conversation. She glanced back at him. He looked worn down and used up.
She leaned over the back of her chair so she could see him better. “Excuse me,” she said. The farmer’s wife lowered her magazine and stared. “Excuse me,” Clare said again. “Do you have a place to stay?”
The man stopped talking and looked at her, like one party to a tete-a-tete examining an interloper.
“Because if you don’t, I know a shelter. You can’t drink there, though.”
He blinked at her, dropped his head, and resumed mumbling to himself.
“Don’t worry about him, Reverend.” Clare whipped around to see Alta standing there, a clipboard in her hand. “He comes in every once in a while. He’ll be here overnight, drying out.” She spoke a little louder to the man. “Doctor will see you in just a few minutes, Mr. Arbot. You hang in there.” The man gave no sign he had heard the nurse.
“Can I go in?” Clare asked her.
“Yep. He’s had some pretty powerful narcotics, so don’t be surprised if he seems out of it. We’re waiting on radiology to clear out, and then he’ll go in for his X rays.”
“Did the doctor say anything?” Clare knew that under the privacy laws, Alta really had no business telling her anything. She wasn’t a relative, nor was she visiting in her official capacity. But the nurses had gotten used to seeing her around as she and the town’s other clergy rotated through the unpaid post of hospital chaplain. Alta responded exactly as she would if Clare had been going in to pray with or counsel a patient who had requested her.
“Looks like a simple fracture, although of course we won’t know for sure until radiology. It’s a bad break, though, and Dr. Stillman will want to put him under to set it. So I suspect the chief will be our guest at least until tomorrow.” As she spoke, she led Clare to the brushed-metal doors separating reception and waiting from the actual emergency room. She whacked a fist-sized button set in the wall, and the doors hissed open. “Right through there,” she said. “He’s in the third bed down.”
Clare, following the nurse’s directions, parted the third pair of limp blue curtains. “Hey,” she said.
Russ was reclining on an angled hospital bed, begowned in a johnny, his broken leg elevated on a pair of poofy pillows. As Alta had said, there was an IV in his arm, and whatever was in it must have been pretty good stuff, because the lines of pain and fatigue that had been chiseled into his face were gone. In fact, Clare had never seen him looking so relaxed.
“Hey,” he said, waving her in.
“How are you feeling?”
“Stoned.” He laughed. It was different from his usual laugh, lighter, younger.
Clare smiled. She nodded toward his leg. The break was hidden by a twill-covered ice pack the size of a small sandbag. “I meant that.”
“I’m not feeling much pain, but Jesus, it looks awful. Take a look.” He sat upright and flipped the ice pack off. He was right. It did look awful, swollen and spectacularly bruised. He resettled the bag over the break and leaned back again.
“I called Harlene,” Clare said. “She’s taking care of everything. I’m supposed to tell you not to fret.”
“No fretting, yes ma’am.” He grinned.
Clare bit her lip to keep from laughing. “I called your mother, but she wasn’t at home. I left her a message. I told her you’d broken your leg, but that you were going to be fine, and I left her my cell phone number in case she wants to reach me. I figured that way, I can let her know what’s going on if she calls when you’re getting it set or something.”
He sobered fast. “Before you tell her anything, make sure she knows I didn’t break my leg while on duty.”
“But you were examining a crime scene.”
“I was walking in the woods.” His face took on a stubborn cast. “If my mom thinks I was injured in the line of duty, she’ll freak out. Her biggest fear is that something’s going to happen to me because of my job.” He took her hand in his and looked up at her, confiding, “She’s not really wild about me being a cop.”
“I had gotten that,” Clare said. “Okay, I’ll tell her we were taking a walk.” She pulled her hand out of his and looked around for a chair, but there was nothing in the drapery-enclosed space except a rolling cart full of medical supplies and Russ’s IV pole.
He stroked the side of the bed. “You can sit here.”
“I’ll stand, thanks.”
“Come on. Keep an injured man company.” He gave her a smile she had never seen before: wheedling, charming.
“I’m getting a look at a whole other side of you,” she said, compromising by leaning her hip against the edge of the bed where he had indicated.
“If I get up in this damn hospital gown, you’ll get a look at every side of me.” He laughed again.
She glanced back at the wilted blue curtain. Maybe she ought to open that. It wasn’t as if they were alone; she could hear one of the nurses cracking a joke and a doctor quizzing a blood technician. And it wasn’t as if she were being inappropriate; when she visited patients they almost always talked in private, behind a drawn curtain or a closed door. But she was uncomfortable with this version of Russ, this sloe-eyed, uninhibited Russ. She liked his inhibitions. She relied on them.
She jumped up and pulled the drapery aside, just in time to whack a doctor standing opposite her who had obviously been reaching for the curtain himself. “Oh!” she said. “I’m so sorry.”
He gave her a hesitant smile. “I’m Dr. Stillman,” he said. His glance flickered to either side of her, as if he were checking to make sure no one else was going to leap out at him. “I’m the orthopedic surgeon. Are you Mrs. Van Alstyne?”
She swallowed her first response, and said, “I’m Reverend Clare Fergusson. I brought Chief Van Alstyne in.”
Russ sat up straighter. “Dr. Stillman?” he said. He peered at the man. “You can’t be Dr. Stillman.”
Clare looked, too, but the doctor seemed authentic enough. White coat, stethoscope, a short stack of medical- record jackets under his arm.
“You must have been one of my dad’s patients,” he said, moving to Russ’s side and peeling the ice pack off his leg. “What did he have you for?”
Russ was still looking suspiciously at him. “Broken collarbone.”
“Your father practiced here?” Clare said. “In Millers Kill?”
Stillman looked up from where he was delicately touching Russ’s leg. “I’m the third-generation Dr. Stillman in these parts. My dad was an orthopedist, too, so I get this reaction a lot from people who had their bones set by him when they were kids.” He grinned. “They can’t figure out how Dr. Stillman’s stayed so well preserved.” He stood up. “Okay, Chief, I’m going to deliver you to the tender mercies of radiology. I’ve already scheduled an operating room for you, so we’ll be able to get this taken care of right away.”
“Operating room!”
“Trust me, you’re not going to want to be awake for this one.” Stillman unlocked the bed’s wheels, rehung Russ’s IV on a stubby hook at the head of the bed, and rolled through the open curtains.
“Clare?” Russ sounded disoriented, like someone calling for a light in a suddenly dark room.
It took her several long strides to catch up. “I’ll be here when you get out,” she said.
They exited the emergency room through a side hall. “It’ll be a few more hours before he’ll be able to see anybody,” Dr. Stillman said. He brought the bed to a stop in front of a pair of elevators. “I’m not sure what room he’s being admitted to.”
The elevator doors opened. Russ caught at her hand, squeezed it tightly, let go. Stillman trundled him into the freight-sized elevator.
“I’ll be here,” she said again.
Russ reached toward her, his arm stretching, his hand outflung as if he could pull her through the elevator doors and take her with him. His eyes were dilated black with the painkillers pumping through him, and even though she knew it was just the drugs, she had to stand for a long time, staring into her scratched and blurry reflection, after the stainless-steel doors closed on his final words: “I’m still holding on. Not letting go.”
