“Can I go with him?” Alison pleads.
Cannady defers to the nurses, one of whom nods and says, “You can come with us as far as the doors to the surgical suite but then you’ll have to go to the waiting room.”
Alison nods. “Thank you,” she says. Then she raises Hurley’s hand to her mouth and kisses it. “He has to be okay,” she says. “We’re supposed to have dinner tonight.”
As the nurses whisk Hurley’s stretcher out of the room and toward the elevator, I briefly consider trying to muscle Alison out of the way, or at the very least taking a spot on the other side of the stretcher and going with them. But then I catch a glimpse of Hurley’s face and see that he’s awake. He’s looking up at Alison’s face as if she is the angel of mercy herself, and then he smiles and says something to her.
My heart sinks. I realize what a huge mess I’ve made of things—romantically, personally, and professionally —and wish I could go back and undo some of what I’ve done. But I can’t. My first thought is to head home and share my sorrows with Ben and Jerry and my fuzzy companions, but I don’t want to leave the hospital until I know Hurley is okay. Nor do I want to share waiting room space with Alison. So I do the next best thing instead and head for the hospital cafeteria.
One Reuben sandwich and piece of peach pie later, Izzy walks into the cafeteria.
“Figured I’d find you here,” he says. “I heard what happened when I was upstairs visiting Mom.”
Typical. News always has traveled fast in this place.
“It was awful,” I tell him. And then the whole story bursts out of me. “I went to take your pictures and I found this receipt Nelson had for a nanny cam and figured out that he had one mounted in the ceiling in his counseling room so I tried to take some pictures of it but then Jackie appeared out of nowhere and started waving this huge knife at me with this crazy look in her eyes and I didn’t know what to do.” I pause for a second to suck in a ragged breath and then continue. “Then Jackie tells me how she and Nelson have been dating and how Shannon found out about Nelson’s little side activities with his patients and was going to report him, so Jackie killed her. She killed Carla, too,” I add, telling him how I figured out Carla’s death wasn’t a suicide. “That car accident Jackie was in years ago scarred a lot more than her skin,” I conclude. “She’s crazy, Izzy, totally and completely crazy. I don’t know how I never picked up on it before. And today she wanted to kill me. I tried to keep her calm by talking but then I ran out of things to say and she was coming at me so I tried distracting her by looking behind her as if someone was there, thinking maybe I could make a run for it. Except all of a sudden Hurley really
Izzy frowns and puts a reassuring hand on my shoulder. “It’s not your fault, Mattie. You didn’t stab him, Jackie did.”
I dismiss his objection with an impatient wave of my hand and try to get myself under control, using my napkin to blow my nose. “You know what I mean, Izzy.”
“The nurses upstairs said Hurley was in surgery,” Izzy says, and I nod. “They said David was operating on him,” he adds, and I nod again. “Interesting situation,” he concludes.
“David won’t let his personal feelings get in the way. And he’s an excellent surgeon. Hurley is in good hands.”
Izzy nods thoughtfully, then says, “I can have Arnie help me with the autopsy today so take the rest of the day off. After all you’ve been through you’ll be pretty useless in the office anyway.”
I smile at him. “I should probably be offended by that comment but I suspect you’re right. And I would like to hang here until I know Hurley is okay. So I think I’ll take you up on the offer. Thanks.”
“No problem. If you don’t mind, I’m going to hang until Hurley’s out of surgery, too.”
“Thanks, I’d like that.”
“Want to head up to the surgical waiting room?”
“Not really. Alison’s up there.”
“So?”
I fill him in on what happened the other day when Hurley overheard me talking to Alison, and the scene that took place in the ER a little while ago. “I’ve totally destroyed my chances with Hurley,” I conclude. “Alison clearly has her clutches in him at this point, and while I’m glad he has someone, I don’t think I can stand to watch the two of them mooning over one another.”
Izzy looks at me with a sad expression and shakes his head. “You are so clueless sometimes,” he says.
“Tell me about it. If I’d known Hurley was standing there I never would have said those things about him.”
“That’s not what I mean. Come on.” He stands, pushes his chair in under the table, and takes my tray of dirty dishes.
“Where are we going?”
“Upstairs.”
I follow him to the elevator and from there to the third floor surgical waiting room. I expect to see Alison sitting there waiting, but there’s no sign of her. One of the OR nurses, a young gal named Kate, appears.
“Mattie! Glad I found you. David wanted to let you know that Detective Hurley is doing very well. He’s in recovery. The knife nicked an artery in his shoulder but we were able to suture it up and stabilize him. You can come in and see him if you want.”
She’s extending me a special privilege since I know that family members and visitors aren’t typically allowed in the recovery area. I’m grateful but also wondering if the courtesy was extended to anyone else. “Is Alison Miller in there?” I ask.
Kate laughs. “Not hardly. She left right after we came up from the ER because Detective Hurley kept asking for you the whole way. He kept saying he wanted Mattie, and needed Mattie, and where the hell was Mattie, anyway. Alison was pretty ticked and lit out of here in a snit.”
“He said all that?” I say, stunned.
“See,” Izzy says. “I told you you were clueless.”
I remember the stab of sadness and jealousy I felt when I saw Hurley looking up at Alison earlier as they were leaving the ER. I had no idea he was asking for me. “Wow,” I say, still digesting it all.
“Yeah, wow,” Kate agrees. “You are one lucky lady. And may I add that you have superb taste in men. That detective is one heck of a hottie. So come on.” She turns toward the recovery area and motions for me to follow behind her. “It’s not nice to keep a hottie waiting.”
Chapter 48
It’s been just over a week since Jackie Nash revealed that she’s a few fries shy of a Happy Meal, and everything is right with the world. Well, almost everything. Jackie is locked away inside a mental institution up north and though it’s now known for sure that she killed Shannon Tolliver and Carla Andrusson, it’s unlikely she will ever stand trial. After the incident in Nelson’s office, she withdrew into a babbling, incoherent puddle of scarred human flesh. Word has it she is catatonic and the few slim threads of reason that remained in her brain have finally snapped.
The blood DNA evidence we sent to Madison came back and proved a match for Jackie. When a cut was discovered on the bottom of her right foot—most likely incurred when she stepped on a piece of the broken glass we found in Shannon’s kitchen—it became clear that she was at the scene at the time of the murder. During a search of Jackie’s house, the cops found the blood-covered shoes she was wearing with a neat little hole sliced through the bottom of the right one. It also became clear to me why I thought something about Jackie was different whenever I saw her. The scarring from the fire left her with contractions that made her favor her left leg, but the
