behind the counter was carrying on with a distraught woman. “Where is he?”
“Can’t you wait your turn like everyone else?” the woman demanded, fixing Alan with a glare from her drug- dilated eyes. “You’re not the only person here, you know.”
“Just tell me where they took him,” Alan demanded of the woman behind the counter, who had already moved closer to him, as though she welcomed even a momentary distraction from the angry patient’s siege.
“The cardiac case?” the receiving nurse asked.
Alan Cline nodded, and the nurse immediately handed him a clipboard. “If you could just fill out as much of this as possible, I’ll find out where your …” She paused expectantly, waiting for Alan to identify himself as either a relative, a friend, or perhaps even the lover of the patient.
“I’m his partner,” Alan offered, then, remembering Seattle’s domestic partnership ordinance, whose passage had been a cause for celebration among at least half a dozen of his employees, he spoke again. “His business partner.”
“Whatever,” the nurse said. “All I really need is his name, if he’s a member of Group Health. I can pull the rest of it out of the computer.”
“Then why can’t you pull my prescription out of the damn computer,” the woman next to Alan complained as he wrote Glen’s name down for the nurse. When the nurse simply ignored her, the addict swore under her breath, seemed to consider the odds of convincing the nurse to give her whatever it was she wanted, then shambled out, after mumbling that she would report the nurse to the co-op’s board.
“Do that,” the nurse sighed, not even looking up from the computer screen she was studying. “See you tomorrow.” As the woman disappeared out onto the street, the nurse finally glanced up, shaking her head sadly. “She thinks we’re a methadone clinic,” she explained. “Comes in practically every day, asking for — Ah, here it is!” She studied the computer screen, then smiled at Alan Cline. “Mr. Jeffers is just being admitted to the cardiac care unit.” Just then, Jim Dover burst through the doors, spotted Alan and joined him at the counter.
“Where’s Glen?” he asked. “Is he okay?”
Alan shrugged. “He’s in cardiac care,” he said. “Find out where it is while I call the office.”
Leaving Dover to get the information from the nurse, Alan crossed to the pay phones that lined one wall of the emergency room, found one that wasn’t broken and dialed the number that would bypass the switchboard and ring directly at the desk of Rita Alvarez, Glen’s secretary. As briefly as he could, he told her what had happened.
Sitting at Glen’s desk, where she had answered Alan Cline’s call, Rita Alvarez glanced at the small television her boss had told her to set up in the office that morning in case his wife showed up on CNN. Now, as she listened to Alan’s disjointed account of Glen’s heart attack, she found herself gazing at Anne, who, along with the warden and the rest of the witnesses to the execution, had just entered a room filled with reporters, cameras, and lights. “Go find out what’s happening,” she said. “Just stay with Glen, and let me know what’s going on. I’ll take care of everything else.” Hanging up the phone, Rita Alvarez went to work, first making a list of the people who had to be notified immediately, starting with Anne and progressing quickly through clients who had appointments with Glen that day, the firm’s attorney, and some of his closest friends. Less than a minute later she was speaking to the operator at the prison where Anne had just witnessed Richard Kraven’s execution.
“It’s an emergency,” she explained. “I need to talk to Anne Jeffers right away. She’s there at the prison. She was one of the witnesses—”
“Everyone wants to talk to everyone who witnessed the execution,” the operator interjected. “And everyone says it’s an emergency. If you’d like me to add your name to the list—”
“I’m secretary to Mrs. Jeffers’s husband,” Rita interrupted. “He’s just had a very bad heart attack. He may be dying.”
Anne hung up the phone but lingered over it, her hand unconsciously resting on the receiver as if maintaining physical contact with the instrument could somehow keep her connected to Seattle and whatever was happening there. A heart attack? Glen? But how was that possible? He wasn’t even forty-five yet! And he jogged every day, watched his weight — both of them were the quintessential Seattleites, spending as much time as they could out- of-doors, skiing at Crystal Mountain and Snoqualmie in the winter, rowing on the lake and exploring the San Juan Islands in sea kayaks in the summer. People like Glen didn’t have heart attacks!
Then she remembered the day almost ten years ago when she’d heard that Danny Branson had dropped dead while jogging, and Danny, only thirty-two at the time, had always been a major jock, running track all through their high school years. So what was life, anyway? Just a big lottery? Even if you did everything right, did you just drop dead?
The terrible feeling of fear and helplessness that had come over her as she listened to Rita Alvarez’s report of Glen’s heart attack began to transform into a calm determination: what had happened to Danny Branson would not happen to Glen. He would recover; together, they would learn everything there was to know about heart attacks, and they would see to it that he didn’t have another one. As the last of the terror faded from her mind, her fingers finally left the phone and she turned around to find Mark Blakemoor watching her, his eyes betraying a concern he rarely allowed to be exposed, either on the job or off.
“Has something happened, Anne?” the detective asked.
“It’s my husband,” she replied. “He’s had a heart attack. I have to get home right away. My flight’s not till tomorrow.” She felt panic rise. “I have to get home!”
Mark Blakemoor reached into the inside pocket of his rumpled gabardine jacket and handed her an envelope. “My flight leaves in a couple of hours,” he told her. “If there isn’t room for both of us, you fly, and I’ll go home on your ticket tomorrow.”
Anne’s brows rose a fraction of an inch. “And in return?” she asked. There had to be a catch: in all her years of dealing with cops, Mark Blakemoor had been the single individual who refused to divulge anything unless he was promised a future favor as the price. Now, to her surprise, he shook his head.
“This isn’t work,” he said. “This is personal. With personal, everything’s a freebie. Okay?”
“Let’s go,” Anne replied, instinctively knowing that he didn’t want to be thanked for the offer.
Five minutes later they were out of the prison, being driven through the crowd of demonstrators and reporters in a car the warden had supplied.
At least, Anne reflected as she heard the muffled questions the press was shouting after the closed vehicle, I don’t have to keep talking about the execution. One more article for the Herald and then, perhaps, she would take a leave of absence, and concentrate on Glen’s recovery.
As the car sped away from the prison, the thought lingered in her mind, and the more she thought about it, the more it appealed to her.
After all, soon it would be summer, and school would be out, and the whole family would be together. Then her mood darkened: how much of the family would there still be?
What if Glen didn’t make it? What would she do? How would she cope? How could she live without Glen?
CHAPTER 7
Total silence hung over the tenth grade journalism class at Maples School, named for the grove of trees within which it had been constructed back in 1923. Heather Jeffers and her classmates gazed fixedly at the television set that had been brought into the room so they could watch and discuss the coverage of Richard Kraven’s execution; the set had been on since eight-thirty, and until the stroke of nine — noon in Connecticut, where the execution was taking place — several of the students had been speculating on how close to the deadline it would get before the execution was stayed. Maude Brink, who had been leading the discussion of both the media coverage of the execution and capital punishment itself for the last week, had warned them that this time a stay was unlikely, but some of the kids clung to their hopes right up until the end. What struck Mrs. Brink as most interesting was that those students most strongly opposed to capital punishment were the most certain that the execution would inevitably be delayed, while those who were the execution’s strongest supporters were convinced
