Of Flesh and Blood (15 page)

Olivia gasped involuntarily. Evan reached out to her, but she shook it off. “No, Evan, please. I want to hear what happened.”

“I pushed the imbecile out of the way. With the simple technique I described, in less than a minute I delivered the little girl. But of course, she was already dead.” He swallowed. “And that poor mother. Olivia, if you could have seen the heartbreak in her eyes. And her complexion . . . how gray it had turned.” His face crumpled with distress. “The woman was hemorrhaging out from all of Andrews’s unnecessary slashes. I had no time . . . no equipment at the ready. . . .”

“Of course, Evan, how could you possibly be prepared?” she murmured.

“I had the Sister apply pressure,” he went on, as if reliving the experience in his head. “And I readied my tools and loaded the needles as quickly as I could. There was no time to even anesthetize the woman. She was so very brave. Not a word of complaint. I had barely started to suture those horrible wounds that Andrews had inflicted on her, when she suddenly stilled . . .” His words petered out.

Olivia rose to her feet and rushed around to his side of the table. She knelt in front of him and took both his hands in hers. She was astounded at her own forwardness but unwilling to release her grip. “Evan, what else could you have possibly done?”

“If she had been attended by an experienced midwife at home, everything would have turned out so much better.” Evan shook his head. “I am so very ashamed of my medical fraternity today.”

Olivia stared up into his tormented gray eyes. She desperately wanted to comfort him, but could not find the right words so she just clasped his hands and said nothing, aware of the electricity in the contact between them.

“We came here to find better care for Virginia,” Evan went on. “The quality of medicine I have seen here is worse than what we left behind. Almost barbaric, at times. And Virginia grows weaker by the day.” He cleared his throat. “Olivia, I think it might be best if I take Ginny back to San Francisco. To her home.”

“No. You cannot!” Olivia flushed crimson at the exuberance of her outburst and the heat of their contact. “You cannot give up so easily, Evan. What
about the clinic you dreamed of in Seattle? That is what would be best for your wife! And others like her. If only that poor woman who passed today had such a clinic to attend . . .”

Evan shook his head helplessly. “Your father is right, Olivia. I have no business sense. I have no means. I have no land. It
is
all just a half-baked dream.”

Olivia let go of his hands and jumped to her feet. “Do not say that! It is a marvelous vision. And you are the best person to see it built. The
only
one. You have the knowledge, the determination, and the compassion to see the job through.” She brought a hand to her chest. “I will speak to Papa again.”

Evan smiled tenderly, but his expression filled with resignation. “It will do no good, Olivia. We both know that.”

Olivia felt tears welling, but she fought them off. “Do not be so sure. And if not Papa, then I will speak to my friends. Some of them have fathers even wealthier than mine.” Reckless with affection, she reached out and touched the light stubble on Evan’s cheek. “We can find a way to make it happen.”

He rose to his feet, put his hands behind her back, and drew her closer to him. “Olivia, you are such a wonderful hopeless dreamer.”

His warm breath tickled her cheek. A fresh wave of heat overcame her. It felt like the summer before when she had kissed Arthur Grovenor after the church picnic, only so much more intense.

“Oh, Olivia,” Evan murmured.

She leaned forward and touched her lips to his. The past months of confusion, denial, and guilt melted away. All she wanted was to stoke the fire that now ran from her toes to her scalp.

Reading glasses riding near the tip of his nose, William McGrath struggled to find a position that would take the edge off his searing backache. Even his beloved high-back rolling leather chair, which had served him his entire forty-one-year career, offered no relief. The pain was getting worse by the day.

“The data is up to date as of eight
A.M
.—” Normie Chow lowered the pages he was holding and nodded to William. “You doing okay there, Bill?” he asked, upbeat as ever, despite the bleak news he had brought with him.

“Fine, Normie, I tweaked my back on the weekend.”

“Golf, right?” Chow asked. “You WASPs love to chase that little white ball through the grass, water, and sand. You old fellas are especially obsessed.”

William chuckled despite the double insult. “I haven’t golfed in ages.”

Chow ran a hand across the hair that he combed over his noticeably bald pate. “It’s not a Viagra-related injury, is it?” he asked.

William rolled his eyes. “Just a long-standing bad back.”

“You need to stretch more, Bill,” Chow advised. “That’s the ticket. The Chinese have known that for years. Ever see those ancient Asians doing tai chi in the parks? That slow-motion kung fu meditation stuff really works. My grandma’s pushing a hundred—which is thirty more than what she weighs—but she could still probably lift a piano.”

“I’ll be in the park tomorrow with a Steinway.” William reached for the report on his desk. “Now about these numbers . . .” Trying to push the burning throb from his mind, William grappled with the details on the busy spreadsheet in his hand. Though he had trouble digesting all of the various numbers on the page, he understood the gist of it—the outbreak at the Alfredson was far worse than originally presumed. The
C. diff
had spread like
wildfire through the Tower. The superbug had already shut down several outpatient units, but the huge building housed too many ill people to find appropriate space elsewhere, so they had to keep most of the Tower’s inpatient wards open, though under the most stringent isolation conditions. Three patients had died. Others were facing the same fate, especially if the
C. diff
ever reached the critical care units or the oncology wards with their already immunosuppressed patients.

And, of course, poor Princess Catherina
, William thought, though she would never appear in any official tally. Earlier in the morning, the princess had left via helicopter for the airport and the private jet that would carry her home, for the last time, to Denmark. William had seen her off. The memory of her swathed in layers of blankets tugged at his heartstrings.

Overwhelmed by the superbug, Catherina had deteriorated rapidly, and her doctors all agreed that she needed to be transferred to the ICU and put on a life-support system. But she had flatly refused. Minutes before her transport chopper arrived, William had gone to see Catherina, accompanied by Dr. Roselle Garland, who wanted one last stab at convincing the princess to reconsider. Catherina’s nurse had stepped out to gather the medications needed for the journey, so only Catherina and her faithful assistant, Jutta Lind—who was more agitated than ever—were in the room.

Catherina’s deterioration shocked William. Her cheeks had sunken to deep hollows and her skin was so sallow it verged on gray. An oxygen mask covered the lower half of her face, but the muscles in her neck still retracted with each hungry breath. Despite her grave condition, the princess was as dignified as ever. She even managed a small smile for her visitors and thanked them for coming.

Catherina panted while listening to Garland’s attempts to convince her to stay in the Alfredson’s ICU. The princess brushed away the doctor’s advice with a single weak wave. “I’ve already lived through too much unwanted attention and controversy.” She gasped. “I do not want it to follow me in death.”

William knew she was right. If Catherina died of the superbug, the media would jump all over it.

“Your Highness, you are still young,” Garland persisted. “With aggressive treatment, you could still beat this.”

Catherina’s pale blue eyes clouded with resignation. She stared at her doctor for a long moment. “No, Dr. Garland, I won’t.”

Garland clasped her hands together in frustration. “How can you know?”

“I am so tired, Roselle.” Catherina’s lips cracked in a grateful smile. “You have done all you can. I have been fighting for a long time. Too long. Now, I just want to go home. To be left in peace.”

Garland opened her mouth as though to argue but appeared to change her mind. Frown still fixed to her features, she merely nodded.

William realized that the princess’s insistence on decamping the Alfred-son without leaving a trace of her presence—or the deadly infection she had acquired there—would spare the hospital negative publicity at a pivotal time. But rather than feeling relieved, he felt sad, ashamed, and partly responsible for her poor outcome at his hospital.

Normie snapped William out of the memory with a waving hand. “Bill, what’s going on here?” he asked. “You having one of them seniors’ moments?”

“Probably.” William sighed as he pushed away the memory of Catherina’s departure. “Normie, what’s the status of the kitchen?”

“I wouldn’t eat off the floors yet.” Chow laughed. After two food preparers had acquired
C. diff
infections, the food services team had had no choice but to shut down the central kitchen. “We’re doing another terminal clean of the whole works but then we still have to retest the surfaces for any trace of
C. diff
.”

Stifling his frustration, William merely nodded. The Alfredson was now outsourcing most of its food preparation. No hotel or catering company in Oakdale had a kitchen large enough to support such a massive meal order that was complicated by so many special dietary requirements. The food services managers were forced to truck food trays in from a Seattle-based airline caterer. It was proving to be a logistical nightmare.

“How much longer would you estimate?” William asked.

Chow shrugged merrily. “Three days. Minimum.”

“Not good.” With the fire heating at the base of his spine, William focused on the paper in front of him. “Am I reading this right? Did we have twelve more
C. diff
cases overnight?”

“Probably more, Bill.”

“What does that mean?”

“Those are just the inpatients,” Chow said. “We haven’t got all the sick calls from staff yet. If yesterday is anything to go by, we’ll dig up five or six more cases by noon.”

William exhaled heavily. He could not fault Chow’s infection control team for how they had managed the crisis so far. They had reacted swiftly to the outbreak with what some considered severe and excessive measures: full-body precautions, banning visitors, confining inpatients to their rooms, and closing all break rooms. The aggressive steps were an absolute necessity. If the
C. diff
spread to other buildings, they might have to shut the doors of the entire complex. In over a hundred years since the Alfredson opened, it had never once closed, not even when the Spanish flu decimated the complex in the fall of 1918. William was determined not to let it happen under his watch.

“Normie, can you give me an idea of what to expect over the next week?”

“Hard to know.” Chow squinted. “If we can keep the
C. diff
out of any other buildings and the staff is rigorous about washing their hands and thumbs—people always forget their frigging thumbs!—then we should see the number of new cases plateau in the next couple days.”

“Plateau” was not the word William had hoped to hear, but it was at least better than some of the alternatives.

“Then again, you know me, Bill,” Chow went on. “I’m a glass-is-half-full kind of guy. Don’t count out the frogs and swarms of locusts just yet.”

“So noted,” William sighed.

Chow glanced at his watch and rose to his feet. “I got a debriefing with my team.”

“Normie, please remind them of how confidential all this information is.”

“Got it.” Chow turned for the door. “Just name, rank, and serial number. Right?”

“Exactly,” William said as he watched Chow hurry out of the room.
If the media gets wind of this now
. . .

He picked up the spreadsheet to study it closer. Another sizzling dagger dug into his spine. He felt so tired that the figures swirled in front of his
eyes. He refused to use exhaustion as an excuse, but the fatigue did remind him he was overdue for a blood transfusion. The lack of circulating red blood cells was affecting his concentration, but he did not know when he would find the time to go in for another bag or two of blood.

Six months earlier, he had been diagnosed with multiple myeloma, a cancer of the bone marrow that shuts down the body’s blood cell production. He had declined aggressive treatments, such as intravenous chemotherapy or a bone marrow transplant. Every time William saw his hematologist, the specialist insisted that William would have at least a 50 percent chance of long-term survival if he would agree to maximal treatment. But William steadfastly refused, because he knew the chemotherapy would make him far too ill to work. Believing the Alfredson could not afford to have its CEO sidelined at such a critical juncture, he opted, instead, for oral medication and blood transfusions, realizing that both steps were merely stopgaps, buying him a few years at best.

Aside from his hematologist, no one, not even his family, knew of his illness. He did not want to have to face his children’s reaction. He imagined Tyler would badger him to accept the ultra-aggressive treatment. As a surgeon, Erin might be more accepting of her father’s decision, but she would insist on including Tyler in discussions William didn’t want to hold yet. He knew the time would come in the not-too-distant future when he could no longer hide his illness, but in the meantime he saw no value in letting his family fret and fuss over the inevitable. If Jeannette were still alive, she would have understood. Of the many things he missed about his wife, her level-headed wisdom was high on the list.

William had so much he needed to accomplish before the cancer caught up to him. Under calm blue September skies, a hurricane was building around his beloved hospital. This
C. diff
outbreak was only the tip of the iceberg. However, its timing could not have been worse in light of the Alfred-son’s extraordinary board meeting that loomed less than two weeks away.