Chapter 11
Hurley’s challenge leaves me more determined than ever, so Monday morning I phone the office to tell them I’ll be in late. Cass takes the message and informs me that Izzy is also tied up this morning so my delay shouldn’t be a problem. I then make a phone call to the hospital to see if Erik Tolliver is on duty. He is, but I have another stop I want to make first.
Ten minutes later I pull into the parking lot of Dairy Airs, head inside, and settle in at one of the tables.
The waitress who serves me is Jackie Nash, an ex-classmate of mine and the owners’ daughter. I know Jackie not only because of our school connection, but because she’s had a number of surgeries at the hospital. Back in high school she had big plans, as did the rest of us, for escaping her small-town roots and moving to the big city. But a tragic car accident in her junior year left her burned over seventy percent of her body, and that changed everything. She still bears some horrific scars despite several plastic surgeries for grafts and scar revisions, and the gnarled tissue on her legs has given her a chronic limp. It might not have been so bad had the damage been contained to her torso and limbs but the flames also reached one side of her face. As a result, she resembles the Batman villain Two Face, looking relatively normal—and quite pretty—from one side, and horribly maimed from the other.
Jackie has been working the family business ever since her recovery from the accident. Those of us in town who know her are used to her scars, but occasionally, when strangers drop in, she is forced to face the awkward stares and rude comments of brutally honest children and tactless adults. Not surprisingly, those moments along with the trauma of the accident and the disruption it caused to her personal life have left her with more than a few emotional scars to go with the physical ones. During the years I worked in the hospital ER, I took care of Jackie during several of her mental breakdowns, though I’ve heard she’s doing better these days.
Today she greets me with a smile, takes my order for a bowl of peach ice cream—I figure fruit is a good choice for breakfast—and brings it back a few minutes later. As I watch her walking back to the table something about her seems different, though I can’t figure out what it is. I finally decide it’s her face, which seems to have a new glow to it. Had she had another graft revision surgery, or was she simply using new make-up?
“What’s new?” she asks, sliding into the chair across from me as I swallow my first spoonful. “What’s this I hear about you and David?”
“I also heard you changed jobs. Someone said you’re working for the coroner now.”
I suspect Jackie is merely being nosy, trying to earn a little leverage in the gossip commodity. But it’s okay because her veiled inquiry offers me the perfect opening.
“That’s also true,” I say after swallowing another bite. “In fact, that’s one of the reasons I’m here. I’m looking into Shannon Tolliver’s murder.”
She shakes her head, looking stricken. “It’s a terrible, terrible thing that happened to Shannon. Do they have any idea who did it?”
“Nothing solid yet. Do you have any ideas?”
Jackie rears back and looks at me, clearly startled by the question. “Me? Why would you ask me?”
I shrug. “You worked with Shannon so I figured you might have some insight into her life and the people in it.”
Jackie glances around at the other tables and then looks down at her hands in her lap, her fingers fidgeting. “I suppose they’ll suspect Erik,” she says in a low voice. “Things
“I heard they had an argument of some sort a couple of days before she died. Were you here when it happened?”
“Oh, yeah,” Jackie says, rolling her eyes. “It was pretty intense. Shannon served Erik with separation papers and he didn’t take it too well.”
“Do you remember what they said?”
Jackie cocks her head to one side and looks up at the ceiling for a moment, giving me time to eat another spoonful of ice cream. “Well, I remember Erik telling Shannon he didn’t want a divorce. He told her he wanted to try to work things out. But Shannon was pretty adamant about going ahead with it. Erik got mad, called her a bitch, and threw the papers at her. Then Shannon yelled at him to leave.”
“Did he?”
Jackie nods. “He stormed out, got in his car, and peeled rubber out of the parking lot.”
“What did Shannon do or say after that?”
“Well, she was pretty upset, crying and all. It was the end of her shift so she went into the back room for a bit to try to collect herself. Then she came out, ordered a bunch of food to go, and as soon as it was ready, she left.”
“Did you see Erik again after that?”
Jackie shakes her head. “Nope, but he never did come around much. He’s lactose intolerant so there isn’t much here he can eat.”
“Who else was working that day?”
“It was me and Shannon up front here. Mom was working in back.”
“Did your mom witness the argument between Shannon and Erik?”
She nods. “Mom spent some time afterward trying to calm Shannon down.”
“Is your mom here today?” I doubt it since I haven’t seen her, and Jackie confirms my guess with a shake of her head.
“Dad’s here today. Mom had a doctor’s appointment.” She takes out her order pad, scribbles something on a blank page, rips it out, and hands it to me. “Here’s our home phone number,” she says. “Give her a call if you want.”
I take the paper and slip it into my purse. “Thanks. I will. If you can think of anything else about Shannon that might be significant, let me know. You can reach me at the ME’s office.” I give her the number, she writes it on another blank page of her order pad, and stuffs it in her pocket.
“Will do,” she says. As a new customer enters, she gets up and adds, “Gotta run, but it was good talking with you, Mattie. Good luck with the whole marriage thing.”
It only takes me another minute to finish my ice cream because I manage to resist the urge to lick the bowl. Then I get back in my car and head for Mercy Hospital, my old employer.
The hospital is an emotional place for me. Not only is it where both the birth and death of my marriage took place, it’s where I worked for over twelve years. A good portion of my adulthood has been spent there, and I have tons of memories, both good and bad.
Many of the good ones are from my years in the ER. Things there can go from monotonous to chaotic in a matter of seconds, and it can be wonderfully, disgustingly messy—emotionally messy, blood-and-guts messy, and life-and-death messy. I left the ER to go work in the OR so I could be closer to my husband, David. But in the end, I lost two things that were very important to me: David and my job in the ER.
These days I’m a topic of lively gossip at the hospital—the nurse who caught her husband playing tonsil hockey with someone else in one of the operating rooms; the nurse who was suspected of murdering the lipstick on the dipstick; and the nurse who now slices and dices in a whole new environment. Oh, yeah, and the nurse involved in the infamous nipple incident.
It’s been a few months since David and I split and since then there have been other topics to occupy the hard-core gossipers. While those events offered some distraction, they weren’t enough to divert attention away from me altogether. I still get stared at and I swear I hear my name whispered in corners every time I go there.
Hoping to minimize the scrutiny today, I bypass the main hospital entrance and go in through the ER instead. The ER staff is a little less judgmental than your average hospital worker. The scale of what’s weird, newsworthy, and important gets altered once you’ve cared for a man with a flashlight up his rectum, a condition that was later dubbed a “butt light.”
