Deadly Diversion: A Medical Thriller (12 page)

She stopped for a sip of water and began again.

“The world has changed since 9/11. People are asking—what am I doing with my life? Is it worthwhile? Does it make a difference?” She looked around the room. “That’s one thing you know for sure—you know that your lives and the work you do has meaning.”

She looked up from her notes and smiled. “You’re wondering what happened to my sister.” She motioned to someone offstage. “Meet Sally—a brand-new RN!”

A smiling, younger version of the speaker came onto the stage, using a wheelchair. The speaker thanked us for coming and joined her sister, giving her a hug. She waved goodbye as she and her sister started offstage.

The room exploded with applause, and people were on their feet clapping. The speaker stopped and smiled, seeming a little embarrassed by the fuss, then she bowed to the audience and mouthed a thank-you.

When the lights came on, two girls next to me wiped their eyes and I heard several people blowing their noses. I needed a tissue, too.

Walking out with the crowd, I remembered why I’d become a nurse.

“MONIKA,” AUNT OCTAVIA greeted me, a broad smile creasing her plump pink cheeks. She pulled me into her small apartment and pressed me to her soft bosom in a hug. She smelled like talcum powder. “Come in, come in, and cool off. That hallway’s hotter than outdoors, I’ll swear.” She fanned herself with her apron.

“I didn’t know if you were back yet but I thought I’d stop by and see,” I said, dropping my keys and wallet on a table by the sofa.

“I just got back last night,” she said, nodding toward a basket of laundry by the wall. Several white nurses’ uniforms—all dresses, no pant uniforms for Aunt Octavia—were piled on top of the sheets and towels crammed in the basket.

A timer went off.

“Make yourself at home,” she said with a backward glance at me.

I sat down at the round table by the window in the dining area that was an L-shaped extension of her living room. Aunt Octavia had lived in the same apartment since I was a little girl, and she still had the same furniture, too. Most of the wood pieces—various tables and cabinets—had been handed down through the family, worn smooth from many polishings. One cabinet had been originally built by a distant uncle in the midnineteenth century shortly after our family had first come over from Germany. Being at Aunt Octavia’s always felt like home.

“It smells like pumpkin pie in here,” I said as she came back in from the kitchen.

“You must have smelled these,” she said with a smile. She moved aside some handwork that was neatly piled on the table and placed a plate of sugar-topped ginger cookies in front of me.

She left again and returned with two glasses of milk and a stack of napkins, then she settled herself opposite me. I took a warm cookie and dunked it in my milk.

Aunt Octavia wiped her face with the dish towel hanging on her shoulder and pushed a few damp curls up into her gray hair. As we sat there eating the cookies she studied the materials spread out on the table covered by stacks of small fabric cutouts of identical shapes—some solid-colored, others in plaids, polka dots and tiny floral prints. An open sewing box stood nearby next to a bowl of raw navy beans.

“It’s already August,” she said, nodding toward the piles on the table. “I usually try to start in July.”

Every year Aunt Octavia, whom we fondly call “Auntie O,” made a small gift for every child in the family. An only child with no children of her own, she doted on the grandchildren of her late husband’s four sisters and five brothers. Her nieces and nephews totaled twenty-seven now.

“They’re going to be frogs.” She held up a finished one, bright in kelly-green. “A bean bag,” she added as the frog’s head flopped over her hand, black button eyes staring straight ahead.

“Where’d you get the idea for that?” I asked her, taking another cookie.

“From the rummage sale at church one year. I bought one and took it apart, then made a pattern of it.” She shrugged as if anyone could have done it.

But Aunt Octavia wasn’t just anyone. She was my favorite aunt, great-aunt by marriage, to be specific. She had become a private duty nurse after she’d left St. Teresa’s about the time I graduated and went to work there. She now worked for families wealthy enough to afford a live-in registered nurse to care for their dying family member.

She had inspired me to choose nursing as a career after I’d watched her care for my grandmother who had died of breast cancer when I was thirteen. Grandmother’s dying was long and drawn-out, and I realize now that her death had been made easier by the attentive, meticulous nursing care Auntie O had provided. She was the one family member I could talk to about things that happened at the hospital without having to sugarcoat the bad stuff.

She placed the right sides of two pieces of pink-flowered fabric together, strapped a pin cushion onto her wrist, and began to pin the edges together.

“So how’s things at St. T’s?” she asked, stabbing the fabric with a pin.

The timer dinged again.

“You wait right here.” She patted my hand. “This is the last batch. I’ll be right back and we can talk.”

After she had refilled the cookie plate and topped off our glasses of milk, I told her about the two deaths the past week, the accreditors due to arrive and the battles over the union.

She chewed slowly, digesting my words. “It seems to me,” she said finally, “that the union is one way to get some power.”

“I can understand it even if I can’t support it. And God knows, we need some clout. Administration doesn’t listen to anything we say. A union—if the organizers are not just doing their own empire building—can help patients.” I stopped. “People think it’s all about money but it isn’t.”

“Of course it isn’t. No one goes into nursing to get rich.” She jabbed a pin through the corduroy fabric and stuck herself. She sucked on her finger. “You know what I think?” She went on without waiting for my answer. “I think forming a union is about getting respect. Plain and simple. Respect from doctors...” She looked out the window, remembering, perhaps, the times when a doctor had berated her for doing the right thing after he had made a mistake. “And from administration,” she added, turning back to me.

“We know what we need in order to do our job,” I said, “but the bottom-line folks—how they can afford to keep hiring more and more of those guys, I don’t know—keep pushing until now the nurses are pushing back.”

“So you think a union’s the answer?” she asked me.

“I don’t know. One thing I do know, though, it pulls everyone apart, even before it happens. Management—that includes me—is told to stay out of it, but how can we? We work with these people on a daily basis, you know how it is.”

She nodded and picked up a green-and-red plaid cutout.

“In ICU anyway, we’re crammed in there together with all the equipment and everything to do and we have to be fast because just as quickly the patient can go bad. We’re like a basketball team, playing off the other. We can’t, or at least, I can’t, just ignore it when my nurses—some of them—are lobbying for a union. Administration says I’m not even allowed to have a civilized discussion about the pros and cons.” I dragged my finger across the table, tracing a thread in the tablecloth.

“Do you think the nurses will vote for it?”

“If they do, I’ll be on the other side of the table from the people I know best. And some contract will spell out for me what I can and cannot do, instead of letting me use my own common sense. You can’t manage by the book. Every nurse, every situation is different.”

She didn’t say anything until she’d finished pinning the frog and placed him on the stack to be stitched.

“No one really knows what nurses do,” she said as much to herself as to me. She’d said it many times, as had most nurses I knew. We’re the invisible majority in health care, this afternoon’s speaker had said, and she was right.

“You watch E.R. ?" Aunt Octavia asked.

“Nah, I’ve never’ve seen it.”

“I haven’t either, except one time at a patient’s house. He wanted to see it.” She shook her head. “I told him, ‘You see that many doctors in the E.R. looking down at you, you’re dead!”’

I laughed as Auntie O passed me the cookie plate.

NINE

Sunday, 12 August, 1050 Hours

I FOUND HANNAH, ROGER and the girls at our prearranged meeting spot waiting for the parade just as snare drums signaled the start. We exchanged quick hugs and turned toward the street to watch.

Deutsch Fest was a South St. Louis tradition, a street fair begun by German immigrants early in the twentieth century to celebrate their heritage. Now, nearly one hundred years later, St. Louisans of all nationalities joined in the festivities at the annual event.

Leading the parade was a troop of boy scouts, Hannah and Roger’s older twins among them, marching to a drum’s beat. Then came a contingent of police officers in uniform, complete with gun belts, holsters and batons. Motorcycle cops rode alongside them.

Following next were the politicians, out in force with their aides and campaign managers because there was an upcoming mayoral election. The current mayor, who wasn’t running for reelection, made his way along the line of spectators. He gave me a quick handshake and a tight smile and moved on. Two of the three candidates for mayor came next, working opposite sides of the street. The woman candidate gave out candy to squealing children, and the man tossed bubble gum into the crowd. Our district’s Congressional representative and his wife walked in front of a contingent of his supporters, all waving placards with his name prominently displayed.

Other local dignitaries followed, riding in cars and pickup trucks sponsored by Southside auto dealers. A giant replica of an Ed Crewe’s ice cream concrete sat atop an open convertible with the genial Mr. Crewes waving to the crowd.

A drum major walked backward in front of a high-school band and blew his whistle to signal the downbeat. The crowd rallied from the heat to scattered cheers as the band broke into “When the Saints Go Marching In.” The sun blazed down on the band members, dressed in heavy wool uniforms, sporting their maroon-and-yellow school colors. But they soldiered on, the trumpet players’ faces beet-red as they passed. A trombone player stopped to wipe his face with the back of his sleeve then hurried back into formation. A tuba player near the end of the group let her instrument droop on her shoulder as she passed in front of me. Suddenly the tuba dropped to the ground with a crash and the girl toppled over on top of it, her cap rolling away into the crowd. I reached her before anyone else did.

“Give her room,” I yelled as curious onlookers crushed around us. Her skin was hot and dry, her breathing shallow. Several cops pushed through the crowd and ordered onlookers to back up. A paramedic ran up, his case banging against his legs. He crouched down beside the unconscious girl.

“Heatstroke,” I said.

The girl twitched with what looked like an impending seizure but quieted as the paramedic slid a needle expertly into a vein, starting fluids from a bag his partner held aloft. The paramedics’ ambulance, positioned on a nearby side street for just such an emergency, squealed around the comer, scattering the more determined onlookers. Soon the girl and her tuba were loaded onto the ambulance and on their way.

I moved to the sidewalk, snagging a scrap of shade to watch the remainder of the parade, and rejoined Hannah and her family when the clowns finished tossing balloons to the children.

A few stragglers, children and some teenagers followed in the street, pretending to be marching. A police officer shooed them over to the sidewalk and the street was reopened to traffic.

Hannah handed around small water bottles and smeared sunscreen on the girls’ bare shoulders. Their sleeveless tops were damp with perspiration. Tina had her balloon inflated but Gena was still struggling with hers, her face red with the effort. Roger blew it up for her and handed it back as BJ joined us for a round of hugs. She’d been a part of our family since we’d met in kindergarten.

On duty, BJ was dressed in full uniform, light blue shirt for summer, black pants and black oxfords shined to a gloss. Her hair was pulled back in a French braid and her cap sat forward, shading eyes covered by reflective sunglasses.

The girls wanted to see her gun. She showed them how it wouldn’t come out of the holster. Gena bought the story, but Tina put both hands on her hips and stuck her chin out. ‘That’s not so. It’s a trick. You have to get it out. What if you see some bad guys?”

BJ leaned down to the girls. “I say a secret word,” she told them. “It’s magic.”

Their eyes opened wide.

“Speaking of magic,” Roger said. “How about some rides?”

“Yes, yes, yes,” the twins squealed, jumping up and down and tugging their parents toward the fair’s midway.

“What’s new?” BJ asked, keeping her eye on the crowd as we walked along the side street now filled with festival activities rather than its usual traffic.

German dancers, the women in brightly colored dirndl skirts and the men in lederhosen, demonstrated an intricate folk dance to the delight of fair-goers who had gathered around them. A canopy-shaded band, consisting of an accordion, two trumpets, a trombone, a tuba and a snare drum, accompanied the lively dancers. We passed a temporary post with signs directing fair- goers to games, rides, food and the first-aid station. “Stuttgart 4733 miles,” one hand-lettered arrow read.

“Your detective was at the hospital,” I told BJ as we joined a line to buy tickets for food, drinks and carnival rides.

“Mine?”

“Harding. The guy I met last spring.”

“Oh, yeah. When that woman was killed,” BJ said, referring to a death in ICU just before Easter. “So what’d he want? Was it about that guy that your nurse, uh, didn’t...?” BJ asked.

“He didn’t kill him, BJ,” I said in a whisper. “He just didn’t do all he should have to revive him.”

“Same thing,” she said. “He’s still dead.”

A woman ahead of us turned around.

We didn’t talk again until we reached the ticket seller. I pulled a ten out of my shorts pocket and ordered ten tickets. We moved on to the next stand. BJ had said she was officially on break, but she kept scanning the crowd.