to send a deputy over there, don’t you think?”
Without hearing the other side of the conversation, I could guess the bone of contention: The medical examiner didn’t want to speculate on cause of death until he’d done an autopsy.
“It’ll be our little secret,” Rhine said. “Cross my heart and hope to die.”
Dr. Kitteridge must have relented, because the sheriff fell silent for a full minute while she listened to his preliminary findings.
“Thanks, Walt. I swear I won’t tell a soul. Give me a call when it’s official.”
She grabbed her winter coat from the booth and began working her arms into the sleeves.
“How’d you like to follow me to the hospital, Warden?” she said with a horsey smile. “Kitteridge found contusions on Randall’s neck and signs of petechial hemorrhage. It looks like someone held his face down in the snow until he suffocated to death.”
FEBRUARY 14
The hospital has got a weird smell. Like Dr. Frankenstein’s laboratory or something. Creepy!
Ma sits me down in a chair in the waiting room while she talks to some frog-faced woman at a desk.
She says Prester is in the EMERGENCY ROOM and we can’t see him until he is STABLE.
Prester has never been stable, Ma says. I think it’s supposed to be a joke, but she don’t laugh.
She smiles and pats my hand. What do you know, Edgar Allan Poe? she asks me.
Nothing, I say. That’s what I always say.
Do you think you’ll be all right here on your own for a few minutes? I need to get something out of the van.
A cigarette?
You know I don’t smoke anymore, Lucas. It’s just something I need right now. She smiles and opens my NOTEBOOK on my lap. Just stay here and write some more stories for a while, she says. No one’s going to bother you.
Can I have a Coke? I need one dollar and twenty-five cents.
Lucas, don’t think you can trick me just because I’m upset.
When she goes out the automatic door, a cold wind blows in behind her, and the mean lady behind the desk shivers hard.
If Prester is frozen solid, that must mean his willie is frozen, too. What if the doctor accidentally snaps it off like an icicle?
OUCH!
Ma comes back and she has something in her hand. I can’t tell what. She’s got her eyes closed and she’s moving her lips like she’s praying, but no words are coming out. She sits down next to me again.
What did you forget, Ma?
She holds out her hand and there’s a little green plastic chip. It says UNITY/SERVICE/RECOVERY in a triangle around the words 3 MONTHS.
What’s that? I ask.
My good-luck charm, she says.
12
You can tell a lot about a town from its hospital. The one in Machias was located on a piney stretch of road, not near anything in particular except an abandoned horse-racing track festooned with NO TRESPASSING signs. Most people would have driven past the building without realizing it was the local medical center. The low-slung brick structure was smaller than my old junior high in Scarborough.
Whoever decorated the interior had gone for a casual down-home effect, sort of like a country inn. The waiting room was painted a canary yellow, with several blue couches and floral-print chairs arranged around an imitation woodstove. A totally bald man who looked like he might have fought in the Battle of the Bulge sat in a robe and slippers, watching old newsreels play in his head. The only other person in the room was an odd-looking boy who had his legs drawn up beneath him in his chair and was scribbling violently in a notebook.
We met a male nurse, a whip-thin guy in green scrubs, coming down the checkerboard hallway that led to the emergency room.
“Hey, Sheriff,” the nurse said. “What’s up?”
“Who’s on duty in the ER this morning, Tommy?”
“Dr. Chatterjee.”
“Can I speak with him?”
“He’s with a patient-it’s a severe hypothermia case.”
“Yes, I know,” said the sheriff. “The patient’s name is Prester Sewall. We have reason to believe he might be dangerous.”
The nurse nodded as if he understood-although he clearly didn’t-and disappeared down the hall in the direction of the ER.
The last time I’d set foot in a hospital had been a year earlier, when I’d had my skull fractured by the scariest man I’d ever met. He’d beaten me to within an inch of my life, and it was a miracle I’d survived. It was a different hospital, different emergency room, but the memories of that day made the hairs on my neck prickle.
After a few minutes, a doctor in a white coat and scrubs came hurrying along from the ER. He had the darkest skin of anyone I’d met in Washington County, and jet-black hair swept up from his forehead. His plastic- frame glasses didn’t hide the shadows under his eyes.
“Is there a problem?” There was a trace of Bangalore in his inflections.
“Not yet,” said Rhine.
“I’ve been up since last night, Sheriff, so I am in no shape for badinage.” When he spoke, his Adam’s apple bobbed up and down like a walnut caught in his throat.
“I’m stationing one of my deputies in a chair beside Prester Sewall’s bed.”
Young Dr. Chatterjee gave a high-pitched laugh. “Tell him to bring a good book.”
“Now you’re the one not being clear, Doc.”
The doctor crooked his finger at us. “Follow me.”
He led us to the intensive-care unit, or med-surg unit, as they called it at this hospital. It was an open area- loud with beeping machines, buzzing phones, and snatches of conversation among passing people-where a nurse sat at a central desk, facing a row of glass-walled rooms. In one of these rooms lay Prester Sewall.
If anything, he looked even worse than the last time I’d seen him. He was stretched out on a wheeled bed, with a sheet pulled up around his chest and an IV jammed into his freckled arm. Most of his nose and both of his ears had gone completely black. His blistered cheeks were mauve. His hands were wrapped in bandages that made his arms look like soft white clubs.
“We’ve just moved him here from the ER,” said Chatterjee.
“Can he hear us?” Rhine asked.
“We’ve given him a dopamine infusion, but he’s so exhausted, he keeps slipping back into sleep.”
“This is the warden who treated him,” the sheriff explained.
Chatterjee studied my face. “You did an excellent job of rewarming him. He’s not showing any signs of atrial fibrillation.”
“So it looks like he’s going to make it, then?” Rhine asked.
“His condition is critical but hemodynamically stable,” the doctor said.
I sensed movement behind me.
“Prester!”
Jamie Sewall stood in the door. Her hair was a frizzled mess and her eyes were red as beets, but I recognized the high cheekbones, the wide lips.
“How did you get in here?” the doctor asked.
“He’s my brother!”
