasket or cleaning off your messy bedside table. Sleeping in a hospital was a luxury.

Especially when your room was full of frightening, unexplained sounds that came at night when everyone else had finally left you alone.

She closed her eyes, but she was suddenly afraid to sleep. She didn't want to have the clanking, clattering, flap-flapping dream again. The dream with the cry of terror.

If it was a dream. ...

Chapter 3

Duffy lay in her hospital bed, her pretty, oval face flushed with fever, her eyes on the yellowed ceihng. She couldn't sleep. She flopped over on her side, unmindful of the IV needle embedded in her left hand.

I wish Jane and Kit would hurry up, she thought. If I tell them about my dream last night, Kit will react logically and rationally, the way he always does. Maybe he can help me figure it out.

Kit Rappaport, graduated the year before from Twelvetrees High School, was a math wizard who had been offered several scholarships and turned down all of them to continue working in his uncle's shoe store. The worst fight Duffy and Kit had ever had was about that shoe store.

"You're nuts!" she had shouted, and he had answered, "You just don't get it, do you? I owe the man!"

Kit Rappaport had been Duffy's good friend since she was nine. He had come into her fourth-grade class, his reddish hair very like hers except that his

was carroty while hers was more cinnamon-colored. His plaid shirt was too small and flapped loosely outside of his jeans, his shoelaces untied. He had taken the seat opposite hers. Halfway through arithmetic, the frog he'd hidden in a pocket escaped and jumped to the floor. Without thinking, Duffy had reached down and scooped it up, hiding it in the folds of her gray sweatshirt before eagle-eyed old Mrs. Lauder could spy it and confiscate it. After class, she had returned the frog to Kit.

They'd been friends ever since, even after Kit skipped ninth grade and moved straight on to tenth, leaving her behind.

They'd never been anything more than friends, although Kit was cute enough, even if he was unaware of it. But he was so wrapped up in the misery of his home life that he had no thought for romance. Orphaned at nine by an automobile accident, he had been taken in by his aunt and uncle. "It's our duty," they told everyone sanctimoniously. Grim, humorless people, without affection or warmth, they believed that children should be useful. So Kit was put to work immediately in his uncle's shoe store, stocking shelves, sorting sizes, and pricing boxes. He hated every second of it.

A day or so after Duffy's argument with Kit about rejecting the scholarships, she had learned the truth from Jane. Upon Kit's graduation, his uncle had demanded that Kit "pay back every cent we've spent on you over the years" by working in the shoe store until the "debt" was paid off.

'Why didn't he tell me?" Duffy shrieked at poor Jane.

"He thought you'd call him a wimp."

Duffy had been ashamed then, because that was accurate. She would have.

Kit told her later he would have ignored his uncle's demands and left town, but his aunt had suffered a heart attack a week after graduation and was unable to help out in the store. He felt then that he had no choice. He would have to stay.

Their friendship had continued. Duffy knew that a lot of her friends didn't understand. Kit was cute and smart and nice. Why wasn't she in love with him? Well, she did love Kit, but not the way most girls loved a boy. She loved him because he understood her, her restlessness, her odd sense of humor, even her temper — and he liked her anyway. And she knew he would always be there for her. Even when he finally did go away to college, they'd still be friends. Forever. That was just the way it was.

And if he could get away from the shoe store, he would come with Jane to visit her that afternoon.

She missed him as much as she missed her parents and Jane. He would calm her down, help her to accept the hospital's routine. Kit could do that when no one else could.

"Hi," came suddenly from behind her, and Duffy turned, hope in her gray eyes.

But it wasn't Kit. Or Jane. Instead, Dylan Rourke was standing beside her bed.

A classmate and an employee of the hospital,

Dylan was wearing the obligatory pea-green slacks and tunic. The tunic pulled impatiently at shoulders that spent an hour every day lifting weights and had been used repeatedly as a battering ram on the football field. Dylan's nose had been broken twice in the same spot and now leaned slightly to the right. It gave his square, honest, open face a look of devilishness, which was quickly cancelled out by the trail of freckles leap-frogging across that same nose. Unlike Kit, Dylan had to struggle for good grades, a battle Duffy thought he was losing. That might keep him out of medical school.

Still, while Dylan might not be as smart as Kit, he was shrewd. Working at the hospital part-time put him in touch with doctors who, if he impressed them favorably, could put in a good word for him in pre-med programs at colleges across the country.

One way or another Dylan was determined, like Cynthia and Smith, to become a doctor. Maybe his methods were different, but Duffy had known him since ninth grade and when Dylan wanted something that much, he usually got it. He might look like an ad for a physical fitness magazine, but there was a lot more to Dylan than brawn.

"Your friendly maintenance engineer is here, at your service," he said, grinning, making the freckles dance across the bridge of his nose. His deep blue eyes focused sympathetically on her flushed face. "Anything I can do for you?"

"You mean my friendly janitor^"^ Duffy said crankily.

Dylan shrugged good-naturedly. ''Whatever.

Dufif, you look really sick. You okay?"

Duffy glared at him. "Dylan, would I be in this horrible place if I were okay?" She waved her needle-pinioned hand at him. "This stuff isn't doing a bit of good. I'd get better faster at home, where I belong."

Concern filled his square, open face. "I know you hate it here, Duffy. It's not the greatest place in the world to spend your weekend. But when someone's as sick as you are, this is the safest place to be."

When he turned away to pick up her wastebas-ket, his broom clanked against the side of the metal container.

That sound last night — was this the same sound?

No. It wasn't quite right ... it didn't. . . clank enough.

"Dylan," she asked, "did you work last night?"

"Uh-uh." He lifted the nearly full basket. "I was wiped out from a chem exam yesterday in Deaton's class. Man, that guy can really dream up some wicked questions! Think I passed, though. No, I wasn't on last night. Why?"

Disappointed that Dylan couldn't help her with last night's puzzle, Duffy sank back against the pillow. "I had this dream ..." she began. Maybe Dylan could help her figure it out. "At least, I think it was a dream. There were these noises ... it was really bizarre, like there was someone in the room. It was too dark to see, and I was kind of asleep. I was sure someone was doing something in here. But when I

called out... if I really did call out, no one answered