Offerings Three Stories (6 page)

Mentally urging her to use both hands like I’d taught her, I left Moseley to her bumbling and tried to think. Would someone have planned to kill a man in a supply closet with a single door that opened into an operating room, which also offered a single door and, thus, only one escape route? Not if they possessed even a particle of good sense, and I didn’t know any dummies who could handle a scalpel the way Dr. Wilkinson’s murderer did.

Dr. Hale’s scalpel sliced through another layer of the patient’s body, opening up the abdominal wall. Dr. Lacey and Moseley hurried to clamp another crop of bleeders. Dr. Auburn took a step forward, anxious to meet his patient. Dr. Gomez just kept pumping gas.

Who would want to kill Dr. Wilkinson? I don’t ordinarily speak ill of the dead, but the man had built a collection of well-deserved enemies. As I’ve said, surgeons are not known for their pleasant personalities. Only the day before, Dr. Wilkinson had lost a patient while Dr. Lacey assisted. He’d laid the blame squarely at Dr. Lacey’s feet, claiming that the younger doctor’s choice of the wrong retractor had hampered his surgical skill, directly causing the patient’s death. I know this, even though the argument took place in the physicians’ private lounge, because their voices were clearly audible to everyone within three counties.

Moseley, on the other hand, had rarely been the butt of the dead doctor’s wrath, despite her incessant fumbling, probably because she was widely believed to be sleeping with him. Given that she’d been caught in a linen closet with Dr. Gomez, and that she’d been named as a party to Dr. Auburn’s divorce, I was inclined to believe the hospital’s formidable army of gossips.

Lover’s quarrels had ended in murder before, though I had trouble picturing ineffectual little Moseley yanking her victim’s intestines out. It was just as plausible to think that Dr. Gomez or Dr. Auburn killed their rival out of jealousy.

And, while on the topic of jealousy, the hospital grapevine said that ice-cool Dr. Hale had been heard to swear a long string of oaths involving God, the devil, and somebody’s mother, when Dr. Wilkinson was honored for developing a new technique for gall bladder removal. I’d watched Dr. Hale use that technique for years, but he’d been too busy taking care of patients to bother writing a scholarly paper. Was he capable of murder? Well, he was a surgeon. Playing God on a daily basis might give a man a penchant for holy retribution.

The brilliant overhead lights bleached the color from the room. The surgical team’s caps and masks obscured their faces, leaving only their eyes visible. Was one of them hoping to bluff a way out of murder? Was there enough evidence left in the supply closet to convict anyone?

The lights reflected off their hair, their clothes, their eyes, the cloths draping the patient’s body. Everything was thrown into a black-and-white world of light and darkness. The shadows at their feet were night-black, as if the floor had dissolved beneath them and exposed the shallower regions of hell. The living red of the patient’s blood was the only color in the room.

A scalpel was poised above the patient’s exposed uterus, and its surface rippled with the baby’s last languid movements before emerging into life’s stark light. I couldn’t stand by, leaving the care of a mother and her child to a killer. I studied them again, one by one, and it struck me that everyone in the room knew that I’d just come out of the supply closet. If the murderer was present, he or she knew what I’d seen.

Dr. Hale reached into the incision for the baby. Dr. Lacey cursed Moseley for being slow with a clamp, because she still insisted on doing everything with her right hand. This puzzled me, because she knew better, until I noticed her left hand hanging curled and useless by her side. It occurred to me that it was dangerous for a married man to carry on with a jittery woman who knew how to open up his trachea.

How would a short woman slice the throat of a taller man? If she was right-handed, she would stand behind him, reach up and grab his chin with her left hand to pull him down toward her, then bring her right hand up to cut from left to right. She might also accidentally deliver a pretty good slash to her left hand, if she was clumsy. I raised my eyes from a rubber glove that could well be hiding some damning evidence and saw that Moseley had taken her eyes off the patient. She studied me for a bare second, then took her second deadly action of the day.

Using her good hand, she released a hemostat, allowing a major blood vessel to hemorrhage into the patient’s abdomen. While both surgeons rushed to salvage this disaster, Moseley grabbed a scalpel and stepped around the foot of the operating table, toward the door on the far side of the room from me. Then she passed the door, hurrying toward the patient’s head.

Why is she moving away from the door?
I wondered, but only for a second, until Moseley lashed out and slashed through the hose delivering oxygen to the patient. Dr. Gomez dived for his rolling supply chest, but she kicked it across the room, forcing another person to choose between chasing her and saving the patient. I was on the wrong side of the operating table. She could be out the door, fleeing into the hospital’s maze of corridors, before I reached her.

Perhaps our minds were traveling down those corridors together. At precisely the moment when I realized she was going to need a hostage to get out of the hospital, she took one.

Wrapping her left arm around Dr. Auburn’s waist, she reached up and pressed the scalpel to his throat, saying, “If anybody follows me out of here, he dies.”

The brilliant lights illuminated three doctors doing what they did best. Dr. Lacey was stanching the bleeding of a patient in critical danger, Dr. Gomez was doing his damndest to restore her air supply, and Dr. Hale was trying to free a baby from a haven that had turned deadly. There was nobody to stop Moseley but me.

I had chosen to put myself in the middle of emergency situations every day of my working life. That was what
I
did best. I did not intend to stand by, helpless, and watch this one unfold.

Stretching my gangly legs to their full length, I leapt onto the operating table and stood astride the patient, one sensible white shoe on either side of her chest. It was the only time in my life that I knowingly violated a sterile field. I stood there for an instant, probably dropping germs and skin particles into the patient’s open incision, then I launched myself onto Moseley. Her scalpel-wielding hand released Dr. Auburn to deal with the more immediate threat. Me.

She did her best with the scalpel, carving a slice through my tibialis anterior, but she couldn’t reach anything but my leg before I descended on her, feet first. Her left clavicle broke under my right foot, and my left foot took out a couple of her ribs. I presume that the police made sure she got adequate medical care, but I can assure you that she wasn’t treated by anybody at our hospital. The police didn’t trust us.

***

Later in the day, when my leg wound had been repaired and I was resting in my hospital room, an aide from the nursery walked in with a wheelchair. Settling me into it, she said, “The baby’s mother is…um…not able to visit with her. Nobody knows where the father is. We thought you’d like to get to know her.”

I passed the afternoon and the evening in a rocking chair with the unnamed baby girl. When word of her mother’s condition filtered through the hospital grapevine, we all knew that there would be no sweet mother-daughter moments for a long time, maybe never. After all these years, I guess there’s no harm in saying that the nursery staff brought her to my room for any number of unauthorized visits, hospital regulations be damned.

A couple of weeks later, the baby’s gutless father surfaced, staying in town just long enough to name the baby Rachel and to saddle his mother with Rachel and her older sister. He committed his wife to a place where she would get lifelong care, courtesy of the state’s taxpayers, and I guess that was a good thing. Nothing was going to repair the damage wrought by too much lost blood and too many minutes without oxygen. I trust that she got better care in that institution than he would have given her.

A hospital houses many eyes, and there was always someone anxious to tell me when they’d seen Rachel at church, or at their child’s piano recital, or on the playground. Sometimes I saw her myself, perched in the basket of her grandmother’s grocery cart. In time, I gleaned information from the newspaper which, in a small town, is always happy to report the exploits of a star basketball player or the awards granted to a talented student. It has been a quarter-century since Rachel married and moved away, but I still hear about her now and then.

My life has been long and productive, filled with the work I love and graced by good friends. There have been no lovers and no natural children, but I have not minded that so very much, because once I had a baby. Her name is Rachel, and she became a grandmother a year ago last March. She is fifty years old today.

~~End~~

From the author:

Thank you for spending time in the operating room with me and my mother and Nurse Crain. And at that nameless theme park with my nameless protagonist and Rosa. And alongside a Florida creek with Lila. I love my characters and I love sharing them with you. (And yes, I know they’re not real. They’re just a few of my many imaginary friends…) I hope you’ll tell your friends about my stories.

I have several novels and short stories that will soon be available as ebooks at
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To find out their publication schedule, get more information on my work, or to learn about how to get print, large-print, or audio editions of my traditionally published books and stories, check my website,
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I love to hear from my readers. Thank you for your support.

Mary Anna

About the author:

Mary Anna Evans is the author of the award-winning Faye Longchamp archaeological mysteries: ARTIFACTS, RELICS, EFFIGIES, FINDINGS, and FLOODGATES. The sixth in the series, STRANGERS, will be published in October. An environmental thriller, WOUNDED EARTH, is available as an ebook on Kindle and with other vendors of electronic books, as well as short stories including those in this collection.
Mary Anna is a chemical engineer by training and license, with a degree in engineering physics thrown in for spice, but she loves reading about history and writing about an archaeologist. Truth be told, she's a little jealous of Faye and her archaeological adventures.
She enjoys reading, writing, gardening, spending time with her family, cooking, and playing her 7-and-a-half-foot-long monster of a grand piano. Her cat helps her write, so she should probably put his name on my books. Learn more about Mary Anna and her work here:

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