The Taint (12 page)

FORTY-THREE

“Emma, what are you doing here?” Susan Donlevy said, looking up from her paperwork.

“I traded with Joyce—she had something going this evening.” Emma put her bag of needlework on the counter and slipped out of her coat. “It’s certainly cool tonight.”

“I know, it’s been chilly in here too. All those windows in the patient rooms—I had to close the shutters.”

“Well, it’ll warm up soon,” Emma held up a key. “I’ll turn up the heat.” She went back into the utility room where the controls were.

Susan followed her back and watched as she fiddled with the switches.

“I think we’re in for a summer storm,” Emma said, peering at the thermostat dial.

“And Nora’s out there in it.” Susan rubbed her arms. “All of the patients have been restive this evening, even Tyler.”

“You know, it’s a funny thing.” Emma paused, the adjustment forgotten. “There’s something about a summer storm in the mountains. The wind sort of whistles through the trees, and the sky looks close enough to touch and there’s something almost brutal in the rain. And the lightning . . .”

“Now you’re making me nervous. I hate thunder.”

Emma smiled. “It passes quickly. And if you’re not out in it, it’s really quite splendid,”

“I’d prefer to just sleep through it.” She gathered up her belongings. “I just hope I get home before it breaks.”

“Oh you will, it’s still off in the west. It’ll be daybreak before it starts.”

It had been a long time since Emma had worked the night shift and it took a bit of getting used to. The halls were dark, with every third fixture lit, and the soft background music was off. Everything was locked up, the phone was silent and there was no one to talk to.

For a while she worked on her embroidery—flowered pillowcases to match her flowered sheets and towels. There were few items in her home that weren’t flowered. Tablecloths and napkins, dishtowels and potholders.

Then there was her knitting, and her crocheting, and the quilts and patchwork. Collages on the walls and lately she’d been thinking about pottery. Or maybe stained glass.

Emma Sutter did not believe in idle hands. Or idle minds.

Still, it was an effort to keep finding things to do or make. The linen closet was bulging at the seams, full to overflowing with her handiwork. She gave gifts for every conceivable occasion, and pushed the point once or twice. The grandchildren were covered in sweaters, caps and mittens. She was nearing total saturation.

She sighed and put the needle through the material, laying the hoop on the counter. Thousands of roses and daisies and violets.

She went to the medicine cabinet to fix the medication tray, wondering if there was any way to do small watercolor pictures on the tiny paper cups. A whole new art form.

Franklin Dunn was awake when she came into his room and she smiled sympathetically at him.

“How are you feeling,” she whispered, setting the tray on his bedside table and picking up his paper cup. She handed it to him and poured a glass of water from the insulated decanter.

“Like a fool.” He accepted the water and took the pill.

“Nonsense.” She watched him crush the little pill cup. “It was an accident, I’m sure.”

“How does one accidentally attempt suicide?”

“An impulse?”

“After being an attorney for so many years, I no longer have impulses . . . they’re too dangerous.”

“Well, whatever it was, I’m sure it’s over.” She patted his hand.

“The way you’re keeping me drugged, I’m sure I couldn’t harm a fly.”

“Doctor’s orders.”

“Where is Nathan, anyway? I thought he would be in to see me . . . or is it worse than I thought, and he’s been here while I’ve been in a drugged stupor?”

“His niece actually got him to take a day off.” Emma fussed around the bed, straightening the covers.

“Good for her.” He paused. “When do you think I might get out of here?”

“When you’re better.”

“Then what?”

“Save your cross-examination for the doctors. I’m only the nurse . . .”

“Huh, and Patton was only a soldier.” He crossed his arms in front of him, looking like a spoiled child.

“Goodnight,” she said and closed the door.

The deputy was asleep in a chair at the back of Wendall Tyler’s room, and she tip-toed in but he started and opened his eyes, sitting upright.

“Sorry,” she said. “Mr. Tyler’s medication.” She held up a syringe.

“Go ahead.” He settled back comfortably in the chair.

She gave the injection intramuscularly, jabbing the needle deep into his hip. The patient did not move.

“Really out of it, isn’t he?” the deputy asked.

“Yes.” She looked at him. “Eric Wilson, isn’t it?”

“I’m surprised you remembered.”

“I’m not as old as I look,” she said dryly. She gestured at the patient. “You’re getting paid to keep an eye on him? The man doesn’t move half an inch a day.”

“He might be dangerous.”

She snorted. “In that case there ought to be two of you, ‘cause you don’t look like you could handle him.”

Wilson patted the gun on his hip. “There are ways to handle trouble.”

“Or start it.” She hustled out the door.

Amanda Frey was as still as death when Emma looked into the room so she closed the door gently and went along the hall. Nelson was sleeping but the other flu case, Brown, complained of nausea and after checking his chart she gave him his pm Donnatol.

At four a.m. she started vitals and when she got to Amanda’s room she noticed a thin line of dried blood running from the corner of her left eye. She wiped it off, thinking that it must have spattered from the IV, and thought no more of it.

Monday

FORTY-FOUR

They began to arrive in the emergency room shortly after six a.m., even as the storm swept in. By the time Emma had the first group situated in the examining rooms, another wave descended. She put in a hurried call to Rachel Adams and then rolled up her sleeves and went back to work.

Their complaints were identical: elevated temperature, nausea and vomiting and severe headaches. She handed out all of the emesis basins that she had on hand and then had no choice but to let them puke into reasonably clean bedpans. The sound of retching drifted down the halls.

Rachel arrived at six-forty and even forewarned she was surprised at the numbers.

“I’ve had to open the west wing,” Emma said. “I’ve got them two to each examining room, and three in each patient room. I’ve kept them out of the east wing because I didn’t want to expose the other patients.”

“Good work.” Rachel hung her coat over a chair and put on a lab coat.

“Some of them are so sick they can’t sit up to vomit—they just lie on their sides and try to hit the pans on the floor.”

“We’ll just have to set up an assembly line treatment, starting with the sickest. I hope we have lots of disposable syringes, and Vistaril and Atropine.”

“Buckets are what we need,” Emma said and was off.

Rachel rapidly established a routine; physical examination, a short history where possible and administration of appropriate medication. After the first four or five patients, she could supply the history herself; sudden onset of severe headache, including dizziness and some visual distortion, and intolerance of bright light. Stomach cramping and nausea followed by forceful episodes of vomiting. Elevated temperature not responsive to aspirin. Generalized weakness and muscular aches. Most had woken from a sound sleep feeling a general malaise which accelerated to misery when they got out of bed.

The sickest among the twenty-two victims were elderly and, as Emma had said, lay inert, eyes begging for relief, vomiting every few minutes.

She was almost finished with the preliminary exams when she heard more arriving.

Joyce Callan arrived at ten minutes after seven and didn’t ask any questions, just began taking care of the people, working alongside Emma.

“How are the in-patients?” she asked after a minute, finished filling a line of syringes with Atropine.

“Gussy’s here,” Emma said, referring to the aide who assisted on days. “She’ll be all right for a while. What we really need is more basins for these patients.”

“Wastebaskets?”

“I’ve got what I could find. We can’t strip all of the patient rooms . . . we’re going to be admitting a few of these people.”

“Wait a minute, I’ve got an idea.” She held her hand out. “Give me the keys.”

Emma handed her the key ring and watched her run off down the hall.

In a moment she was back with six gold-colored plastic buckets. “Voila.” She distributed them to the new arrivals.

“Where did you get those?”

“From the chapel. Reverend Frey uses them to carry donated flowers from the patients out to the cemetery.” She smiled. “We’ll just collect another type of donation.”

“The last thing we need,” Emma struggled to keep a straight face, “is holy barf buckets.”

“I’m just going to draw a little blood, Mrs. Ragusa.” Rachel approached the bed with the venipuncture tray and the old woman began to moan.

She tied the tourniquet around the woman’s thin arm. “Make a fist, please.”

The tiny gnarled hand clenched.

She ran her fingers along the inside of the arm, feeling for the vein. It was a roller; she could have guessed as much. She wiped the arm with alcohol and picked up the needle. The skin punctured easily and she paused before beginning to probe for the vein.

“Oh no, oh no,” the woman moaned.

“It’s all right,” she soothed, “it’ll just take a minute if you’re still.”

“Oh no.” The woman licked dry lips.

The vein was tough and it took some skill to be able to exert enough pressure to puncture it without passing through and blowing it. She did it, though, and quickly pushed the first tube into place, watching the blood fill the tube.

The woman had begun to cry, a high keening wail.

“Almost done,” Rachel said and pushed a second tube onto the needle. The blood was slowing, the pressure in the vein barely enough to keep it moving.

She didn’t want to stick her again.

Finally there was enough blood and she pulled out the needle. Another alcohol swab, a bandage and she was out the door before the woman realized she was gone.

“Nathan,” Rachel came up to him, “I’m glad you’re here.”

“We’re having some sort of a crisis?”

“An epidemic . . .” they were walking toward the lab and she held up Mrs. Ragusa’s blood samples. “I want you to run these through your magic machine.”

“Certainly.” He took the vials from her. “Looking for anything in particular?”

“A straw in the wind.”

“Look at this,” she said. She held an open culture dish in her hands.

“Mr. Tyler’s culture? Still growing like mad.”

“But this isn’t Tyler’s. I did four cultures yesterday,” she was pulling more culture dishes out the incubator and opening them, “and all of them are the same.” She looked at him. “What does this mean?”

He bent over, looking at the dishes, each with a heavy growth completely covering the nutritive base. “Well, it might mean that we have a defective shipment of culture dishes, some impurity or contaminant.”

She waited while he picked up one of the dishes.

“Or we might have an extremely virulent form of organism on our hands.”

They prepared the specimens for shipment to the CDC in Atlanta, working hurriedly, aware of the patients waiting down the hall.

“Do you think they’ll be able to identify it?”

“I imagine so.” Nathan sealed the box with tape. “Although there are new mutations occurring all of the time. Still, they have a better shot at it than we do.”

Rachel took the box after he’d finished marking it and headed back toward ER where Earl Wagner was waiting to drive it down the mountain for immediate shipment to Georgia.

Then she went back to work.

By ten a.m. the storm had arrived in full force and the patient influx had stabilized. The majority of patients had improved following medication and were discharged to their homes with prescriptions and orders not to eat and to take fluids slowly.

They had admitted only four of the twenty-nine and all four were considered isolation cases.

Emma went off duty shortly after ten, three hours late. Her shift report was shorter than was her practice, but she was too tired to search her mind for details.

On the way home she thought that something was waiting to be remembered but she couldn’t make the effort. It would wait.

FORTY-FIVE

Rachel was standing at the window in his office when he returned from making his rounds.

“Look at it rain,” she said, looking out into the courtyard. “I’d almost forgotten rain.”

Nathan pulled a book from the shelf and sat at his desk. “It’s the last thing we need right now. Some people who need medical treatment will stay home because of it, the older ones especially.”

“And Nora.” She turned to face him. “Earl told me they’ve had to postpone the search for her . . . I hope she isn’t out there in the cold.”

“I’m sure she smelled it in the air long before there were any storm clouds.”

“You’re lucky it didn’t rain while you were at the lake.”

He swung around in his chair. “I want to talk to you about that.”

“What?”

“We’ve always been honest with each other,” he began, and then paused, taking a deep breath. “I didn’t go to the lake.”

“Nathan . . .”

“I spent the day with Joyce Callan.”

“Really?” She had to work to keep from smiling.

“We’re very close friends.”

“How long,” she said, “has this been going on?”

“Years. Actually ever since we first met at one of those medical conventions, I think I wrote you about it . . .”

“About the convention, yes, but not . . .”

“I wasn’t sure whether it would last. But it’s been four years now . . .”

“Four years,” she echoed.

“Anyway, I thought it was about time you, and everyone, knew.”

Now she smiled. “I’m happy for you.” She crossed the room and kissed him. “It’s about time.”

“You approve?” He held her away to look at her.

“Nathan, it’s time you stopped worrying about me. Of course I approve, but that shouldn’t be a deciding factor. If you’re happy . . . I’m happy.”

“Joyce thought you might feel that way.”

“I do,” she said firmly.

He hugged her. “I’m relieved. It’s been you and me since Tim died and I didn’t want you to think I’d abandon you now.”

“I’d never think that.” She held his eyes. “And I’m grown up now . . .”

“And you’ll probably be getting married before too long.”

“Well . . .”

“Oh, don’t think I don’t know, I’ve got eyes in my head.”

She blushed. “Know what?”

“About Jon.”

She looked at him. “You know
what
about Jon?”

“You’re in love with him. Have been since you were a little girl. And that he’s the reason that you didn’t marry Kelly.”

“But how . . .”

“I know you. I can see it in your face.”

She sat down, digesting this information. “Like a lovesick adolescent.”

“Oh, you’re better at hiding it now than you used to be.” He smiled at her fondly. “But I can see it.”

“A transparent lovesick adolescent. Except, sometimes, he makes me so mad . . . it’s as if he doesn’t even see me at all.”

“Well, if it’s any comfort to you, I can tell you, he sees you.”

“I wonder.”

“Jon is a complicated man. You have your work cut out for you.”

She nodded slowly and looked back out the window.

“But he’s worth it,” she said.