Effigies (13 page)

Joe was already halfway down the hall before the words were out of her mouth.

“Mr. Judd. Can you hear me? Can you get to the door?”

The door handle shivered.

“Just pull down on the handle and push. If you can get the door open a crack, I can get in and help you.”

Another groan sounded, but Faye could hear the latch moving. She grabbed the handle and pulled, ready to yank the door open as soon as he got it unlatched, before it could close and lock again. “You can do it, sir. I’m right here on the other side of the door.”

Another wordless sound, softer this time, came to her, but the door moved a fraction of a degree. She yanked hard and Judd’s body slumped through the open door.

A Choctaw woman rolled a housecleaning cart out of a room down the hall. Seeing them, she let out a small scream and ran for help.

Faye snatched up his limp wrist and pressed her fingers hard against it, hoping for a pulse. She found one, but she didn’t need a clock with a second hand to tell her that the beats were way too far apart.

Was he breathing? She promised God she’d take a CPR course if only this man would breathe. Faye rolled him over onto his back, tried to make sure his airway was open, then she held her own breath. After an inordinately long time, Judd’s chest rose and fell. Good.

Grabbing her phone out of her pocket, she dialed 911 and called in the cavalry, in the form of an ambulance team. Joe came running a minute later with a hotel employee bearing a key. When he saw Judd, he sank to the floor next to him and asked, “What happened?”

Faye could only say, “I don’t know.”

She and Joe sat together on the floor beside their new friend and held his hands until the ambulance arrived.

Lawrence Judd thought the pretty girl holding his hand was remarkably young to be so self-assured in a crisis. Maybe that meant that she’d seen more than her share of crises in her short life. Or maybe she wasn’t all that young. The strangest part of turning sixty had been the fact that he saw most everybody as young, these days. A person could be a high-powered executive or a mother of three, it didn’t matter, Judd still considered them young if their wrinkles were sparse and their hair wasn’t very gray.

How odd that he was thinking so clearly, yet he couldn’t even focus his eyes on the pretty girl’s face. The thoughts in his head were so much more clear than anything in the outside world. The feel of the carpet against his back. The smell of disinfectant that emanated from the hotel room’s toilet. The sound of footsteps approaching, footsteps that might be bringing help. All these things were growing less real by the second.

Perhaps this was what it was like to die.

Chapter Thirteen

The paramedic checking Mr. Judd’s vital signs seem capable and levelheaded, considering that she was a child. Faye wondered how old you had to be to go around saving lives. Watching the young thing work, Faye decided that she was old enough.

The serious young woman threaded an IV into Judd’s arm, while a man with a familiar face poked an oxygen cannula in his nose. Davis Nail didn’t talk much when he was working, just as he didn’t talk much in everyday life. But here, doing the work he obviously loved, he didn’t radiate anger and resentment. He exuded competence.

“Are you a relative?” the young woman asked Faye.

“No, just a friend. He’s from out of town. I think his family’s all up north. He was supposed to meet me for…um, for dinner. When he didn’t show up, I came looking for him. He was like this when I got here.”

“He hasn’t been responsive at all?”

“No. He was unconscious, just like he is now, but he’s been breathing the whole time.”

The woman was taking notes, while keeping a constant eye on the patient. “Do you know if he takes any medications regularly?”

Here was a question Faye could answer. “Yes, he does. He has high blood pressure, for sure. And angina and high cholesterol. Maybe some other stuff. I think he takes pills for all those things.” She shuffled through the possessions scattered around the suite, finally locating the pill case that held his daily medications in the bathroom. That day’s compartment, marked Monday, was empty, and the rest were full. “There’s at least one more bottle that he takes when he feels bad.” She found it in the pocket of a pair of pants draped over the desk chair. “There may be more, but these are all I know about.”

“This is for angina,” Davis said, taking the prescription bottle and reading the label.

“Has he had a heart attack?” Faye asked. “He was feeling pretty weak this morning.”

“It’s hard to say at this point. These medications look like the typical middle-aged man’s cocktail—diuretic, beta-blocker, ibuprofen, cholesterol drug, multi-vitamin—but the prescription drugs are generic, so they all look sorta alike. Little white bullets.”

The emergency personnel lifted Judd onto a stretcher and hustled him down toward the elevator. “Meet us at the hospital. We’ll take good care of him.”

Faye had always considered hospital waiting rooms to be obnoxious places, well-stocked with magazines which assumed that the whole world was interested in the serpentine love lives of Hollywood stars. They were also always well-stocked with people suffering through the worst day of their lives. Whenever the volunteer at the information desk rose and called out a name, the shadowed eyes of the waiters not called sunk deeper into their sockets.

She and Joe had spent three hours in medical purgatory when Ross Donnelly burst into the room. “I’m staying at the same hotel as Mr. Judd, and I heard one of the employees say that he’d been rushed to the hospital. How is he?”

Faye was assembling a jaundiced opinion of Ross Donnelly—why would he care so much about a man he just met, unless it was because he was hoping for a favor?—until she remembered Joe asking her much the same question. Why did she care about Mr. Judd, whom she didn’t know well? Why did she care about Bodie and Toneisha and Chuck and Dr. Mailer and Oka Hofobi? What did it matter? She just did.

She answered his question. “The paramedics were still trying to get him stable when they loaded him on the ambulance. That’s all we know.”

Ross sank into the chair next to Faye and looked her full in the face. “I heard that you were the one that found him and called 911. Word in the hotel casino is that you’re the hero of the day. How are you holding up?” He leaned in so close that she could smell his after-shave, and his eyes never left hers. His fingers brushed lightly across the back of her right hand.

The man had impeccable romantic radar. Most guys gave Faye a wide berth whenever Joe was sitting right beside her. His six-plus feet of well-toned muscle tended to have that effect on men. Ross had obviously intuited that she and Joe were just friends, and he didn’t mind making a move on Faye right in front of him.

This made Faye more than a little uncomfortable, so her answer was awkward. “Uh, it wasn’t just me. Joe did a lot, too. And the paramedics, of course.”

Joe, who was a little smoother than Faye, rose and asked, “Anyone want anything from the vending machines?”

Faye and Ross both shook their heads and Joe ambled down the hall.

Continuing her efforts at scintillating conversation, Faye asked, “You’re not from around here, are you? I guess that’s obvious, since you’re staying at the hotel.”

“I’m from Brooklyn, but I came south to go to Emory, and I’ve never looked back. I wasn’t made for ice and snow.”

“They get ice in Atlanta now and then.”

“Yeah, and you should see those Georgians try to drive in it. It’s like amateur night at the demolition derby. I think I need to go further south.”

Faye laughed and said, “I’m from Florida. I’ve never seen snow.” Then she caught herself short when she heard how the light-hearted sound of laughter vibrated in the tense atmosphere of the waiting room.

“I’ve always intended to get to Florida, but I was too busy working. People say I’m a workaholic, but I believe in what I do.”

Faye was trying to decide whether to confess to being a workaholic, too, or whether to ask him to tell her more about the work that he believed in so fervently, when the volunteer at the information desk announced, “Friends of Lawrence Judd?”

She and Ross rushed forward. The volunteer held out a phone and said, “Mr. Judd’s wife wants to talk to the young woman who helped her husband. Is that you?”

Faye noticed that the woman’s statement was carefully phrased to avoid revealing anything about the patient’s condition, or even whether he was still alive. She put the phone to her ear and braced herself for a conversation with a woman freshly widowed.

A quavering voice asked, “Are you Faye Longchamp?” and Faye was confused. Mr. Judd had some health problems, but he was barely over sixty. That was hardly elderly, these days. Did this frail, old voice belong to his wife or to his mother?

“Yes, this is Faye Longchamp. I’m so sorry for your husband’s trouble.” Was that the right thing to say? What if he was dead?

“Oh, my dear, if it weren’t for you, I might have lost him.”

Faye blew out a sigh of relief.

The tremulous voice continued. “I wonder if I could ask a favor of you. Lawrence is all alone down there, and my multiple sclerosis hasn’t let me travel for many years.” That explained the shaky voice, and it explained why a wife solicitous enough to load her husband’s pill box for him wasn’t already on a plane to Mississippi. “Will you talk to the doctor for me? And will you talk to Lawrence, then call me and tell me how he looks? I’m just sick with worry, and the doctor’s in such a tearing hurry to get off the phone. I can’t be sure I understand everything that’s going on.”

“Do you think they’ll talk to me?” Faye asked. “I’m not family, and they’re persnickety about privacy around here.”

The voice was no less quavery, but it grew stronger. “I gave the doctor my verbal permission to speak to you, which he resisted, so I faxed a letter to the hospital giving my written permission. I told him that I had not been married to a lawyer for thirty-five years, only to be shunted aside by his arrogance. And I’ll tell you that, even in my day, Bennett College had an excellent English program, so I have learned to express myself well on the printed page. I trust that my letter melted his fax machine.”

To heck with Joe and his accusation that Faye liked everybody, even ax-murderers. She
really
liked Mrs. Judd. “Yes, ma’am. I will gladly do battle with the medical system, if it will help you and your husband. Count on me.”

Ross Donnelly had stepped away to give Faye some privacy for her conversation with Mrs. Judd, so he couldn’t hear what she said. It didn’t matter. The few steps he’d taken away from Faye only served to give him some perspective on the woman. Looking at her like this, from head to toe, it was impossible to ignore the fact that she was dressed like a manual laborer. There wasn’t a woman in Ross’ circle of acquaintance who shopped for her work clothes at the army surplus store. Now that he’d met Faye, it occurred to him that he might need to expand his social circle. Because under those shabby clothes was a body that was as slender and shapely as the ones belonging to his debutante friends.

Above that body, under a heavy coat of dust, was a most appealing face. He liked her eyes, not just because of their exotic up-tilt, but because of their unmistakable intelligence. Her sleek cap of black hair didn’t require mousse or spray to do its job of framing Faye’s delicate features. Her skin, the color of dark honey, was stretched tautly over a most determined jawline. And her full lips were soft, but not weak.

He didn’t know what those lips were saying to Mr. Judd’s wife, but he sensed that her words offered comfort. He sensed that Faye was a woman you could count on. He’d never sought out that quality in a woman, but now that he’d seen it, he wanted it. A hospital cardiac unit was not a propitious place to ask a woman for a first date, but Ross would be looking for a chance to woo Faye. No, not just looking for a chance. He would make his own chance, because that was the kind of man Ross Donnelly was.

Faye was relieved to see that Mr. Judd was conscious and alert. Even better, he made sense when he talked. But the bilious green, ill-fitting hospital gown made him look like a man at death’s door. Cables emerged from beneath the gown, emanating from the general vicinity of his chest. They converged on a fist-sized electronic instrument tucked into a pocket on the front of his gown.

He pointed to the pocket machine, saying, “They say this’ll let them watch my heart beat all night long. If it looks good, I’ll get out of here tomorrow. Did you talk to Sallie? How’s she holding up?”

“Your wife is doing just fine, and you know it, because she’s tough. I understand that she told your doctor where to get off.”

He adjusted the oxygen cannula resting on his upper lip, which had slipped when he chuckled at the thought of his wife chewing out his doctor. “Sallie’s body may not take good care of her, but her mind and her will—well, I’ve never met a stronger woman. No. Let me rephrase that. I’ve never met a stronger person. It looks like my body might be turning on me, too, so maybe I’ll take a page out of Sallie’s book.” Thinking about his wife had brought a bit of color back to the sick man’s face. Faye would like to mean that much to somebody, someday.

“I’ll tell her that you’re looking much better, because you are. But first, she wants me to corner your doctor and get the whole truth out of him.”

“Good luck with that.”